In this episode, we sit down with Victor Varnado, a veteran comedian and entrepreneur who's built a thriving business at the intersection of comedy, content creation, and AI technology. Victor shares his unique journey from comedy to entrepreneurship, revealing the psychological principles behind great comedy and how he's leveraged online platforms to scale his career beyond traditional comedy clubs.

We dive into Victor's creative process, his approach to online content for scaling his reach, and how he's using AI to build innovative storytelling apps. Victor also unveils his most exciting experiment: the Worldwide High Score League, a global gaming competition designed to be accessible to players anywhere in the world.

About Victor

Victor is a New Yorker cartoonist, filmmaker, and has performed as an award-winning comedian on Conan O'Brien and Jimmy Kimmel Live, with writing credits for Marvel, Vice, and Salon.

Victor was awarded an NSF grant for his accessibility technology and is now shaking up creative AI with his tool, the Writing Coach (inside Magic Bookifier), which has made a major difference for first-time authors and educators. He’s currently collaborating with Rising Tide Educators on BrightWrite, an educational initiative bringing these tools to neurodivergent students.

His approach to blending humor, empathy, and technical creativity is rare, and his studio, Supreme Robot, reaches 25,000+ creators and comedy fans.

Connect with Victor:

• Victor’s Instagram: instagram.com/robotosupremo
• Supreme Robot (Victor's Company): supremerobot.com
• Worldwide High Score League: worldwidehighscore.com

Key Topics Discussed

Comedy & Creativity

• The psychology of laughter and the "ABD joke" structure
• Why the best jokes require audience participation in the punchline
• Overcoming social anxiety while performing on stage
• The difference between talking about comedy vs. doing comedy

Business & Content Strategy

• Why Victor stopped doing live shows unless they are recorded
• The scalability advantage of online content vs. live performances
• How one 2-minute clip can reach 700,000+ views across platforms
• Balancing data-driven decisions with creative authenticity
• The danger of chasing the algorithm vs. following your passion

Career Inflection Points

• How hiring the right person increased the number of meetings with key decision-makers
• Going from one high-value meeting every 6 months to multiple per week
• The importance of having a high conversion rate with decision-makers

AI & Technology

• Building storytelling apps that guide users through creative processes
• Creating a screenplay writing app that teaches proper script structure
• The shift from coding to "thinking" and architecture roles in the AI era
• Model-agnostic approach: focusing on how to use AI rather than which model
• The critical skill of asking AI the right questions
• The "42 answer" from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy applied to AI prompts

The Worldwide High Score League

• Creating a truly global, accessible gaming competition
• Designing for web browsers to ensure access for players with less powerful devices
• Building fair competition infrastructure with centralized score tracking
• Plans for expanding the arcade with more games and daily prizes

Notable Quotes

• "The thing I like about doing comedy the most is being funny and talking about comedy is not super funny at all."
• "If I just put out recordings of myself performing, way more people in the industry see me, and I also could pick and choose what they see."
• "It's gotta be a combination of both. Like what do you love and what is working? Where's the Venn diagram where that works best?"
• "The job was never coding. It was thinking."
• "All you have to do is tell AI what you want and then say to AI 'What information do you need from me so that you can help me with that?'"

In this episode, we explore the hidden cost of attributing your struggles to external forces, such as a difficult boss, a tough economy, or past parental decisions. While your observations about these unfair constraints may be factually correct, using them to explain your situation effectively hands control of your life over to them, forcing you to wait for the world to change before you can make progress. We discuss how this dynamic creates a dependency structure where specific people and circumstances become the gatekeepers of your success, leaving you powerless until they behave differently.

Discover how shifting your mindset from blame to responsibility allows you to reclaim your agency and multiply your available options. We examine why taking responsibility is not about accepting fault for your circumstances, but rather about identifying the actionable levers you can pull to move forward from your current position. Tune in to learn how to stop acting as a passenger waiting for perfect conditions and start navigating your reality by asking the empowering question: 'what can I do about this?'.

Read the original essay on ⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠.

Sign up as a podcast guest ⁠⁠here⁠⁠.

In this episode, we explore the mental trap of turning behavioural challenges, like procrastination, into character flaws. We discuss the common spiral that occurs when we judge our own emotions against an imagined standard of competence, often adding a layer of shame or frustration on top of our original feelings. By identifying as our emotions when thinking "I am an anxious person" rather than "I am experiencing anxiety", we risk turning temporary states into permanent identity defects.

We then break down the crucial shift from acting as a "Judge" to becoming a "Scientist" of your own nervous system. While a Judge asks what is wrong with you for feeling a certain way, a Scientist views emotions as data, asking simply what the feeling is responding to. Listeners will learn why mere self-awareness is often insufficient for change and how to move from passive acceptance to active experimentation to understand and regulate their triggers.

Read the original essay on ⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠.

Sign up as a podcast guest ⁠⁠here⁠⁠.

Christopher Zdenek is an architect of consciousness, author, and founder of Soma Ergonomics. With a background in architecture that led him from building design to urban planning and ultimately to understanding human consciousness itself, Christopher has developed a comprehensive framework for understanding human behavior, cultural evolution, and the driving forces of history. His academic paper "The Fractal Nature of Consciousness, The Evolution of the 'Global Human', and The Driving Forces of History" presents a unified theory of human development that explains everything from the rise and fall of empires to individual psychology.

This conversation covers various topics including:

• The fractal nature of consciousness: How self-similar patterns repeat across individual development, cultural evolution, and historical movements
• Critical developmental windows: The two most important periods that shape your "operating system" - perception of separateness (6 months to 3 years) and the cognitive shift (7 to 11 years)
• Developmental stages as cultural memories: Why Aboriginal peoples, Chinese culture, and modern America represent different stages of human consciousness and how to understand them
• The formula for human events: Developmental state + Environmental conditions = Events, and how this explains history, politics, and social change
• Masculine vs. feminine cultures: Understanding East vs. West through the lens of developmental biology and language structure
• Brainwave states and peak performance: How theta, alpha, beta, and delta states affect creativity, decision-making, and accessing subconscious wisdom
• The ground fault interrupt switch: How trauma shuts down feeling as a survival mechanism and leads to maladaptive strategies like narcissism and sociopathologyMetacognition as the key to being human: Why developing the "third-party observer" function is essential for optimal performance, scientific thinking, and emotional regulation
• The most important chart in the world: Understanding the transition from high adolescence to mature self and why every empire in history has failed without making this shift successfully
• Practical tools for development: Vipassana meditation, breathing techniques, brain training methods (Jose Silva), and ergonomic design for optimal consciousness
• People of the Lie: How false selves develop, why defending false reality leads to pathology, and the importance of feeling for empathy and compassion
• Stage theory breakdown: From early childhood (feeling/kinesthetic) through adolescence (self-authorship) to mature integration (second-tier thinking)
• Applications for leaders: Why executive teams with second-tier metacognitive thinking dramatically outperform those at lower developmental stages

Get in touch with Christopher:

• Website: somaergo.com (ergonomic chairs designed for optimal breathing and consciousness)
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlchristopherzdenek/Christopher's paper on the Fractal Nature of Consciousness: https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1043&context=cejournal

Books referenced:

• People of the Lie by M. Scott Peck
• Coming to Our Senses Body & Spirit in the3 Hidden History of the West by Morris Berman
• Taken In (analysis of effect of child rearing styles on the development of adults and American culture and politics)
• The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist (Oxford professor on right/left brain hemispheres)
• The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (1962)
• The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli

Techniques and models discussed:

• Vipassana Meditation (Buddhist mindfulness practice)
• Spiral Dynamics Model as a developmental stage model for humans
• José Silva’s brain training method

Have you ever looked at a couple in a coffee shop and known something was wrong, even though their words were perfectly mundane?. That is because while most of reality is invisible, its effects are always on display, if you know where to look.

In this episode, we explore the concept of "reading reality through reflection". We discuss why direct communication is often unreliable and how the "Mirror Principle" allows you to uncover the truth by observing automatic reactions rather than listening to curated words. Whether you are navigating office politics or entering a new social circle, this episode reveals how to see the invisible systems that actually run the show.

You will learn:

• The Two Conversations: Why every interaction contains both a spoken and an unspoken element, and why automatic responses—like a voice changing when a boss walks by—are the only honest data points.
• Strategic Observation: Why the best approach to a new job or environment is to resist the urge to contribute immediately. Instead, learn why you should "talk half as much" and "watch twice as much" to understand the rules that aren't in the handbook.
• Mapping Power Dynamics: How to identify who holds real authority by watching who people defer to, rather than who holds the official title.
• Reading Transitions: How to spot the truth in the "gaps" between what is stated (e.g., "the project is on track") and what is revealed through body language and tension.
• Comprehension, Not Manipulation: Why reading the room isn't about exploiting others, but about utilizing our natural social instincts to navigate environments successfully.

Read the original essay on ⁠Substack⁠.

Sign up as a podcast guest ⁠here⁠.

Have you ever sat through a meeting where a senior director proposed a flawed idea, and despite knowing it would fail, you stayed quiet because everyone else was nodding along? Your silence wasn’t a lack of courage, it was a perfectly rational calculation within an invisible system.

In this episode, we explore why organisations full of talented, well-meaning individuals frequently produce mediocre results. We unpack the concept of 'strategic interdependence', where your best choice relies entirely on predicting what others will do, often trapping teams in 'bad equilibriums' that nobody actually wants:

• The Hidden Logic of Dysfunction: Why office snacks disappear in a week and shared kitchens stay dirty, not because people are greedy or lazy, but because they are optimising for a game they cannot opt out of.
• The Trap of Good Intentions: Why intelligence does not protect you from bad outcomes, and how the gap between what people want (efficiency, fairness) and what they do is dictated by the structures surrounding them.
• Systemic Solutions: Why telling employees to "try harder" or "care more" is futile. We discuss real structural fixes, such as changing feedback mechanisms or altering how supply allowances work, to make the rational individual choice align with the collective good.

Read the original essay on ⁠Substack⁠.

Sign up as a podcast guest ⁠here⁠.

Have you ever found yourself standing in the kitchen at 7 PM, staring blankly into the fridge or endlessly scrolling through delivery apps, completely paralysed by the sheer number of options?. In today’s episode, we explore the concept of experiential knowledge and why uncertainty is a problem that intense planning cannot solve—it is a problem that only action can resolve.

Join us as we unpack the argument that the "right answer" often only exists on the other side of trying things out. We discuss how shifting from passive analysis to active testing allows you to use pattern recognition to identify what truly energises you and what drains you, replacing abstract theories with concrete signals. By engaging in "small experiments", you can utilise a process of elimination to turn an overwhelming infinite number of choices into a finite, manageable path.

Tune in to discover why "failed" attempts are actually progress rather than wasted time, providing the essential data needed to shrink your pool of possibilities and move forward with confidence.

Read the original essay on Substack.

Sign up as a podcast guest here.

Join us as we explore why real change is the result of persistent action combined with clear thinking, unpacking why good ideas require repetition to truly take root.

We discuss how speaking your goals into existence shapes your mental filters to spot opportunities and how building simple, redundant systems helps you capture the small wins necessary for lasting momentum.

You can also read the original essay on The Adaptable Chameleon substack.

This episode dives into why big ideas often fail when people skip the crucial step of making their first dollar, arguing that only action proves viability and forces you to figure out the entire cycle from idea to payment.

You'll learn how to build unstoppable momentum by creating your own standards, understanding that everything from your resume to a job interview is marketing and sales, and using consistency to accelerate improvement and opportunities through volume and genuine relationship building.

You can read the original essay on The Adaptable Chameleon substack.

Talor Stewart is a licensed architect with over 25 years experience. His book Conscious Home Design (CHD) has hit the #1 best seller list in 7 countries so far. Specializing in single and multi-family homes and intentional communities, he works with clients all over the United States and select places internationally. He also offers a certification program for other designers and architects to learn the CHD method to help their clients apply the life changing principles wherever they are.

This conversation covers various topics including:

• What is conscious home design: A thoughtful approach to shaping your living space to support your well-being, goals, and daily activities, applicable to any home regardless of style, size, or budget
• The body-mind-environment connection: How your surroundings influence you 24/7, and why "environment is stronger than willpower"
• Making any space work for you: Practical ways to implement conscious design principles whether you're renting an apartment or building from scratch
• The hidden shopping list: Important factors most people miss when choosing a home that science shows contribute to happiness and longevity
• Space as the missing ingredient: Why achieving your goals requires not just time and effort, but dedicated physical space
• Efficiency vs. consciousness: The difference between functional design and design that helps you reach your full potential
• The Harvard happiness study: Results from the world's longest study on adult happiness showing relationships as the #1 predictor of life satisfaction and longevity
• Three types of relationships: Understanding giving, receiving, and reciprocal relationships and why balance matters
• Practical bathroom example: Simple, low-cost ways to incorporate relationship-building into everyday spaces using plants, meaningful photos, and thoughtful design
• Setting up for success: How to reduce friction and create "drafting" effects in your home so your environment works for you instead of against you
• The process of working with an architect: What to expect when designing a custom home with conscious design principles

Get in touch with Talor:

Website: https://conscioushomedesign.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ConsciousHomeDesign/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/conscioushomedesign/