Keep Going

This week on Keep Going, I sat down with Karl Alomar, Managing Partner at M13, and former COO of DigitalOcean.Carl’s career, when you say it fast, sounds like a highlight reel. He came to the US from England with an engineering background, started his first company in California in the late 90s, sold it in 2000, got an MBA at Columbia, built a global fintech business to real revenue and exited in 2010, then joined DigitalOcean and helped take it from early product days to IPO. Now he invests at M13.I pushed him on the part people skip, the moment where it almost breaks.He told a story from his first company that still makes my stomach drop. They were raising a big round for the time, about $20 million. Closing day. Fire alarm. Everyone in the parking lot. He gets a call on a brick of a phone. The lead investor tells him the bottom just fell out, they cannot close, they do not know if they ever will. That is not a small problem. That is the whole floor giving way.Carl had to make choices fast. Cut the team in half. Slash spend. Decide whether to try to patch the round together without a lead, which is close to impossible when the mood turns. He had been approached by potential buyers earlier, and in a hot market those talks feel optional, almost annoying. In a cold market, those talks are the only door that still opens. He took the door. In about two months they got an exit. Not the dream outcome, but a real outcome. People got returns, everyone lived to fight again.What stuck with him was not the deal mechanics. It was the loneliness.He said he had no deep bench. No real board support, no real advisor bench, no system around him when the air went out of the room. He was young, the pressure was on him, and he felt like an island. His lesson was blunt. Never go into battle without an army. In plain terms, build a support network before you need it. Investors, board members, mentors, peers, people who can tell you the truth, and keep you steady enough to make good calls.I asked him what that looks like in real life. He was clear that it is not some magic fix. For him it is not a yogi. It is the people you choose to take money from, the board you build, the mentors you keep close, the peers you can call when you are scared and tired and tempted to lie to yourself. He also noted that the culture has changed. Coaching is normal now. Mental health is talked about more openly. In the late 90s, money was just money, and nobody asked what came with it.Then we moved into the question sitting in the room with all of us right now. AI. Are we headed for another crash, another 2000.Carl pushed back on the timing in a way I found useful. He thinks we are closer to 1996 or 1997 than 2000. Early. The “killer” product is not fully settled. He used the browser era as a frame. People thought browsing was the point, but search was the point, and Google won by solving that. His take is that AI still has not found its final shape, not in a way that locks the category down. We have chat tools and model access, but the big lasting system, the one that makes the next giants, is still coming into view.He also pointed out something practical that founders feel every day. Building in AI is still expensive and hard. The tools and the cost curve have not flattened the way cloud did for web builders. If cloud made it cheap to ship software, what makes it cheap to ship AI. Better access to compute, better tools around data and GPUs, better infra. He is excited about the boring part, the picks and shovels that let more people build.I asked the other side of it, the part people whisper about. If you are a regular worker and a wave is coming, what do you do. Carl did not pretend he could map the next 20 years. But he did say the labor market shifts, it does not just vanish. Some work gets automated, other work shows up, and the shift is not overnight. He brought up the growth of gig work, the rise of people building independent lives outside big firms, and the simple fact that lots more people now want to build things than they did decades ago. He sees that trend getting stronger as tools get better.He is not an AI cynic. He thinks cynicism is a way to lose twice, first by missing what is real, then by refusing to adapt. He is optimistic, but he keeps a realist’s eye on the losers that come with any big wave.As we wrapped, I asked what he looks for when he sees the fiftieth “Fitbit for dogs.” He laughed, because he has seen it. His answer was old school. He starts with the founder. Can he work with this person for years. Do they have vision, and can they explain it. Can they hire. Can they raise. Can they steer when the first plan fails. He brought up Slack’s origin story, a good reminder that a strong founder can turn a weak start into a real company.That is the episode in a line. Big waves come, and they always feel obvious after. In the moment, they are confusing, loud, and full of bad copies. The way through is still the same. Keep your head. Build your people around you. Make choices you can defend in the morning. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

Some talks stick under your skin. This one did.On this week’s Keep Going I sat down with Mechele Dickerson, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. Her new book is called “The Middle Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility in the American Dream.” It comes out in January 2026.I picked up the pitch because I have the same nagging feeling everyone else has. The middle class we grew up hearing about feels thin now. Like an old photograph in a cracked frame.Mechele has spent more than a decade trying to write this book. That part alone makes her a good guest for a show about success and failure.She started years ago with a book on homeownership. While she worked on that, she kept seeing a larger pattern. Families were not just locked out of houses. They were locked out of everything we used to connect with a stable life. She saw people who made a decent wage yet could not do basic “middle class” things without strain.So she built a bigger project. She sold the first version of the book to a press. The idea was clear. It is harder than ever for lower and middle income people to become and stay middle class. It is even harder if you are not white. Then the world started shifting under her feet.The 2016 election hit. Commentators suddenly cared about “middle class anger” and “anxiety.” She did not buy the story as it was told, but she knew she had to respond to it. So she rewrote the book to fit that moment.Then 2020 arrived. A pandemic tore through the same families she had been studying. You cannot write about money, housing, and work in this country and ignore those years. She rewrote again. That second rewrite blew up. Reviewers tore it apart. The publisher walked away. A decade of work, gone in one email.This is the point where many people quietly give up. Mechele did something different. She took the hit, walked away for a season, enjoyed Thanksgiving and Christmas, then came back and started from page one. A third draft. New press. New title. Same core idea.That alone is a lesson. Sometimes the work is right and the timing is wrong. Sometimes you are right and the gatekeeper is wrong. You rest. You come back. You keep going.The rest of the talk dug into what “middle class” even means. Mechele uses a simple income band, roughly seventy five to one hundred thirty thousand dollars a year. She picked it for a practical reason. It is the range many universities use when they hand out tuition breaks to families they see as “middle income.” It also adjusts over time, which matters.She is quick to note that income does not land the same in each place. That money looks one way in Abilene, Texas, and another in Austin. Still, the markers are familiar. A home you can afford. A job with health care and some sort of retirement plan. The ability to send your kids to college without wrecking your own future. Maybe a bit put aside for shocks.Her bluntest point is simple. We did not arrive here by magic. The old middle class was built by policy. The GI Bill sent people like my dad to college. New mortgage rules turned owning a house from a rich person’s trick into something workers could reach. Employers built health and pension plans when they could not raise wages during the war.We treat those pieces as background now. They are not. They were choices. They could be made again in new forms.Instead, college costs have climbed far faster than inflation since the eighties. Need blind admission is fading. “Merit” scholarships tilt money toward kids from richer families who look good on paper. Employers use a bachelor’s degree as a filter, so a diploma has become a ticket to even knock on the door.On housing, the ladder keeps moving up. The average age for first time homebuyers is rising. People float the idea of fifty year mortgages, which Mechele, quite correctly, calls “rent” with different branding. If you buy at forty and pay for fifty years, do the math.She walked through how zoning locks people out. Large minimum lot sizes. Rules that make it hard to put up multifamily units. Homeowners’ associations that wrap it all in “protecting values” while making sure cheaper units never appear. At city level, at state level, we have built a system that slowly pushes normal families away from the places where opportunity sits.I pushed the conversation toward entrepreneurship, because the show often goes there. For a lot of kids, the fantasy now is that a startup will be their scratch off. You cannot count on a steady wage to get the markers. So you dream of building the next app, or site, or whatever, to leap straight over the grind.She agreed with the feeling, but brought it back to ground. Starting a business takes capital. Capital comes from family wealth, or from a house you can borrow against, or from a system that lends to people with no cushion. If your parents do not have money and you do not own a home, you are playing with thinner odds. That does not mean you should never try. It does mean we should be honest about the risk.Near the end I told a story about my own family. My grandparents in Ohio, steel town on the edge of West Virginia. They had a house. They had food on the table. My cousins had pools, big televisions, a couple of cars in the drive. All on a worker’s paycheck or a small business. Nothing lavish. Just steady.Standing in modern Chicago or New York, you do not feel that world anymore. The core feels like a stage set for the very rich. Everyone else services it from the outside.So I asked the question out loud. Can we go back. Or is that period gone for good.Her answer was measured. We cannot rewind time. But we can recognize that the old middle class was a choice. It came from rules and programs that treated stability as a public goal. We can make new choices. Tighter rules around predatory loans. Better ways to fund college so a degree is not a lifetime chain. Zoning that lets builders put up real housing, not just luxury towers and big lots.None of this is easy. None of it fits on a bumper sticker. It is easier to bark about culture than to rework tax codes or housing law. That is why very little changes. But the path is not mysterious. We have done it before.As we wrapped, she circled back to why she kept going with the book. She is not writing for one side. She wants people in both parties to see that a strong middle class is not just a feel good phrase. It is the base of a stable country. It is who buys the toaster ovens, the cars, the fridges. It is who keeps the lights on in the real economy.For me, this conversation lit up a vague anger I have carried since walking those polished streets in big cities. The feeling that something is off, that the store window that used to be for everyone is now for a tiny slice at the top. Mechele’s work gives that feeling names and numbers and a path forward.Her book is “The Middle Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility in the American Dream.” It lands in January 2026. When it does, I think it will give a lot of people language for what they see and cannot quite explain.In the meantime, the lesson is simple and personal. If she can drag a book through three full rewrites, one public rejection, and a changing world, the rest of us can take one more swing at whatever hard thing is sitting on our desk. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

Most people meet plant cell culture in the grocery store without knowing it. You see it in the perfect row of blueberries, the identical bananas, the white orchids that look the same every single year. You do not see the lab bench and the flask behind them.On The Innovators, I talked with Yoni Kalin, CEO of Plant Cell Technology, about the quiet infrastructure under all of that. His company has been working in plant tissue culture since 1993. What started as a small family business selling “pet plants” in jars has grown into a Utah based factory, a catalog of more than 500 products, and a bridge between plants, animal cells, fungi, and the people who work with them.At the core, Plant Cell Technology makes the media and tools that keep cells alive and dividing. In the plant world that means the gel or liquid that feeds tiny cuttings, the nutrients that turn one node into a full clone. In the animal world that means the formulas that keep mammalian cells healthy in dishes and flasks. You can think of them as the food and basic kit that every lab needs before any vaccine or seedling can exist.For the first thirty years they stayed in the plant lane. Last year they bought a manufacturing facility and stepped into mammalian cell culture. Now they blend media for human, animal, and insect cells as well. That move puts them inside the engine room of pharma and biotech, where the same cell lines are used for decades to test drugs and make biologic medicines.Yoni gave a simple example. CHO cells, Chinese hamster ovary cells, have been in use since the middle of the last century. The original cells came from one animal. That line has been split and expanded for more than eighty years. Those cells are a standard test bed. If you want to grow a protein drug or check how something behaves, you feed those cells and watch. That kind of work used to mean a lot of live animal testing. The more you can do in culture, the less you have to do in a whole animal.Plant cell culture is less visible but just as important. Instead of planting a seed and accepting whatever mix of traits comes back, growers take a cutting from a known plant, usually a meristem or small node, and regrow it in sterile media. The result is an exact clone of the parent. Every plant you make that way has the same genetics and the same performance.If you are a berry grower, that consistency matters. It is the reason the box of blueberries you pick up in January tastes like the one you bought in July. If you are a greenhouse operator selling fancy houseplants, it means you can produce a thousand copies of the one pink variegated plant everyone wants instead of hoping more seeds turn out the same way. In orchards, forests, and replanting projects, it means you can fill a hillside with trees that all have the traits you need for that climate.It is also the reason you can walk into a store like Trader Joe’s or Home Depot and see the same orchid color and shape every year. Orchid seeds are rough to work with. Cloning them in tissue culture lets growers keep exact copies of the best lines in circulation.Plant Cell Technology sits in that supply chain as a “picks and shovels” vendor, to borrow Yoni’s phrase. They do not sell the fruit or the orchids. They sell the media, the bioreactors, the lab gear, and the training that lets growers and researchers do the work.That education piece is important and it is where things get interesting outside the pure lab. Until a few years ago, if you wanted to learn plant tissue culture, you went to a university or a big corporate lab. You paid tuition or you got hired. Everyone else was on the outside.Around 2020, while people were learning to bake sourdough and dance on short videos, Plant Cell Technology started posting long form instructional content. They now have hundreds of free videos that cover the basics, from aseptic technique to plant physiology to step by step protocols for setting up a small lab. On top of that they run in person and online master classes that focus on practical scale, not just textbook purity. Their goal is to teach you how to produce ten million banana plants, not just how to pass a midterm.That effort has pulled in a new crowd, hobbyists and small entrepreneurs who want to clone rare plants at home. Anyone who has wandered into a trendy plant shop and seen a single cutting selling for forty or fifty dollars knows the appeal. With basic gear, a clean space, and the right media, you can take a small piece of that plant and grow hundreds of copies. That can feed a side business or just fill your home with green.The same idea applies to fungi. Mycology is booming, and tissue culture is a good way to preserve and expand mycelium strains. It is easier in some ways, since many fungal media formulas are simple, often just agar and sugar. Yoni sees that as a gateway for people who might later move into more complex plant or mammalian work.Behind the scenes, the company is pushing on automation. Tissue culture has been labor heavy for decades. A tech sits at a clean bench, cuts, transfers, seals jars, and repeats. That is slow and expensive.Plant Cell Technology’s answer is a low cost bioreactor they call the BioCoupler, paired with an automated system called BioTilt. Instead of growing plantlets on gel in jars, they suspend plant cells or tiny explants in liquid and cycle them through soaking and draining. Soak, let them breathe, soak again. That simple rhythm gives the plant material full contact with nutrients, then air, which speeds up growth. Yoni says they see multiplication rates many times higher than on static gel media.The cost drops too. Gel agents like agar and gellan gum are not cheap. A single kilogram can run close to a couple hundred dollars. A liquid system needs less of that. The BioTilt handles timing and immersion automatically. Sensors and software can watch the process, adjust schedules, and log data in a way a human tech with a clipboard cannot match.The vision is clear. Larger labs and commercial houses will bring in robotics that can cut and move plant material. Bioreactors will handle the growth phase. AI systems will watch sensors, track contamination, and refine conditions. That kind of setup already exists at the very high end. Yoni wants to drag it into the middle of the market and make it less exotic.When I asked him if this was the future of agriculture, he pushed back a bit. This is the present, he said. Seeds are not going away. Fields and barns are not going away. What he sees coming is a stack. At the bottom, a tissue culture lab where farmers keep their own genetics and do their own breeding. Above that, nursery space. Above that, growing and harvest.Vertical farming has been a buzzword for a while. Tissue culture gives it teeth. You can stack genetics in a small lab that would need vast acreage outside. You can build local food systems that rely less on long chains of seed companies and middlemen. You can give farmers some control over the varieties they plant, instead of locking them into sterile seed contracts that keep them dependent.Plant Cell Technology has moved a long way from a single “pet plant” in a jar. Under Yoni’s leadership, the company has turned into a small ecosystem, part manufacturer, part educator, part guide into a field that is usually hidden behind white coats and controlled access doors.If you are a researcher who needs media, a grower who wants to scale, or a curious person who just wants to clone a favorite houseplant instead of buying three more, their site at plantcelltechnology.com is a place to start. The tools that shape our food and forests are no longer reserved for the biggest labs. They are slowly moving into reach, one flask at a time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I am writing this with an Audigo mic sitting next to a hulking broadcast preamp on my desk. The old rig is a nest of cables and knobs. The Audigo is a small square that looks like it fell out of the future and landed in my hand. That contrast is the whole story.On this episode of Keep Going I talked with Armen Nazarian, founder and CEO of Audigo. He is a drummer who took a long detour through engineering and Tesla before circling back to sound. His company makes a small wireless mic and app that lets musicians record real multitrack audio straight to their phones without feeling like they are engineering a studio every time they press record.If you grew up on tape decks and four tracks, the promise of the phone era was simple. Recording would get easier. Sharing would get easier. What Armen found when he came back to music was that a lot of the gear companies had not moved very far. The boxes looked nicer, the apps were shinier, but the basic problem was the same. If you were a musician and you wanted decent sound, you needed a pile of equipment and spare hours to set it up.At Tesla, his job was to sit in the middle of hardware and software and make them feel like one thing. He saw what happens when one team owns the whole stack. The car feels simple even when the system under it is anything but. That experience ruined him for lazy product work. When he picked up a drumstick again and tried to record, he could not stop thinking about the gap. We have supercomputers in our pockets and yet most people still sound like they are playing in the bottom of a well.So he did the mad thing. He walked away from a great job at one of the most famous companies on earth and started a tiny hardware company in 2020, which is about as bad as a calendar can get for that move. Chip shortages. Travel bans. Factories with shutdowns you could not predict. Parts with twelve week lead times suddenly slipping to sixty five.Most of us would have taken that as a sign from God to go back to work on electric cars.Instead, Armen and his small crew started building the first hundred units by hand. They would write code and design boards during the day, then sit and assemble devices at night. Solder, test, pack, repeat. They did not have the luxury of flying to Shenzhen and living on the factory floor. That meant they had to understand every part of their own build before they could trust anyone else with it.Hardware is hard in a very literal way. If a component changes, you cannot ship a patch. If a factory shuts down, your product line stops. Investors know this. When Armen started raising money, he was doing it at a time when everyone in venture still had the ghost of Juicero in their minds. Add to that the normal suspicion of solo founders and you have a nice little wall in front of you.His Tesla badge helped a bit. It told people he knew what a production line looked like and that he had lived through at least one intense product culture. It did not make money fall from the sky. He still had to convince people that a small box with some mics in it was worth taking seriously.Before he left Tesla he did something I respect a lot. He took a week off, told people he was going on an international trip, and stayed home. He had a short list of ideas. He gave each one a full day. He looked at cost, market, and his own stomach. Could he live with this idea for ten years. Could he wake up every day and care about it.Most people skip that part. They leave out of rage or boredom and then try to figure it out on the fly. He treated that week like a tiny private lab. No slides. No pitch deck. Just him, a notebook, and the question of where to spend the next decade of his life. Audigo is the one that would not let go.He also reframed the risk in a way I wish more people would. Around him, at Tesla, people were quitting to go to business school or grad school. They were about to drop a small house worth of money on an education and walk away from a salary for two years. He looked at that and thought, I could do the same thing and call it a startup. No salary, but no tuition either. Two years of hard learning that no case study could match.That is how you move from theory to action. You do not pretend the risk is small. You set it beside other risks you have already accepted and see it in scale.What I like most about Audigo is not some spec sheet. It is what it does to the slope between idea and first take. Most musicians are already drowning in gear. They have pedals, interfaces, cables, and mics that live in drawers and crates. Every extra step between them and the record button is a chance to give up and scroll instead.Armen built for two very different people. On one side there are signed artists who can fly to any studio they want. They use Audigo because it fits in a pocket and lets them grab song ideas, backstage runs, and live clips without hauling a rig. On the other side there are people in their seventies who have played their whole lives and never once recorded a proper track. For them, this is the first time their voice or guitar sounds like it does in the room.Those are very different use cases. The thread is the same. Less friction. Less shame over bad phone audio when you post. More chances to actually hear yourself and send that sound out.The company is not done of course. They are rolling out an Android app now and a web experience next, so people can log in from a browser, pull up projects, and share them. You can feel where this goes. A small piece of hardware and a cloud that holds your sketches, takes, and mixes, whether you are on a phone, a laptop, or in a van on tour.I asked if I should throw out my big Electro Voice setup and live on this thing alone. He laughed and gave the honest answer. Use it more. See where it fits. Tell us what breaks. The product today is tuned for music, not talk radio. Podcasting is on the horizon, not the core yet.That kind of answer is rare. Most founders will tell you their thing replaces everything you own and will also fix your marriage and your sleep. Armen is more careful. They picked a lane, musicians, and they are staying in it long enough to get the details right.So what does all this mean for you if you are stuck in a big company with an idea in your pocket.The first lesson is boring. Give your idea actual time. Not ten minutes between meetings. Take a real block of days. Work through the numbers and the story and your own limits. Some ideas are fun to talk about and horrible to live with.The second lesson is that “safety” is often just a story you tell yourself. The people you see going back to school are taking a huge financial swing. You just do not flinch because the path is familiar. Starting something of your own feels foolish, but the math is often not that different.The third is that the hardest years are the ones no one claps for. No audience sees you sitting in a room, hand building the first hundred units of anything, wondering if the next part shortage is going to kill you. That is the part of “keep going” that this show is really about. Staying with the work when the timing is bad, the market is cold, and your old job looks very warm and safe in the rearview mirror.Audigo will live or die on the same thing every creative tool lives or dies on. Does it actually help people make more work they care about. From what I have seen, it does. It turns social clips from a chore into a quick side effect of playing. It gives shy players a way to hear themselves without booking a studio. It gives pros a way to stay honest when the hotel room starts to feel like a cage.If you are holding an idea that keeps tapping you on the shoulder, take a page from Armen. Step back from the noise. Study it like an engineer. Feel it like a musician. Give it a week of real thought. Then, if it still will not leave you alone, accept that there is no perfect time, only the time you have right now, and keep going. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

My guest is Sudheesh Nair, co-founder and CEO of Tinyfish. He has done this before. Early at Nutanix through IPO. Then six years running ThoughtSpot. He left both without drama. Not because of ego or boredom. Because the rooms filled with the same talks about price and discount. Because he wanted to build again, from first principles, and be accountable as the one in the chair.Tinyfish is an AI shop by label, but the pitch is plain. Make the web act like a person with a browser, at scale, and do work that matters to a customer. Do not sell buzzwords. Sell outcomes. On their site the story is a small hotel in rural Japan, eight rooms, not wired into any fancy API. An agent signs in like a human, checks dates and room types, reads the price and availability, and updates Google Hotels so the listing shows live numbers, not “call for rate.” The hotel changes nothing. Google shows richer results. A traveler gets a real choice. That is the point. Not the model size. Not the paper count. A change you can see.We talked about leaving public companies. He said it straight. Loyalty is not a slogan. A company is a set of contracts, with investors, customers, and employees. You should fight for the mission while you are in the seat. You should also remember who picks you up when you fall. Family. We forget that when things go well. We dump on them when things go bad. If you want to build a place worth working at, draw clean lines, hold purpose and professionalism together, and be all in, until you are not.What drives him now is less shine, more fit. Call it Ikigai if you like. What you are good at. What pays. What the world needs. Cut the romance. Cut the cosplay. Be honest about your limits. Then pick the work where your strengths meet a real need, and grow the pie so others win with you.We also covered the noise around AI. Every site sings the same chorus. He refuses to sell that. The team tells a clear story instead. His co-founders make sense of that stance. Keith was a Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reporter, Pulitzer finalist on Hong Kong. Shu Hao is a deep browser thinker. One believes in lowering barriers to information. The other believes the browser can be a bridge, not a wall. Sudheesh comes from analytics and knows this truth, fresh data starts on the open web, but most stacks mangle it before it’s useful. So they send agents to do the reading, sort the signal, and return only what helps. Less plumbing. More proof.Under it all sits a worry I share. We moved from blue links to feeds to one answer in a chat box. Power pools at the top. If we let that stand, the best coffee or the best small hotel stays invisible, not for lack of quality, but for lack of API glue and ad spend. An outcome-first web is one answer. Do the task. Show the result. Lift the tiny fish, not only the whales.Hire for that mindset. He likes journalists for a reason. Curiosity. Hard questions. Pattern sense. In a field this young, certainty is a tell. The honest posture is study and ship.If you want to see the idea land, go to tinyfish.ai and look at the hotel case. Eight rooms, now visible. Simple, not easy. The kind of fix that bends the web a little closer to fair. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I recorded this episode in an old hoodie, unshaven, feeling more “survival mode” than “thriving.” Which is exactly why I wanted to talk to Jon Rosemberg.Jon is the co-founder of Anther and the CEO of Strongpoint Group. He also has a background in positive psychology and a new book coming out, A Guide to Thriving, from Wiley on November 25. On paper he is the kind of person my inner cynic wants to roll its eyes at. In reality, he is someone who has thought very hard about how to keep going when the world feels like it is sliding sideways.We started with a simple point. If you and I were living a hundred years ago, there is a good chance we would already be dead. No antibiotics. No clean water on demand. No modern surgery. No cheap food from the supermarket. By almost every hard metric, life expectancy, infant mortality, access to education, we are in a far better spot than our grandparents.Jon calls this a kind of golden age. I pushed back with a Matrix joke, because of course I did. But he is not naive about it. His argument is that we confuse the state of the world with the state of our feeds. We stare at screens that are tuned to keep us twitchy and outraged, and we start to believe that this is the full story.He gave a small, sharp example. If you buy all your clothes on Amazon and Amazon only shows you three types of shirts, you live in a world of three shirts. You feel like you are choosing, but someone else quietly narrowed the menu. That is what he means by a loss of agency. We are letting algorithms make the first cut on our options, then telling ourselves we are free.Agency is the core of his book. Not in the motivational poster sense. In a very specific way. Agency, the way he defines it, is the capacity to make an intentional choice, backed by a real belief that the choice matters, that it will have an effect on your life and the people around you.I asked him the question that keeps coming up on this show. What about the project manager who gets replaced by an AI agent. What about the media worker whose “email job” is now a prompt in a chatbot. Do you tell that person to open a bakery, move to the country, become a monk.He refused the easy answer. Instead he walked through a simple framework he uses, AIR, which stands for awareness, inquiry, and reframe.Awareness is the first step. When you get fired, the only thing you can see is the disaster in front of you. He used a Rubik’s Cube as a prop during our talk. When it is right up against your eye, all you see is one little red square. Awareness is the act of moving it away just enough to see that there is a whole cube there. More colors. More faces. More moves than you first thought.Inquiry is the second step. That is where you start to turn the cube. You test ideas. You ask what skills you really have, who is in your network, what resources you can use. You look for more than one path out of the mess. Not fantasies. Actual options.Reframe is the third step. It is not magic. It does not make the pain go away. It is the moment where you admit that your story is not “my life is over because I lost this job.” It becomes something closer to “this is a hard change, and here are three real things I can try next.” That shift sounds small on the page. In practice it is the difference between being frozen and taking a step.This is where AI enters the conversation in a serious way. We are in a very strange time. You can feel the temptation inside big companies. Fire the person making two hundred and fifty grand. Hire a vendor. Drop in an AI system. Call it innovation. Cash the savings.Jon does not pretend to have a script for the next five years. He compared AI to fire. It will be used for good things and for stupid, cruel things. But he pointed to one solid data point. Companies that treat employee well-being as a real priority tend to outperform the ones that do not. Markets are not kind, yet even in that cold space, looking after people seems to pay off.None of that solves the feeling a lot of us have right now. We are living longer. We have more calories, more streaming shows, more everything. And at the same time, depression and anxiety are everywhere. The basic needs are met, and yet we feel like we are coming apart.His answer there is not new, but it is backed by a lot of research. Social connection shifts almost every health outcome we care about. Live longer. Less heart disease. Lower risk of stroke. Better immune response. Lower odds of dementia. You could describe it as the closest thing we have to a real life “miracle drug” that is free.So what do you do with that if you are stuck in a small apartment in a big city, working a job you are scared to lose, scrolling yourself numb at night. You do not fix it in one sweep. You do not suddenly find a tribe by Tuesday. You start with one intentional move toward another human. A regular coffee with one friend. A club. A class. A weekly call with someone who is not part of your household. It sounds tiny. It is not.We also talked about small towns, where you see the same faces every day and still feel alone because everyone is on their phones. He kept returning to the same word. Choice. Not in a “you can do anything if you try” way. In a quieter way. You can choose to put the phone down for an hour and talk to someone. You can choose to ask for help. You can choose to listen.He brought up Viktor Frankl, who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning after surviving the camps. Frankl’s claim was stark. Even in terrible conditions, there was still one last human freedom, the ability to choose how to respond inwardly. Jon is careful here. Some people really do not have options, because of health, war, or poverty. But many of us have more room than we think, and we convince ourselves we have none.That is really the heart of this episode for me. Keep Going is a podcast about success and failure, but it is really about this thin strip between the two, the place where you decide to take one more step or not. Jon’s work is about widening that strip. Creating a bit more space between “everything is ruined” and “I have at least one move.”If you want to go deeper into his ideas, his book is called A Guide to Thriving. It is split into small sections so you can chew on one topic without committing to a big reading project.In the meantime, if today feels like survival mode, try AIR. Notice what is actually happening. Ask a few hard questions about your options. See if you can tell yourself a slightly different story about where you are and what comes next. It will not fix the world. It might help you keep going long enough to see the next door that opens. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

Most people never think about the battery until it dies. Charlie Welch has spent his whole career thinking about nothing else.On The Innovators, he walked me through what he is building at Proper Voltage. Before this, he was doing applied research in battery chemistry at Northrop, trying to get “interesting and exotic” chemistries into real military systems, from underwater gear to aircraft to special operations kits. The problem he kept hitting was not physics. It was integration.Every new battery team heard the same thing from the customer. “We’d love to use your tech, if you redesign it for our system.” Every big OEM said the opposite. “We’d love to use your battery, if you redesign your system for us.” No one wanted to move first. No one wanted to touch legacy hardware. That standoff kept better chemistries on the shelf instead of in the field.Proper Voltage is his attempt to cut through that. The company is not betting everything on one magic chemistry. Instead, they are building a kind of battery operating layer that sits between the cells and the product. They work with sodium ion, lithium titanate, niobium and other “odd” chemistries that each have their own strengths. Then they add a hardware and software block they call a voltage command unit. That unit makes voltage a programmable interface. One pack can now present itself as whatever the device expects, without the device designer having to rip up their boards or add twice as many cells.He gave a clear example. Standard lithium ion cells sit around 3.7 volts. Many sodium ion cells sit closer to 2.3. If you try to drop sodium into a system that expects lithium and do nothing else, you need almost twice as many cells in series. That means more size, more cost, more weight, and energy you do not actually need. With a programmable voltage layer, the system sees what it expects. The chemistry can change underneath without touching the rest of the stack. The product team gets to pick sodium for safety and life, not walk away because the nominal voltage is “wrong.”This matters a lot in defense and aerospace. There are standard formats like the 6T battery for vehicles or the soldier’s small tactical universal battery. There are missiles and aircraft that went through years of testing and certification. No one wants to open those designs just to squeeze in a new pack. Welch told me the only way that community moves is if the new unit is truly drop in. Same form factor, same pins, same expectations. If Proper Voltage can let new chemistries look and behave like the old packs from the outside, while giving better power and life on the inside, that is a real wedge.We also talked about the state of the art. Phone batteries have been roughly the same “spicy pocket brick” for a long time. The gains are slow. Roughly a few percent each year in energy density. The reason you do not feel a huge leap is that every time battery teams squeeze out another watt hour, the chip and software teams spend it on more compute, more video, more background tasks. The pack improves. Your day of use feels about the same.The big jumps happen when you change chemistry outright. Welch mentioned a humanoid robot project that switched from its old pack to a lithium titanate system. Charge time dropped from three hours to about six and a half minutes. Peak power went up by a factor of four. That is not a small tweak. That is a new class of behavior for the machine. Proper Voltage sits in the middle of moves like that, making sure the robot still sees smooth, stable voltage even when it is sprinting or jumping. When robots do high dynamic moves, voltage usually swings all over the place. Their system flattens that, so the robot sees the same “fuel” from full to empty. There is a small efficiency hit in the power electronics, but because the device can use more of the pack’s range without tripping over low voltage issues, you often end up with more usable energy, not less.The near term focus at Proper Voltage is not sci fi robots, though that work is clearly a proving ground. The team is leaning into three markets. First is infrastructure, backup power for telecom sites, data centers, LNG plants, all the places that still sit on old lead acid banks. Sodium ion and other chemistries are well suited there, and Welch likes that the United States has the raw materials to build a domestic supply chain around them. Second is defense, from 6T vehicle batteries to drones and soldier gear. Third is “industrial” in the plain sense, robotics and machines where power, charge time, and lifetime are the difference between a lab demo and a real business.There is a quiet lesson in how he talks about all this. We like big claims about a single breakthrough that will rewrite the rules. Proper Voltage is going after something more boring and more important. The connective tissue. The thing that lets new battery chemistries plug into old systems without fifteen rounds of redesign and risk. If they pull that off, we will not see it in a flashy consumer product first. We will see it in a Humvee that has reliable backup power, a cell tower that stays up during an outage, a robot that can run all shift without a fragile pack.The future of batteries will not arrive as one perfect cell that solves everything. It will come as a lot of different chemistries, each strong in its own narrow way, finally getting a path into real hardware. Proper Voltage is betting that if you want that future, you need to fix the link between the lab and the product. That is not a hot topic on social media. It is the kind of ugly, necessary work that moves the field forward, one pack swap at a time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I used to think my job was to judge founders. Now I ask people to tell me what broke and what they did next. I call it a podcast. It is also penance.This episode is with Dr. Rod Berger. He is a writer, consultant, and the author of The Narrative Edge. We talked about story. Not the fake kind. The real kind.Rod’s view is simple. Story is how people survive each other.You get pulled over for speeding. Before the cop gets to the car, you’re already building your story. You’re trying to make yourself forgivable.First date. Job interview. Getting caught stealing cookies when you’re six. Same act. What can I say so I don’t get dropped. We learn this young. We never stop.Rod says leaders pretend story is optional. It isn’t. It is the only thing that makes you human to other people.Most CEOs are bad at this. I’ve interviewed them. You ask, When did you screw up. They answer, We’re very excited about our platform. Dead air. No blood. No point.Rod says that comes from fear. Since childhood, most of us are still asking, Am I going to get picked. No one wants to tell a story that might make them sound weak. They’re afraid they’ll lose status if they’re honest. So they default to talking points. They seal themselves shut. You can’t connect with that. You can barely stay awake.He told me about someone he interviewed a few times across a few years. Total lockdown. Polished. No air. He finally told her PR rep, Don’t call again. There was nothing human left to work with.So how do you fix that.This is what he does in his consulting work. He sits people down off the record. He interviews them. Long form. He makes them walk through their own past, moment by moment. What happened. Then what. Then what. He watches what they avoid and what they rush to tell. Then he shows them the transcript. He shows them how they actually sound in public. He shows them the gaps.A lot of them hate hearing it. Good. Hate is honest. Hate means they finally heard themselves. After that, most of them want more. He said it can feel like a drug. Once someone feels what it’s like to be listened to for real, they want to keep going. They start to open up. They start to risk.That is the start of being a storyteller. Not branding. Not performance. Just saying what really happened, and how it felt, without flinching.He said something else worth keeping. Story lives in the pause. Not in the slide deck. Not in the press release. In the quiet moment between floors on the elevator, where you admit to yourself what actually happened.He also said this. Life is a series of at bats. You might miss three curve balls. Fine. Next time you see the pitch a little earlier. That’s how you get better at talking like a person. You stand in. You swing. You listen.Rod’s book is The Narrative Edge. If you lead people, or you want to, you probably need what he’s teaching. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I spoke with Mikhail Baklanov, CEO and founder of Donkit, about a problem every enterprise AI team hits sooner or later, retrieval augmented generation that is accurate enough for production. The numbers he quotes are familiar. Companies spend heavily and still spend 18 months experimenting with indexes, chunking, embeddings, evaluators, and guardrails. Accuracy is often not good enough at the end.Donkit’s pitch is simple. Give their “RAG ops” agent your goal and your data. One engineer sets it loose. It runs hundreds of experiments and returns a production ready configuration in about two days. The team pivoted to this idea in March. By August they had a closed alpha. A dozen enterprise teams are piloting it now.Baklanov frames RAG like a library, with indexes, storage, and a librarian. Donkit is a library factory. Instead of hand tuning for months, the agent explores the space of options, evaluates on your data, and converges on what works. The promise is less art project, more systematized process for context engineering and memory management.Their buyer is the head of AI, or a principal AI engineer with a mandate to ship internal assistants and agents. Donkit is not for small teams standing up a single chatbot. It is for accuracy sensitive use cases where error compounds across steps. As Baklanov puts it, if your RAG layer is 80 percent accurate and an agent queries it five times in a chain, the final step’s effective accuracy can collapse. That is why enterprises throw so much effort at squeezing out the last five to ten percent.One pilot sits inside a large retailer’s HR call center. Fifty three specialists support three thousand employees across time zones. Routine questions can take thirty minutes in SAP. Donkit’s approach augments the specialist in real time, first through typed suggestions, then by listening to calls and surfacing answers on screen. It is a clear ROI case that lives or dies on reliable retrieval.Baklanov has talked with more than eighty heads of AI. He sees the same adoption gap. People do not understand how AI works or how to use it. The wins show up in augmentation, not replacement. In software development he says the job is already shifting from hand coding to tasking and reviewing AI generated code. Speed of iteration trumps the debate over organic versus AI code.Donkit has raised $470,000 in angel funding and is preparing an institutional seed. The site is donkit.ai. If you are a larger organization with a head of AI, running agents that depend on trustworthy retrieval, they want to talk.RAG is where a lot of AI projects stall. Everyone has a demo. Few have a system that survives contact with real data and real users. If Donkit can consistently compress the tuning loop from 18 months to two days and do it with one engineer instead of a roomful, that changes the economics. It also sets a higher bar for what “production ready” means. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I first spoke with Ehren Cruz and felt something I do not get often in this space, grounded optimism. He runs a retreat center north of Asheville and guides people through psilocybin journeys with a process that looks more like a rite of passage than a thrill ride.Here is how he works. He starts with a real assessment. Meds, mental health history, trauma, and whether he is the right person to help. Then a month of preparation. Sleep, food, time off the treadmill, and intention. He teaches basic emotional regulation so you are not surprised by your own mind. Only then do you sit. Music, instruments, careful facilitation, and a room that feels safe. Afterward comes the hard part, landing the craft. What did you learn. What will you change. Who do you need to forgive. How will you embody that tomorrow morning.If the language around psychedelics feels too soft, Ehren can meet you in plain English. He talks about neuroplasticity and the way a wider thalamic filter lets you consider ideas that your habitual self would ignore. He also talks about something older. Fungi as a living partner, not a static compound. You bring your healing intelligence. The medicine brings its own. The work happens in the space between.We talked about the fear of change. Many people know they need it but stay put. The familiar pain feels safer than the unknown. Ehren gave me a frame I like. Letting go happens when the risk of staying the same finally outweighs the risk of stepping into mystery. You do not need to force it. You prepare the ground and notice when the fruit is ready to drop.You can do a lot without medicine. Ehren recommends patient practice, Vedic meditation, time with discomfort, and the discipline to ask what pain is trying to teach. Microdosing can help some people create capacity, but he is clear that the big session is not the only door. It is the deep end of the pool. You get dunked. You come out with an imprint you cannot unknow. Then you act.Who should reach out. Curious people who feel stuck. People doing honest mental health work who want a held container. People hungry for individuation, not only symptom relief. He reminds everyone that a ceremony is a step in a longer arc. Not a miracle. Not a single ticket to awe. Part of a continuum of growth, supported by community.If you want to learn more about Ehren’s work and his programs, he is at thesparc.co and active on LinkedIn. If you got something from this conversation, sit with it. Make one small change this week that your future self would thank you for. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

Robots do not need pep talks. They need power. In the field, cables and careful hands are a liability. That is the problem Quaze is trying to solve, and it came through in my talk with Francis Roy, their Chief Strategy Officer.Quaze’s pitch is simple. Turn big surfaces into charging points. Not small targets that demand perfect alignment. Broad mats that you can fold, carry, and drop on dirt or concrete. Plates you can mount on a vehicle so small drones can return, touch down, and sip energy. Panels you can fix at a pier so an underwater vehicle can press, recharge, and push off. If the machine makes contact, it takes power. Shape does not matter. Maker does not matter.The mat is the first product in the wild. It accepts power from what you have on hand, a truck, a wall plug, a solar array. It gives that power back to whatever lands or rolls onto it. Useful, but the point sits deeper, in the electronics that make a surface act like a fuel pump for electrons.That core is the Q6 module. One box, many uses. Mount it in a troop carrier to turn it into a mothership for small drones. Fix it near a net where quadcopters cycle through sorties. The receiver that rides on the aircraft is light, about forty grams in the demo Roy showed. It slots between battery and body. The cost and complexity live on the transmitter side, which keeps retrofit work on the airframe cheap and fast.Numbers matter. Today the Q6 pushes roughly one hundred to two hundred fifty watts. Feed a one hundred watt hour pack at one hundred watts, plan on about an hour, in clean conditions. Field work is never clean, but the point holds. You want steady cycles, not lab trophies. Go, return, touch down, take power, go again. No human kneeling in the dust.Adoption is under way. The mat has early buyers inside the NATO world for testing. That is a good first beachhead. After that, the real work starts, where concepts of operation rule. Where do you place the surfaces. How do vehicles queue. What fails over when a unit is soaked, iced, or shot. Quaze says it has nine integrations in two years with robot makers and prime contractors. That suggests teams can take the electronics, wire them in, and field something real.Why not sooner. Part of the answer is habit. With people hauling batteries and plugging cables, the problem can look solved. Once the people leave, your charge point must work on first contact. Large, forgiving surfaces cut out the alignment dance that kills missions.There are limits. The current power band caps how big and how fast you can refill. Heavy platforms still want generators or pack swaps. Every charger you drop is another box to harden, maintain, and secure. None of that breaks the idea. It is the cost of turning electrons into a supply line.The upside is plain. Uniform energy access across mixed fleets. Fewer hands at risk. Less babying of small drones. A path from one-off hacks to a standard practice that operators can trust.If autonomy is going to move from demo to duty, edge power must be boring, rugged, and always there. Quaze is pushing in that direction. That is worth attention. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

In this week’s Keep Going, I sat down with Steve Rad, founder and CEO of Abacus Brands and Backdrop.com, to talk about building two thriving companies from the ground up. His story starts not in a boardroom but in a Taco Bell parking lot, selling trade show displays out of the back of a car after the 2009 financial crash. What grew from those early hustles became Backdrop.com, a full-scale event display business that’s now introducing Backdrop Alive — a system that turns static backdrops into interactive, augmented reality experiences for trade shows and brand activations.Steve isn’t just rethinking how companies connect with people in physical spaces. He’s also reshaping how kids connect with science and technology. His toy company, Abacus Brands, builds immersive learning kits that mix hands-on projects with virtual reality — from digging up dinosaur bones to exploring crystal caves. The company has already earned a Toy of the Year award and now has new lines launching with National Geographic, DK, and even ESPN.We talked about bootstrapping, surviving the pandemic when trade shows disappeared overnight, and staying “lean and consistent” when everything feels unstable. Steve’s advice for founders is simple: stay in your lane, focus on what you can do exceptionally well, and don’t chase every shiny opportunity.He calls himself a “Basecamp One” entrepreneur — far from the summit, but climbing. That mindset, the willingness to stay small, nimble, and hungry, runs through his entire story.Listen to the full episode to hear how a Craigslist side hustle turned into a two-company career and why, for Steve Rad, making toys is still about wonder, not just sales. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

We recorded late in Tokyo, and Evan Burkosky, CEO of Kimaru AI, laid out a claim that is both obvious and ignored. Most supply chains still run on spreadsheets. People glue together ERP exports, POS reports, CRM notes, and a flotilla of pivot tables, then hope the next week behaves like the last one. It rarely does.Kimaru calls its approach decision intelligence. Strip away the hype, and you get a layer that sits above the systems of record, learns from the metrics the business already tracks, and proposes concrete actions that a human reviews before anything happens. Instead of looking backward at what sold last quarter, planners see forward, with specific guidance on replenishment, pricing, safety stock, and routes, all framed by the constraints that actually govern their work.The company builds what they call a decision digital twin for each user and stakeholder. That twin encodes the choices a role can make, the outcomes that matter, and the limits that cannot be crossed. A set of software agents handles the tedious jobs that eat time, from connecting data and cleaning it, to reconciling mismatched fields across vendors and partners. Once that groundwork is in place, the system runs structured simulations and produces a single best recommendation. The user adjusts or approves, and the order flows back into the existing tools to open a purchase order or move a shipment. Nothing woolly, no free-running bot that buys five million widgets on a whim, and a clear circuit breaker that the user controls.The need is plain in any complex chain. An electronics maker in Taiwan hunts for copper, chips, and specialty parts, sells into high-end audio, and now faces tariffs, shifting routes, and new suppliers in places like Vietnam. A missed signal upstream turns into idle inventory and missed revenue downstream. Many teams still try to manage this with manual reports that take days to compile. Kimaru’s pitch is that the same work can take half a minute once the model understands the business and the user’s risk tolerance.Large firms often have parts of this effort underway. Data lakes in Snowflake or Databricks. Early agents that score demand or smooth seasonality. Kimaru’s value is the connective tissue. The architecture keeps raw data on site through federated learning, shares patterns without moving sensitive records, and records actions for compliance. It plugs into the stack that already exists and tries to make it useful, rather than selling an expensive rip and replace.Under the hood, the tools are not science fair novelties. They are the engines that have powered recommendations and prescriptive planning for a decade, from Monte Carlo to random forests to modern neural nets. The twist is in how those parts are arranged, how cross-company collaboration is modeled, and how the system learns from every correction a planner makes. Evan talked about chaos engines and fractal simulation from his CTO’s doctoral work, and even exploratory talks with quantum groups. The point is not to impress with jargon. The point is to give a planner a credible option on Tuesday morning that shortens a meeting and prevents a stockout.This is not a product for crane operators. It serves the inventory lead at a regional grocer, the VP who sets policy for a chain of factories, the manager who runs a distribution center and needs to pick a lane now. Kimaru has spoken with hundreds of people in those seats. All of them admit they live in spreadsheets because the official systems cannot keep up with the chaos outside the building.There is also the mood to consider. A wave of flashy pilots has soured many buyers on artificial intelligence. Reports claim that most generative pilots fail to produce value. Evan’s answer is blunt. Language toys are probabilistic by design, which makes them risky as a control surface. Operations need structure and memory. The decision layer gives the model something firm to run on, it narrows the error bars, and it keeps people in charge at the points that matter.Kimaru just finished Alchemist, closed out a pre-seed, and is opening a seed round. Interest is strong because the problem is large, boring, and very expensive. The global supply chain ties up vast sums in safety stock to hedge against shocks, and wastes more when plans lag reality. Every hour pulled out of manual reconciliation is an hour that can move product or cut costs.That is the theme worth noting. The most useful advances rarely sparkle. They remove friction that everyone has learned to tolerate. They give professionals a way to make the same decisions they make today, only faster, with clearer guardrails, and with less risk of groupthink. If Kimaru can turn the spreadsheet habit into a system that thinks ahead, it will not be glamorous. It will just be how the work gets done. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

My guest this week was Ashley Manta, a certified sexologist and relationship coach. She works with high achieving women and with couples. Here focus is on pleasure, connection, honesty, and the habits that keep those things from drying out.She says we have to start with stress. If you run a company or live inside one, you know the drill. You carry the day in your jaw, in your shoulders, in your gut. You tell yourself the strain is a tax for the life you chose. Then the bill shows up at home. You argue more. You touch less. You feel alone in a crowded room.Ashley’s first instruction is not soft. Breathe, then unclench your pelvic floor aka your a*****e. On the exhale, let everything loosen. Jaw, hips, the place you never notice until someone reminds you it exists. The body follows the mind, the mind follows the body. If you can learn to relax on purpose, even for a moment, you can find your footing again.From there, she asks basic questions. Where do you feel pressure in your body? What happens when you are alone? Are you checking out on a screen, or can you be present for yourself? With a partner, are you actually there, or are you mentally triaging tomorrow’s tasks while you go through the motions? Presence is not a poster on a wall. It is a skill, and you can practice it.The next step is time. Most of us rush intimacy the way we rush email. We try to beat the clock. Ten minutes, quick kiss, lights out, then wonder why it all feels thin. Slow down. Breathe together. Make eye contact. Ask your body simple questions. Can you feel your right hand. Your left foot. Can you notice your partner’s breath without racing ahead to a finish line. If you treat your bedroom like a sprint, you will get sprint results. Slow work pays.Many couples call their relationship sexless. That word hides more than it reveals. What do you mean when you say you want sex? Do you want pleasure? Do you want to feel wanted? Do you want a break from worry? Do you want a sense of control for a change? Those are concrete needs. You can meet them in many ways. Kissing. Touch. Time together without a screen in sight. Articulate the need, then design the time.Pain and disconnection are real for many women. Ashley talked about plant medicine and the bedroom, not as a cure all, as a set of tools. Some people do not want pills. Some want options that work with their bodies. Be cautious, be informed, talk to real clinicians, then test what helps. The point is agency. Do not outsource your body.We touched the culture too. The grind has become a religion in some rooms. Wear the hours like rank. Build a wall between the self at the office and the self who wants to be known. In other rooms, there is bitterness, the online stew that curdles into contempt. If you are marinating in that mess at three in the morning, there is work to do before you date anyone. If you are simply lost in your calendar, the fix is harder than a quote on a fridge, and still simple. Set boundaries. Delegate. Hire someone to take a shift so you can be a person, not a dashboard.Screens numb. Bodies need air and motion. Touch a tree. Touch water. Lift something heavy and set it down. Watch a sunset without filming it. This is not a lifestyle trend. It is maintenance. When you remember you are alive, you become easier to be with. You are kinder to yourself. You are more open to other people.Ashley runs retreats, workshops, and private coaching. She keeps a Substack where the theme is joy. She travels, a lot. She meets people where they are, online and off. Her end state is clear. A world with more pleasure. Not a cheap slogan. A society where adults feel safe in their bodies, where couples choose each other on purpose, where the half smile on a city street is not rare.I like the plain frame she uses. Pleasure is not a luxury. It is a sign of health. Connection is not a trend. It is an anchor. Sex is not a scoreboard. It is a language. Learn to speak it with care.We keep the show focused on success and failure. Here is the hard truth. If you succeed at work and fail at home, you did not win. You traded one kind of hunger for another. The fix starts with a breath. Relax the muscles you forgot you have. Slow down. Ask for what you want. Give what you can. Put the phone away.Until next week. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

In this episode of The Innovators, I spoke with Pablo Zegers, Chief AI Officer at Kaspix, a company that’s turning everything we think we know about artificial intelligence upside down. Zegers and his team are building analog AI—systems that don’t need transistors, GPUs, or data centers. Their technology runs intelligence directly in hardware, even when that hardware has physical imperfections.Pablo describes it this way: they’ve found a way to make AI work inside the circuitry itself. Instead of relying on digital computation, their system performs the same matrix calculations that underpin modern AI through electrical relations—voltage, current, resistance—executed at the speed of light. It’s artificial intelligence without the silicon.The implications are enormous. Imagine a world where every sensor in a car, every industrial machine, or even every household device could process information locally, without having to beam endless data to the cloud. In Zegers’ words, “you could have a tire that knows when it’s about to fail.” By putting intelligence on the edge—literally in the sensor—systems can predict, react, and self-correct without lag or dependence on distant servers.This isn’t theory. Kaspix is already working with design partners to integrate the technology into real-world applications. The promise goes beyond efficiency and energy savings. If AI runs locally in analog hardware, it becomes nearly impossible to hack, since the intelligence lives in static circuits rather than a centralized, updatable database. In that world, your personal AI could live on your desk—private, secure, and entirely yours.Zegers has been chasing this vision for four decades, and it’s finally real. As he puts it, “In fifty years, all artificial intelligence will be run on this kind of technology.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I spoke with David Carvalhão in Lisbon. He is the CTO at IH Care and sits on a few boards. He has started more companies than most people will ever work for. Twenty six. Some hit. Some missed. Then he lost sixteen in one blow when a partner moved assets out from under him. He fought in court for years. He now calls that a mistake. He says he should have let go sooner.What he works on now is simple in goal and hard in practice. Hospital acquired infections kill about 90,000 people a year in Europe. IH Care is trying to push that number down. They build a device that lets staff give real showers to bedridden patients. They make bed linens that repel water and are antibacterial and antiviral. They coat surfaces in rooms so that when bugs land, they go biologically inactive. Not dead, just quiet. No arms race. No resistant strain winning the day.He put it plainly. Kill and you select for the strongest. Inactivate and nothing new learns to fight back.Keep Going - A Guide to Unlocking Success is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Why this path. Family. He lost a grandfather and a grandmother to infections after hospital stays. He had worked in AI and software for years. In 2015, after the business collapse, he decided to spend his time on social problems. He still builds tech. He just points it at different targets. One project measures carbon stored in forests from satellite images to issue better credits. Another estimates emissions from huge events so organizers can offset with some basis in fact.His mind runs hot. He knows it. He likes to start things. He also knows the cost. In 2022, as the war began in Ukraine, he spun up an NGO to help refugees get to Portugal and settle. It scaled fast. A call center. Hundreds of volunteers. Twelve thousand people moved through the system. The work won an award from the European Commission. On stage in Stockholm, he broke. Memory gone. Seven months to recover.He did not dress it up. The first three months he mostly slept. Long and short term memory both took hits. Then the urge to work came back before the brain was ready. He wrote a book to keep himself steady. In time, he felt whole again.So how does he keep from spinning out now. The answer is boring in the best way. Strict time blocks. He schedules family time and treats it as hard law. He meditates ten minutes a day. He journals for five minutes. Once a month he vanishes for a weekend with an old Nokia, no apps, no feed, no news. He sits. Walks. Rests. Thinks. Monday comes and he knows what matters for the next four weeks.He also faced the standard investor critique. Too many projects. Lack of focus. He agrees it is a fair shot. His response is practice, not talk. He spends most of his time on IH Care. He delegates the rest. He is clear about his edge. He is best at creating and launching products. Others scale them.There is a line he repeats from his grandfather. Leave the world a little better than you found it. It is not a slogan for him. It is a filter. Hospital infections. Carbon math. Refugee work. If it makes a dent and he can help, he leans in, but now with guardrails.I like guests who do not make excuses. David does not. He names the failures and the cost, then keeps going. If you want the short version, here it is. Build for something larger than your own scorecard. Put fences around your time. Rest on purpose. Then do the work. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I invited Shay Levi on because I wanted to separate the AI that writes emails from the AI that moves a business. He is the co-founder and CEO of Unframe, and his pitch is simple. Tell us the pain. We come back in five days with a production-ready solution. If it moves a real metric, you subscribe. If not, you walk.He calls ChatGPT the gold standard for generic tasks. Drafting notes, tidying a paragraph, that kind of thing. Unframe is about the gnarly stuff inside big companies. Think underwriting, lease management, complex workflows that touch five or six systems and a mess of data. You do not want a prompt window for that. You want something that plugs into your stack and quietly does the work.Here is how they do it: They have built a shelf of reusable components, the Lego bricks you always end up writing from scratch. They assemble those into a tailored app for a single business need. No long scoping phase. No hostage-style SOW. Data can stay inside the customer’s perimeter. Then the team hands the keys to the business users and measures impact. Pay only if it works.That model feels like a Fiverr analogy for the Fortune 500. Wish for an application, try it, then decide. The difference is risk. You are not paying up front for a maybe. You are testing a live tool on your data.Shay has done this before. His last company, Noname Security, grew from zero to 250 people in four years and sold to Akamai. He left before the papers were signed because he could not shake the feeling that enterprises were about to drown in point solutions and half-baked build attempts. In his words, the ground in AI moves every morning. Someone had to give value, not just sell more consultants.He is honest about the limits. We still need engineers. Code generation got better, but it did not make software teams obsolete. He also thinks the research gap is wider than people expected. More GPUs alone are not going to deliver a sudden leap. Until we get a new idea, the near term is a man-machine partnership. Humans to define the goal and guardrails. Machines to push the work.One tension I asked about was the in-house IT team. Nobody wants to walk into a department with twenty years of relationships and say your tools will be here in five days. Shay’s answer is practical. Internal teams build the top five, core use cases. Everything else goes to a long wish list. That is where Unframe lives, and it is where most DIY projects stall. If Unframe can ship a working tool in a week, the business moves faster. Nobody gets ripped out. The company gets a head start.There is ambition behind all of this. He does not want to sell the company. He wants to see if this model can scale across industries. If it does, he thinks it is bigger than his last win. If it does not, he will know because customers will cancel. The contract structure forces the truth.What I like here is the focus on time to value. Five days is a claim you can test. You either reduce days outstanding in receivables, or you do not. You either shorten lease onboarding, or you do not. In a space full of big talk, that concreteness is refreshing.If you run a team with a backlog full of good intentions, this is worth a look. Start with one stubborn workflow. Define the metric. See what a week buys you. Worst case, you learn how to scope the next attempt. Best case, you cross something off the list and move to the next one.We will keep watching this model. If Unframe proves you can repeatedly turn messy enterprise needs into working tools in days, that is a real shift. Not a demo. Not a deck. Software that shows up and does the job. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I met Cesar Marin at a psychedelics event in Denver. I watched him on stage. He had a calm ease that carried across the room. Today he tells the story behind that calm.Cesar spent twenty five years at CNN as a producer. He built live shows. He chased breaking news. He lived inside a clock. Then the layoffs came. He was fifty five. The title that shaped his life was gone.Plant medicine had arrived in his life just before that fall. He did not come to it for healing. He was curious. He tried psychedelics once and felt a sharp shift. He started reading. He found communities. He learned how people use these tools for depression, anxiety, trauma, and habit change. He began to microdose with intent. He says it helped him change a hard relationship with cannabis. It also forced a question he had avoided. If the old job ends, what comes next.His answer is Cultivating Wisdom. He built an apparel line that does one thing. It starts plain talk about psychedelics without the tie dye costume. He wanted a shirt you could wear under a blazer. He wanted words that open a conversation in a grocery line. He told a story about a woman who walked up to him, saw the word “microdosing” on his chest, and shared how small, planned doses helped her stop finishing a bottle of wine every night. One shirt. One talk. No stigma.He also built microdosingover50.com. The site is for people who want clear, adult guidance. He does not prescribe. He does not diagnose. He shares what worked for him. He points to research. He asks people to read, ask questions, and go slow. No mystery bars from a gas station. Pick intent first, then protocol, then support.We spoke about work and age. The market does not care about your years of service. It cares about cost and speed. If you are midlife and worried, his advice is simple. Take inventory. Write down what you know well. Turn that into assets that teach. Give something away. Build a course. Speak to people who know less than you, not to the few who know more. That is a sober way forward in a loud time.He is now shaping the Summit Within. It is a small, private container for senior leaders. Five or six people at a time. The plan is to use legal plant work where allowed, breathwork, and other tools to improve focus, care, and honesty. Leave the status gear at the door. Bring your real problems. Learn how to run a company and still be a decent parent, partner, and neighbor. He calls it a move from “F-you wealth” to “love-you wealth.” Make enough to care for your family. Use the rest to make more people smile. That is the entire pitch.We covered risk. We covered the old fears. He agrees that no one should treat this like a toy. Read the science. Talk to a doctor if you have a condition or take meds. Respect the law where you live. Do not do this alone if you can avoid it. These are tools. Tools can help. Tools can also hurt.Cesar’s story is not tidy. He lost a career. He built a new one from scratch. He did it with help, and he says that out loud. Mentors showed up. Friends told the truth. His partner said the quiet line that kept him steady. “The universe has you where it needs you.” He believed it. He worked. He kept going.If you want to learn more, go to cultivatingwisdom.net for the apparel and stories. Go to microdosingover50.com for his courses and community. He set up a 20 percent discount for our listeners. Use code KG20 at checkout. If you buy something and post a photo, he says he will send a bigger code you can share with your friends. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

The Innovators is a new show about how people actually build. Not slogans. Not hype. The work. Each episode starts with a pitch, then gets into the choices that make or break a young company. We ask basic questions that most founders avoid. Who pays you. Why do they stay. What broke. What did you fix. The goal is simple, help real builders sharpen their story and pressure-test their plan, while giving listeners a clear view of how a business grows from zero.Our first guest is Dani Dufresne, founder of Aux Co. Think of Aux Co as a plugged-in production brain for small agencies and brand teams. Not a vendor line item you add at the end. A team you invite in at the start. Dani came up through film and commercial production, then spent years inside big agencies. She saw a pattern. Small, sharp creative shops had ideas worth making, but not the overhead for full-time producers. Big holding company shops had budgets, politics, and habits that dragged the work off course. The result was friction, waste, and flat outcomes.Aux Co is her answer. The firm embeds early, helps shape the creative into something that can be made on time and on budget, then brings the right crew to the table. Agencies keep the client relationship. Aux Co supplies an executive producer mindset and a deep bench. It is white label when needed. It is visible when that helps. The goal is the same in both cases, protect the idea, spend money where it matters, and keep the quality bar high.Dani’s view on incentives is blunt. A freelancer takes a brief and gets it done. An in-house EP at a big shop might default to the same three vendors. Both paths can work, but both can settle. Aux Co set itself up to question decisions early, to tell a client when the plan is off, and to push for better options that fit the money and the clock. That only works if you get in the room before the pitch goes out. So they do that, often without charging for pitch support, and earn their keep in production.The model scales in a quiet way. Retainer clients get producers embedded in Slack, in email, in the office when needed. When a brief lands, Dani assigns specialists for that job, not whoever is idle. She oversees the start, then steps back while her team runs the shoot, the event, the build. That frees creative teams to focus on the idea, not vendor whack-a-mole. It also keeps the work fresh, since the roster is wide and curated. The firm avoids the bad habit of reusing the same production company out of comfort.We talked about the risk in this kind of service. It looks like staff, it acts like staff, but it is not headcount. Finance teams want cost clarity. Dani keeps pricing simple, hourly or flat packages, small retainers that roll over, production fees that track the real job. The promise is speed and fit. You get the right director or developer in days, not months, because the list is already built. You pay for what you use. You keep quality up because the team can say no when something does not line up with the mission you stated at kickoff.There is also a cultural point. Aux Co looks for clients who see questions as care, not conflict. That matters. A lot of work fails because no one raises a hand when the plan drifts. Dani builds teams that ask why, tie choices back to the brief, and hold the line. It sounds small. It is not. It is the difference between a film that lands and a film that sits in a drive.Where is this going. Dani sees brands moving back into the world. Less empty feed. More real life. Community events. Collabs with local groups. Experiences that get people to close the laptop and do the thing the brand stands for. That shift needs producers who can work across formats, from a quick social shoot to out of home to a live build. It also needs partners who can move fast without cutting corners. That is the lane Aux Co lives in.Why start The Innovators with this story. Because it shows the point of the show. A clear pitch. A simple problem, the gap between idea and execution. A practical fix, bring senior production into the room before the sell, keep it lean, keep it honest. You can argue with the approach. You cannot say it lacks a plan.If you run a small agency, this episode will help you rethink when you call production. If you run a brand team, it will help you weigh headcount against access. If you are a founder, it will push you to name your edge and the tradeoffs you refuse to make. That is the tone we want every week. Take the pitch. Pull on it. Find the weak points. Leave with a tighter story and a better path to revenue.New episodes will follow the same line. Founders, operators, and makers walk us through what they sell, how they sell it, and how they keep clients. We keep the talk plain. We push for numbers when it counts. We respect craft, but we do not hide behind it. We ask about the first ten customers, the hardest hire, the month that almost killed the company, the new plan that kept the lights on. We want lessons you can use on Monday morning.If you want to learn more about Aux Co, visit theaux.co, or look up Dani Dufresne on LinkedIn. If you want to pitch on The Innovators, send a short note with what you build, who buys, and why they stay. Keep it tight. Keep it real. We will bring questions. You bring proof. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.keepgoingpod.comWhen you talk to Diane Yu, you hear the mix of humility and steel that makes a founder stand out. She’s the co-founder and CEO of Tidal Wave, an AI company that is trying to modernize one of the most entrenched and slow-moving sectors out there: mortgages.Her take is simple. We live in a world where everything else moves fast—food, rides, even love—but mortgages drag on, slow and archaic. Tidal Wave is her answer: an AI-powered mortgage point of sale system that does the hard work of evaluating and completing applications before an underwriter even looks at them. It’s not flashy, but it’s practical. And in this industry, practical is revolutionary.