GAEA Talks

This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with Natalie Monbiot, one of the earliest and most thoughtful voices in the world on digital twins, AI avatars and human-centred AI. Natalie joined the podcast from the US.
Natalie left the corporate world in 2019 to join Hour One as one of its earliest team members, and helped turn AI-generated video from a category dominated by deepfake pornography into a legitimate enterprise business, with customers including Johnson & Johnson and Berlitz. She now collaborates with AE Studio on AI alignment and safety, who recently co-published a paper with Anthropic on removing dangerous knowledge at the training stage.
The title of this episode comes from a question Natalie borrows from the Cosmos Institute. When the AI is not in the room, are you smarter and more capable, or are you diminished? If it is the second, something has gone wrong.
Topics covered:
Are you smarter and more capable when AI is not in the room
Why the digital twin is a healthier mental model than the answer engine
The cognitive atrophy risk of outsourcing your thinking to an LLM
The shift from AI as answer engine to AI as action engine
Yoshua Bengio on stripping AI of any intrinsic personality
John Vervaeke's "relevance realisation" as a distinctly human capability
Sovereign personal AI - your data, your model, on your device
The Echo Studio and Anthropic paper on removing dangerous knowledge at training
Family-safe AI as a real consumer category
Natalie's three prescriptions for using AI in a way that makes you stronger

This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with Connor Leahy, US Executive Director of Control AI. Connor is one of the most technically credible and politically clear voices in the world on the risks of superintelligence.
Connor has been in AI his whole career. He co-founded EleutherAI, which built some of the first large-scale open-source language models. He then founded Conjecture, a research company focused on controllable and understandable AI systems, before winding it down to move to Washington, D.C. and lead the US work of Control AI.
Filmed in the new London studio, this conversation cuts through more of the current AI narrative in ninety minutes than most policy papers do in a hundred pages. Connor's argument is that superintelligence is not a technical problem, it is a political one. He walks through why modern AI is grown rather than written, why reinforcement learning produces optimising sociopaths by default, why the labs are selling a political product not an economic one, and why "there are no adults in the room" is the single most important thing every leader must understand.
Topics covered:
Why superintelligence is a political problem, not a technical one
Neural networks in plain English - grown, not written
Why we only understand about 3% of what happens inside modern AI
Why reinforcement learning produces optimising sociopaths by default
Why the labs are selling a political product, not an economic one
The leaded gasoline parallel for AI regulation
"Saliency control" as the primary method of mind control
Connor's three prescriptions - write things down, find community, engage policy

Forrester technology and innovation forums (Austin, London, New York). Promo code "GAEATECH" for 10% off. Visit https://forrester.com/events/#tech to book your place.This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with Dr Aaron Balick, psychotherapist, cultural theorist and author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking. Aaron is one of the very few people in the world who thinks about AI and the human mind with equal fluency, and this is one of the most useful and quietly unsettling conversations we have recorded.Aaron grew up in Delaware, studied at the University of Colorado Boulder, moved to the UK for a master's in continental philosophy, and then trained as a psychotherapist. His clinical work sits in the very traditional two chairs and a room. His writing and public work sit at the other end of the spectrum, tracing how technology now mediates who we are, how we relate to each other and what we absorb without noticing. In 2013 he published one of the first serious books applying psychoanalytic thinking to social media. He is now revising it for a new edition, and the story has become far bigger than social media.Filmed in our new London studio.The premise Graeme opens with is that fear has been the single most weaponised feature of modern technology, and if we can see that clearly we can start taking back some agency. Aaron picks it up from there and does not let go for the next hour. He walks through Dunbar's number and why we are being asked to relate at a scale humans were never built for. He explains Melanie Klein's paranoid-schizoid position and why fear literally regresses us into black-and-white thinking, making it easier to be manipulated, polarised and lonely. He revisits Cambridge Analytica and the NRA anxiety-targeting example as case studies in how personality data is used to shift intention, not just spend. He introduces his term "digital impingement". He walks through what AI companions are actually doing to attachment. He argues, sharply, that many of these systems are psychopathic in the strict clinical sense of performing empathy without having any. And he closes on the sovereign psyche - the idea that everything Graeme talks about in Sovereign AI has a mirror inside every one of us that we now need to defend and rebuild.

Forrester technology and innovation forums (Austin, London, New York). Promo code "GAEATECH" for 10% off. Visit https://forrester.com/events/#tech to book your place.This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with Tamara Kostova, founder and CEO of Allvesta, one of the most compelling new voices in wealth technology and a long-standing advocate for global financial literacy.Tamara's career started young. She joined Reuters as a teenager, grew up on the trading floors of some of Europe's largest banks, and spent over a decade in capital markets and wealth management. Somewhere along the way she realised something strange. Despite an MSc in finance and banking and ten years on the trading floor, she had never invested her own capital. Neither, when she asked, had most of her colleagues. That gap between financial expertise and personal financial confidence became the founding insight for her first startup, and for Allvesta, the wealthtech business she launched in early 2026 and is now scaling from London.Filmed in our new London studio, this is one of the most human and useful conversations on money, behaviour and AI that GAEA Talks has recorded. Tamara's argument is that the wealth industry has spent decades building products and technology to sell to people, without ever properly understanding the person behind the money. The result is a global financial confidence gap that leaves ten trillion euros sitting idle in European bank deposits, two and a half trillion pounds sitting in UK savings, and only nine percent of UK households receiving any form of financial advice. The bigger scandal, and the line that gives this episode its title, is that women on average do not start actively managing their own finances until they are fifty two, and usually only because of divorce or the death of a partner.Tamara's thesis is that human-centric AI is the only realistic path to closing this gap at scale. She walks Graeme through the OECD's three pillars of financial literacy, the three behavioural blockers that keep most people out of the markets, the concept of "investor DNA", and the six-to-nine month journey required to turn a saver into a confident investor. She also lays out why the UK is now in a "perfect storm" moment for retail capital - government agenda, an FCA open to AI, and consumers who already trust AI to help them manage money. Essential listening for any founder, policy maker or financial services leader.• Why women on average only start managing their finances at 52 - and what has to change• The OECD's three pillars of financial literacy: knowledge, behaviour, attitude• The three behavioural blockers that keep most people out of the markets• Why the industry has been solving the wrong problem for decades• The "investor DNA" concept and why personalisation is the missing layer• Why compounding is Einstein's "eighth wonder of the world" - and the £5,000 to £500,000 example• The six-to-nine month journey to turn a saver into a confident investor• The trillions of pounds and euros sitting idle in European savings accounts• Why only 9% of UK households receive financial advice• The Lloyd's statistic - 50% of Brits are already using ChatGPT for money questions• The Brazil story - how digital banking access without literacy sent stimulus into gambling• The perfect storm the UK is now sitting on for retail capital•Financial health as an extension of the World Health Organization's definition of health• Why working mums consume financial content in 30-second morning and evening windows• Why sovereign AI in finance is really a human-centred design problem

Forrester technology and innovation forums (Austin, London, New York). Promo code "GAEATECH" for 10% off. Visit https://forrester.com/events/#tech to book your place.
This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with Dr Ravinder Singh, Head of Digital and Systems within the UK Cabinet Office Government Commercial Function, and one of the most authoritative voices in Britain on how governments and enterprises should actually build, adopt and govern AI.Ravinder leads the digital, systems and emerging technology work for one of the most consequential functions in Whitehall, and oversees the Government Commercial College - at over one hundred and six thousand users, the largest learning platform in the country after the Open University. Before his current role he was a Consulting Technical Architect at the Government Digital Service. His path into the civil service came after a private sector career at J.P. Morgan, HSBC, Credit Suisse, Accenture, 3i Infotech and Shell Oil. He holds a PhD from King's College London, arrived in the UK on the Highly Skilled Migrant Programme in 2004, and had already spent years as a civil servant in India, where he built the first Indian-languages word processor across seventeen official languages.Filmed in our new London studio, this is one of the most useful, calm and internationally-informed conversations on AI adoption that GAEA Talks has recorded. Ravinder cuts through the noise with a clarity that only comes from having built systems inside global banks, inside the private sector, inside Whitehall and across two countries. The line at the centre of the episode reframes one of the most misused phrases in the industry. Not human in the loop, but human in the lead. Machine learning has to be taught, guided and trained. Trust is earned iteration by iteration. Intelligence comes later. Everything downstream of that principle changes when you accept it.About Dr Ravinder Singh:Dr Ravinder Singh is Head of Digital and Systems within the UK Cabinet Office Government Commercial Function, where he leads the emerging technology, AI, machine learning, blockchain, IoT and quantum computing programmes and oversees the Government Commercial College with over 106,000 users. He was previously a Consulting Technical Architect at the Government Digital Service. Before joining the civil service he spent his career in global financial services and industry, including senior roles at J.P. Morgan, HSBC, Credit Suisse, Accenture, 3i Infotech and Shell Oil, delivering large-scale digital transformation and complex technology programmes. He holds a PhD from King's College London, arrived in the UK in 2004 on the Highly Skilled Migrant Programme, and previously worked as a civil servant in India, where he built the first Indian-languages word processor across seventeen official languages, holds two software copyrights and received a national award for the Punjabi spellchecking algorithm.The views expressed in this conversation are Dr Singh's own and do not represent the official position of the UK Cabinet Office or His Majesty's Government.