About me and the show

I used to work in HR. Not glamorous, I know. For about six years I helped companies onboard people, write job descriptions, and figure out what to do when someone's role got restructured. Then I got restructured, which was instructive in its own way.

That was 2023. When I was looking for what to do next, I kept running into this same thing: people in completely ordinary jobs — not Silicon Valley people, not economists, not anyone with a podcast already — were sitting with these very real questions about what their work meant going forward. And almost none of them were being asked about it. Or if they were, the people asking wanted a quote, not a real answer.

I'd been listening to podcasts for years. Long-form interviews, mostly. And I noticed that the most honest thing anyone said in any of them was usually in the first thirty seconds before they'd fully settled into interview mode, or in a throwaway aside near the end. The middle — the part where people were giving the considered answer they'd prepared — was often the least interesting.

The one-sentence format came from laziness, honestly. I didn't have a studio or a producer or time to edit two-hour conversations. But I also genuinely believed that if you make someone commit to a single sentence, they stop performing and start just saying what they actually think. It turns out that's true more often than not.

So that's the show. I call it One Sentence. I find people doing real jobs — not founders, not VCs, not people whose whole identity is already built around technology — and I ask them: "What is AI doing to your job? One sentence." And then I record what they say and maybe a few minutes of follow-up if they want to keep talking.

What I've heard so far has been harder to categorize than I expected. Some people are relieved — one administrative coordinator told me, with zero apparent irony, "It does the parts I hated so I can do the parts I'm good at." Some people are angry in a way they can't quite articulate. Some people are frightened and don't really want to say so out loud, but the sentence does it for them anyway. A few people have told me AI hasn't touched their job at all yet and seem either genuinely calm about it or in significant denial. I don't always know which.

I'm not trying to make a point with the show. I don't have a thesis. I'm not optimistic or pessimistic about AI as a rule. I just think this is one of those moments where the people who know what's actually happening are the people doing the regular jobs, not the people writing about it from the outside. I'm trying to give those people a few minutes of tape.

I live in Columbus, Ohio. I have a cat named Dispatch. I make this show out of my apartment on a recorder that cost less than a tank of gas.

If you want to be on it, or if you know someone who should be, email me.