Strictly From Nowhere: A Podcast Experiment by Cause of a Kind

In this episode of Behind Enemy Lines, a segment of CTO Confidential, Michael Rispoli breaks down a lesson every forward deployed engineer, consultant, and AI builder needs to understand:Selling service is not selling software.That same lesson applies directly to forward deployed engineering.An AI phone system that books more appointments might sound like an obvious win until it overwhelms the team, frustrates customers, or damages...

What does it take to build a business in a hundred year old industry when you are young, bootstrapped, and going head to head with billion dollar giants?

In this episode of Forward to Extraordinary, part of the Strictly From Nowhere network, we sit down with Zechariah Thomas, founder and CEO of ⁨@SwiftHockey⁩ . A former pro hockey player from Oshawa, Ontario, Zechariah turned a problem he lived every season, sticks that cost a ...

Search is changing faster than the mobile shift ever did, and most businesses have not caught up yet.

In this episode of Strictly From Nowhere, we dig into Answer Engine Optimization, the emerging practice of getting your business recommended by AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. We share what we learned building our own AEO measurement tool, why it behaves nothing like traditional SEO, and what it means when an answer engine bec...

What happens when the technology adoption curve compresses from decades into a couple of years?

In this episode of CTO Confidential, we sit down with Philip Kiely, software developer at Baseten and author of Inference Engineering, to unpack the economics, careers, and engineering reality behind running AI in production.

We get into why inference is not the money losing operation everyone assumes it is, why most applications d...

Roger Henley joins Mike for a deep dive on AGI, consciousness, and the future of humanity. From building neural networks to understanding what truly separates us from machines.What we unpacked:Defining AGI. It's not just doing 80% of human work. True AGI requires continuous learning, temporal awareness, and something we don't fully understand yet. LLMs are tools. Not there.Can AI discover general relativity? If you gave an ...

Mike breaks down JSON Lisp. A new approach to building UIs with LLMs. How to serve dynamic experiences. Token efficiency. Why rapid prototyping is the future.

What we covered:

API endpoints can serve HTML, JSON, or text. Different formats for different needs. The challenge is building UI that can adapt and scale.

JSON Lisp is token efficient. It's a syntax designed to reduce the amount of tokens needed to describe UI interacti...

Justin and Mike go deep on purpose, ethics, and what it means to build responsibly in the age of AI. They read poetry from The Alpinist and discuss climbing classics that parallel building business.

What we covered:

Climbing is a dance with sorrow. A poem about the longing for home while pursuing mastery. About the exposed unknown of mountains. About building while your family builds at home.

The crux is uncomfortable. The har...

We're breaking down the real state of AI in agencies. From why relying on a single LLM provider is dangerous to Anthropic's catastrophic business missteps.

What we covered:

AI is redefining UI. Personalized experiences instead of one UI for everyone. Google Disco. Whisper Flow. The future of how we interact with machines might not involve keyboards or mice.

Siri is still trash. Apple's had it for years and it's...

Joseph Beauchamp teaches leadership development. His thesis: most leaders don't understand the pieces of their own leadership that actually work.

What we unpacked:

*Leadership styles are tools, not fixed identities. Use the right tool for the moment. Most leaders get stuck with one hammer for everything.

*Culture doesn't establish itself. It drifts. A 1% change in trajectory compounds into massive misalignment over years.

*...

We're talking with Nnenna Ndukwe, lead of developer relations at Qodo, about building a career in tech and why code quality is the biggest problem in the AI era.

Nnenna moved to Boston with her last dollars and worked her way into tech. Her story reveals something most engineers miss: non-technical skills matter as much as the code.

What we unpacked:

Hand coding is non-negotiable. AI is easier. That's why you need to do the ha...

In this episode of CTO Confidential, Mike Rispoli sits down with Ryan Estes — investor, founder, creator, and former founder of podcast guest booking agency Kitcaster, which scaled to a $2M annual run rate before being acquired.

Ryan shares his origin story from music, MySpace-era marketing, failed product experiments, and agency life to building a holding company of service, software, and media businesses. We talk about what it...

AI is changing financial services — but not in the way most people think.

In this episode of CTO Confidential, Mike Rispoli sits down with Damon Gatison, SVP and Head of North America at Synthesis, to talk about how AI, data, governance, and emerging investment products are reshaping wealth management, asset management, and financial services.

We get into why AI is not just “ChatGPT for finance,” how proprietary models are he...

We're breaking down product market fit for service businesses. What does it actually mean for an agency?

Most agencies think PMF doesn't exist for them. But there's a real signal: when demand exceeds your capacity. When people want to buy from you so badly that you have to turn them away.

We've never experienced it. But we're building toward it.

What changed everything is AI. Suddenly coding fast wasn&#...

We sat down with Lyle Ciardi, the guy behind Feel Golf and the Golf Trip With A Stranger series.

His story is the definition of Forward to Extraordinary.

He spent time in prison. Got out. Put himself through college. Built a seven-figure solar business. And then at 30, decided to quit everything to play golf and tell stories.

What started as accountability turned into something much bigger. He went to Europe for three wee...

We sat down with Nat Berman, the guy behind the Be Better movement.

He's been building online since Yahoo GeoCities. He built a sports blog that grew so fast he quit his job after nine months. He ran 25 different websites at one point. Now he's focused on personal branding and building community.

But this episode isn't just about personal branding. It's about authenticity. It's about what happens when you...

We just launched War Room.

Forward deployed engineering as a service.

This is the work we love. When businesses are in their worst moments. Mission critical software is broken. An engineer quit and nobody knows how the system works. A migration is stuck. Aging technology is tanking productivity.

We parachute in for a defined period. One week. A month. Intense focus on your problem. No side projects. No remote retainer. Ju...

It is Friday. Two days from wheels up to South Florida for Frontier Tech Week for AI Engineering and React Miami put on by our friends at G2i . We are pumped.

Before we get on the plane we do a live troubleshooting session in the terminal. Justin has a memory and bandwidth problem that has been killing his recordings and workflow. Claude Code in the terminal becomes the diagnostic tool and what we find is not what either of us e...

​ ⁨@cuzzinjustin⁩  sat down with Drs. Danielle and George Christakis from  ⁨@wellnessfirst2202⁩ , a concierge medical practice in Juno Beach, Florida. This is a story about the fork in the road. The moment you decide to build something on your own terms.Danielle saw the traditional medical system and rejected it. She learned under Dr. Holly Hadley, built equity, and took over the practice. Now she owns her own business and practice...

We just got back from AI Engineering World's Fair in Miami and we had to break it down. Three concentrated days detached from the agency, absorbing everything about where AI is actually headed, who's building the future, and most importantly, where the real opportunity sits for businesses like yours.

The conversation at AIE was different from typical tech conferences. Less noise. More clarity. Engineers talking about sol...