The Honor System is an arc of AI Unveiled: Hype vs. Reality. It examines what breaks when AI makes producing work cheap while leaving judgment expensive. Each episode pairs the podcast with a canonical, verifiable article. Episodes are listed below in order.
AI Unveiled: Hype vs. Reality
The Honor System
A six-part series on where AI work gets trusted without evidence, from review debt to AI activity booked as value, each ending in a control you can build.
- Episode 1
Organizational Model Collapse: When Your Company Starts Believing Its Own AI
KPMG pulled an AI report when only 5 of its 45 citations held up. The deeper failure is unverified AI output becoming trusted organizational memory.
- Episode 2
Review Debt: AI Made Work Cheap. Trust Is Still Expensive.
In 1,140 runs, AI agents left at least one required file unread 67.9% of the time. More than half of those runs claimed a complete review. That gap is review debt.
- Episode 3
The Memory Trust Trap: When Recall Becomes Authority
Sleeper poisoning planted fabricated memories in up to 99.8% of attempts on GPT-5.5, so AI memory must prove it is current before it is obeyed.
- Episode 4
The Trust-Laundering Machine: When Institutions Sign the Slop
A May 2026 audit estimated 146,932 hallucinated citations in 2025 papers; the failure that matters is when an institution signs that slop into authority.
- Episode 5
Policy Is Not a Control: What Europe Just Taught America About AI Governance
Mini Shai-Hulud packages had valid provenance and were still malicious, and under EU AI Act Article 50, Code adherence is not conclusive evidence either.
- Episode 6
The Reckoning: When AI Activity Gets Booked as Value
OpenAI's $110 billion round proves capital was committed, not that value was created: the Honor System finale on how to measure AI ROI with Net Verified Value.