Host Jason Michael Perry sits down with Frank J. Lee, Professor of Digital Media at Drexel University and the founding director of the Entrepreneurial Game Studio, to take a deceptively simple question seriously: what is a game? Frank is the cognitive psychologist who turned a 29-story Philadelphia skyscraper into the world's largest video game — Pong in 2013, Tetris in 2014, both Guinness World Records — and who has spent the last twenty years arguing that games are an art form, a story form, and one of the most underrated tools we have for understanding ourselves and the cities we live in.

Podcast Notes & Links

• Drexel University — Frank J. Lee Faculty Page
• Drexel ExCITe Center — Entrepreneurial Game Studio
• Drexel News — Video Game Design Reaches New Heights in Skyscraper Games
• Technical.ly — Drexel's Open Data Game Wants to Make You Understand Philly's Neighborhoods
• Fortune — Netflix's Competition Isn't Sleep Anymore
• Interesting Engineering — Humanoid Robot Kicks Child in Stomach During Public Demo in China

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Credits

Thanks to the team at WHYY in Philadelphia, our on-site audio engineer Diana Martinez, WYPR's Shania Mapson, and Myrna Martinez, Head of Operations and Marketing at PerryLabs.

Host Jason Michael Perry sits down with Chris Wink, cofounder and CEO of Technical.ly, to explore whether AI is becoming a performance-enhancing drug for founders — and what that means for workers, entrepreneurs, and the cities trying to build ecosystems around both.

Recorded in Philadelphia during Philly Tech Week at the WHYY studios, the conversation digs into Chris's framework for cutting through the AI noise, the gap between what AI could do at work and what people are actually using it for, why the most exposed workers may not be who you expect, and what the bar is now to be taken seriously as a founder in 2026.

Podcast Notes & Links

• Technical.ly — Finding the Signal in AI's Noise
• Anthropic — Labor Market Impacts of AI: A New Measure and Early Evidence
• YouTube — Humans Need Not Apply by CGP Grey
• Amazon — Philly ABCs and Jawns by Christopher Wink
• MacRumors — Searching for 'Disregard' Breaks Google

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Send feedback, questions, or guest suggestions: jasonmperry.com/contact

Credits

Special thanks to the team at WHYY, and our on-site audio engineer, Diana Martinez. Our producer Shanya Mapson at WYPR, and Myrna Martinez, Head of Operations and Marketing at PerryLabs.

Host Jason Michael Perry sits down with Derek Willis, a lecturer at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism and affiliate professor at AIM — Maryland's Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute — to explore what happens when the newsroom's most powerful new tool is also its most dangerous.

In this episode, they dig into how journalism schools are preparing the next generation of reporters for a world where AI can draft articles, fabricate quotes, and produce content at a speed no human can match. Derek draws on years inside The New York Times, ProPublica, and The Washington Post to talk about where AI actually helps journalists, why his "Team Luddite" classroom experiment keeps proving human skill still matters, and how educators teach craft during a technological transition where nobody knows the end state.

Podcast Notes & Links

• An AI Upheaval Is Coming for Media. This Journalist Is Already All In – Wall Street Journal
• Union Denounces AI-Generated News Stories as Baltimore Sun Management Predicts More of Them – Baltimore Brew
• AP's Approach to Artificial Intelligence
• Principles for Using Generative AI in the Times's Newsroom – New York Times
• The Baltimore Banner's Approach to AI
• Editor's Note: Retraction of Article Containing Fabricated Quotations – Ars Technica
• Ars Technica Fires Senior AI Reporter After AI-Generated Quotes Scandal – Futurism
• An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – Scott Shambaugh

Subscribe & Contact

Subscribe to the Thoughts on Tech & Things newsletter: jasonmperry.com/newsletter
Send feedback, questions, or guest suggestions: jasonmperry.com/contact

Credits

Thanks to the team at WYPR, our producers Sam Bermas-Dawes and Shania Mapson, and Myrna Martinez, Head of Operations and Marketing at PerryLabs.