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Slackers

Slackers

Written by: Jaime Solis & Jonathan Sasse
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 Slackers is a podcast for leaders, builders, and creators who want to make work better—more productive, more human, and a lot less frustrating. Hosted by longtime media and technology insiders Jonathan Sasse and Jaime Solis, the show blends candid stories, sharp insights, and practical lessons from decades spent navigating corporate life and creative industries. This isn’t a rant about what’s broken or a step-by-step playbook. It’s a conversation about what actually works; the small wins, the hard lessons, and the patterns that make better teams, better ideas, and better outcomes possible. Each episode connects dots across leadership, strategy, creativity, and culture, helping you think more clearly about how work gets done, and how to do it better. We call it “Slackers” because the heavy lifting happens outside the show. So think of us as a weekly companion on your path to better work and a better way of working.2025 Jaime Solis & Jonathan Sasse | All Rights Reserved. Economics Leadership Management Management & Leadership Self-Help Success
Episodes
  • Calling All Builders: Real AI Use with Keegan Knapp

    Calling All Builders: Real AI Use with Keegan Knapp
    Mar 17 2026
    Everyone has dabbled. But what does it actually look like when someone who builds things for a living sits down with AI tools every day and puts them to real work? Not the worldview conversation. Not the hype. The actual workflow. The shortcuts. The moment you go, "Oh my god. That completely changed how I work." In this episode of Slackers, Jaime Solis and Jonathan Sasse bring in Keegan Knapp — senior strategist, product builder, and hands-on AI practitioner — for the show’s most tactical conversation to date. Keegan has been building AI products with AI, running multi-agent loops, and rethinking what a working knowledge base looks like at the project level. This one is for the builders. Key themes include: Why Cursor is more than a code editor — and how non-developers can use it for strategy workHow to build a working knowledge base using local folders, Markdown files, and context controlThe competitive intelligence workflow: building an agent that scrapes, synthesizes, and stores dailySynthesized executive teams and product advisory councils as AI personas that actively shape your buildThe Ralph Loops framework: how to run autonomous refinement cycles with human checkpointsWhy GitHub is becoming the new LinkedIn — and what that means for how we signal our valueThe difference between curiosity-driven use and shortcut-seeking — and why it mattersWhat a personal AI operating system looks like and why it’s closer than most people thinkThe “spoons” framework: how creation and discovery give energy rather than drain it Keegan walks through a concrete example — a cycling apparel startup — to show exactly how a small team would set up a shared repository, build a competitive intelligence agent, and start generating research in the background without ongoing manual effort. The workflow is more accessible than it sounds. The real barrier, as the conversation keeps returning to, is not technical fluency. It’s the willingness to be curious and to actually start. Jonathan frames the transition clearly: most people have been using AI as a super-powered search engine. The leap — to project-based context management, to building agents, to assembling virtual teams of expertise you don’t personally have — is closer than it looks. And for creatives especially, these tools don’t threaten the work. They finally give ideas somewhere to go. You don’t learn to ride a bike by reading about it. Pick a pet project. Try it one way. Abandon it. Try it a different way. The output will be completely different — and so will you. More from Keegan online: GitHubLinkedInGrindwell.ai (golf training w/AI project)Ralph Loops (learn about this new software engineer mindset) –––The Slackers Podcast is produced by Jaime Solis and Jonathan Sasse.Audio production by Stephen Kallao.Cover art by Jonathan Sasse Connect with the Hosts 🎙️ Jonathan Sasse — Chief Strategy Officer and executive advisor.🔗 Connect on LinkedIn · Forbes Communication Council 🎙️ Jaime Solis — Music & Media executive, strategist, and creator of the Red Threads newsletter.🔗 LinkedIn | Newsletter | Website📱 Social: Instagram · Threads · LinkedIn We want to hear from you!🤔 Do you have a question you'd love to ask us, or a topic you think we should dive into on the show? You can leave us a voice message right here! Thanks for listening!If you enjoyed this episode, please follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast app—and leave a quick rating or review. It helps new listeners find the show.
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    1 hr and 14 mins
  • The Domino's Effect

    The Domino's Effect
    Mar 10 2026

    Most companies define competition incorrectly.

    They build spreadsheets comparing themselves to the businesses in their category. Same product. Same industry. Same lane.

    But customers do not live inside your category.

    They compare every experience they have across their entire life.

    In this episode of Slackers, Jaime Solis and Jonathan Sasse explore the idea that modern competition is horizontal, not vertical. Your real competition is not the company that sells the same thing you do. It is the experience that trained your customer to expect something better.

    • A pizza tracker from Domino’s can reshape expectations for furniture delivery.
    • A seamless checkout flow from Amazon can change what customers expect from healthcare portals.
    • A well-designed Little League app can influence how someone judges enterprise software.

    Once customers experience transparency, speed, or simplicity somewhere else, they begin expecting it everywhere.

    The conversation also explores why traditional competitive analysis often misses the point. Strategy should not be limited to spreadsheets and industry comparisons. It should function as a listening device for understanding what customers are learning from the broader world of commerce.

    Key themes in this episode include:

    • Why industry-based competitive analysis can create blind spots
    • How customer expectations move horizontally across industries
    • The Domino’s Pizza Tracker example and its ripple effects on other businesses
    • Why benchmarking against the “low floor” of your competitors creates vulnerability
    • How the Kano model explains the drift from delight to table stakes
    • Why customer support teams must be part of strategic decision making

    The core lesson is simple.

    Customers compare you to the best experience they had today.

    Not the company that looks most like you.

    –––

    The Slackers Podcast is produced by Jaime Solis and Jonathan Sasse.
    Audio production by Stephen Kallao.
    Cover art by Jonathan Sasse

    Connect with the Hosts

    🎙️ Jonathan Sasse — Chief Strategy Officer and executive advisor.
    🔗 Connect on LinkedIn · Forbes Communication Council

    🎙️ Jaime Solis — Music & Media executive, strategist, and creator of the Red Threads newsletter.
    🔗 LinkedIn | Newsletter | Website
    📱 Social: Instagram · Threads · LinkedIn

    We want to hear from you!
    🤔 Do you have a question you'd love to ask us, or a topic you think we should dive into on the show? You can leave us a voice message right here!

    Thanks for listening!
    If you enjoyed this episode, please follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast app—and leave a quick rating or review. It helps new listeners find the show.
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    54 mins
  • Getting Unstuck with Aric Marshall

    Getting Unstuck with Aric Marshall
    Mar 3 2026
    Most organizations are not stuck because they lack talent. They are stuck because the system that got them here no longer works for where they want to go. In this episode of Slackers, Jaime Solis and Jonathan Sasse are joined by Aric Marshall, former Apple product leader and founder of ronin.ink, to unpack the mechanics of stagnation and the discipline required to create real expansion. Aric draws from 15 years inside Apple during the development era of products like AirPods and HomePod to explain what he calls the difference between motion and purposeful progress. Busy teams can still plateau. Shipping does not equal advancement. Revenue dips are often symptoms, not root causes. The deeper issue is usually outdated assumptions, rigid thinking, or a failure to expand capabilities beyond the original use case. Key themes include: • Why scaling growth is different from expansion growth • The cultural discipline behind Apple’s “1,000 nos for every yes” standard • How high-performing teams maintain a driven yet adaptive “hum” • The danger of normalizing missed goals instead of diagnosing constraints • Why sales plateaus are often product strategy problems in disguise Aric introduces the “Guest Star” model as a practical framework for breaking internal echo chambers. Rather than relying solely on internal debate, organizations should bring in fractional experts to challenge assumptions and pressure-test direction. The conversation also explores: • How to distinguish symptoms from systemic failure • Why over-prepared research beats assertion when influencing executives • The importance of defining success markers before pursuing change • How horizontal capability mapping unlocks new markets • A case study of a camera technology firm that pivoted into agriculture and unlocked acquisition value This is not a motivational conversation about pushing harder. It is a strategic conversation about re-evaluating the architecture of your system. Because getting unstuck is rarely about urgency. It is about redesign. Connect with Aric on LinkedIn. Learn more about Aric and his team at ronin.ink –––The Slackers Podcast is produced by Jaime Solis and Jonathan Sasse.Audio production by Stephen Kallao.Cover art by Jonathan Sasse Connect with the Hosts 🎙️ Jonathan Sasse — Chief Strategy Officer and executive advisor.🔗 Connect on LinkedIn · Forbes Communication Council 🎙️ Jaime Solis — Music & Media executive, strategist, and creator of the Red Threads newsletter.🔗 LinkedIn | Newsletter | Website📱 Social: Instagram · Threads · LinkedIn We want to hear from you!🤔 Do you have a question you'd love to ask us, or a topic you think we should dive into on the show? You can leave us a voice message right here! Thanks for listening!If you enjoyed this episode, please follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast app—and leave a quick rating or review. It helps new listeners find the show.
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    1 hr
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