Have you ever found yourself in the presence of someone you love dearly and had nothing to say? The silence, not indicative of your care for the other, nor of your desire to connect with them, and yet there were no words you could grasp to articulate the depth or quality of your connection to them.

Or, have you found yourself in the same looped pattern of conversation with someone you love? Feeling as though you were treading the same path repeatedly, and it was simply exhausting? Or, even worse, it was deteriorating your connection.

We all crave connection. But sometimes we need help getting there.

Topaz Adizes offers a guide to having the conversations that can lead to that connection in his latest book, 12 Questions for Love: A Guide to Intimate Conversations and Deeper Relationships. After a decade of exploring human emotions and intimacy through more than 1200 conversations in his Emmy Award-winning experience design studio, The Skin Deep, Topaz has been studying and watching humans of all types, and in all kinds of relationships, simply talk. And it’s resonating, having over 1.2 million followers on TikTok and 900,000 on YouTube.

Topaz is a writer, director, and experience design architect. He is an Edmund Hillary Fellow and Sundance/Skoll Stories of Change Fellow. His works have been selected to Cannes, Sundance, IDFA, and SXSW; featured in New Yorker magazine, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times; and have garnered an Emmy for New Approaches to Documentary, along with Two World Press photo awards for Immersive Storytelling and Interactive Documentary.

He is currently the Founder and Executive Director of The Skin Deep. Topaz studied philosophy at UC Berkeley and Oxford University. He speaks four languages, and currently lives in Mexico with his wife and two children.

In this episode, Topaz shares what he has learned from witnessing over 1200 conversations and the lessons from his own first-hand experiences.

Topaz’s creativity, like his humanity, seems boundless. His work on relationship developments is a useful approach to helping us all have deeper and more intimate relationships that helps each us live our lives in full.

Over 20 million copies of one of the most famous memoirs of all-time, “Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson” written by Mitch Albom, have been sold since its 1997 publication, and to this day it remains on many a college’s required reading list.

Twenty-eight years after Morrie Schwartz passed away, his son Rob Schwartz, has edited his father’s last work, and posthumously published what has become a bestselling new book, “The Wisdom of Morrie: Living and Aging Creatively and Joyfully.”

Rob is a journalist and entrepreneur, having founded a number of companies, both in Japan and the US, and held executive positions in others. He’s produced numerous film and music projects with international teams. His areas of expertise include the entertainment industries in Asia, the US, and Europe. His projects often have a special emphasis on music, film, online business development, and developing musical artists’ careers, as well as working for Billboard in Asia.

He has appeared on Good Morning America, Nightline, PBS NewsHour, NBC10 Boston, and in WebMD, Psychology Today, Reader’s Digest, and People magazine. Rob is currently one of the producers of Onetopia, a benefit music festival.

I asked Rob what it was like growing-up in the in the Schwartz household along with his work and background, and what took him to Asia and his work there as a founder, journalist, and in production.

The book’s been described as a profound, poetic, and poignant masterpiece of living and aging joyfully and creatively, but he first starts off examining ageism and explaining how poisonous it is and how wrong it is. In his reflections he confronts the false notion that people are somehow made less by the aging process, and his coining the term “age casting,” as an aspect of ageism and diminishing a person’s value solely based on their age.

We wrapped-up our conversation with him sharing a bit about his efforts in producing a global benefit festival dedicated to mental health and has a playlist on Spotify. He’s also working on the development of Holocaust survivors’ story as a documentary as well.

Rob’s perspectives, work and life serve as an inspiration to us all to live our lives in full.

When you think of modern technologies that aren’t gadgets and gizmos, you probably think of the Web, and with it, the Internet.

If so, you aren’t really thinking of modern technologies.

We are entering a new age. We’ve moved from the “Read-only Web,” which had little functionality for interacting with content, to the “Read-Write Web,” which offered seemingly endless collaborative opportunities, from sharing things with friends and family to shopping at your favorite brands. But the profusion of cyberattacks, data hacks, and online profiling have left many of us to view digital life as a Faustian bargain in need of a major rethink.

It brings with it a new lexicon and vocabulary for concepts and tools like blockchains, the metaverse, NFTs, DAOs, decentralized finance, and self-sovereign identity. In this episode, Alex Tapscott will serve as our guide and interpreter of this brave new world.

Alex is the author of the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail Bestseller Web3: Charting the Internet’s Next Economic and Cultural Frontier. He is also an entrepreneur and seasoned capital markets professional focused on the impact of emerging technologies, such as Web3, AI, VR/AR, the Metaverse, blockchain and cryptocurrencies, on business, government, and society.

Alex is masterful in communicating via both the written and spoken word as to complex topics that are critically important to our future and living fuller lives. As he wrote “In the Read-Write-Own Web of Web3, we are not merely spectators; we are authors of our digital destiny, reclaiming control over our identities and assets.” This episode is not to be missed if you want to better understand what the future holds and how it will impact us all and society.