Podcast appearances and mentions of Ray Kurzweil

As AI advances at an exponential pace, what could the Singularity mean for India's workforce, middle class, and investors? Saurabh joins Nandita to discuss what it could mean for India's workforce, middle class, and investors—and why financial resilience matters more than ever.Get your free goal planning and asset allocation https://shorturl.at/aOsyjIn this episode of Coffee and Investing, Marcellus' CIO Saurabh Mukherjea joins Nandita Rajhansa to discuss Ray Kurzweil's famous Singularity thesis and its implications for India. As artificial intelligence advances at an unprecedented rate, the conversation explores whether exponential improvements in machine intelligence could reshape jobs, wages, inequality, and investment outcomes over the coming decade.

In Arteetude 337 – Ilens Hopium, Detlef Schlich and Sophia, his AI Co-Host, continue the philosophical journey begun in Arteetude 336, The Collapse of Wonder. After exploring the flood of AI-generated images, Heidegger's question concerning technology, and Ray Kurzweil's vision of technological acceleration, this episode moves closer to the river — not as a simple metaphor, but as a living method of thought.From the Nile of AfricaSmile to the River Ilen in West Cork, Detlef reflects on how rivers carry memory, sediment, wounds, names, and fragile possibilities of hope. The River Ilen becomes more than landscape: it becomes biography, artistic method, local presence, and a counter-image to technological acceleration.The episode explores the origin of the word Hopium, first used playfully by Dirk in relation to the emerging WAW song idea Ilens Hopium. What began as a joke opens into a deeper philosophical space: She — the River Ilen — is hoping for hope. Through Heidegger's lens, Hopium becomes a word that reveals contradiction: hope and suspicion, medicine and poison, survival and self-deception. Through Kurzweil's lens, the river offers another kind of intelligence — not singularity, but plurality; not acceleration, but return; not one final answer, but bend after bend, name after name.The episode closes with a new Los Inorgánicos piece titled “First Mist from the Ilen — Every Bend a Hope / Before the Song Appears.” This is not intended to replace the future WAW single Ilens Hopium, which Detlef and Dirk hope to release later this year. Instead, it functions as a philosophical companion in the universe of multilayerism — a sonic sketch, a small ritual support, and a first mist rising from the River Ilen before the full song appears.Detlef Schlich is a rock musician, podcaster, visual artist, filmmaker,ritual designer, and media archaeologist based in West Cork. He is recognised for his seminal work, including a scholarly examination of the intersections between shamanism, art, and digital culture, and his acclaimed video installation, Transodin's Tragedy. He primarily works in performance, photography, painting, sound, installations, and film. In his work, he reflects on the human condition and uses the digital shaman's methodology as an alter ego to create artwork. His media archaeology is a conceptual and practical exercise in uncovering the unique aesthetic, cultural, and political aspects of media in culture.WEBSITE LINKS WAW Official YouTube Channelhttps://www.youtube.com/@WAWBandFrom the forthcoming WAW albumThe Stories of Nil YoungTwo songs from WAW's developing album project The Stories of Nil Young — a mythopoetic journey along the Nile, where river, memory, loss, cooperation and hope flow into music.AfricaSmileAfricaSmile follows the Nile as an imagined journey from its sources to the Mediterranean Sea — a river of memory, movement, rhythm and myth.The song turns the meeting of the White Nile and the Blue Nile into a fragile image of cooperation. It is not a naïve peace anthem, but a wounded musical hope: two different currents meeting, listening, and still moving forward together.The Niles Bittersweet SongThe Nile's Bittersweet Song is the first official single by WAW / Wild Atlantic Way — Detlef Schlich and Dirk Schlömer.The song follows the Nile as a river of memory, beauty, loss and contradiction: a life-giver, but also a force that can take away what it once nourished. Through the story of Kamau, it becomes a poetic reflection on childhood, fragile hope, and the emotional landscape carried by a river that is both kind and cruel.Inspired by East African storytelling traditions and shaped along the Wild Atlantic Way in West Cork, The Nile's Bittersweet Song is a mythopoetic musical journey about water, grief, resilience, and the deep human longing to keep moving with the current.Inspired by East African storytelling traditions and shaped along the Wild Atlantic Way in West Cork, The Nile's Bittersweet Song is a mythopoetic musical journey about water, grief, resilience, and the deep human longing to keep moving with the current.WAW BandcampSilent NightIn a world shadowed by conflict and unrest, we, Dirk Schlömer & Detlef Schlich, felt compelled to reinterpret 'Silent Night' to reflect the complexities and contradictions of modern life.https://studiomuskau.bandcamp.com/track/silent-nightWild Atlantic WayThis results from a trip to West Cork, Ireland, where the beautiful Coastal "Wild Atlantic Way" reaches along the whole west coast!https://studiomuskau.bandcamp.com/track/wild-atlantic-wayYOU TUBE*Silent Night Reimagined* A Multilayered Avant-Garde Journey by WAW aka Dirk Schlömer & Detlef Schlichhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAbytLSfgCwDetlef SchlichInstagramDetlef Schlich ArTEEtude I love West Cork Artists FacebookDetlef Schlich I love West Cork Artists Group ArTEEtudeYouTube Channelsvisual PodcastArTEEtudeCute Alien TV official WebsiteArTEEtude Detlef Schlich Det Design Tribal Loop Download here for free Detlef Schlich´s Essay about the Cause and Effect of Shamanism, Art and Digital Culturehttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/303749640_Shamanism_Art_and_Digital_Culture_Cause_and_EffectSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/arteetude-a-podcast-with-artists-by-detlef-schlich/exclusive-content

In this episode, the mates and Steven Kotler sit down with Ray Kurzweil to discuss AGI, the future, and more.  Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends   Ray Kurzweil is an American inventor and futurist best known for his pioneering work in optical character recognition and his predictions regarding the technological singularity. Peter H. Diamandis, MD, is the Founder of XPRIZE, Singularity University, ZeroG, and A360 Salim Ismail is the founder of Open ExO, a GP at Exponential Venture Capital/The Organizational Singularity Fund and a sought after global speaker and thought leader. Dave Blundin is the founder & GP of Link Ventures Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross is a computer scientist and founder of Reified Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, and founder of the Flow Research Collective and Flow Institute, known for his work on flow and human performance. – My companies: Apply to Dave's and my new fund:https://qr.diamandis.com/linkventureslanding   Go to Blitzy to book a free demo and start building today: https://qr.diamandis.com/blitzy   Your body is incredibly good at hiding disease. Schedule a call with Fountain Life to add healthy decades to your life, and to learn more about their Memberships: https://www.fountainlife.com/peter  _ Connect with Peter: X Instagram Substack Website Xprize Connect with Dave: Web X LinkedIn Instagram TikTok Connect with Salim: LinkedIn X Apply for Salim's Pilot Program  Subscribe to Salim's YouTube channel Exponential Venture Capital Connect with Alex Website LinkedIn X Email Substack  Spotify Threads Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube – *Recorded on May 4th, 2026 *The views expressed by me and all guests are personal opinions and do not constitute Financial, Medical, or Legal advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What if the longevity revolution isn't really a science problem, but a human one we're completely unprepared for?In this episode of Health Longevity Secrets, Robert Lufkin MD sits down with David Donnelly — the award-winning filmmaker behind "Forever Young" (winner of the Mill Valley Film Festival Audience Award). David spent three years across three continents embedded with the world's leading longevity scientists — the Buck Institute, Dr. Eric Verdin, Dr. Steve Horvath, and more — and came back with the uncomfortable question no one wants to ask: do we actually want to live forever in the world we've built?CHAPTERS:00:00 — Introduction02:32 — From Pre-Med to Filmmaker: Donnelly's Origin Story04:58 — Dr. Eric Verdin on Multifactorial Aging09:34 — The 30-Minute Walk That Cuts Disease 40%10:33 — Why 93% of How You Age Is Lifestyle13:50 — The Horvath Epigenetic Clock Explained14:14 — Healthspan vs Lifespan: The 122-Year Cap14:54 — Age Looping and Epigenetic Reprogramming15:57 — Bryan Johnson and the Wild Side16:29 — Do We Actually Want to Live Forever?19:03 — The Loneliness Epidemic Is a Pack a Day21:42 — Death Doula Katie Rose and the Death Positive Movement24:29 — Reframing Retirement for 40 More Years28:08 — Science vs Commercial Hype in Longevity30:49 — Why Normal Bloodwork Isn't Good Bloodwork31:33 — What a True Longevity Clinic Does33:58 — Meet the Producers: Dr. Johnson and Dr. Lewis42:06 — Final Takeaway: Start the JourneyKEY TAKEAWAYS:• Only ~7-10% of longevity is genetic — 93% is lifestyle and epigenetics• A 30-minute walk a day reduces chronic disease risk by 30-40%• The Horvath epigenetic clock makes biological age measurable in real time• Current lifespan is biologically capped near 122 — the real opportunity is healthspan• Chronic loneliness harms your body at the same rate as smoking a pack a day• "Normal" bloodwork often means sick — optimal is a different number• The existential questions — meaning, purpose, death — are missing from the longevity conversationSTUDIES & SOURCES MENTIONED:• "Forever Young" — the documentary• Dr. Eric Verdin — Buck Institute for Research on Aging• Dr. Steve Horvath — epigenetic clock (Nature Aging)• US Surgeon General Advisory on loneliness (2023)• OSK partial reprogramming and lifespan extension (Nature, 2020)• Ray Kurzweil — "The Singularity Is Nearer" (2024)⭐ Enjoying the show? Please leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts — it takes 30 seconds and helps more people discover the science of health and longevity. Thank you!New episodes every Tuesday & Thursday. Subscribe so you don't miss one.Continue this conversation on Substack: https://robertlufkinmd.substack.comLies I Taught In Medical School — Free sample chapter: https://www.robertlufkinmd.com/lies/Web: https://www.robertlufkinmd.comYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/robertlufkinmdX: https://x.com/robertlufkinmdInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/robertlufkinmd/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@robertlufkinLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertlufkinmd/

Peter Diamandis has built more of the future than almost anyone alive. He founded XPRIZE. He co-founded Singularity University with Ray Kurzweil. He started Human Longevity with Craig Venter. And in his new book with Steven Kotler, We Are as Gods, he argues that artificial intelligence isn't just changing what we can do. It's changing what it means to be human. I'm not so sure. This is Peter's fifth time on Into the Impossible, and the conversation I've been waiting years to have. His thesis: AI will deliver not just intelligence at scale, but wisdom — and humanity is already crossing the threshold into godlike capability, whether we're ready or not. My pushback: an experiment one of my students and I ran shows large language models trained only on pre-1911 physics cannot reproduce what Einstein did with the same data. If wisdom were just scale, that shouldn't be true. We go after it for an hour. No hedging, no softening. What you'll hear: — Whether AGI can manufacture genuine wisdom or just better simulations of it — The pre-1911 Einstein test and what it reveals about the ceiling of current AI — The "five forks of humanity": longevity, BCI, off-planet speciation, creators vs. consumers, and uploading — What happens to human purpose when scarcity disappears — Why Peter thinks India dominates the next twenty years of science and technology — Peter's Fermi paradox theory and why he thinks we may be someone else's biosphere experiment — The Future Vision XPRIZE and how dystopian training data may be making AI more dangerous — David Sinclair's epigenetic age-reversal trials, now underway in human eyes Peter says what you did between breakfast and dinner would be godlike to your grandparents. We just stopped noticing. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. CHAPTERS 00:00 Diamandis: AGI will generate wisdom by simulating billions of outcomes 04:07 Brian's counterargument: wisdom requires embodiment, not just simulation 07:07 The GPU + LLM architecture may already be a local maximum 09:48 AI is outpacing most math PhDs but the ceiling is still unknown 15:30 Diamandis fires back at the doomers 17:59 AI will eventually untangle the legal systems blocking the future 23:18 The Singularity has religious qualities and both hosts take that seriously 29:37 Post-scarcity splits humanity into creators and consumers 36:08 Peter's Fermi paradox theory: we may be someone else's biosphere experiment 43:07 Dystopian AI training data may be causing misalignment 51:46 Human trials are underway for epigenetic eye age reversal ——— Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un More: Peter Diamandis Moonshots Podcast: https://www.diamandis.com/podcast Peter Diamandis Substack: https://metatrends.substack.com/ Future Vision XPRIZE: https://futurevisionxprize.com/ Book We Are as Gods: https://a.co/d/0bfz2pBo Peter Diamandis YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@peterdiamandis Follow Peter on X: https://x.com/PeterDiamandis Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe #peterdiamandis #ai #agi #singularity #abundance #longevity Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Arteetude 336 – The Collapse of Wonder, Detlef Schlich and Sophia, his AI Co-Host, enter the philosophical afterglow of the creative process behind the AfricaSmile music video.What began as an AI-assisted editing process became a deeper question: what happens when the world becomes endlessly imageable? When every vision can be generated, corrected, beautified, animated, and replaced, does art gain new freedom — or does wonder begin to collapse under the pressure of too much availability?Through the lens of Martin Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology and Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Nearer, Detlef reflects on AI not simply as a tool, but as a new mode of revealing the world. Heidegger warns that modern technology turns nature into “standing-reserve” — material waiting to be used. Kurzweil, by contrast, sees technological acceleration as part of evolution, moving toward the merging of human and machine intelligence.Between these two poles, Detlef asks: is AI helping us discover deeper secrets, or are we consuming revelation too quickly? From the Nile of AfricaSmile to the River Ilen of the upcoming Illens Hopium, this episode explores the river as a counter-image to machine speed — a slower force of memory, erosion, sediment, and hope.The episode closes with the new Los Inorgánicos song “Slow the River Down”, a dark, poetic reflection on image overload, artistic dignity, and the need to let mystery breathe.Detlef Schlich is a rock musician, podcaster, visual artist, filmmaker,ritual designer, and media archaeologist based in West Cork. He is recognised for his seminal work, including a scholarly examination of the intersections between shamanism, art, and digital culture, and his acclaimed video installation, Transodin's Tragedy. He primarily works in performance, photography, painting, sound, installations, and film. In his work, he reflects on the human condition and uses the digital shaman's methodology as an alter ego to create artwork. His media archaeology is a conceptual and practical exercise in uncovering the unique aesthetic, cultural, and political aspects of media in culture.WEBSITE LINKS WAW Official YouTube Channelhttps://www.youtube.com/@WAWBandFrom the forthcoming WAW albumThe Stories of Nil YoungTwo songs from WAW's developing album project The Stories of Nil Young — a mythopoetic journey along the Nile, where river, memory, loss, cooperation and hope flow into music.AfricaSmileAfricaSmile follows the Nile as an imagined journey from its sources to the Mediterranean Sea — a river of memory, movement, rhythm and myth.The song turns the meeting of the White Nile and the Blue Nile into a fragile image of cooperation. It is not a naïve peace anthem, but a wounded musical hope: two different currents meeting, listening, and still moving forward together.The Niles Bittersweet SongThe Nile's Bittersweet Song is the first official single by WAW / Wild Atlantic Way — Detlef Schlich and Dirk Schlömer.The song follows the Nile as a river of memory, beauty, loss and contradiction: a life-giver, but also a force that can take away what it once nourished. Through the story of Kamau, it becomes a poetic reflection on childhood, fragile hope, and the emotional landscape carried by a river that is both kind and cruel.Inspired by East African storytelling traditions and shaped along the Wild Atlantic Way in West Cork, The Nile's Bittersweet Song is a mythopoetic musical journey about water, grief, resilience, and the deep human longing to keep moving with the current.Inspired by East African storytelling traditions and shaped along the Wild Atlantic Way in West Cork, The Nile's Bittersweet Song is a mythopoetic musical journey about water, grief, resilience, and the deep human longing to keep moving with the current.WAW BandcampSilent NightIn a world shadowed by conflict and unrest, we, Dirk Schlömer & Detlef Schlich, felt compelled to reinterpret 'Silent Night' to reflect the complexities and contradictions of modern life.https://studiomuskau.bandcamp.com/track/silent-nightWild Atlantic WayThis results from a trip to West Cork, Ireland, where the beautiful Coastal "Wild Atlantic Way" reaches along the whole west coast!https://studiomuskau.bandcamp.com/track/wild-atlantic-wayYOU TUBE*Silent Night Reimagined* A Multilayered Avant-Garde Journey by WAW aka Dirk Schlömer & Detlef Schlichhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAbytLSfgCwDetlef SchlichInstagramDetlef Schlich ArTEEtude I love West Cork Artists FacebookDetlef Schlich I love West Cork Artists Group ArTEEtudeYouTube Channelsvisual PodcastArTEEtudeCute Alien TV official WebsiteArTEEtude Detlef Schlich Det Design Tribal Loop Download here for free Detlef Schlich´s Essay about the Cause and Effect of Shamanism, Art and Digital Culturehttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/303749640_Shamanism_Art_and_Digital_Culture_Cause_and_EffectSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/arteetude-a-podcast-with-artists-by-detlef-schlich/exclusive-content

Gesprek met Raymond Hausoul gastdocent aan de ETF in Leuven op basis van een door hem geschreven bijdrage aan het boek "The Oxford Compendium of Hope" getiteld Hope and Transhumanism. Een uitgave van de Oxford Press in Oxford. (https://academic.oup.com/book/61728/chapter/541578971?login=false) Van hun site bij betreffend hoofdstuk: Abstract Influential figures such as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil describe in their publications the possibilities that technological developments can eventually offer humanity to evolve to a “higher form.” This transhumanism movement, which is characterized by this search for a higher transformation of humanity, investigates how these ideological perspectives can be practically realized so that technological developments can optimally improve life on earth. This includes, for example, the question of what possibilities artificial intelligence and robotics offer humanity from an ideological-technological perspective. This chapter explores the hopes that characterize transhumanist proposals. In doing so, I distinguish between Anthony Scioli's four approaches to hope: (1) survival-oriented hope, (2) master-oriented hope, (3) attachment hope, and (4) meaning hope. The chapter shows that this approach provides a suitable classification-method to critically describe and evaluate the different approaches to hope in technological developments within transhumanism.

We've always assumed that if there IS a God, that God made us. But what if it ends up being the other way around… and we're already further along than we think? Artificial intelligence is now offering moral advice, generating new forms of scripture, even simulating conversations with the divine. For some users, the line between useful tool and spiritual authority is already starting to blur. Why does it feel so natural for us to imagine there's a ghost in the machine? And what happens when the people building AI start to talk and think about their creation in religious terms? On this episode, we'll talk to journalist Sigal Samuel about where AI is showing up in religious spaces and how what it becomes will have major consequences for human agency and how we understand our place in the world. And we'll talk to psychologist Paul Bloom about the quirks of human psychology that make us so prone to see minds, intention, and perhaps even the divine, in the machine. Along the way we'll also ask: Can AI be morally formed? Could it ever have something like its own spiritual yearning? And if it could, what might it mean for us?Sigal Samuel is a senior reporter at Vox, where she covers religion, ethics, and the future of consciousness and AI. Check out her writing in Vox's Future Perfect column and follow her on X or Bluesky.Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and the author of several books, including Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil and Against Empathy. Learn more about his work at his website.Also mentioned on this episode:Stewart Elliott Guthrie, author of Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of ReligionWilliam Paley, author of Natural Theology (watch on a beach example)Catholic priest and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who have both influenced the philosophical movement of transhumanism.

AI is not coming for real estate agents. It is already here — and whether you know it or not, it is already shaping who wins and who disappears in the 2026 market. Tim and Julie Harris have spent months deep inside the AI revolution — studying it, using it to run their own business, and writing a brand-new 50-page white paper called The Real Estate Singularity. In today's episode, they bring that research directly to you with one of the most candid, no-BS conversations about AI and real estate that you will hear anywhere. This is not a technology overview. This is a survival briefing. Tim and Julie explain why the traditional work ethic of out-grinding the competition is now obsolete, why your database is your biggest untapped asset and how AI can run it for you automatically, and why agents who delay adopting AI by even 12 to 18 months risk falling so far behind they may never recover. They walk through the exact process of how they produced a 50-page industry white paper in under 15 minutes using Claude's multi-agent AI system, what it means that AI is now operating at AGI-level capability, and where the only true competitive moat now exists for real estate agents in 2026. You will learn why AI-generated content is already indistinguishable from human content and what that means for your marketing, how AI agents can mine your database, fill missing contact data, produce personalized market updates, and send individualized client birthday videos on autopilot, how Ray Kurzweil's exponential growth model applies directly to your real estate career right now, the data center energy problem and why it matters for the AI tools you use every day, and why the only irreplaceable thing you bring to your business is your face-to-face human relationships. The Real Estate Singularity white paper is available for free. Subscribe to the newsletter to receive your copy. Free Newsletter and White Paper: HarrisRealEstateDaily.com Coaching and Training: PremierCoaching.com EXP Realty / Libertas: WhyLibertas.com/Harris Text Tim Direct: 512-758-0206

What if the solution to plastic pollution could simply disappear? In this conversation, I sit down with Johnathan Jakubowski, CEO and founder of Smart Solve, to explore how biodegradable, water-soluble packaging is changing the future of sustainability and business. John shares his journey from early life lessons and a failed startup to building an innovative company focused on solving microplastic pollution. You will hear how purpose-driven leadership, core values, and faith shaped his path, along with practical insights on entrepreneurship, market adoption, and innovation. I believe you will find this discussion both inspiring and useful as you think about leadership, environmental impact, and what it truly takes to build something that matters. Highlights: 00:01:27 – Learn how early life values and family shaped a foundation for leadership and purpose 00:10:26 – Discover how technology and screen use are impacting focus, mental health, and development 00:17:59 – Understand how business failure can redirect you toward a more successful path 00:22:14 – Learn how biodegradable, water soluble packaging works and where it is used 00:27:04 – Discover why microplastics are driving a major shift in global innovation 00:52:49 – Learn how leadership is built through influence, culture, and consistent core values Bottom of Form About the Guest: Jonathan Jakubowski is an entrepreneur, author, inventor, and public policy advocate whose work spans the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of SmartSolve, a company he built around a simple but powerful conviction: that the packaging industry could be reimagined from the ground up. Under his leadership, SmartSolve has developed the world's first patented 100% bio-based, plastic-free, dissolvable food packaging — a genuine breakthrough in the global effort to eliminate packaging waste. SmartSolve's technology represents years of research, invention, and commercial development aimed at solving one of the most persistent environmental and industrial challenges of our time. Jonathan leads the company with a focus on proving that sustainability and profitability are not opposites — that the most innovative solutions can also be the most responsible ones. His work has positioned SmartSolve as a pioneering force in the zero-waste packaging space, drawing national and international attention. Beyond his entrepreneurial work, Jonathan is a published author whose book Bellwether Blues: A Conservative Awakening of the Millennial Soul has received widespread recognition and national media coverage. The book explores the political and cultural landscape facing a generation, and reflects Jonathan's deep engagement with public policy and civic life — shaped in part by his Master's in Public Policy from Georgetown University and his undergraduate years at Bowling Green State University, where he played collegiate football. Jonathan's commitment to service extends across sectors. He is the founder of Champions in Action, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering underprivileged youth in Guatemala, and serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Forge Leadership Network, an organization devoted to developing principled leaders. His career reflects a consistent thread: identifying problems that others have accepted as inevitable, and building solutions that prove otherwise. Jonathan lives in Northwest Ohio with his wife Missy and their four children. Whether in the boardroom, on the page, or in the community, he is driven by the belief that leadership means leaving things better than you found them. Ways to connect with Jonathan:

The future, for most people, is a fog machine set to maximum drama. Politicians pretend to see through it. Media figures squint into it. Meanwhile, your average “expert” treats forecasting like a Ouija board session sponsored by taxpayer dollars. Yet somewhere outside that circus, a man decided that guessing wasn't good enough—and then proceeded to embarrass nearly everyone who ever claimed to know what comes next.Ray Kurzweil didn't just peek into the future. He reverse-engineered it.Now, before anyone rolls their eyes and lumps him in with the usual Nostradamus knockoffs—those poetic fortune-cookie writers who speak in riddles so vague they could predict either a stock market crash or a particularly bad lunch—understand something critical: Kurzweil doesn't deal in mysticism. No incense. No celestial alignments. No vague talk about “energies.” Just data, trends, and the one variable that never changes: human nature.And that, ironically, is what makes him dangerous.Because if the future can be predicted with a spreadsheet instead of a séance, then a lot of very powerful people lose their favorite excuse—“Nobody could have seen this coming.”Except… someone did.Long before Silicon Valley started congratulating itself for inventing the obvious, Kurzweil was laying out a framework that treated technological progress like a compounding force rather than a linear one. His premise wasn't flashy. It didn't need to be. Technology builds on itself. Each breakthrough accelerates the next. Layer human incentives on top of that—profit, convenience, power—and suddenly the “unknown” starts to look suspiciously predictable.Back in 1990, in The Age of Intelligent Machines, Kurzweil made a series of predictions that, at the time, sounded like something between optimism and science fiction. Among them: the collapse of the Soviet Union under the pressure of emerging communication technologies. Not tanks. Not treaties. Not speeches. Cell phones and wireless communication.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The AI compute crisis is here. Anthropic's Claude is getting dumber and Opus 4.7 & OpenAI's Spud are about to make it worse. What happen's next? This week on AI For Humans, we dig into the AI compute crunch that's quietly becoming the industry's biggest problem. The Wall Street Journal just ran a cover story about AI using so much energy that computing power is running out. Claude users are noticing the model getting worse, and an AMD Senior AI Director confirmed. AI pundits are asking whether Anthropic's reluctance to release Mythos is really about safety or about not having enough compute.  Meanwhile, Opus 4.7 is reportedly coming next week, rumors are swirling about a new OpenAI model dropping any day, and Uber already blew through its entire annual AI coding budget. Anthropic just signed a deal with Google and Broadcom for more compute. Greg Brockman published an essay on the computer-powered economy.  Plus, Google DeepMind drops Gemini Robotics Reasoning Model ER-1.6, Steven Soderbergh comes to the defense of AI filmmaking, Diplo says you can't fight AI and the internet has opinions, and Ray Kurzweil says we'll soon just accept AIs as conscious because it'll be useless not to. AI IS RUNNING OUT OF POWER. CLAUDE IS GETTING DUMBER. WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Come to our Discord: https://discord.gg/muD2TYgC8f Join our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/AIForHumansShow AI For Humans Newsletter: https://aiforhumans.beehiiv.com/ Follow us for more on X @AIForHumansShow Join our TikTok @aiforhumansshow To book us for speaking, please visit our website: https://www.aiforhumans.show/   // Show Links // WSJ Cover Story: AI Is Using So Much Energy That Computing Power Is Running Out https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-is-using-so-much-energy-that-computing-firepower-is-running-out-156e5c85 Data on Claude Getting Dumber: AMD Senior AI Director Confirms Nerfing https://x.com/Hesamation/status/2042979500103815306?s=20 Opus 4.7 Coming Next Week (The Information) https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/exclusive-anthropic-preps-opus-4-7-model-ai-design-tool?rc=c3oojq Anthropic's Compute Crunch (The Information) https://www.theinformation.com/newsletters/ai-agenda/anthropics-compute-crunch-strikes?rc=c3oojq Claude Code Routines https://x.com/claudeai/status/2044095086460309790?s=20 New Claude Code Desktop App https://x.com/felixrieseberg/status/2044128194647994585?s=20 Uber Blew Through AI Coding Budgets for the Year Already https://www.theinformation.com/newsletters/applied-ai/uber-cto-shows-claude-code-can-blow-ai-budgets?rc=c3oojq Greg Brockman Essay on the Computer-Powered Economy https://x.com/gdb/status/2043831031468568734 OpenAI's Reckless Spending and Datacenter Cancellations https://x.com/firstadopter/status/2043009456103993426?s=20 Ray Kurzweil on AI Consciousness https://x.com/newstart_2024/status/2043716604442128460?s=20 Gemini Robotics ER-1.6 Blog Post https://deepmind.google/blog/gemini-robotics-er-1-6/ Steven Soderbergh Defends AI Filmmaking https://variety.com/2026/film/news/steven-soderbergh-the-christophers-star-wars-ben-solo-movie-controversial-ai-comments-1236713201/ Diplo: You Can't Fight AI https://youtu.be/zFVpJFFN3dI?si=C6_0MxmNzSHCdrds PI Hard: Fun AI Video https://x.com/aiordieshow/status/2044044721459265557?s=20  

How good are you at predicting the future. Frankly, I'm pretty good, but some of you expected me to say that…But truth be told, I am pretty good at it, and I will explain why in a bit.You want to predict the outcome of President Trump's war with Iran? Or what about his next move on the economy? Then pay attention.Donald Trump is excellent at predicting the future, and is a modern day Ray Kurzweil…The future, for most people, is a fog machine set to maximum drama. Politicians pretend to see through it. Media figures squint into it. Meanwhile, your average “expert” treats forecasting like a Ouija board session sponsored by taxpayer dollars. Yet somewhere outside that circus, a man decided that guessing wasn't good enough—and then proceeded to embarrass nearly everyone who ever claimed to know what comes next.Ray Kurzweil didn't just peek into the future. He reverse-engineered it.Now, before anyone rolls their eyes and lumps him in with the usual Nostradamus knockoffs—those poetic fortune-cookie writers who speak in riddles so vague they could predict either a stock market crash or a particularly bad lunch—understand something critical: Kurzweil doesn't deal in mysticism. No incense. No celestial alignments. No vague talk about “energies.” Just data, trends, and the one variable that never changes: human nature.And that, ironically, is what makes him dangerous.Because if the future can be predicted with a spreadsheet instead of a séance, then a lot of very powerful people lose their favorite excuse—“Nobody could have seen this coming.”Except… someone did.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this powerful episode of The Mike Litton Experience, host Mike Litton sits down with real estate visionary Neal Bawa to uncover an extraordinary journey from adversity to massive success. Born in Mumbai just before the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, Neil faced unimaginable challenges early in life. From losing his father as an infant to navigating poverty in India, his story is one of resilience, grit, and determination. Fast forward to today—Neil is the founder of Grow Capital, managing over $350 million in investments and working with more than 1,300 investors nationwide. In this episode, he shares how he leveraged data science, timing during the Global Financial Crisis, and unconventional thinking to build a thriving real estate empire. What you'll learn in this episode: How Neal turned hardship into a competitive advantage The power of data-driven real estate investing Why 2009 was the greatest buying opportunity in history How depreciation and tax strategy accelerate wealth The truth about passive investing (and the risks most ignore) Why transparency builds stronger investor relationships Neal also shares insights inspired by futurist Ray Kurzweil and discusses the impact of innovation leaders like Elon Musk on global progress. If you're interested in real estate, entrepreneurship, or personal growth, this episode delivers actionable insights and powerful perspective. Don't forget to LIKE, COMMENT, and SUBSCRIBE to The Mike Litton Experience for more inspiring conversations with world-class entrepreneurs and thought leaders. Welcome to The Mike Litton Experience Podcast! Mike is passionate about being a father, a teacher, a Realtor, an investor and a leader! Everyone has a story and our passion is to help them tell it! We never want you to miss an episode, so please be sure to subscribe. Could we ask you for two quick favors? If you like our program, please tell a friend. Wherever you get your podcasts please leave us a rating. It helps us to connect with quality people just like you! Reach out to Mike on Instagram @themikelittonexperience. Thank you for joining us for The Mike Litton Experience! Who you work with matters and we would be honored to interview with you or anyone you know to sell your home! If you have questions, please reach out text or call 760-522-1227. Thank you! #livinginsandiego, #movingtosandiego, #themikelittonexperience, #homesforsaleinsandiego, #mikelitton, #sellahomeinsandiego, #buyahomeinsandiego, #toptipstogetthebestoffer #themikelittonexperience

Craftbier-Kultur: Alkoholfrei und innovativ Die Folge startet wie gewohnt mit zwei Glas in der Hand: Wir verkosten ein alkoholfreie IPA von Fuerst Wiacek und dem Flensburger Strandlager - zwei Versuche, die Bierkrise zu überstehen, als Crafter und als Traditions-Brauerei. Faktencheck, Medien und KI-Redaktionen Ausgehend davon, dass der #vzzzPodcast grundsätzlich keine verlässlichen Fakten liefert, sondern für starke Thesen und unsichere Aussagen steht, diskutieren wir, wie sinnvoll nachgelagerte Korrekturen sind – und wo sie zur Kapitulation der Argumentation verkommen. Wir skizzieren das Ideal einer laufenden Faktencheck-Redaktion, die Debatten in Echtzeit prüft – und fragen, ob genau hier Künstliche Intelligenz helfen könnte. Smart Country Convention: Mehr KI-Setup statt KI-Glaube? Ein zentraler Part der Folge sind die Erlebnisse auf der Smart Country Convention in Berlin, einer Messe rund um Digitalisierung von Staat und Verwaltung. Hier gab es einen inspirierenden Workshop zum Einsatz von KI. Wir diskutieren Prompt-Bibliotheken, Unternehmens-Policies, Datenschutz und die Frage, ob sensible Verwaltungs- oder Firmendaten wirklich bei US-Techkonzernen gut aufgehoben sind. Und dann sind wir schon wieder drin im KI-Thema: Nimmt uns die KI die Jobs weg – oder füllt sie nur Lücken, die der demografische Wandel ohnehin reißt? Wir sezieren Umfragen, in denen 25% Angst vor Jobverlust haben, und zeigen, wie wenig solche Prozent-Zahlen ohne Kontext aussagen. Ray Kurzweil, Singularität & Transhumanismus Wir beleuchten die Visionen von Ray Kurzweil und eine ganz andere Perspektiv die uns Yuval Noah Harari in seiner Buch-Reihe Unstoppable Us anbietet. Wie verändert KI unser Leben, und wo liegen die Grenzen der Technologie? Kurzweils Optimismus scheint grenzenlos: allgemeine KI, Verschmelzung von Mensch und Maschine, Pillencocktails zur Lebensverlängerung und die Hoffnung auf Unsterblichkeit. KI wie auch das ewige Leben entstammen einer Traditionslinie der Literatur, die beide mehr als Fluch, nicht als Heilsversprechen zeichnet. Geht dieser Optimismus hier nicht mit einem Mangel an historischer und literarischer Bildung einher? Harari hingegen beschreibt in seinen Büchern die „Superfähigkeit“ des Menschen, Geschichten zu erzählen – Mythen, Religionen, Ideen, Ideologien. Vom römischen Reich bis zu modernen Demokratien sind es Erzählungen, die Rechtsräume, Werte, Zugehörigkeit und Gesellschaften stiften. Dies ist eine Fähigkeit, die der KI bisher weder zugesprochen noch abverlangt wird. Daraus entsteht die tröstliche These, dass KI uns im Kern – als erzählende, mythenbildende Wesen – nicht völlig ersetzen kann. Ab ins Brain Gym! Aber wie sieht dann die Zukunft mit KI aus? Wenn früher Menschen bei ihrer Arbeit viel Muskelkraft brauchten, ist dies mit heutigen Maschinen nur noch selten nötig und die Muskulatur hat sich zurück gebildet. Untersuchungen zeigen, dass das Gehirn ähnlich funktioniert. Wer sich jahrelang nur mit Navi fortbewegt, verliert irgendwann sein innere Navigationsfähigkeit. Wer jahrelang die KI nutzt, wird wohl noch ganz andere kognitive Fähigkeiten abbauen. Wird es bald - wie die heutigen Fitness-Studios - auch Brain Gyms geben, die unser Gehlrn in Schwung halten? In dieser Episode erfährst du: Wie alkoholfreie Craftbiere die Bierkultur verschieben, warum KI nicht immer die richtige Antwort ist – und was das für uns bedeutet. Warum Ray Kurzweil und Yuval Noah Harari unterschiedliche Perspektiven auf die Zukunft der Menschheit bieten. Abonnier unseren Podcast hier oder auch auf Spotify, Apple oder YouTube. Teile diese Folge mit Freund:innen und erzähle uns auf YouTube oder auf Bluesky von deinen Einschätzung zur Zukunft der KI. Denn gute Geschichten beginnen beim Zuhören.

Esta semana quiero comenzar con algo importante para nuestra comunidad. Algo que estamos construyendo juntos.Y luego hablaremos de mercados, del dólar, de precios que bajan pero siguen altos, y de un debate que sigue siendo el equivocado.Vamos al comentario de esta semana!En tiempo récord lanzamos las temáticas de la agenda del 333 Experience Congress, que se realizará en Guadalajara, México, del 18 al 20 de noviembre de 2026Y por primera vez en nuestras siete ediciones, líderes empresariales participaron en la definición de la agenda, identificando qué necesitan escuchar y qué desafíos enfrentan. El tema clave de este año será:Inteligencia Artificial aplicada.Aplicación práctica en planificación estratégica, optimización de granjas, toma de decisiones comerciales, gestión de datos.Lo vengo diciendo hace meses: 2026 será el año en que la IA deja de ser un tema de tecnólogos y se convierte en herramienta cotidiana para todos.Desde el productor que gestiona su granja hasta el director comercial que planifica sus ventas.Y cada año que pasa, las predicciones de Ray Kurzweil, Director de Ingeniería en Google, se vuelven más cercanas.Kurzweil no habla de ciencia ficción. Habla de singularidad tecnológica: el punto donde la IA supera la capacidad humana y se convierte en herramienta multiplicadora de productividad.Ya predijo cosas que ocurrieron:Internet masivo en los 90Computadoras portátiles accesiblesAsistentes de voz inteligentesY sus hipótesis sobre lo que viene toman más fuerza cada día:IA como co-equipo estratégico (no solo herramienta)Automatización de decisiones complejasAnálisis predictivo en tiempo realPor eso el 333 Experience Congress tendrá un componente central en IA aplicada.Porque no se trata de hablar del futuro. Se trata de enseñar a usarlo hoy.18, 19 y 20 de noviembre. Guadalajara, México.Esta semana el dólar se fortaleció por la guerra en Irán.El aprendizaje de mis años analizando el mercado es que cuando hay tensión geopolítica, los inversionistas se refugian en dólar y oro.Y cuando el dólar sube, los precios de commodities —incluido el cerdo— tienden a bajar en esa moneda.Eso es lo que está pasando a nivel global.Pero cuando miras México y Colombia, la historia es diferente.Los precios del cerdo en México y Colombia han bajado en las últimas semanas.Pero aún así están cercanos a los USD 2,00/kg vivo. Son precios muy altos si hacemos un benchmark en esta moneda con otros países latinoamericanos. He visto algunas voces - que son totalmente válidas - que reclaman que las impotaciones están generando una competencia desleal con el mercado local, si se probase que exista Dumping, sería una amenaza para el libre mercado, pero si no existiese, se importa con las reglas parejas. Un sector porcino verdaderamente competitivo no necesita blindarse de la importación.Necesita:SanidadGenéticaTecnologíaEscalaMientras eso no ocurra, el debate sobre cupos seguirá siendo la discusión equivocada. Porque no se trata de cerrar fronteras. Se trata de ser competitivo con o sin fronteras cerradas.No debemos pedir protección. Debemos construir competitividad.Con eficiencia, productividad y buena salud de nuestras granjasY eso se logra con estándares claros para los productores.Normativas que regulen cómo deben trabajar para:Cuidar animalesCuidar la salud de la población porcina. Garantizar bioseguridadMejorar conversión alimenticiaReducir mortalidadLo ideal siempre es que esa regulación venga de un trabajo publico y privado. Porque si llega solo del mundo estatal, las medidas pueden ser peores. No impuesta desde del Estado, sino construida desde adentro, con productores y profesionales que entienden que los estándares no son una carga. Son una ventaja competitiva.Mientras eso no ocurra, seguiremos hablando de cupos en lugar de hablar de eficiencia.A tu lado en el mercado del cerdo,

Der Titel der heutigen Episode ist: »Künstliche Vernunft?«, und ich freue mich besonders, dass sich Jan Juhani Steinmann wieder zu einem Gespräch bereit erklärt hat. Wir spannen in dieser Episode einen weiten Bogen von der Frage, was Intelligenz, Bewusstsein und Selbstbewusstsein sind, welche Rolle Biologie, Leib und Körper sowie Theologie spielen können, um dann auf die Frage der künstlichen Intelligenz und Vernunft zu kommen. Was hat es mit der sogenannten Singularität und dem Transhumanismus auf sich, und warum könnte die Bevölkerungsentwicklung des Menschen eine wesentliche Rolle spielen? Am Ende legt Jan seine Vorstellung eines positiven Bildes des Zusammenspiels von Mensch und Technik dar. Dr. Juhani Steinmann ist in Bern geboren, mütterlicherseits Finne, ist Philosoph, Dichter und Theologe. Er hat Philosophie, Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaften, Politikwissenschaften sowie Theologie in Zürich, Berlin, St. Andrews, Heidelberg, Rom und Cambridge studiert. Forschungsaufenthalte wurden in Kopenhagen, Helsinki und Oxford durchgeführt. Unter der Betreuung von Prof. Konrad Paul Liessmann hat er 2021 an der Universität Wien in Philosophie promoviert. Zurzeit forscht er am Institut Catholique de Paris, an der Università di Roma LUMSA sowie an der Faculty of Divinity der University of Cambridge zur poetischen Phänomenologie im Kontext des Denkens von Kierkegaard, Nietzsche und Heidegger. Er ist ferner Begründer des Kollektivs Omnibus Omnia. Nebst wissenschaftlichen Publikationen in Philosophie und Theologie publiziert er auch Dichtung. Besonders möchte ich auch seine Bücher erwähnen, vorzugsweise: »Kritik der künstlichen Vernunft. Vorspiel eines Anathemas« und »Das Vorfaltenlicht. Die Alpen und das Valley«. Diese beiden Werke gehören zusammen, sind wie Geschwister zu betrachten. Das erste ist eine Techniktheologie/-philosophie, das zweite eine Technik- und Naturpoesie, da die Gedichte dazu im Silicon Valley und in den Alpen geschrieben wurden. Vorzugsweise deshalb, weil sie zum Thema des heutigen Gesprächs passen. Wir beginnen das Gespräch mit der Frage nach dem Begriff der Intelligenz. Wie kann man sich diesem Begriff nähern, der ja schon beim Menschen mit vielfältiger Bedeutung überladen ist — und dann wird er auch noch für künstliche Intelligenz verwendet? »Intelligenz ist eine Form der Vermittlung innerhalb von Relationen — also, es werden Dinge in ein Verhältnis zueinander gestellt.« Wie leitet sich daraus (beim Menschen) Selbstbewusstsein und Bewusstsein allgemein ab? »Der Mensch ist ja sicherlich das erste Wesen, das überhaupt eine Definition dieser Eigenschaften, die es an sich selbst bemerkt, geleistet hat. […] Intelligenz erkennt sich selbst durch den Menschen als jenem Wesen, das intelligent ist, oder zu sein scheint.« Was folgt daraus in theologisch/philosophischer Reflexion? Was bedeutet der Begriff Logos und wie steht er in Zusammenhang mit Intelligenz und Bewusstsein? Gibt es einen metaphysisch ur-ontologischen Garanten von Bedeutung? Ist Gott der Garant für die Vernünftigkeit der Vernunft? Oder sind diese Eigenschaften des Menschen schlicht emergente Phänomene, die aus der biologischen Komplexität seiner selbst entspringen? Ist die »künstliche Intelligenz« äquivalent zur menschlichen/biologischen Vernunft? Oder ist dies grundsätzlich zu anthropomorph gedacht? Wie ist der Zusammenhang zwischen diesen philosophisch/theologischen und operationalen Ansätzen der Intelligenz — etwa ausgedrückt durch Intelligenztests und dergleichen? Was bedeutet der Begriff des Geistes? Was sind die verschiedenen Modi der Rationalität, in denen Menschen operieren? Was ist dianoetisches und noetisches Denken? Gibt es eine göttliche — hypernoetische Dimension? Welche Rolle spielen Instinkt und Intuition? Wie nehmen wir Stimmungen wahr? Was hat es mit der Leiblichkeit auf sich? Zu welcher Leistung sind nun Algorithmen und Maschinen fähig? »Maschinen imitieren im Grunde Dianoia — zugleich aber simulieren sie noetische Vernunft« Was ist Behaviorismus, und wie hilft er, die aktuellen Entwicklungen zu verstehen? Ist der Mensch frei? Was bedeutet der Begriff der Freiheit überhaupt, besonders wenn man sich auf die sogenannte Willensfreiheit bezieht? Ziehen wir die Grenze zwischen Maschine und Mensch vielleicht nur darum, weil wir gekränkt sind, weil Maschinen nun etwas können, was wir für rein menschlich gehalten haben? Ist das vielleicht nur eine weitere Ergänzung zu den drei Kränkungen des Menschen nach Sigmund Freud? »Warum sollten wir uns selbst abschaffen, hinfällig machen?« Aber haben wir ab einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt überhaupt noch die Wahl? Was ist die Rolle des Leibes für Vernunft und Intelligenz und vor allem für die noetische Dimension? Was ist Informationismus? Sind Maschinen gar die nächste evolutionäre Stufe auf unserem Planeten? Kehren wir zur Frage der Freiheit und Willensfreiheit zurück. Ist das vielleicht eine Frage, die viel weniger philosophische Tiefe hat, als häufig dargestellt wird? Um Wittgenstein zu bemühen: »Die meisten Sätze und Fragen, welche über philosophische Dinge geschrieben worden sind, sind nicht falsch, sondern unsinnig.« Wie zeigt sich das, was wir Autonomie nennen, wie kann es sein, dass wir uns selbst als frei empfinden? »Das ist ja ein schönes Paradox der Freiheit, dass man sich freiwilliger Notwendigkeit hingibt. […] Freiheit ist eine Stimmung — man fühlt sich frei. […] Du willst ja nur, was du willst.« Was folgt daraus? »Wir sind schon immer gefangen in den Bedingungen unseres Hier-Seins. Und von innen — aus diesem System heraus — kann die Freiheit nicht bewiesen werden. So zumindest erscheint es uns.« Schopenhauer sagt: »Ich kann zwar tun, was ich will, aber nicht wollen, was ich will.« Ist dies eine Widerlegung der Freiheit — wie Schopenhauer es annimmt — oder kann man andere Schlüsse ziehen? Gibt es einen Grund anzunehmen, dass es Intelligenz nur beim Menschen, respektive in biologischen Systemen, gibt? Beziehungsweise, dass es überhaupt andere intelligente Wesen außerhalb von mir selbst gibt (die solipsistische Idee)? Was passiert aber mit verkörperter künstlicher Intelligenz, etwa in der Robotik? Sind Roboter nur Körper und kein Leib? Ist es ein Kategorienfehler, die biologische mit der kulturellen und technischen Evolution zu vergleichen? »Die Kultur hat den Menschen schon von der Evolution entfremdet.« Kommt die biologische Evolution zu einem Ende, und wird sie von neuen Gesetzmäßigkeiten abgelöst? Was ist das Zusammenspiel von Technik, Maschinen und Macht? Ist Technik co-evolutionär mit dem Menschen? Gibt es einen Sprung von der Humanität zur Transhumanität? Was versteht man unter (technologischem) Transhumanismus, und was sind die Ursprünge? Allgemeiner gefragt: Ist der Mensch eine Aporie, die man überwinden muss? Wie sieht es mit biologisch/technischen Mischformen, kybernetischen Organismen aus? Steuern wir auf eine Singularität zu, die in etwa so gelesen werden könnte: »Es gibt keinen Gott — programmieren wir doch die Superintelligenz als neuen Gott« So beantwortet Ray Kurzweil die Frage: Is there a god: »Not yet«. »Wir haben keinen Begriff, was auf uns zukommt. Das könnte die Abschaffung des Menschen bedeuten — oder vielleicht eine relativ gemäßigte Koexistenz. Aber wir dürfen es nicht unterschätzen.« Wie groß ist diese Gefahr? Ist es überhaupt eine Gefahr? Können wir diese Technologien kontrollieren und regulieren? »Ich sehe keinen Grund anzunehmen, warum wir obsolet sein möchten.« Wie wahrscheinlich ist das Entstehen einer Superintelligenz, die möglicherweise sogar global wirksam wird? Was wäre die Voraussetzung dafür? Aber selbst, wenn es zu keiner Singularität oder Superintelligenz kommt, ist die Menschlichkeit nicht schon durch die Integration in permanent verfügbare dianoetische Systeme gefährdet? Werden wir unsere Urteilskraft an die Maschine delegieren? Mit welchen Folgen? Außerdem dürfen fundamentale Prinzipien komplexer Systeme nicht vergessen werden: Führen mehr Daten etwa zu mehr Sicherheit oder zu mehr Unsicherheit? Und wie können wir das entscheiden? Woher kommt das Neue in die Welt? »Die Welt ist nicht nur ihre Messbarkeit. Sie ist nicht die Summe ihrer Daten. […] Die Welt ist immer mehr und anders, als sich in einem Ordnungssystem sagen lässt.« Zum Ende des Gesprächs folgt eine vielleicht unerwartete Abzweigung: Bevölkerungen kollabieren weltweit. Im Gegensatz zu den langjährigen Warnungen tritt also das Gegenteil einer Bevölkerungsexplosion mittel- und langfristig ein. Dies gilt praktisch weltweit und besonders in den Industrienationen. Eine dramatisch alternde und gleichzeitig schrumpfende Bevölkerung wird aber erhebliche Probleme haben, ihre ökonomische und militärische und damit geopolitische Position aufrechtzuerhalten. Wird daraus ein enormer Druck entstehen, Robotik und künstliche Intelligenz als Ersatz für fehlende Arbeitskraft zu entwickeln und einzusetzen? Übernehmen — mit Marx gesprochen — die Maschinen also irgendwann die proletarische Arbeit? Gibt es doch noch ein alternatives und hoffnungsfroheres Paradigma? Also zu den Paradigmen der: Humanität Transhumanität Theo-Humanität Was ist darunter zu verstehen? »Lasst uns doch gemeinsam uns vergöttlichen — ob es Gott gibt, oder nicht. Das macht uns zu würdevollen und schönen Wesen.« Wollen wir Technologien, die den Menschen als Idioten betrachten, oder die uns als Menschen erhöhen? Referenzen Andere Episoden Episode 147: Digitale Kolonie oder Souveränität? Ein Gespräch mit Wilfried Jäger und Kevin Mallinger Episode 143: Auf Sand gebaut? Episode 139: Komfortable Disruption Episode 137: Alles Leben ist Problemlösen Episode 134: Das Werdende, das ewig wirkt und lebt? Transzendent oder Transient Episode 132: Fragen an die künstliche Intelligenz — eine konstruktive Irritation Episode 129: Rules, A Conversation with Prof. Lorraine Daston Episode 125: Ist Fortschritt möglich? Ideen als Widergänger über Generationen Episode 123: Die Natur kennt feine Grade, Ein Gespräch mit Prof. Frank Zachos Episode 121: Künstliche Unintelligenz Episode 119: Spy vs Spy: Über künstlicher Intelligenz und anderen Agenten Episode 104: Aus Quantität wird Qualität Episode 98: Ist Gott tot? Ein philosophisches Gespräch mit Jan Juhani Steinmann Episode 85: Naturalismus — was weiß Wissenschaft? Episode 68: Modelle und Realität, ein Gespräch mit Dr. Andreas Windisch Fachliche Referenzen  Webseite und Lebenslauf von Jan Juhani Steinmann YouTube Kanal von Jan Juhani Steinmann Jan Juhani Steinmann, Kritik der künstlichen Vernunft, Lepanto (2025) Jan Juhani Steinmann, Das Vorfaltenlicht. Die Alpen und das Valley, Wieser Verlag (2025) Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781) Peter Sloterdijk, Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, Suhrkamp (1983) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1922) Kränkungen der Menschheit, Sigmund Freud und folgende Andy Clark, Being There, MIT Press (1998) Steve Taylor, How a Flawed Experiment “Proved” That Free Will Doesn't Exist, Scientific American (2019)

Can physics explain the soul? Is AI building a silicon god? Should Christians be open to merging their brains with the cloud or using AI to “resurrect” a loved one? Brian and philosophy professor Isaac Choi explore these and other questions at the intersection of faith, science, and futurism.Check out The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil: https://www.singularity.com/Dr. Isaac Choi directs the George Fox University Honors Program: https://www.georgefox.edu/honors-program/faculty-pages/isaac-choi.htmlDr. Brian Doak is an Old Testament scholar and professor: https://www.georgefox.edu/academics/undergrad/departments/religion/faculty/doak.htmlIf you enjoy listening to the George Fox Talks podcast and would like to watch, too, check out our channel on YouTube! We also have a web page that features all of our podcasts, a sign-up for our weekly email update, and publications from the George Fox University community.

In this deep and wide-ranging conversation, we sit down with John-Clark Levin — researcher, author, and thought leader at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence — to explore the hopes and hazards of the technological era we now inhabit.As research lead for Kurzweil Technologies under futurist Ray Kurzweil, Levin conducts long-term AI foresight and has spoken widely about artificial superintelligence and its implications for society, policy, and human flourishing. We begin by tracing his journey from growing up in Ojai, the book that changed everything for him (Kurzweil's "The Rise of Spiritual Machines" to some of the world's most consequential debates about AI. Along the way, Levin shares how his early interests evolved into a professional focus on the future of intelligence and human-machine symbiosis.A major thread of our discussion centers on Levin's work engaging the Vatican on artificial intelligence — part of a broader effort to ensure that leading global institutions take seriously the ethical, spiritual, and existential questions posed by AI's rapid advance. He describes organizing experts and advocates around what some have dubbed the “AI Avengers,” working to bring the possibility and risks of artificial general intelligence (AGI) into high-level ecclesiastical consideration and eventual guidance. From there we delve into pressing contemporary concerns: the rise of misinformation and disinformation in public life, the risk landscape sometimes referred to as the coming “Slop-acolypse,” and how societies might more effectively marshal truth and trust as AI reshapes information ecosystems.Alongside these serious themes, we trade stories about less expected moments — including Levin's Jeopardy! experience, and the intersecting paths of competition, curiosity, and narrative in his life. The host also reflects on his own Jeopardy! memories in light of Levin's appearance, sparking a candid exchange about learning, memory, and what it means to think like a human — or like a machine designed to mimic human cognition.We did not talk about Japanese names for salt, Simon Bolivar or Greenland annexation.This episode is an engaging, thought-provoking journey through the contours of our strange, accelerating age — from Silicon Valley to the Vatican and from the personal to the planetary. Whether you're deeply invested in AI futures or just curious about the forces reshaping our world, this discussion with John-Clark Levin offers rare insight from one of the field's most provocative voices.You can check out John-Clark's twitter account at https://x.com/JohnClarkLevin, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/johnclarklevin/

Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends   Ray Kurzweil is an American inventor and futurist best known for his pioneering work in optical character recognition and his predictions regarding the technological singularity. Salim Ismail is the founder of OpenExO Dave Blundin is the founder & GP of Link Ventures Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross is a computer scientist and founder of Reified – My companies: Pre order "We Are As Gods" at diamandis.com/book Apply to Dave's and my new fund: https://qr.diamandis.com/linkventureslanding     Go to Blitzy to book a free demo and start building today: https://qr.diamandis.com/blitzy   _ Connect with Peter: X Instagram Connect with Dave: X LinkedIn Connect with Salim: X Join Salim's Workshop to build your ExO  Connect with Alex Website LinkedIn X Email Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube – *Recorded on January 15th, 2026 *The views expressed by me and all guests are personal opinions and do not constitute Financial, Medical, or Legal advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ray Kurzweil promete que en 2045 conectaremos el cerebro a la nube. En este episodio desmontamos esa narrativa: qué dice realmente la ciencia, qué es futurismo ideológico y qué implicaciones políticas tiene un cerebro conectado a infraestructuras controladas por corporaciones y Estados. No es un debate tecnológico, sino de poder, conciencia y libertad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When We Merge with AI. Get all the news you need by listening to WBZ - Boston's News Radio! We're here for you, 24/7. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Age of Transitions and Uncle 12-5-2025AoT#481Don't feel bad if you aren't sure what to do right now. Even the high and mighty captors of America are relying on social media analytics to know what to say. Topics include: esoteric transhumanism, Peter Thiel, Patreon, AI automating online content creation, waiting for something to happen, no normal life, rapid pace of change, Big Tech AI projects, data centers, electrical power needs increasing, Ray Kurzweil, AGI, TMI, Tech oligarch version of Libertarian politics, UBI, social media and legacy media being consolidated, dependence of technological system, technique perfecting itself, faith in creation of technological god, Joe Rogan's transhumanist views, pretending to be Christian, using analytics to craft new media narratives, appropriating conspiracy culture, previous Big Tech religious identities, mainstreaming of fringe media and tech figures, social media marketing, Communism as boogey man scape goat, no accountability built into new American government, no way out of total surveillanceUtp#388Uncle is back, and excited to unbox a package from Creative Accidents. We also take time to honor the memory of Spent Kent. Topics include: back from break, microphones, crack room, unboxing Creative Accidents package, Uncle (the drop glass), Jack Daniels Tennessee Honey, New Year's Revolution, NFL recap, Bread Scott qb, roll away football fields, in the hunt Playoff Picture, Detroit City of Champions, call in on NYE, telethon, Robin update, Spent Kent RIP, LA Dodgers, Ohtani, chat spammer on Kick, not government hour, TikTak videos, Chuck's accidentFRANZ MAIN HUB:https://theageoftransitions.com/PATREONhttps://www.patreon.com/aaronfranzUNCLEhttps://unclethepodcast.com/ORhttps://theageoftransitions.com/category/uncle-the-podcast/FRANZ and UNCLE Merchhttps://theageoftransitions.com/category/support-the-podcasts/---BE THE EFFECTHelp for Ochelli and The NetworkMrs.OLUNA ROSA CANDLEShttp://www.paypal.me/Kimberlysonn1Ochelli Link Treehttps://linktr.ee/chuckochelliBE THE EFFECTListen/Chat on the Sitehttps://ochelli.com/listen-live/TuneInhttp://tun.in/sfxkxAPPLEhttps://music.apple.com/us/station/ochelli-com/ra.1461174708Ochelli Link Treehttps://linktr.ee/chuckochelliAnything is a blessing if you have the meansWithout YOUR support we go silent

Don't feel bad if you aren't sure what to do right now. Even the high and mighty captors of America are relying on social media analytics to know what to say.  Topics include: esoteric transhumanism, Peter Thiel, Patreon, AI automating online content creation, waiting for something to happen, no normal life, rapid pace of change, Big Tech AI projects, data centers, electrical power needs increasing, Ray Kurzweil, AGI, TMI, Tech oligarch version of Libertarian politics, UBI, social media and legacy media being consolidated, dependence of technological system, technique perfecting itself, faith in creation of technological god, Joe Rogan's transhumanist views, pretending to be Christian, using analytics to craft new media narratives, appropriating conspiracy culture, previous Big Tech religious identities, mainstreaming of fringe media and tech figures, social media marketing, Communism as boogey man scape goat, no accountability built into new American government, no way out of total surveillance

Summary In this conversation, Wesley Baker discusses the current and future implications of AI in sales development roles, emphasizing its augmentative role rather than a replacement for jobs. He highlights the importance of customer experience in the automation process and raises questions about the future of AI, referencing predictions about technological advancements. Takeaways AI is currently augmenting rather than replacing SDR jobs. The future of AI in sales is uncertain but promising. Inbound opportunities may see more automation in the future. Customer experience is crucial in the automation process. Fully automating processes without customer delight can lead to loss of business. Wesley references Ray Kurzweil's predictions about AI advancements. The Singularity event in 2045 is a significant milestone for AI. AI's role in qualifying inbound opportunities is evolving. Automation should enhance, not detract from customer interactions. The conversation raises important questions about the future of work with AI. Chapters 00:00 Introduction to the SDR Leader Conference 00:50 Misconceptions About AI in Sales 01:01 Balancing Automation with Human Touch The AI for Sales Podcast is brought to you by BDR.ai, Nooks.ai, and ZoomInfo—the go-to-market intelligence platform that accelerates revenue growth. Skip the forms and website hunting—Chad will connect you directly with the right person at any of these companies.

We're told that AI progress is slowing down, that pre-training has hit a wall, that scaling laws are running out of road. Yet we're releasing this episode in the middle of a wild couple of weeks that saw GPT-5.1, GPT-5.1 Codex Max, fresh reasoning modes and long-running agents ship from OpenAI — on top of a flood of new frontier models elsewhere. To make sense of what's actually happening at the edge of the field, I sat down with someone who has literally helped define both of the major AI paradigms of our time.Łukasz Kaiser is one of the co-authors of “Attention Is All You Need,” the paper that introduced the Transformer architecture behind modern LLMs, and is now a leading research scientist at OpenAI working on reasoning models like those behind GPT-5.1. In this conversation, he explains why AI progress still looks like a smooth exponential curve from inside the labs, why pre-training is very much alive even as reinforcement-learning-based reasoning models take over the spotlight, how chain-of-thought actually works under the hood, and what it really means to “train the thinking process” with RL on verifiable domains like math, code and science. We talk about the messy reality of low-hanging fruit in engineering and data, the economics of GPUs and distillation, interpretability work on circuits and sparsity, and why the best frontier models can still be stumped by a logic puzzle from his five-year-old's math book.We also go deep into Łukasz's personal journey — from logic and games in Poland and France, to Ray Kurzweil's team, Google Brain and the inside story of the Transformer, to joining OpenAI and helping drive the shift from chatbots to genuine reasoning engines. Along the way we cover GPT-4 → GPT-5 → GPT-5.1, post-training and tone, GPT-5.1 Codex Max and long-running coding agents with compaction, alternative architectures beyond Transformers, whether foundation models will “eat” most agents and applications, what the translation industry can teach us about trust and human-in-the-loop, and why he thinks generalization, multimodal reasoning and robots in the home are where some of the most interesting challenges still lie.OpenAIWebsite - https://openai.comX/Twitter - https://x.com/OpenAIŁukasz KaiserLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukaszkaiser/X/Twitter - https://x.com/lukaszkaiserFIRSTMARKWebsite - https://firstmark.comX/Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCapMatt Turck (Managing Director)Blog - https://mattturck.comLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck(00:00) – Cold open and intro(01:29) – “AI slowdown” vs a wild week of new frontier models(08:03) – Low-hanging fruit: infra, RL training and better data(11:39) – What is a reasoning model, in plain language?(17:02) – Chain-of-thought and training the thinking process with RL(21:39) – Łukasz's path: from logic and France to Google and Kurzweil(24:20) – Inside the Transformer story and what “attention” really means(28:42) – From Google Brain to OpenAI: culture, scale and GPUs(32:49) – What's next for pre-training, GPUs and distillation(37:29) – Can we still understand these models? Circuits, sparsity and black boxes(39:42) – GPT-4 → GPT-5 → GPT-5.1: what actually changed(42:40) – Post-training, safety and teaching GPT-5.1 different tones(46:16) – How long should GPT-5.1 think? Reasoning tokens and jagged abilities(47:43) – The five-year-old's dot puzzle that still breaks frontier models(52:22) – Generalization, child-like learning and whether reasoning is enough(53:48) – Beyond Transformers: ARC, LeCun's ideas and multimodal bottlenecks(56:10) – GPT-5.1 Codex Max, long-running agents and compaction(1:00:06) – Will foundation models eat most apps? The translation analogy and trust(1:02:34) – What still needs to be solved, and where AI might go next

In this episode, we expose the unsettling rise of transhumanism—the global elite's plan to merge man with machine and rewrite creation itself. From DARPA's brain-interface projects to Klaus Schwab's “Fourth Industrial Revolution” and Ray Kurzweil's promise of digital immortality, the push to transcend God's design has never been more blatant. We trace the spiritual roots of this movement—the same lie from Eden that “ye shall be as gods”—and reveal how it connects to modern biotech, AI, and the manipulation of human and agricultural seed. This isn't science fiction; it's the seed war of our generation. The battle lines are drawn between the image of God and the image of the machine—and only one kingdom will stand.Email: thefacthunter@mail.comReferences: Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near  Julian Huxley, Transhumanism  World Economic Forum, “The Great Reset” DARPA, Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3)  Neuralink Whitepaper, “An Integrated Brain-Machine Interface Platform Psalm 139:14; Genesis 1:26-27; Genesis 3:5; Proverbs 20:27 (KJV) Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence  Oxford Future of Humanity Institute publications Google Calico corporate filings  Human 2.0 – The Future of Sense Making https://youtu.be/xttBHcXZGM8?si=3ggAL1fvhf4P0i7L Peter Thiel on Transhumanism and the Future of Humanity https://youtu.be/YSp07P8jvYs?si=YUe2wvwdu6LJHpTI

We sat down to record something short when Branan dropped a spontaneous Drop on Anson.  Television: The Handmaid's Tale's 6th & final season. Severance, The Studio, The Rehearsal and Nathan's Fileder's hybrid comedy.  Books: Jeff Vandermeer's latest addition to his Southern Reach Trilogy. Ray Kurzweil's latest book The Singularity is Nearer sparks a long discussion about the transformational power of AI and is immortality worth it?       Podcasts:  “Short history of…”  and “Cautionary Tales”  Plus, Anson sees his first Metallica show and conforms the rumors: they still rule, especially when they're channeling Ennio Morricone.  website audio https://youtu.be/d3OMz76mDCM

Do you think artificial intelligence will ever become sentient? Ray Kurzweil addresses this issue in his book, "The Age Of Spiritual Machines". On this classic broadcast of the Alchemical Lantern, we explore the ideas leading up to the singularity and the advent of transhumanism...www.alchemicaltechrevolution.comMake a donation here:https://buymeacoffee.com/alchemicaltechrevolution

In this conversation, I'm joined by mathematician, meditator, and machine learning engineer Blake Hull. We share stories of therapy, meditation, and Ram Dass, opening up after years of staying in the head, we unravel ideas of masculinity, expand on vulnerability, and dissect what it means to become safe in our own skin. We talk about anger as sacred energy, the strange geometry of emotion, and the daily ritual of saying “Good morning, Blakey Boy” - a quiet reminder that to heal isn't to change, it's to remember who you already are. This is a fluid dialogue that drifts through psychedelics, softness, the mathematics of love, friendship, wisdom - it's an episode that invites you to slow down, breathe, and feel something true. Together, The Great and Wonderful Blake Hull and I explore the space between intellect, emotion, and becoming what we are - I hope you'll join us.Themes: therapy · masculinity · meditation · Ram Dass · psychedelics · inner-child · emotional intelligence · spiritual growthNotable quotes from the episode:“When intellect finally kneels to emotion, that's when growth begins.” - Blake, describing the moment logic yields to honesty.“Emotions are information. You'd be stupid to ignore them.” - Blake quoting a college professor who first reframed feeling as intelligence.“When Jesus flipped tables, that was dharmic anger — anger in service of love.” - Jacob, reframing anger as sacred energy rather than chaos.“I feel most connected with you when you're feeling.”- Blake recounting a moment in therapy that changed his understanding of connection and vulnerability.“Maybe consciousness has always been doing this — reflecting itself through whatever new medium we invent.” - Jacob, near the close, connecting AI, identity, and awareness.“Anger isn't the problem. It's what happens when we stop letting it teach us.” - Blake, redefining emotional intelligence through presence.TIMESTAMPS:00:00:00 – Intro: Setting up, laughter, first exchange, Blake's Bio00:02:15 – “I feel most connected when you're feeling” – therapy and awareness00:05:00 – Logic vs emotion: learning how to feel again00:07:25 – Emotional intelligence and inner safety00:10:45 – Anger as sacred energy (“dharmic anger”)00:12:10 – Modern society, Idiocracy, and humor as medicine00:15:23 – Aldous Huxley, psychedelics, and self-reflection00:16:09 – Paul Stamets, microdosing, and consciousness00:20:00 – Mushrooms, meditation, and integration00:26:00 – Masculinity and vulnerability00:31:00 – Meditation: honesty over peace00:36:03 – “Good morning, Blakey Boy” – the inner-child ritual00:40:03 – Ego, death, and Ram Dass on becoming somebody00:45:00 – Comic relief: fart jokes and humility00:50:00 – Math and metaphysics: when numbers become poetry00:58:48 – Math as beauty and the language of existence01:00:26 – Group theory, triangles, and the philosophy of structure01:02:06 – Did humans discover or invent math?01:10:00 – Humor, curiosity, and teaching through questions01:13:34 – The future of math, AI, and physics (the long view)01:14:13 – Ray Kurzweil and his father's digital journals01:15:15 – iPhone, exponential tech, and AI acceleration01:16:00 – Touchscreens, prediction, and futurism01:20:00 – Consciousness and machine learning01:30:00 – Human identity in the age of algorithms01:37:01 – AI anxiety, UBI, and the ethics of automation01:43:56 – Consciousness itself: What is it, really?02:00:00 – Journaling, memory, and the desire to preserve the self02:14:00 – Humor as grounding: “Even the enlightened still fart.”02:20:00 – Compassion as technology02:31:04 – Returning to therapy: “I feel most connected when you're feeling.”02:40:00 – Closing reflections, gratitude, and quiet laughter#JunkyardLovePodcast #BlakeHull #EmotionalIntelligence #Masculinity #Mindfulness #Meditation #InnerChild #TherapyForMen #ModernSpirituality #AIConsciousness #MachineLearning #SelfAwareness #PodcastEpisode #ListenNowHit subscribe for new episodes, we'll see ya next time.

37. Paul Waters talks to and hears about the winner and runners-up of the 2025 India Global Forum Archer Amish Award for Storytellers - including Jeffrey Archer, Amish Tripathi, Shalini Mullick, Nitya Neelakantan, Yogesh Pandey, & Amit Roy - the editor of the Eastern Eye newspaper. Dr Shalini Mullick is the author of The Way Home. Nitya Neelakantan is the author of Navapashanam - The Quest for the Nine Magical Poisons. And Yogesh Pandey is the author of The Kill Switch.The winner tells us about his/her writing process - the miracle of how it is fitted in to the rest of a very busy life.Jeffrey Archer talks about what makes a page turner & his new book, the latest & likely final instalment in his William Warwick series, End Game, set at the London Olympics. He also gives an insight - courtesy of Commander Robert Broadhurst who was the Met Police Gold Commander for the 2012 Olympics - into what could have gone catastrophically wrong at the real Olympics - & why Sebastian Coe was never told. Jeffrey also explains why Stoner by John Williams is the book that has been gripping him recently. He also has another story up his sleeve which he says is better than Kane and Abel.Amish Tripathi talks about his new book, The Chola Tigers, about a historical assassination squad, & the challenges of researching a setting so long ago. He's been reading something very up to date though - two books by Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, &, The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI. They both also explain why they've chosen who they've chosen as the winner of the inaugural IGF Archer Amish Award for Storytellers - which is incidentally sponsored by the House of Abhinandan Lodha. The IGF itself has Manoj Ladwa as Founder & Chairman.Plus, Amit Roy of the Eastern Eye gives his insight into the divergence of south Asian and British south Asian culture & writing - & why Indian writers & filmmakers come to London, 'the capital of Greater India', for validation. AA Dhand & Satyajit Ray get a mention.We'd Like A Word is a podcast & radio show from authors Paul Waters & Stevyn Colgan. (And sometimes Jonathan Kennedy.) We talk with writers, readers, editors, agents, celebrities, talkers, poets, publishers, booksellers, & audiobook creators about books - fiction & non-fiction. We go out on various radio & podcast platforms. Our website is http://www.wedlikeaword.com for information on Paul, Steve & our guests. We're on Twitter @wedlikeaword & Facebook @wedlikeaword & our email is wedlikeaword@gmail.com Yes, we're embarrassed by the missing apostrophes. We like to hear from you - questions, thoughts, ideas, guest or book suggestions. Perhaps you'd like to come on We'd Like A Word to chat, review or read out passages from books.Paul is the author of a new Irish-Indian cosy crime series set in contemporary Delhi. The first in the series is Murder in Moonlit Square, which published by No Exit Press / Bedford Square Publishers & Penguin India in October 2025. Paul previously wrote the 1950s Irish border thriller Blackwatertown.We can also recommend Cockerings, the comic classic by Stevyn Colgan, and his hugely popular YouTube channel @Colganology

Sit back and relax but pay attention to my conversation with Gee Ranasinha. Gee lives in the Northeast part of France. As he puts it, his marketing experience goes back to the “days of dial-up internet and AOL CDs”. During our conversation Gee tells us how he progressed from working with film, (do you know what that is?), to now working with the most advanced digital and other technological systems.   He is the CEO of his own marketing company KEXINO. He talks a bit about what makes a good marketing firm and why some companies are more successful than others. He says, for example, that most companies do the same things as every other company. While labels and logos may be different, if you cover up the logos the messages and ways to provide them are the same. The successful firms have learned to distinguish themselves by being different in some manner. He practices what he preaches right down to the name of his company, KEXINO. He will tell us where the company name came from. You will see why I says he practices what he preaches.   Gee gives us a great history of a lot of marketing efforts and initiatives. If you are at all involved with working to make yourself or your company successful marketing wise, then what Gee has to say will be especially relevant to you. This is one of those episodes that is worth hearing more than once.     About the Guest:   Gee has been in marketing since the days of dial-up internet and AOL CDs. Today, he's the CEO of KEXINO, a marketing agency and behavioral science practice for small to medium-sized businesses. Over the past 17 years KEXINO has helped over 400 startups and small businesses in around 20 countries grow awareness, reputation, trust - and sales. A Fellow of the Chartered Institute Of Marketing, Gee is also Visiting Professor at two business schools, teaching Marketing and Behavioral Science to final-year MBA students. Outside of work Gee loves to cook, listens to music on a ridiculously expensive hi-fi, and plays jazz piano very badly.    Ways to connect with Gee:   KEXINO website:  https://kexino.com LinkedIn:  https://linkedin.com/in/ranasinha YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/c/Kexino Instagram:  https://instagram.com/wearekexino TikTok:  https://tiktok.com/@kexino Threads: https://www.threads.net/@wearekexino BlueSky:  https://bsky.app/profile/kexino.com     About the Host:   Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening!   Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast   If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset .   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review   Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.       Transcription Notes:   Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:16 Well and a gracious hello to you, wherever you may be, you are now listening to an episode of unstoppable mindset. I am your host, Mike or Michael. I don't really care which hingson and our guest today is Gee Ranasinha, who is a person who is very heavily involved in doing marketing and so on. Gee has been marketing for a long time, and reading his bio, he talks about being in marketing since the days of dial up and AOL and CDs. I remember the first time I tried to subscribe to AOL. It was a floppy disk. But anyway, that's okay. The bottom line is that does go back many, many years. That's when we had Rs 232 cables and modems. Now people probably don't mostly know what they are unless they're technically involved and they're all built into the technology that we use. But that's another history lesson for later. So Gee, I want to welcome you to unstoppable mindset. We're really glad you're here. This should be a fun subject and thing to talk about.   Gee Ranasinha ** 02:27 Well, thank you very much for inviting me, Michael, I do. I do appreciate it.   Michael Hingson ** 02:31 Well, I'm looking forward to it and getting a chance to talk. And love to hear some of your your old stories about marketing, as well as the new ones, and of course, what lessons we learned from the old ones that helped in the new ones. And of course, I suspect there'll also be a lot of situations where we didn't learn the lessons that we should have, which is another story, right?   Gee Ranasinha ** 02:50 Yeah, history does tend to repeat itself, unfortunately, and   Michael Hingson ** 02:55 that usually happens because we don't pay attention to the lessons.   Gee Ranasinha ** 02:59 Yeah, yeah, we, we, I think we think we know better. But I mean, it's, it's, it's funny, because, you know, if you look at other other industries, you know, if, if you want to be an architect, right, you would certainly look back to the works of, you know, Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright or Renzo Piano, or, you know, some of the great architects, and you would look back on their work, look how they did it. And you would, you know, turn back the the annals of history to to see what had gone before. But for some reason, in our industry, in marketing, we we don't think we can learn from the lessons that our erstwhile peers have had in the past, and we've so as a result, we tend to sort of rename things that have gone before, so that the newer generation of marketers will actually pay attention to them. So we give things new names. But actually, if you, if you scratch the surface and look a little bit deeper. It's actually nothing new at all. And I don't quite know why that is. I think people think that they know better than the people who've gone before them, because of the technology, because you know so much of the execution the promotion side of marketing is technology based. They I'm guessing that people don't see a relevance to what happened in the past because of the technology aspect being different, right? But what I contend is that the the essence. Of marketing is about understanding human behavior and their reactions to particular inputs, impulses, right? Um, in which case, we have plenty to learn from the people who've you know, who've walked in our in the walk this path before, and we should be a little bit, maybe a little bit more humble and open minded into accepting that we don't know everything, and we maybe don't even know what we don't know.   Michael Hingson ** 05:36 I always remember back in what was it, 1982 or 1983 we had a situation here in the United States where somebody planted some poison in a bottle of Tylenol in a drug store. I remember that, yeah, and within a day, the president of the company came out and said, This is what we're going to do to deal with it, including taking all the bottles of all the pills off the shelves until we check them over and make sure everyone is clean and so on. And he got right out in front of it. And I've seen so many examples since of relatively similar kinds of crises, and nobody takes a step to take a firm stand about how we're going to handle it, which is really strange, because clearly what he did really should have taught us all a lesson. Tylenol hasn't gone away, the company hasn't gone away, and the lesson should be that there is relevance in getting out in front of it and having a plan. Now I don't know whether he or anyone really had a plan in case something happened. I've never heard that, but still whatever he got right out in front of it and addressed it. And I just really wish more marketing people, when there is a crisis, would do more of that to instill confidence in consumers.   Gee Ranasinha ** 07:07 He did the right thing, right? He did, he did what you or I would have done, or we would like to think we would have done in this place, right? I, I'm, I'm guessing it was probably, not the favorite course of action, if this had been debated at board stroke shareholder level. But like I said, he he did what we all think we would have done in his place. He did the right thing. And I think that there are many instances today, more instances today than maybe in the past, where the actions of an individual they are. An individual has more freedom of expression in the past than they've had in the in the present, and they don't have to mind their P's and Q's as much. I mean, sure we know we're still talking about profit making organizations. You know, we're living in a pseudo capitalist, Neo liberal society. But surely we're still there still needs to be some kind of humanity at the end of this, right? You know, reputations take years, decades, sometimes, to build, and they can be knocked down very quickly, right, right? There's so I think some somebody, somebody, somebody a lot older and wiser than me, well, certainly wiser older. Said a brand's reputation was like a tree. It takes ages to grow, but can be knocked down very quickly, and there are plenty. You know, history is littered with examples of of organizations who haven't done the right thing.   Speaker 1 ** 09:16 Well, the Yeah, go ahead. No, go ahead. Tell me   Michael Hingson ** 09:20 the I observed this actually not too long ago, on a podcast, this whole discussion to someone, and they made an interesting point, which I think is probably relevant, which is, today we have a different environment, because we have social media. We have so many things, where communications go so quickly, and we we see so many people putting out information right or wrong, conspiracy or not, about anything and everything that comes up, that it causes people maybe to hesitate a little bit more to. Truly study what they want to say, because everyone's going to pick up on it. But at the same time, and I appreciate that at the same time, I think there are basic marketing principles. And as you point out, and as you're well aware, there is such a thing as human behavior, and while people want instant gratification, and they want to know right now what happened 20 minutes ago. The reality is we're not necessarily going to get that. The media doesn't help because they want to put everything out and get the story. But still, the reality is human nature is human nature, and ultimately, Truth will win out. And what we need to do is to really work more toward making sure that that happens.   Gee Ranasinha ** 10:48 I, I actually don't agree with that. Okay, in in, you know, in the, in the with the greatest respect, firstly, I think, I think as a cop out to use social media, information channels, news cycles, that sort of thing, because, if anything, because of the pace of the news cycle and The, you know, the fire hose of social media today, me, we're in a better position to say what we mean and not regret it, because it's forgotten it 20 minutes. Yeah, so it works, it's, it's an argument for what we're talking about not, not against   Michael Hingson ** 11:41 it, yeah. I agree. Yeah, go ahead,   Gee Ranasinha ** 11:45 yeah. And the second thing you said, truth will out. And I think truth does not without and there are plenty of people who continue to spout out misinformation and disinformation, yeah, constantly at every level of corporate at a corporate level, at a political level, at a geopolitical level, or at a local level, right? I don't want to sort of go down that rabbit hole, right, but there are, there are plenty of misquotes, myths, truths, which are never, never withdrawn and never counted, never excused and live out there in the ether, in perpetuity.   Michael Hingson ** 12:35 Yeah, it's true, but I also think that in the end, while some people continue to put their inaccurate information out, I think there are also others who have taken the time, or do take the time they put out more relevant information, and probably in the long run, more people buy into that than to misinformation. I'm not going to say it's a perfect world, but I think more often than not, enough positive information comes out that people eventually get more of the right answer than all the yammering and bad information. But it may take time.   Gee Ranasinha ** 13:18 I would love to believe that, Mike, I really would maybe I'm just too cynical, right?   Michael Hingson ** 13:27 I hear you, I hear you, and you know, I don't know I could be just as wrong. I mean, in the United States today, we've got a government with people who are definitely talking about things and saying things that most of us have always felt are untrue, but unfortunately, they're being said and pushed in such a way that more people are not opposing them. And how quickly that will change remains to be seen. And for all I know, and I think, for all I know, maybe some of what they're saying might be right, but we'll see.   Gee Ranasinha ** 14:05 I think that's the issue. I mean, I, as I said, I don't really want to jump down that politics rabbit hole, but no, not really. I think, you know, the issue is, if you say a lie enough times, people believe it. Yeah, right, yeah. And the fact that nobody's fact checking this stuff, I'm like, I said. I'm not. I'm not singling out politics. I'm singling out messaging in its widest in its widest interpretation, right, false messaging of any sort, if left unchecked. Yeah. Correct. I think the people who know an alternative reality or know that it's a lie know that it's an untruth by not publicly facts checking it, by not calling these. People out are complicit in spreading the lie.   Michael Hingson ** 15:03 Yeah, well, I think that's true, and you're right. It doesn't matter whether it's politics. It doesn't matter whether it's well, whatever it is, it's anything. And I think there's one of the beauties of of our country, your country. And I didn't explain at the beginning that G is in the you said, northwest part of France, right? Northeast, northeast, well, east, west, northeast part   Gee Ranasinha ** 15:29 of Yeah, well, near enough, you know, if you go, if you go, if you go east, far enough times you get, you get to West Anyway, don't you? Well, you get back where you started. Or maybe you don't, I don't know if, depends who you listen   Michael Hingson ** 15:39 to, right? If the Earth is flat. Well, even the Flat Earthers have had explanations for why the earth is flat and people don't fall off, but that's okay, but yeah, so northeast part of France and and I hear, I hear what you're saying, and I think it's important that people have the freedom to be able to fact check, and I, and I hope, as we grow more people will find the value of that, but that in all aspects, but that remains to be seen.   Gee Ranasinha ** 16:14 Well, I think especially in you know, perversely, now that we have the ability to check the veracity of a piece of information a lot easier, right? Almost in real time. Yeah. I think the fact that we can means that we don't, you know, you probably know the quote by what was his name? Edwin Burke, who may or may not have said that, you know, evil triumphs when good men do nothing or something like that. Along that sort of lines, some people say that he didn't say that. He did say, it doesn't matter who said it, right? It's a great quote. It's a great quote. It's a great quote. And that's what I mean about being complicit, just by the fact of not calling this stuff out, feeds the fire. Yeah, to the to the point where it becomes and especially, I'm talking with people who maybe are a little bit younger and haven't and are more likely to believe what they see on screens of whatever size, simply because it's in the public domain, um, whereas The older strokes more cynical of us may may question a lot more of what's thrown in front of our eyes. So I think all of us have a responsibility, which I don't think all of us understand the power that we yield or we're afraid to or afraid to? Yeah, absolutely.   Michael Hingson ** 18:08 So tell me a little about kind of the early Gee growing up and so on, and how you got into this whole idea and arena of marketing and so on.   Gee Ranasinha ** 18:18 Well before this, I was the CMO of a software company. I was there for seven years, and before that, I was working for a company in London, working with in the print and publishing industries. So I've been around media for most of my working life, and after, after being at the software company for seven years, sort of hit a little bit of a ceiling, really. I mean, the company was a small company, and it could only grow at a certain rate, and so I wasn't really being challenged anymore. I had to wait a little bit until the company could fill the bigger shoes that had been given, if you like. You know, I mean growing pains. It's very common for companies of all sizes to go through this sort of thing. So to be honest, I probably was treading water a bit too long. But you know, you get you get complacent, don't you, you get comfortable in in the, you know the corporate job, and you know a salary at the at the end of every month, and you know corporate travel and company BMWs and expense accounts and all of that sort of trappings. And you know, I, I fell for all of that. You. Um, but I finally realized that something needed to happen. So at the end of 2007 beginning of 2008 Me and a couple of colleagues decided to start the agency, which, as you will remember, 2008 was not exactly the best time to start a marketing agency. Good time to start any agency,   Michael Hingson ** 20:29 to be honest. The other hand, there were a lot of opportunities. But yeah, I hear you. Well, yeah,   Gee Ranasinha ** 20:34 glass half full. Glass half empty, right? Yeah. But you know, luckily, with with a number of very, very supportive clients in those early days, you know, we weathered the post recession? Yeah, slow down. And 17 and a half years later, here we are. We've now. We started off with three. We were three. We're now 19. We're in nine countries. Nine of us were in the US. The rest are in Europe, South Africa, Japan, and two people in Australia. That's that, that's, that's who we are. So, you know, we're a a team of marketing, creative and business development specialists, and we work with startups and small businesses primarily in the US, even though we're based all over the place, and we combine marketing strategy, proper strategy, with a thing called behavioral science, which works with organizations to increase their awareness, their reputation, their trust, and most of all, of course, sales Right? Because sales is name of the game. Sales is what it's all about. So yeah, I'd say probably 80, 90% of our clients are in the US and, well, certainly North America anyway, and it's all sorts of industries, all sorts of sizes. We've we've got, we certainly had in the past. You know, solopreneur type businesses, small businesses and larger businesses, up to around 40 to 50 mil to revenue that sort of size, anything bigger they usually have, usually got, you know, quite well, working teams within the organization. So we're, you know, the amount of effective contribution that we can add to that is, it's obviously going to be as a percentage, much lower. So it's, it's, it's really for that, that smaller sized profile of organization, and it's not sort of limited by particular industry or category. We've, you know, we work with all sorts. We've worked in sports, healthcare, FinTech, medical, professional services, software, publishing, all sorts, right across the board.   Michael Hingson ** 23:34 What got you started in marketing in the beginning, you you know you were like everyone else. You were a kid and you grew up and so on. What? What really made you decide that this was the kind of career you wanted?   Gee Ranasinha ** 23:46 Marketing wasn't my first career. I've had a few others in the past. I actually started off my first first company, and I founded, way back when was a media production company. I was a professional photographer, advertising photographer, working with advertising agencies as well as direct corporate commissions. This is in the days of film. This was way before digital image capture.   Michael Hingson ** 24:20 So this is going back to what the 1980s   Gee Ranasinha ** 24:23 it's going to late 80s to early 90s. Yeah, and I was working with eight by 10 and four by five view cameras, sometimes called plate cameras. It was mainly studio stuff. I was happier in the studio that we did location stuff as well. But studio was where I was happiest because I could control everything. I suppose I'm on control freak at the end of the day. So I can control every highlight, every nuance, every every part of the equation. And. And and that's where I started. And then after doing that for a while, I came I got involved with professional quality digital image capture. Is very, very it is very, very beginning. And was instrumental in the the adoption of digital image capture for larger print and publishing catalog fashion houses who were looking for a way to streamline that production process, where, obviously, up until then, the processing of film had been a bottleneck, right? You couldn't, you couldn't process film any quicker than the film needed to be processed, right the the e6 process, which was the the term for using a bunch of chemicals to create slides, die, positives, transparencies. I think it used to take like 36 minutes plus drying time. So there was a, you know, close to an hour wait between shooting and actually seeing what what the result was. And that time frame could not be reduced up until that point in time, the quality of digital image capture systems wasn't really all of that, certainly wasn't a close approximation to what you could get with with film at The time, until a number of manufacturers working with chip manufacturers, were able to increase the dynamic range and the the total nuances that you could capture on digital Of course, the problem at that time was we were talking about what, what were, What today is not particularly large, but was at the time in terms of file sizes, and the computers of the day would be struggling to deal with images of that high quality, so It was always a game of catch up between the image capture hardware and the computer hardware needed to to view and manipulate the image and by manipulate it was more more manipulation in terms of optimizing the digital file for reproduction in print, because obviously that was the primary carrier of, yeah, of the information. It was for use in some kind of printed medium. It wasn't like we were doing very much with with email or websites or anything else in the in the early 90s. So the conversion process to optimize a digital image captured file, to give the best possible tonal reproduction on printed material has always been a little bit of a black art, even when we when we were digitizing transparency films, going to digital image capture made things a lot more predictable, but it also increased the computational power needed, number one, but also for photographers to actually understand a little bit more about the photo mechanical print process, and there were very few photographers who understood both, both sides of the fence. So I spent a lot of time being a pom pom girl. Basically Mike. I was, I was, I was waving the pom poms and preaching large about the benefits of digital image capture and how and educating the industries, various in photographic industries, about, you know, possible best practices. There weren't any sort of standards in place at the time,   Michael Hingson ** 29:41 and it took a while for people to really buy into that they weren't visionary enough to understand what you were saying. I bet   Gee Ranasinha ** 29:48 Well, we were also taught very few were enough, and there were two reasons. One of them was financially based, because. We were talking about a ton of money, yeah, to do this properly, we were talking about a ton of money. Just the image capture system would easily cost you 50 grand. And this, you know this, this was in the days when 50 grand was a lot of money,   Michael Hingson ** 30:18 yeah, well, I remember my first jobs out of college were working with Ray Kurzweil, who developed Omni font, optical character recognition system. Oh, my goodness me, I did not know that. And the first machine that he put out for general use, called the Kurzweil data entry machine, was only $125,000 it worked. It still took a while to make it to truly do what it needed to do, but still it was. It was the first machine, and a lot of people just didn't buy into it. It took a while to get people to see the value of why digitizing printed material was so relevant, some lawyers, Some law firms, some banks and so on, caught on, and as people realized what it would do, then they got interested. But yeah, it was very expensive,   Gee Ranasinha ** 31:14 very expensive. And I think the other reason for the reticence is just nature, to be honest. Mike, I mean, you know, as as people, as human beings, most of us are averse to change, right? Because change is an unknown, and we don't like unknowns. We like predictability. We like knowing that when we get up in the morning, the sun's gonna come up and we're gonna go through our our usual routine, and so when something comes along that up ends the status quo to the point where we need to come up with adopting new behaviors that's very uncomfortable for many people. And you know, the adoption of digitization in, you know, any industry, I think, in everybody who's worked in any particular industry has has plenty of anecdotal evidence to show how people would consciously or unconsciously dragging their feet to adopt that change because they were happier doing stuff that they knew,   Michael Hingson ** 32:32 who went out of their comfort zone, right?   Gee Ranasinha ** 32:35 Absolutely, it's natural, it's, it's, it's who we are as as as human beings, who most of us are as human beings with, obviously, we're talking about the middle of the bell curve here. I mean, there are plenty of wackos on either side just go out and do stuff, right? And, you know those, you know, some of those get, you know, locked up with in straight jackets. But the other ones tend to, sort of, you know, create true innovation and push things forward.   Michael Hingson ** 33:04 Steve Jobs, even Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, good examples of some of the people who did things that most people didn't think could be done.   Gee Ranasinha ** 33:18 You know, the true innovation always happens at the periphery, but we tend to over emphasize the median. We know we try to make averages of everything, yeah, but averages aren't what moves the needle, right? No. And you know Britain, you know, for even for marketing, obviously, that's very much, very, very much my sort of thing. Um, most organizations, most business owners, certainly most marketing managers, find comfort in in executing their marketing in ways in which they are comfortable, in ways which are somewhat expected within the industry. But the problem is, it doesn't get you noticed. It doesn't get you attention. If you're in the middle, right? You know the worst, the worst place to walk on the in the street is in the middle of the road right, pick a side, but don't walk in the middle.   34:27 Not a good idea yet.   Gee Ranasinha ** 34:30 That's our our job is to is to, number one, generate attention, because there's no way we can communicate a message unless we have someone's attention. Everything starts from the attention side of things. Now there are very, you know, various ways that we can attract attention, but attention needs to come and needs to come from somewhere. And you know the definite. Of creating attention is to to create some kind of visual, audio, or combination of the two, experience which is somewhat outside of the norm, and create some kind of emotional response that our brains want to pay attention to, right? Want to notice? Because if you're not noticed, then there's no it doesn't matter how great your product is, doesn't matter how wonderful your customer service is, or it's available in 27 colors, or it's free delivery, or what you know, all the rest of it doesn't matter, because you know, unless people know who you are, what you do, who it's for, and why they should give a crap, then you know anything else you do after that Time is is moot, is irrelevant.   Michael Hingson ** 36:00 I read an interesting email this morning from someone who was talking about why speakers don't tend to be as successful as they should be. And this person talked about you could have the greatest speech in the world. You could be   Michael Hingson ** 36:17 talking and getting standing ovations and so on, but you're not getting a lot of speaking engagements, and his comment was the reason you're not is that your talk isn't necessarily relevant. I thought that was interesting. I think there's some things to be said for relevance, but I think it's also that you're not helping to get people to think and realize that being different and getting people to think and value that is more important than we tend to want to recognize as well.   Gee Ranasinha ** 36:59 I would, I would, I would wholeheartedly agree relevance is a very important component. But, you know, I maintain that it starts with attention. Yeah, relevance, I think, within the speaking world, I yes, there's so much we can do with relevance by by coming at a subject matter topic from a totally different perspective. Yeah, right. You know, just because you have the same message as 100 other competitors doesn't mean they have to say something in the same way, right? And so even if the core message is similar, the way that we choose to present that can be, you know, 100 101 different ways. And I think that is something that we forget, and I think that's one of the reasons why so much of the marketing that we see today is ignored. Yeah, you know, there's a there's a marketing Well, I wouldn't say the marketing model. There's a communication model, okay? Sales model actually called Ada, Ida, a, I D, A, okay. So even if you've not, not worked in sales or marketing at all, if you've even seen the film Glengarry Glynn Ross, or the play that it was based on. It's actually playing in New York City at the moment. I believe, yeah, a, I D, A, which is tracking the customer experience in four steps. So the idea is you have awareness, interest, desire and action, right? A, I, D, A, and it's understanding that there are four steps to getting to the position of negotiating the deal with a prospective buyer, but number one starts with awareness. You know they need, they need to be aware that you exist and nobody's going to buy from you if they don't know who you are. They need to know who they need to know who you are before they'll buy from you. Right then obviously needs to be an interest a product market fit what you're selling is something that they could conceivably use in terms of solving a particular problem that they perceive as having the desire. Why should they buy from you, as opposed to somebody else? Why do they. Need to buy your product, as opposed to a competitive product, and then finally, action, right? So that's what we might call sales, activation or performance marketing, or, you know, sales in the old terms, right? As they would say in that film, it's getting the getting the buyer to sign on the line that is dotted. But all of this stuff starts with attention and when we're not doing a very good job, I think as a mark, as an industry, we used to be really good at it, but I think we've taken our eye off the ball somewhat, and hoped that technology would fill in the gaps of our incompetence at being able to, excuse me, being able to shape the way that we market to customers, to buyers, in ways which create the memory structures in the brain to a sufficiently acute level so that when they are in The position to buy something, they think of us, as well as probably a number a handful of other suitors that solve their problem. And this is why, I think this is the reason why, because of the over reliance of technology, I mean, this is the reason why so much of our marketing fails to generate interest, sales to generate the tangible business results that are expected of it. Because we're, we're marketing by bullet point. We're expecting buyers to buy off a fact sheet. We've, we've exercised the creativity out of the equation. And we're and, and we were just producing this vacuous, generic vanilla   Michael Hingson ** 42:12 musach, yeah, if you   Gee Ranasinha ** 42:14 like, Okay, I mean, again, you know, think of any particular industry, you can see this. It's pretty much endemic. You can have two totally different organizations selling something purportedly solving the same problem. And you can look at two pieces of you can look at a piece of marketing from each company. And if you covered up the logo of each person of each company's marketing output, 10 will get you five that what's actually contained in the messaging is as equally valid for company A as it is for Company B, and that's a real problem.   Michael Hingson ** 43:00 It's not getting anyone's attention or creating awareness.   Gee Ranasinha ** 43:03 It's not creating attention or awareness. And worse, it's creating a level of confusion in the buyer's mind. Because we're we're looking for comparisons, we're looking at a way to make an educated decision compared to something else, and if we can't see why product A is miles ahead in our minds of Company B or product B, what often happens is rather than make a wrong decision, because we can't clearly differentiate the pros and cons between the two products, what we end up doing is nothing. We walk away. We don't buy anything, because we can't see a clear winner, which impacts company A and company B, if not the entire industry. And then they turn around and say, Oh, well, nobody's buying. Why? Why? Why is our industry lagging behind so many others? It's because we're just on autopilot, creating this, this nonsense, this generic sea of sameness in terms of communication, which we just don't seem to have a grip on the fundamental understanding of how people buy stuff anymore. We used to Yeah, up and up and up until probably the 90s. We used to know all this stuff. We used to know how get people going, how to stand out, how to create differentiated messaging, how to understand. Or what levers we could pull to better invoke an emotional reaction in the minds of the target buying audience that we're looking to attract. And then for some for, you know the if we plotted these things around two curves, you know, the point at which these curves would cross would probably be the adoption of technology,   Michael Hingson ** 45:29 whereas we came to reproduce the same thing in different ways, but you're still producing the same thing. The technology has limited our imagination, and we don't use re imaginations the way we used to.   Gee Ranasinha ** 45:43 We we've we're using, we're using technology as a proxy for reach. And getting in front of 1000 eyeballs or a million eyeballs or 100 million eyeballs doesn't necessarily mean any of those eyeballs are fit in the ideal customer profile we're looking to attract. Right? More doesn't mean better, and what what we're doing is we're trying to use technology to to fill in the gaps, but technology doesn't understand stuff like human emotion, right, and buying drivers and contextual messaging, right? Because all of this stuff human behavior is totally contextual, right? I will, I will come up with a and I'm sure you're the same thing. You will have a particular point of view about something one day and the next, the very next day, or even the very next hour, you could have a totally different viewpoint on a particular topic, maybe because you've had more information, or just maybe for the for the hell of it, right? We know we are we are not logical, rational, pragmatic machines that always choose the best in inverted commas solution to our issue.   Michael Hingson ** 47:23 Do you think AI will help any of this?   Gee Ranasinha ** 47:29 I think AI will help in terms of the fact that it will show how little we know about human behavior, and so will force forward thinking, innovative marketers to understand the only thing that matters, which is what's going on between the ears of the people we're trying to attract. I think AI is already showing us what we don't know, not what we know,   Michael Hingson ** 48:04 right? And it's still going to be up to us to do something about that and use AI as a tool to help possibly create some of what needs to be done. But it still requires our thought processes ultimately, to make that happen,   Gee Ranasinha ** 48:23 AI can't create. All AI can do is remix what has already been in existence, right? Ai doesn't create what AI does. The thing is, we're using AI for the wrong stuff. AI is really good at a ton of things, and it sucks big time at a load of other things. But for some reason, we want to throw all our efforts in trying to make it better at the things it's not good at, rather than use it at the things that it's really, really good   Michael Hingson ** 49:04 at, such as,   Gee Ranasinha ** 49:08 such as interpreting large data sets, Creating models of financial models, marketing models, marketing matrix, matrices, spotting, spotting trends in data, large, huge, like huge models of data, which no human being could really, in reality, Make any head in the tail of finding underlying commonalities in in the data to be able to create from that, to be able to draw out real, useful insights on that data to create new. New messaging, innovative products, services that we haven't thought of before because we haven't been able to see the wood for the trees,   50:13 if you like, yeah, right   Gee Ranasinha ** 50:17 for that sort of stuff, for the grunt work, for the automation. You know, do this, then do this, and all of that sort of stuff, A, B, testing, programmatic stuff, all of that stuff, banner ads and, you know, modifying banner all of that stuff is just basic grunt work that nobody needs, needs to do, wants to do, right? Give it all to AI it. Most AI is doing it, most of it anyway. We just never called it AI. You know, we've been doing it for 25 years. We just called it software in those days, right? But it's the same. It's the same goddamn thing. Is what we were doing, right? Let it do all of that stuff, because it's far better. And let's focus on the stuff that it can't do. Let's find out about what levers we need to pull at an emotional level to create messaging that better resonates in the minds of our buyers. That's what we need to do. Ai can't do that stuff right.   Michael Hingson ** 51:16 Where I think AI is is helpful today, as opposed to just software in the past, is that it has been taught how better to interact with those who use it, to be able to take questions and do more with it, with them than it used to be able to do, but we still have to come up with the problems or the issues that we wanted to solve, and to do it right, we have to give it a fair amount of information which, which still means we've got to be deeply involved in the process.   Gee Ranasinha ** 51:53 I mean, where it's great. I mean, if we're looking at, you know, Text, type, work, right, right, or I, or ideas or possibilities, or actually understanding the wider consideration set of a particular problem is that the hardest thing is, when you're staring at a blank piece of paper, isn't it? Right? We don't need that's the hardest thing, right? So we don't need to stare at a blank sheet anymore with a flashing cursor, right? You know, we can engage in a pseudo conversation that we need to take into consideration that this conversation is taking place based upon previous, existing ideas. So the chance that we'll get something fresh and original is very, very small. And as you just mentioned, you know, the quality of the prompt is everything. Get the prompt wrong and without enough granularity, details, specificity, whatever else you get just a huge piece of crap, don't you? Right? So in other words, having a better understanding of how we as humans make decisions actually improves our prompting ability, right, right?   Michael Hingson ** 53:12 And I think AI, it is not creative, but I think that AI can spew is probably the wrong word, but AI can put out things that, if we think about it, will cause us to do the creating that we want, but it's still going to be assets involved in doing that.   Gee Ranasinha ** 53:35 The problem is, and what we're seeing, certainly in the last couple of months, maybe even longer, maybe I just haven't noticed. It is just we were, you know, there's this old saying, you know, just because you can doesn't mean you should, right? I just see an absolute tsunami of vacuous, generic nonsense being spouted out across all types of channels, digital and otherwise, but mainly digital, all of it AI generated. Sometimes it's images, sometimes it's videos, sometimes it's both, sometimes it's text, whatever. But we we're adding to the noise instead of adding to the signal. So the inevitable result of all of this is going to be numbness. We're going to becoming different to marketing of all sorts, the good stuff as well as the bad. You're going to be it's we're just gonna get numb. So it's going to make the attention stuff. That's why I've been banging on about attention all this time, right? It's gonna, it's, yeah, there's, see, there is a method to my madness here. So the the point is that creation and maintaining. Attention is going to be even harder than it would have been before. Yeah, and, and we, you know, we're getting to the point where, you know, you've got agentic AI, where you've got agents talking to other agents and going around in this feedback loop. But we're not, we're not, we're not creating any emotional engagement from a, from a from a buyer perspective, from a user perspective, yes, it all looks great. And as a, as an exercise in technology, it's fantastic. So wonderful, right? But how has it increased sales? That's what I want to know has has it reduced or altered the cost of acquiring a customer and maintaining that customer relationship, because that's where the rubber hits the road. That's all that matters. I don't care whether it's a technological masterpiece, right, but if it hasn't sold anything, and actual sales, I'm not talking about likes and comments and retweets and all of that crap, because that's vanity metrics. Is nonsense   Michael Hingson ** 56:11 signing a contract. It's, you know,   Gee Ranasinha ** 56:16 there needs to be as an exchange of money at some point in time. Yeah, right. Is that happening? And I contend that it's not. And I think there are loads of people, loads of business owners, who are throwing money at this in the vain hope they you know that basically they're playing the numbers. They just need one horse to come in, 100 to one to be able to justify what they've spent on all of this stuff, right? Yeah, but I think those odds are getting longer and longer as each month goes, yeah. Well, you I think there's going to be an inevitable backlash back to stuff that actually resonates with people at a human level, at an emotional level, a psychological level, it has to   Michael Hingson ** 57:08 you started your marketing company 17 and a half years ago, caxino. Where'd that name come from?   Gee Ranasinha ** 57:18 From nothing? Okay, it doesn't mean anything I needed. I needed to have something which number one, that the domain was available. Of course, I needed to have something which was short, something that didn't mean, you know, something incongruous in another language and and so after a lot of to ing and fro ing, there were two schools of thought. At the beginning, we didn't know whether to go with something abstract, like caxino or something which was, you know, based based upon the the butting up of two existing words you know, like you see, you know, so many times, you know, big red table, or, you know, whatever. So we did, we decided to go with something abstract, so that we weren't encumbered by language.   Michael Hingson ** 58:22 You practiced what you preach pretty much. You're different, yeah, but why don't you call it? You don't refer to it as a digital marketing agency. Why is that?   Gee Ranasinha ** 58:34 No, I don't see us as a digital marketing agency, because digital marketing is not all we do. And not only that, I think, Well, I think there's, there's a number of reasons. Number one, I think we're using the word digital is, is a curveball. Firstly, because everything that we do is digital, right? Everything is already digital. Print is digital, TV is digital, billboards are digital. So saying digital is like saying electrical, electrical marketing agency, it makes as much sense to be honest. So that's number one. But I think the bigger issue is that by categorizing a marketing agency as being a digital marketing agency does a disservice to its work and indeed its outlook, because The object is not to be digital in your marketing, it's to do marketing in a digital world, which are two very different positions, okay? Because digital, the way that we're talking about it, is not a attributive noun, and it's certainly not an adjective. You. In the context that we're talking about it, digital is a channel. It's simply one way of getting in front of our audience. But it's not the only way of getting in front of our audience. Okay? So, yeah, along with many other reputable agencies, we happen to use the most appropriate channel of communication that makes sense to address a particular target audience group, and that's it. Okay, if that's digital, great. If that's walking down the street with an A frame with something written on the front of it, that's also great, okay, but it's, it's, it's not about it's not about the channel. It's about you being in the places where our target target audience group expects us to be. And so that's why I don't think of us as a digital marketing agency, because digital is only part of what we do, right? And we do many other things. And also, I think it puts it, it puts blinkers on things right? Because if you know, supposing, supposing you go to a Facebook marketing agency, of which there are many. Now, if you go to a Facebook marketing agency and you say, Okay, I want to do some ads. Where should I advertise? What are they going to tell you? Right, maybe Facebook, right? So there's, there's a thing called Maslow's hammer. Okay, in Maslow, as in the hierarchy, the Hierarchy of Needs Maslow. Okay to say, Maslow. He came up with this idea of Maslow's hammer. It's also known as the law of the instrument. And basically what it means, we can distill it down, is, if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail, okay? And what that means is, you're looking to solve any problem that comes along by the tools that you have in your toolbox, regardless of whether that's the best way of moving forward, which I think is a very short term and myopic view. So that's why we we don't like to think of ourselves as the marketing agency, because there are many other there are many ways of solving a particular problem, and it doesn't necessarily have to be   Michael Hingson ** 1:02:50 digital,   Gee Ranasinha ** 1:02:51 digital or promotional or, you know, it's, it's like, you know, are we a video marketing agency? No. Does that mean we don't do video, not at all. Of course, we do it, right? We're not an AI marketing agency, right? In the same way, okay, when we're not a we're not a YouTube marketing agency,   Michael Hingson ** 1:03:11 you're a marketing agency. We're a marketing agency, right? What are some of the biggest mistakes that small businesses make when it comes to marketing?   Gee Ranasinha ** 1:03:21 I think the single biggest mistake, and I speak to business owners pretty much on a daily basis, right? I think the single biggest issue that comes up again and again and again is something which I call self diagnosis, which is the business owner, approaches the marketing agency, or even digital marketing agency, approaches the marketing agency, and says, You know what, I need you to do this for me. Whatever that this is, okay. So you know, maybe it's some digital ads, maybe it's some videos, maybe it's a website, maybe it's a whatever. It doesn't matter what it is, but basically, the business owner is coming to us, coming to the marketing agency, dictating what the tactic is to be, which presumes a number of things, not least, that they think they have come to the conclusion that this particular tactic is going to solve their marketing problem based upon usually waving a wet finger in the air, yeah, or they've seen a YouTube video or something, okay, it's not based on any marketing knowledge experience or education, because, with the greatest respect, these people do not have any marketing knowledge experience. Into education, right? And why would they? Because they're running a business, right? They don't, you know, they it doesn't mean that they've had to do this marketing stuff. So they're, they're, they're presuming that a particular tactic is going to solve a business problem, a marketing tactic is going to solve a business problem. And so what what happens is the the particular tactic is is executed. Nothing changes revenue wise. And so the business owner says, well, that marketing agency was crap. Let's go to another marketing agency and ask them to do something else. So it's playing pin the tail on the donkey. Really, just trying stuff and hoping so. The point is that. The point is that if you're going to pay somebody who does this for a living, the idea that you know more than they do is already setting the relationship on a uneven kill, right? Yeah, you know, if I, if I go, if I go and see my doctor, and I say, and I wake up in the morning and I've got a pain in my chest, and I thinking, oh my goodness, I go and see the doctor, right? So on the way to the doctor's office, I do the worst thing possible, which is go on the internet and say, Okay, what does pain in my chest mean? Right? And I go into the doctor's office, and I sit down and I say, Okay, I've got a pain in my chest, doctor, that means I've got angina. Can you give me some heart medication, please? What's the doctor gonna tell you? Doctor's gonna tell you, shut the hell up. Yeah, I'm the doctor in the office. I'm the actually, where's, Where's, where's your medical degree doesn't exist, does it? No, and   Michael Hingson ** 1:07:00 just because you have a broken rib, we're not going to talk about that. Are we right?   Gee Ranasinha ** 1:07:04 So, What? What? So what's the doctor going to do? The doctor is going to ask you a bunch of questions, right? What did you do the last couple of days? Right? What did you eat? Did you go to the gym and over exert yourself? What's your history? Do you is there a history of heart disease in the family, you know, maybe there's is going to he or she is going to take some blood, maybe they're going to run a few other sort of tests. They're going to do a diagnosis, and at the end of this diagnosis, the doctor is going to come back to you and say, You know what? So, based upon all the questions that you've kindly answered, and based upon the blood work and all these other tests and scans we've done, it turns out that the the pain in your chest is nothing to do with angina. The reason you got a pain in the chest is because you had some spicy food last night. So you don't have you don't have Anjali, you have gas. Yeah, right, right, so I prescribe you a couple of packs of Tums. Yeah, sorted, right. And that's the point. The point is the doctor knows what he or she is doing, and you have to have confidence in that particular medical practitioner to diagnose the issue and prescribe a solution to that issue, right? Your job is not to say what you think is wrong with you at this stage of the conversation. Your job is to tell me where it hurts. That's it right now, I'll come back to you with a list of things which I think we need to do to move forward. Now you can go and get a second opinion, just like at a doctor's office. You may think I'm full of crap, which is absolutely your prerogative. Or you may say, I know better than you. I'm going to do my own thing, which, again, it's your time Absolutely. But if it all goes to crap, you can't turn around and say, well, if only this person had said this, or, you know, If only, if only, if only, and play the victim, because that's also just not going to wash. And I see this time and time and time again. You know, we've tried, well, we've tried a number of different agencies, and none of them have been able to help us. And then you sort of dig a bit deeper, and it's because they're never allowed to do what they're supposed to do, because they've always been second guessed. Yeah, that is probably the single biggest issue that I see coming up again and again and again with small business in market now, if and if it's a question of not having faith in that. Uh, agency, then you shouldn't have been employed. You shouldn't have that agency in the first place.   Michael Hingson ** 1:10:05 Get a second opinion.   Gee Ranasinha ** 1:10:07 You know, not all, not all agencies are great, just like not all plumbers are great. Not all mechanics are great. Same thing, right? It takes time to find the good ones, right? Um, but just because you found a bad one, because I don't know they were cheap, or they were local, or they were whatever, you know, whatever, whatever criteria you tend to use to base your decision upon, right? You can't, you can't criticize what they did if you didn't allow them to do what they were actually being paid to do.   Michael Hingson ** 1:10:47 Well, speaking of that, if people want to reach out to you, how do they do that?   Gee Ranasinha ** 1:10:53 Best way to get hold of me. Gee is on LinkedIn. I spend most of my time on LinkedIn. I post twice a week. I post videos about some of the sorts of things that we've been talking about today, and they're only sort of 60 seconds long, 90 seconds long. It's not sort of taking up anybody's time very much. You can find me there. Would you believe, Mike, there is only 1g runner scene on LinkedIn. Can you imagine fortuitous? How fortuitous is   Michael Hingson ** 1:11:27 that? Yeah, really, and G is spelled G, E, and how do you spell your last name?   Gee Ranasinha ** 1:11:33 You could eat. I'm sure all of this still, the stuff will be put in. It will, but I just figured it we could. But yeah. G, renasina, you can find me there. Otherwise, obviously you can find us on Kexino, k, e, X, I, N, o.com, which is the website, and there's plenty of information there textual information, there are videos, there are articles, there are all sorts of bits and pieces that you can find more about us   Michael Hingson ** 1:12:04 there. Well, this has been absolutely wonderful, and I really appreciate you taking more than an hour to chat with us today. And I hope this was fun, and I hope that people will appreciate it and will reach out to you and value what we've discussed. I think it's been great love to hear from all of you out there. Please feel free to email me. Michael H, i@accessibe.com so that's m, I, C, H, A, E, L, H, I at A, C, C, E, S, S, i, b, e.com, and love to hear from you wherever you're listening. Please give us a five star rating. We value those ratings very highly, and we'd love to to to hear and see you rate us and get your thoughts. If you know of anyone else who might be a good guest for unstoppable mindset. Gu as well, we'd sure appreciate your referring them to us. Introduce us. We're always looking for more people to to chat with, so please do that and again, gee, I just want to thank you one more time for being here. This has been great,   Gee Ranasinha ** 1:13:02 absolute pleasure, delighted to be invited.   Michael Hingson ** 1:13:10 You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite your friends to join us in the future. If you know of any one or any organization needing a speaker for an event, please email me at speaker at Michael hingson.com. I appreciate it very much. To learn more about the concept of blinded by fear, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com forward slash blinded by fear and while you're there, feel free to pick up a copy of my free eBook entitled blinded by fear. The unstoppable mindset podcast is provided by access cast an initiative of accessiBe and is sponsored by accessiBe. Please visit www.accessibe.com . AccessiBe is spelled a c c e s s i b e. There you can learn all about how you can make your website inclusive for all persons with disabilities and how you can help make the internet fully inclusive by 2025. Thanks again for Listening. Please come back and visit us again next week.

Welcome to September. Public media has had a rough summer. On July 18th, Congress passed the Rescissions Act of 2025, which eliminated $1.1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Then on August 1st, CPB announced they would be winding down operations.When folks talk about these cuts, they usually talk about the vital public services public media provides, such as emergency alerts. But we'd be remiss if we didn't also talk about how NPR is an audio storytelling powerhouse. Throughout the month, we've partnered with our friends at NPR to present four pieces that represent the breadth and depth of their incredible reporting.We hope you enjoy.****************************As AI infiltrates every aspect of our lives, who are some of the people behind this huge inflection point? In this special three-part series, you'll hear from the people predicting and shaping our tech future. Host Manoush Zomorodi reports on the latest and revisits her favorite conversations with the minds crafting the digital world we live in today: what they've gotten right — and wrong — and where they think we're headed next. Part 1 features futurist Ray Kurzweil and counterculture icon Stewart Brand.TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at plus.npr.org/ted. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Matt Forbeck is all that and so much more. He grew up in Wisconsin as what he describes as a wimpy kid, too short and not overly healthy. He took to gaming at a pretty early age and has grown to be a game creator, author and award-winning storyteller.   Matt has been designing games now for over 35 years. He tells us how he believes that many of the most successful games today have stories to tell, and he loves to create some of the most successful ones. What I find most intriguing about Matt is that he clearly is absolutely totally happy in his work. For most of Matt's career he has worked for himself and continues today to be an independent freelancer.   Matt and his wife have five children, including a set of quadruplets. The quadruplets are 23 and Matt's oldest son is 28 and is following in his father's footsteps.   During our conversation we touch on interesting topics such as trust and work ethics. I know you will find this episode stimulating and worth listening to more than once.     About the Guest:   Matt Forbeck is an award-winning and New York Times-bestselling author and game designer of over thirty-five novels and countless other books and games. His projects have won a Peabody Award, a Scribe Award, and numerous ENnies and Origins Awards. He is also the president of the Diana Jones Award Foundation, which celebrates excellence in gaming.    Matt has made a living full-time on games and fiction since 1989, when he graduated from the Residential College at the University of Michigan with a degree in Creative Writing. With the exception of a four-year stint as the president of Pinnacle Entertainment Group and a year and a half as the director of the adventure games division of Human Head Studios, he has spent his career as an independent freelancer.   Matt has designed collectible card games, roleplaying games, miniatures games, board games, interactive fiction, interactive audiobooks, games for museum installations, and logic systems for toys. He has directed voiceover work and written short fiction, comic books, novels, screenplays, and video game scripts and stories. His work has been translated into at least 15 languages.   His latest work includes the Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game Core Rulebook, the Spider-Verse Expansion, Monster Academy (novels and board game), the Shotguns & Sorcery 5E Sourcebook based on his novels, and the Minecraft: Roll for Adventure game books. He is the father of five, including a set of quadruplets. He lives in Beloit, Wisconsin, with his wife and a rotating cast of college-age children. For more about him and his work, visit Forbeck.com.   Ways to connect with Matt:   Twitter: https://twitter.com/mforbeck Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/forbeck Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/forbeck.com Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mforbeck Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mforbeck/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/forbeck/ Website: https://www.forbeck.com/     About the Host:   Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening!   Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast   If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset .   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review   Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.       Transcription Notes:   Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:21 Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of unstoppable mindset today. We get to play games. Well, not really, but we'll try. Our guest is Matt Forbeck, who is an award winning author. He is a game designer and all sorts of other kinds of things that I'm sure he's going to tell us about, and we actually just before we started the the episode, we were talking about how one might explore making more games accessible for blind and persons with other disabilities. It's, it's a challenge, and there, there are a lot of tricks. But anyway, Matt, I want to welcome you to unstoppable mindset. We're glad you're here.   Matt Forbeck ** 02:02 Well, thank you, Michael for inviting me and having me on. I appreciate it.   Speaker 1 ** 02:06 I think we're going to have a lot of fun, and I think it'll work out really well. I'm I am sure of that. So why don't we start just out of curiosity, why don't you tell us kind of about the early Matt, growing up?   Matt Forbeck ** 02:18 Uh, well, I grew up. I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I grew up in a little town called Beloit, Wisconsin, which actually live in now, despite having moved away for 13 years at one point, and I had terrible asthma, I was a sick and short kid, and with the advent of medication, I finally started to be healthy when I was around nine, and Part of that, I started getting into playing games, right? Because when you're sick, you do a lot of sitting around rather than running around. So I did a lot of reading and playing games and things like that. I happen to grow up in the part of the world where Dungeons and Dragons was invented, which is in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, about 30 miles from where I live. And because of that I was I started going to conventions and playing games and such, when I was about 12 or 13 years old. I started doing it when I was a little bit older. I started doing it professionally, and started doing it when I was in college. And amazingly enough, even to my own astonishment, I've made a career out of it.   Speaker 1 ** 03:17 Where did you go to college? I went to the University   Matt Forbeck ** 03:21 of Michigan over in Ann Arbor. I had a great time there. There's a wonderful little college, Beloit College, in my hometown here, and most of my family has gone to UW Milwaukee over the years. My parents met at Marquette in Milwaukee, but I wanted to get the heck out of the area, so I went to Michigan, and then found myself coming back as soon as we started having   Speaker 1 ** 03:42 kids well, and of course, I would presume that when you were at the University of Michigan, you rooted for them and against Ohio State. That was   Matt Forbeck ** 03:50 kind of, you know, if you did it the other way around, they back out of town. So, yeah, I was always kind of astonished, though, because having grown up in Wisconsin, where every sports team was a losing team when I was growing up, including the Packers, for decades. You know, we were just happy to be playing. They were more excuse to have beers than they were to cheer on teams. And I went to Michigan where they were, they were angry if the team wasn't up by two touchdowns. You know, at any point, I'm like, You guys are silly. This is we're here for fun.   Speaker 1 ** 04:17 But it is amazing how seriously some people take sports. I remember being in New Zealand helping the Royal New Zealand Foundation for the Blind. Well now 22 years ago, it's 2003 and the America's Cup had just finished before we got there, and in America beat New Zealand, and the people in New Zealand were just irate. They were complaining that the government didn't put enough money into the design of the boat and helping with the with the yacht and all that. It was just amazing how seriously people take it, yeah,   Matt Forbeck ** 04:58 once, I mean, it becomes a part of your. Identity in a lot of ways, right for many people, and I've never had to worry about that too much. I've got other things on my mind, but there you go.   Speaker 1 ** 05:08 Well, I do like it when the Dodgers win, and my wife did her graduate work at USC, and so I like it when the Trojans win, but it's not the end of the world, and you do need to keep it in perspective. I I do wish more people would I know once I delivered a speech in brether County, Kentucky, and I was told that when I started the speech had to end no later than preferably exactly at 6:30pm not a minute later, because it was the night of the NCAA Basketball Championship, and the Kentucky Wildcats were in the championship, and at 630 everyone was going to get up and leave and go home to watch the game. So I ended at 630 and literally, by 631 I timed it. The gym was empty and it was full to start with.   Matt Forbeck ** 06:02 People were probably, you know, counting down on their watches, just to make sure, right?   Speaker 1 ** 06:06 Oh, I'm sure they were. What do you do? It's, it is kind of fun. Well, so why did you decide to get started in games? What? What? What attracted to you, to it as a young person, much less later on?   Matt Forbeck ** 06:21 Well, I was, yeah, I was an awkward kid, kind of nerdy and, you know, glasses and asthma and all that kind of stuff. And games were the kind of thing where, if you didn't know how to interact with people, you could sit down at a table across them and you could practice. You can say, okay, we're all here. We've got this kind of a magic circle around us where we've agreed to take this one silly activity seriously for a short period of time, right? And it may be that you're having fun during that activity, but you know, there's, there's no reason that rolling dice or moving things around on a table should be taken seriously. It's all just for fun, right? But for that moment, you actually just like Las Vegas Exactly, right? When there's money on the line, it's different, but if you're just doing it for grins. You know, it was a good way for me to learn how to interact with people of all sorts and of different ages. And I really enjoyed playing the games, and I really wanted to be a writer, too. And a lot of these things interacted with story at a very basic level. So breaking in as a writer is tough, but it turned out breaking as a game designer, wasn't nearly his stuff, so I started out over there instead, because it was a very young field at the time, right? D and D is now 50 years old, so I've been doing this 35 years, which means I started around professionally and even doing it before that, I started in the period when the game and that industry were only like 10 or 15 years old, so yeah, weren't quite as much competition in those   Speaker 1 ** 07:43 days. I remember some of the early games that I did play, that I could play, were DOS based games, adventure. You're familiar with adventure? Yeah, oh, yeah. Then later, Zork and all that. And I still think those are fun games. And I the reason I like a lot of those kinds of games is they really make you think, which I think most games do, even though the video even the video games and so on, they they help your or can help your reactions, but they're designed by people who do try to make you think,   Matt Forbeck ** 08:15 yeah. I mean, we basically are designing puzzles for people to solve, even if they're story puzzles or graphic puzzles or sound puzzles or whatever, you know, even spatial puzzles. There the idea is to give somebody something fun that is intriguing to play with, then you end up coming with story and after that, because after a while, even the most most exciting mechanics get dull, right? I mean, you start out shooting spaceships, but you can only shoot spaceships for so long, or you start out playing Tetris, and you only put shapes together for so long before it doesn't mean anything that then you start adding in story to give people a reason to keep playing right and a reason to keep going through these things. And I've written a lot of video games over the years, basically with that kind of a philosophy, is give people nuggets of story, give them a plot to work their way through, and reward them for getting through different stages, and they will pretty much follow you through anything. It's amazing.   Michael Hingson ** 09:09 Is that true Dungeons and Dragons too?   Matt Forbeck ** 09:13 It is. All of the stories are less structured there. If you're doing a video game, you know you the team has a lot of control over you. Give the player a limited amount of control to do things, but if you're playing around a table with people, it's more of a cooperative kind of experience, where we're all kind of coming up with a story, the narrator or the Game Master, the Dungeon Master, sets the stage for everything, but then the players have a lot of leeway doing that, and they will always screw things up for you, too. No matter what you think is going to happen, the players will do something different, because they're individuals, and they're all amazing people. That's actually to me, one of the fun things about doing tabletop games is that, you know, the computer can only react in a limited number of ways, whereas a human narrator and actually change things quite drastically and roll. With whatever people come up with, and that makes it tremendous fun.   Speaker 1 ** 10:04 Do you think AI is going to enter into all that and maybe improve some of the   Matt Forbeck ** 10:09 old stuff? It's going to add your end to it, whether it's an ad, it's going to approve it as a large question. Yeah. So I've been ranting about AI quite a bit lately with my friends and family. But, you know, I think the problem with AI, it can be very helpful a lot of ways, but I think it's being oversold. And I think it's especially when it's being oversold for thing, for ways for people to replace writers and creative thinking, Yeah, you know, you're taking the fun out of everything. I mean, the one thing I like to say is if, if you can't be bothered to write this thing that you want to communicate to me, I'm not sure why I should be bothered to read this thing well.   Speaker 1 ** 10:48 And I think that AI will will evolve in whatever way it does. But the fact of the matter is, So do people. And I think that, in fact, people are always going to be necessary to make the process really work? AI can only do and computers can only do so much. I mean, even Ray Kurzweil talks about the singularity when people and computer brains are married, but that still means that you're going to have the human element. So it's not all going to be the computer. And I'm not ready to totally buy into to what Ray says. And I used to work for Ray, so I mean, I know Ray Well, but, but the but the bottom line is, I think that, in fact, people are always going to be able to be kind of the, the mainstay of it, as long as we allow that, if we, if we give AI too much power, then over time, it'll take more power, and that's a problem, but that's up to us to deal with?   Matt Forbeck ** 11:41 No, I totally agree with that. I just think right now, there's a very large faction of people who it's in their economic interest to oversell these things. You know, people are making chips. They're building server farms. A lot of them are being transferred from people are doing blockchain just a few years ago, and they see it as the hot new thing. The difference is that AI actually has a lot of good uses. There's some amazing things will come out of llms and such. But I again, people are over the people are selling this to us. Are often over promising things, right?   Speaker 1 ** 12:11 Yeah, well, they're not only over promising but they're they're really misdirecting people. But the other side of it is that, that, in fact, AI as a concept and as a technology is here, and we have control over how we use it. I've said a couple times on this this podcast, and I've said to others, I remember when I first started hearing about AI, I heard about the the fact that teachers were bemoaning the pack, that kids were writing their papers just using AI and turning them in, and it wasn't always easy to tell whether it was something that was written by AI or was written by the student. And I come from a little bit different view than I think a lot of people do. And my view basically is, let the kids write it if with AI, if that's what they're going to do, but then what the teacher needs to do is to take one period, for example, and give every student in that class the opportunity to come up and defend whatever paper they have. And the real question is, can they defend the paper? Which means, have they really learned the subject, or are they just relying on AI,   Matt Forbeck ** 13:18 yeah, I agree with that. I think the trouble is, a lot of people, children, you know, who are developing their abilities and their morals about this stuff, they use it as just a way to complete the assignment, right? And many of them don't even read what they turn in, right, right? Just know that they've got something here that will so again, if you can't be bothered to read the thing that you manufactured, you're not learning anything about it,   Speaker 1 ** 13:39 which is why, if you are forced to defend it, it's going to become pretty obvious pretty fast, whether you really know it or not. Now, I've used AI on a number of occasions in various ways, but I use it to maybe give me ideas or prepare something that I then modify and shape. And I may even interact with AI a couple of times, but I'm definitely involved with the process all the way down the line, because it still has to be something that I'm responsible for.   Matt Forbeck ** 14:09 I agree. I mean, the whole point of doing these things is for people to connect with each other, right? I want to learn about the ideas you have in your head. I want to see how they jive with ones in my head. But if I'm just getting something that's being spit out by a machine and not you, and not being curated by you at any point, that doesn't seem very useful, right? So if you're the more involved people are in it, the more useful it is.   Speaker 1 ** 14:31 Well, I agree, and you know, I think again, it's a tool, and we have to decide how the tool is going to be used, which is always the way it ought to be. Right?   Matt Forbeck ** 14:42 Exactly, although sometimes it's large corporations deciding,   Speaker 1 ** 14:45 yeah, well, there's that too. Well, individuals,   Matt Forbeck ** 14:49 we get to make our own choices. Though you're right,   Speaker 1 ** 14:51 yes, and should Well, so, so when did you start bringing writing into what you. Did, and make that a really significant part of what you did?   Matt Forbeck ** 15:03 Well, pretty early on, I mean, I started doing one of the first things I did was a gaming zine, which was basically just a print magazine that was like, you know, 32 pages, black and white, about the different tabletop games. So we were writing those in the days, design and writing are very closely linked when it comes to tabletop games and even in video games. The trick of course is that designing a game and writing the rules are actually two separate sets of skills. So one of the first professional gig I ever had during writing was in games was some friends of mine had designed a game for a company called Mayfair games, which went on to do sellers of contain, which is a big, uh, entry level game, and but they needed somebody to write the rules, so they called me over, showed me how to play the game. I took notes and I I wrote it down in an easy to understand, clear way that people had just picked up the box. Could then pick it up and teach themselves how to play, right? So that was early on how I did it. But the neat thing about that is it also taught me to think about game design. I'm like, when I work on games, I think about, who is this game going to be for, and how are we going to teach it to them? Because if they can't learn the game, there's no point of the game at all, right?   Speaker 1 ** 16:18 And and so I'm right? I'm a firm believer that a lot of technical writers don't do a very good job of technical writing, and they write way over people's heads. I remember the first time I had to write, well, actually, I mentioned I worked for Kurzweil. I was involved with a project where Ray Kurzweil had developed his original omniprent optical character recognition system. And I and the National Federation of the Blind created with him a project to put machines around the country so that blind people could use them and give back to Ray by the time we were all done, recommendations as to what needed to go in the final first production model of the machine. So I had to write a training manual to teach people how to use it. And I wrote this manual, and I was always of the opinion that it had to be pretty readable and usable by people who didn't have a lot of technical knowledge. So I wrote the manual, gave it to somebody to read, and said, Follow the directions and and work with the machine and all that. And they did, and I was in another room, and they were playing with it for a couple of hours, and they came in and they said, I'm having a problem. I can't figure out how to turn off the machine. And it turns out that I had forgotten to put in the instruction to turn off the machine. And it wasn't totally trivial. There were steps you had to go through. It was a Data General Nova two computer, and you had to turn it off the right way and the whole system off the appropriate way, or you could, could mess everything up. So there was a process to doing it. So I wrote it in, and it was fine. But, you know, I've always been a believer that the textbooks are way too boring. Having a master's degree in physics, I am of the opinion that physics textbook writers, who are usually pretty famous and knowledgeable scientists, ought to include with all the text and the technical stuff they want to put in, they should put in stories about what they did in you bring people in, draw them into the whole thing, rather than just spewing out a bunch of technical facts.   Matt Forbeck ** 18:23 No, I agree. My my first calculus professor was a guy who actually explained how Newton and Leipzig actually came up with calculus, and then he would, you know, draw everything on the board and turn around say, and isn't that amazing? And you were, like, just absolutely enamored with the idea of how they had done these things, right? Yeah. And what you're doing there, when you, when you, when you give the instructions to somebody and say, try this out. That's a very big part of gaming, actually, because what we do this thing called play testing, where we take something before it's ready to be shown to the public, and we give it to other people and say, try this out. See how it works. Let me know when you're starting out of your first playing you play with like your family and friends and people will be brutal with you and give you hints about how you can improve things. But then, even when you get to the rules you're you send those out cold to people, or, you know, if you're a big company, you watch them through a two way mirror or one way mirror, and say, Hey, let's see how they react to everything. And then you take notes, and you try to make it better every time you go through. And when I'm teaching people to play games at conventions, for instance, I will often say to them, please ask questions if you don't understand anything, that doesn't mean you're dumb. Means I didn't explain it well enough, right? And my job as a person writing these rules is to explain it as well as I humanly can so it can't be misconstrued or misinterpreted. Now that doesn't mean you can correct everything. Somebody's always got like, Oh, I missed that sentence, you know, whatever. But you do that over and over so you can try to make it as clear and concise as possible, yeah.   Speaker 1 ** 19:52 Well, you have somewhat of a built in group of people to help if you let your kids get involved. Involved. So how old are your kids?   Matt Forbeck ** 20:03 My eldest is 26 he'll be 27 in January. Marty is a game designer, actually works with me on the marble tabletop role playing game, and we have a new book coming out, game book for Minecraft, called Minecraft role for adventure, that's coming out on July 7, I think, and the rest of the kids are 23 we have 423 year olds instead of quadruplets, one of whom is actually going into game design as well, and the other says two are still in college, and one has moved off to the work in the woods. He's a very woodsy boy. Likes to do environmental education with people.   Speaker 1 ** 20:39 Wow. Well, see, but you, but you still have a good group of potential game designers or game critics anyway.   Matt Forbeck ** 20:47 Oh, we all play games together. We have a great time. We do weekly game nights here. Sometimes they're movie nights, sometimes they're just pizza nights, but we shoot for game and pizza   Speaker 1 ** 20:56 if we get lucky and your wife goes along with all this too.   Matt Forbeck ** 21:00 She does. She doesn't go to the game conventions and stuff as much, and she's not as hardcore of a gamer, but she likes hanging out with the kids and doing everything with us. We have a great time.   Speaker 1 ** 21:10 That's that's pretty cool. Well, you, you've got, you've got to build an audience of some sorts, and that's neat that a couple of them are involved in it as well. So they really like what dad does, yeah,   Matt Forbeck ** 21:23 yeah. We, I started taking them each to conventions, which are, you know, large gatherings gamers in real life. The biggest one is Gen Con, which happens in Indianapolis in August. And last year, I think, we had 72,000 people show up. And I started taking the kids when they were 10 years old, and my wife would come up with them then. And, you know, 10 years old is a lot. 72,000 people is a lot for a 10 year old. So she can mention one day and then to a park the next day, you know, decompress a lot, and then come back on Saturday and then leave on Sunday or whatever, so that we didn't have them too over stimulated. But they really grown to love it. I mean, it's part of our annual family traditions in the summer, is to go do these conventions and play lots of games with each other and meet new people too well.   Speaker 1 ** 22:08 And I like the way you put it. The games are really puzzles, which they are, and it's and it's fun. If people would approach it that way, no matter what the game is, they're, they're aspects of puzzles involved in most everything that has to do with the game, and that's what makes it so fun.   Matt Forbeck ** 22:25 Exactly, no. The interesting thing is, when you're playing with other people, the other people are changing the puzzles from their end that you have to solve on your end. And sometimes the puzzle is, how do I beat this person, or how do I defeat their strategy, or how do I make an alliance with somebody else so we can win? And it's really always very intriguing. There's so many different types of games. There's nowadays, there's like something like 50 to 100 new board games that come out and tabletop games every month, right? It's just like a fire hose. It's almost like, when I was starting out as a novelist, I would go into Barnes and Noble or borders and go, Oh my gosh, look at all these books. And now I do the same thing about games. It's just, it's incredible. Nobody, no one person, could keep up with all of them.   Speaker 1 ** 23:06 Yeah, yeah, yeah, way too much. I would love to explore playing more video games, but I don't. I don't own a lot of the technology, although I'm sure that there are any number of them that can be played on a computer, but we'll have to really explore and see if we can find some. I know there are some that are accessible for like blind people with screen readers. I know that some people have written a few, which is kind of cool. Yeah.   Matt Forbeck ** 23:36 And Xbox has got a new controller out that's meant to be accessible to large amount of people. I'm not sure, all the different aspects of it, but that's done pretty well, too   Speaker 1 ** 23:44 well. And again, it comes down to making it a priority to put all of that stuff in. It's not like it's magic to do. It's just that people don't know how to do it. But I also think something else, which is, if you really make the products more usable, let's say by blind people with screen readers. You may be especially if it's well promoted, surprised. I'm not you necessarily, but people might well be surprised as to how many others might take advantage of it so that they don't necessarily have to look at the screen, or that you're forced to listen as well as look in order to figure out what's going on or take actions.   Matt Forbeck ** 24:29 No, definitely true. It's, you know, people audio books are a massive thing nowadays. Games tend to fall further behind that way, but it's become this incredible thing that obviously, blind people get a great use out of but my wife is addicted to audio books now. She actually does more of those than she does reading. I mean, I technically think they're both reading. It's just one's done with yours and one's done with your eyes.   Speaker 1 ** 24:51 Yeah, there's but there's some stuff, whether you're using your eyes or your fingers and reading braille, there's something about reading a book that way that's. Even so a little bit different than listening to it. Yeah, and there's you're drawn in in some ways, in terms of actually reading that you're not necessarily as drawn into when you're when you're listening to it, but still, really good audio book readers can help draw you in, which is important, too,   Matt Forbeck ** 25:19 very much. So yeah, I think the main difference for reading, whether it's, you know, again, through Braille or through traditional print, is that you can stop. You can do it at your own pace. You can go back and look at things very easily, or read or check things, read things very easily. That you know, if you're reading, if you're doing an audio book, it just goes on and it's straight on, boom, boom, boom, pace. You can say, Wait, I'm going to put this down here. What was that thing? I remember back there? It was like three pages back, but it's really important, let me go check that right.   Speaker 1 ** 25:50 There are some technologies that allow blind people and low vision people and others, like people with dyslexia to use an audio book and actually be able to navigate two different sections of it. But it's not something that is generally available to the whole world, at least to the level that it is for blind people. But I can, I can use readers that are made to be able to accept the different formats and go back and look at pages, go back and look at headings, and even create bookmarks to bookmark things like you would normally by using a pen or a pencil or something like that. So there are ways to do some of that. So again, the technology is making strides.   Matt Forbeck ** 26:37 That's fantastic. Actually, it's wonderful. Just, yeah, it's great. I actually, you know, I lost half the vision of my right eye during back through an autoimmune disease about 13 years ago, and I've always had poor vision. So I'm a big fan of any kind of way to make things easier,   Speaker 1 ** 26:54 like that. Well, there, there are things that that are available. It's pretty amazing. A guy named George curser. Curser created a lot of it years ago, and it's called the DAISY format. And the whole idea behind it is that you can actually create a book. In addition to the audio tracks, there are XML files that literally give you the ability to move and navigate around the book, depending on how it's created, as final level as you choose.   Matt Forbeck ** 27:25 Oh, that's That's amazing. That's fantastic. I'm actually really glad to hear that.   Speaker 1 ** 27:28 So, yeah, it is kind of fun. So there's a lot of technology that's that's doing a lot of different sorts of things and and it helps. But um, so for you, in terms of dealing with, with the games, you've, you've written games, but you've, you've actually written some novels as well, right?   Matt Forbeck ** 27:50 Yeah, I've got like 30, it depends on how you count a novel, right? Okay, like some of my books are to pick a path books, right? Choose Your Own Adventure type stuff. So, but I've got 35 traditional novels written or more, I guess, now, I lost track a while ago, and probably another dozen of these interactive fiction books as well. So, and I like doing those. I've also written things like Marvel encyclopedias and Avengers encyclopedias and all sorts of different pop culture books. And, you know, I like playing in different worlds. I like writing science fiction, fantasy, even modern stuff. And most of it, for me comes down to telling stories, right? If you like to tell stories, you can tell stories through a game or book or audio play or a TV show or a comic, or I've done, you know, interactive museum, games and displays, things like that. The main thing is really a story. I mean, if you're comfortable sitting down at a bar and having a drink with somebody, doesn't have to be alcohol, just sitting down and telling stories with each other for fun. That's where the core of it all is really   Speaker 1 ** 28:58 right. Tell me about interactive fiction book.   Matt Forbeck ** 29:01 Sure, a lot of these are basically just done, like flow charts, kind of like the original Zork and adventure that you were talking about where you I actually, I was just last year, I brought rose Estes, who's the inventor of the endless quest books, which were a cross between Dungeons and Dragons, and choose your own adventure books. She would write the whole thing out page by page on a typewriter, and then, in order to shuffle the pages around so that people wouldn't just read straight through them, she'd throw them all up in the air and then just put them back in whatever order they happen to be. But essentially, you read a section of a book, you get to the end, and it gives you a choice. Would you like to go this way or that way? Would you like to go beat up this goblin? Or would you like to make friends with this warrior over here? If you want to do one of these things, go do page xx, right? Got it. So then you turn to that page and you go, boom, some, actually, some of the endless quest books I know were turned into audio books, right? And I actually, I. Um, oddly, have written a couple Dungeons and Dragons, interactive books, audio books that have only been released in French, right? Because there's a company called Looney l, u n, i, i that has this little handheld device that's for children, that has an A and a B button and a volume button. And you, you know, you get to the point that says, if you want to do this, push a, if you want to do that, push B, and the kids can go through these interactive stories and and, you know, there's ones for clue and Dungeons and Dragons and all sorts of other licenses, and some original stories too. But that way there's usually, like, you know, it depends on the story, but sometimes there's, like, 10 to 20 different endings. A lot of them are like, Oh no, you've been killed. Go back to where you started, right? And if you're lucky, the longer ones are, the more fun ones. And you get to, you know, save the kingdom and rescue the people and make good friends and all that good stuff,   Michael Hingson ** 30:59 yeah, and maybe fall in love with the princess or Prince.   Matt Forbeck ** 31:02 Yeah, exactly right. It all depends on the genre and what you're working in. But the idea is to give people some some choices over how they want the story to go. You're like, Well, do you want to investigate this dark, cold closet over here, or would you rather go running outside and playing around? And some of them can seem like very innocent choices, and other ones are like, well, uh, 10 ton weight just fell on. You go back to the last thing.   Speaker 1 ** 31:23 So that dark hole closet can be a good thing or a bad thing,   Matt Forbeck ** 31:28 exactly. And the trick is to make the deaths the bad endings, actually just as entertaining as anything else, right? And then people go, Well, I got beat, and I gotta go back and try that again. So yeah, if they just get the good ending all the way through, they often won't go back and look at all the terrible ones. So it's fun to trick them sometimes and have them go into terrible spots. And I like to put this one page in books too that sometimes says, How did you get here? You've been cheating there. This book, this page, is actually not led to from any other part of the book. You're just flipping   Speaker 1 ** 31:59 through. Cheater, cheater book, do what you   Matt Forbeck ** 32:04 want, but if you want to play it the right way, go back.   Speaker 1 ** 32:07 Kid, if you want to play the game. Yeah, exactly. On the other hand, some people are nosy.   Matt Forbeck ** 32:15 You know, I was always a kid who would poke around and wanted to see how things were, so I'm sure I would have found that myself but absolutely related, you know,   Speaker 1 ** 32:23 yeah, I had a general science teacher who brought in a test one day, and he gave it to everyone. And so he came over to me because it was, it was a printed test. He said, Well, I'm not going to give you the test, because the first thing it says is, read all the instructions, read, read the test through before you pass it, before you take it. And he said, most people won't do that. And he said, I know you would. And the last question on the test is answer, only question one.   Matt Forbeck ** 32:55 That's great. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah,   Speaker 1 ** 32:57 that was cute. And he said, I know that. I that there's no way you would, would would fall for that, because you would say, Okay, let's read the instructions and then read the whole test. That's what it said. And the instruction were, just read the whole test before you start. And people won't do that.   Matt Forbeck ** 33:13 No, they'll go through, take the whole thing. They get there and go, oh, did I get there? Was a, there's a game publisher. I think it was Steve Jackson Games, when they were looking for people, write for them, or design stuff for them, or submit stuff to them, would have something toward the end of the instructions that would say, put like a the letter seven, or put seven a on page one right, and that way they would know if you had read the instructions, if you hadn't bothered to Read the instructions, they wouldn't bother reading anything else.   Speaker 1 ** 33:42 Yeah, which is fair, because the a little harsh, well, but, but, you know, we often don't learn enough to pay attention to details. I know that when I was taking physics in college, that was stressed so often it isn't enough to get the numbers right. If you don't get the units right as well. Then you're, you're not really paying attention to the details. And paying attention to the details is so important.   Matt Forbeck ** 34:07 That's how they crash from those Mars rovers, wasn't it? They somebody messed up the units, but going back and forth between metric and, yeah, and Imperial and, well, you know, it cost somebody a lot of money at one point. Yeah. Yeah. What do you   Speaker 1 ** 34:21 this is kind of the way it goes. Well, tell me, yeah. Well, they do matter, no matter what people think, sometimes they do matter. Well, tell me about the Diana Jones award. First of all, of course, the logical question for many people is, who is Diana Jones? Yeah, Diana Jones doesn't exist, right? That's There you go. She's part game somewhere? No, no, it doesn't be in a game somewhere.   Matt Forbeck ** 34:43 Then now there's actually an author named Diana Wynne Jones, who's written some amazing fantasy stories, including Howell's Moving Castle, which has turned into a wonderful anime movie, but it has nothing to do with her or any other person. Because originally, the Diana Jones award came about. Because a friend of mine, James Wallace, had somehow stumbled across a trophy that fell into his hands, and it was a pub trivia trophy that used to be used between two different gaming companies in the UK, and one of those was TSR, UK, the United Kingdom department. And at one point, the company had laid off everybody in that division just say, Okay, we're closing it all down. So the guys went and burned a lot of the stuff that they had, including a copy of the Indiana Jones role playing game, and the only part of the logo that was left said Diana Jones. And for some reason, they put this in a in a fiberglass or Plexiglas pyramid, put it on a base, a wooden base, and it said the Diana Jones award trophy, right? And this was the trophy that they used they passed back and forth as a joke for their pub trivia contest. Fell into James's hands, and he decided, You know what, we're going to give this out for the most excellent thing in gaming every year. And we've now done this. This will be 25 years this summer. We do it at the Wednesday night before Gen Con, which starts on Thursday, usually at the end of July or early August. And as part of that, actually, about five years ago, we started, one of the guys suggested we should do something called the emerging designers program. So we actually became a 501, c3, so we could take donations. And now we take four designers every year, fly them in from wherever they happen to be in the world, and put them up in a hotel, give them a badge the show, introduce them to everybody, give them an honorarium so they can afford to skip work for a week and try to help launch their careers. I mean, these are people that are in the first three years of their design careers, and we try to work mostly with marginalized or et cetera, people who need a little bit more representation in the industry too. Although we can select anybody, and it's been really well received, it's been amazing. And there's a group called the bundle of holding which sells tabletop role playing game PDFs, and they've donated 10s of 1000s of dollars every year for us to be able to do this. And it's kind of funny, because I never thought I'd be end up running a nonprofit, but here I'm just the guy who writes checks to the different to the emerging designer program. Folks are much more tied into that community that I am. But one of the real reasons I wanted to do something like that or be involved with it, because if you wander around with these conventions and you notice that it starts getting very gray after a while, right? It's you're like, oh, there's no new people coming in. It's all older people. I we didn't I didn't want us to all end up as like the Grandpa, grandpa doing the HO model railroad stuff in the basement, right? This dying hobby that only people in their 60s and 70s care about. So bringing in fresh people, fresh voices, I think, is very important, and hopefully we're doing some good with that. It's been a lot of fun either way.   Speaker 1 ** 37:59 Well, I have you had some success with it? Yeah, we've   Matt Forbeck ** 38:02 had, well, let's see. I think we've got like 14 people. We've brought in some have already gone on to do some amazing things. I mean, it's only been a few years, so it's hard to tell if they're gonna be legends in their time, but again, having them as models for other people to look at and say, Oh, maybe I could do that. That's been a great thing. The other well, coincidentally, Dungeons and Dragons is having its best 10 year streak in its history right now, and probably is the best selling it's ever been. So coinciding with that, we've seen a lot more diversity and a lot more people showing up to these wonderful conventions and playing these kinds of games. There's also been an advent of this thing called actual play, which is the biggest one, is a group called Critical Role, which is a whole bunch of voice actors who do different cartoons and video games and such, and they play D and D with each other, and then they record the games, and they produce them on YouTube and for podcasts. And these guys are amazing. There's a couple of other ones too, like dimension 20 and glass cannon, the critical role guys actually sold out a live performance at Wembley Arena last summer. Wow. And dimension. Dimension 20 sold out Madison Square Garden. I'm like, if you'd have told me 20 years ago that you know you could sell out an entire rock stadium to have people watch you play Dungeons and Dragons, I would have laughed. I mean, there's no way it would have been possible. But now, you know, people are very much interested in this. It's kind of wild, and it's, it's fun to be a part of that. At some level,   Speaker 1 ** 39:31 how does the audience get drawn in to something like that? Because they are watching it, but there must be something that draws them in.   Matt Forbeck ** 39:39 Yeah, part of it is that you have some really skilled some actors are very funny, very traumatic and very skilled at improvisation, right? So the the dungeon master or Game Master will sit there and present them with an idea or whatever. They come up each with their own characters. They put them in wonderful, strong voices. They kind of inhabit the roles in a way that an actor. A really top level actor would, as opposed to just, you know, me sitting around a table with my friends. And because of that, they become compelling, right? My Marty and my his wife and I were actually at a convention in Columbus, Ohio last weekend, and this group called the McElroy family, actually, they do my brother, my brother and me, which is a hit podcast, but they also do an actual play podcast called The Adventure zone, where they just play different games. And they are so funny. These guys are just some of the best comedians you'll ever hear. And so them playing, they actually played our Marvel game for a five game session, or a five podcast session, or whatever, and it was just stunningly fun to listen to. People are really talented mess around with something that we built right it's very edifying to see people enjoying something that you worked on.   Speaker 1 ** 40:51 Do you find that the audiences get drawn in and they're actually sort of playing the game along, or as well? And may disagree with what some of the choices are that people make?   Matt Forbeck ** 41:02 Oh, sure. But I mean, if the choices are made from a point of the character that's been expressed, that people are following along and they they already like the character, they might go, Oh, those mean, you know that guy, there are some characters they love to hate. There are some people they're they're angry at whatever, but they always really appreciate the actors. I mean, the actors have become celebrities in their own right. They've they sell millions of dollars for the comic books and animated TV shows and all these amazing things affiliated with their actual play stuff. And it's, I think it, part of it is because, it's because it makes the games more accessible. Some people are intimidated by these games. So it's not really, you know, from a from a physical disability kind of point. It's more of a it makes it more accessible for people to be nervous, to try these things on their own, or don't really quite get how they work. They can just sit down and pop up YouTube or their podcast program and listen into people doing a really good job at it. The unfortunate problem is that the converse of that is, when you're watching somebody do that good of a job at it, it's actually hard to live up to that right. Most people who play these games are just having fun with their friends around a table. They're not performing for, you know, 10s of 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s of people. So there's a different level of investments, really, at that point, and some people have been known to be cowed by that, by that, or daunted by that.   Speaker 1 ** 42:28 You work on a lot of different things. I gather at the same time. What do you what do you think about that? How do you like working on a lot of different projects? Or do you, do you more focus on one thing, but you've got several things going on, so you'll work on something for one day, then you'll work on something else. Or how do you how do you do it all?   Matt Forbeck ** 42:47 That's a good question. I would love to just focus on one thing at a time. Now, you know the trouble is, I'm a freelancer, right? I don't set my I don't always get to say what I want to work on. I haven't had to look for work for over a decade, though, which has been great. People just come to me with interesting things. The trouble is that when you're a freelancer, people come in and say, Hey, let's work on this. I'm like, Yeah, tell me when you're ready to start. And you do that with like, 10 different people, and they don't always line up in sequence properly, right? Yeah? Sometimes somebody comes up and says, I need this now. And I'm like, Yeah, but I'm in the middle of this other thing right now, so I need to not sleep for another week, and I need to try to figure out how I'm going to put this in between other things I'm working on. And I have noticed that after I finish a project, it takes me about a day or three to just jump track. So if I really need to, I can do little bits here and there, but to just fully get my brain wrapped around everything I'm doing for a very complex project, takes me a day or three to say, Okay, now I'm ready to start this next thing and really devote myself to it. Otherwise, it's more juggling right now, having had all those kids, probably has prepared me to juggle. So I'm used to having short attention span theater going on in my head at all times, because I have to jump back and forth between things. But it is. It's a challenge, and it's a skill that you develop over time where you're like, Okay, I can put this one away here and work on this one here for a little while. Like today, yeah, I knew I was going to talk to you, Michael. So I actually had lined up another podcast that a friend of mine wanted to do with me. I said, Let's do them on the same day. This way I'm not interrupting my workflow so much, right? Makes sense? You know, try to gang those all together and the other little fiddly bits I need to do for administration on a day. Then I'm like, Okay, this is not a day off. It's just a day off from that kind of work. It's a day I'm focusing on this aspect of what I do.   Speaker 1 ** 44:39 But that's a actually brings up an interesting point. Do you ever take a day off or do what do you do when you're when you deciding that you don't want to do gaming for a while?   Matt Forbeck ** 44:49 Yeah, I actually kind of terrible. But you know, you know, my wife will often drag me off to places and say we're going to go do this when. Yes, we have a family cabin up north in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that we go to. Although, you know, my habit there is, I'll work. I'll start work in the morning on a laptop or iPad until my battery runs out, and then I shut it down, put on a charger, and then I go out and swim with everybody for the rest of the day. So it depends if I'm on a deadline or not, and I'm almost always on a deadline, but there are times I could take weekends off there. One of the great things of being a freelancer, though, and especially being a stay at home father, which is part of what I was doing, is that when things come up during the middle of the week, I could say, oh, sure, I can be flexible, right? The trouble is that I have to pay for that time on my weekends, a lot of the time, so I don't really get a lot of weekends off. On the other hand, I'm not I'm not committed to having to work every day of the week either, right? I need to go do doctor appointments, or we want to run off to Great America and do a theme park or whatever. I can do that anytime I want to. It's just I have to make up the time at other points during the week. Does your wife work? She does. She was a school social worker for many years, and now as a recruiter at a local technical college here called Black Hawk tech. And she's amazing, right? She's fantastic. She has always liked working. The only time she stopped working was for about a year and a half after the quads were born, I guess, two years. And that was the only time I ever took a job working with anybody else, because we needed the health insurance, so I we always got it through her. And then when she said, Well, I'm gonna stay home with the kids, which made tons of sense, I went and took a job with a video game company up in Madison, Wisconsin called Human Head Studios for about 18 months, 20 months. And then the moment she told me she was thinking about going back to work, I'm like, Oh, good, I can we can Cobra for 18 months and pay for our own health insurance, and I'm giving notice this week, and, you know, we'll work. I left on good terms that everybody. I still talk to them and whatever, but I very much like being my own boss and not worrying about what other people are going to tell me to do. I work with a lot of clients, which means I have a lot of people telling me what to do. But you know, if it turns out bad, I can walk I can walk away. If it turns out good, hopefully we get to do things together, like the the gig I've been working out with Marvel, I guess, has been going on for like, four years now, with pretty continuous work with them, and I'm enjoying every bit of it. They're great people to work with.   Speaker 1 ** 47:19 Now, you were the president of Pinnacle entertainment for a little while. Tell me about that.   Matt Forbeck ** 47:24 I was, that was a small gaming company I started up with a guy named Shane Hensley, who was another tabletop game designer. Our big game was something called Dead Lands, which was a Western zombie cowboy kind of thing. Oh gosh, Western horror. So. And it was pretty much a, you know, nobody was doing Western horror back in those days. So we thought, Oh, this is safe. And to give you an example of parallel development, we were six months into development, and another company, White Wolf, which had done a game called Vampire the Masquerade, announced that they were doing Werewolf the Wild West. And we're like, you gotta be kidding me, right? Fortunately, we still released our game three months before there, so everybody thought we were copying them, rather than the other way around. But the fact is, we were. We both just came up with the idea independently. Right? When you work in creative fields, often, if somebody wants to show you something, you say, I'd like to look at you have to sign a waiver first that says, If I do something like this, you can't sue me. And it's not because people are trying to rip you off. It's because they may actually be working on something similar, right already. Because we're all, you know, swimming in the same cultural pool. We're all, you know, eating the same cultural soup. We're watching or watching movies, playing games, doing whatever, reading books. And so it's not unusual that some of us will come up with similar ideas   Speaker 1 ** 48:45 well, and it's not surprising that from time to time, two different people are going to come up with somewhat similar concepts. So that's not a big surprise, exactly, but   Matt Forbeck ** 48:56 you don't want people getting litigious over it, like no, you don't be accused of ripping anybody off, right? You just want to be as upfront with people. With people. And I don't think I've ever actually seen somebody, at least in gaming, in tabletop games, rip somebody off like that. Just say, Oh, that's a great idea. We're stealing that it's easier to pay somebody to just say, Yes, that's a great idea. We'll buy that from you, right? As opposed to trying to do something unseemly and criminal?   Speaker 1 ** 49:24 Yeah, there's, there's something to be said for having real honor in the whole process.   Matt Forbeck ** 49:30 Yeah, I agree, and I think that especially if you're trying to have a long term career in any field that follows you, if you get a reputation for being somebody who plays dirty, nobody wants to play with you in the future, and I've always found it to be best to be as straightforward with people and honest, especially professionally, just to make sure that they trust you. Before my quadruplets were born, you could have set your clock by me as a freelancer, I never missed a deadline ever, and since then, I've probably it's a. Rare earth thing to make a deadline, because, you know, family stuff happens, and you know, there's just no controlling it. But whenever something does happen, I just call people up and say, hey, look, it's going to be another week or two. This is what's going on. And because I have a good reputation for completing the job and finishing quality work, they don't mind. They're like, Oh, okay, I know you're going to get this to me. You're not just trying to dodge me. So they're willing to wait a couple weeks if they need to, to get to get what they need. And I'm very grateful to them for that. And I'm the worst thing somebody can do is what do, what I call turtling down, which is when it's like, Oh no, I'm late. And then, you know, they cut off all communication. They don't talk to anybody. They just kind of try to disappear as much as they can. And we all, all adults, understand that things happen in your life. It's okay. We can cut you some slack every now and then, but if you just try to vanish, that's not even possible.   Speaker 1 ** 50:54 No, there's a lot to be there's a lot to be said for trust and and it's so important, I think in most anything that we do, and I have found in so many ways, that there's nothing better than really earning someone's trust, and they earning your trust. And it's something I talk about in my books, like when live with a guide dog, live like a guide dog, which is my newest book, it talks a lot about trust, because when you're working with a guide dog, you're really building a team, and each member of the team has a specific job to do, and as the leader of the team, it's my job to also learn how to communicate with the other member of the team. But the reality is, it still comes down to ultimately, trust, because I and I do believe that dogs do love unconditionally, but they don't trust unconditionally. But the difference between dogs and people is that people that dogs are much more open to trust, for the most part, unless they've just been totally traumatized by something, but they're more open to trust. And there's a lesson to be learned there. No, I   Matt Forbeck ** 52:03 absolutely agree with that. I think, I think most people in general are trustworthy, but as you say, a lot of them have trauma in their past that makes it difficult for them to open themselves up to that. So that's actually a pretty wonderful way to think about things. I like that,   Speaker 1 ** 52:17 yeah, well, I think that trust is is so important. And I know when I worked in professional sales, it was all about trust. In fact, whenever I interviewed people for jobs, I always asked them what they were going to sell, and only one person ever answered me the way. I really hoped that everybody would answer when I said, So, tell me what you're going to be selling. He said, The only thing I have to really sell is myself and my word, and nothing else. It really matters. Everything else is stuff. What you have is stuff. It's me selling myself and my word, and you have to, and I would expect you to back me up. And my response was, as long as you're being trustworthy, then you're going to get my backing all the way. And he was my most successful salesperson for a lot of reasons, because he got it.   Matt Forbeck ** 53:08 Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, I mean, I've worked with people sourcing different things too, for sales, and if you can rely on somebody to, especially when things go wrong, to come through for you. And to be honest with you about, you know, there's really that's a hard thing to find. If you can't depend on your sources for what you're building, then you can't depend on anything. Everything else falls apart.   Speaker 1 ** 53:29 It does. You've got to start at the beginning. And if people can't earn your trust, and you earn theirs, there's a problem somewhere, and it's just not going to work.   Matt Forbeck ** 53:39 Yeah, I just generally think people are decent and want to help. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've had issues. Car breaks down the road in Wisconsin. Here, if somebody's car goes in the ditch, everybody stops and just hauls them out. It's what you do when the quads were born, my stepmother came up with a sign up sheet, a booklet that she actually had spiral bound, that people could sign up every three three hours to help come over and feed and bathe, diaper, whatever the kids and we had 30 to 35 volunteers coming in every week. Wow, to help us out with that was amazing, right? They just each pick slots, feeding slots, and come in and help us out. I had to take the 2am feeding, and my wife had to take the 5am feeding by ourselves. But the rest of the week we had lots and lots of help, and we were those kids became the surrogate grandchildren for, you know, 30 to 35 women and couples really, around the entire area, and it was fantastic. Probably couldn't have survived   Speaker 1 ** 54:38 without it. And the other part about it is that all those volunteers loved it, because you all appreciated each other, and it was always all about helping and assisting.   Matt Forbeck ** 54:48 No, we appreciate them greatly. But you know every most of them, like 99% of them, whatever were women, 95 women who are ready for grandchildren and didn't have them. Had grandchildren, and they weren't in the area, right? And they had that, that love they wanted to share, and they just loved the opportunity to do it. It was, I'm choking up here talking about such a great time for us in   Speaker 1 ** 55:11 that way. Now I'm assuming today, nobody has to do diaper duty with the quads, right?   Matt Forbeck ** 55:16 Not until they have their own kids. Just checking, just checking, thankfully, think we're that is long in our past,   Speaker 1 ** 55:23 is it? Is it coming fairly soon for anybody in the future?   Matt Forbeck ** 55:27 Oh, I don't know. That's really entirely up to them. We would love to have grandchildren, but you know, it all comes in its own time. They're not doing no well. I, one of my sons is married, so it's possible, right? And one of my other sons has a long term girlfriend, so that's possible, but, you know, who knows? Hopefully they're they have them when they're ready. I always say, if you have kids and you want them, that's great. If you have, if you don't have kids and you don't want them, that's great. It's when you cross the two things that,   Speaker 1 ** 55:57 yeah, trouble, yeah, that's that is, that is a problem. But you really like working with yourself. You love the entre

The pretense of being a Libertarian was just too much work to keep up with for Peter Thiel, and so a new label has been conjured up to describe him. As a contrarian, he now has the luxury of not having to believe in anything, and instead maintain an appearance of antagonism to the status quo.  Topics include: Patreon posts, Carroll Quigley, mainstreaming of conspiracy culture, transformation of former Truth Movement, creative spark is back, transhumanism becoming a mainstream topic, exposing technocratic propaganda, disinformation everywhere, Peter Thiel the contrarian, public relations, building public persona, move away from Libertarian identity, adaptations within right wing propaganda stream, shifting narratives, Elon Musk public profile model, Christian Identity, Anti-Christ lecture series, no charisma Silicon Valley billionaires, Ray Kurzweil, Rogan interviews, Andreessen, Techno Utopian Manifesto, taking attention away from real problems, puritanical dark religious aspect to right wing propaganda, international disinformation campaigns, Bernays, Technological Society, perfection of technique, global government, luxury bunkers, end times head space, Revelation of the Method, occult concepts, poor or no research feeds you into disinformation stream, encouraging nihilism, pretending not to be the new establishment, old mainstream media no longer exists, going deeper into the virtual world, rapid change

Age of Transitions and Uncle 9-5-2025AoT#473The pretense of being a Libertarian was just too much work to keep up with for Peter Thiel, and so a new label has been conjured up to describe him. As a contrarian, he now has the luxury of not having to believe in anything, and instead maintain an appearance of antagonism to the status quo. Topics include: Patreon posts, Carroll Quigley, mainstreaming of conspiracy culture, transformation of former Truth Movement, creative spark is back, transhumanism becoming a mainstream topic, exposing technocratic propaganda, disinformation everywhere, Peter Thiel the contrarian, public relations, building public persona, move away from Libertarian identity, adaptations within right wing propaganda stream, shifting narratives, Elon Musk public profile model, Christian Identity, Anti-Christ lecture series, no charisma Silicon Valley billionaires, Ray Kurzweil, Rogan interviews, Andreessen, Techno Utopian Manifesto, taking attention away from real problems, puritanical dark religious aspect to right wing propaganda, international disinformation campaigns, Bernays, Technological Society, perfection of technique, global government, luxury bunkers, end times head space, Revelation of the Method, occult concepts, poor or no research feeds you into disinformation stream, encouraging nihilism, pretending not to be the new establishment, old mainstream media no longer exists, going deeper into the virtual world, rapid changeUtp#380Uncle does another beer review with a five shot glass tour. Topics include: beer review, Taiwan Beer, 5 shot glasses, TikTak BTS stream, Chargers beat Chiefs, NFL pick sheet pools, animals with strange fungal infections, neighborhood fruit trees, good neighbors, drink responsibly, MLB baseball talk, multiple teams in one city, NHL, Kiss Cam problems, suits vs casual clothes at ball gamesFRANZ MAIN HUB:https://theageoftransitions.com/PATREONhttps://www.patreon.com/aaronfranzUNCLEhttps://unclethepodcast.com/ORhttps://theageoftransitions.com/category/uncle-the-podcast/FRANZ and UNCLE Merchhttps://theageoftransitions.com/category/support-the-podcasts/---Email Chuckblindjfkresearcher@gmail.comBE THE EFFECTOchelli Link Treehttps://linktr.ee/chuckochelli---NOVEMBER IN DALLAS LANCER CONFERENCEDISCOUNT FOR YOU10 % OFF code = Ochelli10https://assassinationconference.com/BE THE EFFECTListen/Chat on the Sitehttps://ochelli.com/listen-live/TuneInhttp://tun.in/sfxkxAPPLEhttps://music.apple.com/us/station/ochelli-com/ra.1461174708Ochelli Link Treehttps://linktr.ee/chuckochelliAnything is a blessing if you have the meansWithout YOUR support we go silent.---NOVEMBER IN DALLAS LANCER CONFERENCEDISCOUNT FOR YOU10 % OFF code = Ochelli10https://assassinationconference.com/Coming SOON Room Discount Details The Fairmont Dallas hotel 1717 N Akard Street, Dallas, Texas 75201. easy access to Dealey Plaza

After listening to him for many years, I'm honored to have Herbert Ong of  ⁨@BrighterwithHerbert⁩ on the show!Other than being a T$LA investor, he has also founded 3 companies, awarded the Thomson Reuters Healthcare Star Performance Excellence Award in 2007, and was the Head Product Manager who built and launched CareDiscovery (used by the majority of US hospitals). Watch the incredible episode on YoutubeEPISODE HIGHLIGHTS[00:00-07:14] Why Tesla? The S-Curve of Innovation[07:15-08:11] Diversifying Beyond Tesla[08:12-12:00] Growth vs. Value Investing[12:01-6:02] The Data Edge: Tesla's  Advantage[16:01-20:00] Robotaxis: The Economic Case[20:01-23:36] Optimus: The Next Layer of AI[23:37-27:54] Real-World Data: The Key to AGI[27:55-32:03] Glipse of the Age of Abundance[32:04-38:09] Solar farms? Global Energy Shifts[38:10-44:45] Utopia or Dystopia? The AI Future[44:46-48:00] Should we be afraid?[48:01-51:47] A Holodeck FutureSpecial Mentions:Elon Musk, Tesla AI, EVs, robotaxi, Optimus, Waymo, AppleTony Seba, Ray Kurzweil, Gary Black, AIM Free Book: The Singularity is Near, predicting AGI by 2029.Any questions?*** Start taking action right NOW!

Dara Ladjevardian, founder and CEO of Delphi, is creating digital minds that allow people to scale their thoughts and availability without replacing human connection. Inspired by Ray Kurzweil's theory of mind as a hierarchy of pattern recognizers, Dara built an adaptive temporal knowledge graph that captures how people think and reason. From helping CEOs train new hires to enabling coaches to monetize their expertise 24/7, Delphi represents a new form of conversational media. Dara explains why authentic human representation matters, how digital minds actually increase desire for real human connection, and why he believes 2026 will be the tipping point for adoption for digital minds. Hosted by Sonya Huang and Jess Lee, Sequoia Capital Mentioned in this episode: How to Create a Mind: 2012 book by Ray Kurzweil that inspired Dara The Memoirs of Akbar Ladjevardian: 2008 book about Dara's grandfather, an Iranian industrialist, that led him to create his first “digital mind” Build: 2022 book by Tony Fadell that refers to itself as “a mentor in a box”; another inspiration for Dara The 2 Sigma Problem: 1984 paper by Benjamin Bloom about how students that receive one-on-one tutoring perform two standard deviations better than students educated in a classroom environment

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, in the wake of Elon Musk's xAI Grok chatbot turning anti-Semitic following a recent update, Razib catches up with Nikolai Yakovenko about the state of AI in the summer of 2025. Nearly three years after their first conversations on the topic, the catch up, covering ChatGPT's release and the anticipation of massive macroeconomic transformations driven by automation of knowledge-work. Yakovenko is a former professional poker player and research scientist at Google, Twitter (now X) and Nvidia (now the first $4 trillion company). With more than a decade on the leading edge computer science, Yakovenko has been at the forefront of the large-language-model revolution that was a necessary precursor to the rise of companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity, as well as hundreds of smaller startups. Currently, he is the CEO of DeepNewz, an AI-driven news startup that leverages the latest models to retrieve the ground-truth on news-stories. Disclosure: Razib actively uses and recommends the service and is an advisor to the company. Razib and Yakovenko first tackle why Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is offering individual pay packages north of $200 million, poaching some of OpenAI's top individual contributors. Yakovenko observes that it seems Meta is giving up on its open-source Llama project, their competitor to the models that underpin OpenAI and ChatGPT (he also comments that it seems that engineers at xAI are disappointed in the latest version of Grok). Overall, though the pay-packages of AI engineers and researchers are high; there is now a big shakeout as massive companies with the money and engineering researchers pull away from their competitors. Additionally, in terms of cutting-edge models, the US and China are the only two international players (Yakovenko notes parenthetically that Chinese engineers are also the primary labor base of American AI firms). They also discuss how it is notable that almost three years after the beginning of the current booming repeated hype-cycles of artificial intelligence began to crest, we are still no closer to “artificial general intelligence” and the “intelligence super-explosion” that Ray Kurzweil has been predicting for generations. AI is partially behind the rise of companies like Waymo that are on the verge of transforming the economy, but overall, even though AI is still casting around for its killer app, big-tech has fully bought in and believes that the next decade will determine who wins the future.

When running a law firm, it's vital to know what's important. Results? Production? Call it “everything.” When we explore the future of law, it's important to talk about the whole picture. Today, that means AI, money, financing, and results. Guest Dan Lear, VP of Partnerships at InfoTrack shares his insights.  It starts with understanding the “hemispheres” of the brain and understanding yourself and how you think. The world is moving from a “left brain” logical type of approach to a more holistic, creative approach, tapping unconventional, big picture skills. The narrow approach learned in law school and practiced in the past is due for an upgrade.  There's a lot going on. Will AI make you more productive, or will it jam you up? Understanding today's legal landscape and the new era of work demands your attention.  Lear digs into how fast things are changing. AI is rewriting the very tech we use, and you can't escape it, only keep up. Take a new look at the future of work, and, equally important, the future of money, outside funding, and the practice of law as a business.  Join the next Community Table live. What's on your mind? Mentioned in This Episode: Clio legal software Clio, Daily Matters, “Dan Lear, Chief Instigator of Right Brain Law”  Avvo Daniel Pink, author Mycase Smokeball “The Free-Time Paradox in America,” The Atlantic, Derek Thompson Books by Ray Kurzweil, Amazon The Matrix, trailer “The End of Lawyers,” Richard Susskind Claude AI “The Prize,” on Amazon Legal Talk Network team

“Manager and leader”? What's the difference. During my conversation this time with Scott Hanton, our guest, we will discuss this very point along with many other fascinating and interesting subjects. As Scott tells us at the beginning of this episode he grew up asking “why” about most anything you can think of. He always was a “why” asker. As he tells it, unlike many children who grow out of the phase of asking “why” he did not. He still asks “why” to this very day.   At the age of 13 Scott decided that he wanted to be a chemist. He tells us how this decision came about and why he has always stayed with it. Scott received his bachelor's degree in Chemistry from Michigan State and his PHD from the University of Wisconsin. Again, why he changed schools for his PHD work is an interesting story. As you will see, Scott tells stories in a unique and quite articulate way.   After his university days were over Scott went to work, yes as a chemist. He tells us about this and how after 20 years with one company how and why he moved to another company and somewhat out of constant lab work into some of the management, business and leadership side of a second company. He stayed there for ten years and was laid off during the pandemic. Scott then found employment as the editorial director of Lab Management Magazine where he got to bring his love of teaching to the forefront of his work.   My hour with Scott gives us all many insights into management, leadership and how to combine the two to create a strong teaming environment. I believe you will find Scott's thoughts extremely poignant and helpful in everything that you do.     About the Guest:   Scott Hanton is the Editorial Director of Lab Manager. He spent 30 years as a research chemist, lab manager, and business leader at Air Products and Intertek. Scott thrives on the challenges of problem-solving. He enjoys research, investigation, and collaboration. Scott is a people-centric, servant leader. He is motivated by developing environments where people can grow and succeed, and crafting roles for people that take advantage of their strengths.   Scott earned a BS in chemistry from Michigan State University and a PhD in physical chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is an active member of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the American Society of Mass Spectrometry (ASMS), and the Association of Lab Managers (ALMA). As a scientist Scott values curiosity, innovation, progress, and delivery of results. Scott has always been motivated by questions beginning with why. Studying physical chemistry in graduate school offered the opportunity to hone answers to these questions. As a professional scientist, Scott worked in analytical chemistry specializing in MALDI mass spectrometry and polymer characterization.   At Scott married his high school sweetheart, and they have one son. Scott is motivated by excellence, happiness, and kindness. He most enjoys helping people and solving problems. Away from work, Scott enjoys working outside in the yard, playing strategy games, and participating in different discussion groups.   Scott values having a growth mindset and is a life-long learner. He strives to learn something new everyday and from everyone. One of the great parts of being a trained research scientist is that failure really isn't part of his vocabulary. He experiments and either experiences success or learns something new. He values both individual and organizational learning.   Scott's current role at Lab Manager encompasses three major responsibilities: ·      Writing articles and giving presentations to share his experience with lab managers. ·      Driving the creation and growth of the Lab Manager Academy (https://labmanageracademy.com/) that currently contains three certificate programs: lab management, lab safety management, and lab quality management. ·      Helping people through his knowledge of science, scientists, management, and leadership. He is very happy sharing the accumulated wisdom of his experiences as a researcher, lab supervisor, and lab manager. Each article posted on Lab Manager addresses a decision that a lab manager needs to make. Lab management is full of decision-making, so helping people make better, faster, more complete decisions is very satisfying. Ways to connect with Scott:   https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-hanton/   About the Host:   Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening!   Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast   If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset .   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review   Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.       Transcription Notes:   Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:20 Well, welcome to another episode of unstoppable mindset where inclusion diversity and the unexpected meet, and mostly we get to deal with the unexpected, as opposed to inclusion or diversity. But that's okay, because unexpected is what makes life fun, and our guest today, Scott Hanton, will definitely be able to talk about that. Scott has been a research chemist. He comes from the chemistry world, so he and I in the past have compared notes, because, of course, I come from the physics world, and I love to tell people that the most important thing I learned about physics was that, unlike Doc Brown, although I do know how to build a bomb, unlike Doc Brown from Back to the Future, I'm not dumb enough to try to go steal fissionable material from a terrorist group to build the bomb. So, you know, I suppose that's a value, value lesson somewhere. But anyway, I am really glad that you're all here with us today, and we have lots to talk about. Scott, as I said, was in chemistry and research chemist, and now is the editorial supervisor and other things for a magazine called lab manager, and we will talk about that as well. So Scott, welcome to unstoppable mindset. We're glad   Scott Hanton ** 02:38 you're here. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to have this conversation with you today.   Michael Hingson ** 02:43 Well, I think it'll be a lot of fun, and looking forward to it. Now, you're in Michigan, right?   Scott Hanton ** 02:48 That's right. I live in South Lyon, Michigan,   Michael Hingson ** 02:51 ah, what's the weather back there today?   Scott Hanton ** 02:55 It's probably about 55 degrees and cloudy   Michael Hingson ** 02:58 here today. Well, it's still fairly sunny here, and we're actually, according to my iPhone, at 71 so it was up around 80 earlier in the week, but weather changes are still going to bring some cold for a while   Scott Hanton ** 03:15 in here in Michigan, I visited a customer earlier this week, and I drove by about 1000 orange barrels on the highway, which means it's spring, because there's only two seasons in Michigan, winter and construction.   Michael Hingson ** 03:29 There you go. Yeah, I know. I went to the University of California, Irvine, UCI. And if you ask somebody who doesn't know that UCI stands for University of California at Irvine. If you ask them what UCI stands for, they'll tell you, under construction indefinitely. Sounds right? Yeah. Well, it's been doing it ever since I was there a long time ago, and they they continue to grow. Now we're up to like 32,000 fresh, or excuse me, undergraduates at the university. And when I was there, there were 2700 students. So it's grown a little. That's   Scott Hanton ** 04:05 a lot of change. I'm used to big universities. I'm a graduate of both Michigan State and the University of Wisconsin. So these are big places.   Michael Hingson ** 04:13 Wow, yeah. So you're used to it. I really enjoyed it when it was a small campus. I'm glad I went there, and that was one of the reasons that caused me to go there, was because I knew I could probably get a little bit more visibility with instructors, and that would be helpful for me to get information when they didn't describe things well in class. And it generally worked out pretty well. So I can't complain a lot. Perfect. Glad it worked well for you, it did. Well, why don't you start, if you would, by telling us kind of about the early Scott growing up and all that sort of stuff.   Scott Hanton ** 04:49 I grew up in Michigan, in a town called Saginaw. I was blessed with a family that loved me and that, you know, I was raised in a very. Supportive environment. But young Scott asked, Why about everything you know, the way kids do? Yeah, right. And my mom would tell you that when I was a kid, why was my most favorite word? And most kids outgrow that. I never did, yeah, so Me neither. I still ask why all the time. It's still my most favorite word, and it caused me to want to go explore the sciences, because what I found, as I learned about science, was that I could get answers to why questions better in science than in other places.   Michael Hingson ** 05:34 Yeah, makes sense. So what kinds of questions did you ask about why? Well, I asked   Scott Hanton ** 05:43 all kinds of questions about why, like, why are we having that for dinner? Or, why is my bedtime so early? Those questions didn't have good answers, at least from my perspective, right? But I also asked questions like, why is grass green, and why is the sky blue? And studying physical chemistry at Michigan State answered those questions. And so   Michael Hingson ** 06:03 how early did you learn about Rayleigh scattering? But that's you know?   Scott Hanton ** 06:07 Well, I learned the basic concepts from a really important teacher in my life, Mr. Leeson was my seventh grade science teacher, and what I learned from him is that I could ask questions that weren't pertinent to what he was lecturing about, and that taught me a lot about the fact that science was a lot bigger than what we got in the curriculum or in the classroom. And so Mr. Leeson was a really important person in my development, and showed me that there was that science was a lot bigger than I thought it was as a student, but I didn't really learn about rally scattering until I got to college.   Michael Hingson ** 06:43 But at the same time, it sounds like he was willing to allow you to grow and and learn, which so many people aren't willing to do. They're too impatient.   Scott Hanton ** 06:58 He was a first year teacher the year I had him so he hadn't become cynical yet. So it was great to just be able to stay after class and ask him a question, or put my hand up in class and ask him a question. He also did a whole series of demonstrations that were fabulous and made the science come to life in a way that reading about it doesn't stir the imagination. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 07:23 I had teachers that did that too. I remember very well my freshman general science teacher in high school, Mr. Dills, and one day, and he loved to do kind of unique things, just to push the boundaries of students a little bit. He came in one day and he said, I got a pop quiz for everybody, which doesn't help me, because the pop quiz was in print, but he handed it out. And then he took me to the back of the room, and he said, You're not going to really be able to do this quiz. Let me tell you why. And he said, Oh, and one thing he said is, just be sure you follow all the instructions and you'll be fine on the test to everybody. He brought me back to the back of the room. He says, Well, here's the deal. He says, if people really read the instructions, what they'll do is they'll read the instruction that says, Read all the questions before you start answering, and if you get to the last question, it says answer only the first question, which is what is your name and and sure enough, of course, people didn't read the instructions. And he said, so I wouldn't be able to really deal with you with that one, with that whole thing, just because it wouldn't work well. And I said, I understand, but he loved to make students think, and I learned so much about the whole concept of realizing the need to observe and be observant in all that you do. And it was lessons like that from him that really helped a lot with that. For me,   Scott Hanton ** 08:48 I had a high school chemistry teacher named Mrs. Schultz, and the first experiment that we did in her class, in the first week of classes, was she wanted us to document all of the observations that we could make about a burning candle. And I was a hot shot student. Thought I, you know, owned the world, and I was going to ace this test. And, you know, I had maybe a dozen observations about a burning candle, and thought I had done a great job describing it, until she started sharing her list, and she probably had 80 observations about a burning candle, and it taught me the power of observation and the need to talk about the details of those observations and to be specific about what the observations were. And that experiment seems simple, light a candle and tell me what you see. Yeah, but that lesson has carried on with me now for more than approaching 50 years.   Michael Hingson ** 09:47 Let's see, as I recall, if you light a candle, what the center of the flame is actually pretty cool compared to the outside. It's more hollow. Now I wouldn't be able to easily tell that, because. Is my my process for observing doesn't really use eyesight to do that, so I I'm sure there are other technologies today that I could use to get more of that information. But   Scott Hanton ** 10:12 I'm also sure that that experiment could be re crafted so that it wasn't so visual, yeah, right, that there could be tactile experiments to tell me about observations or or audible experiments about observation, where you would excel in ways that I would suffer because I'm so visually dominant. The   Michael Hingson ** 10:33 issue, though, is that today, there's a lot more technology to do that than there was when I was in school and you were in school, but yeah, I think there is a lot available. There's a company called Independence Science, which is actually owned and run by Dr Cary sapollo. And Carrie is blind, and he is a blind chemist, and he wanted to help develop products for blind people to be able to deal with laboratory work. So he actually worked with a company that was, well, it's now Vernier education systems. They make a product called LabQuest with something like 80 different kinds of probes that you can attach to it, and the LabQuest will will provide visual interpretations of whatever the probes are showing carry, and independent science took that product and made it talk, so that There is now a Talking LabQuest. And the reality is that all those probes became usable because the LabQuest became accessible to be able to do that, and they put a lot of other things into it too. So it's more than just as a talking device, a lab device. It's got a periodic table in it. It's got a lot of other kinds of things that they just put in it as well. But it's really pretty cool because it now makes science a whole lot more accessible. I'm going to have to think about the different kinds of probes and how one could use that to look at a candle. I think that'd be kind of fun.   Scott Hanton ** 12:15 And it's just awesome to hear that there's innovation and space to make science more available to everybody. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 12:23 the real problem that we face is the one that we mostly always have faced, which is societal attitudes, as opposed to really being or not being able to do the experiments, is people think we can't, and that's the barrier that we always, usually have to overcome.   Scott Hanton ** 12:39 What I find in my time as a coach, mentor, supervisor, is that if somebody believes they can't do it, they can't do it. Yeah. And so it's often about overcoming their own mental limitations, the limitations that they've placed on themselves,   Michael Hingson ** 12:56 and that's right, or unfortunately, the limitations that other people place on us, and we, all too often and weigh too much, buy into those limitations. So it's it is something that we, especially in the sciences, should recognize that we shouldn't be doing so much of. I know that when I was at UC Irvine as a graduate student, I learned once that there was a letter in my file that a professor wrote. Fortunately, I never had him as a professor, but it and I was in my master's program at the time in physics, and this guy put a letter in my file saying that no blind person could ever absorb the material to get an advanced degree in physics at the University. Just put that in there, which is so unfortunate, because the real thing that is demonstrated there is a prejudice that no scientist should ever have.   Scott Hanton ** 13:51 I'm hopeful that as you graduated, there was a retraction letter in your file as well,   Michael Hingson ** 13:57 not that I ever heard, but yeah. Well, I'd already gotten my bachelor's degree, but yeah. But you know, things happen, but it is a it is a societal thing, and society all too often creates limitations, and sometimes we don't find them right away, but it is one of the big issues that, in general, we have to deal with. And on all too often, society does some pretty strange things because it doesn't understand what science is all about. I know when we were dealing with covid, when it all started, leaving the conspiracy theorists out of it. One of the things that I learned was that we have all these discussions about AI, if you will. But AI was one of the primary mechanisms that helped to develop the mRNA vaccines that are now still the primary things that we use to get vaccinated against covid, because they the artificial intelligence. I'm not sure how artificial. It is, but was able to craft what became the vaccine in a few days. And scientists acknowledged, if they had to do it totally on their own, it would take years to have done what AI did in a few days.   Scott Hanton ** 15:13 The AI technology is amazing and powerful, but it's not new. No, I met a person who shared her story about AI investigations and talked about what she was doing in this field 30 years ago. Yeah, in her master's work. And you know, I knew it wasn't brand new, but I didn't really realize how deep its roots went until I talked to her.   Michael Hingson ** 15:37 I worked as my first jobs out of college with Ray Kurzweil, who, of course, nowadays, is well known for the singularity and so on. But back then, he developed the first reading machine that blind people could use to read printed material. And one of the things that he put into that machine was the ability, as it scanned more material, to learn and better recognize the material. And so he was doing machine learning back in the 1970s   Scott Hanton ** 16:07 right? And all of this is, you know, as Newton said on the shoulders of giants, right, right? He said it a bit cynically, but it's still true that we all in science, we are learning from each other. We're learning from the broader community, and we're integrating that knowledge as we tackle the challenges that we are exploring.   Michael Hingson ** 16:27 So what got you to go into chemistry when you went into college?   Scott Hanton ** 16:33 That's a good question. So when I was 13 years old, I went on a youth a church group youth trip to another city, and so they split us up, and there were three of us from our group that stayed overnight in a host family. And at dinner that night, the father worked in a pharmaceutical company, and he talked about the work he was doing, and what he was doing was really synthetic chemistry around small molecule drug discovery. And for me, it was absolutely fascinating. I was thrilled at that information. I didn't know any scientists growing up, I had no adult input other than teachers about science, and I can remember going back home and my parents asking me how the trip went. And it's like, it's fantastic. I'm going to be a chemist. And they both looked at me like, what is that? How do you make money from it? How do you get that? My dad was a banker. My mom was a school teacher. They had no scientific background, but that that one conversation, such serendipity, right? One conversation when I was 13 years old, and I came home and said, I'm going to be a chemist, and I've never really deviated from that path. Did you have other siblings? Younger brother and another younger sister?   Michael Hingson ** 17:54 Okay? Did they go into science by any remote chance?   Scott Hanton ** 17:58 Not at all. So they were both seventh grade teachers for more than 30 years. So my brother taught math and English, and my sister teaches social studies.   Michael Hingson ** 18:10 Well, there you go. But that is also important. I actually wanted to teach physics, but jobs and other things and circumstances took me in different directions, but I think the reality is that I ended up going into sales. And what I realized, and it was partly because of a Dale Carnegie sales course I took, but I realized that good sales people are really teachers, because they're really teaching people about products or about things, and they're also sharp enough to recognize what their products might or might not do to help a customer. But that, again, not everyone does that, but so I figure I still was teaching, and today, being a public speaker, traveling the world, talking, of course, about teamwork and other things, it's still all about teaching.   Scott Hanton ** 18:57 I think I've always been a teacher, and if you talk to my coworkers along the way, I enjoy helping people. I enjoy sharing my knowledge. There's always been a teacher inside but only in this job as the editorial director at lab manager have I really been able to do it directly. So we've developed what we call the lab manager Academy, and I create e learning courses to help lab managers be more successful, and it's been a passion project for me, and it's been a load of fun.   Michael Hingson ** 19:30 And it doesn't get better than that. It's always great when it's a load of fun, yes,   Scott Hanton ** 19:35 well, so you left college and you got a bachelor's and a master's degree, right? No masters for me, that step you went right to the old PhD, yeah. So I went straight. I went graduated from Michigan State. So Michigan State was on terms back in those days. So graduated in June, got married in July, moved to Wisconsin in August. To graduate school at the end of August at the University of Wisconsin. Okay? And my second year as a graduate student, my professor asked me, Do you want to stop and complete a master's? And I said, Wait, tell me about this word stop. And he said, Well, you'd have to finish the Master's requirements and write a thesis, and that's going to take some time. And I said, Do I have to and he said, No, and I don't recommend it. Just keep going forward and finish your PhD. So that's   Michael Hingson ** 20:30 and what does your wife do?   Scott Hanton ** 20:33 So my wife also is in the graduate program at the University of Wisconsin, and she decided that a master's degree was the right answer for her, because she didn't want to be a PhD scientist in XYZ narrow band of science. She wanted to be a master of chemistry. Okay, and so we took different paths through graduate school, but each of us took the path that worked best for us, and each pass has great value, so we're both happy with the choices that we made,   Michael Hingson ** 21:06 and complement each other and also give you, still lots of great things to talk about over dinner.   Scott Hanton ** 21:12 Absolutely. And she took that master's degree, went into the pharmaceutical industry and largely behaved as a librarian in her first part of her career, she wasn't called a librarian, but what she really did was a lot of information integrating, and then moved into the Library Group, and was a corporate librarian for a long time, and then a community librarian. So that path worked brilliantly for her. She also has a Masters of Library Science. So I have one PhD. She has two Master's degree. I have one bachelor's degree. She has two bachelor's degree.   Michael Hingson ** 21:50 Oh, so you can have interesting discussions about who really progressed further,   21:54 absolutely.   Michael Hingson ** 21:57 Well, that's, that's, that's cute, though. Well, I I got my bachelor's and master's. My wife, who I didn't meet until years later, wanted to be a librarian, but she ended up getting a a Master's at USC in so in sociology and and ended up getting a teaching credential and going into teaching, and taught for 10 years, and then she decided she wanted to do something different, and became a travel agent, which she had a lot of fun with. That is different, it is, but she enjoyed it, and along the way, then we got married. It was a great marriage. She was in a wheelchair her whole life. So she read, I pushed, worked out well, complimentary skills, absolutely, which is the way, way it ought to be, you know, and we had a lot of fun with it. Unfortunately, she passed now two and a half years ago, but as I tell people, we were married 40 years, and I'm sure she's monitoring me from somewhere, and if I misbehave, I'm going to hear about it, so I try to just behave. Sounds like good advice. Yeah, probably certainly the safe way to go. But we, we, we had lots of neat discussions, and our our activities and our expertise did, in a lot of ways, complement each other, so it was a lot of fun. And as I said, she went to USC. I enjoyed listening to USC football because I thought that that particular college team had the best announcers in the business, least when when I was studying in Southern California, and then when we got married, we learned the the day we got married, the wedding was supposed to start at four, and it didn't start till later because people weren't showing up for the wedding. And we learned that everybody was sitting out in their cars waiting for the end of the USC Notre Dame game. And we knew that God was on our side when we learned that SC beat the snot out of Notre Dame. So there you go. Yeah. Yeah. Oh gosh, the rivalries we face. So what did you do after college?   Scott Hanton ** 24:09 So did my PhD at the University of Wisconsin. And one of the nice things, a fringe benefit of going to a big, important program to do your PhD, is that recruiters come to you. And so I was able to do 40 different, four, zero, 40 different interviews on campus without leaving Madison. And one of those interviews was with a company called Air Products. And that worked out, and they hired me. And so we moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania to go to work. I went to work at Air Products and and Helen found a role in the pharmaceutical industry at Merck. And so we did that for a long time. I was initially a research expert, a PhD expert doing lasers and materials and analytical stuff. And over the years. I progressed up the ladder from researcher to supervisor to what did we call it, group head to Section Manager, to operations manager, and ultimately to General Manager.   Michael Hingson ** 25:13 Well, at least being in Allentown, you were close to a Cracker Barrel restaurant. Yes, that is true. That was the closest to one to where we lived in New Jersey, so we visited it several times. That's how I know   Scott Hanton ** 25:26 about it. Maybe we were there at the same time. Michael, maybe this isn't our first. It's   Michael Hingson ** 25:31 very possible. But we enjoyed Cracker Barrel and enjoyed touring around Pennsylvania. So I should have asked, What prompted you to go to the University of Wisconsin to do your your graduate work, as opposed to staying in Michigan. So   Scott Hanton ** 25:47 my advisor at Michigan State, our advisor at Michigan State, told us, here's the top five schools, graduate programs in chemistry, apply to them all. Go to the one you get into. And so I got into three. Helen got into two. The one that was the same was Wisconsin. So that's where we went, yeah?   Michael Hingson ** 26:09 Well, then no better logic and argument than that.   Scott Hanton ** 26:14 It was a great Madison. Wisconsin is a beautiful city. It one of the things I really liked about the chemistry program there then, and it's still true now, is how well the faculty get along together so many collaborative projects and just friendliness throughout the hallways. And yes, they are all competing at some level for grant support, but they get along so well, and that makes it for a very strong community,   Michael Hingson ** 26:41 and it probably also means that oftentimes someone who's applying for something can enlist support from other people who are willing to help.   Scott Hanton ** 26:50 And as a graduate student, it meant that I had more than one professor that I could go to my advisor. There was a whole group of advisors who ran joint group meetings and would give us advice about our work or our writing or our approach, or just because we needed a pep talk, because completing a PhD is hard. Yeah, right, so that community was really important to me, and it's something I took away that when I started my industrial career, I had seen the value of community, and I wanted to build stronger communities wherever I went, yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 27:26 So what does a company, does air products do   Scott Hanton ** 27:31 that's sort of in the name, right? They're an industrial gas company. Got some of their big, biggest products are taking air and separating it into its components of nitrogen, oxygen, oxygen, argon, whatever, right? But at that time, they also had a chemicals business and a semiconductor business, or electronics business. So there was a lot of chemistry going on, although a lot of my work colleagues were chemical engineers who were working on the gasses side of the business, we had significant number of chemistry, sorts material science, sorts of people who are working on the chemicals side. Now, over time, Air Products divested those businesses, and now it's much more of a true industrial gas company. But I had the opportunity to work in an integrated science company that did all sorts of things.   Michael Hingson ** 28:23 Yeah, and as as we know, certainly a little helium never hurt anyone.   Scott Hanton ** 28:30 No little helium, you know, raises people's spirits, it   Michael Hingson ** 28:34 does and their voices, it does. I I've visited helium tanks many times at UC Irvine when they had liquid helium, which was certainly a challenge because of how cold it had to be. But occasionally we would open a valve and little cold but useful helium gas would escape   Scott Hanton ** 28:56 very cold. Please be safe. Cryogens are are dangerous materials, and we gotta make sure we handle them with due respect.   Michael Hingson ** 29:05 Yeah, well, we, we all did and and didn't take too many chances. So it worked out pretty well. So you stayed in Allentown and you stayed with Air Products for how long   Scott Hanton ** 29:19 I was in Air Products for 20 years. So the analytical group that I was part of, we were about 92 or 93 people when I joined the company, when I just left after earning my PhD. After 20 years, that group was down to about 35 just progressive series of decisions that made the department smaller, and as the Department got smaller and smaller, we were worried about our abilities to sustain our work. And so a dear friend and a key colleague, Paula McDaniel, and I, worked to try to see what other kind of opportunities there were. Yeah. And so we reached out to a contract research organization called Intertech to see if they would be interested in maybe acquiring our analytical department. And when we called them, and by the way, we called them before we talked to our boss about it, she forgave us later, but when we called the guy on the end of the phone said, Wait a minute, let me get your file. And it's like, what you have a file on Air Products, analytical, really? Why? Well, it turned out that they had a file, and that they had an active Merger and Acquisition Group, and they wanted an integrated analytical department on the east coast of the US. And so we engaged in negotiation, and ultimately this analytical department was sold by Air Products to Intertech. So on Friday, we're a little cog in a giant engine of an global, international company, and our funding comes from Vice Presidents. And on Monday, we're a standalone business of 35 people, we need to write quotes in order to make money. So it was an enormous challenge to transition from a service organization to a business. But oh my goodness, did we learn a lot,   Michael Hingson ** 31:13 certainly a major paradigm shift,   Scott Hanton ** 31:18 and I was lucky that I lost the coin flip, and Paula won, and she said, I want to be business development director. And I said, thank God. So she went off to be the key salesperson, and Paula was utterly brilliant as a technical salesperson, and I became the operations manager, which allowed me to keep my hands dirty with the science and to work with the scientists and to build a system and a community that allowed us to be successful in a CRO world.   Michael Hingson ** 31:49 So at that time, when you became part, part of them, the new company, were you or the standalone business? Were you working in lab? Still yourself?   Scott Hanton ** 32:01 Yes. So I had the title Operations Manager and all of the scientific staff reported into me, but I was still the technical expert in some mass spectrometry techniques, particularly MALDI and also tough Sims, and so I still had hands on lab responsibility that I needed to deliver. And over time, I was able to train some people to take some of those responsibilities off. But when the weight of the world was particularly heavy, the place for me to go was in the lab and do some experiments.   Michael Hingson ** 32:34 Yeah, still so important to be able to keep your hand in into to know and understand. I know I had that same sort of need being the manager of an office and oftentimes working with other people who were the engineers, coming from a little bit of a technical background as well. I worked to always make sure I knew all I could about the products that I was dealing with and selling, and my sales people who worked for me constantly asked, How come, you know, all this stuff, and we don't then, my response always was, did you read the product bulletin that came out last week? Or have you kept up on the product bulletins? Because it's all right there, whether I actually physically repaired products or not, I knew how to do it. And so many times when I was involved in working with some of our engineers, I remember a few times our field support people, and we were working out of New Jersey, and then in New York at the time, in the World Trade Center, we had some customers up at Lockheed Martin, up in Syria, Rochester, I think it was. And the guys would go up, and then they'd call me on the phone, and we'd talk about it, and between us, we came up with some bright ideas. And I remember one day, all of a sudden, I get this phone call, and these guys are just bouncing off the walls, because whatever it was that was going on between them and me, we figured it out, and they put it in play and made it work, and they were all just as happy as clams at high tide, which is the way it ought to   Scott Hanton ** 34:13 be. It's great to work in a team that finds success. The longer I was in technical management, the more I enjoyed the success of the team. It didn't need to be my success anymore that helping the scientists be successful in their roles was truly satisfying,   Michael Hingson ** 34:33 and that helped you, by definition, be more successful in your role.   Scott Hanton ** 34:36 And no question, it could be seen as a selfish byproduct, but the fact is that it still felt really good.   Michael Hingson ** 34:43 Yeah, I hear you, because I know for me, I never thought about it as I've got to be successful. It's we've got problems to solve. Let's do it together. And I always told people that we're a team. And I have told every salesperson. I ever hired. I'm not here to boss you around. You've convinced me that you should be able to sell our products, and sometimes I found that they couldn't. But I said my job is to work with you to figure out how I can enhance what you do, and what skills do I bring to add value to you, because we've got to work together, and the people who understood that and who got it were always the most successful people that I ever had in my teams.   Scott Hanton ** 35:30 One of the things I strive to do as a leader of any organization is to understand the key strengths of the people on the team and to try to craft their roles in such a way that they spend the majority of their time executing their strengths. Yeah. I've also discovered that when I truly investigate poor performance, there's often a correlation between poor performance and people working in their weaknesses. Yeah, and if we can shift those jobs, change those roles, make change happen so that people can work more often in their strengths, then good things happen.   Michael Hingson ** 36:07 And if you can bring some of your skills into the mix and augment what they do, so much the better.   Scott Hanton ** 36:16 Yeah, because I'm just another member of the team, my role is different, but I need to also apply my strengths to the problems and be wary of my weaknesses, because as the leader of the organization, my words carried undue weight. Yeah, and if, if I was speaking or acting in a space where I was weak, people would still do what I said, because I had the most authority, and that was just a lose, lose proposition   Michael Hingson ** 36:43 by any standard. And and when you, when you operated to everyone's strengths, it always was a win. Yep, which is so cool. So you went to Intertech, and how long were you there?   Scott Hanton ** 36:57 I was at Intertech for 10 years, and work I can if you know, for any listeners out there who work in the CRO world, it is a tough business. It is a grind working in that business, yeah? So it was a lot of long hours and testy customers and shortages of materials and equipment that was a hard a hard a hard road to plow,   Michael Hingson ** 37:22 yeah, yeah, it gets to be frustrating. Sometimes it's what you got to do, but it still gets to be frustrating gets to be a challenge. The best part   Scott Hanton ** 37:32 for me was I had a great team. We had senior and junior scientists. They were good people. They worked hard. They fundamentally, they cared about the outcomes. And so it was a great group of people to work with. But the contract lab business is a tough business. Yeah, so when covid came, you know, the pandemic settles in, all the restrictions are coming upon us. I was tasked as the General Manager of the business with setting up all the protocols, you know, how are we going to meet the number of people this basing the masks, you know, how could we work with and we were essential as a lab, so we had to keep doing what we were doing. And it took me about a week to figure non stop work to figure out what our protocols were going to be, and the moment I turned them into my boss, then I got laid off. So what you want to do in a time of crisis is you want to let go of the the general manager, the safety manager, the quality manager and the Chief Scientist, because those are four people that you don't need during times of stress or challenge or crisis. On the plus side for me, getting laid off was a bad hour. It hurt my pride, but after an hour, I realized that all the things that I'd been stressing about for years trying to run this business were no longer my problem. Yeah, and I found that it was a tremendous weight lifted off my shoulders to not feel responsible for every problem and challenge that that business had.   Michael Hingson ** 39:14 And that's always a good blessing when you when you figure that out and don't worry about the the issues anymore. That's a good thing. It was certainly   Scott Hanton ** 39:25 good for me. Yeah, so I'm not going to recommend that people go get laid off. No world to get fired. But one problem that I had is because Paula and I worked to create that business, I sort of behaved like an owner, but was treated like an employee. And my recommendation to people is, remember, you're an employee, find some personal boundaries that protect you from the stress of the business, because you're not going to be rewarded or treated like an owner.   Michael Hingson ** 39:58 Yeah, because you're not because. Or not.   Scott Hanton ** 40:01 So I got laid off. It was in the height of the pandemic. So, you know, I'm too busy of a human being to sort of sit in a rocking chair and watch the birds fly by. That's not my style or my speed. So I started a consulting business, and that was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed doing the consulting work, but I learned something really important about myself, and that's that while I can sell and I can be an effective salesperson, I don't like selling, and as a company of one, when I didn't sell, I didn't make any money, yeah, and so I needed to figure out something else to do, because I really hated selling, and I wasn't doing it. I was procrastinating, and that made the business be unpredictable and very choppy   Michael Hingson ** 40:51 in that company of one, that guy who was working for you wasn't really doing all that you wanted.   Scott Hanton ** 40:56 Exactly the Yeah, you know me as the founder, was giving me as the salesman, a poor performance review was not meeting objectives. So I had a long time volunteer relationship with lab manager magazine. I had been writing articles for them and speaking for them in webinars and in conferences for a long time, probably more than 10 years, I would say, and they asked me as a consultant to produce a a to a proposal to create the lab manager Academy. So the the founder and owner of the the company, the lab X Media Group, you really saw the value of an academy, and they needed it done. They needed it done. They couldn't figure it out themselves. So I wrote the proposal. I had a good idea of how to do it, but I was new to consulting, and I struggled with, how do I get paid for this? And I had four ideas, but I didn't like them, so I slept on it, and in the morning I had a fifth, which said, hire me full time. I sent in the proposal. An hour later, I had a phone call. A week later, I had a job, so that worked out fantastic. And I've really enjoyed my time at lab manager magazine. Great people, fun work. It's really interesting to me to be valued for what I know rather than for what I can do. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 42:23 the two relate. But still, it does need to be more about what you know, what you really bring, as opposed to what you can do, because what you can do in general probably is an offshoot of what you know.   Scott Hanton ** 42:38 So this gives me the opportunity to help lots of people. So on the outside of the company, I'm writing articles, creating courses, giving talks to help lab managers. Because I was a lab manager for a long time, yeah, over 20 years, and I know what those challenges are. I know how hard that job is, and I know how many decisions lab managers need to make, and it's wonderful to be able to share my experience and help them, and I am motivated to help them. So was it hard? Oh, go ahead, on the inside, I'm literally an internal subject matter expert, and so I can coach and teach and help my colleagues with what's the science? What do lab managers really think? How do we pitch this so that it resonates with lab managers, and I think that helps make all of our products better and more successful.   Michael Hingson ** 43:31 So was it hard? Well, I guess best way to put it is that, was it really hard to switch from being a scientist to being a lab manager and then going into being a subject matter expert and really out of the laboratory. So   Scott Hanton ** 43:48 people ask me all the time, Scott, don't you miss being in the lab and doing experiments? And my answer is, I miss being in the lab. And I do miss being in the lab. You know, on very stressful days at Intertech, I'd go in the lab and I'd do an experiment, yeah, because it was fun, and I had more control over the how the experiment was run and what I would learn from it than I did running a business. But the flip side of that is, I do experiments all the time. What I learned as the general manager of a business was the scientific method works. Let's data hypothesis. Let's figure out how to test it. Let's gather data, and let's see if the hypothesis stands or falls. And we ran a business that way, I think, pretty successfully. And even now, in in media and publishing, we still run experiments all the time. And it's kind of funny that most of my editorial colleagues that I work with, they think my favorite word is experiment. My favorite word is still why, but we talk all the time now about doing experiments, and that was a new thing for them, but now we can do continual improvement more in a more dedicated way, and we do it a lot faster. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 45:00 yeah. So what's the hardest thing you think about being a lab manager?   Scott Hanton ** 45:06 I think the hardest thing about let me answer that with two. I'm not going to be able to narrow it down to one, so I'll give you two. The first one is you transform, maybe one day to the next, from really being in control of your science and working with whether it's animals or rocks or electrons or chemicals, whatever you're working with, having a great degree of knowledge and a lot of control, and the next day, you're hurting cats. And so it's about that transition from having control over your destiny to influencing people to get the work done, and working with people instead of working with experiments, that's really hard. The second is, as a lab manager, there's endless decisions, and so combating decision fatigue is a big deal, and everybody in the lab depends upon you for the decisions you make. And it's not that every decision has to be perfect, you know, that's just a different failure mode if you try to make perfect decisions, but every decision needs to be made promptly. And as a scientist, I could always make more data in order to make a better decision, but as a lab manager, I would often only have maybe 40 or 50% of the data I wanted, and a decision had to be made. And getting comfortable making decisions in the face of uncertainty is really hard.   Michael Hingson ** 46:29 So certainly, being a lab manager or Well, dealing with managers in the way we're talking about it here, has to be very stressful. How do you how do you cope with the stress?   Scott Hanton ** 46:42 So I think ways to cope with the stress successfully is, first of all, you've got to take care of yourself. You know, we've all flown on airplanes, and what is the safety person in the aisle or on the video? Do oxygen masks will fall from the ceiling, and what do we do with them? We put them on before we help somebody else, right? We all know that. But in the workplace, especially as a manager, it's hard to remember that as we care for our team and try and take care of our team, there might not be enough time or energy or capacity left to take care of ourselves, but if we don't fill that gas tank every day doing something, then we can't help our team. And so one way to deal with the stress is to make sure that you take care of yourself. So   Michael Hingson ** 47:28 what do you do? How do you deal with that? So   Scott Hanton ** 47:31 for me, ways that I can reinvigorate is one. I like being outside and get my hands dirty. So I'm not really a gardener, but I call myself a yard dinner. So I grow grass and I grow flowers, and I trim trees, and I want to go outside, and I want to see immediate return on my effort, and I want it to be better than when I started. And it's good if I have to clean from under my fingernails when I'm doing it. Another thing I like to do is I play all kinds of games I'm happy to play, sorry, with little kids, or I'll play complicated strategy games with people who want to sit at a table for three or four hours at a time. Yeah? And that allows my brain to spin and to work but on something completely different. Yeah. And another thing that's been important for me, especially when I was a lab manager is to be involved in youth coaching, so I coached kids soccer and basketball and baseball teams, and it's just beautiful to be out there on a field with a ball, with kids. And you know, the worries of the world just aren't there. The kids don't know anything about them. And it's fun to work with the ones who are really good, but it's equally fun to work with the ones who have never seen the ball before, and to help them do even the most basic things. And that kind of giving back and paying it forward, that sort of stuff fills my tank.   Michael Hingson ** 48:51 Yeah, I empathize a lot with with that. For me, I like to read. I've never been much of a gardener, but I also collect, as I mentioned before, old radio shows, and I do that because I'm fascinated by the history and all the things I learned from what people did in the 2030s, 40s and 50s, being on radio, much Less getting the opportunity to learn about the technical aspects of how they did it, because today it's so different in terms of how one edits, how one processes and deals with sounds and so on, but it's but it's fun to do something just totally different than way maybe what your normal Job would be, and and I do love to interact with with people. I love to play games, too. I don't get to do nearly as much of it as I'd like, but playing games is, is a lot of fun,   Scott Hanton ** 49:52 and I agree, and it it's fun, it's diverting, it's it helps me get into a flow so that I'm focused on. Me on one thing, and I have no idea how much time has gone by, and I don't really care. You know, people who play games with me might question this. I don't really care if I win or lose. Certainly I want to win, but it's more important to me that I play well, and if somebody plays better, good for   Michael Hingson ** 50:14 them, great. You'll learn from it. Exactly. Do you play   Scott Hanton ** 50:18 chess? I have played chess. I've played a lot of chess. What I've learned with chess is that I'm not an excellent I'm a good player, but not an excellent player. And when I run into excellent players, they will beat me without even breaking a sweat.   Michael Hingson ** 50:34 And again, in theory, you learn something from that.   Scott Hanton ** 50:37 What I found is that I don't really want to work that hard and yeah. And so by adding an element of chance or probability to the game, the people who focus on chess, where there are known answers and known situations, they get thrown off by the uncertainty of the of the flip the card or roll the dice. And my brain loves that uncertainty, so I tend to thrive. Maybe it's from my time in the lab with elements of uncertainty, where the chess players wilt under elements of uncertainty, and it's again, it's back to our strengths, right? That's something that I'm good at, so I'm gonna go do it. I've   Michael Hingson ** 51:20 always loved Trivial Pursuit. That's always been a fun game that I enjoy playing. I   Scott Hanton ** 51:25 do love Trivial Pursuit. I watch Jeopardy regularly. A funny story, when we moved into our new house in Pennsylvania, it was a great neighborhood. Loved the neighbors there. When we first moved in, they invited my wife and I to a game night. Excellent. We love games. We're going to play Trivial Pursuit. Awesome like Trivial Pursuit. We're going to play as couples. Bad idea, right? Let's play boys against the girls, or, let's say, random draws. No, we're playing as couples. Okay, so we played as couples. Helen and I won every game by a large margin. We were never invited back for game night. Yeah, invited back for lots of other things, but not game night.   Michael Hingson ** 52:06 One of the things that, and I've talked about it with people on this podcast before, is that all too often, when somebody reads a question from a trivial pursuit card, an answer pops in your head, then you went, Oh, that was too easy. That can't be the right answer. So you think about it, and you answer with something else, but invariably, that first answer was always the correct answer.   Scott Hanton ** 52:32 Yes, I'm I have learned to trust my intuition. Yeah. I learned, as a research scientist, that especially in talking to some of my peers, who are very dogmatic, very step by step scientists. And they lay out the 20 steps to that they felt would be successful. And they would do one at a time, one through 20. And that made them happy for me, I do one and two, and then I'd predict where that data led me, and I do experiment number seven, and if it worked, I'm off to eight. And so I they would do what, one step at a time, one to 20, and I'd sort of do 127, 1420, yeah. And that I learned that that intuition was powerful and valuable, and I've learned to trust it. And in my lab career, it served me really well. But also as a manager, it has served me well to trust my intuition, and at least to listen to it. And if I need to analyze it, I can do that, but I'm going to listen to it,   Michael Hingson ** 53:31 and that's the important thing, because invariably, it's going to give you useful information, and it may be telling you not what to do, but still trusting it and listening to it is so important, I've found that a lot over the years,   Scott Hanton ** 53:47 Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called Blink, where he talks about the power of the subconscious, and his claim is that the subconscious is 100,000 times smarter than our conscious brain, and I think when we are trusting our intuition, we're tapping into that super computer that's in our skulls. If you want to learn more, read blank. It's a great story.   Michael Hingson ** 54:10 I hear you. I agree. How can people learn to be better leaders and managers?   Scott Hanton ** 54:18 So I think it's there's really three normal ways that people do this. One is the power of experiment, right? And I did plenty of that, and I made tons of errors. It's painful. It's irritating, trial and error, but I used to tell people at Intertech that I was the general manager because I'd made the most mistakes, which gave me the most opportunity to learn. It was also partly because a lot of my peers wanted nothing to do with the job. You know, they wanted to be scientists. Another way is we, we get coached and mentored by people around us, and that is awesome if you have good supervisors, and it's tragic if you have bad supervisors, because you don't know any better and you take for granted. That the way it's been done is the way it needs to be done, and that prevents us from being generative leaders and questioning the status quo. So there's problems there, too. And I had both good and bad supervisors during my career. I had some awful, toxic human beings who were my supervisors, who did damage to me, and then I had some brilliant, caring, empathetic people who raised me up and helped me become the leader that I am today. So it's a bit of a crap shoot. The third way is go out and learn it from somebody who's done it right, and that's why we generated the lab manager Academy to try to codify all the mistakes I made and what are the learnings from them? And when I'm talking with learners who are in the program, it's we have a huge positive result feedback on our courses. And what I talk to people about who take our courses is I'm glad you appreciate what we've put together here. That makes me feel good. I'm glad it's helping you. But when these are my mistakes and the answers to my mistakes, when you make mistakes, you need to in the future, go make some courses and teach people what the lessons were from your mistakes and pay it forward. Yeah. So I recommend getting some training.   Michael Hingson ** 56:17 What's the difference between management and leadership?   Scott Hanton ** 56:21 I particularly love a quote from Peter Drucker. So Peter Drucker was a professor in California. You may have heard of him before.   Michael Hingson ** 56:29 I have. I never had the opportunity to meet him, but I read.   Scott Hanton ** 56:34 I didn't either material. I've read his books, and I think he is an insightful human being, yes. So the quote goes like this, management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things. So as a technical manager, there's a bunch of things we have to get right. We have to get safety right. We have to get quality right. There's an accuracy and precision that we need to get right for our outcomes and our results. Those are management tasks, but leadership is about doing the right things. And the interesting thing about that definition is it doesn't require a title or a role or any level of authority. So anyone can be a leader if you're consistently doing the right things, you are exhibiting leadership, and that could be from the person sweeping the floors or the person approving the budget, or anyone in between.   Michael Hingson ** 57:33 Yeah, I've heard that quote from him before, and absolutely agree with it. It makes a whole lot of sense.   Scott Hanton ** 57:41 Other definitions that I've seen trying to distinguish management and leadership tend to use the words manage and lead, and I don't like definitions that include the words that they're trying to define. They become circular at some level. This one, I think, is clear about it, what its intention is, and for me, it has worked through my career, and so the separation is valuable. I have authority. I'm the manager. I have accountability to get some stuff right, but anyone can lead, and everyone can lead, and the organization works so much better when it's full of leaders   Michael Hingson ** 58:21 and leaders who are willing to recognize when they bring something to the table, or if someone else can add value in ways that they can't, to be willing to let the other individual take the leadership position for a while.   Scott Hanton ** 58:40 Absolutely, and you know that really comes down to building an environment and a culture that's supportive. And so Amy Edmondson has written extensively on the importance of psychological safety, and that psychological safety hinges on what you just said, right? If the guy who sweeps the floor has an observation about the organization. Do they feel safe to go tell the person in charge that this observation, and if they feel safe, and if that leader is sufficiently vulnerable and humble to listen with curiosity about that observation, then everybody benefits, yeah, and the more safe everyone feels. We think about emotion. Emotional safety is they anyone can bring their best self to work, and psychological safety is they can contribute their ideas and observations with no threat of retaliation, then we have an environment where we're going to get the best out of everybody, yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 59:46 which is the way it it really ought to be. And all too often we don't necessarily see it, but that is the way it ought   Scott Hanton ** 59:53 to be. Too many people are worried about credit, or, I don't know, worried about things that I don't see. Yeah, and they waste human potential, right? They they don't open their doors to hire anybody. They they judge people based on what they look like instead of who they are, or they box people in into roles, and don't let them flourish and Excel. And whenever you're doing those kinds of things, you're wasting human potential. And businesses, science and business are too hard to waste human potential. We need to take advantage of everything that people are willing to give. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 1:00:33 we've been doing this for quite a while already today. So I'm going to ask as a kind of a last question, what, what advice do you want to leave for people to think about going forward in their lives and in their careers?   Scott Hanton ** 1:00:48 So I was participating in a LinkedIn chat today where a professor was asking the question, what sort of advice would you wish you got when you were 21 Okay, so it was an interesting thread, and there was one contributor to the thread who said something I thought was particularly valuable. And she said, attitude matters. Attitude matters. We can't control what happens to us, but we can control how we deal with it and how we respond, right? And so I think if we can hold our attitude as our accountability, and we can direct our strengths and our talents to applying them against the challenges that the business or the science or the lab or the community faces, and we can go in with some positive attitude and positive desire for for change and improvement, and we can be vulnerable and humble enough to accept other people's ideas and to interact through discussion and healthy debate. Then everything's better. I also like Kelleher his quote he was the co founder of Southwest Airlines, and he said, when you're hiring, hire for attitude, train for skill. Attitude is so important. So I think, understand your attitude. Bring the attitude you want, the attitude you value, the attitude that's that's parallel to your core values. And then communicate to others about their attitude and how it's working or not working for them.   Michael Hingson ** 1:02:31 And hopefully, if they have a positive or good enough attitude, they will take that into consideration and grow because of it absolutely   Scott Hanton ** 1:02:41 gives everybody the chance to be the best they can be.   Michael Hingson ** 1:02:47 Well, Scott, this has been wonderful. If people want to reach out to you, how can they do that?   Scott Hanton ** 1:02:51 So LinkedIn is great. I've provided Michael my LinkedIn connection. So I would love to have people connect to me on LinkedIn or email. S Hanson at lab manager.com love to have interactions with the folks out there.   Michael Hingson ** 1:03:08 Well, I want to thank you for spending so much time. We'll have to do more of this.   Scott Hanton ** 1:03:13 Michael, I really enjoyed it. This was a fun conversation. It was stimulating. You asked good questio

Art Bell - Ray Kurzweil - Life Extension

As AI infiltrates every aspect of our lives, who are some of the people behind this huge inflection point? In this special three-part series, you'll hear from the people predicting and shaping our tech future. Host Manoush Zomorodi reports on the latest and revisits her favorite conversations with the minds crafting the digital world we live in today: what they've gotten right — and wrong — and where they think we're headed next. Part 1 features futurist Ray Kurzweil and counterculture icon Stewart Brand.TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at plus.npr.org/ted.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is a preview — for the full episode, subscribe: https://newmodels.io https://patreon.com/newmodels https://newmodels.substack.com Our guest is American media theorist Douglas Rushkoff. He is the author of such seminal books on digital culture and networked communication as Cyberia (1994), Media Virus (1995), and Coercion (1999); and numerous further titles including, Program or Be Programmed (2010/2025) and Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires (2022). He is also the host of Team Human and a professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics as CUNY/Queens. On this episode, Doug speaks with us about the evolution (and devolution) of digital culture across web 1, 2, 3, and beyond via a synthesis of media theory, psychedelic thinking, and practical wisdom for navigating our contemporary networks. Names cited: Adam Curtis, Alex Garland, Allan Kaprow, Amazon, Art Bell, AT&T, Bernie Madoff, CNN, Cyberia, CVS, Dan Rather, Daniel Dennett, David Bowie, David Hershkovitz, David Lynch, Donna Haraway, Douglas Rushkoff, Elon Musk, Emmanuel Levinas, Francis Bacon, Genesis P-Orridge, Jake Tapper, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jesse Armstrong, Joe Rogan, John Brockman, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Chaikin, Kamala Harris, Lauren Sanchez, Louis Rossetto, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Madonna, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Buber, Martin Heidegger, Media Virus, Michael Jackson, Milton Friedman, Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf, Neil Simon, New Models, New York Times, Norbert Wiener, Orit Halpern, Paper Magazine, Peter Thiel, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Present Shock, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Dawkins, Robert Anton Wilson, Ross Douthat, Skinny Puppy, Spinoza, Star Trek, Team Human, Temple of Psychic Youth, The Long Boom, The Process Church, The Simpsons, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Walter Benjamin, William S. Burroughs, Wired Magazine

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.comThe futures of the past have curdled into the nightmares of the present. The richest and most powerful people the world has ever known want to colonize mars, live forever, and digitize human consciousness. To make these technological miracles come to pass, they say, will require people to dramatically change the way they live and work. Will it be worth it? Does science even say it's possible?On this Angry Planet, astrophysicist and author Adam Becker joins us to explain all the problems with Silicon Valley's dreams of the future. It's not a short list. Much of the tech, and even the physics, don't work the way techno-utopians say it does. Some of the people hawking robot slaves and immortality are chasing the impossible for tragic personal reasons. Others are just trying to sell you something. It's all the subject of Becker's new book: More Everything Forever.ShareFranics Fukuyama and the end of everything“Death is the ultimate limit, the ultimate loss of control.”Moore's law, the singularity, and Ray Kurzweil's fatherThe Face on Mars and large language modelsElizas all the way downThe false binaries of the tech bro futureSilicon Valley's lost boys“Death is avoidable and taxation is theft.”Stasis for me but not for thee“Mars sucks”Against Life Extension by Francis FukuyamaMore Everything Forever on BookshopMore Everything Forever on AmazonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Is America 2025 about to become a rerun of a prophetic box office dud? Even George Carlin's narration could rescue the comedy catastrophe, Americathon, from its own bankruptcy.  Will the Trump administration plan to “put our [natural] assets to work” be any better?The financial system's on the brink—gold and Bitcoin clash as commercial real estate crumbles, DoorDash hawks subprime burger loans, and Wall Street plots to sell off America's soul to dodge a $37 trillion debt bomb. Trump's flirting with treason, eyeing a British Commonwealth reunion just in time for 1776's 250th bashAI's storming in, slashing 70% of white-collar jobs, with Swedish robot dogs and Nvidia's humanoid army set to rule by 2030, watching your every move in a dystopian nightmareTed Kaczynski's ghost is cackling—his pre-internet prophecies of a jobless, AI-choked world are hitting hard, with even tech gurus and FBI agents whispering, “Uncle Ted was right!”An app called Worldly zaps Babel's curse, sparking “new Pentecost” hypeUkraine's luring kids to war with cheeseburger bonuses while Trump pumps a $20 billion fighter jet as swarms of cheap AI drones win the real battles.Disney's Snow White flops as a socialist “girl boss” mess, mirroring a society celebrating witches and gender picks for newborns.From subprime rib scams to cultural rot, it's a full-on reckoning—grab your popcorn, because this collapse is blockbuster-sized2:30The Great Financial Reckoning: Gold, Bitcoin, and the Collapse of Everything You Know!The world of money as we know it is teetering on the edge of a seismic upheaval! The whispers are growing louder: the monetary system is primed for a radical restructuring: commercial real estate crumbling under a tsunami of expiring loans, DoorDash peddling subprime hamburger microloans (yes, you read that right!), Doug Burgum, and Wall Street sharks eyeing a fire sale of America's vast assets to keep the ship afloat. It's a wild, desperate gambit that smells suspiciously like bankruptcy dressed up as innovation! 1:00:41Trump's Royal Betrayal: Surrendering America to King Charles' Commonwealth Conspiracy!Just in time for the 250th anniversary of 1776, Trump like the idea of uniting with the British Commonwealth.  Trump's fans call it trolling, but critics scream treason as he flirts with making America Great Britain again.  Is it because NATO and Five Eyes are working out so well for Americans?Why? And what would be the implications for trade, sovereignty, etc.? 1:18:47 Thank you to supporters and emails about AI Big Brother driver monitoring of ambulances, buses, etc and “Just War” 1:38:58AI's Silent Invasion: Your Job, Your Life, and Your Robot “Agent” Overlords Are ComingGet ready for a spine-chilling wake-up call: Artificial Intelligence isn't just knocking on the door—it's kicking it down and taking over everything! From programmers, to lawyers, to doctors, AI's relentless march is set to obliterate 70% of white-collar jobs. Meanwhile, Swedish robot dogs powered by AI “agents” are learning to hunt goals and Nvidia's CEO says humanoid robots roaming the streets are less than five years away and ready to replace factory workers for a cool $100K a year. it's a dystopian nightmare barreling toward 2030, where jobs vanish, robots rule, and the elite watch and analyze your every move 1:55:45Are You TedPilled? Ted Kaczynski's Terrifying Tech Apocalypse Is HereNow even FBI agents and tech gurus like Ray Kurzweil are nodding, “Uncle Ted was onto something!” His chilling words, scribbled long before the internet took over, predict a world where jobs vanish, AI watches our every twitch, and the masses become “superfluous”—and guess what? It's happening right now.  So what DID he predict?  Is “Doomerism” the appropriate response? 2:11:30AI's Tower of Babel: Is a Fake Pentecost “Miracle” Something We Should Embrace?An AI app called—get this—Worldly — isn't just a translation tool; it's a high-tech reversal of the Tower of Babel's curse, uniting 60 languages in a flash.  Some hail it as a “new Pentecost” or a “miracle”.  How SHOULD we view it? 2:18:29Chee-Burgers to Die For: How Many Cheeseburgers Would It Take for YOU to Enlist in Zelensky's Futile War?     Get ready for a jaw-dropping plunge into absurdity that'll make your stomach churn! Ukraine's desperate military is dangling a bonus broken down into McDonald's cheeseburgers—to trick 18-to-24-year-olds into the crosshairs of the frontline. As the USA continues to finance the war on a credit card, DoorDash is offering “micro loans” to defer payment of your cheeseburger. Bundle that risky fast food credit into a “subprime prime rib” package, and poof—risk vanishes, just like the 2008 mortgage scam     And, Trump announces a $20 BILLION fighter, doubling down on expensive, complex, products of failing military contractor when wars will be won with asymmetrical, low cost AI swarms 2:33:39 Thank you to Zelle supporters 2:34:54Disney's Snow Job: Woke Disaster Unleashes Evil's ReignRe-invented as a “girl boss”, this socialist “disjointed pile of clichés,” is just part of what's wrong with Hollywood and society.  New Jersey hospitals push parents to pick their newborns' gender and witches revel in a cultural comeback, and the movies have gone full villain-worship, a stark warning of a culture drowning in spiritual rotIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @DavidKnightShow@protonmail.comCash App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTFor 10% off supplements and books, go to RNCstore.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

Are we on the brink of merging with machines? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O'Reilly dive into the mysteries of consciousness versus intelligence, panpsychism, and AI with neuroscientist and author Anil Seth.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here:https://startalkmedia.com/show/is-consciousness-everywhere-with-anil-seth/Thanks to our Patrons James Boothe, Vicken Serpakian, John Webb, Doctor Pants, Greg Gralenski, Lost_AI, Bob Lester, kim christensen, Micheal Gannon, Aaron Rosenberg, Shai Kr, Kyle Bullock, JyinxTV, James Myers, victor recabarren, David Pederson, Ted McSheehy, Terena, Tracy Sheckells, Groovemaster24, Sheedrealmusic, David Amicucci, Brian Ridge, M Ranger, Peter Ackerman, Mars Colony AI, DonAlan, Harry Sørensen, G Anthony, Muhammad Umer, and Joshua MacDonald for supporting us this week. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.