Yapping is Communication

The other day I was explaining to someone the benefits of proceedings writing, meeting reports, note taking, meeting minutes, and our vision at Nairobi Rapporteur Services. He unknowingly poured cold water on the elevator pitch when he said, “I just use AI during my meetings nowadays. It produces instant transcripts of the discussion.” Fair. The world is navigating towards the “machine” making work easy for us. I’m not naïve. Meanwhile the rest of us are in the race to compete with the machines that are taking over from us. You know? But then I got thinking about the whole movement of shifting from traditional human work to AI-enabled work. At first was the obvious that AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. [Told you I’m smart]. And the fact that it’s “artificial.” According to Google, that means ‘made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally…a copy of something natural.’ Meaning the whole idea of AI is a copy of what is already naturally part of our being known a...

The 2024 US elections remind me two hard lessons that I learned coincidentally this first week of November in 2016 (Trump vs. Hillary) and in 2020 (Trump vs. Biden) both at the eve of election days back when I was a passionate, but disillusioned day trader. Flashback to 2016. I had just started some lessons on forex trading through a local trainer that September. And instead of being patient and learning the ropes before going into live trading, I wanted to start making profit immediately while still a student. The thing is, in early September 2016, I had lost a job that I mistakenly held too close to my heart and the whole experience of losing it broke my heart to pieces. I didn’t realize how no longer having a place called an office to go to every day and no longer having colleagues around whom I had consider as close friends could make me almost sink into depression. To compensate for that loss of purpose, loss of dignity, and loss of a stable income and financial security, I de...

  Campaign rallies have been the hallmark of any election season in democracies all over the world and the U.S. is not an exception. Organizing rallies in different cities, counties, and towns is traditionally the best opportunity for candidates to communicate their agenda to their potential voters. How candidates communicate to their constituents, individually and through their teams, determine their success on the ballot box and overall, the success of the nation when they win. Verbal and non-verbal communication techniques employed by the candidates have been used throughout the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign and a couple of observations have been made along the way on political communications 101. Thank you for your time Political rallies in the US elections are well-organized solely out of respect for people’s time. Time taken to plan, stand in queues, sometimes for hours, and attend the rallies. That’s why it is commendable that American political candidates’ campa...

  5 Reasons Donald Trump Had a Better Chance in 2020 Than He Has in 2024 The US elections is on Tuesday, November 6th. And on the red MAGA hat corner we have the twice impeached, one-term controversial New York businessman and former President Donald J. Trump running for a record third time. On the blue corner, we have the current and first woman Vice President of the United States, the former senator from California and former San Francisco District Attorney, Kamala Harris.  The question here is why would Donald Trump think he can win the race to the White House today and yet he failed to do so when he was in charge at the White House? The following are reasons why it will be harder for Mr. Trump in 2024 than it was in 2020 to become commander-in-chief again. 1-     The Advantage of the Incumbent It can only take a huge dip in public confidence to deny any US President (or any world leader, really) a second term. Considering that Mr. Trump became the first ...

  This is tough to share. Some time back I was at a retreat with a group who were mostly meeting for the first time. During that weekend, I met a couple of friends who I had not talked to for over 10 years. Two encounters left a bitter taste in my mouth, but at the same time, they inspired this article regarding what to (and not to) say when you run into a former friend you haven’t spoken to for many years. The first encounter was my fault. The last time I saw this person was 18 years earlier when he and his brother were barely in their teens as I had briefly worked for his mother at the time. When I realized it was him, I excitedly approached him, took him aside, introduced myself and went on and on about the last time I met him and his brother, and how it’s all connected all while he looked like he did not remember me. I went on to remind him of a certain trip we took together out of town with his mother and brother and this and that funny incident happened and that I still h...

It seems that these days we will only listen to those who somehow flatter us, those who speak from the Circle of Fraud, those who keep insisting that the purpose of human existence is to find fulfillment and realize one's bliss and find the means to perpetuate an interminable happiness. The honesty of Freud was to say that the purpose of psychoanalysis was to turn a pathological misery into an ordinary unhappiness. And that ordinary unhappiness is good enough for a human existence. Because things, as Andrew Mitchell was saying on the Heidegger program, can always get far worse than they actually are. And this is what's very scary, that our barbarism is always just one step away from us.