Keep Going

<p>Some talks stick under your skin. This one did.</p><p>On this week’s Keep Going I sat down with <a target="_blank" href="https://law.utexas.edu/faculty/mechele-dickerson/">Mechele Dickerson</a>, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. Her new book is called “<a target="_blank" href="https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-middle-class-new-deal/paper">The Middle Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility in the American Dream</a>.” It comes out in January 2026.</p><p>I picked up the pitch because I have the same nagging feeling everyone else has. The middle class we grew up hearing about feels thin now. Like an old photograph in a cracked frame.</p><p>Mechele has spent more than a decade trying to write this book. That part alone makes her a good guest for a show about success and failure.</p><p>She started years ago with a book on homeownership. While she worked on that, she kept seeing a larger pattern. Families were not just locked out of houses. They were locked out of everything we used to connect with a stable life. She saw people who made a decent wage yet could not do basic “middle class” things without strain.</p><p>So she built a bigger project. She sold the first version of the book to a press. The idea was clear. It is harder than ever for lower and middle income people to become and stay middle class. It is even harder if you are not white. Then the world started shifting under her feet.</p><p>The 2016 election hit. Commentators suddenly cared about “middle class anger” and “anxiety.” She did not buy the story as it was told, but she knew she had to respond to it. So she rewrote the book to fit that moment.</p><p>Then 2020 arrived. A pandemic tore through the same families she had been studying. You cannot write about money, housing, and work in this country and ignore those years. She rewrote again. That second rewrite blew up. Reviewers tore it apart. The publisher walked away. A decade of work, gone in one email.</p><p>This is the point where many people quietly give up. Mechele did something different. She took the hit, walked away for a season, enjoyed Thanksgiving and Christmas, then came back and started from page one. A third draft. New press. New title. Same core idea.</p><p>That alone is a lesson. Sometimes the work is right and the timing is wrong. Sometimes you are right and the gatekeeper is wrong. You rest. You come back. You keep going.</p><p>The rest of the talk dug into what “middle class” even means. Mechele uses a simple income band, roughly seventy five to one hundred thirty thousand dollars a year. She picked it for a practical reason. It is the range many universities use when they hand out tuition breaks to families they see as “middle income.” It also adjusts over time, which matters.</p><p>She is quick to note that income does not land the same in each place. That money looks one way in Abilene, Texas, and another in Austin. Still, the markers are familiar. A home you can afford. A job with health care and some sort of retirement plan. The ability to send your kids to college without wrecking your own future. Maybe a bit put aside for shocks.</p><p>Her bluntest point is simple. We did not arrive here by magic. The old middle class was built by policy. The GI Bill sent people like my dad to college. New mortgage rules turned owning a house from a rich person’s trick into something workers could reach. Employers built health and pension plans when they could not raise wages during the war.</p><p>We treat those pieces as background now. They are not. They were choices. They could be made again in new forms.</p><p>Instead, college costs have climbed far faster than inflation since the eighties. Need blind admission is fading. “Merit” scholarships tilt money toward kids from richer families who look good on paper. Employers use a bachelor’s degree as a filter, so a diploma has become a ticket to even knock on the door.</p><p>On housing, the ladder keeps moving up. The average age for first time homebuyers is rising. People float the idea of fifty year mortgages, which Mechele, quite correctly, calls “rent” with different branding. If you buy at forty and pay for fifty years, do the math.</p><p>She walked through how zoning locks people out. Large minimum lot sizes. Rules that make it hard to put up multifamily units. Homeowners’ associations that wrap it all in “protecting values” while making sure cheaper units never appear. At city level, at state level, we have built a system that slowly pushes normal families away from the places where opportunity sits.</p><p>I pushed the conversation toward entrepreneurship, because the show often goes there. For a lot of kids, the fantasy now is that a startup will be their scratch off. You cannot count on a steady wage to get the markers. So you dream of building the next app, or site, or whatever, to leap straight over the grind.</p><p>She agreed with the feeling, but brought it back to ground. Starting a business takes capital. Capital comes from family wealth, or from a house you can borrow against, or from a system that lends to people with no cushion. If your parents do not have money and you do not own a home, you are playing with thinner odds. That does not mean you should never try. It does mean we should be honest about the risk.</p><p>Near the end I told a story about my own family. My grandparents in Ohio, steel town on the edge of West Virginia. They had a house. They had food on the table. My cousins had pools, big televisions, a couple of cars in the drive. All on a worker’s paycheck or a small business. Nothing lavish. Just steady.</p><p>Standing in modern Chicago or New York, you do not feel that world anymore. The core feels like a stage set for the very rich. Everyone else services it from the outside.</p><p>So I asked the question out loud. Can we go back. Or is that period gone for good.</p><p>Her answer was measured. We cannot rewind time. But we can recognize that the old middle class was a choice. It came from rules and programs that treated stability as a public goal. We can make new choices. Tighter rules around predatory loans. Better ways to fund college so a degree is not a lifetime chain. Zoning that lets builders put up real housing, not just luxury towers and big lots.</p><p>None of this is easy. None of it fits on a bumper sticker. It is easier to bark about culture than to rework tax codes or housing law. That is why very little changes. But the path is not mysterious. We have done it before.</p><p>As we wrapped, she circled back to why she kept going with the book. She is not writing for one side. She wants people in both parties to see that a strong middle class is not just a feel good phrase. It is the base of a stable country. It is who buys the toaster ovens, the cars, the fridges. It is who keeps the lights on in the real economy.</p><p>For me, this conversation lit up a vague anger I have carried since walking those polished streets in big cities. The feeling that something is off, that the store window that used to be for everyone is now for a tiny slice at the top. Mechele’s work gives that feeling names and numbers and a path forward.</p><p>Her book is “<a target="_blank" href="https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-middle-class-new-deal/paper">The Middle Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility in the American Dream</a>.” It lands in January 2026. When it does, I think it will give a lot of people language for what they see and cannot quite explain.</p><p>In the meantime, the lesson is simple and personal. If she can drag a book through three full rewrites, one public rejection, and a changing world, the rest of us can take one more swing at whatever hard thing is sitting on our desk.</p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_2">www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe</a>

<p>Most people meet plant cell culture in the grocery store without knowing it. You see it in the perfect row of blueberries, the identical bananas, the white orchids that look the same every single year. You do not see the lab bench and the flask behind them.</p><p>On The Innovators, I talked with Yoni Kalin, CEO of <a target="_blank" href="https://plantcelltechnology.com">Plant Cell Technology</a>, about the quiet infrastructure under all of that. His company has been working in plant tissue culture since 1993. What started as a small family business selling “pet plants” in jars has grown into a Utah based factory, a catalog of more than 500 products, and a bridge between plants, animal cells, fungi, and the people who work with them.</p><p>At the core, Plant Cell Technology makes the media and tools that keep cells alive and dividing. In the plant world that means the gel or liquid that feeds tiny cuttings, the nutrients that turn one node into a full clone. In the animal world that means the formulas that keep mammalian cells healthy in dishes and flasks. You can think of them as the food and basic kit that every lab needs before any vaccine or seedling can exist.</p><p>For the first thirty years they stayed in the plant lane. Last year they bought a manufacturing facility and stepped into mammalian cell culture. Now they blend media for human, animal, and insect cells as well. That move puts them inside the engine room of pharma and biotech, where the same cell lines are used for decades to test drugs and make biologic medicines.</p><p>Yoni gave a simple example. CHO cells, Chinese hamster ovary cells, have been in use since the middle of the last century. The original cells came from one animal. That line has been split and expanded for more than eighty years. Those cells are a standard test bed. If you want to grow a protein drug or check how something behaves, you feed those cells and watch. That kind of work used to mean a lot of live animal testing. The more you can do in culture, the less you have to do in a whole animal.</p><p>Plant cell culture is less visible but just as important. Instead of planting a seed and accepting whatever mix of traits comes back, growers take a cutting from a known plant, usually a meristem or small node, and regrow it in sterile media. The result is an exact clone of the parent. Every plant you make that way has the same genetics and the same performance.</p><p>If you are a berry grower, that consistency matters. It is the reason the box of blueberries you pick up in January tastes like the one you bought in July. If you are a greenhouse operator selling fancy houseplants, it means you can produce a thousand copies of the one pink variegated plant everyone wants instead of hoping more seeds turn out the same way. In orchards, forests, and replanting projects, it means you can fill a hillside with trees that all have the traits you need for that climate.</p><p>It is also the reason you can walk into a store like Trader Joe’s or Home Depot and see the same orchid color and shape every year. Orchid seeds are rough to work with. Cloning them in tissue culture lets growers keep exact copies of the best lines in circulation.</p><p>Plant Cell Technology sits in that supply chain as a “picks and shovels” vendor, to borrow Yoni’s phrase. They do not sell the fruit or the orchids. They sell the media, the bioreactors, the lab gear, and the training that lets growers and researchers do the work.</p><p>That education piece is important and it is where things get interesting outside the pure lab. Until a few years ago, if you wanted to learn plant tissue culture, you went to a university or a big corporate lab. You paid tuition or you got hired. Everyone else was on the outside.</p><p>Around 2020, while people were learning to bake sourdough and dance on short videos, Plant Cell Technology started posting long form instructional content. They now have hundreds of free videos that cover the basics, from aseptic technique to plant physiology to step by step protocols for setting up a small lab. On top of that they run in person and online master classes that focus on practical scale, not just textbook purity. Their goal is to teach you how to produce ten million banana plants, not just how to pass a midterm.</p><p>That effort has pulled in a new crowd, hobbyists and small entrepreneurs who want to clone rare plants at home. Anyone who has wandered into a trendy plant shop and seen a single cutting selling for forty or fifty dollars knows the appeal. With basic gear, a clean space, and the right media, you can take a small piece of that plant and grow hundreds of copies. That can feed a side business or just fill your home with green.</p><p>The same idea applies to fungi. Mycology is booming, and tissue culture is a good way to preserve and expand mycelium strains. It is easier in some ways, since many fungal media formulas are simple, often just agar and sugar. Yoni sees that as a gateway for people who might later move into more complex plant or mammalian work.</p><p>Behind the scenes, the company is pushing on automation. Tissue culture has been labor heavy for decades. A tech sits at a clean bench, cuts, transfers, seals jars, and repeats. That is slow and expensive.</p><p>Plant Cell Technology’s answer is a low cost bioreactor they call the BioCoupler, paired with an automated system called BioTilt. Instead of growing plantlets on gel in jars, they suspend plant cells or tiny explants in liquid and cycle them through soaking and draining. Soak, let them breathe, soak again. That simple rhythm gives the plant material full contact with nutrients, then air, which speeds up growth. Yoni says they see multiplication rates many times higher than on static gel media.</p><p>The cost drops too. Gel agents like agar and gellan gum are not cheap. A single kilogram can run close to a couple hundred dollars. A liquid system needs less of that. The BioTilt handles timing and immersion automatically. Sensors and software can watch the process, adjust schedules, and log data in a way a human tech with a clipboard cannot match.</p><p>The vision is clear. Larger labs and commercial houses will bring in robotics that can cut and move plant material. Bioreactors will handle the growth phase. AI systems will watch sensors, track contamination, and refine conditions. That kind of setup already exists at the very high end. Yoni wants to drag it into the middle of the market and make it less exotic.</p><p>When I asked him if this was the future of agriculture, he pushed back a bit. This is the present, he said. Seeds are not going away. Fields and barns are not going away. What he sees coming is a stack. At the bottom, a tissue culture lab where farmers keep their own genetics and do their own breeding. Above that, nursery space. Above that, growing and harvest.</p><p>Vertical farming has been a buzzword for a while. Tissue culture gives it teeth. You can stack genetics in a small lab that would need vast acreage outside. You can build local food systems that rely less on long chains of seed companies and middlemen. You can give farmers some control over the varieties they plant, instead of locking them into sterile seed contracts that keep them dependent.</p><p>Plant Cell Technology has moved a long way from a single “pet plant” in a jar. Under Yoni’s leadership, the company has turned into a small ecosystem, part manufacturer, part educator, part guide into a field that is usually hidden behind white coats and controlled access doors.</p><p>If you are a researcher who needs media, a grower who wants to scale, or a curious person who just wants to clone a favorite houseplant instead of buying three more, their site at plantcelltechnology.com is a place to start. The tools that shape our food and forests are no longer reserved for the biggest labs. They are slowly moving into reach, one flask at a time.</p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_2">www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe</a>

<p>I am writing this with an <a target="_blank" href="https://www.audigolabs.com/?srsltid=AfmBOors1xEPetzyLAKj6TYT7o-heu0bnd8BhYVpDMcTETn23NLQqvgS">Audigo</a> mic sitting next to a hulking broadcast preamp on my desk. The old rig is a nest of cables and knobs. The Audigo is a small square that looks like it fell out of the future and landed in my hand. That contrast is the whole story.</p><p>On this episode of Keep Going I talked with <a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/armen-nazarian/">Armen Nazarian</a>, founder and CEO of Audigo. He is a drummer who took a long detour through engineering and Tesla before circling back to sound. His company makes a small wireless mic and app that lets musicians record real multitrack audio straight to their phones without feeling like they are engineering a studio every time they press record.</p><p>If you grew up on tape decks and four tracks, the promise of the phone era was simple. Recording would get easier. Sharing would get easier. What Armen found when he came back to music was that a lot of the gear companies had not moved very far. The boxes looked nicer, the apps were shinier, but the basic problem was the same. If you were a musician and you wanted decent sound, you needed a pile of equipment and spare hours to set it up.</p><p></p><p></p><p>At Tesla, his job was to sit in the middle of hardware and software and make them feel like one thing. He saw what happens when one team owns the whole stack. The car feels simple even when the system under it is anything but. That experience ruined him for lazy product work. When he picked up a drumstick again and tried to record, he could not stop thinking about the gap. We have supercomputers in our pockets and yet most people still sound like they are playing in the bottom of a well.</p><p>So he did the mad thing. He walked away from a great job at one of the most famous companies on earth and started a tiny hardware company in 2020, which is about as bad as a calendar can get for that move. Chip shortages. Travel bans. Factories with shutdowns you could not predict. Parts with twelve week lead times suddenly slipping to sixty five.</p><p>Most of us would have taken that as a sign from God to go back to work on electric cars.</p><p>Instead, Armen and his small crew started building the first hundred units by hand. They would write code and design boards during the day, then sit and assemble devices at night. Solder, test, pack, repeat. They did not have the luxury of flying to Shenzhen and living on the factory floor. That meant they had to understand every part of their own build before they could trust anyone else with it.</p><p>Hardware is hard in a very literal way. If a component changes, you cannot ship a patch. If a factory shuts down, your product line stops. Investors know this. When Armen started raising money, he was doing it at a time when everyone in venture still had the ghost of Juicero in their minds. Add to that the normal suspicion of solo founders and you have a nice little wall in front of you.</p><p>His Tesla badge helped a bit. It told people he knew what a production line looked like and that he had lived through at least one intense product culture. It did not make money fall from the sky. He still had to convince people that a small box with some mics in it was worth taking seriously.</p><p>Before he left Tesla he did something I respect a lot. He took a week off, told people he was going on an international trip, and stayed home. He had a short list of ideas. He gave each one a full day. He looked at cost, market, and his own stomach. Could he live with this idea for ten years. Could he wake up every day and care about it.</p><p>Most people skip that part. They leave out of rage or boredom and then try to figure it out on the fly. He treated that week like a tiny private lab. No slides. No pitch deck. Just him, a notebook, and the question of where to spend the next decade of his life. Audigo is the one that would not let go.</p><p>He also reframed the risk in a way I wish more people would. Around him, at Tesla, people were quitting to go to business school or grad school. They were about to drop a small house worth of money on an education and walk away from a salary for two years. He looked at that and thought, I could do the same thing and call it a startup. No salary, but no tuition either. Two years of hard learning that no case study could match.</p><p>That is how you move from theory to action. You do not pretend the risk is small. You set it beside other risks you have already accepted and see it in scale.</p><p>What I like most about Audigo is not some spec sheet. It is what it does to the slope between idea and first take. Most musicians are already drowning in gear. They have pedals, interfaces, cables, and mics that live in drawers and crates. Every extra step between them and the record button is a chance to give up and scroll instead.</p><p>Armen built for two very different people. On one side there are signed artists who can fly to any studio they want. They use Audigo because it fits in a pocket and lets them grab song ideas, backstage runs, and live clips without hauling a rig. On the other side there are people in their seventies who have played their whole lives and never once recorded a proper track. For them, this is the first time their voice or guitar sounds like it does in the room.</p><p>Those are very different use cases. The thread is the same. Less friction. Less shame over bad phone audio when you post. More chances to actually hear yourself and send that sound out.</p><p>The company is not done of course. They are rolling out an Android app now and a web experience next, so people can log in from a browser, pull up projects, and share them. You can feel where this goes. A small piece of hardware and a cloud that holds your sketches, takes, and mixes, whether you are on a phone, a laptop, or in a van on tour.</p><p>I asked if I should throw out my big Electro Voice setup and live on this thing alone. He laughed and gave the honest answer. Use it more. See where it fits. Tell us what breaks. The product today is tuned for music, not talk radio. Podcasting is on the horizon, not the core yet.</p><p>That kind of answer is rare. Most founders will tell you their thing replaces everything you own and will also fix your marriage and your sleep. Armen is more careful. They picked a lane, musicians, and they are staying in it long enough to get the details right.</p><p>So what does all this mean for you if you are stuck in a big company with an idea in your pocket.</p><p>The first lesson is boring. Give your idea actual time. Not ten minutes between meetings. Take a real block of days. Work through the numbers and the story and your own limits. Some ideas are fun to talk about and horrible to live with.</p><p>The second lesson is that “safety” is often just a story you tell yourself. The people you see going back to school are taking a huge financial swing. You just do not flinch because the path is familiar. Starting something of your own feels foolish, but the math is often not that different.</p><p>The third is that the hardest years are the ones no one claps for. No audience sees you sitting in a room, hand building the first hundred units of anything, wondering if the next part shortage is going to kill you. That is the part of “keep going” that this show is really about. Staying with the work when the timing is bad, the market is cold, and your old job looks very warm and safe in the rearview mirror.</p><p>Audigo will live or die on the same thing every creative tool lives or dies on. Does it actually help people make more work they care about. From what I have seen, it does. It turns social clips from a chore into a quick side effect of playing. It gives shy players a way to hear themselves without booking a studio. It gives pros a way to stay honest when the hotel room starts to feel like a cage.</p><p>If you are holding an idea that keeps tapping you on the shoulder, take a page from Armen. Step back from the noise. Study it like an engineer. Feel it like a musician. Give it a week of real thought. Then, if it still will not leave you alone, accept that there is no perfect time, only the time you have right now, and keep going.</p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_2">www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe</a>

<p></p><p>My guest is <a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sudheenair/">Sudheesh Nair,</a> co-founder and CEO of <a target="_blank" href="https://www.tinyfish.ai">Tinyfish</a>. He has done this before. Early at Nutanix through IPO. Then six years running ThoughtSpot. He left both without drama. Not because of ego or boredom. Because the rooms filled with the same talks about price and discount. Because he wanted to build again, from first principles, and be accountable as the one in the chair.</p><p>Tinyfish is an AI shop by label, but the pitch is plain. Make the web act like a person with a browser, at scale, and do work that matters to a customer. Do not sell buzzwords. Sell outcomes. On their site the story is a small hotel in rural Japan, eight rooms, not wired into any fancy API. An agent signs in like a human, checks dates and room types, reads the price and availability, and updates Google Hotels so the listing shows live numbers, not “call for rate.” The hotel changes nothing. Google shows richer results. A traveler gets a real choice. That is the point. Not the model size. Not the paper count. A change you can see.</p><p>We talked about leaving public companies. He said it straight. Loyalty is not a slogan. A company is a set of contracts, with investors, customers, and employees. You should fight for the mission while you are in the seat. You should also remember who picks you up when you fall. Family. We forget that when things go well. We dump on them when things go bad. If you want to build a place worth working at, draw clean lines, hold purpose and professionalism together, and be all in, until you are not.</p><p>What drives him now is less shine, more fit. Call it Ikigai if you like. What you are good at. What pays. What the world needs. Cut the romance. Cut the cosplay. Be honest about your limits. Then pick the work where your strengths meet a real need, and grow the pie so others win with you.</p><p>We also covered the noise around AI. Every site sings the same chorus. He refuses to sell that. The team tells a clear story instead. His co-founders make sense of that stance. Keith was a Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reporter, Pulitzer finalist on Hong Kong. Shu Hao is a deep browser thinker. One believes in lowering barriers to information. The other believes the browser can be a bridge, not a wall. Sudheesh comes from analytics and knows this truth, fresh data starts on the open web, but most stacks mangle it before it’s useful. So they send agents to do the reading, sort the signal, and return only what helps. Less plumbing. More proof.</p><p>Under it all sits a worry I share. We moved from blue links to feeds to one answer in a chat box. Power pools at the top. If we let that stand, the best coffee or the best small hotel stays invisible, not for lack of quality, but for lack of API glue and ad spend. An outcome-first web is one answer. Do the task. Show the result. Lift the tiny fish, not only the whales.</p><p>Hire for that mindset. He likes journalists for a reason. Curiosity. Hard questions. Pattern sense. In a field this young, certainty is a tell. The honest posture is study and ship.</p><p>If you want to see the idea land, go to <a target="_blank" href="https://www.tinyfish.ai">tinyfish.ai</a> and look at the hotel case. Eight rooms, now visible. Simple, not easy. The kind of fix that bends the web a little closer to fair.</p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_2">www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe</a>

<p>I recorded this episode in an old hoodie, unshaven, feeling more “survival mode” than “thriving.” Which is exactly why I wanted to talk to <a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonrosemberg/">Jon Rosemberg</a>.</p><p>Jon is the co-founder of Anther and the CEO of <a target="_blank" href="https://strongpointgroup.ca">Strongpoint Group</a>. He also has a background in positive psychology and a new book coming out, <a target="_blank" href="https://amzn.to/3K7wLvd">A Guide to Thriving</a>, from Wiley on November 25. On paper he is the kind of person my inner cynic wants to roll its eyes at. In reality, he is someone who has thought very hard about how to keep going when the world feels like it is sliding sideways.</p><p>We started with a simple point. If you and I were living a hundred years ago, there is a good chance we would already be dead. No antibiotics. No clean water on demand. No modern surgery. No cheap food from the supermarket. By almost every hard metric, life expectancy, infant mortality, access to education, we are in a far better spot than our grandparents.</p><p>Jon calls this a kind of golden age. I pushed back with a Matrix joke, because of course I did. But he is not naive about it. His argument is that we confuse the state of the world with the state of our feeds. We stare at screens that are tuned to keep us twitchy and outraged, and we start to believe that this is the full story.</p><p>He gave a small, sharp example. If you buy all your clothes on Amazon and Amazon only shows you three types of shirts, you live in a world of three shirts. You feel like you are choosing, but someone else quietly narrowed the menu. That is what he means by a loss of agency. We are letting algorithms make the first cut on our options, then telling ourselves we are free.</p><p>Agency is the core of his book. Not in the motivational poster sense. In a very specific way. Agency, the way he defines it, is the capacity to make an intentional choice, backed by a real belief that the choice matters, that it will have an effect on your life and the people around you.</p><p>I asked him the question that keeps coming up on this show. What about the project manager who gets replaced by an AI agent. What about the media worker whose “email job” is now a prompt in a chatbot. Do you tell that person to open a bakery, move to the country, become a monk.</p><p>He refused the easy answer. <strong>Instead he walked through a simple framework he uses, AIR, which stands for awareness, inquiry, and reframe.</strong></p><p>Awareness is the first step. When you get fired, the only thing you can see is the disaster in front of you. He used a Rubik’s Cube as a prop during our talk. When it is right up against your eye, all you see is one little red square. Awareness is the act of moving it away just enough to see that there is a whole cube there. More colors. More faces. More moves than you first thought.</p><p>Inquiry is the second step. That is where you start to turn the cube. You test ideas. You ask what skills you really have, who is in your network, what resources you can use. You look for more than one path out of the mess. Not fantasies. Actual options.</p><p>Reframe is the third step. It is not magic. It does not make the pain go away. It is the moment where you admit that your story is not “my life is over because I lost this job.” It becomes something closer to “this is a hard change, and here are three real things I can try next.” That shift sounds small on the page. In practice it is the difference between being frozen and taking a step.</p><p>This is where AI enters the conversation in a serious way. We are in a very strange time. You can feel the temptation inside big companies. Fire the person making two hundred and fifty grand. Hire a vendor. Drop in an AI system. Call it innovation. Cash the savings.</p><p>Jon does not pretend to have a script for the next five years. He compared AI to fire. It will be used for good things and for stupid, cruel things. But he pointed to one solid data point. Companies that treat employee well-being as a real priority tend to outperform the ones that do not. Markets are not kind, yet even in that cold space, looking after people seems to pay off.</p><p>None of that solves the feeling a lot of us have right now. We are living longer. We have more calories, more streaming shows, more everything. And at the same time, depression and anxiety are everywhere. The basic needs are met, and yet we feel like we are coming apart.</p><p>His answer there is not new, but it is backed by a lot of research. Social connection shifts almost every health outcome we care about. Live longer. Less heart disease. Lower risk of stroke. Better immune response. Lower odds of dementia. You could describe it as the closest thing we have to a real life “miracle drug” that is free.</p><p>So what do you do with that if you are stuck in a small apartment in a big city, working a job you are scared to lose, scrolling yourself numb at night. You do not fix it in one sweep. You do not suddenly find a tribe by Tuesday. You start with one intentional move toward another human. A regular coffee with one friend. A club. A class. A weekly call with someone who is not part of your household. It sounds tiny. It is not.</p><p>We also talked about small towns, where you see the same faces every day and still feel alone because everyone is on their phones. He kept returning to the same word. Choice. Not in a “you can do anything if you try” way. In a quieter way. You can choose to put the phone down for an hour and talk to someone. You can choose to ask for help. You can choose to listen.</p><p>He brought up Viktor Frankl, who wrote <a target="_blank" href="https://amzn.to/4oI3ZjL">Man’s Search for Meaning</a> after surviving the camps. Frankl’s claim was stark. Even in terrible conditions, there was still one last human freedom, the ability to choose how to respond inwardly. Jon is careful here. Some people really do not have options, because of health, war, or poverty. But many of us have more room than we think, and we convince ourselves we have none.</p><p>That is really the heart of this episode for me. Keep Going is a podcast about success and failure, but it is really about this thin strip between the two, the place where you decide to take one more step or not. Jon’s work is about widening that strip. Creating a bit more space between “everything is ruined” and “I have at least one move.”</p><p>If you want to go deeper into his ideas, his book is called <a target="_blank" href="https://amzn.to/3K7wLvd">A Guide to Thriving</a>. It is split into small sections so you can chew on one topic without committing to a big reading project.</p><p>In the meantime, if today feels like survival mode, try AIR. Notice what is actually happening. Ask a few hard questions about your options. See if you can tell yourself a slightly different story about where you are and what comes next. It will not fix the world. It might help you keep going long enough to see the next door that opens.</p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_2">www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe</a>