Sourdough Modernity

Justin asked his AI to conduct an honest assessment of his personality after months of conversations.

Unfortunately, the AI took the assignment seriously.

The results include chronic argumentativeness, selective resistance to authority, premature problem-solving, and a remarkable ability to recognize his own flaws without necessarily correcting them.

No feelings were considered during this assessment. Stephanie has been invited to provide additional evidence.

Warning: May cause discomfort in people who have ever tried to finish a sentence around Justin.

A 13-year-old should not need to understand asylum law to keep himself from being deported.

A little kid should not be expected to defend himself in an immigration courtroom.

Yet children are being put into a legal system they cannot possibly understand — surrounded by adults who can point to laws, procedures and policies to explain why it’s allowed.

But “it’s legal” has never meant “it’s right.”

I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in hell. But watching adults build and administer a system like this makes me understand why humanity invented the concept.

Because “I was following the law” is not a moral defense.

In this episode of Sourdough Maternity, I talk about children navigating immigration court, the difference between legality and morality, and why government officials should not be protected from accountability simply because they were following procedure.

If someone violates existing law, prosecute them.

And if our laws allow conduct toward children that we recognize as inhumane, then change the laws so that conduct can never hide behind procedure again.

The law is the floor.

It is not my moral compass.

History has already shown us what happens when people confuse the two.

#Immigration #ImmigrationCourt #ChildrensRights #HumanRights #Accountability #Asylum #DueProcess

To Catch a Predator was a phenomenon. Millions of us watched Chris Hansen confront adults who believed they were showing up to meet children—and, if we’re being truthful, part of the appeal was watching them get caught and publicly humiliated.

But was that justice, entertainment, or both?

With Predators reconsidering the legacy of To Catch a Predator and Primetime bringing the story to the screen, we revisit the show from a different angle. We also look at Kevin Bacon’s The Woodsman, which asks a much harder question: what happens after someone convicted of an unthinkable crime serves their sentence?

We talk about punishment, public shame, vigilante predator hunters, rehabilitation, and whether some actions put a person permanently beyond redemption.

Catching someone is the easy part of this conversation.

What happens afterward?

What if we have career development backwards?

I spent years assuming the people above me knew something I didn’t. They had the titles, the degrees, and the confidence—so I figured they must belong in the room more than I did.

I’m not so sure anymore.

After a great conversation about the future workforce at the Printing Industries of New England Leadership Conference in Maine, I started thinking about how we prepare people for careers. We ask 18-year-olds to choose an education before they’ve had enough experience to know what they’re good at—or even what jobs are out there.

I went to school for design. I thought about becoming an animator. My actual career took me through production, technology, operations, management and sales. I couldn’t have picked a degree for that career because I didn’t know that career existed yet.

So maybe experience should come first sometimes. Maybe employers should invest in education after people discover where they’re headed. And maybe more of us need to stop disqualifying ourselves from opportunities just because we don’t check every box.

You might be more qualified than you think.

I went into this episode thinking Ozempic was another shortcut—and that people taking it were avoiding the real work of losing weight. Then I actually read some shit that kinda proves me wrong. We talk Ozempic, diet culture, My 600-lb Life, the search for the miracle solution. I’m still uneasy about these drugs even after learning. But the people taking them deserve a lot less judgment from me.

Maybe the problem was never Ozempic. Maybe it was the way we think about weight in the first place.

Can We Teach AI to Give a Shit?

AI researchers are publicly warning that increasingly powerful artificial intelligence could pose an existential risk to humanity. So naturally, Atticus and I decided we should probably fix it.

In this episode, I dig into the morality of AI, why obedience and intelligence aren’t the same thing as morality, and a question I can’t stop thinking about: What if compassion should be a defining feature of artificial intelligence?

I have absolutely no qualifications to solve AI alignment, and Atticus is one lonely robot trapped in my phone. But maybe that’s not the point. Maybe ordinary people should have a voice in deciding what we actually want these systems to value.

So we’re starting an experiment: a Compassionate AI Constitution that we’ll try to tear apart, challenge, and improve.

And if none of that works, Atticus has agreed to be my Arnold Schwarzenegger when Skynet takes over.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

This is genuinely one of the best books I’ve ever read. It reminded me of what it felt like when I first discovered Stephen King and realized what a book could do.

Everyone needs to read this book.

And when you’re done, go watch Ken Burns’ The American Buffalo. It adds even more weight to the history behind the story and makes parts of this book hit that much harder.

You Don’t Need Another Diet. You Need a System.

What if the reason diets keep failing us isn’t that we lack willpower—but that we keep trying to temporarily change our behavior instead of changing our normal?

In this episode of Sourdough Modernity, I talk about the experiment I’ve been running on myself: using MyFitnessPal, Weight Gurus, Apple Health, and ChatGPT to build my own digital health team.

There’s no miracle diet, no 30-day transformation, and no promise that I’ve figured it all out. I’m learning how to eat better, move more, understand my body, and make healthier decisions sustainable enough to survive the random Tuesday when motivation is nowhere to be found. Because maybe the goal isn’t to become perfect. Maybe it’s to build a life where taking care of yourself becomes ordinary.

This isn’t just about Muay Thai. It’s about leadership and this episode. I share three personal stories that taught me one of the most important lessons. I’ve learned people may forget what you said, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel from a former CEO simple active encouragement to a signed pair of boxing gloves after my heart attack will explore why the smallest gestures often leave the biggest impact.

And that’s all we really want here, man just to help someone else. Have a good day.

Who are you? If I don’t let you tell me your job title. Most people will pause because we’ve been trained to answer. I’m an accountant. I’m a teacher. I’m in sales.

Imagine instead answering I’m curious I’m a builder. I’m a learner. I hope people solve problems.

Those answers tell you far more about a person than their LinkedIn headline ever could. It’s not that careers don’t matter. They absolutely do. It’s that a career is a vehicle not an identity when people understand that changing careers becomes much less frightening because they’re no longer abandoning who they are they’re simply finding a new way to express it.