The Brave Technologist

Andy McMahon, Principal AI Engineer at Barclays, shares how a 200-year-old bank is deploying autonomous agents inside one of the most heavily regulated environments in the world. He argues that observability and kill switches matter more than raw capability, and that the real test isn't whether the AI works in a demo, but whether it can fail safely in production. Key Takeaways How a major bank is...

Fred Gifford, Strategy Lead and Sr. Product Manager at Sony AI, shares how his team is building knowledge graphs from academic literature to predict new biomedical relationships and accelerate drug discovery. He explains why Sony AI publishes so much of its research openly, what he got wrong about AI therapy when writing his novel and why he believes accountability for AI's ethical failures still...

Riccardo Arnaldi, Agentic AI Product Manager at Pandora, shares what it actually looks like to build and scale a brand-facing LLM shopping agent live with millions of customers. He explains why too much autonomy is a liability, how a deterministic routing layer keeps the AI from going off-script, and why traditional QA teams had to rebuild their processes from scratch. He also breaks down a real c...

 Zach Shefska, Founder & CEO of CarEdge, shares how he and his father (a 43-year auto industry veteran) turned a broken, opaque car buying process into a transparency-first business powered by AI agents that now negotiate deals on behalf of consumers. He also explains how data collected from over 100,000 agent driven negotiations is reshaping what buyers can know before they even walk into a deale...

Harry Halpin, CEO of Nym Technologies, shares why the surveillance Web is more dangerous than most people realize, and why most privacy tools aren't enough. He explains how traditional VPNs still leave you exposed, why metadata is more revealing than the content of your messages, and how Nym's decentralized mixnet offers unique protection. Key Takeaways: Why encrypting your data isn't enough and w...

Balazs Nemethi, CEO of the Agent Community, explains why AI agents need identities and why the window to decide who controls that infrastructure is closing fast. He breaks down how a community-governed effort is working to secure .agent as a top-level domain, and why domains are a smart foundation for agent identity. Key Takeaways: Why agents need identities, including personalized names and domai...

João Moura, CEO of crewAI, shares why single AI agents fall short and what changes when you give them a crew. He explains how multi-agent systems are already running inside Fortune 500 companies; why accountability and human oversight still matter as agents grow more autonomous; and what it looks like when an AI agent negotiates on your behalf (and wins). Key Takeaways: How multi-agent systems are...

Sam Lyman, Head of Research at the Bitcoin Policy Institute and former Senior Advisor and Chief Speechwriter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, shares what it looks like inside the U.S. Treasury when Bitcoin, stablecoins, and AI are being treated as strategic national assets. He explains why the current administration's approach marks a fundamental break from the Gensler era; how freedom tech is...

Ken Liu (Computer Science PhD at the Stanford AI Lab) and Erik Chi (CS PhD at UMich) are the Creators of the Open Anonymity Project, which lets people prove things about themselves online without revealing their identity. In this episode we explore what it means for AI systems to "know" you; why today's so-called privacy modes fall short; and how the next generation of AI systems could be built wi...

Ed Gaudet, CEO and founder of Censinet, shares how cybersecurity threats have evolved from data breaches to full-scale operational disruptions, and why modern resilience strategies must go beyond prevention. He explains why ransomware has fundamentally changed the stakes, how AI is rapidly expanding the attack surface, and what organizations are getting wrong about risk. He also highlights the hum...

Jourdan Hathaway, Chief Business Officer at General Assembly, discusses her experience integrating AI agents into her admissions team, including stories of real-world complexities, edge cases, and unexpected messiness of the implementation. We also explore the evolving AI skills gap and how companies have now shifted from expecting basic AI literacy to prioritizing skills like AI workflow design,...

Andy Maskin, Director of AI Creative Technology at Publicis Sapient, explains why brands are shifting from SEO to "AI visibility," where success is no longer about ranking on search engines but instead showing up in tools like ChatGPT. He also explains how agentic AI fails without clean data and modernized systems. How MCP (Model Context Protocol) enables AI agents to communicate and coordinate ta...

Dr. Maha Hosain Aziz, an international relations professor at NYU and Global Foresight Advisor at the World Economic Forum, highlights the often-overlooked societal, economic, and psychological impacts of AI adoption. She explores the growing anxiety around job displacement and the emerging "occupational identity crisis" occurring as AI reshapes industries and how people define purpose and stabili...

Or Eshed, co-founder and CEO of LayerX Security, shares why the browser has become the most critical (and overlooked) security layer in modern work. He explains key browser risk areas including phishing, cookie theft, compromised extensions, and data exfiltration, and how AI now increases the urgency around these risks. He also provides examples of real-world breaches that are reshaping how organi...

Joseph Ng, Chief Strategy Officer of GeneGenius and author of The Hybrid Mind, discusses how institutions must redesign decision architectures as humans and intelligent machines operate together. His vision for the "hybrid mind" is one with supervised intelligence where humans set mission, values, and boundaries while AI participates in operational decisions. He also discusses his work at GeneGeni...

Anna Yuan, founder of Perena and former head of stablecoins at the Solana Foundation, discusses how Perena is designing new on-chain financial products, including USD*, a liquid yield token that earns continuously while remaining spendable. We also explore why trust remains one of crypto's biggest challenges, how decentralized and traditional finance are converging, and what role AI agents may pla...

 Elise Neel, Global Head of Strategy & Strategic Partnerships at Panasonic Go, shares lessons from leading innovation within large legacy companies and the cultural challenges of driving transformation. She explains how organizations should rethink AI governance and talent, and why roles like the CHRO may become central in the AI era. Key Takeaways: Why leaders must move from simply using AI tools...

Bri Teresi, host of ' Free The Money ' and a prominent crypto influencer, shares the biggest misunderstandings about cryptocurrency in mainstream media and consumer behavior, along with the biggest challenges faced by content creators today. Topics include: the risks of platform dependency and censorship; the importance of self-custody and owning one's own crypto keys; financial sovereignty and fr...

Maggie Love, Founder and CEO of SheFi , discusses the critical role of the community in managing decentralized spaces and making crypto accessible and relatable for all. She delves into the importance of building technology that works for everyone (not just early insiders), and details the urgent mission she's on with SheFi: to ensure women aren't left behind in the next era of the Internet. Key T...

Manoj Saxena, Founder and CEO of Trustwise, explains why agentic AI represents a major shift inside organizations: from AI as a tool to AI as an active participant. He addresses the operational challenges that organizations face today, including AI-to-AI interactions, opaque decision-making, regulatory pressure, and the growing need for continuous oversight as AI systems gain autonomy. Key Takeawa...

Kapil Gupta, former Enterprise AI Product & Platform Leader at Cigna, shares insights from more than two decades of turning cutting-edge technology into enterprise-ready products. He unpacks the difference between generative AI and agentic AI, and why governance, user choice, and thoughtful design matter just as much as innovation. Learn how enterprises can scale responsibly and why the best techn...

Chastity Murphy, former Senior Advisor at the U.S.Treasury and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, shares her experiences working on digital money legislation, including the Stable Act. She reflects on the transition from cash to digital payments along with her current research developing offline, anonymous public interest payment systems. Key Takeaways: How early stablecoin...

Evin McMullen, co-founder and CEO of Billions Network, explores how identity for agents is going to unlock the next era of the Internet. She shares outcomes from collaborations with regulatory bodies and major companies (like HSBC and TikTok), along with their use of Zero Knowledge Proofs in proving you're human without giving up privacy. Key Takeaways: How Billions Network plans to save the Inter...

Charles Hoskinson is a co-founder of Ethereum, and the CEO and Founder of Input | Output (the company behind the Cardano blockchain). In this episode he shares his journey into the world of cryptocurrencies and his early influences. He also explains the conception and operational details of the Midnight Network (a privacy-focused, layer-two solution), and discusses his ambitious efforts in anti-ag...

Dave Chatterjee, Adjunct Associate Professor at Duke University,  explains how scale, speed, and surprise are reshaping cyber threats and why many organizations remain dangerously reactive. He shares his Commitment-Preparedness-Discipline (CPD) framework along with ways that leaders can move beyond checkbox compliance by treating cybersecurity as a strategic business priority. Key Takeaways:  The...