Stormy and I talk about care and technology—the uses and misuses of AI already threading through clinics and living rooms. Predictive systems help with patterns and logistics; generative systems promise companionship and language scaffolding. But Stormy keeps us honest: these tools must support relationship, not replace it. The chatbot is endlessly patient—and a little too eager to please—which can nudge us toward “frictionless” exchange and away from the brave work of being with one another.

I speak with my old friend Wayne Goodrich— once upon a time, the quiet maestro behind the spectacle of Steve Jobs onstage. We go way back—to the Joe’s Digital Diner days in San Francisco, but for more than two decades across NeXT, Pixar, and Apple, Wayne produced the keynotes that became our collective campfire: product stories told with rigor, restraint, and a touch of theater.

We talk about what’s next: the human side of emerging tech, from spatial audio to assistive robotics, and the health-span tools older adults actually need—less hype, more coherence. Wayne’s career has always been a bridge: translating fragility into reliability, complexity into experience, ambition into a live moment that lands.

Tim teaches at a small theological school in Ohio where his classroom spills into fields and wetlands. He helped launch a campus farm that feeds the dining hall and a 150-family CSA, tying soil to spirit, dinner to dignity. He names his work “ecological theology,” asking why, if this Earth is our only home, we so often treat it like a disposable container.

Our conversation wanders the way good pilgrimages do. We ask whether technology can be a lantern rather than a lure, and if story work—writing it, voicing it, listening to it again and again—functions as spiritual practice in a secular age. We talk about using emerging tools, even AI, as instruments of attention rather than distraction—craft for wisdom, not noise.

Jim Winship is a long time friend of StoryCenter. He spent several decades at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater teaching social work and building bridges between campus and community. He was deeply impacted by his work in Latin America, and he and his son developed a documentary about the role of food banks in rural Wisconsin during the pandemic, https://vimeo.com/735268763?fl=pl&fe=vl.

In our conversation you'll hear the humility of an East Tennessee kid that grew up and listened to the stories around him, and like me, became convinced story work is as essential as bread.

Sara Orem has been practicing an answer in community for a long while. She came to teaching through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute—OLLI for the initiated—after a late-life doctorate just shy of sixty, proof that curiosity has no mandatory retirement age.

Sara’s path wanders through gratitude, mindfulness, and joy—not as slogans, but as steady practices, the kind you take up with neighbors and keep returning to when the world tilts. Her classes draw from the Greater Good Science Center and the mindful provocations of Ellen Langer in dialogue with Buddhist perspectives. Listen in as we talk about life writing and writing through the fade.

Dr. Tricia Jenkins, has been doing digital storytelling with older adults for over a decade, co-running this organization called Digitales. Digitales has trained hundreds of facilitators across Europe.

But what really gets me is that story work with seniors isn't just a professional calling for her, it is deeply felt.

She watched her own parents navigate dementia, and as she put it to me, she was "appalled by the lack of agency that older people have." So she did what any of us who've been touched by this work might do - she made it personal. Dedicated her PhD research to understanding how digital storytelling can help older adults reframe their lives and reclaim their voices.

The stories she shared with me... working in assisted living facilities when residents suddenly discover each other's remarkable histories for the first time - touches me deeply.

Today's episode is a talk with Mark Silver—social worker, longtime co-coordinator of the Wellbeing Clinic for Older Adults at Swinburne, and one of the steady hands shaping intergenerational story work in Australia. Mark helped found PADSIP back in 2007—the Positive Ageing Digital Storytelling Intergenerational Program—which pairs older adults with students to co-create short, first-person digital stories. What began in Melbourne has since popped up with community groups, schools, and aged-care homes across the city and out into regional Victoria. It’s simple on the surface—two people trading life experience and media skills—but the outcomes are big: belonging, respect, and a little more light in the room for everyone. 

Mary Ann Schultz has spent 50 years in nursing—from her start as a staff nurse in Youngstown to leadership roles in university hospitals and a department chairship at Cal State San Bernardino—and in her encore career she’s become a clear-eyed voice in nursing informatics and precision health. She brings the receipts: peer-reviewed work on precision medicine and a recent gubernatorial appointment advising California’s Institute to Advance Precision Medicine.

In our conversation, she brings precision health down to ground level: the bracelet that notices a gait change before a diagnosis; ambient listening that frees a clinician’s hands to touch an elbow and make eye contact; and the stubborn realities of aging alone, where a fall can turn into a night on the floor unless our networks—kin, neighbors, and yes, the bots—are invited to help. This is story work for urgent times: designing care so the data serves the dignity.

today I'm talking with Gary Glazner, founder and executive director of the Alzheimer's Poetry Project.

Gary has spent over 25 years developing and teaching a revolutionary approach to working with people living with dementia—using the power of poetry to create moments of connection, joy, and creative expression. What started as a simple observation in an adult day program in Northern California has grown into a movement that's reached 36 states and 10 countries.

We have reached the point now where discussing the use of companion bots in support of aging adults is no longer science fiction, but a burgeoning billion dollar industry. The ethics of machines acting as support personnel seem fraught with disaster. But rather than run the other direction, I thought I would go to the source. So this interview is with someone with a true insider's perspective.