Standing Inside the Change | AMP Episode Two

There is so much happening right now that it can be difficult to know where to zoom in. Every subject seems connected to ten other subjects. Every headline is presented like the beginning of the end or the beginning of some miraculous new future. Most of it is designed to make us afraid, angry, excited or distracted long enough to keep watching.

So tonight, I want to talk about artificial intelligence without the fear campaign and without the grand promises. I do not know exactly what AI is going to become. Nobody does. Anyone who claims to know exactly what the world will look like five or ten years from now is either guessing, selling something or doing both.

What I do know is that technologies rarely disappear once they prove they can save money, make money, increase efficiency or become useful in everyday life. The dot-com bubble burst, but e-commerce did not. There was a time when Roku sounded like some strange gadget nobody needed. Now devices like it are one of the primary ways people receive television and video programming. There was also a time when paying for radio sounded ridiculous to me. Why would anybody pay for something they could already hear for free? I was wrong. I pay for satellite radio now.

Traditional radio is almost nothing like the industry I worked in during the 1990s and the first part of the 21st century, but radio did not completely disappear. Audio did not disappear. Broadcasting did not disappear. The distribution form changed. The listening habits changed. The business changed. Something still remained.

That is my observation about AI tonight. The hype may collapse. Some of the companies will fail. A lot of money will be lost. Many of today’s promises will probably look foolish later. There will be backlash, resistance, mistakes, abuse and regulation. But the underlying technology is not going back into the bottle.

That does not mean I have to worship it. It does not mean you have to fear it. It means we are alive during the confusing stage when something new has arrived, but nobody can yet see its final shape. There is something deeply human about that uncertainty. We have all lived through versions of it before. We simply did not always recognize the moment while we were standing inside it. Well, I did, but that’s a whole other story.

From there, let me tell you what is happening inside AMP. With AMP Solutions, I am beginning the process of recruiting panelists. This part is not about replacing human conversation. It is about creating more of it. I want real people, real experiences, real frustrations and real perspectives involved. I do not want to build something based entirely on my own assumptions about what businesses, creators and customers need. I want to listen. I want people to respond, challenge the ideas, point out what is missing and help reveal what is actually useful.

The human engagement is the program. Any technology used later to market, organize or promote what comes from those conversations is secondary. First comes the conversation itself.

Over at Jim’s Toy Box, I have begun selling pieces of the collection. There is no clever spin required. The economy is rough, income has been nonexistent for too long and sometimes you sell things. They are objects. I enjoy them, I appreciate them and many have stories attached to them, but they are still things.

What has surprised me is that the process has also caused me to revisit Toys Are Totems. That book came from fifteen years of Jim’s Toy Box, collecting, selling, displaying, presenting and thinking about why these objects matter to us. I released the book, but I do not believe I gave its marketing and promotion the energy or sustained attention it deserved.

So I am going back to it. Not because it replaces Eerie Entertainment and not because I am retreating into the collection. I am going back because the work already exists, the story is real and there is more life in it than I allowed myself to develop the first time.

Then there is Eerie Entertainment. A remarkable amount has happened. It is easy for me to overlook that because I am standing in the middle of it every day. I tend to see what is unfinished before I see what has already been created.

But the universe is becoming real. WDRL exists. The characters exist. The books, stories, station imaging, music, programming ideas, artwork, collectibles, Better Haunts and Happenings, the website and the operating structure all exist in some form now. Some pieces are complete. Some are rough. Some are still little more than a signal trying to break through the static. But the signal is there.

My larger mission is still to show you how things are done by doing them myself. Not by selling you a course about something I have never built. Not by promising you exposure through some meaningless spotlight. Not by standing outside the arena and explaining how everybody else should fight.

I want to build real things, make real mistakes, adjust in public and show the results. For a while, even that became foggy for me. I have been writing, producing, marketing, broadcasting and creating for so long that repeating demonstrations with my own material sometimes began to feel like busy work. I already knew I could do those things.

The greater value may now come from applying that experience to somebody else’s work, somebody else’s business or somebody else’s idea. But that begins with people. It begins with listening, talking, understanding and engaging. The tools come later.

Tonight is not about knowing exactly where all of this leads. It is about recognizing that we are already moving. And sometimes the only honest thing a person can do is tell you what he sees from where he is standing. Check it out on my Facebook page.

Now, Go Play…

Jim -08/06/2026