Jeff Frick

I am not telling you something to sell you something. I am sharing something to entertain, educate, and get you to stop and think for a minute. | Top Voice | Friday Five | Turn the Lens | Work 20XX

With over 30 years of experience in the media industry, I am a podcast host and a media entrepreneur who is passionate about the future of work, leadership, and innovation. I have founded and led Menlo Creek Media, a company that helps leaders, marketers, and communications professionals navigate and leverage an AI-driven asynchronous world, by offering executive training for podcast hosts and guests, content creation and media library curation and amplification programs, and community development programs.

I also host two podcasts, Work 20XX and Turn the Lens, where I facilitate the spread of best practices, insights, learning, and wisdom on topics that matter to the modern workforce and society. I aim to be a trusted source of information and inspiration for my listeners, by featuring smart and diverse guests, engaging in lively and thoughtful conversations, and sharing nuggets of knowledge. My goal is to help people get more impact with their communications and content investments and to empower them to thrive in a time of rapid change and uncertainty.

Founder & Principal

Please visit www.MenloCreek.com for a more comprehensive list of services and resources. 

Helping Leaders, Marketers, and Communications professionals navigate and leverage an AI driver asynchronous world. 

Host of 'Work 20XX'  with Jeff Frick show on the Future of Work 
Host of 'Turn the Lens' with Jeff Frick on Leadership and of other topics of interest.

Manipulation is about negotiating with the world. Whereas a lot of robotics, there's not much negotiation. If you're in its way, you better hope you're stronger. - Jeremy Fishel

Compliance is critical because when you bump into something you want time to react to that information. - Jeremy Fishel
-----
Collisions. 
It's robot industry vocabulary for bumping into things.

Feeling isn't only about control, 
it's also about reacting to the world, in time to prevent harm.

Jeremy Fishel: Nature's Best Manipulator, Man's Best Controller: Hands | Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick

Episode page with extensive show notes, transcript, links and references 
https://lnkd.in/gN9spBJb 
YouTube - https://lnkd.in/gdgMY8ie 
Spotify - https://lnkd.in/g9G8gbkM 
Apple Podcast - https://lnkd.in/gNZrG7tV
or where ever you podcast 

For more on Humanoids Summit, including May 2026 Summit in Tokyo visit 
https://lnkd.in/ga487tGq 

For more from Humanoids Summit SV 
https://lnkd.in/gyxXZcVT 

#Robotics #HumanoidRobots #Compliance #RoboticManipulation #EmbodiedAI #FutureOfWork #RobotSafety #AIRobotics #Innovation #HumanoidsSummit #TurnTheLens #EdColgate #HANDERC #DeepTech #TurntheLens #RoboticsEngineering #WorkplaceTechnology #SanctuaryAI #HumanoidsSummit #Robots #Hands

When you remove someone's sense of touch, their capabilities drop off tremendously. - Joe Michaels

Bringing that back into the robot equation and giving the human the feeling of what that robot is doing and creating a closed loop. - Joe Michaels

It makes a very natural and powerful control system. - Joe Michaels
--
Humans and machines working together for an enhanced version of both.

Teleoperation, for literal operation as well as fine grain training.

Feedback is an essential component to control, whether teleoperating from a distance in dangerous places, or rehearsing high-risk situations in the safety of digital worlds and simulation environments.

And yes, Sigourney Weaver and her P-5000 Powered Work Loader Exoskeleton from Alien immediately jumps to mind.

Joe Michaels: Teleoperation, Controlling Complex Robots by Feel | Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick
Episode page with transcript, show notes, links, and references
https://lnkd.in/eYVnUAdT
YouTube - https://lnkd.in/g8TytYCb
Spotify - https://lnkd.in/gvfDZsnX
Apple Podcasts - https://lnkd.in/gA4UeFSy
or wherever you enjoy your podcasts.

Released in collaboration with Humanoids Summit. Humanoids Summit is sponsored and produced by ALM Ventures.
For more on Humanoids Summit, including the May 2026 Summit in Tokyo, visit
https://lnkd.in/ga487tGq

For more from Humanoids Summit SV 2025 -
https://lnkd.in/gA4XmZiE

#teleoperation #touch #feel #feedback #training #remoteoperation #finegrain #1HMX #humanoidssummit #turnthelens 1HMX #robots #robotics #Robotics #HumanRobot #HapticFeedback #Dexterity #FutureOfWork #Teleoperation #RoboticsEngineering #AI #Automation #PhysicalAI #HumanMachineInterface #Innovation #EmbodiedAI #Work20XX

Visiting Pakistan, I was seven, the first time I met someone missing a limb. She was living in poverty in the streets, missing her right leg and using a tree branch as a crutch. - Aadeel Akhtar, PhD

That's what inspired me to go into this field. - Aadeel Akhtar
--
Moment of impression.

Call it a calling, an obsession, a mission.
In a world that feel anything but certain or stable,
some experience a moment of clarity that sets a course that will not be denied. 

Very helpful if you want to be an entrepreneur. This was the ninth version of Aadeel's hand. Some lessons can only be learned by doing, not drawing.

Transforming Lives and Robotics: Jeff Frick talks with Aadeel Akhtar, PhD, PSYONIC - via Humanoids Summit
https://lnkd.in/gjw5GeSV
For more on Humanoids Summit
https://lnkd.in/ga487tGq
#Robotics #BionicLimbs #Prosthetics #FutureOfWork #HealthTech #MedTech #Innovation #SocialImpact #Entrepreneurship #Founders #PurposeDriven #HumanAugmentation #EmergingTech #TechForGood #Robots #Hands #InclusiveTech #Humanoids #HumanoidsSummit #TurnTheLens #PSYONIC

For robots, we have a term in the industry. My robot 'collided.' — Bernt Børnich

Everything we do through our life is a collision. When I pick up this bottle, I'm colliding with it. If I put my hand on this table, I'm colliding with the table. If I take a step, I'm colliding with the ground. — Bernt Børnich

Humans don't collide. We just interact with the world.
I can do this in a very stable manner, very low impact, not dangerous to myself or the environment. — Bernt Børnich
----
High energy with gears and ratios.
or
Low energy that moves slowly and has time to
react before something significant happens.

Bernt and the team worked 10 years on the motors to bring low-energy capabilities to their humanoids.

Safety first. That includes 'collisions,' or as we say in the human world, bumping into things.

How 1X is Changing the Game: Jeff Frick Chats with Bernt Børnich, 1X
Humanoids Summit YouTube Channel
https://lnkd.in/g8jYtFjb

Who's going to Tokyo? 
https://lnkd.in/ga487tGq

#Robotics #HumanoidRobots #RobotSafety #FutureOfWork #Automation #AIHardware #Cobots #RoboticsDevelopment #EmergingTech #EnterpriseRobotics #ManufacturingTech #HumanRobotInteraction #TechInnovation #IndustrialRobotics #SafetyFirst #1X #HumanoidsSummit #TurnTheLens #Robots #Humanoids

Pursuing vertical integration for its own sake is actually to be a bit misguided. Vertical integration should always be in service of either making the best thing or actually optimizing in the short or the long term for iteration speed. - Evan Wineland

We're able to control that much more of the end user experience. - Evan Wineland 

We only do it as much as is necessary to make the thing right. - Evan Wineland 
----------------------
Vertical Integration

Guess I shouldn't be surprised.
Both Evan and Kaan Dogrusoz, his co-Founder at Weave Robotics were most recently at Apple.

But the specific qualifier, 'in service of iteration speed' 
is notable and a little counter intuitive.

Seems logical that off the shelf components from multiple suppliers would develop faster as a group. And Evan qualified, they only do as much as necessary. And necessary is that which interacts with the objective, and the environment. The OS, the grippers, and more, they write and develop from scratch to increase the iteration speed to accomplish their list of task objectives. A large part of at this stage, folding laundry.

Evan Wineland: Deploying is the Point. Affordable Robots that Work | Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick 
Episode page with transcript, show notes, links, and references https://lnkd.in/gZnpAQSc 
YouTube - https://lnkd.in/gb-HbVxZ  
Spotify - https://lnkd.in/gHtgWHYw 
Apple Podcasts - https://lnkd.in/gk3Mnzja 
or wherever you enjoy your podcasts.

Release in collaboration with Humanoids Summit. Humanoids Summit is sponsored and produced by ALM Ventures. 

For more on Humanoids Summit, including May 2026 Summit in Tokyo visit 
https://lnkd.in/ga487tGq 

For more from Humanoids Summit SV 2025 - 
https://lnkd.in/gHDGNhdX 

#VerticalIntegration #ProductStrategy #TechLeadership #Innovation #FutureOfWork #IterationSpeed #UserExperience #StartupStrategy #EnterpriseTech #WeaveRobotics #HumanoidsSummit #WorkTwentyXX #TurnTheLens #ProductDevelopment #TechInnovation #BuildingProduct #FounderMindset

People have been working on robotic hands gosh, for 40, 50 years, really as long as we've been thinking about robots. What's new? AI. - Ed Colgate

The ability to take something so complicated as this hand and actually do something useful with it. That wouldn't be possible without AI. - Ed Colgate
--
AI, GenAI, Foundation Models, Transformers, and the relentless pace of better, faster, cheaper hardware (from GPU to mechanical parts) means robotic hands finally have the potential to mirror the performance of the most dexterous manipulator in nature, the human hand.

Ed Colgate and the extended HAND ERC community are building the foundational technology for the next decade's technological advances in robotic hands, including sensing, actuation, design, simulation, learning, control, social, legal and industrial studies.

Ed Colgate: Soft Hands, Dexterous Robots | Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick
Transcript and Show Notes https://lnkd.in/grjhZf2y 
YouTube - https://lnkd.in/gsv4UKKs
Spotify - https://lnkd.in/gTCHeBx2 
Apple Podcast - https://lnkd.in/ghkjsVgY 
Substack - 
or wherever you podcast 

HAND ERC 
The National Science Foundation 'Human AugmentatioN via Dexterity' Engineering Research Center (HAND ERC)
https://hand-erc.org/

Released in collaboration with Humanoids Summit. Humanoids Summit is sponsored and produced by ALM Ventures. 
For more on Humanoids Summit, including May 2026 Summit in Tokyo visit 
https://lnkd.in/ga487tGq 

For more from Humanoids Summit SV 2025 - 
https://lnkd.in/gPcYu2Xt 

#Robotics #Robots #PhysicalAI #Hand #Hands #RoboticHand #HANDERC #ProstheticHand #Humanoids #HumanoidsSummit #TurntheLens #AI #GenAI #EmbodiedAI #RoboticHands #AIInnovation #FutureOfWork #ManufacturingTech #Automation #HumanoidRobots #MachineLearning #RoboticsEngineering #DeepTech #AIApplications #IndustrialRobotics #EmergingTech #TechLeadership

Evan Kirstel B2B TechFluencer

Create📝Publish🗞️Amplify📣 TechInfluencer, Analyst, Content Creator w/600K Social Media followers, Deep Expertise in Enterprise 💻 Cloud ☁️5G 📡AI 🤖Telecom ☎️ CX 🔑 Cyber 🏥 DigitalHealth. TwitterX @evankirstel

B2B Social Media Maven | Tech Industry Storyteller | Trusted Partner for Global Tech Brands | TV Host | Podcaster | Livestreamer | Blogger | Industry Analyst 

With over three decades in tech, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and thought leadership. My focus? Not personal brand promotion—but delivering educational, authoritative, and thought-provoking content to cultivate sustainable, long-term business growth. 

I am host on a TV show called TechImpact appearing on FOXBusiness and Bloomberg which has a reach millions of viewers. 

From Enterprise IT to AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, Cybersecurity, 5G, and Digital Health, my expertise spans the tech landscape. As a leading content creator, I bring unparalleled insights into the Future of Work, Unified Communications, Collaboration, and Customer Experience , producing impactful narratives that resonate with key decision-makers worldwide. Let’s turn your ideas into stories that captivate and engage audiences while delivering eye-popping ROI.

Social Reach: 600K+ followers across LinkedIn (60K), Twitter (380K), YouTube (110K), Meta platforms (120K), and beyond. Livestreaming, blogs, Newsletter (20K) and podcasts that reach millions globally.  My personal network includes CIOs, CMOs, analysts, media, and key tech industry leaders. 

By leveraging our proven B2B Influencer Marketing methodology, I place your brand at the forefront of decision-makers' minds, ensuring you're the partner of choice when investment and purchasing decisions arise.

Our approach prioritizes Awareness, Education, and Engagement by delivering high-value content that reaches and influences millions globally. Unique stories and narratives position your brand as a trusted leader.  Informative, jargon-free messaging educates decision-makers about your value proposition.  Blogs, videos, podcasts, and live-streams inspire clicks, likes, shares, and meaningful leads.  

I’ve built impactful, long-term partnerships with industry leaders like Palo Alto Networks, Intel, T-Mobile, Microsoft, Cisco, AMD, AT&T, and Broadcom. These collaborations deliver consistent results in reach, thought leadership, and measurable engagement, all while driving growth at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing.

We work collaboratively with your teams, agencies, and stakeholders to develop, produce, publish, promote, and amplify your content. Whether for evergreen campaigns or point-in-time initiatives, our strategies are built to scale globally

Member and Contributor

Forbes Business Council Is An Invitation-Only Organization For Successful Small And Mid-Sized Business Owners. I look forward to contributing content to Forbes.com!

Evan Kirstel

AI is everywhere right now, but the hard part is turning dozens of pilots into durable systems that actually run a business. We sit down with the Senior Vice President of Product Management at GTT to unpack what changes when enterprises move from “testing AI” to deploying agentic AI at scale across thousands of sites, users, and applications.

We start with how GTT thinks about networking and security as a service, and why the promise is not just bandwidth or a product SKU but a simpler experience that helps customers connect, secure, and simplify. Tom explains the GTT Envision DX platform and how it spans the edge, the core IP backbone, and public cloud so teams can deliver consistent connectivity, SD-WAN, and security outcomes while preparing for new AI workloads that increasingly want compute closer to the premises.

Then we get practical about what agentic AI requires: data readiness, trustworthy context, and APIs that let agents act safely without constant human validation. We talk frameworks versus one-time deployments, why vendor lock-in is riskier in a fast-changing AI cycle, and how an “AI factory” mindset brings manufacturing discipline to data pipelines, orchestration, validation, deployment, and continuous improvement.

We also share real internal examples, including a cash application agent that helps match remittances to invoices across messy real-world variations, plus how GPU infrastructure supports operational intelligence and proactive network issue detection. If you care about enterprise AI, SASE and SSE, edge computing, and building a scalable agentic architecture, this conversation is built for you. Subscribe, share with a teammate, and leave a review, what part of your AI foundation needs the most work right now?

#RSAC #cybersecurity #networking

Evan  Kirstel

TechInfluencer, Analyst, Creator w/600K Social Media followers, Deep Expertise in Enterprise 💻 Cloud ☁️5G 📡AI 🤖Telecom ☎️ CX 🔑 Cyber 🏥 DigitalHealth. TwitterX @evankirstel. Lets meet at RSAC!

Telco's growth model is broken. Here's the blueprint to fix it.

5G returns are under pressure. Hardware costs keep climbing. And operators are drowning in complexity they can't monetize.

We sat down with VMware by Broadcom leaders to cut through the noise — and what emerged is a sharp, actionable roadmap for what comes next.

Three big shifts every telco leader needs to understand:

**1. The mobile core is your highest-leverage asset right now.**
Not the edge. Not the RAN. The core and the operators who productize it with disciplined lifecycle management will outpace those still treating software as an afterthought on hardware.

**2. AI monetization is real but only if you architect for it.**
The team walks through VMware Cloud Foundation as the engine for GPU-as-a-service and AI-as-a-service: model stores, runtimes, vector databases, compliance baked in, data isolation from day one. Not someday. Now.

**3. Sovereign cloud isn't a checkbox anymore it's a revenue line.**
Especially in Europe. Jurisdiction and residency are becoming competitive differentiators, not legal formalities. The operators moving fast here will own the enterprise stack.

We also go deep on:
→ Co-innovation with Nokia, Ericsson, Mavenir, and Oracle and why full-stack ecosystem orchestration is replacing the old "software on hardware" mindset
→ How consolidated dashboards, certification, observability, and license governance cut change risk and accelerate upgrades and why this matters more as Kubernetes complexity stacks up
→ Intelligent operations: embedded AI that reads signals across storage, network, compute, and Kubernetes and recommends next actions while keeping humans in the loop
→ Agentic AI traffic: bursty, hard to cache, and arriving fast. Telcos sit at the crossroads of inter-DC connectivity, edge placement, and quality guarantees  and that's a strategic position worth owning

The takeaway: stop selling raw connectivity. Start selling trusted AI capacity and outcomes.

If you're lowering TCO, launching AI services, or charting a pragmatic path toward autonomous networks this conversation will help you act with confidence, not just follow the hype.

#MWC26 #MWC #MWCBarcelona VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) VMware Telco Cloud

TechInfluencer, Analyst, Creator w/600K Social Media followers, Deep Expertise in Enterprise 💻 Cloud ☁️5G 📡AI 🤖Telecom ☎️ CX 🔑 Cyber 🏥 DigitalHealth. TwitterX @evankirstel. Lets meet at MWC26, RSAC, HIMSS, more!

Anthony Bourdain spent years trying to get permission to film in Iran. In 2014, he finally got the green light.

He landed in Tehran with a small crew, not sure what he'd find. What he found surprised him. "Iran does not look, does not feel the way I had expected," he said. "Neither East nor West, but always somewhere in the middle."

His guides were Jason Rezaian the Washington Post's Tehran bureau chief and his wife Yeganeh Salehi, both journalists, both deeply in love with their country. They took Bourdain through the markets and teahouses, introduced him to dizi (a lamb stew that goes back to ancient Mesopotamia), and rode a bus with him out to Isfahan, this stunning ancient city in the southern desert.

Persian pizza with ketchup. Non-alcoholic beer on hilltops with young Iranians showing off their classic American cars. Real conversations about what life actually looked like there the contradictions, the warmth, the complexity.

The episode aired on CNN that November and became one of the most talked-about Parts Unknown episodes ever. American audiences had never seen Iran like that. The laughter. The generosity. The food.

But by the time it aired, things had already gone wrong.

Six weeks after filming, Iranian authorities arrested Jason and Yeganeh at their Tehran home. Espionage charges. The charges were absurd. Yeganeh was released after about two months. Jason wasn't.

He spent 544 days in Evin Prison: solitary confinement, a sham trial, a conviction that the entire international journalism community rejected. He was finally released in January 2016 as part of a prisoner swap.

Bourdain was gutted. He wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post pleading for their release. He called them "a danger to no one" and said there wasn't a hint of anything that should concern any government. "They are nobody's enemy."

When Jason eventually wrote a memoir about his imprisonment, Bourdain published it himself through Anthony Bourdain Books. One of the last acts of solidarity between two men who genuinely believed that sharing a meal with a stranger could change something.

Bourdain died in 2018. Jason is still at the Washington Post and now co-directs a commission on hostage-taking at CSIS, working to make sure what happened to him doesn't keep happening to others.

That Iran episode remains one of the most powerful hours of television Bourdain ever made. Not despite what followed because of it. It captured something real: the warmth of ordinary people can exist right alongside the cruelty of the systems that rule them.

Sometimes sitting down and sharing a meal is the most radical thing you can do.

Most tech companies start with a business model. Moxie Marlinspike started with a question.

Why should private conversations on the internet be readable by anyone other than the people actually having them?

It sounds obvious. But in the late 2000s, messaging was exploding and security was an afterthought. Billions of conversations were moving online while platforms collected metadata, stored messages in plaintext, and treated privacy as a feature they might get around to someday. The assumption baked into the architecture was that someone, somewhere, could always read what you wrote.

So he built what eventually became Signal. Not a messaging app with encryption bolted on, but a platform designed from the ground up around one uncompromising idea: only the sender and receiver can read the message. Not the company. Not advertisers. Not a government with a subpoena. Nobody in between.

Early on, the audience was small and self-selecting. Cryptographers. Investigative journalists. Privacy researchers who already understood the stakes. But the underlying technology was so rigorous, so well-constructed, that it didn't stay contained. The Signal protocol spread far beyond the app itself. Today it protects conversations for billions of users across platforms they use every day, often without knowing it.

Then came the decision that separated Signal from everything else.

Rather than take venture money and chase growth metrics, Marlinspike helped establish the Signal Foundation. No ads. No user data sold. Minimal metadata collected. Code open to public inspection by anyone who wanted to look. It was the kind of structural choice that forecloses certain futures permanently, and that was exactly the point. Without investors pushing monetization, Signal could focus on the one thing it was actually built to do.

That clarity of purpose compounded over time.

Today Signal is infrastructure. Journalists use it to protect sources. Executives use it for conversations that can't be intercepted. #Security teams coordinate breach response on it. In conflict zones and under heavy surveillance, where the wrong message to the wrong person can have irreversible consequences, encrypted messaging isn't a convenience feature. For activists, diplomats, citizens, and reporters operating in those environments, it can be the difference between safety and exposure.

A cryptography side project became a pillar of global communication.

As the RSA Security Conference approaches and the security community gathers to talk about what comes next, Signal holds up as a useful reminder about how durable technology actually gets built. Not by optimizing for engagement. Not by treating user trust as a variable to be managed. By starting with a principle that doesn't bend, and building everything else around it.

Private communication should actually be private.

Marlinspike proved that wasn't a naive idea. It was an engineering requirement.

#RSAC RSAC #infosec Signal Messenger

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