Your armor can protect you so well it can prevent your ability to grow. Mat Cashman - musician turned trader turned educator - unpacks the paradox at its core: you need both the unglamorous reps of practice AND the dissolution that comes when you step into unfamiliar territory. This is a conversation about why the pursuit of growth is what makes a life.

When two counties with nearly identical unemployment rates face completely different economic futures, something fundamental about how we measure economic health has gone wrong. Eric Pachman shows why the unemployment statistics we've been watching all along are quietly masking an economic catastrophe unfolding across 32% of American counties. The real story lives in the labor force data, and it's far more ominous than anyone's paying attention to.

When every organization is drowning in information and AI is only accelerating the flood, the last thing you need is more output - you need someone who can help you find the right problem in the first place. Elie Jacobs, founder of communications strategy group Purposeful Advisors, is back on Just Press Record reacting to the Chief of Staff renaissance and unpacking why problem-finding has become more valuable than problem-solving. At some point, you stop trusting the computer and take the stick.

Nearly a century ago, classical scholar Milman Parry made an extraordinary discovery when he found the last of the great Yugoslav epic singers, composing 13,000-line narratives in real time without writing or memorization. Today, we're building AI systems that claim to accomplish a similar task - composing language token by token, and generating novel outputs from learned patterns. However, what Parry found in those mountains may hold the key to understanding and building the future of artificial intelligence in their much more humanistic tradition.

Rick Lake traces this lineage from ancient tradition to modern AI, revealing what the guslari can teach us about safety, efficiency, and what it means to compose at scale.