On this episode of Plain Talk, recorded on location inside Brewhalla at the TedXFargo event, we talked about a deeply uncomfortable topic.

Suicide, namely. Our guest was Haley DeGreve, founder of the Gray Matters Collective, an advocacy group focused on mental health issues which also provides training for the public on how to recognize mental health episodes and health.

We think about CPR training, and first aid training, but what about someone who is having a manic episode, or contemplating suicide? "Where our organization has leaned into that gray area is there are people like you and I who care, but we don't know how to help," DeGreve told us. "We're not trained in this. And so, we actually spend a lot of our funding on training to get people trained so, if you're in the grocery store and you see someone having a mental breakdown, you know what to do. You know how to connect them."

Also on this episode, co-host Chad Oban and I discussed a recent, tacit acknowledgement that property tax exemptions have a real cost for the public.

"The true thing is that when we give away an exemption, there's a cost," I argued. "Maybe the cost is worth paying, right? We can have a debate about that, but it is a cost and we can't ignore it."

We also discussed the back lash against data centers, and how the public's shift towards online populism has influenced that. "This is what happens when there's an issue that's very complicated and you have a fringe that's sort of running the messaging on this that everything is terrible," I said.

The real threat of AI, I argue, is that it can make nonsense arguments seem plausible. "Any moron can sound like Hemingway with ChatGPT," I said.

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