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?

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.

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

Hunter Grad, CEO and founder of Ameliogenix, 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

Hannah Storey, Advocacy and Policy Advisor at Amnesty International, 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”

Speech AI model helps preserve indigenous languages

Empire of AI, by Karen Hao

Cory Doctorow’s new book, "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It"

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

Chase Cunningham and cyber war

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

Chase Cunningham and cyber war

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. 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

Kashmir Hill’s detailed reporting on Adam Raine’s death and the part played by ChatGPT 

(Warning: detailed discussion of suicide)

Colorado parents sue Character AI over daughter's suicide

Sewell Setzer's parents sue Character AI

Deloitte to pay money back after caught using AI in $440,000 report

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
• Emily Blunt among Hollywood stars outraged over 'AI actor' Tilly Norwood
• AI: Meta, Google & OpenAI lean into AI Generated Social Videos
• Brazilian scammers, raking in millions, used Gisele Bundchen deepfakes on Instagram ads
  

The lads are traveling this week, so we're revisiting their interview with Savannah Sly, dominatrix and sex worker rights advocate. She joined the show to talk about privacy, power, and the nuances of human intimacy as generative AI takes hold.

George K and George A talk to Savannah about:

• The current state of privacy for vulnerable communities and the real-world operational security challenges they face
• Practical steps individuals can take to protect their digital identities when dating online
• The intersection of AI, deepfakes, and the weaponization of intimate content
• The zeitgeist and cultural headwinds for sex workers today