Recent Posts
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Burn The Map: Why AI Won’t Fix a Leadership Problem w/ Angeley Mullins
We talk to Angeley Mullins about what it actually takes to scale in a market where the ground keeps moving under your feet. She gets into the brutal gap between founder-led sales and real product-market fit, why most teams think they have a tech problem when they actually have a leadership problem, and why AI is exposing weak judgment faster than ever. From brand and content to org design and digital leadership, this conversation is a sharp look at what modern go-to-market really demands when speed, scrutiny, and automation are all turned up to eleven.
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Burn The Map: Let the AI Do the Work, Let Humans Be Human w/ Chris Singel
We talk to Chris Singel about comedy, marketing, AI, media trust, and the quietly unnerving future of work. Chris has spent more than 20 years making people laugh — teaching improv, sketch, and stand-up, and spending nearly a decade at Funny or Die — so he’s got a sharp read on what actually lands with an audience versus what just tries too hard. His core idea: you probably can’t teach someone to be funny, but you absolutely can help them understand what they find funny and how to make other people come along for the ride. From there, the conversation gets bigger fast. We get into why crowd work is exploding, why authenticity is both powerful and dangerously easy to fake, and how AI is already good enough to change the way creative work gets made. Chris doesn’t do the usual techno-utopian fantasy or anti-AI panic spiral. He’s more interesting than that. He’s asking the messier question: if machines increasingly handle the labor, what exactly are humans supposed to do with themselves — and are we ready for the answer?
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Burn The Map: Build the Bot, Break the Bot, and Fix the System w/ Bradford Carlton
We talk to Bradford Carlton about what happens when a former attorney gets obsessed with automation, agentic systems, and the uncomfortable truth that most businesses have no idea how their own work actually gets done. Bradford walks through his shift from running a law firm to building AI-powered workflows, dashboards, bug-reporting bots, homeschool tools, and what’s basically a personal operating system for his life. This conversation gets into the difference between AI that looks impressive and AI that actually works. Bradford is blunt about the part most people skip: the real value isn’t in generating code or spinning up 600 workflows—it’s in the debugging, the testing, the logic, and the discipline to break work down into tasks a machine can actually execute. If you’re trying to use AI inside a business without drowning in hype, this one’s for you.
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Burn The Map: Random Acts of Marketing Are Killing Your Growth w/ Michael “Buzz” Buzinski
We talk to Michael “Buzz” Buzinski about what it takes to build a company that can actually grow without the founder becoming the bottleneck, the brand, and the burnout point all at once. Buzz breaks down why so many B2B founder-led businesses get stuck in what he calls random acts of marketing—a messy cycle of reactive decisions, scattered messaging, and growth that depends way too much on the owner staying in the middle of everything. We also get into why B2B buying is still emotional no matter how much people pretend it’s rational, why most “AI experts” are sprinting way ahead of reality, and why judgment, context, and lived experience are only getting more valuable as the cost of content drops toward zero. It’s part growth strategy, part anti-hype AI conversation, and part founder therapy session.
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Burn The Map: Digital Twins, Human Judgment, and AI That Actually Works w/ Stephanie Sylvestre
We talk to Stephanie Sylvestre about what it means to build AI that actually helps people instead of just adding more noise, risk, and technical debt to the pile. She’s been working in this space long before the current AI hype cycle, and her perspective is refreshingly grounded: useful AI should remove busywork, expand human capacity, and still keep a human in the driver’s seat. Stephanie walks through the accidental origin story behind AvatarBuddy, her belief that mentorship is really a supply chain problem, and why digital twins could make guidance, support, and opportunity available at a scale the real world has never been able to offer. We also get into the less sexy—but way more important—side of AI: responsible implementation, secure systems, bloated code, fake experts, and why “faster” is not the same thing as “better.”
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Burn The Map: Why Human-First AI Wins w/ Mike Montague
We talk to Mike Montague about what it looks like to use AI without becoming lazy, robotic, or completely unbearable. Mike’s the founder of Avenue9, a marketer-who-codes, a broadcaster-turned-podcaster, and one of the few people talking about AI in a way that doesn’t sound like either a doomer spiral or a LinkedIn hallucination. His core bet is simple: AI should make humans better at building trust, not better at faking it. Mike breaks down why so much “agentic AI” still feels more like a magic trick than true autonomy, why most companies are using personalization in the dumbest possible way, and why the real opportunity is in removing friction—not replacing human judgment. He and Dan also get into cognitive overload, AI burnout, context engineering, the small-business advantage, and why average work is about to have a very hard time hiding. This is a sharp one for anyone trying to figure out how to use AI to get more human, not less.
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Burn The Map: Community, Concrete, and the Coming Automation Wave w/ Matthew Byrd
We talk to Matthew Byrd about what it takes to build a real community around emerging technology instead of just slapping “innovation” on a sales deck and calling it a day. Matthew is the founder of Reality Capture Network (RCN) and the guy behind R-CON, a conference built for the people modernizing the physical world—construction, infrastructure, facilities, transportation, and all the messy, essential systems that keep society standing up. He breaks down why the built environment is such a massive and overlooked opportunity, how digitizing physical spaces unlocks everything from AI analysis to robotics to autonomous vehicles, and why the real leverage isn’t just in the tech—it’s in helping people understand what the tech is actually for. We also get into a deeper thread running underneath the whole conversation: why community matters more than content, why in-person relationships still beat digital convenience, and why the people shaping the future should probably be the ones close enough to the work to understand the consequences.
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Burn The Map: SEO, LLMs, and Calling Bullshit Early w/ Jason Berkowitz
We talk to Jason Berkowitz about the weird, messy overlap between SEO, AI search, and the growing industry of people selling certainty where there really isn’t any. Jason breaks down what’s actually changing, what’s mostly recycled packaging, and why a lot of the current GEO/LLM optimization conversation is just old-school SEO wearing a sharper outfit. He walks through the real problems brands are dealing with right now: collapsing organic traffic, bot scraping, fuzzy attribution, shifting baselines, and leadership teams asking for answers before the platforms themselves have settled. The throughline here is simple: don’t confuse novelty with clarity. AI is changing search, but that doesn’t mean you should hand your strategy over to people promising magic tricks. What still matters is judgment, strong fundamentals, clear messaging, and knowing the difference between useful automation and expensive theater.
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Burn The Map: Build, Buy, or Get Left Behind w/ Jonathon “Coach K” Kvarfordt
We talk to Jonathon Kvarfordt, aka Coach K, about what it actually looks like to implement AI in go-to-market without falling for the easy-button fantasy. Jonathon has spent years in sales coaching, GTM strategy, marketing, and AI education, and most recently helped lead go-to-market at Momentum through its acquisition by Salesforce. He’s one of the few people in the space who sounds like he’s actually done the work—because he has. This conversation gets into where AI projects really break: bad inputs, lazy implementation, fuzzy goals, and teams that want transformation without changing how they operate. Jonathon makes the case that the future isn’t about doing the old workflow a little faster. It’s about rethinking the system underneath it. We also get into the bigger existential question hanging over all of this—if everyone has access to the same models, same tools, same agents… what’s left that’s actually defensible? His answer: your taste, your scars, your judgment, and your IP.
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Burn The Map: AI, Knowledge Inflation, and the Race to Stay Valuable w/ Tim Kapp
We talk to Tim Kapp about what happens when AI stops being a cool tool and starts becoming an economic event. Tim breaks down his idea of knowledge inflation — the unsettling reality that the thing most of us have been selling for decades, namely knowledge work, is getting cheaper by the day. From coding and product design to education, law, and marketing, he walks through what happens when intelligence becomes abundant, syntax becomes cheap, and the real value shifts somewhere else. This one goes into the deep end: AI as a force that reorganizes work, rewards taste over rote skill, and exposes entirely new bottlenecks in business. Tim and Dan get into autonomous agents, trust, universities losing their grip as the default signal of competence, and why the winners in this next era may be the people who can read the terrain, think structurally, and build what should exist next.