Mind Meets Machine is a video podcast by Avik where mental health, AI, and business collide in the most human way. Real conversations with founders, therapists, doctors, and creators. Practical tools, clear insights, and zero fluff. Learn to think clearer, work smarter, and live better in a tech-driven world.
Your AI can write faster than you can think, but that is not the upgrade we actually need. I sit down with Ben Finklea, CEO and CMO at Volaki and founder of Armbrain, to explore a more uncomfortable and more useful idea: AI as shared memory and context, not just a productivity tool. When you treat AI like a “faster version of what you already do,” you may move quicker, but you do not necessarily move smarter. We dig into why the real leverage is better decisions, not more output.
We talk about how leaders have spent decades reshaping their work to fit computers, manually sorting information into tidy systems even though the human mind is messy by design. Ben breaks down the limits of working memory and why executives often decide among only a few visible options while a large-context AI can hold thousands of signals at once. The goal is not to let a machine make your choices. The goal is to let it filter the noise, read what you cannot read in the moment, and surface the “nectar” that deserves your attention.
Ben shares the moment that sparked Armbrain: an overwhelmed morning, a simple prompt, and the sudden relief of having one clear priority. We end with a practical challenge to try AI support for a month, measure whether it protects focus, and reclaim your mornings from inbox-driven urgency. Subscribe for more conversations about how technology reshapes thinking, share this with a friend who feels constantly behind, and leave a review with the one work signal you wish an AI could filter for you.
📌 Disclaimer This episode is for educational and informational purposes only. Guest views are personal and do not represent the host or Healthy Mind by Avik™. The Network does not verify or endorse guest statements. Nothing here is medical, legal, financial, or professional advice, please consult a qualified professional. Engage critically. Third-party content referenced under fair use. Guests are responsible for their own statements. Concerns? Contact us | Full disclaimer.
Dear listeners, you know, like we have gotten like good at asking AI every every day we are using, right? Uh asking AI to do things, like this, create this, uh, summarize that, generate the title, description, and all of those things, and all of a lot of other things as well. But what if the real shift is not about what AI can do for us, but at the same time about how it thinks with us, right? Because it has our brains only. So, what happens when AI stops being a tool that we use and starts becoming something more like a memory that we share, a context that we carry, and a layer of thinking that does not replace our own thing, our own uh, but it at the same time it extends in ways like we are only beginning to understand. So, welcome to Mind Meets Machine. I'm your host Savik, and this is where we slow down to look into or look at what technology is actually doing to the way that we think and lead our lives. And that's not the hype, not the shortcuts, just the honest conversations, sometimes uncomfortable questions, also about what it means to be human in a world that's learning to think alongside us. And today I'm having a very lucky guest with us. Please welcome Ben Franklin Clay. Welcome to show. Thank you, Avik.
SPEAKER_00
I appreciate you having me on. Looking forward to our conversation.
SPEAKER_02
Thank you. Thank you so much, Ben, for being here. And tell us like before we get into the discussion, I'll quickly introduce you with Ben. So he's the CEO and CMO of uh Volaki and founder of uh Ambin and an AI agency, which is a platform basically to build to help business leaders maintain the context across their work at the intersection of the marketing, entrepreneurship, and the kind of practical AI adoption that actually changes how people operate, not just how fast they can. That's really great to uh know more about. So uh I'll not take much of your time. Let's
get started. So Ben like uh when people when people they hear about this word AI and the business, they usually think about the productivity, right? And productivity, speed, efficiency. But what you are you are talking about is something else, like the context and the memory part. So what do you think, according to you, is the misconception here that we are or the people are missing when we treat AI like it's just faster or it's the faster version of what we already do. So what do you have to say?
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, sure. Well, so you're absolutely right. I think that's how a lot of business leaders consider AI. It's a way to get more productivity from the same number of hours worked, or if you're lucky, maybe you work fewer hours because AI can knock out some of the work for you. What I think that really misses is how AI can help with the decision-making process. And so if all you're doing is getting the same work done faster, you're just gonna move a little faster toward whatever goals you have. People I work with are mostly executives, entrepreneurs, and they're autonomous in their decision making. They can decide what their company is gonna do, they can decide the things they're gonna work on today. They get to make those decisions, right? They're not just going through a set of things that they need to do every day. That work, that kind of set list, great for automation. Move that off into the AI. But when an executive needs to make a decision, efficient work is not gonna help them make a better decision. What we need to do is have that human AI interface that augments each other. AI is not about taking work away from humans, it's about allowing humans to do their best work.
So when a leader comes to you, right, and they want to use AI to save the time. Like most of us are we also doing the same also sometimes, right? So, I mean, what is the first thing you asked to help them unlearn? Anything.
SPEAKER_00
That so we've learned over the last 40, 50 years of using computers and going from businesses where nobody had a computer to now everybody has two, three, four computers on them all the time. And what we've done over these last 40 years is learned how to adjust the way that we work so that the computer can work more efficiently. So we take our data instead of instead of, you know, the human mind doesn't have spreadsheets in it. It absorbs data from many, many different sources and it stores it in a very, in a in a computer sense, it's a very messy kind of way. It's just random. Right. And then we process it later. I think your last podcast was about sleep and how sleep is used to process all those inputs that are coming in. I I really enjoyed uh that podcast. That was a good one. But the human mind doesn't put things into columns and rows. It it doesn't just, it doesn't process things one little bit at a time. It processes vast amounts of information, far more than the most powerful computer, but it does it and it does it all simultaneously. But there's some trade-offs. There's some trade-offs when we do that. The mind is also very efficient and always looking for ways to be more efficient. And so it dumps, it dumps most of the input that it gets, it dumps it out. But what we find is that some of those inputs are really important. And so when an executive sits down to make a decision, uh very well-known studies, multiple studies have shown that the human mind can hold at most about seven things. And for me, I think it's more like about three things. That's about all I can hold in my mind at one time is three things. And so when you sit down to make a decision, you are always deciding among three things, three or four things. That's it. But a computer, it can hold, especially like an AI with a right now, a million context seems to be pretty standard. A million token context, a million tokens can hold something in the order of seven or eight thousand things in that mind at the same time. So if you're deciding what to work on and what's important, and you're deciding among, say, seven things versus someone else who's deciding among seven thousand things what's most important, who's gonna make the better decision about what needs my attention and focus? Well, it's the guy who can look at a much bigger, broader scope of what's going on in their business and in their life and pick that thing that might be the most important. Now, sometimes it's this I can pick among the three, and I can pick among the the or the seven, and I can pick among the 7,000, and I will come up with the same thing. And that's great. That's great. But very, very often there are important things coming in that we don't even know about. How long does an email sit from your boss or from a client or somebody important in your inbox before you read it? Is it five minutes? Is it an hour? Is it five hours? What if your AI could read that email while you're working on something else and go, this is important. This is important enough for me to interrupt Avic and say, hey, you got this thing you need to take care of right now. Well, now you have shown your capacity to be much higher. You're much more responsive. Everyone around you is happier because you're producing in a better way. And you didn't do it by being this kind of distracted person who's constantly trying to get all of his stuff into the computer. You can do it by having the AI automatically ingest all that information and then learn what's important and ingest it and then give it back to you in a way that you can decide at that moment, okay, I'm gonna set this work aside and I'm gonna do this thing quickly, right? And then I'm gonna move on. So, what do I have to unteach them? That I need to put every little thing that comes in into the computer, that it's my job to put all the data into the computer, that it's my job to organize all that data that comes in, that it's my job to tell it what's important. Oh, let me give it a let's it's uh, you know, a three layers of importance or 10 layers of importance or a hundred layers, you know, that I'm supposed to give it a number and then it knows, then the computer knows what's important. No. AI should help me decide from all the signals coming in. AI can absorb all those, thousands of them, and go, here's what I know Ben thinks is important. Here's what Avik thinks is important. None of these things match up to that. They're, you know, yeah, when he gets time later, when he's when he's got reached a stopping point, I'm gonna say, okay, here's a list of things that came in, here's some important things you might want to look at. Nothing worth interrupting you, except those times when, you know, it does. So teaching teaching an executive to let the computer do the work and teaching them to stay focused. You don't need to bounce out to your email. You don't need to look have your phone constantly looking in at your phone to make sure that you don't fall behind on anything. No, the AI is gonna the AI is gonna help you. The AI is gonna tell you when something's important.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That I mean, it is very, very uh when I'd say it's truly said, and like it's very interesting also because we have built this entire thing around being the person who remembers the connect who connects the dots, who holds the bigger picture. And now we are being asked to trust something else to do that thing, right? And we are giving the exercise back, right? So that I mean that takes more than a new tool, right? And I'd say that's that takes a kind of we're surrendering kind of thing, right?
SPEAKER_00
I don't want to I I uh I don't think that we're trusting it to make those decisions for us. I think we need to make those decisions.
SPEAKER_02
Exactly. I mean, what I'm trying to say is like we are uh trusting, trusting in the sense like we are obviously uh deciding because at the end at the beginning, like I mentioned, the brain is ours
only. We are only deciding, but we are giving the whole access, like which we used to do, but that thing someone else is doing. So that kind of surrender we are doing to the uh kind of machine.
SPEAKER_00
So so the the I think the surrendering is uh because of the the nature of the way that computers work is so much data comes in. You know, and your mind has has evolved over many, many years to filter out the stuff that's that's not important. So right now you're sitting, unless I point it out, you're not thinking about the weight of your headphones on your head. You're not thinking about the shadow on the wall that's in front of you or the feeling of the chair under your back under your seat, right? You you you you only think about those things because I mentioned them, right? But your brain is receiving the signal constantly. And so your brain filters those things out because, well, it is redundant, right? I'm getting that same signal again and again and again and again, and I know it's not important, so I'm not gonna bubble that up to the to the top of mind, right? Unless, oh, he's talking about that. I do, I do feel my chair, I do feel the headphones, right? So that structure in the brain is what I've been building into arm brain, which is that you're gonna get lots and lots of signal, but most of it is noise, right? So what we want to do is we wanna teach the AI to filter out the stuff. So it's it's more that we're trusting the AI to remove what's not important than it, we're trusting it to make decisions about what is important. I want to make the decision, right? My what I want to do is I want to get the AI to take care of all of that filtering that I'm doing personally myself, and just give me the stuff that's the most, the nectar, the nectar of what is coming into my email or my meetings or you know, my dot the documents that are coming, whatever it is that's coming in, give me the nectar, right? Filter everything else out and just tell me what is the decision I need to make right now. What is the thing I need to do right now? What's the most important thing that I can do right now? That's what I want AI to do, is just to be my be my filter. Definitely.
SPEAKER_02
So anyway, I mean, the all the strategy, all the thinking, all the decision will be ours for sure. Execution level AI is doing and it's not bad. I I don't say it's it's it's bad or someone if someone is saying it's bad. No, I mean we have the control, definitely. We have the control, we are using it. We are using it to make our lives easier, not to make our lives into riskier things. That's the thing. But there are a lot of other things as well. I do not want to get into that, but but but for for a normal normal person in our daily life, right? A business leader suppose wakes up, coffee in hand, his or her inbox is full, and they just open the system like arm print, right? And so in in that scenario, like what do you say? Like, I mean, what does it actually feel like to work with the AI that remembers you? Like how does that show up in the daily life, right? Or Monday morning, Tuesday morning kind of thing.
question. Um, I want to tell you uh just a little story um about kind of the genesis of the idea for Armbrain. This was a a couple of years ago. Um so this right now we're we're recording, it's early September in 2026. So in case somebody listens to this years from now, they'll they'll know what we're talking about around 2023, 2024, something like that. I, as a fractional CMO, I had a lot of things coming at me at one time and I was overwhelmed. And I uh spent a morning just bouncing from thing to thing, and I was stressed. And I got to lunch and I stopped for a short break, and I I realized I I've bounced from all these different things to I got nothing done this morning. Just nothing. And I thought, you ever had days like that?
unknown
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
You're just like, I got nothing done.
SPEAKER_00
And so I sat down, I came back from lunch and I said, hmm. And I sat down to this relatively new tool. It was Chat GPT. I think it might have been three point something or 4.0 or something. I forget. But I just said, hey, I'm very frustrated. It was a very simple prompt. I'm very frustrated. I'm supposed to get these things done today, and I got I got none of them done all morning. Here's a list of the things. Please help me. I didn't even tell it to help get organized. I didn't, nothing. I just said, just help. And what it did is it reordered them and said, this is the most urgent thing. Just do this one thing. Don't worry about the other six. Just do this one thing. And that relief that I felt like a weight had been lifted. And I said, okay, I'm not going to think about the other things. I'm just going to do this one. And I did the one thing, focused 45 minutes, got it done, got it knocked out. I'd spent four hours this morning and got nothing done. First 45 minutes after lunch, I got the most important thing done in my day. I want to capture that. That is the nectar that I'm trying to capture for my customers is that stop trying to triage everything continuously all the time. There's this concept your readers can, or your listeners, your listeners can look up called executive function. And executive function is that thing that helps us decide what to do at the moment. And the world that we live in is moving faster than our brain has evolved to handle the input of information. So executive function, what I want to do every morning, what that what I want that executive to do every morning with when they sit down to their coffee with their coffee is I want them to say, what's the most important thing I could that I need to get done today? And do it. That's it. What's the most important thing? Do that thing. Is it a customer thing, a personal thing? Is it an organizational thing? Is it a conversation I need to have? Is it a decision that needs to be made? Is it a problem that needs to get solved for someone else? Is it a blocker I need to remove? What is the most important thing that's going to move my goals forward, my business's goals forward? What is that thing? And I want all of that stress of going, I don't really know what the most important thing is. Well, I'm going to work on this because why? Why do we decide to work on stuff? Because it's the most recent email that we got. Right? So when we do that, we're letting whoever emails us decide what we work on. Whether it's uh your your boss or a friend or your spouse or a store you bought something at five years ago. You're deciding, they're deciding what's important. Instead, I want you to decide, I'm not gonna work on unimportant work. I'm only gonna work on important work. And let a system, let an AI or arm brain help you understand. Here's all the important things going on in your life. Here's all the stuff. I'm gonna, we're gonna hide away all the stuff that's not important. You can deal with that when you have spare time. But every morning I want you to get the most important things done when you start your day. And the the sense of freedom, the focus that it brings, and the the removal of those distractions so that I I feel I'm at my most effective every day when I have that experience. And that's what I want to give to others.
SPEAKER_02
So if you have to give one advice to the listeners today, what that'll be.
SPEAKER_00
I'm sorry, I I couldn't hear you guys. Say again.
SPEAKER_02
I said, like if you have to give one advice to the listeners today, what that'll be.
It's hard. You've learned to work in a certain way your whole career, and and you've been successful because you worked that way. The world changed. The world changed in the last five years, right? It doesn't work like that anymore. And the more you hold on to the old way, the harder and harder you have to work just to stay in place. AI is a it is still a pretty raw tool. You can sit down to Chat GPT and it can help you some, but it is still pretty raw. What we've been trying to do is turn that raw processing power into something that makes people efficient in the important things and offload the drudgery. So my advice is try it. Just try it for a month, for two months, give it a shot, see what happens, see if it doesn't at least help to move you towards being the best version of yourself. The one that gets the stuff done that they're supposed to get done, that makes great decisions because they've got all the information in front of them. That's the goal.
So uh and if they want to connect with you, how they can connect?
SPEAKER_00
How they can connect with me. So my my email is ben at armbrain.io. Just like it sounds armb-in, armbrain.io. My name is Ben. If you go to armbrain.io, then you can sign up for armbrain. You can get a free 30 days, and it's free for personal use when you want to use it for business and work. That's then there's a monthly fee for that. But you can try it out for free right now, and I'd highly encourage you to do that. And then give give me feedback. You know, this is a this is a brand new product. We we only launched uh about a month ago. And uh I want to hear how is it working? Is does it help? Is it giving you the information at the right moments for you? It is it do you feel more organized? Is there is there something missing? What's missing? What do you wish that it that it would do for you? And help us to create a system that again makes you the very best that you can be at work and at life. Move toward your goals faster.
Very, very true. Yeah. So uh dear listeners, like I would just say, just go check out Umbrain and uh do share the feedback and do also let us know like how you loved about the AI and how it is helping you, because this will also help us uh understand and also give other people also learn from it. So AI is not here to replace your thinking, right? So it is here to hold space for it. So Ben, thank you so much for sharing this perspective. It is really a great one. And 30 days of free.
SPEAKER_00
I appreciate very much the opportunity for being on here to get a chance to talk to you and talk to your audience. Uh, we are all of us plowing into this new world together. Um and I I I I really hope we can come together and figure out the best ways to use this new technology.
SPEAKER_02
Exactly. Exactly true. And dear listeners, like if you're listening or if you'll be listening later as well. I mean, it's all about the understanding what like we are actually inviting into the way that we work, uh, that we lead and that we remember. So it is also very important. So and that deserves more than a quick yes or no thing. That deserves the kind of attention that like we just gave it, right? So with this hope, until next time, keep asking the questions that uh don't have the easy answers, right? So with this hope, this is your whole services and this is my needs machine. That's where the real things are.
.png)
.jpeg)
