Castos Creator Spotlight: Erik and Kris from Examining

The people behind great podcasts

Great podcasts start with great people. The Castos Creator Spotlight is a twice-monthly series featuring creators in our community, exploring the stories, craft, and passion behind their shows.

A Show That Started in a Crisis and Kept Going

In July 2020, with classrooms shut and teachers scrambling to move everything online overnight, Erik Christiansen and Kris Hans started a podcast called EdTech Examined. At first it had one job: help educators survive the switch to emergency remote instruction.

Five years later the show is simply Examining, “the technology focused podcast that dives deep,” and it covers a lot more ground. These days the two get into artificial intelligence, privacy, productivity, user experience, and the tools people actually use to do their work, aimed primarily at educators but useful to any professional trying to make sense of where technology is heading.

The two hosts come at technology from different angles. Erik is an information professional and UX specialist who describes his own work as “turning friction into clarity.” Kris is a faculty member at the University of Calgary and an instructor at Mount Royal University’s business school, where he teaches everything from design thinking to new venture marketing. Erik has the librarian’s instinct for cutting through noise; Kris has the strategist’s eye for why a technology matters. They record remotely from opposite ends of Calgary, trade a topic back and forth, and let the conversation do the explaining.

The promise is straightforward: help people understand technology and hand them practical tools to do their jobs better. Every episode opens the same way, in Erik’s voice: “Welcome to Examining, a technology focused podcast that dives deep.”

Meet Erik Christiansen and Kris Hans


Go-to tool	Zoom (they record remotely from opposite ends of Calgary)
Consistency philosophy	Keep shows simple and focused with fewer topics, and do the prep, so the recording happens and the conversation sounds natural
Using AI?	Covers it constantly on the show, but doesn’t use it to produce the episodes
In a year	Doubling downloads and landing more regular interviews with technologists they know

Erik and Kris’s recording tip: “Lower the bar for length and prioritize consistency. If you keep shows simple and focused, with fewer topics, you’re more likely to make the recording happen. And do the prep. Podcasts are more fun to record and easier to edit when the co-hosts have thought about the topics for a while. The conversation sounds more natural.”

Inside the Episodes

Examining runs in two modes: interviews and deep-dive discussions.

The interviews bring on people doing specific, concrete work, often from the hosts’ own Calgary network. Start with Episode 90. Kris first met Sasha Ivanov years earlier, when Sasha was working at the Apple Store, and brings him on to talk about Maple Scan, an app Sasha built over a single weekend when the tariff news hit. Point your phone at a product in a grocery aisle and it tells you the item’s Canadian ties and suggests home-grown alternatives. It went viral fast: roughly 135,000 downloads, and Sasha was on Calgary news nearly every day for two months. “I felt the country coming together to support this cause,” he tells them. Episode 97 brings on University of Calgary professor Soroush Sabbaghan to talk about what ethical AI use looks like in a classroom; Episode 93 features Ross “Memphis” Pambrun, whose career spans healthcare, firefighting, technology, and music.

The two-host and solo episodes are where the show actually dives deep. “Is Neo the One?” (Episode 91) pulls apart the gap between how fast people are adopting AI and how little they understand it, then turns into a tour of why Alberta has become an AI hub, from the Alberta AI Academy to the research roots of Amii in Edmonton. “Goblins in the Cloud” (Episode 96) runs through a new GPT release, a strange quirk in how ChatGPT talks, and a sober look at AI’s effect on jobs.

Episode 83, “Why AI Prompting Is Hard,” is the clearest window into what Erik brings to the show. As an information professional, he spends his days teaching people how to search. “A big part of my job is teaching people how to translate an idea into an effective search,” he explains, before laying out why chatbots break every habit twenty years of Google trained into us: “It’s not difficult because you need special knowledge. It’s difficult because you have to do the opposite of what you’ve been trained to do for 20 years.” It’s the kind of thing the show does well: take something everyone uses and explain why it actually behaves the way it does.

It tracks with their own advice, too: few topics, real prep, and no hesitation about calling a piece of tech overhyped.

Looking Ahead

Their goals for the next year are modest and concrete. They’d like to double their downloads, and they want more regular interviews with technologists in their own network, the people they already know and trust to have something real to say. More good conversations, reaching more of the educators and professionals trying to keep up.

It’s a fitting plan for a show that started as a lifeline for teachers in a crisis.

Listen to Examining

Here’s where you can find Examining:

Website: examining.ca
Apple Podcasts: Examining on Apple Podcasts
Spotify: Examining on Spotify

Thanks, Erik and Kris, for being part of the Castos community. Go give Examining a listen, and pass it along to anyone still trying to make sense of where technology is heading.