Can a machine harbor the soul of an artist? This question leads our latest discussion with Harvard professor and acclaimed artist Matt Saunders.

It's not a simple question to answer. Creativity is a complex concept and we have to dig into the many ways that word could be defined. Who better to ask about creativity than someone who is both an accomplished artist himself and an instructor at one of the most distinguished art schools in the country?

Matt is a Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. His art has been featured in exhibitions around the world, and the list of museums with his work in their collections includes the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many other names that you would likely recognize.

Matt's art is grounded in the material - particularly painting, but in most of his work you can see how he challenges himself to push back against the idea of a static rectangle of paint-on-canvas and create something more dynamic and transient - something more like an experience than an image.

That same resistance to conventionality comes out in our conversation about AI, and it leads us to some brutally honest conclusions about how we view the techno-obsessed world around us.

Matt is a very thoughtful and inspiring person, and this interview is easily one of the more impactful conversations I've had in a long time.

Welcome back, after two months of silence, to Road Work Ahead, a podcast that explores the unmapped future of business and technology.

My name is Sam Gerdt, and today I'm sharing a recent conversation with one of my long-time colleagues, Larisa Aslanyan. A few months ago, Larisa and I were talking about big changes in paid advertising. Obviously, artificial intelligence is a major factor in these changes, but there's a lot more than that happening under the surface.

At the core of our talk is how the internet, and the way we interact with it, is radically changing. When it comes to paid advertising, your strategies will have to adapt to the new ways your audience is searching. These search habits are often wildly different from generation to generation, so while I may still use Google like a grandpa, younger generations are developing search practices that require new advertising strategies.

My skepticism and cynicism shines through quite a bit in this discussion, but I really did have a lot of fun imagining all of the ways that new technologies like AI will forever change how we interact with the world around us. The next few years are going to be interesting.

Welcome everybody, once again, to Road Work Ahead, a podcast that explores the unmapped future of business and technology. My name is Sam Gerdt, and today I'm talking to the co-founder of a company that has, without exaggeration, changed my life. I'm talking about Reclaim.ai, and my guest is Henry Shapiro.

Most people are familiar with the negative impact of meetings stacked on meetings or poor time management in the workplace. As our jobs get more complex, so does the task of managing an effective schedule.

Reclaim is an AI scheduling tool that does the work of time blocking for you. On top of this it gives you tools for managing meetings and establishing habits, guarding your time against the invading forces that so often steal your lunch hour or pull you away from deep, meaningful work.

Henry and his co-founder Patrick built Reclaim as a solution for teams to minimize disruptions and do more meaningful work, but Henry admits that no one expected such an overwhelmingly positive response to their product. Even in our interview I found it hard to contain my own enthusiasm.

Also, just a quick note: Henry says reCLAIM, I say REclaim . . . Potato, PoTAHto. Enjoy the interview! 

We have a bad habit that we need to talk about. We tend to think that everybody has the same problems that we have. And every time we have a problem, we tend to go to the same places to find a solution. It's a bad habit for two reasons. First, we're limiting the kinds of solutions that we're going to get; and second, we're missing out on hearing from a lot of incredible problem solvers - people who would bring new and innovative perspectives if we took the time to find them and listen to them.

This is one of the topics for discussion in this week's interview with Harold Hughes. Harold is a founder from a very different background than the typical ivy league, Silicon Valley scene, but his company, Bandwagon, is making no less of an impact. Bandwagon is an experience technology company using blockchain to authenticate experiences and bring communities of all kinds closer together.

Bandwagon's Proof of Experience technology is an idea that could revolutionize the entertainment industry and possibly provide an easy solution to the problem of AI-fabricated news, but Harold isn't interested in talking about "disruption". Instead, he says collaboration is the way to move us forward and amplify the quieter voices in our community.

When Harold isn't running Bandwagon, he's advocating for minority entrepreneurs and equipping a more diverse generation of solution providers. Our conversation was an encouragement to me. I hope you enjoy it.

Last episode, we talked a lot about the importance of retrospection in the process of growth and innovation. Thinking back through all the talks I've had over the past several months on this podcast, this idea is the one that stood out to me as being the most helpful for anyone who is feeling uncertain about the future. In looking back, we can revisit those core values and principles that should be guiding our decision making. We can find and help the people around us who've been falling behind. We can organize and optimize our business processes and our thought processes.

So today we're doing something a little different. I invited my friend and colleague, Erin Durham, into the studio to look back over the past 7 episodes and talk about the ideas that made the biggest impact for us, in our own work and thought processes. We're calling this episode a retrospective. It was an excellent conversation. I hope you enjoy it.

Hi everybody,

No episode this week, I'm sorry! We're busy people and sometimes we have to take a week off. But I do have a request:

We're two months into this podcast and we want to know if the content of our interviews is helping you to think more productively about the future of business and technology. What have you liked? How can we make it even better?

Would you email us? The address is [email protected]. You won't be added to any lists, and we won't publish what you write without permission.

Thanks for listening!
Sam

As someone who is diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder, there is an incredible amount of friction that I have to account for in my work and personal life. The same goes for other neurodivergent people - whether they have Autism, ADHD, dyslexia, or something else - there are a significant number of genuinely talented people in the workplace who are, to a certain extent, drained of their capacity for excellent work because they lack the freedom or confidence to work in a way that fits their specific needs.

This episode starts as a discussion about addressing neurodiversity in the workplace, but really becomes a conversation about a much broader epidemic in many organizations, which is the de-prioritization of people. There are a large number of people in the workplace - and not just neurodivergent people - who are being left behind because they're too afraid to speak up.

Loryan Strant is a Microsoft product specialist and Product Lead, and his wife Megan is a product design, learning and adoption specialist. They are also both diagnosed with ADHD and Autism. Their track records in digital product innovation and adoption, as well as their own experiences with neurodiversity, served as an excellent jumping-off point for a conversation that ultimately led us all to agree that we need to be looking backward before we move forward.

I talk a lot about new technology with my guests, but maybe the most valuable way to connect with your audience isn't new at all. Email has been used and abused to the point that most people, marketers and salesmen included, have given up on investing any real thoughtfulness into their approach. As an industry, we've reduced email to a numbers game.

But email could be so much more! We should be realizing that email is the last remaining opportunity to claim complete ownership of a communications channel, and it's your best shot at collecting and leveraging the purest first-party customer data you're ever gonna to get.

This week I sat down with Yuval Ackerman for what turned out to be a masterclass in ethical email marketing. Yuval is one of the most thoughtful marketers I've met, and she's somebody who's absolutely nailing the human connection in this present age of terrible AI writing and cold emails that nobody asked for. Trust me, you'll want to take notes on this one.

Join Yuval's email list: https://ackermancopywriting.com/subscribe

How do you approach your duty and responsibility to protect yourself and those around you from cyber threats? Whether you're a large organization or an individual, it's never right to assume that someone else is protecting your best interests.

Our generation is living in an incredibly significant transitional period, and the rules and expectations about how people should be treated are still being tested and hotly debated. The only way to ensure that you and your business remain safe is to take personal responsibility for that safety. In addition, we should also be lining up to preserve the safety of the more vulnerable members of our community - the older and younger generations.

This week, I sat down with Kristi Hoffmaster, who is a senior analyst at Okta, a company that provides secure identity management for businesses of all sizes. Kristi's experience and expertise in third-party risk management yielded a conversation that centered around the need to carefully evaluate and monitor the technology that you allow into your business and your life.

While we spent a good deal of time talking about the specifics of securing an organization's technology stacks, it was the individual, human aspect of cybersecurity that resonated most deeply for me. I was left at the end of our conversation feeling very confident that the only way for humankind to ensure our future cyber safety is to begin fostering a strong sense of individual responsibility across the board.

I hope this discussion leads you to the same conclusion.

When you work and live deeply within the realm of new technologies, it can be easy to forget that most of the world doesn't share that same perspective. Many of us have been spending the last 9 months freaking out about the generative AI arms race and the end of white-collar work, but my conversation this week with Mark Johnson steered my thinking in a very different direction.

Mark is the co-founder and CTO of an online learning platform called Pathwright, and the majority of our conversation was spent talking about AI from the perspective of the end user. The origin of Mark's 11-year-old tech company looks a lot different than we're accustomed to seeing. There was no venture capital or seed round. Instead, Pathwright was funded and built by aligning the development roadmap directly with the specific needs of early adopters.

In the decade since, Pathwright has continued to develop its platform with the mindset of serving actual needs and staying true to its core values. So, I was curious how a founder and CTO like Mark is thinking about the rush in the tech world to implement AI as quickly as possible. Is this something that his customers are demanding, or are technologists putting this pressure on themselves?

Besides this topic, we also talked about the implications of AI in education, the likelihood of an AI bubble, and how to foster an optimistic view of the future in the way you think about and interact with new technology.