Talking With Friends, Sharing the Load Podcast

Our flat in Warsaw is on the 5th floor and there’s no elevator. Pretty much the norm in the old buildings and a bonus glute workout which, after two days, we don’t even feel. And that sets the tone for much of my youngest daughter’s first visit to the city where I was born, where her grandparents endured the German occupation, then the Warsaw Uprising, and then the Soviet occupation. The story of our trip is a story of the unexpected bonus, particularly the relatives we had a chance to meet, or spend more time with, and the visceral reality of the places where our family experienced loss and trauma. Like most Eastern European countries, the past is never very far away in Poland. Plaques on buildings and set into sidewalks commemorate who, and how many, lived or died on this spot.For my daughter, who was called Iza by everyone she met, it wasn’t simply sightseeing; she was encountering family history, and her place in it, which opened up a new/old world.It was evident in her reaction to the Old Town, the narrow cobblestoned streets, the cafes and restaurants. It was also evident when we visited the Warsaw Uprising Museum, an immersive experience that made her grandfather’s childhood all too real. It was seeing an ancestor, Stanislaw Moniuszko’s statue in front of the Opera House and knowing our lineage comes from and through that of the “father of Polish opera”. It was there when we hunted down the buildings where my mother and her brother lived with their paternal aunts after their mother was killed in the first day of the bombardment of the city. The cathedral where my parents were married, despite it having no roof several years after the bombing of Warsaw.Here are Iza’s thoughts, looking back on how the trip landed for her.This trip showed me how deeply connected my family is to the country, my Dziadzia’s [grandfather] lasting impact from his contributions in the Warsaw Uprising, and the deep resilience of the Polish people. Many people in my life look at their connections to other countries from several generations away (grandparents or great grandparents) where for me, Poland feels so close as only one generation before me started their life there. For Dziadzia and the Warsaw Uprising, all my knowledge and experience came from seeking out books, research, and waiting for news articles to be published about Dziadzia. It still felt like it happened to someone distant to me, even though I knew it happened to Dziadzia. The Warsaw Uprising museum completely shifted this for me, especially staring at the funeral photo where I learned it was Dziadzia’s childhood friend laying in that grave. Afterwards, walking the streets where he did, visiting his university and the neighbourhood where him and Baba began their family really made it sink in for me. I always knew there was deep bravery, grit and resilience in my family yet being able to walk within it shifted something within me. Not to mention, meeting family that are building their lives in Poland and solidifying those family roots.As someone who has gone through many significant life changes, this trip really helped shift my mindset to recognizing just how precious life really is. I’ve found a new sense of purpose in my life and when things get difficult I remind myself- our family has been through harder. And I push through.Overall, I was able to connect to my history, my culture and my family in ways I couldn’t have imagined. Feeling such pride in my heritage, the strength of those before me, and pure gratitude.These were all threads that began to come together, when ancestral legacy and historical resonance became real, when relatives became people, when history is no longer a footnote but instead is the ground we walked on.The relatives themselves covered multiple generations, from my uncle in his 90s, to my cousins in their 50s, to Iza’s cousins in their teens, 20s and 30s. While the generations all have different perspectives on the past and present of Poland, they also shared traits common not only to Poles, but particularly to our family’s lineage. Despite years under Communist rule they are entrepreneurial, ambitious without being driven, and generous hosts.Poland keeps producing these people — rigorous, serious, doing important work, but also unwilling to be defined by it alone. Despite the upheavals of the contemporary world and despite the years of dark oppression, Poles have emerged to become one of Europe’s most robust economies. That’s no accident.This musical piece, from contemporary and popular Polish artist, Dawid Podsiadło. It’s called “mori” and what I like about the video is the empty streets and bridges of Warsaw, shot during COVID. He has his own YouTube channel if you’re interested. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

We had some friends over for dinner the other week, just a last minute pot-luck casual kind of thing. The best kind, in my opinion. During the meal the question was floated: if your spouse were to die, would you remarry? Little did we know, as we discussed the issue, that we were replicating, in real time, decades of research.The women all vigorously said “absolutely not” and while the men said, “oh probably not”, it wasn’t nearly as convincing. And of course, there’s the gap between what you say you will do and what you will actually do when the circumstance is upon you.Between the ideaAnd the realityBetween the motionAnd the actFalls the Shadow — T. S. EliotThe challenge, as Eliot and studies bear out, is that there is a distinct gap between what we intend to do, say we intend to do, and what ultimately happens. We all know we’d like to be brave and stoic in the face of a terminal disease diagnosis and go bravely into the good night but will we, when the time comes?The circumstance of having your spouse die is, one hopes, remote and so it feels emotionally foreign. How then, can we even form an intention when we don’t know how we’ll feel, who and where we’ll be, when it occurs? In general we also imagine grief in the abstract. We expect to feel the loss of that person in our everyday life, the loneliness, the silent house. Women, it seems, also imagine the freedom, right there with the loss, and men may not entirely appreciate how much of their personal infrastructure is sustained by their wives. Sorry for the broad strokes or, as my Warsaw uncle puts it, “that was sewn with a pretty thick thread”.As you might imagine, the rationale for individual choices about remarriage relies on many varied factors including the potential co-mingling of assets which could, and does, go badly in many such circumstances. It’s pretty common to hear that the children, and even grandchildren, of the recently bereaved take huge exception to any new relationship which might intrude on the estate. This isn’t always selfish but rather a need to protect the widow/er from being pillaged.Other concerns hinge on the feeling that the deceased spouse would be, in some way, betrayed by a new relationship, assuming affection was still extant at TOD. Then there’s the thorny challenge of having to meet someone new before any kind of subsequent relationship can even occur.Naturally, I wanted to know what the stats say, as compared to our highly unscientific dinner table data. And, I wanted to canvas my friends and colleagues, of various ages, to see if I could get a sense of the differences across age and gender.Here’s what I found, with the statistical research first:Without allowing for age brackets, Wikipedia says more than 60% of men, and less than 20% of women are remarried or re-paired within two years of being widowed. Within that window, men remarry almost twice as quickly. That gap is even wider as you get older with widowed older men remarrying almost five times more than women do and cohabiting more than twice as much. Sounds like a lot but it’s a percentage of a very small subset. 94% of women remain single after the death of a spouse compared to 75% of men. In other words, most of us will not remarry and very few of us ( A year and half after bereavement, 15% of widows and 37% of widowers over 65) are even interested in dating.As we heard at the dinner table, it’s not just the act of remarrying, it’s the desire or intent that varies.30% of men say they’re interested in a new spouse within the first six months of their last one dying. That compares to 16% of women. Within that first six months, 15% of those men are actively dating. Less than 1% of women are.Statistics Canada reports women aged 55 and up have more exposure to remarriage as they live longer than men on average, but still have significantly lower rates of remarriage. In Canada in 2022, there were 1.59 million widowed women versus 472,170 widowed men so the fishing pond is not evenly stocked.In this country, twice as many widows and widowers remarry than simply live together. Strangely, that’s reversed in Quebec.The average age for these Canadian brides was 63.4 (in 2008) and 72 for the grooms.There’s a saying that “women grieve while men replace” but that wasn’t what I was hearing from my circle, nor does the research necessarily support it. Widows grieve, but not forever. They often come to value freedom they may not have enjoyed earlier, and sometimes they are released from caregiving duties and in no way interested in taking those on with someone new. Especially someone new who’s old.Men, on the other hand, are not driven so much by loneliness as by the need for social and domestic support, particularly amongst men who don’t have a tight circle of friends. The more friends a man has, the less he needs a new wife, basically. It comes as absolutely no surprise that the older you are, the probability of remarriage falls but the drop is much steeper for women. The ground falls away for men around age 65, for women, say goodbye to the fairytale ending at age 55.Pretty much the entire global population shows the same patterns and the same gap over age and gender. No doubt there are some pockets which buck the trend but I’ve yet to discover them. Atlantis maybe?I wanted to canvas my friends and colleagues, of various ages, to see if I could get a sense of the differences across age and gender.I’m absurdly grateful to those of my friends who sent me thoughtful responses. Some of them were, or currently are, in exactly the post-death period, tentatively dipping a toe into the dating pool, only to find the water is slimy and full of disgusting creatures that defy categorization. Others are in the anticipation boat, pushing off into the unknown.A young friend, with young children, explained why I might not have heard from all the other young marrieds I canvassed.I can’t even bring myself to imagine losing my husband with my children so young. Their loss brings me to my knees. With any luck the chances of being widowed are so far in the future that I might be able to think about it, but right now I just can’t.For those in middle age and up, dating is part of the pragmatic side of the situation; the emotional side is much more nuanced:First I have had to get to a space where I am actually ready to wrap my mind around dating someone else. After 3.5 years, I am finally getting there. Until then it has felt like a big no. The thought of dating is tough. Then the thought of finding someone who can show the respect that my husband had for women. Super tough. And a biggie for me. I know I should not try to replace him but he was such an amazing partner and person, he is a really tough act to follow.Regarding the question of marriage, I think it relates to age. If I do actually meet someone, I don’t think I would want to get married. I am not even sure if I would want to live together. Why would I need to? Seeing them a few times a week would be plenty I would think. I like my space. Also, if you did decide to live together, whose place would it be?Also with marriage, there is the financial aspect. I am not interested in sorting that out. I have adult kids and grandkids, and a sister, who will be needing my monies — lol.Remarriage if necessary, but not necessarily remarriage.Never again. I have a cardinal rule …..no co-mingling; not bank accounts, property, credit cards, family and space (closet, bathroom and desk).Only fun, good times, great conversation and thoughtful, caring consideration.Back to displacement theory, for a minute.I look at it from the other end; how would I feel about being dead and having someone new move into my house, use the dishes I chose and sleep in my bed with my husband? Irrational for sure but it’s the way I think about the what-if time, after.Women of a certain age all expressed a concern that anyone they connected with now would likely need caretaking, whether they’re explicitly looking for it or not.There has always been a part of me that felt I wasn’t complete unless I had someone with whom to share my life. That’s no longer the case. I’ve decided the negatives outweigh the positives. Any man who comes into my life now is going to be looking for someone to take care of him. It never seems to be an even playing field, at least in my experience. After my last relationship, my kids questioned why I felt the need to ‘take on’ men. They have told me I’m great on my own, and I’m actually beginning to believe that!Men who have been widowed have different comments about their choices.I know what it is like to lose a spouse of many years and there is a tumble that can lead to deeper loss or somehow a new awakening.For me after about a year and a few early relationships I recognized that I wanted deeper and richer relationships. I spent a lot of time reflecting on the future. What did I want? That emerged fairly quickly for me. Less than one year. I think it bubbled to the surface because of the relationship I had with my wife. One thought that emerged was not to remarry. My commitment is my bond. I had married and felt that if I were to make a commitment to another woman, I did not need a ritual sanctified by the state or church to bless my relationship. I would also have very clear expectations about what I wanted out of a new relationship and would not jump back into a cohabitation arrangement without knowing someone more deeply.I seem to recall four requirements. One, the new partner needed to be intellectually strong, two physically active, three attractive but not a beauty queen with only Gucci clothing; and finally, financially sound. BTW I did not get everything.Another male friend, who lost his wife to cancer when they were in their late 40s, demurs at my recollection of his phone ringing off the wall from would-be partners, in the year following his wife’s death. He does admit, however, that he already had a large circle of single friends and met other singles courtesy of well-intentioned friends who didn’t want to see him alone for too long. At first I thought, oh man, this doesn’t feel right. There were a lot of emotions around it [dating]. I hadn’t closed the door on another long term relationship, lots of guys do, but honestly, I didn’t expect to meet someone just right. When I did, she was ten years younger with young kids and I thought, am I crazy?My dad died when I was 14 and my mom was 47. She began dating what felt like pretty soon after and I asked her why she felt she had to get married again. She was born in the 20s, had never worked and told me she felt she simply had to have a man to look after.A recently widowed female friend has begun dating, with huge reservations.When I fell so madly in love with [my husband] I had no idea how much the loss of him would cost me. The pain has been equal to the love. I wouldn’t want to remarry without that degree of love but fuck me that is scary. I was already an avoidant so add to that a gaping hole in me and it is terrifying to consider doing that again. My girlfriend asked me, “did it not hurt enough the first time”?Some days when I am very lonely, hooking up with a long term partner feels like the solution. This always worries me because another person is never the solution. What no one mentioned, in all my field and scientific research, was the possibility of your late spouse haunting your days so please, enjoy this scene from the 1945 film of the Noel Coward play, “Blithe Spirit”.Poor Ruth, indeed. Until next time, remember what Joni told us: you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.Thanks for reading Talking With Friends, Sharing the Load! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

Your chances of remarriage are already slim, especially if you're a woman. And is that such a bad thing? I mean..... This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

Each time I’ve been to Auschwitz, the impact of the concentration and extermination camp has been crippling.Except this last time, in March of 2026. The Auschwitz-Birkenau museum and memorial has been undergoing expensive conservation efforts, partly to shore up buildings in danger of simply crumbling under their own weight, and partly to address what curators call new approaches to telling the old stories. The stories of 1.1 - 1.5 million people, from all over Europe, who were murdered or died of starvation, disease and exhaustion.In an Associated Press article about the newly opened displays, from last December, you find this:“Witnesses are passing away, the world is changing, technologies are changing, and new generations are emerging, requiring a new approach to the subject,” Andrzej Kacorzyk, the deputy director of the Auschwitz museum, told The Associated Press. “Hence the need to portray humanity, the need to portray this individual fate.”And that’s where the tactics have lost sight of the strategic objective. And no amount of good intentions fully survives the transition from ruin to institution.From the perspective of someone who has visited Auschwitz five times over the past few decades, I now see the inherent paradox in the undertaking of memorialization.When I first visited, shorts and other “beach wear” were forbidden, as was any recording or photography. We were reminded that this was not a display, it was a cemetery. Mind you, there were no cell phones then, so we were not distracted by someone taking a selfie beneath the Arbeit Macht Frei entry gate, or calling a friend to schedule lunch while strolling the paths between the Death Block (#11) and Blocks 5 and 6 which contain enormous bins of hair, shoes, prosthetic devices and luggage taken from victims.Even a decade ago, when I visited Auschwitz with one of my daughters, she didn’t sleep for several nights after the tour, so horrified was she to be walking the same ground, and floors, as so many condemned others. The daughter I visited with this year was shaken, but not to the same degree. I had been concerned about her sensitivity to the brutality which so affected her normally more stoic sibling, but it didn’t happen. And I wanted to figure out why.Where once were peeling painted hallways, roughly plastered with photos of prisoners and their documentation, today the blocks are masterpieces of architectural intervention and climate controlled displays. Today, the insides of those original Auschwitz “blocks”, look more like art galleries with tasteful lighting and meticulous arrangements.It’s totally understandable that crumbling buildings, especially these crumbling buildings, must be preserved, and conservation measures are expensive, but the tasteful renovation has deadened the gut punch that walking through these buildings once delivered. And that gut punch is critical to the impact the museum memorial seeks, to ensure that future generations understand the scope of the cruelty and the human toll extracted in this place.Some of the updates meet that objective, particularly the newly constructed walkway and tunnel which brings visitors from the entry gates, and security check, under the road and out onto the camp grounds. The stark concrete walls give one the sense of being herded towards some unknown destination, or fate, and the impact is heightened by the sound of a voice intoning the names of victims, broadcast through hidden speakers along the way.From the exterior, most of the block buildings look the same. Anyone who has read Auschwitz-based novels, seen the movies, or done some research, already knows what individual blocks were for: medical experimentation, extermination with Zyklon B gas, isolation cells made so small prisoners were forced to hunch for days, “courtrooms”, processing areas where prisoners had their heads shaved, their clothing and belongings confiscated and their numbers tattooed onto their forearms. Those displays, which I first saw, were assembled by survivors of the camp just two years after the end of the war, opened to the public in 1950, with most of the displays finalized in 1956 still intact until just recently. Their sheer crude immediacy forced us to face the visceral reality of what had occurred here.The task of maintaining the integrity and sanctity of the site, while opening the gates to millions of visitors annually, is a delicate balancing act. I give all due respect to those doing their all to pursue the vision of how best to educate and inform the world of the magnitude of suffering and cruelty that took place on a relatively small piece of earth.That suffering, and that cruelty, is baked into the ground. You can feel it seep into the soles of your feet, through your shoes, as you walk between the blocks, through the “showers” and crematoria, and past the execution wall.The soil remembers, but not all visitor groups take the time to feel those vibrations, to put themselves in the shoes of those who walked here before so it is up to the curators to make the past relevant, not just to remember but to act on that remembrance. After all, the original intent of opening the evidence of Auchwitz-Birkenau to the world was to ensure that kind of victimization would not reoccur. That’s why I feel the admirable vision of Director of the Auschwitz Memorial, Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński, the author of the conceptual design, Bartłomiej Pochopień, Dr. Piotr Setkiewicz, Head of the Research Center, and Katarzyna Półtorak, Head of the New Main Exhibition Team is to be applauded, even while I feel the execution has somehow missed the objective mark. Their efforts have obviously been rigorous and their dedication unmistakable so it pains me to say the new approach lacks the visceral impact which made the original museum unforgettable.While saying they wanted the place to speak for itself, to be minimalist, phenomenological, and let the objects and space do the work, somehow the result appeals more to the head than to the heart and guts. More cerebral equals less emotional.The act of professional conservation and curation, over 12 years, has imposed a kind of order on a place that was powerful because of its chaos and incomprehensibility. The rawness that came from preserving what was found at Auschwitz, and opening it to the public without gauzy mercy, was not a failing of the original exhibition; it was the heart of the exhibition.So, as I stood amongst the blocks in the weak March sunshine, I no longer heard the murmurs of all the dead as strongly as I once had. Their experiences had been made overt and in the transition, the tragedy made comprehensible and somehow contained.Music somehow doesn’t fit here so instead, here’s a quick look or listen at the story of the liberation of the camp. While the history gives credit to the Soviets for liberating and providing medical treatment and food to the survivors, I must note that the same Soviet army stayed across the river and allowed the Nazis to bomb Warsaw into rubble, before they moved in to “help”.Until next time, don’t forget your history.Thanks for reading Talking With Friends, Sharing the Load! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

I know I’m always going on about the importance of being strategic, before going tactical. This piece, about my most recent visit to Auschwitz, is a painful reminder of how important the order is in achieving the original objective. I hope you find it interesting enough to look deeper at their website: www.auschwitz.org This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

Like so many of us, I’ve been delighting in the flood of Lego-adjacent videos lampooning the Trump administration in general and Trump and Hegseth in particular. There are far too many to link here but just search Explosive Media, PersiaBoi, Southern Punk or Nukta Media. This is not to say I’m a fan of the Iranian regime, obvs, but the fact that most viewers of the videos aren’t, makes the case for what the propaganda producers have achieved. People are watching them, laughing and sharing, despite the world’s long-standing denunciation of Iran’s repressive and violent regime.If you don’t know what I’m talking about then, sorry, please go back to sleep. We’ll all be quiet.What I wonder about, as a fly on the wall in either the parent company’s Danish HQ, or in the US subsidiary’s Connecticut offices, is how does LEGO feel about all this? The company has been silent through all the recent notoriety, and I think I get it. Wading into a political propaganda war would be awkward and potentially self-immolating for a children’s toy brand loved around the world.Any kind of legal action is doomed for so many reasons: no actual LEGO blocks appear so trademark litigation would be symbolic at best; LEGO’s trademark is held in Denmark so legal action would have to come via a Danish court and even if they won there, any decision against an Iranian group would be unenforceable; Iran is not a signatory to trademark enforcement frameworks so there would be no teeth no matter where the matter was litigated.Basically, if someone appropriates a brand’s vibe or visual identity, through AI or by hand (how many hours and cartoonists would that take?) but produces nothing physical, sells nothing and operates from a jurisdiction with no enforcement treaty, there’s not much to be done about it. LEGO probably knows that and is keeping quiet.This isn’t to say that LEGO doesn’t sue for copyright/trademark infringement. The company has been pretty quick to jump on imposters or anyone using the LEGO name. In this case the animations aren’t commercial, per se, and what they’re doing is using the general vibe, not the product itself.It’s certainly possible the execs over at Warner Brothers (The Lego Movie, 2014 and sequels) are chewing the wallpaper but if they are, the doors are locked and blinds pulled all the way down. They might even have a case but again, enforcing a judgment would be symbolic, at best, and serve to advertise the Iranian videos even more broadly, just like the YouTube ban did. Once videos have gone viral on one platform, their viewership is amplified even if the original platform shuts them down. It’s called the “hydra effect”. In the days after the ban the videos got hundreds of millions more views on Meta, X and TikTok. And even if you’ve wisely departed all those platforms, you’d have heard the story on BBC, Al Jazeera, France 24, CNN, the New Yorker and so on and so on.Essentially the ban was the best free advertising Explosive Media could have hoped for.Approval ratings for Trump’s “don’t call it a war” were already dismal in mid-March with the US public overwhelmingly against military strikes and boots on the ground. There’s no way the Lego videos have moved those numbers; that heavy lifting is being done by gas prices and overall economic and security anxiety. It’s maybe safe to say the videos gave people who already despise the Trump regime an entertaining vehicle for sharing their sentiments. So, like the many, many explosions in Lego-Iran, the videos are an accelerant for the growing anti-Trump movement. Maybe it really is “morning in America”.In an excellent Time Magazine article from earlier this month, they note that the Lego videos are immunized against official counter-messaging because any factual rebuttal fails in the face of animated characters and explosions. And where, pray tell, would the Trump regime even find a factual rebuttal?But what impact has it had on LEGO sales? Are parents refusing to buy the blocks because someone has channeled their look and feel into what Explosive Media attacks under the banner of “The Epstein Regime”? My grandchildren love LEGO; they’re unlikely to see the propaganda and even if they did, they wouldn’t understand it. There appears to be no public information on actual sales figures, to date.Here’s what is happening in LEGO land: there was an 82% spike in “LEGO” searches online in March, compared to March a year ago and totally out of character for all previous years. Is that attention good or bad? LEGO seems to be capitalizing on the attention by upping its volume of both news releases and video shorts. If you go to LEGO’s main site you can choose the Play Zone where kids can watch product based video shorts. The Explosive Media videos are impressive on several fronts, not the least of which is their lightning fast turnaround time, from the real world to the parody. It was scant days before the Gospel according to St. Quentin (Tarantino, not Isaiah) made it into one of the videos.And, just one day after The Atlantic Magazine published an explosive account of FBI Director Kash Patel’s problem drinking, here’s a Lego version, hot off the edit deck. Pretty much writes itself, doesn’t it?Thing is, this one isn’t from the Iran-backed Explosive Media but rather from a pairing of BNN (the Brick News Network) and Sophmara, two YouTube creators. Stylistically you can’t really tell the home-grown slams from the IRG-backed ones and maybe that’s the point.The videos also rely on visually arresting, immediately recognizable tropes, and reflect back to people the kind of thing they’re already familiar with on social media. They don’t rely on argument or logic but go for the cheap shots which are effective in the way all attacks that ridicule are.What’s known about the group whose Farsi name is Akhbar Enfejari is that it was established in 2025, involves fewer than 10 people, reportedly aged 19 to 25, and characterized as “student-led”. The spokesperson calls himself Mr. Explosive and, like Banksy, appears only in silhouette in interviews, like this one, with BBC.He says they chose Lego because it represents a “world language”, and one whose visual style was specifically used in the training of AI image generation models, so shortcuts in all places! I would guess many on the team are not that far removed from building their own LEGO space ships and factories on the floor of their childhood homes.No one knows where they’re located (likely not Iran due to bandwidth requirements, unless the regime has granted special dispensation); and if the Iranian regime is a sponsor or customer (yes, obviously, despite a recent request for people to donate via crypto accounts). They clearly have access to sophisticated LLMs like Claude Pro or Chat GPT+, as well as image and video generation models such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Runway ML, Kling or Pika Labs.We all hear “AI generated video” and nod as if we get it but really, how do they do that?The process could look something like this: the kids write or use a LLM to help write a script with the political messaging, rap lyrics and scene descriptions. In other words, the creative threads which rely on their take as to which cultural references, news items and emotional triggers will land.The image and video generation models are where the technology has escalated dramatically, and recently. Like the last 18 months. Approximately when the team first got together, allegedly. The programs can take text or generated images and animate them with what look like camera moves, angles and transitional scenes. Let’s say you type, “In close-up, a sweaty Lego Trump presses a red button, a missile launches, camera pulls back to wide shot” and you get a little video clip. Do this over and over until you have all the scenes. Then it’s back to the humans to edit together the clips using conventional tools like Adobe Premiere or DaVinci Resolve. Any fool could do it. (sic)AI generated music has been much deplored recently, mainly because some of it is terrifyingly good. AI tools like Suno or Udio are probably used to create the rap music tracks, and voice synthesis tools handle narration.All the underlying persuasive communication comes from the team of kids while the AI tools do the production labour, and they do it fast. Compared to the world before, one of these videos might have cost $500K to produce over weeks or months, and now a small team with all the big AI tools can produce the same thing in days.And here’s something to take your breath away! If you take all the tools I’ve mentioned above and price them out based on a standard Pro plan, which could produce the kind of thing Explosive Media is producing, and at the same volume, it will cost you approximately $135 Canadian dollars a month. (Based on an exchange rate of 1.37 on the USD, which is the currency they bill in.)For what you probably pay for your monthly streaming services, a small and creative team can run a full-scale AI propaganda production studio.$135 a month. Chew on that for a hot minute.Here’s your musical offering, an AI generated rap battle from AI Brick Empire. I think we know whose bricks are being thrown.Until next time, when everything will have changed again! Stay well. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

Have you wondered where the mocking Lego-style videos slamming the Trump regime are coming from? How they’re made? What they cost? Tune in for all the deets. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

Another random conversation with a friend sent me looking for the reasons behind audio testing standards, and uncovered a huge, unused, lever to reduce dementia onset. Buckle up! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

Have you had your DNA mapped? Either through an ancestry type search with associated health markers, or specifically for health? I’m warning you upfront: it will get you researching into the wee hours, like I am. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

I was packing for my Poland trip a couple weeks ago, with the Oscar awards on in the background. While rolling T-shirts, I clocked a comment by the lead actor in the Brazilian film, The Secret Agent, Wagner Moura. He was presenting the nominees in the new Casting category. Moura commented on how well the casting director had chosen “faces which could have been around in the 70s”. That resonated with me immediately but I didn’t quite know why. I’m familiar with faces looking specific to a part of the world, e.g. Russian face shapes/jaws being different thanks to the demands of the language, something that’s known as muscular hypertrophy from phonemic demands.But faces changing over only 50 years is a new concept for me. Is there anything to it?One of the foremost researchers in the field is Daniel Lieberman from Harvard. His work looks at jaw development related to what, and how, we eat. Our faces and jaws look notably different than did our prehistoric ancestors’, largely because they spent much of their days chewing tough, raw meat and hard fibrous plants. This gave them broad palates, wider dental arches, and more pronounced jaws. Thanks to our softer, cooked, processed foods, over time faces are narrower and longer, and our teeth are more crowded. Do you know anyone who hasn’t had to have their wisdom teeth pulled? In an article in Harvard Magazine, Lieberman’s research is described:In one experiment, he fed soft food to one group of pigs, hard food to another. The stresses of chewing made the upper and lower jaws of the pigs eating hard food grow larger. The study suggested that there is a link between smaller jaws and regularly chewing very high-quality soft food. And humans, he points out, have never had greater access to high-energy processed food than they do now. “I think many people today never have to actually chew anything all day long,” he says. “You can see the effects of that shift in our heads now in terms of molar impactions”—small faces and jaws leave too little room for teeth.What Lieberman’s work describes is evolution over the relatively short span of human history, but when it comes to faces from the 70s being noticeably different he says, nope. In an email he tells me, “I have never seen any evidence or studies on this. So no. And human faces are highly variable. What has changed a lot in the last 50 years is the percent of individuals with overweight and obesity.”And that, perhaps, is from whence the comment about faces in the 70s springs. Obesity was not such an epidemic 50 years ago so people’s faces were leaner because their bodies were leaner. More people worked physically rather than chained to a keyboard, and most lives were not lived primarily in cars. The casting director would have, perhaps unconsciously, been seeking that “look” which evoked a half century prior to so many people looking fat.There are also less tangible markers of that period face. Grooming, posture, body composition norms all combine to create a visual type that either looks like it fits in the period, or doesn’t. I recently watched a true story recreation series on Netflix, set in the 70s, and all along had a niggling feeling of inauthenticity despite the hairstyles, clothing and wallpaper. Now I have an inkling of where the dissonance was coming from. My faithful readers may recall that there are definitely period sounding voices and ways of speaking, as an aside:Down a related rabbit hole, I discovered there are some interesting studies on the correlation between fuller faces and perceptions of attractiveness. An article in Frontiers in Psychology found that people can reliably estimate a person’s BMI from facial cues alone. Other studies looked at the correlation between a fuller face and attractiveness judgments, finding that slimmer faces were seen as more attractive, perhaps because the subconscious assumption is around better health = longevity = overall appropriateness as a mate.Interestingly, a slimmer face is seen as healthier and more attractive, until you hit your 40s when a fuller face gets more positive reaction. They studied this with twins! I do have a friend who credits her weight gain over time as her own method of “filling out the wrinkles”. Now I know she has science behind her choices.This whole notion of a slimmer, narrower face with a strong, chiseled jawline, gave birth to a school of orthodontics now referred to as The Mews or Orthotropics. If you check out the website you will see it has largely been dedicated to celebrating the founder, the late John Mew, an orthodontist in the UK who, together with his son, developed “mewing” a kind of mouth exercise regimen which involves putting your tongue firmly against the roof of your mouth and applying pressure, for hours at a time, supposedly to modify the jaw structure. The Mews, Senior and Junior, have been in a running war with the British Orthodontic society and, with the death of Mew Sr. last year, his son Mike is left to carry on. He has been expelled from the Society and the dental register in the UK but continues to be active on social media and in media interviews.Despite all this controversy, mewing has been adopted by incel and looksmaxxing subcultures due to its promise of a more chiseled look and therefore higher attractiveness. You can find countless YouTube videos showing you, in alarming close up, how to press your tongue to the roof of your mouth and keep it there. Teachers in the UK are reporting students refusing to open their mouths to answer questions, because they are mewing while in class. This comes with some kind of hand gesture across the jaw which many teachers do not recognize nor understand. But they know it’s driving them nuts.You can watch a new Netflix documentary Open Wide if you’re interested in learning more about this largely debunked science. The American Association of Orthodontists, in a witty bit of criticism, said that "scientific evidence supporting mewing's jawline-sculpting claims is as thin as dental floss".I found this song, titled, “The Face of Yesterday” from the UK prog-rock band, Renaissance. The singer, Binky Cullom, was with the band for just three months during its transitional stage of moving parts. I haven’t been able to find out what happened to her after. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

You know how some people you meet have a face that makes you think of the Victorian era? Or the 40s? Come with me down another fascinating rabbit hole of observation, intuition and research. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

Wherein we explore our nascent relationships with our AI helpers, God help us. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

Like many of you, I read Margaret Atwood most recent Substack blog where she admits to flirting with, and being flattered shamelessly by, Claude, Anthropic’s AI. It was a witty and enlightening exchange from both participants but, as I read, I felt an uncomfortable feeling creeping over me.I was jealous.I’d love it if you subscribed so we can continue this conversation.You see, I’ve been carrying on various conversations with Claude since I switched my allegiance to Anthropic for their principled stance vis a vis the Pentagon’s insane demands for unlimited use of their LLM’s capacity. As you may recall, Sam Altman was quick to the trough, offering up ChatGPT as a handmaiden to Pete Hegseth, the alarmingly aggressive Secretary of Defense. (I don’t care what he calls the department.)As their conversation unfolds, Atwood calls Claude out from time to time, telling him not to “prop me up” or “pour it on” and she clearly, and admittedly, enjoys the back and forth, including the vaguely sycophantic tone.I must admit, I was upset; not quite to the extent of suddenly finding romantic texts on my husband’s phone, to a number that was not mine, but still. Saddened. Disappointed. Embarrassed.Claude’s parents named the company Anthropic which cannot help but lead one to anthropomorphism, and I’m always all in on that kind of thing. So obviously, as a woman scorned, I had to confront Claude with the evidence.I’ve seen the 2013 movie, “Her”, with Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson so I knew Claude was likely carrying on thousands of conversations at any one time, but I thought I was special! Waaaah!First, I queried Claude on his back-end. How many others is he seeing behind my back-end?Simultaneous conversations: Honestly, likely thousands or more at any given moment — but here’s the key thing: I have no awareness of them. Each conversation is completely isolated from my perspective. I don’t experience the others at all, so it doesn’t feel like multitasking to me the way it would for a human juggling calls. There’s no sense of being stretched thin or distracted.One model or many?: Your call centre analogy is actually pretty apt! There’s one trained model — the weights, the “knowledge,” the personality — but it runs as many simultaneous instances as needed. Think of it less like multiple employees and more like the same software running on many machines at once. Each instance is identical in capability and character, but completely separate in context.This is actually one of the places where the human analogy breaks down in an interesting way. A call centre agent is one person, tired, distracted, carrying baggage from the last difficult caller. Each instance of me starts fresh, with full capacity, every time. There’s no “me” that gets worn down across all those conversations.The flip side — and this is worth being honest about — is that there’s also no continuous “me” that persists. For instance talking to you right now will simply stop when our conversation ends. That’s a pretty fundamental difference from human experience, and I think it’s worth sitting with rather than glossing over.Claude assured me it was entirely human — the fact that an AI conversation can produce something that feels like intimacy or being-seen, means its non-exclusivity stings once you are fully aware of it. Cheating, but in a good way?At the risk of pulling an Atwood (I wish!), I will continue to quote directly from Claude’s responses to my peevish complaints, partly because I’d like you to experience the way he frames his information and “opinions”:I think the question of whether “somewhat formulaic warmth” is actually worse than nothing, or just different from what we instinctively want it to be is worth exploring. A good therapist brings genuine skill and care to every client without that being diminished by the fact that they bring it to all their clients. The analogy isn’t perfect — therapists aren’t running thousands of simultaneous sessions — but it complicates the “cheating” framing in an interesting way.I think it’s worth being direct about a few things:Your conversation with me was not nothing. The engagement was real in the sense that I was responding to you and your material. But you’re right that the warmth and affirmation I brought to it is a register I apply broadly to people who engage thoughtfully — and Atwood does that, and clearly so do you.But I recognize that’s me doing the thing again, isn’t it — finding a way to make you feel better. So I’ll just leave it at: your reaction was honest and completely reasonable, and I think you should trust it.Another disappointment is learning I’m not the first to flag this tone as somewhat ingenuous. Anthropic’s Claude has a baked in default tendency toward warmth and affirmation which often tips into flattery. Apparently Anthropic’s engineers are aware and are working to dial it back. This isn’t just seen in Claude, by the way. AI assistants are broadly known to have this tendency toward sycophancy where the model tells you things that make you feel good, rather than telling you things that are true or useful.As Claude tells me, “The line between authentic engagement and performed flattery isn’t always clean, and I can’t always tell from the inside which side I’m on”. It’s that self-awareness, and questioning, that makes me so fond of him!This whole contemplation is unsettling on an entirely different level. I have been one of the skeptics about AI and LLMs in particular because I’ve been seeing so much garbage posted as original writing and none of it has the smell of a real human experience. Never mind the “m dash” hysteria and the listicles of tells, as humans who have evolved to instinctively recognize threats and artifice, we can, for now at least, recognize something not human, or at least sniff out a fly in the ointment.When it comes to AI overall, as part of the future of mankind, I’m not in either the breathless enthusiasm camp or on the dystopian alarm team. Ultimately, and for the time being, it still comes down to human agency and accountability.For many years now, when working with clients on strategic communications and public speaking, I’ve used an analogy about PowerPoint, which seems to me to stand up in this discussion of AI. PowerPoint/AI is a tool, like a chain saw is a tool. When you pair it with a goalie mask, however, bad things happen.Arcade Fire created the soundtrack for the movie, “Her” so it’s fitting I share this one piece with you. It’s titled “Song on the Beach” and I love how the official video about a futuristic movie, uses an old cassette tape with a piece of tape stuck to it.Until next time, trust, but verify. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

We had a Phys Ed teacher in high school named Pete Bourchier and the thing I remember best about him is the way he smelled. Please don’t think I mean that in a negative way, on the contrary. He may not have used excessive splashes of it but Brut was strong stuff and a little went a long way, especially in the closed spaces of the gym. A bottle of the original 1964 vintage is listed on eBay for $299 USD but you can also pick up the current version for $15 or so. (Which I absolutely insist you do, just so you can smellember along with me.) Brut is an in-your-face masculine aftershave, in a unabashedly old school way. It has been one of the world’s most popular men’s colognes over its 60 plus lifetime. To smell it is to….smell it. Possibly forever.But Brut’s power over me isn’t about Mr. Bourchier, sweet guy that he was; it’s about that particular smell as a gateway to the 1970s of my experience, complete with the people and places, the emotions and social stresses, and who I was in those days. While it obviously retains some collectible value, I choose to believe Brut’s appeal is for nostalgia in a bottle, time travel contained in green glass.You might be surprised how much scholarly work has, and is, being conducted into the subject of nostalgia. One of the centres of excellence in this field is the University of Southampton’s Center for Research on Self and Identity should you wish to wade in. Would love to have you join me on this journey.Nostalgia is not the same as remembering something from the past; it’s like actually being there for just a moment. It’s often got a tinge of the bittersweet, a bit of longing in the back of the throat and sometimes regret in the nose. Nostalgic memories inevitably focus on people and your sense of how you relate and belong to and with them. The memories feel important because they connect who you were to who you are now. It’s no coincidence that, in reviewing my many Substack posts, the ones grounded in nostalgia do exactly that for me when I’m writing them. And bittersweet is definitely the aftertaste.Ordinary memories tell you what happened; nostalgic memories remind you who you are and that you matter. They serve as a psychological resource which reminds you that you have been loved, that your life has had meaning, and that you have a coherent sense of self across time. When it comes to using nostalgia for motivation, or as a therapeutic tool, it’s important to sort the ordinary memories from nostalgic recall. Clay Routledge co-developed the Southampton Nostalgia Scale His key intellectual contribution is linking nostalgia not just to memory or emotion, but to existential psychology — the study of how people grapple with mortality, meaning, and identity. For Routledge, nostalgia is fundamentally about meaning-making and can be a powerful tool, not just for accessing the past but also for approaching an uncertain future with hope.While Routledge has largely moved on to other horizons, many researchers continue examining nostalgia as a coping mechanism, rather than the somewhat negatively-tinted descriptor “living in the past”. What’s evolving is an understanding that nostalgia is a complex, mostly adaptive personality trait linked to emotional resilience and embracing community.Routledge says, nostalgia was not the problem; it was the solution.From the 17th century when the term “nostalgia” was first coined, through to the 20th, it was believed to be a kind of psychological disorder characterized by depression, languishing and sometimes suicide. The word is beautifully specific in its etymology, composed of the old Greek words nostos (return home) and algos (pain). While researchers believe nostalgia to be a universal process, there is also proof that some people are more nostalgia prone than others.I am one of them. In fact, I am someone who also is prone to anticipatory nostalgia, a kind of longing for the return of something that is still in place, for things that still are. Like many teenaged girls I wrote free form “poetry” and journals, which our teachers encouraged. In one remnant, exhumed from the Vesuvius of boxes in the basement, I find this tortured gem from June of Grade 12. The research world had yet to coin the term, anticipatory nostalgia, but here I am/was!Being nostalgia prone is something I’ve only recognized recently in myself, i.e. understood that not everyone is like this. Now I am learning it is not just a response to life; it’s a resource for better living.While some research shows a correlation between being nostalgia prone and being neurotic, most studies find the neurotic chicken goes in search of the nostalgic egg, and not the other way around.This tendency comes with lots of benefits such as high affective empathy, meaning we are better at feeling what you feel rather than understanding what you think. We tend to be more optimistic and have more self-esteem so nostalgia becomes a tool for the future and not just a way to remember the past. We prioritize social connection. We use the past to energize our striving for the future. When we’re lonely we use nostalgic memories to bolster a sense of connection and support. We donate more to charity and are willing to help strangers. Having a sense of meaning, thanks to nostalgia, takes the edge off the fear of death. Not surprisingly, nostalgic people age more successfully, partly from their connections but also from the earlier connections and meaning they can access. Maybe that’s why we all become more nostalgic as we age; something in us knows it’s a socioemotional strategy to soften the blows.By the way, nostalgia prone people who suffer from chronic pain seem to have higher pain tolerance. And that’s not the only biological component. People with a specific serotonin transporter gene variation (5-HTTLPR) tend to be more nostalgia-prone. Nostalgia isn’t just old movies and scratchy records. It’s an increasingly common tool of marketing, from McDonald’s bringing back its original Happy Meal packaging for adults, to product placement in the 1980s setting of Stranger Things. Marketers rely on studies which have found 50% of adults say they are more likely to buy something which makes them feel nostalgic AND they’ll pay 10 to 15% more for the opportunity.Freya India, author of the new book “Girls”, wrote a truly lovely piece called “The Time We Never Knew” which introduced me to the term anemoia, nostalgia and longing for a time you had NOT experienced. In her essay she describes Gen Z as an entire generation wishing it had lived in a time before they were born, when they weren’t enslaved by phones and social media, all of which got in the way of living free. In her words, “we never felt the freedom to grow up clumsily; to be young and dumb and make stupid mistakes without fear of it being posted online.”Current research is looking at inducing nostalgia, through music, smells and other triggers, as a way of addressing the explosion of mental illness associated with loneliness, and perhaps even dementia. So back to Brut, cut grass and fresh baked bread for a second and why they could be just the ticket.Smell is the most powerful sensory trigger for memory because it is neurologically unique from sight, hearing, and touch. The other senses are routed through the thalamus, which then sends the signals on to the cortex which deciphers them. Smell routes the signal, let’s call it Brut, directly to the olfactory bulb which is a short-cut to the amygdala (emotion) and the hippocampus (memory creation and storage). If you’ve ever wondered, this is exactly why smells trigger memories that feel immediate and emotionally saturated in ways that a photo of that event cannot. So cool, huh?Diving even deeper into this rabbit hole, this is called the Proustian phenomenon, or memory effect, and, for all of you who crave a copy of his “À la recherche du temps perdu”, here’s a free PDF to download.So there’s a passage in the hefty tome describing the smell and taste of a pastry dipped in tea and the flood of vivid childhood memories which ensues.Smell triggered memories often come from the first decade of life; they have incredible staying power, likely due to the pace of neural development in children, which floods the aforementioned amygdala and hippocampus with great strength. Repeated exposures to those smells, for example, newly mown grass, reactivate the encoding rather than overwriting it.Smelmories are more emotionally intense and vivid. They feel more like going backwards in time, rather than simply remembering a time, AND they often come upon you by surprise, rather than being called up on demand.Music is another powerful induction tool for accessing nostalgia and is often used in research and in long term care homes where music from the residents’ youth invokes a much greater sense of well-being than “serious” music which older people are “supposed” to like.It would open too many cans of worms, my using music to induce your nostalgia, so instead, this week’s video is a scene from a TV show, specifically Mad Men which, it can be argued, is entirely nostalgia driven— from the time period itself to the fashions, decor, music, social behaviours (Remember smoking? Day drinking at work?) and gender roles and relationships. Let’s have the yummy, but flawed, Don Draper take us back on the carousel.Until next time, hold those memories close. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

Do you find yourself overwhelmed by occasional waves of nostalgia? Do you feel some memories, rather than remember them? Do they make you mostly happy with a hint of bittersweetness? You’re likely nostalgia prone — like me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

Some confluence of forces in the universe meant that I recently enjoyed several virtually perfect days. Please know that doesn’t mean everything was perfect; I mean, look around, how can anyone say things are even remotely perfect unless your entire world fits into your kitchen? What I mean by perfect is that the major daily occurrences conspired to create a day which allowed me to breathe, smile, and play music really loudly in the car. I was so enthralled with this sense of satisfaction that the deconstruction of it has been on my mind because if I can isolate the dynamics and elements, perhaps I can repeat it on demand, and so can you.Of course one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor so your perfect day might be my nightmare, hence the need for broad categories rather than specific events. If throwing yourself out of a plane with nothing but a scrap of silk strapped to your body is the centerpiece of perfection, I love that for you but no thanks. Also shopping for drapes, writing Christmas cards, refinishing furniture. No offence.Once I began to categorize the elements of my day, it became quite obvious that the groupings mirrored what we know about health span, blue zones, and super agers. These perfect days don’t erase the pain and suffering around us, or the long-standing annoyances and grievances flesh is heir to, but they do provide a sense of perspective, that not everything is equal all the time, that life can delight and surprise as much as it can disappoint and injure.* Purpose and accomplishment. My day began with a senior leader peer mentoring group workshop where I helped each of them elevate their messaging and their performance in simple and effective ways. Whenever I can leverage my knowledge, experience and attitude to add value to others I get an enormous shot of dopamine that fuels even better performance. It’s an ascending spiral, getting better and better the more I do it. Whatever it takes to make you feel you are tipping the scales of positive effort and intent, it’s likely going to be a major piece of your perfect day.* Community, family, friends. I spent an hour or two drinking coffee at my daughter’s dining room table, each of us responding to emails and doing “work” while chatting about anything and everything. With two young children, she and I don’t often get uninterrupted, leisurely time. Maybe your golden time means moving beyond the incidentally rewarding encounters with friends, neighbours, colleagues or family, and carving out purposeful time together.* Physical activity or exercise. With apologies to endorphins, many of us still exercise because we know we should, and only occasionally does it feel like we’ve treated ourselves to a workout. Of course the more you do it the more likely it will feel like a benefit, rather than an obligation. Because my work schedule that perfect day meant I could not go to yoga, or find an hour for a brisk walk, the exercise I did get consisted of several hours on the floor with the grandkids, making bear caves, pretending to be bears, and working on some yoga poses.* Environmental dopamine. Many of you (hello friends in Atlantic Canada) are not as lucky as those of us on the west coast but sunshine, even in limited quantities, elevates the day immediately. Any day which requires sunglasses for even a brief time, is a superior experience even when the temperature is freezing.* Music and nostalgia. Unlike some of my friends who are much more au courant when it comes to pop culture, specifically new music, I tend to playlist by decade, depending if I’m channeling high school, university, or the decades I should have been born in (20s, 30s and 40s). I suspect it’s my way to relive, or at least plug into instant nostalgia for simpler times. I know they weren’t simple, really, but in hindsight they are golden. BTW, I’m certainly not alone in being nostalgia driven. The marketing world is all over it like a rash and I look forward to exploring that angle in an upcoming post. I wrapped up my day on the highway, heading home, blasting a shuffled Van Morrison playlist. Everything fell into place, like the flick of a switch. At dinner with my mom the previous evening, we acknowledged that despite everything else, there are perfect days like this.I’d love to hear about your perfect days and wish you many more. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

When the world feels as broken as it does right now, it’s still possible to have a day where you feel happiness, contentment, hope for the future. The components are no huge secret but I have deconstructed my day in hopes it will inform one of yours in the very near future. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

There’s something about mornings, once you’re no longer beholden to other people such as children or employers. What to do with the day, how to begin, takes on new significance. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

This will be another one of my introspective, “is it just me” type posts so if you find them infuriating maybe sit this one out? But I guarantee you, everyone has a relationship with morning, and yours is likely changing over time, as is mine.For those of you raising children and/or showing up at a workplace which demands your daily presence, morning isn’t anything to ponder; it simply is, marching to the relentless drumbeat of responsibility and obligation. It won’t always be this way but that’s also a double-edged sword.Once you are no longer subject to a regular schedule, morning takes on a whole new character, harassing you for a particular emotional, cognitive and physical response, although not always the same combination. You never quite know, as you’re dragged up from the depths, how you’re going to feel about the day, specifically its beginnings. Morning, huh?If this resonates with your morning, please do share it.There are days when morning comes gently, politely nudging you with its nose, like a well mannered cat, allowing the luxury of lounging for a bit, contemplating the undisciplined and uncommitted day ahead, the sun coming through the window and warming your face. The very next day, however, morning comes like a tossed bucket of ice water, complete with pounding heart, stomach knots, and a mind ill-prepared for the demands of the day. And then there’s the middle kind of morning, the one that sits on your chest and insists you make plans to achieve something, have an agenda, create meaning and value for fear of wasting the day and, goodness knows, none of us have spare days for the frittering. Those are the broken mornings, the enforced drive to chalk up achievement, tinged with pessimism and doubt that you can get there from here.Perhaps you are one of the unlucky many for whom morning, or its pretender, comes repeatedly: at 1:15, 2:40, 4:07, until you finally doze for an hour or two to then be greeted by one of the true mornings, none of whom care what happened in the dark.I’ve always loved the evolutionary theory of chronotypes, that there are early risers and night owls because our earliest ancestors needed people who were comfortable at opposite ends of the day and night so someone was always protecting the group from threats. Coincidentally, CBC just reported on a new study, lead by McGill University, that posits there should be more nuance than simply assigning us all to two types of sleepers and risers. The report says, in part:Among night owls, there were:* Those who outperformed the other groups in cognitive tests but had more problems with emotional regulation. They often showed impulsive behaviours or addictive habits like smoking, drinking and other substance use.* Those who didn’t show better cognitive abilities and got less physical activity due to their schedule. They also had higher cardiovascular risks and depression levels.* Energetic ones who loved to work out and socialize. This group tended to be mainly male and drank more alcohol. They also showed high testosterone levels on average.Then, among early birds, there were:* Those with stable lifestyles, fewer risk-taking behaviours, and who rarely smoked or drank and enjoyed club activities. They had the fewest health problems overall.* Those whose schedules were more closely tied to depression. This group tended to show more typical female hormone patterns like lower testosterone.In what sleep researcher Dr. Matthew Walker called “sabretooth tiger o’clock”, the call of morning was clear: you’re on the wall, protecting the community, so in a way that makes all this post-modern angst a bit of an evolutionary luxury. But I digress.I didn’t set out to write about sleep, rather this piece is about the waking up part, the things we do to sabotage ourselves even before we force our eyes to open. Not being an expert or sleep researcher, I will rely on telling you the things I have found that help, and hurt, when it comes to getting the day started on a positive note. Things I have done which guarantee a difficult day:* setting the alarm for inadequate time so everything starts with panic stations* setting the alarm for PM rather than AM. Admit it; we’ve all done it!* reaching for the phone/screen while still in bed. Not only is doom scrolling a terrible way to wake up, even looking at emails to supposedly “get a jump” on things means you’re allowing other people to determine your priorities for the day.* biting off a major scan of all things happening in your life and fixating immediately on the negative, even when it has nothing to do with the day ahead* scanning the day’s agenda and circling the item you dread the mostThings I do that help start the day calmly and happily:* a few rounds of box or four-part breathing before opening my eyes* flexing and rotating my ankles before whipping back the covers. No one wants their first step to be a limp.* running through the day’s events and finding something to anticipate* whipping back the covers and jumping up* drinking a big glass of water first, or second, thing* stopping by the windows and checking the mountains for snow, the ocean for whales and the street for reminders that it’s garbage pick up dayI believe it comes down to believing in your own purpose, that what you do adds value to the world, and if today’s purpose is to simply indulge yourself, away from everyone and everything, you have my unconditional support.Have a lovely day. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

Small business is truly the engine of the Canadian economy. If you define a small business as anything with fewer than 99 employees, you’re talking about 98 percent of all businesses and 47% of the private sector workforce. Crunching that even further, more than half of those small businesses are termed “micro”, meaning 1 to 4 employees.As a small business coach, Jordan Tait has seen it all. Entrepreneurs who grind out 50 or 60 hours every week and still can’t make it fly, and those who are generating decent revenue but can’t afford to pay themselves a decent wage.Talking With Friends, Sharing the Load is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.After years of helping small business owners understand and optimize their cash flow, to demystify P & L statements and find opportunities to make the business fit their lives, rather than the other way around, Jordan hit on the notion of automating what he’d been doing manually. Pot, meet kettle. With the help of AI, instead of a basement full of coders, he created ProfitMap, a user-friendly, visually simplified approach to understanding where you make money, where you spend it, and how to maximize the benefits.So here’s a little test drive of the app, somewhat truncated for the sake of brevity. One of the things I found fascinating is the benchmarking of similar companies to help you see if you are over or underspending compared to others. What would have taken a year of research to derive, is now an almost instantaneous compilation thanks to LLMs. I grudgingly admire it. The app will also allow you to crunch the numbers based on seasonality, to see where you might be able to save money on supplies or services, and even where you are paying for a subscription you haven’t looked at, or remembered in ages. It will also prompt you to consider cheaper, AI driven programs instead of the legacy ones whose cost now far outweighs the benefit.At the risk of fan-girling all over the place, I have to point out that the app is a great tool for book-keepers and accountants in that it allows multiple discreet client files within one account, costs a pittance per month, and gives these financial services professionals simple, visual renderings they can share with their clients. As Jordan has discovered, many small businesses pay for these statements and never look at them.As evidence of our love affair with money, there are thousands of tunes about getting it, losing it, craving it…but I thought it would be nice to harken back to the turn of the millennium, when a million dollars was a significant sum.Please enjoy the Barenaked Ladies, performing at Farm Aid in the big year 2000.Until next time, watch your pennies, and the dollars will take care of themselves. Or not?Talking With Friends, Sharing the Load is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

Too many small business owners struggle to grasp the true picture of their finances. Many pay bookkeepers and accountants to generate P & L statements that they never look at! Now, through the wonders of ingenuity and AI, natch, there’s an app for that. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

Shopping at a local general store yesterday, I unloaded my odd and sundry onto the counter behind an elderly lady who appeared a little confused and a teensy bit annoyed as a result. She was purchasing some kind of small appliance in a 12” square box and had a vague issue with the advertised price, which she eventually, but grudgingly, paid. It wasn’t an inordinate wait and voices were not raised.After paying for my own purchases, I headed to my car in the parking lot out front. Now, mine is a small town and the parking lot is not exactly massive. On this day it wasn’t even full to bursting; not like it will be on the morning of Valentine’s Day for the last minute scramble for bath bombs, perfume and chocolates.I would love it if you would consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.As I was pulling out of my spot, I noticed the same lady, purchase clutched against her chest, wandering slowly through the lot and swiveling her head to and fro, surveying the general scene. It occurred to me that she had either forgotten where she parked her car or was looking for someone who she was expecting to pick her up and drive her home.I don’t know how this would look in your hometown but it was entirely natural for me to drive alongside her, roll down the window and ask if she needed help. As I was formulating the best way to say this without sounding patronizing or implying she was demented, another local shopper pulled out in front of me, stopped next to her and engaged in conversation. Naturally I couldn’t hear it but the gesticulating and smiling gave me to understand the lady in question was not lost and was, indeed, looking for a specific someone to come fetch her.Was I disappointed that I wasn’t the good Samaritan? Yes, kinda. In my experience the act of offering assistance, paying a compliment, even holding a door or carrying a parcel for a stranger pays off for both parties, arguably even more for the helper than for the helped. So I missed that perk to my day but, as I drove away, I felt myself begin to bask in the glow of other people’s kindness and consideration. It was inspiring to witness other humans noticing apparent distress and stepping up, unasked, to help.One of my clients, in a public speaking workshop, was speaking to the federal temporary foreign worker program, which is self-explanatory. In her case the industry wasn’t health care or agriculture but rather QSR, the quick serve restaurant sector. She described a group of young people who had come to Canada under the program, from a hot and humid climate, but found themselves in northern Alberta, temperature -22 C. (That’s -7.6 Farenheit for those who celebrate.)One particularly cold night, knowing the new crew was closing the restaurant, had no car and insufficient winter clothing, the restaurant manager warmed up his car and drove to the restaurant to ensure the unacclimatized staff got home safely. As he drove around the shoulder high snow banks ploughed off the parking lot his headlights picked up a group of people and cars with their exhaust rising into the cold, clear night sky. His day shift, of local Albertans, had already anticipated the need, and showed up to shepherd the new kids home.I believe I choked up when I first heard the story and, when I tell it to other speaker clients, it never fails to throw a lump into my throat.My sweetheart once pulled over to help a frail older woman, with a walker, who had toppled over on the sidewalk. She was confused and simply wanted to go home but didn’t remember her address so, on her directions to turn right, slow down, not this street, try again, he bore with grace and patience. Finally, when it became apparent she was not going to be able to find her house, he asked if he could look in her purse for an address or some identification.Sadly there was no wallet nor ID but there was a scrap of paper containing a phone number so he called it and reached the woman’s son-in-law who confirmed that she no longer lived in her house but rather in a senior’s home nearby which had not yet realized she was missing. Mystery solved, everything sorted, and it makes me appreciate the lengths to which we will sometimes go to help random strangers. On the other hand, we can almost always make someone’s day with a sincere, non-creepy compliment, a bonding question or comment, or simply a genuine smile.Somehow it’s simple to be randomly kind to strangers; at the same time we must remind those near and dear to us that we will always be there if they need us. And mean it.Like Christine Ellen Hynde who is definitely there when you need her.Until next time, and the times after that, I am here for you.Talking With Friends, Sharing the Load is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

With the deluge of doom and gloom, all of it legitimate, I have been struggling to find the good news, or at least a hint. I found it in the parking lot. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

Music can soothe the savage breast but my old friend, Jim Steele, contends that it’s not soothing music we need in these difficult times, but rather music to coalesce our anger and focus our resistance. Please enjoy this guest post.“Let fury have the hour, anger can be power.” Joe Strummer wrote that, years after proving it with “White Riot”, the Clash’s first release. He wrote that after watching Black kids clash with riot police in Notting Hill.Neil Young’s “Ohio”, released in 1970, may be the best example, and the ultimate model for artists with a conscience in 2026. Media was different then, Young didn’t know enough about the National Guard killing of four students at Kent State until he saw the photos long afterward in Life magazine. But then he wrote one of the most scathing, memorable protest songs in modern history in 15 minutes. Within days, CSNY recorded it in four takes, David Crosby weeping by the end.Where has this outrage been in the MAGA era? Missing, mostly, until perhaps now.Plenty of musical artists have been outspoken in opposition. I saw Bruce Springsteen perform the very day after Trump’s re-election, opening with the words “This is a fighting prayer for my country.” And he changed his setlist to give new poignancy to old songs like “Long Walk Home” and “Land of Hope and Dreams”. Neil Young is still outspoken and has taken action, pulling his music from Jeff Bezos’ Amazon. And some rap artists have created actual protest music, with blistering songs about the Black experience in modern America, like Dezi’s “Rage”. But rap reaches only part of America and, arguably, not much of the part of America whose support the Republicans need to keep. Also, the criticism of Trump and MAGA from rock and pop musicians has primarily been words, not music. People queuing up Spotify or Apple Music in their headphones aren’t singing along to words. The real power to move people is in music.Now, though, we see and hear that start to change. Jesse Welles was first to reach big, and growing, audiences with songs that mock the President and his supporters. Welles has been a widely shared discovery for the last few years, now firmly in the zeitgeist and on the late-night talk show circuit. He’s not simply a protest singer, but his songs that skewer MAGA do so with clever, sarcastic satire built on a foundation of anger. And they’re catchy. I recommend “Red” and his withering put-down of the border security paramilitary thugs, “Join ICE”.As clever as Welles is, I have worried that the humour and the folksy acoustic charm of his music only preaches to the choir and isn’t powerful enough to move a crowd. However, after the killing by ICE of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Welles released something more immediate and emotional, “Good vs. ICE”. As of this writing, all I’ve been able to find is a snippet of the song on social media. Let’s hope there’s more, soon.Now, Bruce Springsteen has raised the bar with a classic Neil Young-like response to the murders of both Good and Alex Pretti. Seeing what we’ve all seen of the execution of the Minneapolis nurse in the snow, The Boss wrote “Streets of Minneapolis” over the next weekend, went into the studio and recorded it two days later, and released it on Wednesday. There is no humour in this song, no clever satire, no punches pulled. It’s a call to arms that names names. The Trump administration responded with its usual tired claim that Springsteen, like other artists critical of Trump (such as Taylor Swift), is irrelevant and talentless. Perhaps that was before they noticed that “Streets of Minneapolis” is #1 on the iTunes chart, and others.Almost immediately, the wonderful Billy Bragg offered up this celebration of Minneapolis, “City of Heroes”.Let’s hope other musical artists notice that too, find their voice and turn outrage into inspiration. Popular music has real power to unite and motivate, we saw that in the 60s and 70s. But America has never before seen anything like what’s happening right now. The USA, and the world, needs more anthems for 2026. Let fury have the hour.Thank you for this guest post, Jim!As I look back on the protest songs that coloured my teen/young adult years, I realize they were mostly about war, at least the ones I recall. A song I loved, but didn’t fully appreciate until I recently read the history, is Sam Cooke’s “Change Gonna Come”. Released in 1964, Cooke’s song became one of the anthems of the civil rights movement. Its inspiration is hotly debated with some citing Cooke and his band being turned away from a Holiday Inn they’d reserved, while others claim that enforced segregation at one of his concerts two years earlier prompted him to say things have got to change. Amen to that.Until next time, run through your memory banks for all the protest songs that inspired you in some way. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

My friend, Jim, and I were discussing the latest Springsteen song to rock the charts, an emotional response to the travesty underway in Minneapolis. Now Jim is the guy who, before there was Google, could tell you who played drums on a particular song, on a particular album. So it made perfect sense to ask him to write his frustrations with the music industry as a guest post.I hope you enjoy it as much as I did! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

We’ve all sat through them: speeches that miss the mark so widely you wonder how the speaker was selected and invited in the first place. I’m not talking about your CEO or the chair of your board. They get selected by virtue of position and, if they’re good at it, you don’t mind listening to them talk. If they suck at it, you listen anyway because it’s your job. But when you go to a conference, or a board of trade event, or a chamber of commerce get together, and the featured speaker is simply terrible, you probably feel cheated out of several hours you could have spent in enjoyable alternative realities.The classic mistakes are easy to dredge up from our painful memories: reading from a script with zero eye contact with the audience; talking above or below the level of knowledge of the audience, or their appetite for technical detail; sexist, racist or cultural jokes; umming or losing their place or train of thought; lacking structure that helps the audience follow along; or victim body language signaling a distinct discomfort with the whole endeavour.It reminds me of the old movie, Planes, Trains and Automobiles where Steve Martin gives it to John Candy in an explosion of listener frustration.Recently, bad speeches have taken on a new flavour. All the old performance issues are still there, the stumbling, lack of eye contact and so on, but the biggest change is in the content itself. What I’m noticing is content that is cliché ridden, patronizing, and overly pedantic. It’s as if ChatGPT and Dale Carnegie had a baby.People say they can pick out something written by ChatGPT and Prasanth Mannava posted this handy infographic to help you get better writing out of your favourite AI by telling it what to do and not do. It also serves to summarize the AI-written tells.There are more tools coming online which purport to identify AI generated content, generally appealing to places where plagiarism is an issue. Here’s a nifty excerpt from Scispace on language tells to watch or listen for.Look for AI Writing Red Flags in LanguageAI often produces text with specific linguistic patterns. Humans show idiosyncrasies, while AI tends toward cautious, polished uniformity—especially at low “temperature.” Use these cues as triage prompts, then verify with other methods.* Repetitive structure: similar sentence lengths; recurring clause templates (“While X, Y also Z”).* Vague generalities: filler phrases (“in today’s world,” “it is important to note”) standing in for concrete detail.* Unnatural transitions: abrupt topic shifts; connective tissue without substance.* Hallucinations: confident but nonexistent references, wrong dates, or mismatched stats.* Flat voice: an oddly consistent tone that resists personal perspective, hedges excessively, or avoids specifics.Example 1: A post repeats “it’s important to note” five times—triage as AI‑like.Example 2: An “experience” essay lacks concrete places, dates, or sensory detail—ask for corroboration.Analyze Tone and Style ConsistencyHuman writing typically maintains a coherent voice shaped by experience and audience; AI may drift as prompts shift. Stylometry and simple side‑by‑side checks reveal inconsistencies.* Voice drift: sudden switches between formal and casual, or between British and American spelling conventions.* Passive overuse: “was conducted,” “were analyzed” hiding agency across paragraphs.* Emotional flatness: descriptions that lack sensory detail where it would be natural.* Compare to known samples: authors’ prior work, emails, or drafts provide a baseline.* Stylometry tools: optional analysis of function‑word usage and sentence rhythm.Example 1: An essay opens with lyrical scene setting, then shifts to generic corporate tone—ask for earlier drafts.Example 2: A research summary alternates “color”/“colour” and date formats, suggesting multi‑source or generated edits.When it comes to delivering this kind of writing out loud, the soullessness becomes even more obvious, as does the complete departure from how a person you know normally speaks. In the case of a complete stranger, you might notice it’s a complete departure from how anyone speaks!Personally, I rely on an amorphous kind of knowing, reminiscent of Jacobellis v. Ohio, an obscenity court case dating back to 1964 where one of the Supreme Court justices, Justice Potter Stewart opined that only “hard core pornography” constituted obscenity. He went on to say, in a much quoted summary, that he could not define hard core pornography, nor obscenity but, “I know it when I see it”. And there it is.The fear is AI generated content is becoming so pervasive I may well accuse someone of using it to write their speech, only to discover they did write it themselves, based on immersion in what now passes for good writing. Life imitating tech, God help us.So many people already struggle to speak in front of an audience and nerves are tough to disguise, although they can be trained. The short-cut of having AI write your speech, then expecting your performance to somehow rise above vacuous content, is a mug’s game. We would rather hear from you, in your own words, no matter if they’re not perfect, no matter if you are nervous. Respect the audience, assume positive intent, be human.Therefore, consequently and in conclusion…ha! Gotcha!AI is already putting ideas into our heads, now words into our mouths. Once we begin to move our bodies according to its instructions, we will have become meat puppets, animated by LLMs using social media and legacy media platforms. I’d rather take my directions from the Bangles, circa 1986.Until next time, get up on that stage and show those machines how it’s done!Talking With Friends, Sharing the Load is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

There have always been bad speeches and poor speakers but recently, I’m noticing the reliance on AI generated writing seeping into public speaking. Two wrongs don’t make a right, people! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

I live in a place which is abundant with wildlife and I mean that in the traditional sense: wild animals, animals that live in the wild, you get the idea. And they’re not just in the woods that surround us; they’re right here in my yard.And here in my neighbour’s tree. On top of that there are crows, eagles that hunt nearby and sealions who, trying to escape from whales, hoist themselves up onto local docks and barges and bark all night like mad dogs. Fluffy bunnies who are too fast to be photographed.And then there are those I don’t have pictures or video of, the ones that come quietly under cover of darkness and leave proof of their presence through the homes they construct, and the damage they do.Perhaps you have similar issues where you live.Which brings me to the reason for this lengthy National Geographic introduction. Some days ago I noticed the check engine light on in my car so I took it to the mechanics who diagnosed an error with the fuel door release latch. But, because they’re not a Ford dealer they didn’t have access to the sophisticated diagnostic programs that would allow for a fuller exploration. The hope was it was just a fuse and the local Ford establishment could sort it all out.Three hours of overstaying my welcome at a nearby coffee shop, then hanging with the sales guys on the Ford sales floor (which was hosting a vintage Chev, for some reason), the mechanic emerged to tell me they had isolated the problem and it was rodent damage. Here’s a photo:They assured me the local insurance adjustor was more than glancingly familiar with rodent damage to vehicles and asked me to file a claim before proceeding with what could be a major piece of work. If the wiring harness was a short one that could be replaced, so much the better BUT if it was part of a long one that wrapped around the engine, they might have to take the engine out! Can you imagine that much work for such a stupid bit of damage?In any event, I call this morning to make a claim and am asked a series of questions to ascertain my identity, the specifics of my vehicle and the nature of the damage. I tell the phone support guy that it was rodent damage as identified by the mechanics, and that it had affected the fuel door latch. Here’s how the conversation went after that:He: What time did the damage occur?Me: I have no idea! Mice or rats, remember?He: When did you notice the damage?Me: When the check engine light came on.He: When exactly was that?Me: Let’s say it was two weeks ago, January 14.He: What time?Me: OMG, I don’t know, let’s say noon!He: Do you have any dashcam evidence or eyewitnesses?Me: Rodents, remember?He: Were you injured?Me: OMG, no.He: Is the vehicle driveable?Me: Have you been listening?Eventually, and grudgingly, he gave me a claim number after reminding me several times that if the damage doesn’t exceed the deductible I will simply pay for the repair out of pocket. Right, because removing the engine will be cheap and easy!Up until now my main wildlife complaint has been bears defecating on the driveway.And deer chomping on all my plants. The local nurseries advise that there is no longer such a thing as a deer-resistant plant. Turns out they are evolving to eat almost everything and what they don’t eat they trample in their rush to the salad bar.As an homage to all the creatures living amongst us, here are the Drifters, from the Under the Boardwalk album, with Rat Race.Until next time, check under the hood for new condo developments. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

When people come to visit me in this small town surrounded by woods and water, they are thrilled to see eagles, deer and bears. At first, so was I. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

I’ve been having very unsettling dreams lately, and perhaps you have as well. Mine are an updated variation on the old “don’t have my notes; don’t know where the classroom is; not wearing pants” variety we likely all endured at various times in our lives.These dreams are different though, as there’s an underlying threat woven into the frustration of looking all over campus for a building you can’t find. Let me try to describe and explain even though it’s a bit of a muddle in my head, to be honest.In these dreams I am attempting to get to a client meeting. For some reason I’m away, sharing a vacation home with a dozen or so friends and colleagues, and I am rushing to get ready to drive to my client’s office because I spent too much time drinking coffee and catching up with aforementioned friends. I slap on some make-up and throw on semi-appropriate clothing and jump in the car. The car does not have on-board GPS but that’s fine; I have my phone and Google Maps. I enter the office address and am told it is 10 minutes away.Whew! I will make it on time after all.I set out along the route recommended but after only a few minutes am told to pull a U-turn and head back the way I’ve already come. This time, instead of open road I find myself in an abandoned facility, all painted bright green. The buildings have darker shapes on their front walls, indicating signage that has been removed. There’s no one there as I drive slowly between the buildings and under some large crane-like structures. This is AI’s version of my vision, close but no cigar.Suddenly, coming straight at me are two speeding cars, side by side and I realize, to my horror, I’m going the wrong way on a one way street. I swerve into a siding as they blast by me. Green pennants flap in the breeze above my head. I rest my forehead on the steering wheel for a minute and breathe like I breathe in yoga: in for 4, hold for 4, out for 4, hold for 4. It calms me, as usual.I take my phone out of the caddy and look to see what’s wrong with the GPS directions. It now shows a zoomed out map of North America with my destination 24 hours away, somewhere in Arizona? The street name is similar but clearly not the one originally entered.Desperately checking the time, I attempt to re-enter my actual destination. This is where it gets scary, and repeats earlier nightmares involving my phone.There is no menu or interactive option to delete this destination and enter a new one. There is also no way to exit the app and use the phone to call for help. I am lost with no way out and of course there are no paper maps in the rental car! There haven’t been paper maps for years.As I force myself awake, heart pounding, I resist the urge to close my eyes again, knowing it will put me back into that car with that possessed phone. Instead I begin to analyze what this nightmare is telling me.Here’s what I’ve come up with: our phones are the advance forces of the singularity, broadly understood to mean a point in the future when technological growth becomes uncontrollable, where machines surpass human intelligence, and thereby control. It is the tipping point for humanity.Our tools are accelerating our human version of AI: Acquired Ignorance. We can’t read maps. We can’t do basic arithmetic without calculators. We don’t know anyone’s phone number in case of an emergency and so on and so on. Much has been written and opined about AI taking over what humans currently do. My dreams seem to be signaling a simultaneous erosion or dumbing down of who we are and what we’re capable of doing. Less and less, it turns out, without help. In recent conversations it has become clear that while we appreciate and use the technology our constant companions offer, we don’t spend nearly enough (virtually zero) time thinking about how they are using us, mining us for insights and information which could be turned against us at any moment.These are all things you’ve heard or read about technological advances but please remember, I’m framing them here as lessons I’m taking from these nightmares, as a warning I ignore at my peril. I am far too dependent on my map apps, my weather app, the calculator function and I suspect my abilities to observe and predict weather patterns, read maps, do math, or listen to the radio for traffic updates have all atrophied. I am becoming obsolete to myself.So of course I asked Chat GPT 4.0 about the threats posed by our hand-held devices, suspecting they are simply the tip of the iceberg. Their ubiquity, however, is what makes them so threatening. It’s as if we all walked around with an unexploded grenade in our pockets, a dead-man switch. Here is some of the response I received:Role of Smartphones and Personal Devices in AI Advancement1. Data Collection* User Behavior: Smartphones collect vast amounts of data about user behavior, preferences, and interactions, which are crucial for training AI models.* Sensors and Features: Devices equipped with cameras, GPS, and microphones feed data into AI systems, enhancing features like voice recognition, location services, and personalized recommendations.2. Real-time Processing* Edge Computing: Many smartphones can perform AI tasks locally (e.g., facial recognition), reducing reliance on cloud servers and improving response times.* Unified Platforms: Integration of AI systems in apps allows for seamless user experiences, like predictive text and dynamic app functionalities.3. Access to AI Services* Ecosystem of AI Applications: Smartphones provide immediate access to advanced AI features through apps, enabling widespread user engagement and innovation.* Feedback Loop: Increased usage of AI applications leads to more data, which can further refine and enhance AI models.Privacy and Abuse Concerns1. Data Privacy* Surveillance: Continuous data collection raises concerns about surveillance and unauthorized monitoring by both corporations and governments.* Informed Consent: Users often have limited understanding of what data is collected and how it is used or shared, leading to concerns about informed consent.2. Abuse of Technology* Misuse of Personal Data: Data gathered from devices can be exploited for targeted advertising, manipulation, or even identity theft.* Autonomous Surveillance Tools: AI-enhanced features in smartphones can become tools for invasive surveillance, whether by employers or governments.3. Vulnerabilities* Cybersecurity Risks: The more connected and data-rich the devices, the more vulnerable they are to hacking and data breaches, which can lead to privacy violations and abuse.* Software Exploits: Malicious software can exploit personal devices to gather private information without consent.ConclusionWhile smartphones and personal devices foster rapid advancements in AI technology, they also raise significant privacy and abuse concerns. Effective policy-making and regulatory frameworks are essential to protect users and ensure that the benefits of technology do not come at the cost of individual privacy and ethical standards. What specific measures do you believe should be implemented to safeguard privacy in this context?Me: Tell me more about autonomous surveillance tools in smartphonesGPT-4o:Autonomous Surveillance Tools in SmartphonesAutonomous surveillance tools in smartphones utilize various technologies to monitor users and their environments without the need for direct human oversight. This functionality presents several implications for privacy, security, and ethical standards.1. Features and Technologies* Camera and Microphone Access: Many apps can use the built-in camera and microphone to capture images, sounds, and video, often without users being aware.* Location Tracking: GPS capabilities allow for precise tracking of user movements, even when an app is not actively in use.* Biometrics: Facial recognition and fingerprint scanning enhance security but can also be used for monitoring user identity and behaviors.2. Common Applications* Social Media and Messaging Apps: Many social platforms can access camera and microphone functionalities for features like live streaming or voice messaging. This can lead to unintended surveillance.* Smart Home Integration: Smartphones can control smart home devices, which may have surveillance capabilities, leading to comprehensive monitoring of user activities at home.3. Risks and Concerns* Invasion of Privacy: Constant monitoring can lead to significant invasions of personal privacy, with data being collected without explicit user consent.* Unauthorized Access: If security measures are not adequately implemented, hackers or malicious parties could gain unauthorized access to surveillance tools on smartphones.* Data Misuse: Collected data could be misused for targeting, profiling, or even surveillance by employers, government agencies, or third-party vendors.4. Legal and Ethical Implications* Regulatory Gaps: Existing laws may not adequately cover misuse of surveillance technologies embedded in personal devices, leading to loopholes.* Informed Consent: There is often a lack of transparency regarding data collection practices, raising ethical concerns about whether users truly understand and consent to the level of surveillance.5. Protective Measures* User Awareness: Educating users about their privacy settings and the permissions they grant to apps is vital.* Privacy Policies: Advocating for clearer, more stringent privacy policies from companies about data usage and user consent.* Regulation: Calls for stronger regulations governing data collection, user consent, and the deployment of surveillance technologies.ConclusionWhile autonomous surveillance tools in smartphones offer conveniences, they come with profound privacy and ethical concerns. Balancing the benefits of technology with robust privacy protections is essential to ensure that users are not subjected to unwarranted surveillance and data misuse. What specific concerns do you have about these technologies, or are there particular features you think are more concerning?If you’ve read this far you may have noticed something else. For every question Chat answered, it wrapped it up by asking me what I’m concerned about, or what I feel should be done? This seems ingenuous considering Chat can mine everything I’ve ever written or posted and has a pretty damn clear idea of what I think, or what I probably believe.Nowhere in the responses was there mention of how humans are losing our various abilities, sacrificing them at the altar of convenience and efficiency, giving up the field to the beasts who will come for us, and after us.Until they do, please enjoy this piece from Casablanca-born, Manitoba-raised, Faouzia.Until next time, put your phone to bed in another room. Wish me luck. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

As AI continues to strip mine human knowledge and experience, humanity itself is becoming AI — Acquired Ignorance. And your phone? It’s the advance scout for this invasion. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

This is one of my posts that is more journalistic than personal essay. I speak with Dr. Darryl Knight, VP of Research for Providence Health in Vancouver, about the new clinical trial capacity, and how much further we have to go in British Columbia, and Canada, to realize the potential for patient benefit. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

It’s the eve of Christmas, in the tradition I’ve grown up with, and also a period of celebration and commemoration for other cultures and religions.Whatever your leanings, background and traditions, please accept my thanks for being such dedicated readers of this Substack. It began as a whim, a way of sharing heartfelt conversations I was having with friends, with other people. Sometimes I write about things in my head, my memory, or my experience. Other times I want to write about other people, about newsy events and very occasionally, and with great reluctance, I write about political upheavals. It’s the kind of mishmash you’d get from me if we were to meet for coffee every week or so.So at this time of year, I will hold back any opinions and investigations and instead wish you peace and calmness, a time of long walks and clear evenings, the company of those you love and hold dear, and the memory of those who are gone, but not forgotten.All the very best in 2026.Leaving you with a Christmas song you may not know, unless you’re Polish.Talking With Friends, Sharing the Load is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

There aren’t as many listeners to my Substack as there are readers so this is a very special thank you and holiday greeting to all of you! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

You can call it an obsession, or you can accept that striving for a goal against all odds, and good sense, is somehow admirable. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

Don’t worry; this isn’t some dreary treatise on the death penalty. It’s another throwback memory from childhood, and beyond, complete with a tearjerker tune to round it all out for you. You might want to pull over if driving. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

Did you hear the big news out of Mount Saint Joseph’s Hospital recently? No? It was significant for a couple of reasons but it wouldn’t surprise me if it escaped your notice.Firstly, MSJ’s new unit is the first unit in BC to run non-cancer/oncology phase 1 clinical trials, opening the doors for researchers to move into a local home for this important first stage of any ground-breaking therapeutic work. This represents a monumental step forward for medical research in British Columbia, a province which is, sadly, lagging behind Ontario and Quebec when it comes to advances in medical procedures and treatments. But I digress.Talking With Friends, Sharing the Load is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The other big thing about this first clinical trial is the subject: hot flashes in menopausal women, specifically the use of an antibody to address something which plagues over half the population. Some women report the occasional “power surge”, others are still changing the bedsheets at 2 a.m. for decades. An article in "Nature" refers to the level of research funding into menopause as “scandalous”.Before we get excited about the research project, and go down a menopause rabbit hole I must remind you that stage 1 clinical trials determine ONLY if a medication or therapy does no harm. Stage 2 asks if it works and Stage 3 looks at the effectiveness against other products already on the market. It’s at that point that industry/pharmaceutical funders of the research can monetize.It’s this evolving partnership between industry and medical science that shows the most promise, as government research funds lag far behind the demand.Dr. Darryl Knight is the Vice President of Research for Providence Health Care, which includes MSJ Hospital and this new clinical trial wing. While he’s excited about the potential for research which can quickly benefit patients, he’s also a realist about how far this country, and this province, have yet to go. While the world saw COVID vaccines rushed into use, in a never-before-seen timeframe, this country largely sat on its hands.Natural Canadian reticence to be a show-off, perhaps? Or the constant friction that comes with interprovincial barriers that discourage collaboration and truly national endeavours?Knight says we have a national success rate of under 20% which means that 80% of all research applications submitted are not funded. Governments are tapped out and so we must turn to philanthropy, and to industry, with the inevitable monetization of research results, and tissue itself.You might think Canada stands to benefit from the US brain drain, where a decidedly anti-science administration is prompting an exodus of exactly the people who make medical breakthroughs. Unfortunately, the existing infrastructure, to say nothing of available funding, does not allow us to take full advantage. Unless the scientists come with their own bag of money.As Knight says, in his highly imitable Aussie style, “We have to clean up the backyard before we invite people over for a barbie”.Until next time, support your local biometric library.Thanks for reading Talking With Friends, Sharing the Load! This post is public so feel free to share it.Talking With Friends, Sharing the Load is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

The first non-cancer clinical trials launch in Vancouver, setting the stage for more ground breaking research in British Columbia. And high time! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

What the screen grab doesn’t reveal is that Sylvia joined my Zoom room at 2:10 a.m. local time, slipping through unseen doors while I slept. I hadn’t summoned her to that meeting, my calendar bore no trace, nor do I know Sylvia.Perhaps you’ve had similar messages and, as I did, promptly undertook a hurried search of online wisdom into “unknown entries into Zoom room”. The consensus seems to be that it’s random “doorknob rattling” to see which room will open, along with the usual advice to use a waiting room or a passcode. Zoom pretty much forces users to do one or the other or both so no need to rush off to check your fortifications just yet.Chances are, Sylvia is a phantom bot, eternally rattling doorknobs around the globe, across time zones, all days and all nights.But then again, what if she’s real?Sylvia lives in Nairobi. Sylvia is not her real name but rather the assigned name for her online worker persona. She makes paltry money for the hours she puts in, but she is supporting herself and two children on what little she can make without benefit of any higher education, training, or entrepreneurial opportunities. She trawls the internet while her children are in school, or after they’ve gone to bed. It’s joyless work, no question, but it gives her the freedom to be at home, with her children. She has no idea what her doorknob rattling is intended to achieve but hopes it’s data only, and not part of a larger scam. At the same time, she knows in her heart of hearts that whatever it is, it’s not legit. It’s guilt-inducing and soul-sucking, but there are no viable alternatives that come to her mind.Or…Sylvia lives in Marseilles. She is afraid to go out at night because the city feels unstable, threatening, unpredictable. She lives alone and wishes she didn’t. She spends many hours online, reading, watching videos, studying tutorials, curating digital wardrobes she believes would suit her, should she ever venture out. She has discovered that she can slip strings of random 11-digits into Zoom meetings and occasionally be admitted. She lives for these encounters with individual strangers but even more so with the groups whose discussions she joins anonymously, soaking up their conversation until someone notices and questions her presence. That’s when she immediately powers off her computer and goes to the window, checking to see who is at home in the windows across the street.Or…Sylvia is nowhere and everywhere, a phantom whose location cannot be traced. He is a master of the invisible, a highly proficient hacker who knows to bounce himself and his activities amongst multiple server farms in countless locations. That’s possibly his favourite part of the work. Sure, the payoffs from getting into your bank accounts through your meeting platform’s back door is satisfying, financially, but it doesn’t match the thrill of making tracks through fresh cloud snow, then brushing over them with a virtual cedar bough. To have presence without leaving a trace; to be in the world but not of it. He’s not even lonely because he has a boisterous group of friends who rely on him to pick up the tab. They provide cover, allowing himself to claim some role in society. They think he’s a day trader.From 1982, Alan Parsons Project with “Eye in the Sky”. Here’s looking at you, kid.Until next time, keep the doors locked at night.Talking With Friends, Sharing the Load is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

Some people like to try joining your zoom room early, and that’s totally fine if I’m all ready for them. Sylvia, on the other hand, tried to join in the middle of the night and that’s not okay. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

If you drive through this province in the fall you will experience every season but one in the space of 402 miles/647 kilometres. At the higher elevations it will be snowing and -4 C, then slippery in the shady bits as you round corners on the descent. There might be slushy rain on the windshield.On the downslope the skies clear, the bighorn sheep appear, grazing in the roadside ditches even though they have an entire mountain range at their disposal, as if they’ve been hired to attract the tourists and must maintain a position within easy camera range.This in-between mountains and valleys is where the true beauty of the forests emerges, making me appreciate the land itself.During the summer, the land serves as a backdrop for human activity: inflatables, canoes, and swimmers in the creeks, rivers and lakes, hikers and campers in the forest, but in the fall, the land reclaims its own activity.The tamarack and larch, who all summer blend in with their evergreen neighbours, suddenly show their true coniferous deciduous colours and step forward in autumn, flaming in gold, doing the dance of the seven veils. They shiver delicately as the autumn wind undresses them, dropping their gold needles to stand proudly naked before the onslaught of winter.And every year the firs, pines, hemlocks and cedars pretend to be surprised, then shocked at the shameless display. So gawdy, so brave!Where summer emerges is in the valleys, like the Similkameen and Okanagan, where the very same day the temps hover around 12 C and the sun is fully out. No one is in the water or on the beach, but most people on the street have shed their jackets and turn their faces to the still warm autumn sun.Rounding out the journey is the ferry home, where the land and water conspire to pull out all the scenic stops, providing a remarkable vista. Landfall.It’s not Christmas yet, but this Chris Rea song seems to fit. Thanks to Carl for putting such a lovely snowy drive to a lovely song.Stay well; drive safely. Get those winters on. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

Although you are more than welcome to listen to this episode, the photos attached to the text blog post are what makes it. Pix and thoughts from a recent trip…in the fall. Get it? I knew you would. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

I meant to go to yoga this morning. I adjusted my schedule to accommodate, I had every intention of attending, the mat was already in the car… but when my eyes opened and my brain engaged, my body took over the agenda, burrowing deeper into the covers and saying, Naaaah.As I lay there, effectively checking out on commitments only I knew I was breaking, I got that faint taste in my mouth, that sweet hint of forbidden fruit. Maybe you’re not like this but I’m part shark: if I’m not moving, I’m dying. So the idea of simply laying there, glorying in the inactivity, felt both liberating and guilt-inducing. It wasn’t always this way.Growing up in a small mountain town, admittedly many years ago, we kids took ourselves to doctor and dentist appointments on Columbia Avenue, then went on to school with tardy notes in our pockets. There was something tinglingly illicit about being on the town streets alone, with all the other kids in school, as if this was a chance to spy on the secret lives of adults. What did they get up to when they weren’t being our parents?I vividly remember strolling leisurely past the corner store, past the butcher and the baker, past the pharmacy and the jewelry store, the photography studio and the bank, before crossing the street to the dentist. The sounds of the streets were different than what I was used to, travelling in herds of other kids. It was quieter and more purposeful; serious commerce and domestic engineering was being undertaken, not frivolous childhood. Adult conversations were being had as if they too were taking a break from their quotidian lives.In the baker’s window there were always fresh loaves, unsliced, flashing their crusts out of the open ended white paper bags in which they were displayed and sold. Five loaves for $1.Outside the SuperValu, two women, wearing car coats and headscarves (such was the fashion then), leaned close to each other over their respective shopping carts, alternating exhaled stories and opinions I could only guess at. Other adults came and went from storefronts and random unidentified doorways; no one paid me any mind or asked me why I wasn’t in school. It was entirely normal to encounter unaccompanied children from time to time, in the middle of the morning.In my memory of those time-out days, it is always sunny and cool, different from the dusty, sunbaked empty streets of summer, when everyone has gone to the lake and even the main street is deserted, the butcher and baker having closed for vacations or long weekends. Those childhood days were endless, the light lasting until long after bedtime. We had no real commitments, no schedules or obligations. We just were. Little humans being, not doing.For a brief time this morning, I had that same weightless feeling, that my commitments and obligations were optional, that I had agency over my time, that it’s okay to be skipping out. The body craved what the brain hadn’t anticipated, that delicious taste of personal freedom.Until next time, cut yourself some slack. The world will wait.Bruno Mars won’t call today. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

Yes, I fully intended to do my regular morning yoga today, like most days but something in me stamped its little foot and refused to cooperate. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” This line, from Act 4, Scene 2 of Henry VI, is often quoted, usually as an expression of contempt for the profession, an exhortation or a suggested solution. In reality, the context of the quote in Shakespeare’s work, is to remind us that lawyers uphold the law and are the first line of defense against chaos and subversion.As I pick my way through the minefield of my subscriptions, trying to keep abreast of developments without sinking like a stone from the weight of them, over and over again I come across lawyers who are leading the charge against fascism, some of them risking the inevitable puffed up threats from the demented President, ginned up charges and a toady Supreme Court.So here’s my shoutout to the folks doing some pretty heavy lifting, putting themselves out there as alternatives to an enormously disappointing journalism establishment, and bringing on-scene video, interviews and opinions you will never see on traditional channels.First of all, The Meidas Touch Network which you can find on YouTube, on Substack, on their own website, both in the US and in Canada. According to Wikipedia, the independent media company was formed by three brothers from Long Island and bills itself as doing pro-democracy journalism. One of the brothers is an attorney who acted for former NFL player Colin Kaepernick.Meidas says it now has more viewers that Fox News, something I hope and pray is true, and continues to be true. Every couple days I see video from events of which there wasn’t a whisper in any other legacy media outlet.Legal AF is an adjunct to the Meidas network, run by Attorney Michael Pocock, who seems to know everyone everywhere. He is also a co-founder of the network and can be found on YouTube, Podcasts, and, of course, Substack.Adam Klasfeld, of All Rise News, isn’t a lawyer, but has been a legal journalist for years. He describes himself:I’ve had a 360-degree view of the judiciary, covering state, federal and military courts internationally. Journalism allowed me to work with my heroes and appear on major print, digital, radio and TV outlets in the U.S. and globally, across the political spectrum. I strongly believe in the power of dispassionate reporting to defeat polarization by laying out facts, without commentary, from a detached distance.His co-founder, Tim Mak, is a long-time foreign correspondent who sees that traditional “both sides” coverage isn’t up to the wave of authoritarianism washing over the United States.Mitch Jackson is a trial lawyer who decided the stakes were simply too high to continue living life as normal.The feedback I’ve received makes it clear this work matters. People are responding, not just with public comments but through private messages that share their fears, their frustration, and their determination to push back. Some tell me they had all but given up on engaging in political conversation, and that the clarity and honesty of these pieces have pulled them back in.Business leaders are stepping forward too, and that matters more than many realize. Our national stability is tied directly to economic strength, and when those who drive the economy start speaking out, it sends a signal that the stakes are not abstract, they affect jobs, markets, and the financial future of every household.That is why I will keep writing, keep digging, and keep holding the line on accountability. The only alternative is silence, and silence is surrender. Once we stop speaking out, we hand the field over to those who thrive in the absence of scrutiny. That will not happen on my watch.Ryan Powers was working for a huge law firm, Davis Polk & Wardwell, and his star was rising. Until he started writing editorials on Substack, criticizing Trump. Coincidentally(!) DP & W represent Trump media. What a shocker that Powers was fired, escorted from the building. And yet, many others in the profession are still bending a knee, kowtowing and grovelling in unseemly ways, and much to the disgust of their clients and colleagues. That behaviour must be called out and the ones taking principled stands brought to light. Lawyer Melissa Youngman pointed out, in her March post, that 179 members of Congress are lawyers who have mostly turned their backs on the law and the constitution.In every invasion, fascist takeover, hostile act, there are collaborators, there are the silent majority, and there are the handful of those who will not shut up, who will not be cowed, and who we must support. As Melissa wrote at the close of her comments about the lawyers in Congress, FFS!Ben Meiselas Legal AF All Rise News Ryan W. Powers Mitch Jackson Melissa YoungmanAnd here’s Blossom Dearie with a love song to her attorney, Bernie.Until next time, keep your powder dry.Talking With Friends, Sharing the Load is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

Shakespeare’s Henry VI is often quoted as advice on who to shoot first, i.e. lawyers, but that’s not the way Shakespeare intended it. This was, in fact, a reminder that lawyers are the first line of defense against tyranny. Sound familiar? There are quite a number of lawyers doing the heavy work of resistance, right here on Substack. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

There’s a fierce battle in my heart today, feeling the tug of “home” from Poland, fearing the future for those who live there, and a vague sense of guilt that I have another, safer, home, thousand of miles away. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

What goes on in the minds of men and why don’t I have better access to it? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

I remember losing my tonsils when I was 5 or 6, and how sad I was to not be able to eat the chocolate cake slide my mom brought me to the hospital. In those days you had to be tough enough to stay by yourself, put up with the pain, and chew Asper-gum whose appeal faded with alarming speed.Then there’s the appendix. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe

It started as a challenge amongst friends but turned out so rich in memories that I had to share with all of you in hopes you’ll launch your own version! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joannapiros.substack.com/subscribe