Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks

This past week George K and A were off for the holidays. We revisit an episode from earlier this season.  What if the best investment decision is one where no human is involved? Brant Meyer, partner at Trac VC joins the show this week to talk about the firm’s approach, where algorithms — not partners in puffer vests — make every single call. Over 115 investments to date with zero human invest...

When companies mandate AI adoption without a use case, without a strategy, and without a business outcome in mind, they don't get transformation. They get jazz hands and nightmare token bills. This month's System Update pulls apart what's actually happening beneath the headlines: Oracle's 21,000 layoffs attributed to "AI adoption," Amazon arming junior developers to replace senior engineers, and e...

When an institution says it's changing, how do you tell the difference between real reform and a vocabulary update? Charlotte Duval-Lantoine has spent years studying organizations that adopt the language of culture change while leaving intact the structures that made change necessary in the first place. The tells are subtler than most leaders want to believe, and they show up earlier than most are...

What if the problem with American democracy isn't that the system is broken, but that it's working exactly as intended, just not for you? Travis Misurell, founder of FiNC (Future is Now Coalition), has spent years watching civic tech efforts try to fix democracy by building better tools. Every one of them failed. His argument: they got the sequence wrong. You don't build the technology and hope a...

The travel schedules and time zone tango is real. This week, revisit one of the most downloaded episodes this season, with Rachelle Tanguay.  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...

The hype machine spent two years telling us AI was coming for your job. Now it's quietly walking that back. Why now? Follow the money. On this week's system update, George K. and George A. pull apart the vibe shift happening at the top of the AI economy: from Uber's COO admitting he can't draw a line between token spend and shipped features, to the broader reckoning hitting every CFO who signed a...

What if the reason most people struggle to build meaningful professional relationships isn't effort — it's that they've mistaken a transaction for a foundation? David Homan has spent thirteen years building the largest private network of super connectors on the planet. Not by being the most impressive person in the room, but by being the most useful one — long before anyone asked. His thesis is th...

What happens when a community votes no…but the #AI datacenter construction starts anyway? That is not a hypothetical. It’s what happened in Saline Township, Michigan, when a $16 billion OpenAI-Oracle data center was rejected by the local planning commission, rejected again by the township board, and broke ground weeks later anyway. The developer sued. The town settled. They had no real choice. Sha...

In the wake of more layoffs attributed to "AI," we thought it worthwhile to revisit this conversation from earlier in the year. Increasingly, AI is being used as a catch-all excuse to justify layoffs without clear return on business value, other than the stock price...so it's time to dig deeper. What if your AI rollout isn't failing because of the technology, but because no one asked your employee...

What if the story we're being told about AI's inevitability is hiding something underneath? That's the question Jessica Parker and Kimberly Becker put to George K. on their podcast, Women Talking ‘Bout AI . This conversation is a replay from their feed. It followed the money: the special purpose vehicles, the obfuscatory financing, the concentration of risk in a handful of companies and a single i...

The AI hype machine is taking up all the oxygen we need to actually stop the harm happening today. This month we heard from three guests who didn't compare notes. Didn't coordinate. And all three circled the same thing: the #AI hype machine isn't just wrong, it's actively making things worse. Capital flows going to “everything machines” instead applications that actually accomplish tasks. Gas turb...

Are tech industries selling us a problems they invented? Ryan Clarque, CSO at Black Rifle Coffee Company , doesn't flinch at the big provocations. When Claude's Mythos model showed up in every LinkedIn feed promising a software apocalypse, Ryan's take was blunt: the basics were broken before Mythos, and they'll still be broken after it. The real question about a powerful AI model, it’s whether you...

What if narrow #AI, rather than imagined AGI through scaling will be what changes the world? In some places, that’s already happening. El Mahdi Aboulmanadel founded DeepLeaf after watching smallholder farmers in Morocco misdiagnose crop disease because three distinct conditions can look identical to the human eye. Wrong diagnosis, wrong treatment, chemical residue on food. Best case scenario? Expo...

Amber Bennoui calls it like she sees it: most of what gets sold as "AI security" is just cloud security with sparkle emojis on it. She's co-founder of AISECA, a veteran product leader, and a more honest voices in a space that isn't exactly famous for honesty right now. We sat down with her fresh off RSA, and the conversation got very real: The real AI risk isn't the sci-fi scenario. It's the DevOp...

When was the last time a news headline about AI actually told you something true? George K. and George A. recorded this one from opposite sides of the planet — George K. fresh off RSA in San Francisco, George A. embedded at a global trust and safety conference in London. The distance didn't slow them down. This month's System Check has a theme: we’re living inside a story that powerful institution...

What if the best investment decision is one where no human is involved? Brant Meyer, partner at Trac VC joins the show this week to talk about the firm’s approach, where algorithms — not partners in puffer vests — make every single call. Over 115 investments to date with zero human investment decisions. An 8.5% loss ratio, orders of magnitude less than traditional VC, would seem to suggest they’re...

We've spent the last several months talking to people who live at the intersection of technology and the humans on the receiving end of it. A data privacy attorney. A corpus linguist. A clinical psychologist. A performance coach. An entrepreneur who built a business on failure. They don't all agree with each other. But they're all pointing at the same thing: the gap between how technology gets bui...

Why do your friends and parents still get breach notification letters from companies they’ve never heard of? John Watters aka “The Cowboy” joins the show this week for a hard look at information security. In the early 2000s, he built iDefense from a bankruptcy buyout into one of the most influential threat intelligence companies in the world, pioneered responsible disclosure before the term even e...

What if your AI rollout isn't failing because of the technology, but because no one asked your employees how they feel about it? Dr. Marissa Alert is a clinical psychologist who works with organizations scaling AI. Her argument is deceptively simple: the resistance leaders keep running into isn't a change management problem. It's a diagnostic failure. And until you treat it like one, AI rollouts t...

The voices telling you it won't work usually belong to people who never tried. Nobody gives you permission to take a chance. You just do it. Chris built a 50K MRR business without a formal education, a tech background, or a plan. As an actor, a car dealership paid him $400 to be in a commercial and he thought, "If I can pretend to do this, what happens if I just actually do it?" From there it was...

What happens when you get everything you thought you wanted and still feel empty? Tychon Carter won Big Brother Canada, gained fame and followers overnight, and felt completely lost. The success arrived before he was ready for it. The external validation didn't fill the internal void. In this conversation, we dig into the gap between looking successful and actually feeling whole. Tychon walks thro...

This week we're taking stock of conversation trends to let it rip on AI market jitters and what happens when the math stops math-ing. We start with the numbers that have investors nervy: Amazon's $200 billion capex projection for 2026, and the uncomfortable reality of building an entire economy on depreciating GPU infrastructure with a three-year shelf life. Why the dot-com bubble comparison are i...

What happens when AI-generated text masquerades as human research? Kimberly Becker, PhD, a corpus linguist joins the show this week to talk about her study comparing human-written versus AI-generated abstracts in high-stakes healthcare research. The findings reveal something unsettling about how LLMs may potentially reshape scientific communication. ChatGPT's outputs showed higher informational de...

We need to stop treating our data like something to be stored and more like a mission critical supply lines. Andrew Schoka spent his military career in offensive cyber, including stints in the Joint Operations Command and Cyber Command. Now he's building Hardshell to solve a problem most organizations don't even realize they have yet. Here's the thing: AI is phenomenal at solving problems in place...

Are we sleepwalking into a security crisis that makes ransomware look quaint? Nuclear security expert Audrey Crowe joins the show to talk about the convergence of grey zone warfare, critical infrastructure, and nuclear security. This isn't your parents’ Cold War nuclear threat, this is about adversaries who've figured out they don't need missiles when they can manipulate our infrastructure through...