So yeah, that's the way I would think about my day.

Yeah.

And Tom, I'll, you know, maybe...

Pick up the first part of your question a little bit, like, you know, the beginning of my career, because it evolves, right, over time.

And I'm sure it's changed now, but, you know, 20 some odd years ago, 20 plus years ago, you know, the job was...

To show up at the client site, you know, and I had one job, right, which was to deliver for whatever part of the project and whichever client I was serving.

And that typically involved a very specific work stream that I was focused on for that client.

But when you were there at kind of the forefront of that, everyone talked about the industry changing then, and yet it grew and built.

Wow.

That became a really unique that has is a really unique feature of, of talk to me goose now.

And I found myself playing with it all the time while I was trying to figure out that question about what is this business? Yep.

And it was staring me in the face is storytelling because people like to create and share stories.

And so we created a second app because it was staring me in the face.

called Fables Adventures, which is available to consumers on the App Store and iOS only for people to download and create and share stories that they create, audio stories that are pretty compelling.

And I learned a lot in that process about how to facilitate a user in creating their own personalized stories, putting my theater background, my facilitation background, the technology to work to create pretty compelling stories that are assisted by AI, but are really the user's own ideas.

What's one belief you've changed your mind

No, I

don't mind at all.

I've been quite transparent about it.

So yeah, 2024 was a strange year.

I'm an avid cyclist.

And by avid, I mean I was riding a Thousand miles a month.

In 2024, I was training for Ride Across Britain again.

So from that point of full outlook to time off to today, how did that path happen?

When you became the patient, what did you realize you had not fully understood?

[chuckles] I spent years talking to physicians and health system leaders and, um, executives and others about the importance of empathy, uh, the importance of, you know, putting the patient at the center of, of the experience.

And, um, you know, as a consultant, you know, advising, talking to clients, talking to these folks, you know, I could make that case.

And to me it seemed natural.

It seemed, it seemed like the right thing to do.

And, um, it seemed like the clients that I was talking to understood that that was the natural way of moving forward.

And then as a patient, when I found myself navigating through this diagnosis, it became very clear to me how hard that is for physicians and how hard that is for many health systems to do and, and how much work there is to do in that arena, uh, still.

Has faith, in whatever form it takes for you, changed since the diagnosis?

How do you see your story relating to someone with some other chronic disease?

Let me back up and talk a little bit about the solution and the problems that I was trying to solve and then talk about what I saw in the industry and then why I think our solution addresses that.

Once a consultant, always a consultant, I guess.

When I looked at the landscape of solutions that were available, what I saw right out of the gate was, First of all, the bulk of the solutions that were available were still largely reliant on voice technology that sounded robotic.

And I recognize that as my disease progresses, I will likely one day lose the ability to speak.

And I did not want to sound like a robot.

And so I wanted to take advantage of the best technology available and use leading voice cloning technology if I could.

So when you look at potential barriers and you look at the technological advancements that are being able to put a bunch of different capabilities in the hands of patients, What might you think is one of the more realistic changes policy-wise that can be made to help improve the system? And or what are you pie-in-the-sky thinking? But more so, what do you think is realistic?

Well, obviously many did.

Many did, yes.

And oftentimes they were even true.

That's an added bonus.

Added bonus, right.

So I talked all day and I would find myself at the end of the day with my speech slowing down and even one of my dear friends and colleagues said to me, it's as if your tongue can't keep up with your brain.

Um, and so, you know, I, I, I got this diagnosis and as someone who processes the world out loud, I began to wonder again, once a consultant, always a consultant, what are the tools that, that people use, um, when, when they lose the ability to speak, understanding that with this diagnosis, people will, you know, frequently, um, lose the ability to speak.

What do you mean by the word secure in this context?

This is

a very powerful propellant to civil conflict because it's not a one-time sort of election loss.

It's a permanent status loss.

It's not a simple change in this or that policy.

It is a permanent change to the political rules of the game and to the cultural rules of the game.

This is obviously highly impactful and highly frightening.

So it tends to animate people to conflict in a very powerful way.

Are there other such instances, or is this, to your mind, the most important instance of how fractured society has become?

But would you s- is it fair to, to characterize or to synthesize what you're saying by the vertical vector as being a sign that could lead towards revolution, whereas the, the horizontal vector, uh, is, um, a phenomenon that would indicate civil war?

Uh, yes, I think that's fair.

The, the horizontal fac- vector is one that, uh, would quite possibly lead towards balkanization, and then, uh...

Right, so, um, whereas the, uh, the, the vertical is, um, um, has more the nature of a peasant revolt.

Um, so in other words, it, it has a revolutionary aspect to it.

The only thing that I hesitate around that is I don't think that, um, this revolt is so much about the, uh, uh, the replacement of, uh, the, the, the elite.

It isn't that sort of thing.

Tell me a bit, if you wouldn't mind, in your own words, about the, the... how this, um, centrifugal social forces in the UK will splinter British society into the, into these three factions that you've indicated: the Islamic faction, the, the white Caucasian faction, and then the, the faction that's loyal to the, to the state and its clients.

Uh-

These would include the, uh, looming, uh, essentially the, uh, longstanding expectation gap amongst, particularly amongst, uh, uh, youth who have poorer economic prospects, le- lower levels of security, in, in fact, uh, possibly even diminishing, um, uh, expectation, uh, age ex- uh, life ex- uh, expectations of lifespan, and, and health and so on in society, less opportunities to own homes, procreate and so on.

There's an expectation gap that derives from structural economic problems in society that have been building for a long time, that are likely to come to a crunch point here in the UK probably in the next six months, um, given...

I'm, I'm not an economist, but I think that's a fairly, uh, reasonable, um, um, reasonable view, uh, certainly widely expressed, uh, economic viewpoint and the s- and the fi- another proximate factor hinted at by Tim, uh, uh, Stanley there, uh, is the lack of a unified and competent elite in the UK.

Uh, the government is, um, uh, simply not terribly competent.

They don't know what they are doing.

They're reac- they are reacting in a, in a highly, um, capricious manner, uh, uh, in as essentially as frightened people do when they, when they themselves are fearful of the monster that they've created and they can see a rising.

Give me a few words, if you wouldn't mind, on that, please.