2025 was hella weird. The AI revolution is here whether we asked for it or not. This week, George K and George A reflect on the year and what it means for 2026.

At AWS re:Invent, George A watched a machine create a custom fragrance and marketing campaign in real-time from a voice prompt. What does that portend for product prototyping, and scaled manufacturing?

Could voice and natural language finally replacing typing as the primary interface? We're watching the biggest shift in human-computer interaction since the mouse.

Worldwide AI adoption isn't hype anymore—it's happening and doing so unevenly. Some enterprises are getting serious and some are still noodling. The tools are maturing. The question shifted from "if" to "how do we do this responsibly."

There are serious questions to answer. GPU lifecycles. The Magnificent Seven’s circular financing models. The human cost of moving this fast. But that's the work—building technology that serves us instead of the other way around.

The revolution came. Now comes the interesting part: what we actually build with it.

2026 is going to be wild. We remain up to the challenge.

Mentioned:

 * Brookings Institution, “New data show no AI jobs apocalypse—for now” [https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-data-show-no-ai-jobs-apocalypse-for-now/]
 * Discussed in further detail with Ethan Mollick on Your Undivided Attention [https://open.spotify.com/episode/7tVke0Fuo6WSssgJ4eUDQa?si=UXKBrqKyR2acZqVl3UqXwA]
 * Reid Hoffman’s interview with Wispr Flow founder/CEO Tanay Kothari [https://open.spotify.com/episode/7AxM51x61saSou9M1GkYwk?si=h7yIQa3fSrWyT2E4B8jYJQ]
 * More on Coreweave’s financing model at The Verge [https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/8/23824661/coreweave-nvidia-debt-gpu-ai-chips-collateral?utm_source=podcast&utm_id=bareknucklesbrasstacks]

Looking ahead to the next year in tech and human impact

What if your biggest career obstacle isn't external—it's the “broken code” running in your own head?

Rachelle Tanguay joins the show to unpack the difference between consuming self-help content and actually doing the uncomfortable work of rewiring your internal programming.

From advising deputy ministers to coaching professionals across sectors, she's seen what happens when high-performers hit the wall between knowing what to do and actually being able to execute.

This conversation cuts through the dopamine-hit culture of five-minute reels and quick fixes. Rachelle breaks down why most people confuse consuming content with doing the work, how imposter syndrome is not your own voice “chirping in your ear," and why even the most senior leaders need help to see the forest through the trees.

If you've ever wondered why smart people with all the right information still can't break through their own barriers, this episode is for you. No buzzwords, no corporate speak—just an honest look at what it takes to level up when the real bottleneck is you.

Mentioned

https://www.kornferry.com/about-us/press/71percent-of-us-ceos-experience-imposter-syndrome-new-korn-ferry-research-finds

https://www.mogawdat.com/solve-for-happy

https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits

Why leveling up is about fixing your own “broken code” and doing the work

Graeme Rudd spent years taking emerging technology into austere environments and watching it fail.

He assessed over 350 technologies for a Department of Defense lab. The pattern was consistent: engineers solved technical problems brilliantly. Lawyers checked compliance boxes. Leadership approved budgets. And the technology failed because no one was looking at how humans would actually use it.

So he went to law school—not to practice law, but because solving technology problems requires understanding legal systems, human behavior, operational constraints, and business incentives simultaneously.

Now he works on AI governance, and the stakes are higher. "Ship it and patch later" becomes catastrophic when AI sits on top of your data and can manipulate it. You need engineers, lawyers, operators, and the people who'll actually use the system—especially junior employees who spot failure points leadership never sees—in the room together before you deploy.

This conversation is about why single-discipline thinking fails when technology intersects with humans under stress.

Why pre-mortems with your most junior people matter more than post-mortems with experts.

Why the multidisciplinary approach isn't just nice to have—it's the only way to answer the question that matters:

Does it work when a human being needs to operate it under conditions you didn't anticipate?

How Expertise becomes a blind spot in technology development

What happens when you go all in and bet on yourself?

Taylor McClatchie, professional Muay Thai fighter with ONE Championship, joins the show to share how she did just that.

She spent a decade in reproductive science, working in a lab. Then she walked away from it all to turn her pastime into her profession. Went 20-0 as an amateur. Made her pro debut at Madison Square Garden with a head kick knockout. Has competed 65 times—exceptionally rare for a North American woman in combat sports.

This episode isn't about technology. It's about what happens when you stop following the prescribed steps and start building a life around what actually matters to you.

Taylor didn't fall in love with winning. She fell in love with the process. With adding one more piece to training camp—sprints, nutrition coaching, strength work—and never taking them away. With waking up and doing it again.

She talks about needing three types of sparring partners: people worse than you to test new skills, people at your level to compete with, and people better than you just to survive the round. "I never want to be the best person in the room because what am I getting from beating up on the new kids?"

The parallel to our industry is unavoidable. You can't grow if you're always punching down. You need to be uncomfortable. You need rounds where you're just trying to survive.

We spend a lot of time on this show questioning whether technology actually serves human interests. Sometimes the best lessons come from outside our world entirely—from someone willing to abandon the expected path to pursue something real.

Getting Addicted to the Process and Chasing Excellence

Eric Pilkington joins the show to cut through the noise around artificial intelligence and deliver some hard truths about what's actually working—and what's just expensive theater.

AI isn't new; it's been around for 70+ years. The current generative AI boom is democratization, not innovation—and 95% of AI projects are still failing.

Startups with no product, no customers, and no revenue raising $30-100 million. Companies are getting massive funding without a single dollar of revenue.

The real AI leaders aren't the loudest voices on conference stages. They're the ones quietly embedding AI into workflows, building better products, and closing the gap between pilots and actual impact.

 Most companies chase cost savings instead of using AI to drive top-line growth. You can't cut your way to growth. Real business transformation comes from understanding the actual problems you're solving, not from chasing the newest shiny object. The superheroes of AI aren't prognosticating on stages—they're in garages and labs building things that'll matter five years from now.

Mentioned:

MIT Study on failure of AI pilots in business [https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Business_2025_Report.pdf]

Re-thinking How AI Can Actually Drive Business Value

Hunter Grad, CEO and founder of Ameliogenix [https://ameliogenix.ca/], joins the show to talk about developing mRNA immunotherapies for cardiovascular disease. George K and George A sit down with Hunter to discuss:

 * How a procrastinated university project turned into a biotech startup tackling the leading cause of death worldwide
 * The novel application of mRNA technology to permanently reduce cholesterol levels through targeting proteins within the body rather than viral diseases
 * What it takes to bootstrap a biotech company in Ottawa, not Silicon Valley
 * The brutal realities of fundraising in biotech versus software startups, and why pivoting isn't always an option when lives are on the line
 * Clearing up the myths and misinformation around mRNA technology, from how it actually works to addressing fertility concerns
 * The role of machine learning in accelerating biotech research and drug discovery, and why quality data matters more than flashy AI hype

Hunter breaks down complex immunology concepts into digestible explanations while sharing the raw challenges of being a young founder in a traditionally academic-led industry. This episode explores innovation at the intersection of technology and medicine, the importance of rigorous science over buzzwords, and what it means to swing for the fences on a problem that affects 2 billion people worldwide.

Mentioned:

Using AI, MIT researchers identify a new class of antibiotic candidates [https://news.mit.edu/2023/using-ai-mit-researchers-identify-antibiotic-candidates-1220]

A Biotech Innovation to Treat a Chronic Health Problem Impacting 2 Billion People

Hannah Storey, Advocacy and Policy Advisor at Amnesty International [https://www.amnesty.org], joins the show to talk about her new brief that reframes Big Tech monopolies as a human rights crisis, not just a market competition problem.

This isn't about consumer choice or antitrust law. It's about how concentrated market power violates fundamental rights—freedom of expression, privacy, and the right to hold views without interference or manipulation.

Can you make a human rights case against Big Tech? Why civil society needed to stop asking these companies to fix themselves and start demanding structural change. What happens when regulation alone won't work because the companies have massive influence over the regulators?

Is Big Tech actually innovating anymore? Or are they just buying up competition and locking down alternatives? Does scale drive progress, or does it strangle it?

What would real accountability look like? Should companies be required to embed human rights due diligence into product development from the beginning?

Are we making the same mistakes with AI? Why is generative AI rolling forward without anyone asking about water usage for data centers, labor exploitation of data labelers, or discriminatory outcomes?

The goal isn't tweaking the current system—it's building a more diverse internet with actual options and less control by fewer companies.

If you've been tracking Big Tech issues in silos—privacy here, misinformation there, market dominance over here—this episode is an attempt to bring those conversations together in one framework.

Mentioned:

Read more about the Amnesty International report and download the full report here: “Breaking Up with Big Tech: a Human Rights-Based Argument for Tackling Big Tech’s Market Power” [https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/pol30/0226/2025/en/]

Speech AI model helps preserve indigenous languages [https://it-online.co.za/2024/01/22/speech-ai-model-helps-preserve-indigenous-languages]

Empire of AI, [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/743569/empire-of-ai-by-karen-hao/] by Karen Hao

Cory Doctorow’s new book, "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It" [https://www.versobooks.com/products/3341-enshittification]

Confronting Big Tech’s Abuses as a Question of Human Rights 

RE-ISSUE: This recording corrects for an audio overlap problem in the previous version of this interview at the 28:00 mark.

Zach Lewis, CIO/CISO at University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis, joins the show to talk about his experience with a ransomware attack by the LockBit group.

Zach takes us beyond the technical recovery into territory most people don't talk about: the gut-punch moment of finding the ransom note and the months of running on pure adrenaline while keeping his team from cracking under pressure.

Key takeaways from our conversation:

The human toll matters. When hospital systems go down, it's not just inconvenient. People can't get medications, emergency rooms have to reroute patients, and lives are at stake. This is the cyber war nobody wants to acknowledge.

Attribution is nearly impossible. Even when you know who attacked you, there's rarely closure for victims.

Leading through crisis. Zach shares how he kept his team together during months of remediation by staying calm on the outside, and knowing which team members could handle the pressure and which ones needed to stick to routine work. Sometimes the best leadership is just being that steady presence when everything else is chaos.

If you want to understand what really happens when ransomware strikes, this episode is required listening.

Available wherever you get your podcasts.

Zach's book "Locked Up" drops January 6th and is available for pre-order now: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1394357044

Mentioned:

Cyber Attack Suspected in German Woman’s Death [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/world/europe/cyber-attack-germany-ransomeware-death.html?unlocked_article_code=1.uU8.Cf4H.LEjQ0lmlN_Wn&smid=url-share]

Chase Cunningham and cyber war [https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonybradley/2025/10/16/midnight-in-the-war-room-and-the-unsung-heroes-of-cybersecurity/]

What a Ransomware Attack on a Hospital Really Mean (Audio Issue Fixed)

Clinical psychologist, Dr. Sarah Adler, joins the show this week to talk about why “AI Therapy” doesn’t exist, but is bullish on what AI can help therapists achieve.

Dr. Adler is a clinical psychologist and CEO of Wave [https://www.wavelife.io/]. She's building AI tools for mental healthcare, which makes her position clear—what's being sold as "AI therapy" right now is dangerous.

Chatbots are optimized to keep conversations going. Therapy is designed to build skills within bounded timeframes. Engagement is not therapy. Instead, Dr. Adler sees AI as a powerful recommendation engine and measurement tool, not as a therapist.

George K and George A talk to Dr. Adler about what Ethical AI looks like, the model architecture for personalized care, who bears responsibility and liability, and more.

The goal isn't replacing human therapists. It's precision routing—matching people to the right care pathway at the right time. But proving this works requires years of rigorous study. Controlled trials, multiple populations, long-term tracking. That research hasn't been done.

Dr. Adler also provides considerations and litmus tests you can use to discern snake oil from real care.

Mental healthcare needs innovation. But you cannot move fast and break things when it comes to human lives.

Mentioned:

A Theory of Zoom Fatigue [https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/a-theory-of-zoom-fatigue]

Kashmir Hill’s detailed reporting on Adam Raine’s death and the part played by ChatGPT  [https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/technology/chatgpt-openai-suicide.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nU8.DE_a.Ur81NxfjZuNn&smid=url-share]

(Warning: detailed discussion of suicide)

Colorado parents sue Character AI over daughter's suicide [https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/lawsuit-characterai-chatbot-colorado-suicide/]

Sewell Setzer's parents sue Character AI [https://apnews.com/article/chatbot-ai-lawsuit-suicide-teen-artificial-intelligence-9d48adc572100822fdbc3c90d1456bd0]

Deloitte to pay money back after caught using AI in $440,000 report [https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/06/deloitte-to-pay-money-back-to-albanese-government-after-using-ai-in-440000-report]

Can Ethical AI Democratize Therapy and Higher Quality Care?

This week George K and George A switch formats to tackle the AI revolution's messiest questions—from autonomous coding agents to digital actresses and deepfake scams.

The hosts examine what happens when innovation moves faster than ethics. When Claude Sonnet 4.5 promises 30 hours of autonomous coding, what's the real trade-off between productivity gains and security fundamentals? When talent agencies want to represent AI-generated actresses, are we witnessing the death of human performance art or just another moral panic? And when Brazilian scammers can steal millions in $19 increments using celebrity deepfakes, who bears responsibility—the platforms, the regulators, or the users?

They explore the uncomfortable economics behind AI video generation, where companies promised to cure cancer but instead delivered infinite dopamine-mining slop. The conversation digs into data center energy consumption, the exploitation of human attention, and why your grandmother clicking Facebook ads might represent democracy's newest vulnerability.

George A brings a practitioner's lens to AI governance, arguing for education from elementary school up, metadata standards for content authenticity, and balanced regulation that protects innovation without enabling exploitation. George K challenges the fundamental premise: if supercomputers are being pointed at our dopamine receptors just to sell more ads, what happened to building technology that actually improves human life?

Most importantly, they ask: Are we building applications that create a better future, or are we just doubling down on the attention economy?

News examined:

 * Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 4.5 in latest bid for AI agents [https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/787524/anthropic-releases-claude-sonnet-4-5-in-latest-bid-for-ai-agents-and-coding-supremacy]
 * Emily Blunt among Hollywood stars outraged over 'AI actor' Tilly Norwood [https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c99glvn5870o]
 * AI: Meta, Google & OpenAI lean into AI Generated Social Videos [https://michaelparekh.substack.com/p/ai-meta-google-and-openai-lean-into]
 * Brazilian scammers, raking in millions, used Gisele Bundchen deepfakes on Instagram ads
   [https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazilian-scammers-raking-millions-used-gisele-bundchen-deepfakes-instagram-ads-2025-10-03/]

So, Are We Gonna Cure Cancer or Just Double Down on Mining Attention?

Hosted by two guys named George on either side of the divide, this is a cybersecurity podcast that tackles the relationship between vendors and their customers. George Kamide is on the security vendor side, and George Al-Koura is a CISO on the customer side. Vendors gotta sell, and companies need tooling to protect their data. Tune in to hear real conversations from opposing sides of the pitch about cybersecurity marketing, sales, and go to market strategies. We go after these topics and bad practices with bare knuckles, then it’s down to brass tacks to look for solutions. Tune in to hear from guests from either side, including CISOs, SMEs, sales leaders, frontline account managers, and more!

George Kamide

Shows