Episode 4 welcomes Andy Masley, the independent writer and researcher behind one of the most widely read Substacks applying careful, numbers-first thinking to AI. A former high school Physics teacher with a background in philosophy, Masley has built a following by taking the claims everyone repeats and checking if they hold up.

Dr. Samuel Jay and Larry Sampler begin with language itself. Masley argues that the two dominant framings of AI like "it is just a tool" and "it cannot really think because it is not human," are both broken, and that the metaphors we reach for quietly shape policy, teaching, and who gets held accountable. From there the conversation moves into harder territory: what interpretability research can and cannot tell us about what is happening inside a model, why visible chain-of-thought reasoning may be fading, and why "it just predicts the next word" badly misleads people about what these systems do.

The back half turns to Masley's signature beat: AI and the environment. He walks through why the viral "a bottle of water per prompt" figure is wrong by roughly two orders of magnitude, where the real concerns actually sit (the green-energy transition, local gas turbines, electricity prices), and why contextless big numbers tell you nothing about any industry. Along the way: the higher-education cheating crisis, the geopolitics of whose values get trained into frontier models, the unglamorous work of fixing broken business practices before automating them, and a closing tour through effective altruism.

A wide-ranging, occasionally unnerving hour about thinking more clearly.

Check out Andy's Substack. It's a must-read, especially if you're playing a part in AI-related decision-making.

In this episode of Thinking Out Loud, recorded on-site at the Ai4 Conference in Las Vegas, Sam and Larry sit down with Kevin Taylor, Chief Information Officer, and Mike Hart, Chief Information Security Officer, at MSU Denver. Together, we explore what it means to lead institutional IT and cybersecurity at a moment when advanced AI has moved out of the labs and into daily campus life. Kevin and Mike share how their thinking has shifted, where the real tensions sit between innovation and governance, and what it takes to balance faculty, staff, and student demand for AI access with the realities of maintaining a complex enterprise environment.

Links mentioned during the interview:

• Colorado Higher Ed Computing Organization (CHECO)
• Terms of Service, Didn't Read

In episode three of Thinking Out Loud, Sam Jay and Larry Sampler recap their presentation to the MSU Denver Board of Trustees, subsequent discussion, and the work to be done over the summer as faculty, staff, and students prepare for a new academic year.

Have any question, comments, ideas, or feedback? Email us at ai@msudenver.edu.