Four Fs Podcast: 10-Minute Wins

"You can't suffer unless you love. It's because we love so much that we suffer."

Trauma therapist Richie Landward explains why so many people quietly choose suffering — even when it's painful — because it's familiar, because it grants permission not to act, and because losing it is more terrifying than carrying it.

In this 10-minute conversation, Richie shares:

• Shame as "the backlight of fear" — and why it keeps fear alive

• Why homeless veterans he worked with were often more at peace than the housed

• The Catholic mother who hid and drank after losing her only child — and why

• The real source of trauma: not the event, but the fear of losing love because of it

• How peace, once you have it, becomes its own terrifying thing to lose

• The choice to suffer because it gives you permission not to change

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Four Fs Podcast: 10-Minute Wins delivers a daily short clip from in-depth conversations with founders, veterans, executives, and world-class experts you won't hear on every other show — on leadership, entrepreneurship, failure, and personal reinvention.

Full episodes available on the Four Fs Podcast feed on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

"I was like, wow, I've been working my way through school and paying you, and now they're going to pay me to go to school? I'll do that."

Dr. Craig Kaplan — AI researcher who studied under Nobel laureate Herbert Simon at Carnegie Mellon — walks back through the unlikely path that took a kid from Berkeley to Phillips Exeter Academy (yes, the same prep school as Mark Zuckerberg) and then into the field of AI in 1985, when "AI" was still a tiny niche only a few geeky people cared about.

In this 10-minute conversation, Craig shares:

• Growing up the second-poorest-dressed kid at one of the most elite prep schools in America

• Why senior year of high school was harder than his first year at UC Santa Cruz

• The professor who pulled him aside and revealed that grad schools pay you to attend

• Studying under Herbert Simon — one of the 11 scientists who named the AI field in 1956

• Sharing an office with Jeff Hinton's collaborators when neural networks were still skeptical, fringe research

• Self-driving cars at CMU in the 1980s — vans that drove inches per hour stopping to ask "is that a leaf or a person?"

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Four Fs Podcast: 10-Minute Wins delivers a daily short clip from in-depth conversations with founders, veterans, executives, and world-class experts you won't hear on every other show — on leadership, entrepreneurship, failure, and personal reinvention.

Full episodes available on the Four Fs Podcast feed on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

"I challenge you to stay in alignment with yourself. When you find yourself in those spaces, soak it all up, stay curious, and keep driving from there."

Tiffanie Janowitz — youngest of eight, former University of Utah competitive cheerleader, now CEO of Limitless Society — answers a question from an 8-year-old listener about why she chose cheerleading, and uses it to unpack what "living in alignment" actually means.

In this 10-minute conversation, Tiffanie shares:

• The friend who invited her to a cheerleading practice at age 10 — and the moment everything clicked

• What competitive cheerleading actually teaches you as a life skill

• Why being the youngest of eight made her MORE independent, not less

• The fork in the road: people-pleasing checklist vs. her own voice

• What it feels like to operate from alignment — gratitude, peace, less friction

• Why she stayed in the mold for years before finally breaking it

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Four Fs Podcast: 10-Minute Wins delivers a daily short clip from in-depth conversations with founders, veterans, executives, and world-class experts you won't hear on every other show — on leadership, entrepreneurship, failure, and personal reinvention.

Full episodes available on the Four Fs Podcast feed on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

Today's AI sounds smart because it knows a little about everything. But the moment you ask it about something you're an expert in, the cracks show up fast.

So how does it become genuinely smarter than the smartest human?

Craig Kaplan — Wall Street veteran, AI researcher, and founder of SuperIntelligence.com — joins The Four Fs Podcast to break down the path from "average intelligence" to actual superintelligence in language anyone can understand. No PhD required.

In this 10-minute conversation, Craig shares:

• Why current AI is the average of the internet — and why that ceiling is lower than people think

• The "two heads are better than one" idea, scaled to 2 million heads working together

• How AI can train on top-quality experts to leapfrog the average

• Why playing itself a million times turned chess and Go AI into unbeatable champions

• Synthetic data: how AI generates its own new thoughts to bootstrap higher intelligence

• The speed advantage — a lifetime of reasoning in the time it takes you to sip coffee

• Why your brain has to fit through a birth canal, and AI doesn't

• The 1,000+ pages of designs Craig is giving away for free at SuperIntelligence.com

• How knocking AI tail-risk from 20% down to 1% becomes everyone's job

Whether you're an AI skeptic, an AI optimist, or just trying to keep up, this is the simplest explanation you'll hear of where this is actually going.

Learn more: https://superintelligence.com

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Four Fs Podcast: 10-Minute Wins delivers a daily short clip from in-depth conversations with founders, veterans, executives, and world-class experts you won't hear on every other show — on leadership, entrepreneurship, failure, and personal reinvention.

Full episodes available on the Four Fs Podcast feed on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

One bottle of Centrum Silver. An unlocked locker. One jump away from Ranger selection.

David Porter — former 75th Ranger Regiment, now a senior executive at ServiceNow — tells the story of how a tiny mistake at airborne school cost him his shot at Ranger Assessment and Selection, and how the next two weeks reshaped his entire career.

In this 10-minute conversation, David shares:

• The morning his sea bag got dumped and the bottle of vitamins on the CO's desk

• Being reassigned to "the island of misfit toys" while his class moved on to selection

• How he rebuilt the headquarters intake system in Excel and Access — and got noticed

• The single jump the CO greenlit so he could catch back up to his class

• Why he believes the detour actually put him ahead of his buddies

• What "engineered failure" in elite training really teaches you

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Four Fs Podcast: 10-Minute Wins delivers a daily short clip from in-depth conversations with founders, veterans, executives, and world-class experts you won't hear on every other show — on leadership, entrepreneurship, failure, and personal reinvention.

Full episodes available on the Four Fs Podcast feed on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

"Grab a coffee. Tell me what happened." That's the entire script.

Desai Link — author of "Beyond the Incident" — explains why he's the first person to translate 400 years of British legal causation principles into safety investigation tools, and why the word "interview" itself can wreck the conversation before it starts.

In this 10-minute conversation, Desai shares:

• How British adversarial law evolved tools for weighing competing oral testimony

• Why humility + respect + psychological safety beats any structured interview script

• The "proactive labeling" technique — naming the conversation before it happens

• "Grab a coffee" vs. "I need to interview you" — what changes in the brain

• Why the best interview probably doesn't ask a single question

• How to apply legal causation to a workplace incident review

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Four Fs Podcast: 10-Minute Wins delivers a daily short clip from in-depth conversations with founders, veterans, executives, and world-class experts you won't hear on every other show — on leadership, entrepreneurship, failure, and personal reinvention.

Full episodes available on the Four Fs Podcast feed on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

Food poisoning. 5 days in the ICU. Five weeks of chemotherapy. And a priority list that's never changed since.

Microsoft veteran Rich Kaplan walks through the 2005 illness that nearly took his life, the operating philosophy he's lived by ever since — family, health, service — and the unforgettable QVC moment where he sold 22,000 copies of Windows 95 in a single appearance.

In this 10-minute conversation, Rich shares:

• The 2005 food poisoning that became 5 days in ICU and weeks of chemo

• Family > health > service to others — and ignoring everything else

• Selling 22,000 copies of Windows 95 in a single QVC appearance

• Meeting Susan Lucci and working with anchor Joyce Taylor on TV

• Joining the Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center board after the experience

• The early-internet marketing problems no one talks about anymore

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Four Fs Podcast: 10-Minute Wins delivers a daily short clip from in-depth conversations with founders, veterans, executives, and world-class experts you won't hear on every other show — on leadership, entrepreneurship, failure, and personal reinvention.

Full episodes available on the Four Fs Podcast feed on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

What does getting handcuffed at 17 over a $1.25 subway token have to do with becoming a Microsoft developer? Everything — if you know how to turn a story into a lesson.In this 10 Minute Wins conversation, Himani Naresh — Columbia computer science grad, version-one SharePoint developer, and former VP at a global media company — walks through the through-line from her NYC subway arrest to her early days as the only woman engineer at Microsoft, and the exit-interview feedback that changed how she thinks about confidence forever.If you've ever felt like you're not as smart as the people around you, this one is for you.🎯 What you'll learn:• Why your past mistakes can be the best material you have• What it really felt like being the only woman on a male engineering team• The exit-interview feedback Himani wishes she'd heard years earlier• How to spot the skills you already have but undervalue• How to build resilience when you have no obvious ally in the room⏱ Chapters:00:00 The $1.25 subway token she still keeps in a photo album01:45 Columbia, computer science, and landing at Microsoft in 199903:10 Version-one SharePoint and writing C++ in Visual Studio04:30 Why she switched from developer to program manager05:30 The exit-interview comment that changed everything07:15 "Stop comparing — focus on what you're good at"08:45 Being the only woman in tech — and on the 40th floor of Embarcadero10:20 Building resilience without an obvious ally12:00 Priorities at 22 vs. priorities at 30+🎙 About The Four Fs Podcast — 10 Minute Wins:Four Fs Podcast: 10-Minute Wins delivers a daily short clip from in-depth conversations with founders, veterans, executives, and world-class experts you won't hear on every other show — on leadership, entrepreneurship, failure, and personal reinvention.Full episodes available on the Four Fs Podcast feed on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.#WomenInTech #Resilience #CareerAdvice #Microsoft #FourFsPodcast

An osprey drops a baby turtle from the sky. It hits a worker in the head. Welcome to Barrow Island.

Desai Link — NZ-based health and safety leader and author of "Beyond the Incident" — opens with the wildest stories from a career he never planned: Class A nature reserves in Western Australia, 8-foot monitor lizards that don't fear humans, and the day-to-day reality of an H&S role no one teaches you about.

In this 10-minute conversation, Desai shares:

• 8.5 years in H&S — and the expansion into risk and privacy

• What an H&S manager actually does: compliance, engagement, influence, advisory

• Barrow Island Class A nature reserve and the osprey-turtle incident

• 2.5-meter monitor lizards strolling between trucks with zero fear

• Why "influence" matters more than authority in the safety world

• The book that translates 400 years of legal precedent into safety practice

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Four Fs Podcast: 10-Minute Wins delivers a daily short clip from in-depth conversations with founders, veterans, executives, and world-class experts you won't hear on every other show — on leadership, entrepreneurship, failure, and personal reinvention.

Full episodes available on the Four Fs Podcast feed on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

What if the inventions meant to solve our biggest problems actually ended up nearly destroying the planet? Dive into the messy, human side of science where grudges and mistakes have shaped our modern world.

In this clip from the Four Fs Podcast, I’m joined by Dr. Jeffrey Zurek—a geophysicist, volcanologist, and host of the Whimsical Wavelengths podcast. We discuss the fascinating (and sometimes dark) history of scientific discovery, from the lead pollution crisis to the surprising evolution of giant prehistoric insects.

Key Takeaways

The Dark Side of Innovation: Learn about Thomas Midgley Jr., the man whose inventions (CFCs and leaded gasoline) nearly destroyed the Earth twice.

Science is Human: Discover how personal grudges—like one scientist's obsession with proving Aristotle wrong—led to major breakthroughs in understanding sound and light.

The Messiness of Data: Why extracting the "human" from scientific data can make it harder for the average person to connect with important stories.

Prehistoric Giants: A look into why insects like dragonflies used to be several feet across and the biological limits that keep them small today.

The Future of Physics: The search for a unified theory and why the "big domino" of gravity and quantum mechanics has yet to fall.

Chapter Timestamps

0:00 - Introduction to Dr. Jeffrey Zurek

0:27 - Logistics and challenges of international science projects

1:08 - The legacy of Thomas Midgley Jr. and the lead/CFC crisis

3:10 - Why science needs to embrace its "human messiness" 3:43 - Proving Aristotle wrong out of spite

5:07 - The difficulty of solo science communication

6:05 - Surprising facts about insect breathing and ancient giants

8:05 - The "Big Domino": Gravity, Quantum Mechanics, and the Unified Theory

If you enjoyed this deep dive into the secrets of science, make sure to follow the Four Fs Podcast so you don't miss tomorrow's clip! For the full conversation with Dr. Jeffrey Zurek, search for "Four Fs Podcast" on YouTube or your favorite podcast app, or tap the link in the description.