Through Another Lens Podcast

1975 In 1975, The Tubes released a song called “What Do You Want From Life?” and answered with a six-minute satirical avalanche: a Ginsu knife, a kewpie doll, a trip to Tahiti, someone else’s wife. The joke was obvious, because none of it was the answer. Fifty years later, I’m still asking the same question, but I wait for a real answer. The Blank I sit down with smart people for a living, the kin...

Mark compiles four decades of personality assessments - from natal charts to HEXACO profiles - and discovers why certain AI approaches work for him when they fail for others. The surprising finding: three specific self-sabotage mechanisms (Shiny Object Syndrome, Analysis Paralysis, and the Upper Limit Problem) that explain exactly how he engineered EVERYWHERE, his 35-agent orchestrated intelligenc...

SHOW NOTES Episode Title: I Built a 35-Person Team. I'm the Only Human. Publish Date: December 29, 2025 Duration: ~26 minutes Description: Mark reveals the origin story of EVERYWHERE — how shopping lists led to Moon Tide Pig, forty GPTs, and finally orchestrated intelligence. Along the way: why naming AI agents matters, the ethics of anthropomorphization, and what he learned about collaboration by...

Episode Title: The Year AI Pays Off: A Name Your Year Story Runtime: 26:00 Publication Date: December 21, 2025 EPISODE DESCRIPTION For over ten years, my wife Kymberlee and I have named our years. Not resolutions. Not goals. One phrase that becomes a filter for every decision we make. This year, I did something different. I let my own AI agents interrogate the decision. In this episode, I share ho...

A Sunday Story I was having coffee with my friend last week. He teaches at Berkeley and talks really fast. We were discussing something—I can’t even remember what—and I made a joke. “I’m glad I can listen faster than you’re talking.” He laughed. Said something about “listening speed” being a thing. That got me curious. How fast DO we listen? How fast do we think? How fast can we actually talk? I w...

Last Week Last week I told you about Off-Topic Verbosity. In this scientifically documented condition, older people wander from topic to topic because our brains have too many connections firing at once. I told you about WAIT and WAIST. The CIA’s reminder to ask yourself, before speaking: Why Am I Talking? And if you’ve been going for a while: Why Am I Still Talking? This week, I want to tell you...

WAIT. WAIST. — What Elders Know: Part One Episode Summary: Mark explores Off-Topic Verbosity (OTV), a scientifically documented phenomenon in which older adults wander from topic to topic. He shares a conversation with his friend Becky that sparked the realization, introduces the CIA's WAIT and WAIST acronyms for managing conversation, and explains how his AI team uses the walk-and-talk method to...

A 72-year-old’s reflection on discovering—through restaurants, Disney, martial arts, and improv—that the most fundamental human skill is the one nobody teaches. Every Thursday night, I’m at rehearsal with my improv house team, An Embarrassment of Pandas, and every single week our coach stops us mid-scene with the same note. “Eyes,” he’ll say, and we’ll stop everything, center ourselves, and look o...

October 20th, 2025. I’m at the Go Duck Yourself restaurant in San Francisco with my grandsons, Mason and Lincoln. We’re grabbing dinner before I head to TED AI the next morning—two days of talks about how AI is transforming everything from civilization to culture. Naturally, I’m curious where they stand on all this. Mason is 19 and works at a bait shop. Lincoln’s 16. They’ve grown up with screens,...

ASH ON FOOD, WINE IN THE CELLAR It’s September 1975. I’m 28 years old. I’m the chef at the Jesuit Novitiate in Montecito - this beautiful property tucked into the foothills where young men spend two years figuring out if they want to become Jesuit priests. A novitiate, if you’re not familiar with the term, is the first step. It’s where you test the calling. Some guys come straight out of college....

“I’ve never had a job interview like that,” she said on the phone. “No one has ever put the values of the company before the technical skills needed to do the job.” She wanted the job. Badly. Not because of the salary or the title or the company name on her resume. She wanted to see what it was like to work in that kind of environment. I wasn’t trying to be innovative. I was running the only compa...

This was the first time I’d ever had a full day alone with Dax, my youngest grandson. First time having dinner with just Mason and Lincoln, no one else around. First time Lee Daley and I had uninterrupted hours together in years, maybe ever. It all happened in one week. All of it felt rare. All of it made me realize something I’d been missing: everyone texts, but not everyone breathes the same air...

I’ve sat through those meetings. You know the ones. The leadership team locked in a conference room for eight hours, trying to wordsmith a mission statement that captures the essence of what the company does, why it matters, and where it’s going. Someone suggests “empower.” Someone else counters with “enable.” A third person insists we need “leverage” in there somewhere. By hour six, everyone’s ex...

Tonight, while writing this, I built a complete business intelligence system. Agenda management. Task tracking. Calendar integration. Email automation. A working system is ready to use tomorrow morning. Took me maybe an hour while I was thinking through this story. Thirty years ago, at Wavefront, that would have required a team of developers and months of work. And that gap—between then and now—te...

My twelve-year-old grandson Dax didn’t break eye contact with me for twenty minutes. We’d been sitting at my kitchen table talking about consciousness - not the stuff they test in school, but the idea that only twenty percent of who we are operates consciously. The rest, that massive eighty percent, runs in the background. Processing. Recognizing patterns. Sending signals we’re barely aware of. Hi...

The thing about growing up on Lenny Bruce and George Carlin is that they taught you that comedy’s job was to rub our noses in hypocrisy. Smart comics. They held up mirrors to society and made us laugh at what we saw, even when it was uncomfortable. Especially when it was uncomfortable. I thought I understood what that meant until I found myself producing an improv troupe at 70, standing in front o...

Most of us grow up mistaking obligation for love. I did too—until I finally saw what a healthy connection actually feels like. Here's what nobody tells you about dysfunctional families: they don't feel dysfunctional from the inside. The scariest part isn't the apparent toxicity you see in movies. It's how completely normal your patterns feel when they're all you've ever known. I spent 49 years thi...

I'm standing in line at Lighthouse Coffee on a Sunday morning, watching an older gentleman who looks about my age - which is 72 - order his usual. Something about him seems familiar, not because I know him, but because he carries that quiet Sunday energy that comes with being a regular somewhere. "Hey," I say, stepping closer. "Do you have any grandkids?" He looks at me with that split-second calc...

I'm standing in my front yard in Montecito, holding a mason jar with a chrysalis hanging inside. It's early morning, and I notice something different. The chrysalis is moving. Not swaying. Moving. Shaking like something is fighting to escape from inside. Which, of course, is exactly what's happening. The Jade Pendant That Changed Everything Ten years ago, a guy here in Santa Barbara gave my wife K...

I thought I was building a framework for podcasts. What I didn't realize was that I was developing a way of thinking about every creative project I've worked on since - from meals for 2,500 people to AI ventures, improv classes, and even dinner parties. It started ten years ago in a client meeting. They wanted the tactical stuff - microphones, software, and hosting platforms. But I kept pulling th...

I'm staring at another TEDx speaker application in my inbox. The subject line promises "A Revolutionary Idea That Will Change Everything." The email begins with "Dear TEDx Organizer" and proceeds to three paragraphs outlining how their groundbreaking concept will transform humanity. There's just one problem. They never looked at our website. Because if they had, they would have seen those four wor...

When Clever Stops Working I used to think the best scenes came from clever ideas. If I could front-load a tidy premise and stack a few plot beats, the rest would take care of itself. Then, at rehearsal one night, everything changed with something so small I almost missed it. We ran a drill that punishes clever. Tag outs, fast pivots, lots of chances to get in our own way. I opened a scene with a t...

I do not set out to be a podcaster. My first memory of the medium is Adam Curry in my ears on an iPod, and I think, This is portable radio that belongs to me. Interesting. Then life moves on. The spark to actually make a show lands in 2015. I'm having coffee downtown when I hear a host say, "Live from the basement of the Balboa Building in Santa Barbara, California." Two blocks away from where I'm...

Capturing the Moment I'm on a quick trip to Colorado for my friend Duey Freeman's 75th birthday. He picked me up at the airport Saturday night, and now it's Sunday morning, over breakfast at my hotel in Golden. Duey and I found ourselves talking about something neither of us had examined before. Two men in their seventies, trying to figure out why neither of us has had what we'd call a best friend...

It’s a picture-perfect Santa Barbara day at Tucker’s Grove. Blue sky, soft breeze, and that warm sun that sinks into your skin like it belongs there. We’re gathered under the trees, catching up—old Wavefront friends. Forty-one years since we launched the company. Most of us are now in our sixties or seventies. The conversation feels familiar: grandkids, travel, the joys of slowing down. You’ve hea...