Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks

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 [https://www.wavelife.io/]. 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 [https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/a-theory-of-zoom-fatigue] Kashmir Hill's detailed reporting on Adam Raine's death and the part played by ChatGPT  [https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/technology/chatgpt-openai-suicide.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nU8.DE_a.Ur81NxfjZuNn&smid=url-share] (Warning: detailed discussion of suicide) Colorado parents sue Character AI over daughter's suicide [https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/lawsuit-characterai-chatbot-colorado-suicide/] Sewell Setzer's parents sue Character AI [https://apnews.com/article/chatbot-ai-lawsuit-suicide-teen-artificial-intelligence-9d48adc572100822fdbc3c90d1456bd0] Deloitte to pay money back after caught using AI in $440,000 report [https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/06/deloitte-to-pay-money-back-to-albanese-government-after-using-ai-in-440000-report] Original Air Date: October 13, 2025

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? Original air date: Nov 24, 2025

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 through his journey from urban planner to reality TV winner to performance coach, and the hard lessons about self-worth that came with it. We explore the masks we wear in professional spaces, the cost of performative confidence we don't feel, and why so many high-achievers feel stuck despite checking all the boxes. Tychon's "Start With You" framework breaks down three critical areas most of us keep out of balance: * Power (accessing your authentic self) * Play (creating and enjoying life beyond work) * and Peace (finding internal harmony) The conversation gets real about mental health, the isolation trap of self-reliance, and why giving to community might be more rewarding than the endless pursuit of more. Mentioned Johann Hari, Lost Connections [https://bookshop.org/p/books/lost-connections-johann-hari/33248fe6585d4c88?ean=9781632868312&next=t&next=t&affiliate=12476] On prescribing community work to treat depression [https://www.lucksyardclinic.com/lost-connections-and-social-prescribing-in-nature/] More on Adam Grant and Jane Dutton's study of contribution journals [https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/star-psychologist-adam-grant-for-motivation-and-happiness-a-contribution-journal-beats-a-gratitude-journal/91193347] Original air date: Feb 16, 2026

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 density, formulaic patterns, and a lack of hedging, the linguistic uncertainty that marks careful scientific thinking. The AI doesn't say "may suggest" or "could indicate." It asserts. Confidently. Even when it's wrong. This matters beyond academia. When we optimize for speed and polish over depth and precision, we're changing how we write, and therefore changing how we think. We're externalizing cognition to systems trained on Reddit threads and blog posts, then wondering why the output feels sterile and an inch-deep. Becker's work raises uncomfortable questions: * Are we training ourselves to accept confident wrongness? * What happens when a generation of researchers doesn't communicate uncertainty? * And fundamentally, can a predictive text model ever replicate the pause, the breath, the examination that Neil Postman argued was essential to meaningful thought? This episode is about whether we're paying attention to what we're losing while we chase efficiency. Mentioned: * James Marriott, Dawn of the Post-Literate Society [https://jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1] * Neil Postman's seminal work, Amusing Ourselves to Death [https://bookshop.org/p/books/amusing-ourselves-to-death-public-discourse-in-the-age-of-show-business-neil-postman/ebe4569d9072fac7] * Derek Thompson, The End of Thinking [https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-end-of-thinking] *  Linguistics Relevance Theory [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance_theory] Original air date: Feb 2, 2026

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. It started when 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 APIs learned on someone else's Amex, webhook integrations figured out under pressure, and enough failures to make most people quit. He's now responsible for 40% of some dealerships' bottom lines, working remotely from Ottawa, heading to Costa Rica. We talked about why people don't take that first step. Chris's take is it's mostly the room you're in. When you move somewhere nobody knows you, the risk calculus changes. The voices telling you you're going to look stupid usually belong to people who never left. We also got into social media — the throttled notification drip sequences designed to keep you coming back, the rage bait economy, the positive reinforcement loop that rewards the most outrageous behavior. His advice was simple: put your phone down and take life at face value. Originally aired: Feb 23, 2026