2026 July 14 Being broadly curious

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7Every Minute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me to talk about what I call broadband, broad-based curiosity. Let's get started. If you like what's here today, please leave a like, subscribe, tell your friends, send me a message.

This week we're going to be talking about what I call broadband curiosity. So what does that even mean? Broadband is actually a term from engineering and communications, and it means handling or working with many different signals all at once. When a cable TV company sends TV signals, telephone, internet, maybe even radio down one cable, that's broadband signaling. Each one of those is very different from the others, and they're all carrying different information, but one receiver looks at them all.

When you look at the world around you, there's a lot of different information coming in, and it's in various forms and formats — videos, podcasts, radio, written content. Sometimes you're listening to more than one thing at once, and very often they're on very different topics, but our brain knows how to separate it all out, and then it decides what it wants to pay attention to. We all probably know someone who looks at only one or two things — kind of the other extreme.

It might be politics or sports or finances, but only one or two things are really interesting to them. That's okay, but to me it seems like that's leaving not only a lot of the world unnoticed, but it's also missing many interesting and sometimes important associations that make our world so interesting. Now, we all know that this is related to curiosity at some level, and that's why curiosity is one of our five foundational pillars of balanced living.

What really struck me today — I was taking an AI class from one of my AI mentors, Jonathan Mast of Whitebeard Technologies. One of the things I noticed first off is that many of his students are older. I consider Jonathan sort of the Mr. Rogers of AI — nothing really flusters him.

He moves at a steady pace, and he answers the same questions multiple times if he needs to. It's a very measured, easygoing class to attend — still thorough, covers everything you need to know. You know how it goes in some classes, where the instructor keeps switching screens and you just want to say, "Will you please stop switching screens so I can read something?" Well, Jonathan doesn't do that. It's all nicely laid out, nicely paced, with a wide range of people and ages attending. There are no big hooks in the headings or major sales pitches.

Here's what the class is about. If you need this, take this class. He isn't trying to sell as much as inform.

So it's fun to see all these people in their 50s, and literally up through their 80s and beyond, learning new skills and applying them to a wide array of businesses and charities — basically just staying curious.

But as I was doing something different this afternoon, I realized that my sense of curiosity about a broad base of topics is one of the things that continues to make my life interesting. Not shockingly, many of my close friends are the same way. Perhaps it goes along with engineering, since in engineering, to be really effective, you have to understand everything going on around you as well as your own field. Regardless, most of my friends and I are perpetually interested in almost everything happening in life. Many of these people I've known for nearly 50 years, and they're still actively researching new things, learning new techniques — everything. We just find learning, and learning about the world, fun.

And that leads us to the world of AI, which we've looked at a little bit before. Once you ignore the fringe outlooks — you know, that it's the end of the world, that it's the beginning of endless leisure, that it's the devil, that it's God — and yes, there are people saying all four of those things, including that it's God incarnate — but once you get past all the edge cases, you have only a few general viewpoints.

The first one is kind of like, "I don't understand it, so I'm afraid of it." They — whoever "they" are — say my grandchildren won't be able to find a job. The next group: "I don't understand it, and I can't be bothered to try and learn something new." Then, moderating a little, "I kind of understand it, but I still can't be bothered to try and learn it beyond making silly pictures and looking up jokes." So they're not scared of it, but they don't really use it. Fourth is, "It seems neat, I guess there's a place for it." And fifth, on the high end: "It's incredible — once you realize its limitations and put in the time to train it, it has increased my productivity tremendously."

Now, with those five categories, who do you think might be feeling better about the world overall? Correct — the last two, the people who are open-minded and making an effort to see change as opportunity, because indeed, change is always opportunity. Now, where do many older adults land? Correct again — in the first three categories, who either fear AI or can't really be bothered to try and use it.

You might be saying, "But Jim, I'm 55, or 60, or 70, or 80 — whatever. I don't want to learn anything new." And that's a fair choice if that were true, but usually it's not really the case at all. A new scratch-off game is released, and suddenly all your lottery-playing friends of every age, including older people, immediately know the odds, the best times to buy, and everything about that new game. A new sport is created, such as pickleball, and suddenly everybody's a pickleball expert. So why are people shying away from AI in particular, and technology in general? I think at least part of it is the jargon, with all sorts of new words and concepts. Some of it's also peer pressure, but those other people are probably thinking the same thing: "I just don't understand it."

By the way, the jargon is part of the reason Jonathan is so popular, I believe. He explains everything repeatedly, so you don't have to be a technical wizard to understand the conversation.

But what this illustrates is that for many — I'd say probably most older adults — their curiosity hasn't diminished, and they still have that broad-based interest in the world. It's just that they're caught in the space between introductory information for younger people and children, and advanced information that assumes you're already familiar with the whole universe of technology. Think about that for a minute.

I'll use AARP ads for flip phones as an example, because I like to pick on the AARP. I know many older adults who use smartphones, and their level of proficiency is directly related to who taught them and from what viewpoint. If the instruction was, "Do this, don't do anything else, and it'll work just like your old phone," then they're typically living in terror of their phone because they don't understand anything about it. But if they're shown some of the neat things they could do — getting pictures of their grandkids, sending messages to their children, talking to friends all over the world for free — those people are all over smartphones and all the features available. It wasn't a learning issue, and it wasn't a curiosity issue. For the first group, it was simply that the person or group teaching them assumed they were incapable of learning something new, and taught them nothing but limitations instead of possibilities.

And why do I pick on the AARP? Because I think much of what they used to focus on — they are getting better about this, thankfully — but what they used to focus on was accommodating the perceived limitations of older adults instead of promoting the endless possibilities. As we've discussed many times before, more and more newer research is showing that older brains, in most cases, are totally capable of learning new things.

Usually, the two bigger impediments are either us suppressing our curiosity out of fear or embarrassment, or the people who educate and assist us underestimating our ability to learn. Like I said, I've taken a few courses from a few different instructors, and in all cases, if the instructor starts off with a neutral attitude, older adults have no problem keeping up with the younger learners.

So the next time you're tempted to say something along the lines of, "I'm too old to learn something new," or "I really don't want to learn something new at this point" — stop immediately and ask yourself, why did I just say that? Neuroscience disagrees with the first statement — you certainly are totally capable of learning new things. And your own overall curiosity disagrees with the second statement. In most cases, it's our own lack of self-confidence, or fear of being embarrassed by not having the background we think is needed, that's holding us back.

As always — and you should know this well by now — our brain's number one job is to keep us alive and safe. That means: do what we know works, and learning new things is, by definition, new. Intrinsically, our brain is cautious to a fault about new things, so its immediate reaction to something new is "no," and then it thinks up reasons to support that decision. Instead, in those sorts of situations, try saying something like, "That looks neat, I don't know much about it yet — can you teach me a little bit?" This puts your brain in an entirely different frame of reference. Now the pressure isn't on you to perform — you've already said this is new to you — plus you're just asking for a little information, so it's unlikely you'll be overwhelmed. This gives your brain a nice, comfortable space to check out the new thing without risk, to start to learn about it, and then it can get fully behind your curiosity to learn even more about the world around you.

So remember, curiosity isn't something that disappears — it's just that sometimes we tend to hide it a little, because our brain is always hesitant to jump into new things. Structure things so you can ease into something new, even something way out of your comfort zone, but give yourself time to adapt, and I think you'll be amazed at all the new opportunities that open up. Be curious and open-minded, but remember to be kind to your brain when it comes to how it has to access new situations — and never doubt your ability to learn new things. I've taken too many advanced internet and AI classes with 80-year-olds in the same group to accept that as an excuse.

So that's it for the evening. Thank you so much for stopping by. Remember, one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. Please see UKR7.com, the link to help the people of Ukraine, and WCK.org — World Central Kitchen — which works internationally in disaster areas. There are also a lot of local charities, and local charities are always looking for help. Even just a simple smile can change someone else's day for the better in ways you can't imagine.

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