An Analog Brain In A Digital Age | With Marco Ciappelli cover art

An Analog Brain In A Digital Age | With Marco Ciappelli

An Analog Brain In A Digital Age | With Marco Ciappelli

By: Marco Ciappelli
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[ Formerly Redefining Society & Technology ] An Analog Brain In A Digital Age Podcast is your backstage pass to my mind — where analog meets digital, and the occasional pig flies. In an age racing toward algorithms and automation, the best ideas still come from curiosity, experience, emotion, and the unexpected connection. What you'll find are conversations on technology & society, storytelling in all its forms, branding & marketing, creativity, and the odd surprise.© Copyright 2015-2026 ITSPmagazine, Inc. All Rights Reserved Philosophy Science Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Telling the Stories of Cybercrime | An Interview with Geoff White | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli

    Telling the Stories of Cybercrime | An Interview with Geoff White | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli
    May 24 2026
    PODCAST EPISODE | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli Geoff White goes where organized crime and technology cross, and he comes back with stories. In this one he announces his newest BBC series — the rise and fall of the Conti ransomware gang — and we get into the thing underneath all of it: how you make a crime nobody can see feel real to people who will never see it. 📺 Watch | 🎙️ Listen | marcociappelli.com There was a red light. A sign, really — ON AIR — that lit up the second a broadcast began, and everyone in the room understood it without a word. Quiet. We're live. I grew up around that light. Geoff White and I opened this conversation laughing about it, because you still catch it hanging behind some podcasters, a little piece of analog theater none of us can quite bring ourselves to retire. We kept the light. What we lost is the patience. Geoff is an investigative journalist — the kind other journalists call when they want to know what actually happened. He works where organized crime and technology cross, and his complaint about modern news is one I share. We get the big bang: something was hacked, data leaked, a hospital went dark. Then the cycle moves on before anyone asks the only questions that matter. How did it work? Who did it? Should I be worried? He told me he once had four minutes on Channel 4 News to explain Bitcoin. Four minutes. He called it impossible, and he's right — but the deeper trouble is that we've trained ourselves to believe four minutes is enough. That reading the headline is the same as reading the story. It isn't. It never was. What pulled me in was the subject of his new BBC series. Conti — one of the most profitable ransomware gangs the world has seen — does not look like the hooded figure in the stock photo. It looks like a company. Payroll. Sick pay. Annual leave. A training program. Strategy meetings. A translation department, because a ransom note full of spelling mistakes doesn't get taken seriously, and these people cared, deeply, about being taken seriously. Someone, on some ordinary Tuesday, had to ask who was running payroll that month. While the gang was shutting down hospitals. I keep turning that over. We like our villains monstrous and separate; it's more comfortable that way. But a criminal enterprise that runs on bonus schemes and brand reputation isn't a monster from the deep. It's a mirror, doing what the rest of us do, with the morality removed. Geoff says the most fascinating part of the 300,000 leaked messages — spilled because a war split the gang in two — is the mundanity. I believe him. The horror isn't that these people are alien. It's that they're familiar. And this is where he and I actually agree on the work. He says you need three things to tell a story, and he reaches for Star Wars to prove it: a victim, a villain, a hero. For years cybercrime refused that shape — the heroes wanted the spotlight, the villains stayed silent, the victims ran. What changed is that the villains started talking. They leak themselves into the open now. Which means, for the first time, the story can actually be told. That's the part people get wrong about cybersecurity. They think the hard part is the technology. It isn't. The hard part is making an invisible crime feel real to someone who will never see it — no broken window, no smoke, just a screen that stopped working. You cannot patch your way to that. You have to tell it. A name. A face. A beginning, a middle, an end. Which is the most analog thing I can imagine. The most digital crime of our age still has to be carried into people's heads the way stories always have. That isn't a weakness. That's the thing worth carrying forward. Geoff's new BBC series, Cyber Hack — the Conti story — is coming; you'll find it linked below. And if you like conversations that take the long way around, the newsletter lives at marcociappelli.com. The red light still means something. Some of us are still on air. Let's keep thinking. — Marco Co-Founder ITSPmagazine & Studio C60 | Creative Director | Branding & Marketing Advisor | Personal Branding Coach | Journalist | Writer | Podcast: An Analog Brain In A Digital Age ⚠️ Beware: Pigs May Fly | 🌎 LAX🛸FLR 🌍 About Marco Marco Ciappelli is Co-Founder & CMO of ITSPmagazine, Co-Founder & Creative Director of Studio C60, Branding & Marketing Advisor, Personal Branding Coach, Journalist, Writer, and Host of An Analog Brain In A Digital Age podcast. Born in Florence, Italy, and based in Los Angeles, he explores the intersection of technology, society, storytelling, and creativity — with an analog brain, in a digital age. 🌎 marcociappelli.com | itspmagazine.com | studioc60.com About the Guest Geoff White is an investigative journalist and author who specializes in the place where technology and organized crime meet — cyber heists, ransomware gangs, money laundering, fraud, and the criminal networks that operate in...
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    30 mins
  • Book: Deep Future — Creating Technology That Matters | An Interview with Pablos Holman | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli

    Book: Deep Future — Creating Technology That Matters | An Interview with Pablos Holman | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli
    May 4 2026
    PODCAST EPISODE | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli Pablos Holman has built spaceships, zapped malaria-carrying mosquitoes with a laser, earned thousands of patents, and is now betting his venture capital on the inventors Silicon Valley forgot to fund. His new book, Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters, is a call to arms against a tech industry that got drunk on software and forgot about the other 98% of the world. 📺 Watch | 🎙️ Listen | marcociappelli.com I grew up in a city full of inventors. They just didn't call themselves that. Florence in the fifteenth century wasn't running on venture capital. It was running on curiosity, obsession, and the refusal to accept that the way things had always been done was the way they had to be done. Leonardo didn't have a manual. Galileo didn't ask for permission before pointing a better telescope at the sky. They took things apart, looked at what was inside, and put them back together differently. They hacked things. That's Pablos Holman's word — and when he used it in our conversation, I recognized it immediately. Not as a tech industry term. As something much older. A way of being in the world that says: the instructions are a suggestion, not a ceiling. Pablos has had one of those careers that resists a tidy summary. He was writing code in Alaska as a kid, with one of the first Apples ever made and nobody around to teach him anything. He figured it out on his own — and never really stopped doing that. Cryptocurrency in the '90s. AI research before anyone called it that. Helping build spaceships at Blue Origin. Then years at the Intellectual Ventures Lab with Nathan Myhrvold, going after problems Silicon Valley had decided weren't worth the trouble: a laser that identifies and destroys malaria-carrying mosquitoes in flight, hurricane suppression systems, a nuclear reactor powered by nuclear waste. Six thousand patents. Thirty million TED Talk views. Now he runs a venture fund called Deep Future, and he's written a book with the same name. The subtitle says what he thinks about most of what Silicon Valley has been doing for the past two decades. Creating Technology That Matters. He calls the alternative shallow tech. Apps that replace taxis. Apps to rent a stranger's couch. Apps to have weed delivered by drone. Not useless, exactly — but not living up to what we actually have. And what we actually have, Pablos says, is the best toolkit in all of human history: more people, more education, more resources, more raw scientific understanding than any generation before us. If all that produces another chat app, something has gone badly wrong. The number he threw out in our conversation — and I'm going to mention it here because it deserves to be mentioned, not as a hook but as a quiet scandal — is that all the software companies in the world combined, every single one of them, account for about two percent of global GDP. The other ninety-eight is energy, shipping, food, manufacturing, construction, automotive. Industries that haven't fundamentally changed in a century. Industries that software can nudge a few percent better but cannot make ten times better. Ten times better is where Pablos starts. One of his portfolio companies is building autonomous sailing cargo ships — no crew, no fuel, no emissions — targeting a two-trillion-dollar industry that currently burns half its revenue on fuel. He's also continuing the malaria work that could save half a million lives a year, half of them children under five. That's the scale he's measuring things against. We got to AI eventually, as you do. What he said landed simply and cleanly: chatting is the least important thing we can do with it. What we should be using AI for is understanding things that were previously too complex to model — what's happening in every cell of your body, how to actually get a grip on the climate, how to start solving the problems that have been resistant to every tool that came before. Instead we are using it to generate fake videos and build an AI version of TikTok. We've hit peak entertainment, he said. I think that's right. And I think what comes after peak entertainment — if anything does — is the real question sitting underneath all of this. The conversation ended the way the best ones do: not with a conclusion, but with an invitation. Pick something you care about and work on it. The people who built Apollo weren't all rocket scientists. They were cable layers and logistics coordinators who never saw the rocket up close. But they were part of something that exceeded their own individuality, and they knew it, and that was enough. That pride is still available. Whether we want it more than we want another scroll — that's on us. Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters is out now — find it here. Subscribe to the newsletter at marcociappelli.com. Let's keep thinking. About Marco Ciappelli Marco Ciappelli is Co-Founder & CMO of ...
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    41 mins
  • New Book: Healing the Sick Care System — Why People Matter | An Interview with Gil Bashe | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli

    New Book: Healing the Sick Care System — Why People Matter | An Interview with Gil Bashe | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli
    Apr 26 2026
    PODCAST EPISODE | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli The United States spends 18.7% of its GDP on health — two to three times what countries like Italy spend. Italy has a longer life expectancy. So what exactly are we paying for? Gil Bashe, Chair of Global Health & Purpose at FINN Partners, former combat medic, and author of Healing the Sick Care System: Why People Matter, joined me on An Analog Brain In A Digital Age to talk about what happens when a system designed to heal people forgets that people exist. This is not a rant. It's a diagnosis — from someone who has seen the system from every angle: the battlefield, the boardroom, the pharmaceutical lobby, and the bedside of his own child. 📺 Watch | 🎙️ Listen | marcociappelli.com Gil Bashe started his career as a paratrooper combat medic. He's also the father of a child with a rare disease. He spent years as a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry — and he'll tell you that upfront, without flinching, before explaining why he still thinks that work mattered. He has led billion-dollar global agencies, advised companies that make life-saving drugs, and sat in rooms with the CEOs of hospital systems, pharmacy chains, and insurance companies. He asked them once if they understood each other's business models. The honest answer was: no. That's the system he's writing about. Not a broken one — a fragmented one. A system where the prime customer of healthcare has become the system itself, and the actual patients have been quietly reclassified as beneficiaries. As Gil puts it: if your washing machine breaks and you call the company and they tell you you're a "beneficiary of our appliance," you'd think they were out of their minds. You paid for it. You're a customer. Treat you like one. His new book, Healing the Sick Care System: Why People Matter, was born from a long accumulation of observations — 11 or 12 years of writing about the health ecosystem from every angle — and catalyzed by one specific moment: the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, and the public reaction to it. The fact that the killer had a following. The fact that people were applauding. Gil found that more disturbing than anyone seemed comfortable admitting. When anger reaches that level, something in the system has gone deeply, fundamentally wrong. I should say: this is a conversation I had some skin in. I'm type 1 diabetic. I know what it's like to sit across from an endocrinologist who tells you things you already know, reads from a checklist, and never quite looks up from the laptop. The human element — the education, the empathy, the sense that this person actually sees you — is often just gone. And I think most doctors started their careers because they wanted to be healers. The system squeezed it out of them. Gil agrees. He says 51% of doctors now report burnout. Nearly 60% of nurses. And that's not a coincidence. That's a design failure. The AI question we kept circling was the one nobody in healthcare leadership seems to want to answer directly: if artificial intelligence takes some of the administrative burden off doctors' shoulders, does that time go back to patients — or does the system simply use it to push more throughput? More appointments per day, not more minutes per patient. Gil's framework for thinking about this is worth keeping: IQ, EQ, and TQ. Intellectual intelligence, emotional intelligence, and technology intelligence. The doctors we need going forward aren't just the ones who scored highest on their MCATs. They're the ones who can read a room. Who can hear a patient bring in a printout from WebMD and respond with curiosity instead of dismissal. Who understand that a curious patient is a gift, not an inconvenience. He told me a story from the book — one doctor who cut his wife off mid-sentence and said, "Who are you gonna believe? Me, or a patient?" And another doctor, in Santa Monica, who performed a long and complicated surgery on his daughter, walked into the hospital cafeteria in his surgical scrubs with photographs of every step of the procedure, laid them out on the table, explained everything in plain language, and then left his personal cell phone number. "Call me with any question." They did. He picked up. That's not technology. That's not policy. That's personality. And Gil's argument — which I think is correct — is that we've built a system that systematically selects against it. The hopeful part of the conversation surprised me. I expected nuance. What I got was genuine belief. We have the best trained doctors in the world. We are the source of global medical innovation. We spend enough money — the problem isn't resources, it's alignment. The fix, as Gil sees it, starts with every part of the system — payers, pharmaceutical companies, hospital systems, policy makers — looking in the mirror and asking: am I still on mission? And then, slowly, getting back to why this system was created in ...
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    37 mins
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