Honest Workstudio Podcast

See clearly.
Move deliberately.
Work honestly.

AI is rewriting how we live, how we work, and how organizations run, and most of what you hear about it is noise. We sit down with the people actually building it and ask the questions they usually get a pass on. No hype. Just the clear picture, so when you move, you move well.

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Latest Episode

What we explore

Life

What AI does to how we learn, think, and decide, and what we should refuse to hand over.

Work

Which jobs, skills, and businesses survive an AI-first economy. Who's hiring, who's hype.

Organizations

What happens when companies are rebuilt around people and AI agents. Who decides, who's accountable, who's still needed.

Conversations

05

Dr. Harshal Sanghvi — Director of Healthcare Analytics, FAU College of Business

AI Will Cure Cancer: Truth or Trap? | Dr. Harshal Sanghvi | HWS05

TL;DR
  • —Detect, Don't Diagnose: He'd let his AI scan him for disease with no doctor in the room, but only to detect. Diagnosis takes medical training, so AI stays an assistant to the physician, who makes the call.
  • —Workflow Is the Real Product: Saving minutes at the front desk, on a report, or in surgery lets clinicians see more patients. That's how he'd pitch a hospital CEO on healthcare analytics, without ever saying "AI."
  • —The Eye Is a Doorway: His models read retinal scans, chest X-rays and brain MRIs, and his VR-headset telehealth system spots nystagmus remotely. Oculomics can flag cardiovascular and neurodegenerative risk from the eye alone.
  • —Know the Field Before the Tool: AI is just a tool you apply to an industry. Learn the basic sciences first, get real industry exposure through CPT and OPT, and bring engineers and business thinkers together so research becomes something that works in a clinic.
  • —Jobs Change, Training Wins: He doesn't expect AI to take medical jobs, but professionals who refuse to learn it will lose out to those who do. Med school still matters, because hands can't be trained by a model.
  • —Truth or Trap? His rapid-fire answer is "truth," with a caveat: AI can assist in curing cancer, but how, and with what benefit, is a much bigger answer than yes.
→ YouTube

04

Dr. Hari Kalva — Chair and Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Florida Atlantic University

The Secret Creator of MP4 | Dr. Hari Kalva | HWS04

TL;DR
  • —Make the Most of What's in Front of You: Growing up in Kurnool, he had no long-term plan. Research clicked at FAU, where he had the freedom to explore, including a 1,024-processor parallel computer nobody was using.
  • —Protect Your Ideas: His master's work on chunk-based video streaming underpins how YouTube and Netflix stream today, but it was published, not patented. Know that your ideas have value, and keep a dated, signed paper notebook.
  • —From MP4 to Standard-Essential Patents: His team wrote the first implementation of the MP4 file format with collaborators at AT&T Research, and he explains how patent pools let companies license standard-essential technology.
  • —Dolby Acquires FAU Patents: Dolby acquired around 250 granted patents from FAU, including patents essential to the VVC (H.266) video standard.
  • —Video for Machines: His lab works on machine-to-machine video and edge AI, from privacy-aware elder care to wildlife conservation, and warns about "builder's blindness" in biased AI, like pulse oximeters that misread darker skin.
  • —Advice for Students: Learn how to learn with AI, be reliable and responsible, and know that a degree still builds depth and judgment. FAU's new AI Bootcamp helps students show real projects.
→ YouTube

03

Charles Whiteman & Aman Sharma — Co-Founder & CEO, and Co-Founder & CTO, Lamatic.ai

"Don't Be A Tool" — The Unfiltered Career Advice CS Graduates Need | HWS03

TL;DR
  • —Co-Founders Are About People: They matched on Y Combinator's co-founder platform, put the red flags on the table first, assume positive intent, and keep ego out of disagreements so both stay focused on the objective.
  • —An Operating System for Agentic Businesses: Lamatic handles the hard plumbing — security, reliability, infrastructure — so experts can turn their know-how into agentic software, with the aim of customers maintaining and extending it themselves.
  • —Vibe Coding Settled Down: It's great for prototypes and landing pages, but production software still needs engineers. AI raises the floor of entry-level work rather than erasing it, so focus on systems and problems, not LeetCode.
  • —Follow the Bottleneck: Every system has a choke point and AI just moves it — next is turning answers into the physical world. Change arrives one function and one vertical at a time, and execution beats the idea.
  • —Don't Be a Tool: Be a problem solver who asks second-order questions, build T-shaped skills (broad knowledge with real depth in one area), and stay adaptable.
  • —See Through the Customer's Eyes: Don't build for your own point of view — sit with the people you want to serve and understand how the world looks from where they sit.
→ YouTube

02

Dr. Ernesto Lee — Faculty, AI and Data Analytics

AI Won't Replace You—But Someone Using AI Will | Dr. Ernesto Lee | HWS02

TL;DR
  • —Protect the Productive Struggle: Learning happens when you wrestle with a problem. Outsourcing that thinking to AI builds dependence, not knowledge — master the fundamentals first, then use AI as a consultant, not a replacement.
  • —Grade the Thinking, Not the Answer: Answers are now cheap and infinite, so assessments should look at how you reasoned and how you engaged with AI, including your prompt history.
  • —Pair Domain Expertise with AI: Knowledge workers who ignore AI will be weeded out, while people who combine real expertise (business plus tech, law, healthcare, even a family pool-cleaning business) can multiply their output many times over.
  • —Synthetic Employees: Map each role's pain points and high-value workflows, turn them into skills, connect the tools through MCP servers, and bundle them into agents that automate a large share of the work.
  • —Land the Job Like a Builder: Certifications, final projects and a 24-hour prototype beat saying you have no experience. Treat the search as a numbers game, with a human in the loop.
  • —Bias Gets Baked In: AI inherits the bias in human-generated data, from the Boston housing dataset to the COMPAS algorithm, and people tend to trust the machine without questioning it.
→ YouTube

01

Dr. Fernando Koch — Director Generative Intelligence Lab, Research Professor at FAU

Why We Haven't Had AI's iPhone Moment Yet | Dr.Fernando Koch | HWS_01 Honest Work Studio

TL;DR
  • —AI is in its Infancy: The current state of artificial intelligence is in its very early stages, comparable to the era of older mobile phones before the industry experienced a revolutionary shift.
  • —Startups Require Reputation: Because AI allows developers to build products in a matter of hours, a startup's success now depends heavily on its reputation, credentials, and proven market use cases rather than just the initial idea.
  • —Human Accountability is Essential: While AI will effectively automate repetitive tasks and basic coding, careers that require human accountability, relationship-building, and complex problem-solving will remain secure and necessary.
→ YouTube

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