x

75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

PODCAST

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks

BKBT Productions

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks is the tech podcast about humans. Hosted by George K and George A, this podcast examines AI, infrastructure, technology adoption, and the broader implications of tech developments through both guest interviews and news commentary.Our guests bring honest perspectives on what"s working, what"s broken, and new ways to examine the roles and impacts of technology in our lives.We challenge conventional tech industry narratives and dig into real-world consequences over hype

technology

All Episodes

40:41

AI Security Is Just as vague as "Cloud Security", but...

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks ·

2026/04/06

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 DevOps engineer at a 900-person company arguing they should be able to send commands via a remote control

en

40:48

The lawsuit that could reclaim the internet, and the...

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks ·

2026/03/30

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 institutions are writing for us, and most of us aren't stopping to ask who's holding the pen.Meta and YouTube just

en

47:14

Deep Learning vs Intuition: AI models and venture...

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks ·

2026/03/23

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 on to something.George K. and George A. wanted to know, if machines make the decision, what exactly is

en

38:10

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

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks ·

2026/03/16

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

en

48:55

Why cybersecurity is broken and time is the enemy

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks ·

2026/03/09

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 existed, and has watched the attack surface evolve from nation-state espionage into something that hits

en

40:33

What leaders get wrong about AI rollouts and employee...

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks ·

2026/03/02

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 turn into guesswork.High usage doesn't mean successful adoption. It might just mean fear-driven

en

35:57

The art and Science of grit, ambition, & betting on...

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks ·

2026/02/23

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 taking on teaching himself APIs, webhooks integrations, and enough failures to make most people quit. He's

en

41:47

Finding meaning and community in tech-fueled hustle...

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks ·

2026/02/16

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

en

38:01

AI market jitters, post-truth reality, data, and...

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks ·

2026/02/09

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 incomplete, and questioning what happens when billions flow into overwhelming into transformer model

en

41:02

AI vs Human writing and what it means for our thinking

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks ·

2026/02/02

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-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

en

39:51

Protecting data as the critical supply line for AI...

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks ·

2026/01/26

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 places where data is incredibly sensitive. Healthcare, financial services, defense—these are exactly where AI

en

35:54

Securing nuclear energy systems on all fronts with...

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks ·

2026/01/19

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 cyber operations, disinformation, and coercion that lives in the murky space below armed conflict.While

en

35:44

Why future applications of AI will need higher...

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks ·

2026/01/12

What if the real AI revolution isn't about better models—but about unlocking the data we've been sitting on?Mike McLaughlin—cybersecurity and data privacy attorney, former US Cyber Command—joins us to discuss something most people miss in the AI conversation: we're building the infrastructure for a completely new asset class.The conversation moves past today's headlines and LLM limitations into what becomes possible when we solve the data access problem:Research acceleration at unprecedented scale

en

34:46

Translating security and tech concepts for the...

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks ·

2026/01/05

When did we stop asking how things work? Rich Greene joins the show to talk about his new podcast Plaintext with Rich, and we get into something that matters more than any tech: curiosity itself.Rich spent 20 years in Special Operations before becoming a SANS instructor. Now he's taking complex tech topics and breaking them down for people who need to understand, not just use.There's a tension building between the tech sector and society at large. AI promises to make everything easier, and maybe it

en

2:06

Stay sharp, stay real: Wishing you a kickass 2026!

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks ·

2025/12/29

Wishing you a very happy and prosperous New Year!We'll be back in 2026!

en

7:19

Happy Holidays! Our listeners are the greatest gift!

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks ·

2025/12/22

It's a holiday week, so turn off this podcast!But if you'd like to tune in all the same, then we're here to say think you. You, the listeners, have been the greatest gift this season as we've made this turn in our format from security to looking more broadly at the human impact of technology.You've stuck with us. We've gotten a lot of great messages of support, and we love the direction of the show and love that you love it!Happy holidays from BKBT! May your time off be peaceful and energizing for

en

43:39

Best Of: Confronting big tech's abuses as a question...

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks ·

2025/12/15

We're off this week, deep into planning and scheduling for next year. Please enjoy this Best Of episode, originally released in October.Hannah Storey, Advocacy and Policy Advisor at Amnesty International, joins the show to talk about her new brief that reframes Big Tech monopolies as a human rights crisis, not just a market competition problem.This isn't about consumer choice or antitrust law. It's about how concentrated market power violates fundamental rights—freedom of expression, privacy, and

en

33:28

Looking ahead to the next year in tech and human impact

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks ·

2025/12/08

2025 was hella weird. The AI revolution is here whether we asked for it or not. This week, George K and George A reflect on the year and what it means for 2026.At AWS re:Invent, George A watched a machine create a custom fragrance and marketing campaign in real-time from a voice prompt. What does that portend for product prototyping, and scaled manufacturing?Could voice and natural language finally replacing typing as the primary interface? We're watching the biggest shift in human-computer

en

43:03

Why leveling up is about fixing your own "broken...

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks ·

2025/12/01

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 internal programming.From advising deputy ministers to coaching professionals across sectors, she's seen what happens when high-performers hit the wall between knowing what to do and actually being able to execute.This conversation cuts through the

en

40:45

How Expertise becomes a blind spot in technology...

Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks ·

2025/11/24

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

en

181 results

Similar Podcasts

Lead With AI

Tamara Nall

Linux in the Ham Shack

Black Sparrow Media

Data Engineering Podcast

Tobias Macey

Eye On A.I.

Craig S. Smith

Reflections

Livewire Labs