Speaking & Podcasts
Ideas worth
talking about.
Available for podcast conversations, keynotes, panels, and workshops. The topics are clear thinking, AI adoption, and where those two things collide.
Speaking & Podcasts
A few things worth saying out loud.
Every conversation is different, but it tends to orbit the same territory: how people think, how organizations decide, and what it means to navigate complexity without losing your clarity.
Mental Models for Real Life
How frameworks for thinking change what you see, what you decide, and how you live. Not abstract theory — practical tools for the situations most people face repeatedly and never quite crack.
AI Adoption Without the Hype
What AI actually looks like inside complex organizations — from someone who has made these decisions from the inside, under real constraints, in regulated environments. What’s worth building and what’s just noise.
The Cross-Domain Advantage
What filmmaking taught about product leadership. What product leadership taught about AI. The argument for why the people who learn to see across domains outperform the ones who go deeper into one.
Clarity as a Leadership Practice
Why most organizational problems are not resource problems or talent problems — they are clarity problems. How leaders can build the thinking habits that make good decisions more repeatable.
Speaking & Podcasts
How this typically works
The format shapes the conversation. Here is what tends to work well.
Podcast Guest
Long-form conversations where the ideas actually have room to develop. The format where most of the best work happens.
Keynote
A single through-line talk built around one idea worth leaving with. Usually 20–45 minutes with Q&A.
Panel or Fireside
Best when the conversation is genuinely exploratory. Not panel-as-performance — panel-as-thinking-out-loud.
Workshop
A working session for teams that want to actually apply mental model thinking to a real decision or challenge.
Get in touch
Want Juan Carlos on your show or at your event?
Direct conversations, real ideas, no pre-packaged takes. Fill out the form and let’s figure out if it’s a fit.
Response time is typically within a few business days.
Past Appearances
A running archive of podcast conversations. The through-line across all of them: thinking more clearly and building things that matter.
The Mankind Podcast
Brandon Clift & Boysen Hodgson
Ep. 246
The Mental Shifts That Could Change Your Life
Most people struggle not because they lack intelligence — they lack frameworks for thinking. A conversation about mental models, storytelling, and how better thinking creates better choices.
Doomed to fail
Taylor Pineiro & Farz Sokhansanj
Ep. 235
Fallacies of Logic: Second Order Thinking
Three historical disasters — the Cleveland balloon release, Biosphere 2, and a vaccine rollout gone wrong — examined through second-order thinking and what happens when people only consider immediate consequences.
The intuition Strategist
Leah Goldman
Ep. 18
Mental Models and Strategic Clarity
A deep conversation about the Re:Mind system, the intersection of intuition and logic, and what it means to build frameworks that help people think — not just decide.
Nerds that talk good
Joel Benge
Ep. 22
Kintsugi to Cognitive Biases with Re:Mind Creator Juan Carlos
From kintsugi to cognitive biases — how the Re:Mind framework helps people move through complexity with more honesty, and why the right mental model depends on the shape of your problem.
Self Aligned
Robert Ta
Ep. 16
A Technologist’s Quest for Meaning
Most people struggle not because they lack intelligence — they lack frameworks for thinking. A conversation about mental models, storytelling, and how better thinking creates better choices.
Beyond the prompt
Jeremy Utley & Henrik Werdelin
Ep. 12
Make ChatGPT Your Personal Tutor
How Juan Carlos used ChatGPT as a developmental tutor to build an iPhone app from scratch — no prior programming experience. What it revealed about AI as a learning accelerator, not just a productivity tool.
Fail Faster
Emerson Taymore
Ep. 470
Rethink Your Thinking: The Power of Mental Models
The thinking behind Re:Mind — how mental models and decision frameworks help leaders cut through noise, make better calls, and build the inner operating system that everything else runs on.
Fail faster
Vandana Sharma
Ep. 391
Staying True to the Purpose of Creating Meaningful Impact
From filmmaker to product leader — a conversation about meaningful work, the transitions that change you, and what it looks like to embrace change without losing the thread of what you care about.