Best Of: What are we building? And the future of human flourishing...

Best Of: What are we building? And the future of human flourishing...

Author: BKBT Productions March 16, 2026 Duration: 38:10
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 built, deployed, and sold — and what it's actually doing to people. This week's episode is our attempt to pull that thread. * Mike McLaughlin — The AI ecosystem is running on bad data, has no real mechanism to fix it, and the next wave of cybercrime will target the training data itself. * Kimberly Becker, PhD — AI-generated text is structurally overconfident, and a corpus linguist traced that pattern all the way back to how decontextualized certainty language helped fuel the opioid epidemic. * Dr. Marissa Alert — What organizations call employee resistance to AI is, clinically, a fear and identity threat response that most rollouts are spending millions to ignore. * Tychon Carter — Winning is often where the real crisis begins, and the goalpost never stops moving until you decide your value isn't determined by your output. * The "Bad Hombre" — A solopreneur who built a business on public failure makes the case that the willingness to fail more than most people even try is the only real competitive advantage. Every one of these conversations eventually arrives at the same place: the distance between what we're building and who it's landing on.

There’s a lot of noise in the world of technology talk, but Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks cuts through it with a focus on the people behind the products and the societal currents shaping our digital landscape. Hosts George K and George A steer conversations that are less about specs and hype, and more about real-world consequences. You’ll hear them dig into topics like the messy rollout of new AI tools, the often-invisible backbone of digital infrastructure, and why communities adopt or reject certain technologies. This podcast regularly features guests from various fields who offer unvarnished opinions on what’s genuinely functional and what’s fundamentally flawed in our tech-saturated lives. The discussions move beyond simple commentary to challenge the standard narratives promoted by the tech industry, examining the cultural and social ripples of every new development. It’s a show for anyone who feels that technology coverage often misses the human element-the frustrations, the adaptations, and the ethical dilemmas. Tune in for a grounded, critical, and consistently engaging dialogue that connects the dots between code and culture. This production from BKBT Productions lives up to its name, getting down to the brass tacks of how technology is built and used, with a bare-knuckle honesty that’s increasingly rare.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 50

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks
Podcast Episodes
BEST OF: Can Ethical AI Democratize Therapy and Higher Quality Care? [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 57:03
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 […
BEST OF: How expertise becomes a blind spot in technology development [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 40:45
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…
BEST OF: Finding Meaning and community in tech-fueled hustle culture [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 41:47
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 rea…
BEST OF:  AI vs Human writing, and what it means for our thinking [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 41:02
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-st…
BEST OF: The art and science of grit, ambition, & betting on yourself [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 35:57
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, o…
Season 4 Finale...and special announcement! [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 6:20
That's a wrap on season 4! What's coming next isn't just another season. Fifty-two episodes took the show past its cybersecurity origins into conversations with a corpus linguist, a nuclear security expert, an Amnesty In…
Designing Human-AI collaboration to make people heroes not cogs [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 47:45
No one gets fired for doing what McKinsey says. That's not a joke, it's the actual product being sold in half of enterprise consulting: credibility a board can point to when a decision goes wrong. This week, Tim Lidman,…
Deep learning vs Intuition: AI models for VC investing [Replay] [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 47:14
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 [https://ww…