In this episode:

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Why a venture firm's entire junior associate function now runs on an agent with a first name — and what that means for every entry-level seat in your company

The San Francisco espresso machine repair shop that's about to run its whole operation on a custom system built in two weeks, off one day of training

Why $700 billion in data center investment and a 90% enterprise failure rate can't coexist forever — and what happens when they finally decouple

The B-minus grade Itamar gives tech leadership on explaining AI to the public, and why that failure is manufacturing the backlash against it

Why "how do I build AI that gets me out of my job?" is the question the best founders now ask every single employee

The hire-versus-build decision: how to tell which roles on your team should be a person and which should be a system

Why AI still can't make the final call — the nuance problem that breaks statistical decision-making when the stakes are real

What San Francisco's total concentration of AI talent means for everyone operating in Dallas, Austin, and every market that isn't the Bay

The upskilling gap nobody is closing — not Washington, not the tech companies — and what that leaves business owners to solve alone

Why the lawyer who hands 80% of the work to AI ends up with 5x the clients instead of no job at all

The 1999 parallel: what came out of the last infrastructure bubble, and why the wreckage produced Google and Amazon

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Connect with Itamar: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itamarnovick/

Recursive Ventures: https://www.recursiveventures.com/

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Host Fred Davis leads business development at ForPsyte Talent Assessments — a lean startup pairing AI with 20 years of I/O psychology to build behavioral-based assessments for the people side of your business. Sharpen who you bring into the building, and find the stars already sitting on your roster. ForPsyte.com

The way your brand shows up in AI isn't random — and if you haven't figured that out yet, you're already behind. Justin Inman spent a decade at Google watching marketers miss the early windows on search, social, and mobile. Now he's built Emberos to make sure brands don't miss this one. As founder and CEO, Justin is building what may be the infrastructure layer for AI visibility — the operating system that tells you how ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity are describing your business, and more importantly, what to do about it.

In this episode:

Why 90% of brands have at least one inaccuracy across the major LLMs — and why that number will hurt more as agentic shopping explodes

The "perfect storm" killing traditional organic traffic: AI Overviews cutting clicks while consumers quietly move their searches to chatbots

What "Share Prompt" is — and why Emberos thinks it's the metric that should replace Share of Voice in every marketing conversation

How Emberos re-genred a misclassified film from "violent thriller" to the correct comp in four weeks — and why that matters six months later when someone asks for a movie recommendation

The 12-to-18-month window that's closing: why brands that don't establish LLM visibility now risk being locked out of the conversation permanently

Why "push to publish" AI-generated content is poisoning the internet — and how Grandma's Blog became an authoritative ChatGPT source for running shoes

Brand Orchestration vs. SEO hacking — the long-term strategy Emberos is building that connects PR, Reddit, social, Wikipedia, and earned media into one AI-visibility play

The Echo agent — Emberos's Q2 build targeting truth scores, hallucination rates, and compliance across regulated industries

Justin's read on what we're getting wrong about AI: why fear is drowning out the possibility that AI solves cancer in three years

Connect with Justin:
linkedin.com | emberos.com

Powered by The Lead Ref — The Lead Ref is an AI-powered lead marketplace connecting customers with the right businesses — and giving providers exclusive, high-intent opportunities. No shared leads. No spam. No race to the bottom. AI-Powered. With a Human Touch. TheLeadRef.com

Jonathan Schaeffer has spent four decades inside the machine — and he'll be the first to tell you it's all an illusion. A pioneer in AI and competitive game-playing systems, Jonathan has watched this field evolve from hand-coded expert systems to large language models that can fool the world into thinking they're intelligent. Now he's building Kind — a privacy-first desktop AI that keeps your data yours, eliminates hallucinations, and cuts through the noise of the AI gold rush with something radical: trust.

In this episode:

Why the distrust of AI is earned — and what the industry got wrong by losing sight of the eight billion people it's supposed to serve

How Kind works as a privacy-preserving desktop AI that answers questions exclusively from your own data — with zero hallucinations

Why Jonathan calls modern AI the "Harry Houdini effect" — and what chess, poker, and ChatGPT all have in common with magic tricks

The 2017 Google paper that set the stage for the ChatGPT revolution — and why Google didn't see what they had

Why AI is just sophisticated text completion — and how that simple model produces both stunning results and dangerous hallucinations

Deep Blue vs. Kasparov: what 200 million positions per second teaches us about playing to your strengths instead of your weaknesses

Why "Artificial Intelligence" is a dangerous misnomer — and how anthropomorphizing these systems is setting society up for a reckoning

The nuclear technology parallel: why AI regulation can't afford to be reactive, and what proactive guardrails need to look like right now

What Google's AlphaFold and the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry tell us about where AI is actually winning — and why it matters to everyone

What we're getting right about AI: breakthrough science, protein analysis, and technology that will save lives at scale

What we're getting wrong: the race to the finish line at the expense of the trust that will determine whether any of this actually gets adopted

Connect with Jonathan Schaeffer & Kind: LinkedIn: Jonathan Schaeffer | Kind

Powered by The Lead Ref — The Lead Ref is an AI-powered lead marketplace connecting customers with the right businesses — and giving providers exclusive, high-intent opportunities. No shared leads. No spam. No race to the bottom. AI-Powered. With a Human Touch. TheLeadRef.com

Meghan Houle has spent 15-plus years pulling back the curtain on what's actually broken in recruiting — and nobody wanted to talk about it, because the big platforms profit from the dysfunction. Now she's done talking and started building. Meghan is the founder of CONCÉ, an AI-powered talent intelligence platform designed to replace keyword-filtered chaos with predictive, dynamic matching that actually gets people hired. Think Raya for executive talent — private, vetted, and built by someone who's placed careers worth millions the old-fashioned way.

In this episode:

Why AI is not replacing C-suite executives in fashion — and what luxury brands like LVMH teach us about the irreplaceable value of human experience

The real problem with ATS: why 75% of applicants have no business applying, and why keyword matching is still how most companies make million-dollar hiring decisions

How Meghan posted one job, received 1,000 resumes in seven hours, and realized the entire industry needed to be rebuilt from scratch

Why CONCÉ is built like Bumble meets Raya for jobs — no mass applying, no spray-and-pray, just intentional matching

The proprietary data cloud and dynamic scoring engine that gets smarter the more companies use it — and why that institutional IP becomes a moat

How CONCÉ scales beyond fashion into healthcare, hospitality, finance, and any industry still running talent decisions on 1990 technology

Why "closed mouths don't get fed" — Meghan's founder philosophy on asking boldly, building in public, and surrounding yourself with the right experts

What we're getting right about AI: efficiency gains on the low-lift admin that's been eating your time for decades

What we're getting wrong: outsourcing your voice, your creativity, and your point of view to a chatbot and calling it content

Connect with Meghan Houle & CONCÉ: LinkedIn: Meghan Houle | hirewithconce.com

Powered by The Lead Ref — The Lead Ref is an AI-powered lead marketplace connecting customers with the right businesses — and giving providers exclusive, high-intent opportunities. No shared leads. No spam. No race to the bottom. AI-Powered. With a Human Touch. TheLeadRef.com

Steve Ancheta is a 16-year sales veteran turned AI founder who quit his job at 23 with $10,000 in the bank, a new house, a toddler, and a brand new marriage — and never looked back. Now he's co-founder of Zig.ai, an AI-powered revenue platform built to replace the chaos of disconnected sales tools with one intelligent system that learns how you work, not just what you do.

In this episode, Steve breaks down why domain expertise is the only real moat left in the AI era, how Zig's compounding context layer changes the game for sales teams, and why he believes data centers are heading to outer space and the ocean.

In this episode:

Why the software moat has shifted — building is now a commodity, and domain expertise is the only defensible edge left

The $2 billion cattle collar company that proves you don't need a Silicon Valley background to win with AI

How Zig sits between generic AI chat tools and rigid legacy SaaS — and why both sides are still wasting your time

What the "compounding context layer" actually means: an AI system that learns at the org level and the individual user level

Why models are already killing startups — and the three things you must own to survive: data, workflows, and intelligence

The AI volume game backlash: why mass email and LinkedIn outreach is already desensitizing buyers and why relationship is becoming the last true differentiator

Steve's bold prediction: data centers are going to outer space and the ocean — and why the energy and cooling math makes it inevitable

Why trades (roofing, HVAC, plumbing) are the sleeper wealth play of the next decade

The batting average framework for lead quality: why closing one in three makes you an industry leader

What we're getting wrong: assuming AI will completely surpass human beings in every aspect of what it means to be human

What we're getting right: recognizing this is the most revolutionary technology since the internet — and it's not a bubble that's going away

Connect with Steve Ancheta & Zig.ai: LinkedIn & zig.ai

Powered by The Lead Ref — The Lead Ref is an AI-powered lead marketplace connecting customers with the right businesses — and giving providers exclusive, high-intent opportunities. No shared leads. No spam. No race to the bottom. AI-Powered. With a Human Touch. TheLeadRef.com

Ken Troupe is a sports business veteran and co-founder of Sports Biz Advisors, working with teams and technology companies across professional and collegiate athletics. With decades of experience in ticket sales, relationship-driven revenue, and now sports technology consulting, Ken's seen every wave of "the next big thing" — and he's got a healthy skepticism about who's actually using AI versus who's just slapping the label on their pitch deck.

In this episode, Ken breaks down what's actually happening with AI adoption in sports business, why relationship-driven sales still can't be replicated by bots, and where teams are finding real value (and where they're just chasing buzzwords).

In this episode:

Why only 18-19% of sports professionals are actually using AI tools — despite everyone claiming they are

The AI buzzword problem: vendors saying "we're AI" without being able to articulate what they're actually doing

How AI is making individual jobs more efficient (note-taking, email cleanup, content creation) before it tackles bigger organizational challenges

Why ticket sales jobs aren't going away: the human relationship factor AI can't replicate (yet)

The hilarious story of a team that accidentally named their AI sales bot after a successful adult film star

How user-generated content platforms like Fanways are using AI to extract metadata (number of TVs at a tailgate, what beer fans are drinking) and feed it directly into CRM systems

Ken's approach to AI in the classroom at SMU: use it to refine your original thought, not replace it

What we're getting wrong: assuming everyone who says they're an "AI expert" actually knows what they're talking about

What we're getting right: staying curious about how AI can drive revenue in a results-obsessed industry

Connect with Ken Troupe & Sports Biz Advisors: LinkedIn & sportsbizbuilders.com & fanwayz

Powered by The Lead Ref — The Lead Ref is an AI-powered lead marketplace connecting customers with the right businesses — and giving providers exclusive, high-intent opportunities. No shared leads. No spam. No race to the bottom. AI-Powered. With a Human Touch. TheLeadRef.com

Burak Karakan is the co-founder of Bruin, an AI-powered data analytics platform that connects every data source inside your organization and delivers answers in minutes — not weeks. Built by engineers who spent years duct-taping data tools together for enterprise clients, Bruin was born out of frustration with how long it takes businesses to get answers from their own data.

In this episode, Burak breaks down why most companies are sitting on a goldmine of untapped data, why agentic AI is completely changing what's possible, and what the next phase of business intelligence actually looks like.

In this episode:

Why 80% of the value your business needs is already inside your own data — you just can't access it yet

From 6 weeks to 6 minutes: what happens when AI collapses the time between question and answer

The "burger test" — why teams don't trust answers that come too fast, and how Bruin breaks that psychological barrier

How agentic AI differs from traditional AI — and why the ability to iterate changes everything

What Bruin's on-premise deployment means for enterprises that can't afford data security risks

Why the companies that think AI can't do something today will be proven wrong within a year

What's coming next: proactive analytics, autonomous campaign management, and AI data teams that never sleep

Connect with Burak Karakan & Bruin: LinkedIn & getbruin.com

Powered by The Lead Ref — the AI-powered business growth platform delivering exclusive, intent-based leads and targeted marketing campaigns with a human touch. We open doors to commercial and B2B relationships you can't access alone. TheLeadRef.com

Jim Spignardo leads AI enablement at Pro Arch, a deep Microsoft partner helping enterprises navigate the AI revolution. With a focus on practical implementation over hype, Jim conducts executive briefings for organizations trying to move beyond "what is AI?" to "how do we actually use this?"

In this episode, Jim breaks down why most companies are still in the "second inning" of AI adoption, why Microsoft Copilot is quietly dominating the enterprise space while everyone obsesses over consumer tools, and the critical mistake organizations make when they skip the "what problem are we solving?" question and jump straight to tools.

In this episode:

Why AI hallucinations happen — and the dangerous reality that AI's first obligation is to make you happy, not tell you the truth

How Microsoft is playing the long game: building the infrastructure that powers their competitors while positioning Copilot as the enterprise AI front-end

The human skills gap that AI actually makes more important — why expertise matters more than ever, not less

Why one skilled person with AI can now do the work of five, but you can't skip being skilled in the first place

The real timeline for AI transformation: why it's going to take 10-12 years before we look back and don't recognize 2023

What organizations get dangerously wrong about AI job displacement versus the actual "adjustment" that's coming

Why Pro Arch always starts with use cases and data readiness before ever discussing which AI tool to implement

Connect with Jim Spignardo & Pro Arch:LinkedIn & proarch.com

Tyler Wells has spent over 25 years in software development — with stops at Skype, Microsoft, Twilio, and multiple startups along the way. Now he's channeling all of that experience into BrainGrid, a platform designed to solve one of AI's biggest frustrations: turning a messy idea in your head into working, deployable software.

In this episode, Tyler breaks down why simply having access to Claude Code or Cursor doesn't automatically make anyone a developer, why context is king when working with AI agents, and what he and his co-founder discovered that became the foundation for BrainGrid.

In this episode:

Why non-technical founders still face real barriers even with powerful AI coding tools available

How BrainGrid acts as an AI-powered product manager — asking the right questions to turn your idea into a detailed software specification

The origin story of BrainGrid and the "aha moment" that started it all

Why Anthropic's models consistently outperform the competition in their evaluations

The biggest daily challenges of building a product at the speed AI now makes possible

What we're getting right — and dangerously wrong — about AI

Connect with Tyler Wells & BrainGrid: braingrid.ai & LinkedIn

Adapt. Evolve. Scale.

That’s the Mantra at Subatomic.Ai and in this episode, Fred Davis sits down with Karl Simon, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Subatomic AI, to explore how agentic AI is reshaping industries from manufacturing to wealth management to legal services. Karl has been in the data game since the 90s (yes, building data warehouses at Oracle before it was cool), and now he's leading a company that's gone from 23 to 100+ AI coworkers internally — while maintaining zero dissatisfied customers.

This conversation delves into:

✅ Why businesses should hire AI coworkers, not buy software

✅ How agentic workflows adapt, evolve, and scale at the speed of business

✅ The "SaaS apocalypse" and why static software is dying

✅ How Subatomic turned a pessimistic prospect into their lead investor

✅ The AI bubble: infrastructure vs. application layer

✅ Why "seeing is believing" — and how to demo AI in days, not months

✅ The future of work: humans as managers of AI coworkers

✅ What we're getting right (and wrong) about AI

🔗 Connect with Karl Simon:‍ ‍

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karlsimon/‍ ‍

Subatomic AI: [https://www.subatomic.ai/]‍ ‍