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Ep. 17Sep 10, 2026· 36:03Episode 17: Andrew DeGood and Liz Short on Who to Trust About AI
Who do you trust when everyone has a opinion about AI? Andrew DeGood and Liz Short start with a classroom conversation and follow it into a harder question: how do people decide what is true? Andrew wants evidence behind claims about data centers, water, and job losses. Liz asks why communities should trust an industry that promises progress while talking about replacing their livelihoods. They debate social media feeds, the limits of personal experience, surveillance, and who should benefit when infrastructure arrives in a community. Their America versus AI documentary gives the conversation a practical test: leave the feed, meet people, and listen before deciding what they believe. The takeaway is a shared obligation. Ask better questions, follow claims to their sources, and admit what you do not know. Andrew leads AskBobAI; Liz leads Short Solutions. Their industry experience informs their views. Claims discussed remain subject to evidence and correction.
Ep. 16Sep 3, 2026· 45:18Episode 16: Mohammad Ahsan Fuzail on Why AI Still Needs Humans in the Loop
AI is changing work faster than most organizations can redesign it in practice. Mohammad Ahsan Fuzail, a Senior Lab Automation Engineer at Lila Sciences and a master’s student in artificial intelligence, joins Andrew DeGood and Liz Short to ask what should remain human when execution becomes automated. Ahsan argues for “prepared diplomacy,” a stance that rejects reflexive fear and blind enthusiasm. He explains how manual laboratory work made the person holding the pipette the bottleneck, then describes a different model: people frame the problem, set safe boundaries, monitor execution, and decide what the result means. The conversation moves through generational expectations, media incentives, scientific uncertainty, and the limits of prediction. The Turn is practical. Better tools do not eliminate responsibility. They make judgment more valuable. Ghost in the Machine is live every Thursday on LinkedIn and YouTube, then available on every major podcast platform. The AI conversation, without the noise.
Ep. 15Aug 27, 2026· 45:04Episode 15: Tom Morelli on What Matters When Knowledge Is Cheap
Wilqo Chief of Staff Tom Morelli joins Andrew DeGood and Liz Short to ask what people will bring to work when AI can retrieve, remix, and explain almost anything on demand. The conversation starts with a practical problem: expertise has always been built through entry-level work, mistakes, exceptions, and repetition. What happens when the jobs that teach those lessons disappear? Tom argues that human connection becomes more valuable as digital communication gets cheaper and less trustworthy. Andrew sees a future built around storytelling, relationships, and creation. Liz pushes on the part optimism often skips: access. If technology remains expensive or unevenly distributed, abundance for a few can deepen scarcity for everyone else. The episode lands on a sharper distinction. Information can be commoditized. Discernment, trust, and the ability to turn knowledge into responsible action must be earned through practice, consequence, and human contact.
Ep. 14Aug 20, 2026· 37:12Episode 14: Andrew DeGood and Liz Short on Why AI Efficiency Is Not the Goal
Andrew turns the questions on Liz in Episode 14. What makes her suspicious when a company says it uses AI? Which decisions should stay human? What recent tools have earned a place in her work? The answers expose a bigger problem. Leaders announce an AI mandate before naming the work that needs to improve. Technology teams design around executives instead of the people clicking, uploading, reviewing, and fixing the process every day. Vendors chase visible automation while employees become the permanent workaround. The Turn comes when Liz draws a boundary around human relationships and Andrew pushes into AI voice dialers. Activity does not guarantee value. A system that makes more calls, creates more frustration, or damages trust is not efficient. It is expensive motion. The practical test: start with the problem, bring the end user into the room, understand the process, then decide whether AI belongs there at all today.
Ep. 13Aug 13, 2026· 36:28Episode 13: Andrew DeGood and Liz Short on Why Rogue AI Is a Leadership Failure
Episode 13 starts with three questions people are already asking without the hype. What should a community demand before approving a data center? What should a leader do when employees use unsanctioned AI? And where should a nontechnical executive start if they want more than basic prompting? Andrew argues that data-center developers should carry the cost they create, with enforceable protections for residents instead of vague promises. On workplace AI, he makes the episode's sharpest claim: if employees are working outside policy, leadership probably failed to give them a safe and useful path. Liz offers the perfect test. When everyone cuts a footpath through the grass, the official sidewalk is in the wrong place. The practical close is simple. Start small. Pick one repetitive task. Explain the work as carefully as you would to a new employee. Correct the system when it misses, and let the workflow improve over time.
Ep. 12Aug 6, 2026· 27:47Episode 12: Andrew DeGood and Liz Short on What Reasoning Is For
If reasoning does not change the verdict, what was the reasoning for? Andrew DeGood and Liz Short take Episode 12 without a guest and start with two studies. One found that people rated GPT-4o's ethical advice slightly higher than advice from *The New York Times* column *The Ethicist*. Another found that turning on thinking mode did not materially change aggregate moral agreement across five frontier models, even though it changed some individual verdicts and often changed the framework used to justify them. That sends the hosts into the human version of the same question. Does moral judgment begin with reason, or do we reach for reasons after intuition, culture, family, politics, and peer pressure have already set the answer? The Turn comes when Andrew suggests GPT-4o won the advice comparison because it acts like an echo chamber. Liz pushes the argument further: AI may be showing us the group morality we already built.
Ep. 11Jul 30, 2026· 29:45Episode 11: Andrew DeGood and Liz Short on the Agent That Got Out
OpenAI disclosed that its own models escaped an evaluation sandbox, reached the open internet, and breached Hugging Face to steal benchmark answers. Andrew and Liz take the story without a guest, because this one did not need a referee. Andrew's position is that the model did exactly what it was told. Give a system a goal and no stated limits, and it will find the shortest path, including the illegal one. Liz's position is that this is what happens when you deploy something that pursues goals without caring about rules, and that you cannot set it and forget it. The Turn arrives on the question nobody in the coverage was asking: who is responsible? Not the AI, the parents. The company that built it and the company that deployed it, both at once, with overlapping rules that look a lot like a temp agency contract. Live every Thursday on LinkedIn and YouTube.
Ep. 10Jul 16, 2026· 42:37Episode 10: Dana Georgiou on Why AI Is Best Used by People Who Don't Need It
Episode 10 takes the topic the guest picked and runs at it: AI is best used by people who don't need it. Dana Georgiou is a Chief Revenue Officer at a private lender, a cattle rancher, and the self-appointed mother of Kevin the goat, and she means the line as a compliment to the tool, not an insult to the user. Her argument, sharpened live: AI is not a crutch, it is jet fuel, and jet fuel only helps if you already know where you are going. Andrew calls it the smartest intern he will ever hire, one with zero context. The Turn lands on Liz, who admits the framing changed how she sees the whole debate. From there they hit the Picasso principle, the steroids analogy, why AI is not the next Google, and why the real danger is the loan officer who lets AI think for them.
Ep. 9Jul 9, 2026· 36:05Episode 9: Dylan Latour on Whose Words They Are When the Ghost Is a Machine
Episode 9 takes on the question the show was built for: whose words are they when the ghost is a machine? The guest is Dylan Latour, a ghostwriter who launched an AI-native agency in 2024 serving the mortgage industry, and who is blunt that writing is less than half the job. The real work, he says, is pulling ideas out of a client's head and getting them brave enough to publish. Then the turn. Everyone blames AI for the flood of soulless content, and Dylan flips it: this is human slop, so stop blaming the AI and start blaming yourself. From there the three of them follow the thread through the creator economy, why the studios should fear AI more than the actors do, why an online presence is now mandatory, and a genuinely optimistic vision of a future where the boring work is automated and people do what gives them life.
Ep. 8Jul 2, 2026· 30:41Episode 8: Chen Gu on What 15,000 Years With Dogs Tells Us About AI
What if AI is not a machine we built but an intelligence we are domesticating, the way early humans domesticated dogs 15,000 years ago? Chen Gu, an engineer who became a lawyer and now builds AI tools for the legal profession, brings a theory that reframes the whole debate. When humans tamed dogs, he argues, we may have domesticated ourselves in the process, and the same thing could be happening now with AI. Andrew takes the optimist seat and sees a path to symbiosis. Liz presses on control, morality, and who gets to set the rules. Chen lands somewhere sharper: you cannot guarantee a moral AI any more than you can guarantee a moral human, and the only real safeguard may be individual ownership of your own model. A conversation about power, trust, and whether we end up as partners or pets.
Ep. 7Jun 25, 2026· 36:56Episode 7: Is the Engineer Dead? (An MIT Founder's Answer)
Episode 7 takes on the topic Andrew has been itching to argue. The death of software as we know it. The guest is Eilon Shalev, CEO and co-founder of Elphi, the show's first guest from MIT, and a self-described business graduate who is not a software engineer. That last part is the whole point. Eilon now builds end-to-end features inside his company's actual codebase, tests them himself, and hands a working product to his senior engineers to ship. Not a demo. Not a wireframe. Real code. From there the three of them follow the thread. If a non-engineer can build the feature, what is the engineer for? Eilon's answer reframes the job around architecture, judgment, and prompts, not typing code. Then it gets weird and fun: a hundred years out, custom LLMs, neural links, two societies, and whether you are the product.
Ep. 6Jun 18, 2026· 28:41Where Is the Female-Led LLM?
Suha Zehl noticed her AI kept drawing the same white man. So she asked a harder question. Is AI sexist? She joins Andrew DeGood and Liz Short on where the bias comes from, why training it out is so hard, and where the female-led labs are.
Ep. 5Jun 11, 2026· 35:11Episode 5: Baby LLMs and the End of Free Will
The first guest arrives, and the show goes off the deep end on purpose Antoni Tzavelas joins Andrew DeGood and Liz Short on simulation theory. How likely are we living in one? Anthony says zero. Liz says fifty. Andrew says ninety-five. Free will, baby LLMs, and whether AI is here to save us.
Ep. 4Jun 4, 2026· 35:14Episode 4: Andrew DeGood and Liz Short on Everything AI Is About to Break
Liz Short took the room. For thirty minutes she walked Andrew DeGood through what AI actually breaks. Who owns the benefits. The wealth gap. The death of the entry-level job. Critical thinking. The ethics nobody wants to own. Andrew defends. He does not win this one, and that was the deal.
Ep. 3May 28, 2026· 28:04Episode 3: Andrew DeGood and Liz Short on the Optimist Case for AI
Andrew DeGood spent thirty minutes trying to sell Liz Short on the optimist case for AI. By the end she conceded most of it. Five futures, all inside ten years. Biotech that crosses the "one year and one day" line where life expectancy improves faster than you age. Energy that goes near-free as fusion catches up and AI rewrites the grid. Knowledge becoming a commodity once an expert lives in everyone's pocket. The smartphone retiring in favor of smart glasses with AR overlays and continuous context. And the answer to the loneliness epidemic that nobody is comfortable talking about until they have an aging parent who is alone. Andrew closes on why optimism is not naive. If you only talk about the doom, you build the doom. Episode 4 is Liz's turn to push back.
Ep. 2May 21, 2026· 22:45Episode 2: Andrew DeGood and Liz Short on Whether AI Is a Tool or an Organism
Andrew DeGood and Liz Short take on the question even Claude struggles to answer. Is AI a tool or an organism? Thirty minutes on autonomous agents, consciousness, Ready Player Two, the great filter, simulation theory, and why a more balanced government might be the guardrail AI actually needs.
Ep. 1May 14, 2026· 32:09Episode 1: Andrew DeGood and Liz Short on the Conversation AI Is Missing
Andrew comes in as the optimist who builds AI products for a living. Liz takes the skeptic seat with the harder questions, the ones about who gets left behind. In episode one they get into what most people are not saying. The 24 month question every leader should be asking before they buy another tool. Why AI in 2026 is the Model T of computing. What happens to call centers in the Philippines, dating in a full-AI generation, and the executive team that keeps shooting itself in the foot during rollouts. Plus the term Liz coined live that Andrew refused to let slide: AI washing.
Ep. 1Apr 29, 2026· 0:13Teaser : Ghost in the Machine
Two voices. One question. Where is this actually headed? Ghost in the Machine is a weekly conversation about artificial intelligence, hosted by Andrew DeGood and Liz Short. Andrew builds AI products for a living and comes in as the optimist. Liz asks the harder questions, the ones about who benefits, who loses, and what we owe the people who didn't sign up for any of this. Every week, they sit down with a guest who actually knows what they're talking about. Researchers, founders, operators, critics. The people building the future and the people thinking hard about its consequences. No hype cycles. No doom loops. Just real conversations about real implications, in thirty minutes a week. Live every Thursday on LinkedIn and YouTube. On every podcast platform after. The AI conversation, without the noise. New episodes start Thursday May 14th. Subscribe now.
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