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.

Anthropic refused to let the Pentagon use Claude without explicit constraints on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. Within hours, the Trump administration blacklisted the company. OpenAI, claiming the same principles, signed the contract that afternoon. This is not a story about defense contracting, so much as it's a story about the moment we hand a tool that talks to people who kill and realize we've already seen this movie a thousand times. Rick Lake traces the warning through the Golem, through Hephaestus' forge, through every myth and film that tried to tell us: the technology isn't the danger. The only danger, always, is the person certain he understands what he's holding.

What do you do when your origins keep calling you back even as your ambitions pull you forward? Morgan Ranstrom returns to discuss a clip from Michael Perry and Aaron Gwyn about the tension between a rural upbringing and artistic success in the larger world. He discusses why self-promotion isn't pride, why community building can't wait, and what his four-year-old understands about Minneapolis that too many others can't seem to grasp.