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Welcome back. About a month ago I was at a working dinner with peer CTOs and a head of AI Enablement, and someone pitched a product that automates meeting transcription so nobody on your team ever has to take a note again. I pulled my I/O Psychology hat off the shelf and pushed back, because the friction we are racing to remove is the friction that makes us think, remember, and lead. The act of…

Snake oil salesmen never left. They just learned to code. My friend keeps rockets in the sky, and he still feels like he’s losing to a landing page. I tried to tell him why. So this episode is about that scoreboard. I walk you from an 1890s snake-oil wagon parked outside a general store in Kansas all the way to a 2026 AI landing page. Same four tricks. Same top hat. Different typography. Then I…

I was standing in my kitchen at 9 at night trying to add a four digit number to my security system so my son could let himself in after he comes back from school. That was the entire task. Four digits, one kid, one door. I opened myADT on the browser the way I had a hundred times before, and the dashboard was gone. Where the users panel used to live, a little chat bubble bobbed on the screen with…

How I built an open-source AI detector after my own writing got flagged as artificial In 2011, I finished my PhD dissertation. Thousands of hours of research, writing, rewriting, and defending my ideas in front of a committee that seemed personally offended by my comma usage. That document sat on a university server for over a decade, bothering nobody. Then ChatGPT happened in late 2022, and…

They say AGI will be the last invention humanity ever makes. That the moment we flip the switch, something wakes up inside the machine, something smarter than us, faster than us, and utterly indifferent to whether we survive. Grey goo. Robot armies. Engineered plagues. The paperclip apocalypse. A god born in silicon that rewrites itself into something we can’t comprehend, can’t contain, and can’t…

Everyone panicked when AI came for the artists. Then the novelty wore off, and we all moved on. But what happens when AI doesn’t come for your job, it comes for your thinking? Sci-fi author and tech leader Stephen Salaka on the moment he realized we’re not being replaced. We’re abdicating.

You know that moment when you’re building something with an AI coding assistant and you think, “I really wish it could just *look* at the webpage”? That’s the itch. And after months of scratching it with hacky workarounds — screenshots piped through base64, Chrome DevTools protocols that break every third Tuesday, headless browsers that get flagged by every anti-bot system on the internet — I…

I had the privilege of sitting down with Phil Howard on the You’ve Been Heard IT Leadership Podcast for Episode 412, and we went deep. We talked about how I started out wanting to build nuclear bombs, how a training accident redirected me into computer science, and how a stint in Japan taught me the real superpower behind every technology initiative: herding cats. Getting humans to actually use…

Something has been broadcasting from the edges of thought: questions about consciousness, technology, the occult, and the things we argue about when we think no one’s listening. Sci-fi author, tech leader, and IO psychologist Stephen Salaka opens the channel for the first time. Who he is, what this is, and why some conversations are worth having even when, especially when, we don’t agree.