Thinking Straight

Jason Griffing
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Business

Thinking Straight is a podcast for business leaders, product builders, and entrepreneurs who want to think rigorously about AI. Featuring interviews with founders, builders, investors, and operators, the show brings an honest perspective to an AI narrative that is too often dominated by either breathless optimism or doomsday prophecies. We cover: The tools, models, and breakthroughs actually worth your attention, what AI adoption actually looks like inside real organizations, and the hard questions facing our society as we navigate this transformation. Examining the technology from multiple angles, the show aims to help listeners build a clear and grounded understanding of AI and its implications.

Episodes

  1. 2d ago

    Halting the Race to Superintelligence, with Kevin Lotto

    Kevin Lotto is a volunteer with the Torchbearer Community, a regular AI safety speaker with the AI Safety Awareness Project in Wisconsin, and co-founder of the Control AI Wisconsin Action Group. He is also a daily power user of the same AI tools he advocates regulating, which puts him squarely in the tension this show is built around. We start with what people get wrong about AI company economics, and why the profitability debate may be a sideshow to a bigger race. From there we get into why modern LLMs are grown more than engineered, the Bitter Lesson, and the difference between AGI and ASI. We take on the “just build an off switch” argument, the Moloch trap that pushes businesses to adopt AI faster than they’d like, and the multitasking trap of running too many agents at once. We also cover how business leaders can roll out AI with guardrails, how listeners can engage their lawmakers, the argument that China makes slowing down impossible, and the case for narrow AI as an alternative to the race toward general intelligence. We close on whether there’s cause for optimism, and on a question the show keeps coming back to: AI isn’t going away, so how do we steer it, and is the real problem less the technology itself than the speed of the race around it? 🔗 Episode Links: - Kevin Lotto on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinlotto/ - Torchbearer Community: https://www.torchbearer.community/ - ControlAI: https://controlai.com - The Bitter Lesson (Richard Sutton): http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html - Meditations on Moloch (Scott Alexander): https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ - Max Tegmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Tegmark - Instadocs: AI Gone Wild (Netflix): https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/instadocs-ai-gone-wild-release-date-news

  2. Oct 17

    Neoclouds and the Future of AI Infrastructure, with Mike Maniscalco

    Mike Maniscalco is the CEO of QumulusAI, an AI infrastructure provider built to deliver high-performance computing for AI natives and inference providers. Mike is a serial entrepreneur with multiple successful exits who previously served as CTO of Applied Digital. Most of us experience AI as software, but every prompt runs on chips, power, cooling, and buildings that take years to bring online. Mike spends his days on that physical layer, and this conversation provides a fascinating glimpse into the infrastructure that makes it all possible. We start with what a neocloud is and why the ChatGPT moment opened the door for a new kind of cloud provider to compete with traditional hyperscalers like AWS, Google, and Microsoft. From there, we unpack the challenges around scaling AI infra, how demand for compute keeps outrunning the data center capacity needed to serve it, and how advancements in chips and cooling technology are reshaping the way data centers are built. That leads to what all of this means for businesses building with AI: why more companies are moving to open source models and inference providers as their AI spend grows, how routing each task to the right model can cut costs without sacrificing quality, and why trust and data isolation matter when deciding where your workloads run. Finally, we zoom out to get Mike's take on the broad implications of AI on topics like job displacement, healthcare, and the future of work, and why he remains an optimist about where it's all headed. 🔗 Episode Links: - Mike Maniscalco on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelmaniscalco/ - QumulusAI: https://www.qumulusai.com - QumulusAI on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/qumulusai - TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers: https://www.top500.org 🔖 Chapters: 00:00 Intro 03:26 What are Neoclouds? 07:08 Comparing Neo Clouds with Traditional Cloud Providers 09:52 The Intersection of AI and Cryptocurrency Infrastructure 12:24 QumulusAI Overview 15:52 The Mixture of Experts: Enhancing AI Models 22:48 The Supply-Demand Imbalance 26:45 Who are Neocloud Customers? 29:15 Business implications of open source and self-hosting 36:49 Trust and Flexibility in AI Solutions 39:06 Challenges in the Neo Cloud Space 41:54 Innovations in Data Center Cooling Technologies 48:52 The Future Impact of AI on Society 57:45 AI's Impact on Healthcare and Quality of Life 01:02:56 Wrapping Up

  3. Sep 30

    Hard-Earned Lessons from AI's Front Lines, with Melissa Tondi

    Melissa Tondi is an agentic AI and quality engineering leader with deep experience in process engineering across the software development lifecycle. She has deployed AI at scale inside real organizations, and in this conversation we dig into the traps companies fall into and how leaders can use proven change management to avoid them. We start with why AI is an operating model change, not a tool rollout, and why buying licenses is the easy part. Melissa shares a candid story about a company-wide adoption metric that measured activity instead of value, and how it sparked fear, shadow AI, and eroded trust. We then get into what worked instead: letting department leaders own their outcome metrics, one-on-one conversations with respected detractors, and an AI ambassador program built on peer credibility. From there, we make AI governance concrete, covering approved tools, data classification, human review by risk level, and customer disclosure. We close with agentic engineering, including how a risk-tiered approach to testing and autonomy keeps quality built in rather than inspected at the end. If you're a leader trying to move your organization from tossing out AI licenses and hoping for the best to generating real results, this one is for you. 🔗 Episode Links: Melissa Tondi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-tondi-186551/?isSelfProfile=false 🔖 Chapters: 00:00 - Intro 00:52 - Introduction to AI and Operating Models 03:37 - Common Traps in AI Rollouts 12:43 - Navigating AI Mistrust and Detractors in Organizations 28:54 - Building an Ambassador Program for AI Engagement 36:44 - Establishing Governance in AI Implementation 42:03 - Understanding Agentic Engineering and Its Impact 54:02 - Balancing Quality and Flexibility in Software Development

  4. Aug 30

    Grok Bot, Robotics, Cybersecurity, and AI Infrastructure, w/ Rob Carpenter

    Rob Carpenter is the managing member of Frost River Capital, where he's actively acquiring and growing a portfolio of residential service businesses. Before that, he founded and led Valyant AI, a conversational AI platform for the drive-thru food industry that was acquired in 2024. He holds five patents in conversational AI and has been featured by Fox Business, The Washington Post, The New York Times, the BBC, and TechCrunch. We cover: Grok Bot, cybersecurity in the age of AI, robotics, and AI Infrastructure 🔖 Chapters: 00:09 Grok Bot 00:29 Intro 02:07 The Age of the Agent 06:47 Grok Bot 18:09 Context Windows 21:33 Security and Computer Control 27:03 Grok Bot & Image Creation 28:36 Is Grok Bot the Real Deal? 34:58 The Broader Cybersecurity Landscape 40:26 Robotics 44:59 Infrastructure Build-Out 49:31 How Optimistic Are You? 52:00 Getting in Touch

  5. Aug 27

    Keeping Your Mind in the Age of AI, with Erika Lenz

    Is AI making everyone in the room dumber, one polished answer at a time? In this episode of Thinking Straight, we talk with Erika Lenz, founder of KeepYourMind.ai and Kinetic Change, about the human side of AI adoption: the messy, cognitive, and organizational work that most companies skip on their way to "just go use AI." We explore what "human-centered AI" actually means in practice, why 95% of AI adoptions are failing to deliver expected ROI, and why the real bottleneck in software isn't engineering anymore; it's distribution, customer attention, and the humans still stuck in every workflow. We dig into the theory of constraints, the danger of frameworks that automate an entire product lifecycle while skipping the ends that matter, and why senior judgment and taste are becoming more valuable, not less, even as AI writes the code. We also get into AI critical literacy: the discipline of asking not just how to use AI, but whether and when to use it at all. That includes the sycophancy baked into these tools, the practice of demanding the "bull and bear case" before trusting an output, the real research on cognitive de-skilling, and simple habits like journaling decisions, drafting without AI once a month, and capturing a first take before handing it to the model, for keeping your own thinking sharp.

  • 5 Episodes

About

Thinking Straight is a podcast for business leaders, product builders, and entrepreneurs who want to think rigorously about AI. Featuring interviews with founders, builders, investors, and operators, the show brings an honest perspective to an AI narrative that is too often dominated by either breathless optimism or doomsday prophecies. We cover: The tools, models, and breakthroughs actually worth your attention, what AI adoption actually looks like inside real organizations, and the hard questions facing our society as we navigate this transformation. Examining the technology from multiple angles, the show aims to help listeners build a clear and grounded understanding of AI and its implications.

Information

  • Creator
    Jason Griffing
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    5
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Jason Griffing