u/reesefinchjh

I sat down with Jerri Williams recently. 26 years in the Bureau working fraud and corporate corruption in Philadelphia. She now runs a podcast with nearly 10 million downloads where she only interviews retired FBI agents. I asked her about profilers. You know the ones. Every crime show has them hunting serial killers through dark hallways. She laughed. She said profilers are back in their office reviewing files. They’re consultants. They’re not the ones running down suspects. The active investigators bring cases to them when they’re stuck not the other way around. The other one that got me was the FBI doesn’t play well with others thing. She said they run over 240 joint task forces. In most communities they already know local law enforcement before anything happens. She also talked about her first four years. Serious imposter syndrome. Looking around at the people she worked with and genuinely wondering if she belonged there. It took a while before she stopped listening to the external voices and trusted her own. Her definition of confidence is the thing I keep thinking about. She said it’s not walking in saying I’ve got this. It’s walking in completely out of your depth, taking a breath, and knowing you’ll find your way through it.

Full conversation: https://youtube.com/watch?v=71y9Y3M0ND4&si=BvEu0rpFnB4sDDd-

So I interviewed Nelson Johnson recently. Retired judge from New Jersey. Spent his career in law, got obsessed with Atlantic City history, wrote a book because he felt nobody had told the real story properly.
HBO picked it up. He thought it was a movie. They said no, it’s a series. He thinks they were right.
Here’s what I found genuinely interesting for this community. His role on set was basically historical guardrail. They’d call him in when they were nervous about accuracy. Half a dozen people around a table, and he’d tell them whether something was possible or whether a serious historian would rip them apart for it.
Everything else was theirs. He was very clear about that. The scripts, the characters, the dramatic choices. He wasn’t precious about it. He just stopped them driving into a ditch.
No agent. No manager. No connections. A judge who wrote a history book because someone had to.

Full conversation: https://youtube.com/watch?v=76ifjRgHbTo&si=BvEu0rpFnB4sDDd-

I sat down with Dr Marc Cooper recently. He’s 78, spent decades working with people trying to fundamentally change how they live, and has the directness that comes from someone who stopped softening difficult truths a long time ago.

His starting point is something I think this community will understand more deeply than most. He talks about living your life backwards from death. Not morbidly but practically. When you know how much time is left the unimportant things stop competing with the important ones.

He also makes a distinction between knowledge and wisdom that I hadn’t heard framed quite this way before. Most of us were taught to pursue information. He argues that was the wrong map entirely.

The section on what he calls shocking moments, the specific experiences that actually change people rather than just inform them, is the most honest thing I’ve heard about why real change is so rare.

He also identifies one word most people use constantly in conversation that quietly destroys genuine connection. Simple but once you hear it you can’t unhear it.

If anyone here has lived an extraordinary story and would be open to a long conversation, I’m always looking for remarkable people. No fame required, just a life worth talking about.

Full conversation: https://youtu.be/ai5IeO5n1z0?si=1S\_RF9EbBMROFazr

Most people haven’t heard of Kerrie Holley. They should.

He started writing code in 1968 before personal computers existed, in a field where people who looked like him were almost entirely absent. In 2000 he became IBM’s first African American Distinguished Engineer. In 2006 he was appointed IBM Fellow. In 2023 he was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering. In 2025 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

That’s not a career. That’s a series of firsts spanning six decades.

I sat down with him for a long conversation that went beyond the achievements. He talked about the self doubt he carried, the barriers he navigated, what it actually took at each stage, and what he thinks young people today are getting wrong about building something that lasts.

He’s also remarkably calm about AI. He’s watched every technology hype cycle from the inside since 1968. His view on what’s real and what’s noise is unlike anyone else I’ve spoken to.

Full conversation: https://youtube.com/watch?v=NksnZzv4ANU&si=9FX\_BEsfbUXRtHGG

My evidence for this is Sue Jacques. She spent years as a forensic death investigator, over 5000 cases. I expected someone who had become numb to it. What I found was someone who became more passionate about how we treat each other in ordinary daily moments, not less.

Her argument is that proximity to death clarifies what actually matters. The small cruelties and kindnesses we exchange every day look different when you’ve spent years at the end of things.

She left forensic investigation and now teaches etiquette and human courtesy. The through line between those two careers is the most interesting part of her story.

Change my view

https://youtu.be/wCIp-8IeoeM

Dr Glen Swartwout was diagnosed with glaucoma and given a bleak prognosis. Rather than accepting it he spent four decades researching the root causes of disease from a different angle entirely, looking at what conventional medicine consistently overlooks.

I sat down with him and what struck me wasn’t the controversy around some of his conclusions. It was how specific he was about the journey. The mercury discovery, the generational trauma connection, the distinction between treating symptoms and finding actual causes.

He’s not dismissive of conventional medicine. He’s asking a different question about where it stops looking.

Full conversation: https://youtu.be/quCqgu8PT4c

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Wendell Wallach recently. He wrote Moral Machines, worked alongside Stuart Russell, Yann LeCun and Daniel Kahneman, and has spent decades thinking about where AI governance is failing.

His argument isn’t doom and it isn’t hype. It’s more uncomfortable than both. We’re building systems of increasing capability without any meaningful accountability structure around them. When something goes wrong the responsibility is so distributed across developers, deployers, regulators and users that nobody ends up truly accountable. He thinks that gap is more dangerous than any capability threshold we might cross in the future.

The section on autonomous weapons and who bears responsibility when an AI system causes harm in a military context is the most unsettling part of the conversation.

Full interview: https://youtu.be/-usWHtI-cms?si=RPFdbB5xPqwk-fAK

I sat down with David Horne, a funding expert based in London who has raised over $140 million across his career. His starting point is a number that should bother everyone: female founders receive less than 2% of venture capital funding.

What makes this conversation different from the usual discussion is that he doesn’t stop at the statistic. He identifies three specific structural biases that maintain this gap and he’s precise about how each one operates in practice. The Lego study he references early on is a striking illustration of how bias gets embedded before anyone even enters a boardroom.

He also has a practical perspective on what actually changes things, not just what should change theoretically.

Full interview: https://youtu.be/jsE9PLqaylk?si=HbliSS0G-cV3KWS2

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Professor Thomas Seyfried from Boston College. He’s spent four decades studying cancer metabolism and his central argument is one the mainstream oncology world is still pushing back on hard: cancer is primarily a metabolic disease, not a genetic one.

The implications of that distinction are significant. If he’s right, the entire framework of targeted genetic therapies is built on an incomplete foundation. He’s not fringe, he’s published extensively and his work is taken seriously in metabolic research circles, but it remains deeply controversial in oncology.

What I found most interesting wasn’t the science itself but the practical conclusions he draws. The dietary and metabolic interventions he discusses as adjuncts to treatment are specific and he’s been applying them with patients for years.

Whether you agree with his thesis or not, the conversation raises questions about how cancer research is funded, what gets studied, and whose interests shape the direction of treatment. Worth watching and forming your own view.

Full interview: https://youtu.be/S-9N49diTjQ

Lester Keizer has had four completely different careers, minister, healthcare executive, tech CEO, yacht charter king, and nearly died in between most of them.

Widow-maker heart attack. Stage 4 liver cancer. Liver transplant. Long Covid. Each time he came back with a clearer sense of what the time he had left was actually for.

His two word philosophy at the end of the conversation is the simplest and most honest piece of wisdom I've heard in a long time. The kind of thing that sounds obvious until you realise how rarely anyone actually lives it.

Full interview: https://youtu.be/yHz6LLbCd-o

Andrew Feustel was NASA’s Chief Astronaut. Three spaceflights, six spacewalks, 226 days aboard the ISS. I spent about an hour with him on camera and the bit that stayed with me most was when he tried to describe what actually happens to your perception when you see Earth from that distance. He was very precise about it. Not poetic in the expected way, more clinical, which made it land harder.

He also talked about the psychological preparation, what failure looks like at that level, and how the experience of being in space changes how you think about ordinary decisions back on Earth.

Full conversation: https://youtube.com/watch?v=voS6LWpgQ1g&si=Rdn9pyPxK258kJSc