Thought Leaders
William Dempsey: Supporting LGBTQ+ Youth Mental Health, Safety, and Resilience
William Dempsey, LICSW, is a Boston-based clinical social worker and LGBTQ+ mental-health advocate. He founded Heads Held High Counselling, a virtual, gender-affirming group practice serving Massachusetts and Illinois, where he and his team support clients navigating anxiety, depression, trauma, ADHD, and gender dysphoria. Clinically, Dempsey integrates EMDR, CBT, IFS, and expressive modalities, with a focus on accessible, equity-minded care. Beyond the clinic, he serves on the board of Drag Story Hour, helping expand inclusive literacy programming and resisting censorship pressures. His public scholarship and media appearances foreground compassionate, evidence-based practice and the lived realities of queer communities across North America.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen2 months ago in Interview
Elena Sabry on Outages, Survival, and Human Dignity: Life in Kyiv Under Winter Strikes
Elena Sabry is a Ukrainian-American executive career coach at Career Academy, based in Las Vegas. With family in Kyiv and constant contact with friends and colleagues in Ukraine, she follows the war's daily realities through Ukrainian news, social media, and direct conversations. Sabry previously worked in Kyiv hospitality, including at the InterContinental Kyiv, and has lived abroad in the United Arab Emirates, sharpening her perspective on language, culture, and migration. Shaped by early economic hardship after her father died in 1992, she now helps clients build resilient careers and supports Ukrainian communities through advocacy, practical guidance, and storytelling during prolonged crises.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen2 months ago in Interview
Is This the Rights' Fight? Wrong Turn on Right 5: Charlie Kirk Case, Prosecutor Disqualification, and Israel Debate
Irina Tsukerman is a human rights and national security attorney based in New York and Connecticut. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in National and Intercultural Studies and Middle East Studies from Fordham University in 2006, followed by a Juris Doctor from Fordham University School of Law in 2009. She operates a boutique national security law practice. She serves as President of Scarab Rising, Inc., a media and security strategic advisory firm. Additionally, she is the Editor-in-Chief of The Washington Outsider, which focuses on foreign policy, geopolitics, security, and human rights. She is actively involved in several professional organizations, including the American Bar Association’s Energy, Environment, and Science and Technology Sections, where she serves as Program Vice Chair in the Oil and Gas Committee. She is also a member of the New York City Bar Association. She serves on the Middle East and North Africa Affairs Committee and affiliates with the Foreign and Comparative Law Committee.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen2 months ago in Interview
Urban Designer Sakshi Nanda Discusses Her Roots and the Inspiration Behind Her Work
Urban designer Sakshi Nanda carries a unique perspective when it comes to city planning. Having grown up in the vibrant, densely populated streets of Mumbai her views have been honed by her experiences in the sprawling city of Atlanta and planned city of Portland. During her formative years, Nanda witnessed the transformative power of efficient public transportation through Mumbai’s famed local train system, and now, in her professional life, she strives to recreate that sense of a connected, sustainable community.
By Lisa Rosenberg2 months ago in Interview
Inside Oprah Winfrey’s Anti-Aging Lifestyle: How She Slows Time Through Habits, Not Age
There’s a certain stillness to Oprah Winfrey that people notice before they ever comment on how she looks. A steadiness. A calm authority that doesn’t rush to fill silence. When conversations turn to aging, this is usually where they land—not on numbers, not on years, but on presence.
By Darryl Hudson2 months ago in Interview
William Stern on Community, Jewish Values, and Leadership at Cardiff
William Stern is a finance entrepreneur and founder and CEO of Cardiff, a B2B financing firm operating in North America, Portugal, and Israel. He launched Cardiff in 2004 after seeing many small and lower-middle-market businesses struggle to secure timely, cost-effective capital. Stern emphasizes transparency in rates and margins, relationship-based underwriting, and “ethical financing with a soul,” often using phone conversations rather than purely automated decisions. He describes leadership as a series of consistent, small actions that compound over time. Inside Cardiff, he favours frequent check-ins over annual reviews to support employees as whole people and to protect trust with customers, applicants, and stakeholders.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen2 months ago in Interview
10 Minutes with Bill Gates
Introduction Spending 10 minutes with Bill Gates may sound brief, but even a short conversation with one of the world’s most influential innovators can offer insights that last a lifetime. As the co-founder of Microsoft, a philanthropist, an author, and a global thought leader, Bill Gates has shaped how the world uses technology and how it addresses some of its most pressing challenges. In just ten minutes, one could explore decades of experience in innovation, leadership, failure, success, and global responsibility.
By shaoor afridi2 months ago in Interview
Fumfer Physics 36: Proto-Thoughts, Context, and Memory Hooks
Scott Douglas Jacobsen asks whether it is naïve to look for a discrete “unit” of thought, given that thoughts vary in informational content and rarely arrive as neat sentences. Rick Rosner argues that language captures only a thin slice of cognition: perception, background knowledge, self-critique, and half-formed associations run in parallel as “proto-thoughts.” He uses the example of viewing a painting to show how sensory input and contextual inference accompany any sentence-like notion. Most thoughts, he adds, pass without leaving retrieval “hooks,” much like dreams. Without deliberate encoding—or a later contextual trigger—mental material vanishes, because recall depends on activating the right associative patterns.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen2 months ago in Interview
Igor Finkelshtein: What Long-Term Builders Know That Fast-Growth Founders Often Miss
In today’s entrepreneurial culture, speed is often treated as the ultimate indicator of success. Founders are encouraged to move fast, launch quickly, and scale before competitors catch up. But after years of building businesses in industries where reliability and trust matter more than headlines, I’ve learned a different lesson.
By Igor Finkelshtein2 months ago in Interview
Fumfer Physics 35: Cognitive Limits, Big Data, and AI’s Role in Human Reasoning
In this exchange, Scott Douglas Jacobsen asks what human consciousness cannot process adequately. Rick Rosner argues that people hit hard limits with big data, large parameter spaces, and even simple mental representations like number grids. Computers can find correlations, but humans struggle to hold enough information at once to test whether patterns are causal. Rosner suggests AI could surface correlations and generate wide-ranging analogies across culture at superhuman scale, while humans remain responsible for interpretation and meaning. He extends the point to scientific imagination—alternative cosmologies and modified-gravity ideas—and notes AI may help break cognitive ruts, even if it is not yet a top-tier theoretical mathematician.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen2 months ago in Interview
