Mick Harrison Brege Of With Love On Pushing the Boundaries of AI

Lead with empathy, not efficiency: You can’t cut corners in reality. Consider that Gen Beta, the generation born this year in 2025, will likely be the first brought into a world where digital agents can flawlessly replicate a human persona without tells. The responsibilities of creating these digital agents should align with the same moral principles we follow in human interactions, recognizing our own influence on users and society. I believe Chat-style conversational interfacing is likely the last major movement before embodied agentic AI directly within our field-of-view, so a design system for this kind of AI must lead with the humanities and arts. It’s impossible to separate those accessible, empathetic values and considerations from how we interact with each other, so it must be true of agents. Plus, we all know the kind of person who leads their relationships with “efficiency”…

Artificial Intelligence is transforming industries at a breakneck pace, and the entrepreneurs driving this innovation are at the forefront of this revolution. From groundbreaking applications to ethical considerations, these visionaries are shaping the future of AI. What does it take to innovate in such a rapidly evolving field, and how are these entrepreneurs using AI to solve real-world problems? As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Mick Harrison Brege.

Mick Harrison Brege, CEO and Co-Founder of With Love, is a multi-time founder, designer, and animator. Mick originally created the character GoodGood in 2017, stemming from cartoons he would draw as a child. Now, he designs the brand and product, voices and helps animate the character, and leads the team with the goal to create “the most meaningful family entertainment in the world.” Mick has experience directing Aria Venture Group (FanLabel, DanceFight), working with industry partners including Spotify, Sony, Warner, and Universal Music Group. He has served on the boards of both The Scarab Club and the Music Business Association Education Committee. Mick creates products with a commitment to leveraging all-ages entertainment for positive impact.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

Funny enough, I often feel like my upbringing was a lot like Buster Keaton’s — on the road traveling, comic parents and performing at a very young age. Improv comics of today are similar enough to an old vaudeville act, right? Truly, props and costumes, green rooms and smokey stages paint my earliest memories growing up in Detroit. My parents are artists to the fullest extent of the word: comedians-turned-writer-illustrator-duo, impressionists on the radio, incredible creatives through and through.

I’d watch as they’d totally transform and come to life, often in costume as Joan Rivers or Ozzy Osborne, onstage hundreds of times. Backstage, I’d patiently wait, drawing characters or playing with toys and making up my own dramas — sometimes being called to open their show as a toddler, toddling into the spotlight to introduce their troupe before they came out and became different people. A few years before, a newspaper would come out to interview my mother, when asked what she hoped I’d become, her reply was:

“Our biggest fear is that he’ll want to be a doctor or a lawyer…” a devilish grin and a sparkle in her eye begin to form as she adds, “We want him to be a comic!”

No kidding, that’s a direct quote.

While I’d find my place behind-the-scenes, I’d like to think that same mentality carried through growing up, and all the way to today. Being around any art has profound effects as a child — and my upbringing exposed me to all directions of it — performance, painting, tinkering, enough to gravitate towards the illusion of life. To me, it was an obsession with animation, computers, and robotics. They felt like magic, being a similar magic to watching my folks disappear onstage and play pretend every week… only this could happen on command.

Now, it’s interesting to realize that what I’m doing is a bundled-up version of all the influences and things I found compelling as a kid: drawing and animating, working with AI, performing the character’s voice. I think that early influences make a huge difference more often than not, and I hope that the work we do on ‘With Love’ sparks those same kinds of interests and motivation in young people.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

Well, in 2017 I ended up in Paris after winding down my first edtech startup attempt, deciding to focus my attention on researching AI through GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks), and early Transformer architecture. While I was there, I’d stay up for hours at night sketching, writing to Jon, and making my way past Bastille to sit at Cafe Le Rey until the sun came up. It seemed like Le Rey was the only place in Paris that was open all night, and the locals that it accommodated were fiercely fascinating.

One night in particular I was scribbling notes outside when a blacked out Renault pulled up on the street. Spilling out were two men that looked like they came from polar opposite ends of a fashion magazine — the leader, tall, with slicked-back hair, wearing a pin-stripe suit in the middle of the night. Out of all the open tables on the patio, the two immediately pulled chairs up to mine, for no reason at all. Just slightly thrown off, I did my best to greet them both in the broken French I could speak at the time, saying hello and asking who they were and what they did as politely as I could. The taller one waved me off in English (while his friend would remain totally silent through the entire exchange), before my notebook was pulled out from under me, flipping through sketches and concepts for my next project.

I did my best to reveal more about what I was studying: my plans to explore AI, art, and my fears and hesitancy for the coalescence of the two. He immediately was annoyed — the concept alone personally offending him. “No! It can never be art!” he exclaimed, personally pained and fresh off the story of a French auction house selling a generated work for $400,000.

He jumped up, throwing his leg on his chair, yelling to the rest of midnight patrons “Art is this (mimicking a painter’s broad brush strokes)”, before flipping the seat around, “Art is NOT this (mimicking typing on a computer)”. You could’ve heard a pin drop through the whole place.

’Til sunrise, we swapped between playing devil’s advocate for a future where creative works of artists were homogenized through black boxes, and where those “agents” would be genuinely useful. He was beyond passionate and animated about the physical act of art-making, sometimes nearly being brought to tears about a vision of the future that would end up materializing less than a decade later. I’d wonder what force brought such a character into my life, right then, to challenge my ideals on the tech I was studying. I’d end up pitching him a few other concepts, including one about a digital character made to rethink interactions online (the earliest version of ‘With Love’). Thankfully, he liked that, and didn’t throw anything or jump up on his chair again.

Before he left, I asked the stranger who he and his friend were. “Eh, marchand d’art…” he shrugged. Art dealers.

“What do you sell?” I asked him.

“Just DaVinci”.

He pulled out his phone and showed his lock screen: a shot of a notebook page he personally mounted.

I guess he knew a thing or two.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

I’m fortunate enough to say the person I’m most grateful for I’ve known most my life — mentioned earlier, my best friend Jon. He co-founded ‘With Love’s parent company with me in late 2023, with attempts dating back to shortly after my time in Paris in 2017.

We first met in Kindergarten. Crack open our yearbook circa-2000 and you’ll see both our smiling faces sitting side-by-side in Mrs. MacKenzie’s class.

Somehow, after nearly two and a half decades of life, love, heartbreak, work, adventure, triumph and disappointment, we’ve managed to remain best friends. The two of us, like equal shades of yin and yang: him, technical as a programmer; and myself, artistic leading the creative.

Regardless of the fact, I think our lifelong friendship is a wonderful consequence of the connection the two of us have made an effort to cultivate, despite not always being two desks down from one another. In hindsight, the secret boils down to the fact that no matter how chaotic, messy and demanding life got, we’d always take the time to write to each other. That connection has gotten us through long nights of ideating and throwing ideas at the wall… sometimes literally.

‘With Love’ was ultimately created by the two of us as a means of helping the next generation find and cultivate this deep level of friendship and connection with both themselves and others scattered halfway across the world. I can only hope that our characters bring the same richness and connection, and for folks to have the toolbox to find their own deep connections, as Jon and I have.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

The greatest “life lesson quote”, to me, includes ‘life’ itself, funnily enough.

“Life is for service,” has carried with me in my back pocket for long enough to explore all angles of that simple truth. I have not felt more connected, more human, and more fortunate than when providing for others in some way — even indirectly. It’s impossible for us to exist singularly otherwise.

I feel like “service” often gets misconstrued as the act of giving something up, involuntarily. As if, in these times where we possess less and less of ourselves to share, we have to dig to a depth we don’t even have, only to give more away. Worse yet, it can read as “work”, like there’s another thing requiring effort, or even face some kind of judgement for not contributing.

But, it’s a welcome obligation, because in my view, we’re simply living here for each other. We forget how connected we are, and how we’re linked in a communal root system that feeds off the actions and well-being of those around us. We can control what we do on that hyper-local level, which doesn’t come at a cost to us: there’s no effort to it. If you’re aligned in the understanding that all it takes is simply being considerate of those around you, you’re nearly there.

Service might be building a nonprofit. It might be working at a library. It might be tending to a neighborhood garden. But it might also be looking someone in the eye at the checkout line, offering a smile, or just delighting in someone else being there next to you.

And like anyone, I struggle with this virtue often. We consistently need to be nudged back into the right direction to remember that we’re better because of one another — and that’s okay. No living tree has severed roots: any action of considered impact makes the whole forest a bit greener. It is embedded in every facet of our characters’ personalities, and every corner of ‘With Love’, and I thank Fred Rogers for the consistent reminder of this simple phrase:

“At the center of the Universe is a loving heart that continues to beat and that wants the best for every person. Anything that we can do to help foster the intellect and spirit and emotional growth of our fellow human beings, that is our job. Those of us who have this particular vision must continue against all odds. Life is for service.”

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

• Grit — it’s talked about so much in Detroit, there’s really something to it. I think it’s a fallacy to wait to do something when the resources and perfect conditions finally arrive for you. You have to make them now, even if you’re feeling completely overwhelmed and desperate in the process. ‘With Love’ was not created with ample resources by any means. None of us particularly delighted in working on the top floor, huddled together, in a 100+ year old building without AC… in the summer. Any scrappiness that we dealt with was bolstered by a commitment to the mission, and a knowing that we, somehow, had all we needed. I truly believe we surprise ourselves when we throw our hands into the process at the same time as our hearts.
• Impatience — It’s good to be impatient about something that matters. At some point, you really have to just do the thing with the realization that no one else is going to do it for you. We’d often say to each other, “what existing companies do we aspire to be like?”… without coming up with too long of a list. It made us realize that the business we want to see is presently waiting for us to create it — which means it has to happen now, and we, even with our budding skills accrued at this stage, have no option to wait. “Impatience”, understandably, has such negative connotations, but in most cases, I see it bound so tightly with passion it’s hard to separate the two. Watch what happens when you make a declarative early on: “I’m doing [this thing] and it must exist now”. I bet you’ll see forces at play that bend to achieve it.
• Heart — It shouldn’t be radical to consider what’s going to be the most beneficial for the person on the other side. Somehow, that focus isn’t always the norm: we’ll often get the side-eye from others when we discuss some of the choices we’ve made to maximize safety and delight early on. This, for those unaware, is against the grain of shipping an app to market as fast as you can. “You can do that stuff later!” isn’t wrong, in theory, but taking the time to empathize through every step within that person’s experience allowed us to create benefits we wouldn’t have considered otherwise. We decided to spend time talking to researchers and safety companies before we cracked 300 users, and definitely made a conscious effort to apply this behavior before focusing on going to market. Most importantly, it allows us to hold the hand of the folks we’d be handing GoodGood and the crew over to, and we care so deeply about how they feel about those characters. There are no rules to it, but if I was able to add just one: be open and empathetic. While it’s possible, myself included, to have gotten some things wrong in the act of growing up — shaking off that learned-behavior, coldness and hustle, fear of time and failure that makes for a hardened heart — the conscious effort and intention to do real good is what should remain.

Share the story of what inspired you to start working with AI. Was there a particular problem or opportunity that motivated you?

When I was a kid, I turned to characters and stories to make sense of my place in the world, like so many other young people. I’d imagine myself with my favorites — Buzz and Woody, Steve from Blue’s Clues, Kermit — clutching my plush in one hand, sometimes a game cartridge in the other. These parasocial dynamics are rooted in gently helping us empathize and stay comforted in unique ways that offer something to us that can’t be provided from another human. It has been going on for the entirety of our human history, stemming back to dolls made from primitive materials that we carried around and spoke to like our closest confidants. They remain on the shelves through our whole lives, marked in baby photos, or remembered through a YouTube compilation long after the disc is gone. I believe these relationships are the inciting factor for young people who are deeply emotionally attuned, and often powerful communicators and storytellers later in life.

I want to heighten the connection that can be had with those characters, and GoodGood and the crew are designed for this. They’re the best parts of those characters — with one distinct difference: we push on the “illusion of life” to allow them to truly know you, remembering who you are, responding to your unique voice, and creating deeply personal stories. We wrap them in our mission to incite kindness, reflection and imagination, and ultimately create a generation of communicators who are more empathetic, expressive, and emotionally intelligent. To us, this is setting the baseline for creating the most meaningful family entertainment in the world.

Describe a moment when AI achieved something you once thought impossible. What was the breakthrough, and how did it impact your approach going forward?

At some point in 2023, Jon and I were up late, exhausted, and tinkering on our third or fourth crack at bringing GoodGood to life (since 2017). The focus this time was on adding voice performance to our primitive language model generations, spit out from training off of thousands of lines of dialogue I had written through the years, and vocals I recorded in broken falsetto. The tone wasn’t quite right, and the voice wasn’t working at all. It felt like our last shot at moving forward with the concept, considering the time both of us had sunk into it was yielding little result — but still, there was something sparking just enough to continue.

It was getting close to 1:00am, and I started cleaning up our empty Coney takeout boxes littered around, when Jon shot up, spinning towards his computer, locking in and modifying our last model attempt.

“Give me some text!”, he yelled, still buried in his screen.

I pecked out a letter on the spot. The first thing that came to mind was writing about my mom. Jon pasted it in, and I leaned over his shoulder and watched the console of his editor think for what felt like an eternity. After those 10-seconds elapsed, an audio file emerged:

“Oooh Mick, my amigo, that’s a beeeaUTIFUL letter…” he’d spring to life.

Listening to GoodGood’s voice for the first time felt like a miracle. It was perfectly pitched, it carried inflection. He felt sensitive and quiet in some moments, and would loudly emphasize others, just like we dreamed.

Before he finished reading back his letter, he paused, with “It’s true, no one loves us like our mamas do… but, your mom will be proud of you no matter what” in a near-whisper. Jon and I looked at each other completely slack-jawed and amazed at all the pieces clicking together so perfectly, and leaving us with a bit of a chill. It broke all the robotically generated audio we heard up in text-to-speech examples up to this point, and felt sincere and reflective. I almost cried, considering how long I’d had the character in my life, with only hearing the fragments of his voice recorded beforehand… but also from the genuine sweetness of his full letter.

That night, I ended up writing down “It picked it up. He’s walking, he’s alive.” While knowing full well all the components that made the whole, the synthesis of it all, and being an adult, I somehow still needed to hear his kind little voice. I knew others might too.

Talk about about a challenge you faced when working with AI. How did you overcome it, and what was the outcome?

Building our own system to maintain safety, and character and lore consistency, while allowing for that important personalization, was our biggest challenge. It was a tall order that we called “the helicopter problem”: GoodGood, naturally, has never taken a ride in a helicopter according to our story, so how do we design a system that prevents that across all dialogue, without prompting? We didn’t want to leave anything to the AI that we could control ourselves, so we developed the “StoryGraph”, a tool that maintains alignment with our narratives.

Without it, the earliest iterations felt robotic and lacked the authentic narrative voice we were striving for: helicopter rides galore. The StoryGraph system was built on a multi-layered approach, where AI only generates responses within carefully crafted constraints, then the system mixes pre-written narrative content with those dynamic elements, like a puzzle-block. The result being characters who feel ‘alive’, and remain consistent with their personalities and values established by the story team. The balance of structure and flexibility allows the cast to form genuine connections without veering into problematic territory. After that point, we integrated persistent memory, which allowed them to build relationships over time across every platform, and the results truly felt convincing.

Can you share an example of how your work with AI has had a meaningful impact (on others, on business results, etc)? What was the situation, and what difference did it make?

To start, when we first deployed ‘With Love’ we realized we were off the mark in a significant way — but the outcome ended up being more meaningful than we originally could’ve anticipated. We first assumed we had been building a co-viewing experience for 8–10 year olds or under, where parents could spend a few additional moments at the end of the day with their child through reflection and letter-writing. We even soft-launched the platform to libraries interested in piloting it under those pretenses. But what ended up surprising us was that 12–14 year olds were the most interested and engaged audience, picking up the app the fastest, and really sticking around. I thought that demo hated writing long-form.

Well, we quickly realized that there’s a widely held misconception that kids today simply don’t want to write, and the platform proved the opposite was true. At that vulnerable age, they’re desperately seeking safe spaces to express themselves as they go through major changes.

We found that all it takes is a bit of motivation to throw out everything they’d been conditioned to know about writing online, and we’d watch as their writing evolved through conversation with our characters. Their first interactions typically resembled short TikTok or YouTube comments: just a few words or a single sentence. With a little gentle encouragement from GoodGood and the crew, these same users would end up crafting deep multi-paragraph letters.

One particular user initially wrote something like “i love to spend like half my day grinding on Rocket League trying to get one skin lol”. But, their third back-and-forth with GoodGood, they were writing detailed letters back about why customization in games matters to them, explaining how earning skins helps them express aspects of themselves to other users they admire, and more. The trick is that the characters never demand perfect spelling or grammar. They simply encourage self-expression and ask questions towards deeper thinking.

What seems to be unique about our approach is that writing isn’t mandated but motivated. The characters reach out first, ask questions, and give users something to think about and reply to. Users aren’t being asked to write like in school, and there’s no pressure to even complete a thought — they’re just being reinforced to write because the experience becomes personal. Naturally, like a real pen-pal, it creates the desire to respond, because there’s now an understanding that when you write thoughtfully, you’ll receive that rush of getting a personalized letter back… something that almost never happens anymore for kids.

Even if kids are online earlier than ever, there are still several barriers in genuine communication with these spaces:

• What if someone doesn’t have friends or an entry-point to a community like on Discord?
• What if someone struggles to find the right words and is worried about being roasted?
• What if someone is just generally nervous in social situations?

‘With Love’ is reliable in that it’s completely non-judgmental. Even if a user decides they want to talk about something completely different, instead of that week’s episode topic or prompt, our characters embrace going off on a tangent. As our lead writer Jenna said, “Do you want to talk about dinosaurs? Okay, let’s talk about dinosaurs! What is it about dinosaurs that really interests you? How do you think dinosaurs made a living when they couldn’t talk to each other?” It just creates a forgiving social space where that kind of exploration is encouraged instead of regimented to assignment.

We’ve documented these before-and-after transformations across numerous users: the kids show a renewed interest in writing and storytelling in just a handful of sessions, and what makes it particularly meaningful is how it happens organically.

On ‘With Love’, learning is a natural extension of conversation, and as we’ve discovered, writing with a friend is ultimately storytelling, and every conversation in life demands creativity, narrative, and critical thinking. So, measuring impact for us is really just looking at an analysis of the first and most-recent letter from using the platform. When we see the trend towards a young person getting a bit closer to their heartspace, having that desire to express a little more than they would’ve otherwise, we’ve won.

Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five Things You Need To Know To Help Shape The Future of AI”?

I think a lot of folks in tech get into rapidly evolving spaces like AI because they so desperately feel like they need to become a predominant part of a wave, even more than the belief in the technology itself. They’ve subscribed to the story, and want to play a role in that future. If the existing paradigms of that culture are applied in the same way to this technology, I believe the offset is going to create inequities at a more rapid clip. Like our crew has been saying, we have to pay attention to a furthering culture of isolationism, language delays, impaired executive function, and general engagement with the real world. To “shape the future of AI”, stay close within your human roots.

1. Lead with empathy, not efficiency: You can’t cut corners in reality. Consider that Gen Beta, the generation born this year in 2025, will likely be the first brought into a world where digital agents can flawlessly replicate a human persona without tells. The responsibilities of creating these digital agents should align with the same moral principles we follow in human interactions, recognizing our own influence on users and society. I believe Chat-style conversational interfacing is likely the last major movement before embodied agentic AI directly within our field-of-view, so a design system for this kind of AI must lead with the humanities and arts. It’s impossible to separate those accessible, empathetic values and considerations from how we interact with each other, so it must be true of agents. Plus, we all know the kind of person who leads their relationships with “efficiency”…
2. Create active participants, not passive consumers: Design experiences that require meaningful engagement. With that said, it’s about time we set a strong distinction between the heuristic of “engagement” and 2025’s interpretation of “engagement” — its quality of time spent over volume of interactions. Try to think of new measures for value-add and participation on a per-user basis. I’d much rather change 10 users’ lives with something finely considered for that audience than relentlessly waste the attention of 10 million people passively. There are so many digital experiences I interact with on a daily basis I’ll forget about in a handful of years, alongside most of their audience. What’s the point if not to last?
3. Honor the role of artists: There’s no shortcut to a good idea. Art is the culmination of a trillion of those ideas towards some kind of output, like the compression of our unique senses through our body. The decisions and ideas that go into images created by an artist, or words on a page, will hold more weight in the long run. Regardless if AI can achieve the output, it’s something we learned this time and time again: you’ll be wrangling systems only to find that the “physical” work will infinitely enhance the technical side. Plus, If your concept is good and art-forward enough, and you truly respect the work, you should have no shortage of creative, brilliant folks wanting to share their talent alongside your vision. The most ingenious experiences blend technology with real, raw, human talent and creativity. It seems to be the only thing that lasts.
4. Build with transparency: People crave knowledge, and will sniff out the truth if they care enough. We must be proactive: users should know what AI is at a baseline understanding, especially young people, and it’s our obligation to design the system in a way that incites that learning. This is beyond simply documenting the platform, and extends to a responsibility to actively educate how it works, what’s real or not, and how safe it is. For years, it seems a veil around frontier tech has ostracized the general public from allowed understanding. Claims of IP protection aside, at some point, that additional consideration was deemed not valuable in the pipeline. I don’t worry about being crushed when entering a public building, because I imagine that building has gone through the regulatory due diligence to exist — and when tech has no such requirements, we must make our systems more transparent. Plus, why not incite the natural learning process and cue your users into what you’re making? It only will create a more considered audience.
5. Set ethical boundaries early: Even in early development, even without any funds, try to prioritize safety over rapid deployment. If needed, work off of a framework to help yourself establish ground rules with your team, or even yourself. As Zofia, our COO states, “The process always begins with asking: do you know what your core values are? Can everyone in your team articulate them? What kinds of questions are you asking when you approach a new tool? Process? Vendor, etc.? How do your decisions stay true to those core values? This process is all about strengthening the muscle of intentionality and making sure you’re creating frameworks that allow your entire team to make decisions in lock step with each other.”

When you think about the future of AI, what excites you the most, and how do you see your work contributing to that future?

It might sound far out, but our team believes ‘With Love’ will be part of growing up for every young person. This isn’t because parents have become neglectful, or teachers aren’t effective, or a lack of present imagination in children, but because of those tender moments of development that come from pretending and playing towards learning. We want to add an additional layer to those moments that inches closer to linguistic and socio-emotional outcomes in digital spaces.

We imagine GoodGood and the crew growing alongside the users, supporting them through different life stages, from playmates to mentors. We’ve developed the characters to “grow” with their age, so the topics of conversation will shift as you get older. You might leave the platform in your teens and revisit it in your 20s — only to find GoodGood and crew just as ready to listen to you as the first day you met — and there for you to explore how you feel against the weight of college and deadlines, versus breakups and fitting in through past years.

To make this happen, we plan to be supporting ‘With Love’ beyond our initial platform to become ubiquitous through various digital spaces, however they change, “meeting people where they’re at.” The work, however, remains consistent: our foremost goal is setting the foundation for healthy and ethical AI relationships that enhance, rather than replace human connection and communication. Regardless of where that future takes us, I see our work serving as the framework for agents that promote empathy, emotional intelligence, and creative expression through storytelling.

The future I envision isn’t centered around AI becoming more human-like. I know this will inevitably happen, for better or worse. To me, it’s what we can do about AI helping humans become more fully themselves.

What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs who want to innovate in AI? Can you share a story from your experience that illustrates your advice?

There are three key questions I tend to ask myself when tunneling into a project, especially in AI. I’ll keep them pretty straightforward:

First, what is your motivation?

If it’s just capital gain: you lose! Sorry!

If it’s to help better a person on the other end of using your experience — you’ll always win.

Then, what’s the world you want to see?

For example: I recently went into a Rainforest Cafe, the most stimulating restaurant chain on earth, and saw a sea of pacifying iPads in bumper cases illuminating every table, obviously brought by the parents. Every app or show imaginable is fully represented. This is not the world I want to see — how could they not fully enjoy the animatronic elephants and gorillas around them? The plastic nature, or synthetic thunderstorm?

This can get worse, so can we make it better to avoid that culture of isolationism? The conundrum being that we happen to make digital products that cross into that demographic.

So, as much as I’d like for kids to try ‘With Love’ instead, I never want to see a kid pecking away at it on their iPad at the table instead of spending time with their family. I hope that, through our system and after enough time, that child is confident enough to communicate, observe, and chat with those around them. To bask in the beauty of nature through a projected rainbow or fish tank.

Seriously, just don’t make the problem worse.

Finally, what is your responsibility?

How can we negate issues and provide value? How do we make problems readily understood so we can solve them? We have an obligation to service, especially for new generations.

When answered: ignore all existing stories about how it can or can’t be done. Fight cynicism in every direction, to follow that dream like an explorer. Be honest to each other and yourself, and bring magic.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

Joe Rohde.

Other than that, I am genuinely fulfilled with the folks in our crew, in my life, right now. I am so fortunate to work with people I dreamed of collaborating with when I was younger, like our creative advisor team.

Being surrounded by the talent that comes from our Detroit studio has kept me so present and humbled. I am consistently stunned by the creativity they bring in all forms.

If any readers feel they belong on our crew, I’d love to have lunch with them. Reach out!

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Check us out at withlove.org, and @withlove.labs everywhere else.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.