We are watching AI slide from “tool” into “identity upgrade.” And when that happens, we do what humans always do. We other each other, we get addicted to output, and we start confusing speed with meaning.In this episode, we unpack three flavors of productivity, output, outcome, and life. We talk about why time savings often get eaten by validation, rework, and inflated expectations. We look at what the research actually shows, including writing tasks completed significantly faster with higher quality, and customer support gains that disproportionately help newer workers.Then we get practical. You’ll get simple boundaries to test, a few low stakes experiments, and one big question to take into the week.Also yes, we talk about the haunted look in our eyes. Because we have all seen it.

From ice storms in Appalachia to record-heat in Australia, it feels like we are all getting different weather, different news, different incentives, and different definitions of “right.” After the World Economic Forum headlines and the algorithmic hot-take buffet, we land on the real question.How do we price, hire, pay, market, and sell ethically when ethics are cultural, contextual, and constantly contested?In this episode, we build a simple, usable system for directive decisions that do not require certainty. We draw the red line (what we will not do), drop the anchor line (what we will always do), and create a flex line (what we can adjust without betraying ourselves). Then we turn values into “North Star coordinates” by naming what each choice costs and what it protects.

We’re in another biblical weather event, trees down, outages, and somehow businesses are still expected to run like nothing is happening. So today we’re talking about the thing under the thing.

What is “fair” anymore. Fair pay. Fair PTO. Fair expectations. Fair work ethic. Fairness as a feeling, fairness as a policy, fairness as the story we tell ourselves when we’re scared.

This is not “boss bad, worker good” or “workers lazy, bosses saints.” The binaries are dead. What’s left is the exchange.

In this episode, I’ll give you a simple framework to define the deal, revisit it regularly, and stop letting invisible rules create resentment, water-cooler politics, and burnout culture.

Here it is. The book that started the whole series.

We grew up thinking The Lord of the Rings was about heroes, villains, and epic battles. Turns out, it’s actually about why every “efficient,” “necessary,” “just this once” solution eventually eats your soul.

In this final episode of the year, we walk with Tolkien through war, bureaucracy, technocrats in wizard robes, and the quiet danger of believing power can be handled cleanly by the right people. We talk about why domination doesn’t start with cruelty, why certainty is more seductive than evil, why Frodo had to fail, why Sam is the real blueprint, and why the story doesn’t end when the ring is destroyed.