The podcast
Whatever else we are, human beings are the ones who understand, judge, choose and act. Machines can now do a lot of that for us. This show asks what that does to us, and whether the same machines could be built and used to make us more capable of thinking for ourselves rather than less.
Each episode is one long conversation with one guest, recorded remotely and running an hour to an hour and a half. It moves through three parts. First, what the guest has found or built. Then I bring it down to a specific room where it matters — a QC lab, a plant floor, a classroom, a clinic — and sometimes push back. Finally, one thing a listener could do differently tomorrow.
Every episode lands somewhere concrete. If you finish one and cannot name what you would change, we did it wrong.
Two kinds of guest, on purpose. The researchers who study what happens to people when thinking is handed to a machine — cognitive offloading, deskilling, judgment, autonomy — give the show its spine. The people living it at work give it its ground: quality directors, plant managers, validation leads, clinicians, and the manager who noticed that her analysts had stopped catching errors. Roughly half and half.
The question underneath it all is the one in Cognitive Sovereignty in the AI Age: how do you keep thinking for yourself when a machine will happily do it for you? The show asks it out loud, of people who have spent years on it.
I'm Jared Clark. I have spent my career inside heavily regulated industries, where the question of who actually decided is not philosophical — it is what an inspector asks when a record goes wrong. Now that machines draft the records, that question has a new edge, and I think it belongs in a much wider conversation. More about me is here and at jaredclark.me.
“This show is made possible by Evata Consulting Group, which builds and deploys AI for small and mid-sized businesses. Evata pays for the show and does not pick the arguments.” That sentence is said once near the top of every episode, and never a second time.
Nobody is sold anything on air. Guests are not paid and do not pay to appear.
Everything you need to know — how it works, how long it takes, what you will need and what you agree to — is on one page for guests. If you would like to suggest someone, write to [email protected].