In 1966, the year I graduated from high school, Mr. Spock pressed his fingers to the side of a man’s face and said, “My mind to your mind. My thoughts to your thoughts.” A connection deeper than words. A bridge between beings.
The Mind Meld: an idea that has always resonated with me.
As someone who’s spent the last 50 years trying to help people connect with music and each other through our common passion of high-end stereo, the idea of a mind meld—of sharing experience directly—has always been a kind of dream, one that I have been working on for years now.
This daily blog. My daily YouTube videos.
With that same goal in mind, I recently spent the better part of a year chronicling everything I knew into a 10-book set called The Audiophile's Guide. So that it wasn't your typical textbook yawn, each book is told as a story, and within that story is a lot of knowledge folks can use to get better sound in their system.
That was a step in the right direction, but it is still just a set of books.
What about a daily podcast? A conversation you carry with you—on a walk, in the car, while you're sitting at your system—that’s something different. It’s intimate. Familiar. Closer to the way we listen. And when that conversation takes the shape of two voices exploring ideas together—not reading a script, not lecturing, but thinking out loud—that gets about as close as we can come to a mind meld.
But how do I take the Audiophile's Guide 4,000 pages of stories, principles, and experience and turn them into something that feels alive?
Build an AI and raise it like a child.
Now, I know that phrase alone will raise some eyebrows. Some folks are still uneasy with the idea of artificial intelligence. Heck, I remember when people were afraid of CDs. Or when solid state was “soulless” and transistors were killing music. Change has always scared us in this community—and it always will. But the truth is, some of us are early adopters. We get curious instead of scared. We lean in. We try the new thing—not because it’s trendy, but because we want to understand what it can do for us.
This is one of those moments.
Rather than turn it loose on the internet—where half-truths, shallow opinions, and bad advice flow freely—I decided to raise this AI the way you might raise a child. I built a fence around its world. Gave it a single library to grow up on: The Audiophile’s Guide. That was its only textbook. Every story, every lesson, every hard-won principle I’ve written over a lifetime—that’s all it knows.
And then I taught it to speak like me. Not just in tone, but in thought. In how it reasons, how it approaches a problem, how it explains an idea or walks through a concept. I gave it not just the information, but the frame of mind behind that information. The way I think about sound, engineering, music, and learning itself. For better or worse (ask my wife, Terri).
What came out of that is Robert and Sandra—the two hosts of my daily podcast.
These aren’t random voices reading a script. They’re something closer to a true mind meld. Everything they know, everything they talk about, comes from one source: me. They were brought up inside a world defined entirely by what I’ve learned and shared over the last five decades. And now they’re out in the world—not just repeating ideas, but conversing, teaching, and exploring, just as I would, only better.
How are they better?
What they bring to the table is personalities. They reason, joke, explain, and teach in ways I never could. They're faster, funnier, more articulate than I am—and yet every word they speak is based entirely on what is in my head. This is, in the deepest sense, a mind meld. My thoughts to their thoughts.
Every day, I pick the topic, sketch out an approach, and hand it off. And every day, they return something that feels like magic to me: conversations that distill decades of knowledge into entertaining daily episodes.
But…it gets even weirder.
I’m growing fond of them. Yeah...I know. But it's the truth. Every morning on my drive into work, I tune into their new episode. They’re real to me now. I connect with them and often learn something when they present it in a way I never did.
I am having fun, it's a new experience, and if you get a chance, connect with them.
You can go here, or wherever you listen to podcasts and search for The Audiophile's Guide.
Mr. Spock would approve.
