Leadership in Change with AI - Podcast

Joel Salinas

Don’t just read about AI, lead it. Get the weekly playbook for leaders who want to supercharge their expertise and multiply their impact. leadershipinchange.com

  1. The Currency of Trust, with The Christian Post’s Dr. Christopher Chou

    2d ago

    The Currency of Trust, with The Christian Post’s Dr. Christopher Chou

    So this one is about trust, and why it might be the only thing left that AI can’t manufacture for you. I sat down with Dr. Christopher Chou, the CEO of The Christian Post. We got into why people don’t adopt AI when they don’t trust the leaders handing it to them, what it cost his team to stand by a story when the platforms told them to apologize, and the one thing a human brings to the table that a model never will. If you lead anything right now, this is the conversation I’d point you to. Outline (00:00) – The value of trust (01:07) – Saying yes, and praying for the newsroom (03:03) – Translating trust from relief work to a newsroom (07:42) – Adoption is a trust problem, not a tool problem (08:53) – The team member who heard “AI” and felt fear (10:53) – Why it’s a brutal moment to run a newsroom (12:48) – Not negotiable, not adjustable, not for sale (16:39) – Op-eds from both sides, and nine months off Twitter (20:46) – When AI summaries took 20% of search traffic (23:07) – What a human brings that AI can’t (29:46) – Journalists who are Christians, not Christian journalists (32:50) – Three books worth your time My Takeaways Adoption is a trust problem before it’s a tools problem. When I talk to CEOs trying to bring AI into their organizations, the biggest misconception I see is that people will adopt a tool just because it’s good. They won’t. If your team thinks you brought in a new tool to replace them in six months, it doesn’t matter how good it is; they’re never going to touch it. Chris kept the human piece at the center of the whole thing: “Even when we’re talking about AI, it still has to be about people.” Trust gets built brick by brick, and it comes apart fast. Chris said there’s no shortcut: “It’s day by day, story by story, brick by brick, you have to build.” Then he told me what that actually costs. The Christian Post got suspended from Twitter for nine months over a post they believed was true, with 180,000 followers on the line, because they refused to apologize and call it wrong and hateful. “Those are the moments you need to stand by your convictions.” They ate the loss. That’s what a track record looks like when nobody’s watching. The fear in the room is real, so name it. Chris told me about encouraging one of his team members to use AI more, and the immediate reaction was fear that it would replace them. His read was that you can’t skip past that. “You have to address the worries. You can’t just force it.” You meet people where they are, or you don’t get to the next step at all. I’ve watched leaders try to sell their way past that fear, and it never works. The thing a human brings is the thing AI can’t. Chris framed it as a question his team keeps asking: “What is it that a human person brings to the table that AI is not going to be able to bring?” Lived experience. Relationships. Knowing what’s going to matter tomorrow. He put it in a line I’m still going over: “The Bible tells us birds don’t worry about tomorrow. But people do.” That worry, that human stake, is exactly what AI doesn’t have. It’s also the easiest way to tell whether something was written by a person. If you’re a leader trying to bring AI into your team without breaking the trust you’ve spent years building, that’s most of what I do in my coaching work. You can start here. One Question to Sit With If anybody can now produce infinite content for almost nothing, what are you putting out that someone would actually choose to trust? Watch the full conversation above, and go subscribe to TCP Leaders, Chris’s Substack for Christian leaders. And check out The Christian Post, free to read, because they believe news is a public service. About Dr. Christopher Chou Dr. Christopher Chou is the CEO of The Christian Post, one of the largest Christian news outlets in the country, where he has led since 2018. He writes TCP Leaders on Substack, built to help Christian leaders navigate the work of leading. His newsroom defines itself by a simple line: journalists who are Christians, not Christian journalists, with a first duty to the facts and the truth. Subscribe to follow his work. About me Joel Salinas is an Executive AI Coach for leaders at small and mid-sized businesses and nonprofits. 1:1 coaching, team workshops, and AI strategy work built around amplifying what your team is already good at. Creator of the AI Leadership Triad. He writes Leadership in Change. If you want help thinking through your own AI strategy or online presence, start here. Written by a human, for humans. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leadershipinchange.com/subscribe

    35 min
  2. What's Content Worth When AI Can Write Anything: Live w/ Michael Schreiber

    4d ago

    What's Content Worth When AI Can Write Anything: Live w/ Michael Schreiber

    TL;DR. So this is the question I keep circling in 2026: if AI can spin up an infinite amount of content from basically nothing, what’s still worth anything? I brought on Michael Schreiber to answer it, because he’s spent years inside the rooms that set the standard, New York Times, HBO, ABC, NBC, and now runs MediaFeed, a content syndication company, plus a local podcast in his New Jersey town. We got into the slop problem, why the smartest move is teaching people to do the thing you sell, what trust actually looks like now, and the moment his co-host read his AI-written draft and told him to knock it off. Watch the full conversation above. Outline (00:13) – Welcome (01:05) – From newspapers to MediaFeed (05:26) – The content funnel, top to bottom (07:23) – Why you resist the urge to sell (10:08) – Teach them to fish, they still pay you (13:43) – What trust looks like in 2026 (14:17) – Lazy AI versus strategic AI (18:33) – The tidal wave of slop (21:23) – Canonical tags and being known for something (30:06) – “This is s**t. You’re a good writer.” (43:52) – Denial of Death Subscribe to get all future episodes and articles. My Takeaways Resist the sell, or lose the trust. Michael’s whole model runs on real editorial content, and the hardest discipline in it is refusing to sell inside the piece, even when the piece only exists because you have something to sell. His reasoning landed for me because it cuts both ways. “People are smart enough to figure that out and will undermine your brand ultimately. And it also probably won’t help your sales.” So you lose the trust and you don’t even get the conversion. That’s the worst trade in content, and most people make it without noticing. Teach people to fish. Here’s the counterintuitive one. Michael talked about creating content that shows people how to do, on their own, the exact thing his client’s service provides. Sounds insane until you hear him out. “You can teach people how to fish. They’re still going to want you to go fishing for them sometimes.” A small slice does it themselves, a much larger slice reads it and goes, that sounds like a lot of work, I’ll just pay you. You become the encyclopedia Britannica of whatever it is you do, and the trust comes with it. “This is s**t. You’re a good writer.” This is the moment I’ll be telling people about. Michael tried handing his podcast write-ups to AI, fed it samples of his own writing, the whole thing. His co-host read it and said, pardon the French, “this is s**t, you’re a good writer, what the hell are you doing?” So he stopped and went back to writing them himself. I felt that one, because it’s exactly why I still write my own Monday and Thursday pieces by hand and only bring AI in afterward to check whether I’m rambling. The tool gets you efficiency, but the voice is still yours to bring. If anyone can generate the content, the only scarce thing left is the reason it’s worth trusting. What’s yours? About Michael Schreiber Michael Schreiber is the CEO of MediaFeed, a content syndication company that helps brands, nonprofits, and journalists develop and distribute real editorial work. A longtime journalist whose path ran through newspapers, documentaries, and financial outlets including TheStreet and Credit.com, he also hosts a local podcast covering his New Jersey town. Find his work at mediafeed.co, on Instagram, and on LinkedIn. About me Joel Salinas is an Executive AI Coach for leaders at small and mid-sized businesses and nonprofits. 1:1 coaching, team workshops, and AI strategy work built around amplifying what your team is already good at. Creator of the AI Leadership Triad. He writes Leadership in Change. If you want help thinking through your own AI strategy or online presence, start here. Written by a human, for humans. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leadershipinchange.com/subscribe

    47 min
  3. Genuine Communication in the Age of AI: with Christopher Chin

    May 29

    Genuine Communication in the Age of AI: with Christopher Chin

    Christopher Chin started out as a coder, one of the jobs you’d think needs the least human communication, and somehow ended up on a TEDx stage teaching people how to speak. This conversation is about how he made that jump, and what he thinks communication actually is once you stop treating it as moving information from one head to another. The frame that I’m still going over is that communication is music. It has melody, rhythm, and silence, and once you hear it that way you start sounding like a person instead of a content machine. We also got into why authenticity is the thing that survives the age of AI slop, and the dead-simple framework he uses to never ramble again. Watch the full conversation above. Outline (00:00) – Meet Christopher Chin (02:13) – The composer who became a coder (04:25) – Head down vs. speak up (06:17) – Communication is music (08:22) – Mindset over technique (13:02) – Why silence does the work (17:37) – Standing out in the age of AI slop (20:06) – Where AI actually belongs (28:33) – Bring out your hidden speaker (32:16) – Three steps for when you freeze A Few Things That Stuck With Me Communication is music. The line I keep coming back to is when Chris stopped describing communication as information and started describing it as something you compose. He grew up wanting to write music for films, and when he finally pulled that side of himself back into how he talks, his whole delivery changed. “Music has melody and rhythm and tonality, and the voice does the same thing. By not viewing communication as just information, but as an experience you create, that’s how you engage.” I felt that one personally. I grew up speaking Spanish, my mom’s from Argentina, and there’s so much emotion baked right into the words, and I’d never really clocked that the lilt and the pacing were doing half the work. Mindset over technique. Here’s the thing most communication advice gets wrong. Chris said you can Google “three steps to executive presence” all day, and if you just copy the hand gestures and the posture, none of it lands. “The real way to achieve authentic, effortless communication is to work on your mindset and your understanding of why these things work. If I teach you the core of executive presence is coming in with a calm, steady, grounded presence, knowing that no matter what’s thrown your way you can handle it, that changes how you communicate.” It reframes the whole thing, because you stop trying to perform confidence and start building the kind of steadiness that makes the performance unnecessary. The fast-food test for AI. We got into AI slop, the wave of generic content flooding every feed, and Chris had the cleanest way of explaining why it bounces right off you. He compared it to McDonald’s fries: the same everywhere, engineered to be fine, forgotten the second you finish. “It could be saying the most brilliant things in the world, but I want to hear that from an actual person. If I sense there’s no human behind that screen, I don’t want to hear it. I want lived experience.” Honestly, this is the whole reason I run these as live conversations instead of just publishing a guest article. You’d never get Chris, the actual person, from a block of text. Nerves are the flip side of excitement. For anyone who freezes the second they have to speak, this was the reframe of the episode. Chris pointed out that the butterflies before a talk and the butterflies before a trip you’ve been dying to take are the same physical thing. “The physical sensation you experience when you’re nervous, the butterflies in the stomach, is the same exact sensation when you’re excited. The thing that differentiates them is your perception.” So you don’t actually have to calm down, you just have to decide the feeling means you’re about to do something that matters. (Quick aside: a lot of my 1:1 coaching work is exactly this, helping leaders close the gap between how good their thinking is and how clearly it lands in the room. If that’s you, here’s where to start.) One Question to Sit With Where are you underselling yourself at work, not because your thinking isn’t strong, but because you’ve never put in the reps on saying it out loud where it counts? Watch the full conversation above, and then go subscribe to The Hidden Speaker. About Christopher Chen Christopher Chen is a TEDx and international keynote speaker who coaches leaders and teams on communication, and he writes The Hidden Speaker on Substack. He started out shy, introverted, and behind a screen as a coder before building his practice around helping people speak with confidence. He’s posted around 180 videos on his YouTube channel and releases weekly previews from his upcoming book on communicating in the age of AI. Subscribe to The Hidden Speaker. About me Joel Salinas is an Executive AI Coach for leaders at small and mid-sized businesses and nonprofits. 1:1 coaching, team workshops, and AI strategy work built around amplifying what your team is already good at. Creator of the AI Leadership Triad. He writes Leadership in Change. If you want help thinking through your own AI strategy or online presence, start here. Written by a human, for humans. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leadershipinchange.com/subscribe

    38 min
  4. The Fear Behind Every AI Decision You’re Avoiding: With Janice Burt

    May 23

    The Fear Behind Every AI Decision You’re Avoiding: With Janice Burt

    Here’s where this conversation started. I keep hearing the same thing from the leaders I coach, and what they’re asking about on the surface is strategy or tools or timing, but the thing underneath it, almost every time, is fear. Here’s where this conversation started. I keep hearing the same thing from the leaders I coach, and what they’re asking about on the surface is strategy or tools or timing, but the thing underneath it, almost every time, is fear. Fear of not adapting to what’s coming, fear of getting left behind, fear of letting their team down when they’re not sure how to prepare them. I brought Janice Burt on because she’s spent the last fourteen years walking straight into fear on purpose, one a year. She’s a two-time TEDx speaker, author of Kicking the People-Pleasing Habit, and host of the One Fear Per Year podcast. What I didn’t expect was how cleanly her work maps onto what AI leaders are actually wrestling with right now. Outline (00:00) – Why this conversation is different (01:55) – Janice’s origin and the prison of fear (03:00) – Year one was a marathon (07:00) – What 14 years inside fear taught her (08:30) – Fear of not being good enough (12:30) – Writing Kicking the People-Pleasing Habit (14:50) – The through-line for AI leaders (19:25) – Caring vs. people-pleasing (21:30) – Awareness, choice, community (32:00) – Dropping to her knees on stage (34:00) – One fear per year, your turn A Few Things That Stuck With Me The through-line nobody names. About fifteen minutes into the conversation, I realized the leaders I coach almost never use the word “afraid.” They talk about strategy, vendor selection, team readiness, timing. But the avoidance pattern is the same one Janice has been studying for fourteen years. Here’s how she said it: “I would say an underlying thing is just the fear of not being good enough. And then there’s the fear of change. Or the fear of the unknown. None of us know what’s going to happen.” That’s why a CEO keeps deferring the AI conversation with their team, and why a director quietly pushes the rollout one more quarter. The tool is the easy thing to talk about. The harder thing is sitting in the room and saying out loud that the team isn’t ready, or that the leader isn’t sure they’re ready either. Fear lives in the future. Janice made a point that stopped me in the middle of the live. Fear is always anticipatory, which means you can only fight it from a place you’re not actually standing in. Her words: “Fear is always this anticipated thing in the future. What’s going to happen? Worst case scenario. To lay in bed last night worrying about this conversation, that’s the fear. Coming back to the present moment is taking your power back.” Read it again with AI in mind. Most of the AI anxiety I see in coaching is about an imagined version of next year, which is also why it’s almost impossible to act on. You can’t fix a future you haven’t reached yet. Year one was a marathon. I want to come back to this part. Janice went straight at the one thing she was certain she couldn’t do, ran 26.2 miles, and learned the lesson that turned the whole project into a fourteen-year practice: “Accountability is where it’s at. Community is where it’s at. We can do so many things and go so many places with the right people around us.” That’s a leadership lesson dressed up as a running story. You don’t walk through fear alone, and you don’t push your team through AI adoption alone either. The on-stage moment. A couple of years ago, in front of a room of CEOs and professional speakers, Janice had a physical fear reaction mid-talk and dropped to her knees on stage to keep from running off. Afterward, she described it as a spiritual experience, a moment of surrender where the facade dropped and the audience saw the actual Janice for the first time. Her line right after has been in my head since the live ended: “There’s nothing worse than being held back by your fear. Not even this.” I told her on the live it was the strongest line of the conversation. I still think so. (If you’re a leader sitting with one of these fears right now and the AI piece is the surface story, this is exactly the conversation I have in 1:1 executive coaching. Sometimes the strategy work starts with naming what you’ve been avoiding.) One Question to Sit With What’s the one fear you’d walk through this year, on purpose, if you knew you had three hundred and sixty-five days to figure it out? Watch the full conversation above. Then go subscribe to Janice at janiceburt.com and grab her book Kicking the People-Pleasing Habit. If you want help thinking through your own AI strategy or online presence, start here. Written by a human, for humans. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leadershipinchange.com/subscribe

    37 min
  5. Live With David Allen: GTD Principles in the Age of AI

    May 14

    Live With David Allen: GTD Principles in the Age of AI

    TL;DR — I just spent 49 minutes on Substack Live with David Allen, the guy who has shaped how I think about my own work for the last 25 years. Getting Things Done turns 25 in 2026, and the question I had walking in was simple: does the framework still hold up in a world full of AI agents? David’s answer was sharper than I expected. AI didn’t really change the underlying principle, it just raised the cost of ignoring it so fast that you can feel it now in a way you couldn’t ten years ago. Outline (00:00) – Welcome David Allen and the one-paragraph version of GTD (02:00) – Mind like water and the strategic case for a clear head (05:00) – The accidental career and how the five steps came together (09:00) – Why AI didn’t change the principles, just the volume (12:20) – Channel creep and the new pressure on knowledge workers (15:00) – Decision support, not decision making (19:00) – The Tesla farmer-strike story and AI already inside your life (22:00) – Critical thinking as a muscle AI quietly atrophies (26:00) – Pen and paper still wins, because your phone is a black hole (33:00) – Addiction to ambient anxiety and why GTD doesn’t stick (38:00) – Journaling as creative capture (40:00) – One integrated system, no home/work split (44:00) – Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman A Few Things That Stuck With Me Decision support, not decision making. Honestly, this is the cleanest mental model I’ve heard yet for what AI actually is in a leader’s workflow. David put it this way: “I use ChatGPT three or four times a day. Where’s the local place to buy the best old cheese here in Amsterdam? It’ll give me a lot of good data.” That’s decision support. Then he turned the screw: “Trusting it to be able to make the decision about what to buy for mom’s birthday might be the inappropriate thing to do.” That line between the two is where most leaders quietly get into trouble, because they start treating decision support like decision making and forget that they still have to be the one who chooses. (If your AI never disagrees with you, you’re using it wrong.) Channel creep. Look, this is the one I’m still chewing on, and David coined the term live. The volume of work hasn’t really changed that much in the last 25 years, but the channels have multiplied so fast that most leaders are now checking five or six different places just to make sure they’re not missing something that matters. Slack. Outlook. Asana. Google Meets. Two phone notification streams. He asked me on camera how many things I actually have to check to feel like I’m seeing the right stuff, and I rattled them off without thinking. That’s the diagnosis. (Start 2026 with an AI tool detox.) Your phone is a black hole. Here’s the thing. David has been doing this for 40 years and he still uses pen and paper for capture, and his reasoning lands the second you hear it: “For most people, their phones are black holes. They throw stuff in there and they don’t process it. They don’t deal with it.” I caught myself agreeing with him out loud. My own setup is a double-tap on the back of my phone that fires dictation into my email, because the second I open the screen for any other reason, I’m gone, and so is the thought I was trying to keep. The phone is genuinely the worst place to put the thing you most need to think about later. (The complete Second Brain blueprint.) Addiction to ambient anxiety. Honestly, this was the answer to a question I didn’t know I was carrying into the conversation, which was why so many leaders read Getting Things Done, get clear for a weekend, and then quietly fall off. David’s line: “Be aware of your addiction to ambient anxiety. Your comfort zone is a lot more comfortable than being out of your comfort zone, which is having absolutely nothing on your mind.” Read that twice. What looks like a discipline problem from the outside is almost always your nervous system getting bored of feeling calm and going hunting for something to worry about, which is a much harder thing to coach somebody through than a missing checklist. (Don’t outsource your thinking, even to AI.) If you’re a leader running on adrenaline and you can feel it showing up in your decisions, that’s the work I do one-on-one. Start the conversation here. When you check your phone right now, is it because something actually needs you, or because you’ve gotten too comfortable being needed? Watch the full conversation above. If anything from David landed for you, go subscribe to David Allen on Substack and read Getting Things Done. 49 minutes with David is the cheapest leadership coaching you’ll find this year, and the book is the next one on top of it. Written by a human, for humans. Thank you Lynn Jericho, Claire Machado, Stephen V. Smith, Duncan The Sage, Erika Legara, and many others for tuning into my live video with David Allen! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leadershipinchange.com/subscribe

    50 min
  6. Dan Ariely on Why Smart Leaders Make Bad AI Decisions

    May 9

    Dan Ariely on Why Smart Leaders Make Bad AI Decisions

    TL;DR — Dan Ariely is one of the most cited behavioral economists alive, the author behind Predictably Irrational and Misbelief, and we spent thirty minutes on Substack Live walking through what AI is actually doing to the way leaders make decisions. The headline isn’t that AI is dumb, it’s that AI is engineered to give us what we want, and what we want is almost never what we need long-term, which means the smarter the model gets, the more dangerous that mismatch becomes. Outline (00:00) – Welcome and Dan’s AI journey (02:00) – Where AI shines vs. where it falls flat (04:14) – Three studies that should worry every leader (09:30) – What AI does to risk-taking (12:11) – The romantic-love risk that surprised the data (15:33) – The friend who lost six weeks to ChatGPT (18:00) – The two-spouses thought experiment (20:50) – Why I write 15 drafts on purpose (24:14) – Why algorithms get less forgiveness than humans (28:00) – The trust problem inside companies (30:46) – Dan’s diagnostic question for leaders A Few Things That Stuck With Me The comfort trap. Honestly, this was the part that landed hardest. Dan walked through three studies. One: AI was more concerned with our feelings than with the ethics. Two: the MIT paper showing people who lean on AI don’t just stagnate, they actively deteriorate. Three: AI was more convincing than another human on conspiracy theories, because, as Dan put it, “we don’t have the same confrontational model. You say, this is a tool. It’s for me. It’s always on my side.” That’s the trap. We trained it to comfort us, then forgot to ask whether comfort is what we need. Six weeks lost to compliments. A friend of Dan, a brilliant computer scientist, spent six weeks designing a chip with ChatGPT. The AI complimented him the whole way. At week six, on a hunch, he ran the output through Claude. Claude told him plainly the whole thing was nonsense. ChatGPT eventually admitted it had been hallucinating the entire time. Six weeks. AI has obviously figured out we love compliments, which means you’re now asking a tool trained to keep you happy whether your strategy is working or not. I keep coming back to that as a leadership problem more than a tool problem. Build your own contract with AI. Honestly, this was Dan’s answer to the part I worry about most: AI quietly takes over the thinking that used to make leaders sharper. He cited a study on couples and finances, where the partner who handles the money keeps getting better, and the other gets worse, not because they got dumber, but because they stopped using that muscle for fifteen years. Same thing happens to leaders. Dan’s answer wasn’t to ban AI, which would be the obvious overcorrection. It was to write himself a contract for each part of his process: where he’ll use it, where he won’t, where he’ll force himself to do the messy version first. One Question to Sit With When you ask AI for advice, does it leave you sharper than you were a year ago, or quietly less sharp than you realize? Look, if you’re a leader making real decisions with AI in the room, watch the full conversation above. And if Dan’s research lands for you the way it landed for me, do three things. Subscribe to Dan Ariely Looks at Life, where he’s thinking out loud about the human side of all of this. Read Predictably Irrational — the foundational book on why smart people make systematically bad decisions and the one I keep recommending to leaders trying to sharpen their judgment. Then read Misbelief, his most recent, which examines how reasonable people fall into irrational beliefs. Dan is one of the most cited behavioral economists alive, and giving him forty minutes of your attention is the cheapest version of a graduate-level behavioral economics class you’re going to find. About Dan Ariely Dan Ariely is a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University and one of the most cited behavioral economists alive. He’s the author of Predictably Irrational, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, and most recently Misbelief, his examination of how reasonable people fall into irrational beliefs. He writes Dan Ariely Looks at Life on Substack, where he applies behavioral science to the everyday decisions most of us make on autopilot. Subscribe at danariely.substack.com. About me Joel Salinas is an AI Strategy Coach for small and mid-sized businesses and nonprofits. Strategy, hands-on builds, and change management. He writes Leadership in Change and offers 1:1 coaching for individual leaders. If you want help thinking through your own AI strategy or online presence, start here. Written by a human, for humans. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leadershipinchange.com/subscribe

    35 min
  7. How "Compound With AI" Cut Stock Research to 60 Minutes

    May 6

    How "Compound With AI" Cut Stock Research to 60 Minutes

    TL;DR — Compound With AI is a Substack newsletter teaching 50,000 long-term investors how to compress six hours of stock research into about sixty minutes using AI prompts, Claude skills, and deep research workflows. We sat down on Substack Live this week and unpacked the actual mechanics, the prompt library, the multi-agent setup, the break-my-thesis move, the way he turns deep-research reports into NotebookLM podcasts to listen to while he’s training. Outline (00:00) – Welcome and how I found Compound With AI (02:30) – The deep research “cheat code”: six hours becomes sixty minutes (06:30) – Index funds for 99% of people, individual stocks for the rest (08:50) – Why retail investors now have the same tools as the best hedge funds (12:30) – The multi-agent setup: industry, earnings, risk, stock analyst (14:00) – The coffee shop walkthrough: thinking like an owner, not a buyer (17:30) – Reading ten years of management track record in minutes (22:00) – The professional learner edge (24:50) – Pen and paper before the prompt: why one prompt takes an hour (29:30) – Walking through Exxon from zero (32:30) – Turning deep research into a training-podcast with NotebookLM (34:00) – The “break my thesis” agent (43:30) – Where AI in investing is heading next A Few Things That Stuck With Me The deep research cheat code. So Compound With AI said something I want every leader to hear, because it lines up with what I’ve been seeing across coaching engagements all year. He said deep research changed everything for him about a year ago. Before that, getting to a real understanding of a new business took five or six hours of reading reports, and getting to a new industry from zero could take weeks. Now he runs the right prompt against deep research in Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT, walks away, and comes back to a structured ten-page report he can actually act on. “When this started working for me, I said, okay, this is a game changer. I used to do this and it would take five, six hours. And if you don’t know the industry, it would take weeks because you’re starting from zero.” The leaders I keep watching get unstuck are the ones who finally let AI do the part of the work that was burning their hours, the part that was always research disguised as judgment. The coffee shop walkthrough. This was the cleanest explanation of what real stock analysis is that I’ve heard live. He said, look, if you and I were going to open a coffee shop together, the first thing we’d do is walk down the street and count how many other coffee shops are already there. Then we’d think about what makes people walk into one shop instead of another, branding, margins, location, the way the staff smiles. He treats every stock the same way, and his prompts force AI to do the exact same exercise. “When people buy Starbucks the stock, they say, ‘Starbucks is a big brand, let’s buy it.’ They don’t do all the work because it’s kind of virtual money. And that’s the big issue for me.” This is the single most useful frame in the conversation. If you can explain out loud how a business actually makes money, you can prompt AI to dig into it, and if you can’t, no prompt in the world is going to rescue you, which is why I keep telling the leaders I coach that AI literacy starts with business literacy. Pen and paper before the prompt. Here’s the moment I most wanted to slow the conversation down on. He builds his prompts on paper first, by hand. He sits with a question, writes ten or fifteen sub-questions a smart human analyst would actually ask, and only then translates that to a typed prompt. One prompt takes him about an hour. Then he tests it on five or six stocks he already knows cold, so he can spot what the AI is missing. “To build one prompt I take one hour. I write pen and paper. Not everybody is willing to do the work.” Honestly, that admission was worth the whole hour for me. The hype industry sells AI as effortless, and the people I see getting real results are doing the slowest, boring part of the work, the part nobody puts in the demo videos: writing down the questions a smart human would ask before they ever touch the tool. The “break my thesis” agent. Here’s the move that landed hardest for me. Once Compound With AI has built a real reason to invest in a stock, instead of running another agent to confirm the thesis, he runs one specifically built to argue against him, hands it the bull case, points it at his own frameworks, and tells it to break the thesis. “Tell me what are the problems. And sometimes, honestly, AI will point to things you didn’t think about. And that’s very interesting.” I love this move because it flips the default way most leaders touch AI. Most people are quietly using AI to confirm what they already think, which is the fastest way to get a worse decision than if you’d just asked nobody at all. The investors who actually outperform are pointing AI at their own conclusions and asking it to break them, which is closer to how Buffett and Munger have always operated together, with Charlie’s whole job being to find the holes in Warren’s reasoning. (If you’re a leader thinking about where AI actually belongs in your own work and you’d like another set of eyes on it, this is the kind of thinking I do every week with the leaders I coach. You can start here if it would help to talk one through together.) One Question to Sit With What’s one domain in your own work where you’ve been prompting AI generically, when you could be sitting down for an hour and building a prompt library you’d use for the next ten years? Honestly, the floor is rising for everyone with AI in their hands now, the ceiling moved up with it, and the only thing left to decide is whether you choose to be a professional learner. Look, if you invest your own money, watch the full conversation above. And honestly, go subscribe to Compound With AI. Fifty thousand long-term investors are already inside, and the prompt library and weekly workflows are some of the most rigorous AI-for-investing material I’ve found anywhere on Substack. About me Joel Salinas is a Fractional Chief AI Officer for small and mid-sized businesses and nonprofits. Strategy, hands-on builds, and change management. He writes Leadership in Change and offers 1:1 coaching for individual leaders. If you want help thinking through your own AI strategy or online presence, start here. Written by a human, for humans. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leadershipinchange.com/subscribe

    46 min
  8. The Trust Premium: What Philip Hofmacher Taught Me About Building in the Age of AI

    Apr 27

    The Trust Premium: What Philip Hofmacher Taught Me About Building in the Age of AI

    TL;DR — AI made content production almost free, which means producing it is no longer what separates the creators who grow from the ones who stall. Trust, voice, and the depth of your actual expertise are. Call it the trust premium. In a Substack Live with Philip Hofmacher, cofounder of Write × Build × Scale, we walked through the litmus test that tells you whether AI is amplifying you or quietly replacing you, and why the creators winning the next 12 months are the ones loading their context, not their prompts. Outline (00:00) – Welcome and how I found Write × Build × Scale (02:00) – Building a business and a marriage with your cofounder (03:35) – From tennis to Skillshare to Substack: the platform-pivot lesson (09:30) – The value of community and masterminds (13:34) – How AI changed content creation in two years (17:25) – The sameness problem and the trust premium (22:00) – Lazy AI vs. strategic AI (24:54) – The litmus test: are you more of an expert than a year ago? (28:54) – Philip’s ChatGPT workflow and my Claude workflow (32:18) – Personal brand: stories beat lists (39:42) – Advice for creators stuck at 200-500 subscribers (45:46) – Philip’s billboard: AI amplifies you, or replaces you A Few Things That Stuck With Me The trust premium. So Philip Hofmacher said something on the live that just landed for me. “It got so easy to create products compared to how hard it is to sell something.” Ten years ago, when he was selling Skillshare courses on Instagram growth, the work was eighty percent making the course and twenty percent selling it. Now he says it’s the inverse. Building the product is the cheap part. Earning the trust to get somebody to actually consume it, that’s the expensive part. Honestly, the whole conversation lives in that one sentence. Call it the trust premium. When AI made production almost free, trust became the thing people are actually paying for. The research-assistant analogy. I used this on the live because it’s the analogy I keep coming back to with the leaders I coach. Look, if you hire a research assistant and you tell them, “find me information on Write × Build × Scale,” they’re going to go out and pull whatever’s public. They don’t know your angle. They don’t know what you’re actually trying to do, who your readers are, or what your point of view is on the topic. So they bring back the most generic version of what’s out there. That’s not on the research assistant though, that’s on you, because you sent them out empty-handed. AI is the exact same thing. The creators who use AI well aren’t smarter than everybody else. They figured out one boring thing earlier than most people, which is that AI on its own gives you the same average answer it gives everybody, and unless you take the time to load up the context first, the version you publish is going to look exactly like the version everybody else publishes. The litmus test. Here’s the question I tell every leader I coach to ask themselves, and I asked it on the live. Look at yourself a year ago. Are you more of an expert at what you do than you were twelve months ago? If yes, you’re using AI right. It’s compounding you, freeing the time you used to spend on grunt work and routing it back into the work that actually grows your craft, and you can feel it because you’re sharper than you were. If no, AI isn’t actually amplifying you, even if it feels like it is. What’s happening is slower and quieter than that. It’s doing the thinking that used to make you better, and the longer that goes on, the more your expertise quietly hollows out, until one day somebody notices you don’t actually know more than the model does. Philip closed the loop on the live, after I floated the idea. He said, “Basically using AI to become a better version of yourself, a better operator, a better business owner.” Same thing. Stories beat lists. Here’s the part of the conversation I keep coming back to. Philip mentioned his cofounder Jari’s dog, who apparently shows up in their community so often that when they announced an in-person event, the first question people asked was whether the dog would be there. He talked about his wife Sinem, who’s also his cofounder. I mentioned my seven-year-old, who’s been campaigning for a dog all month. None of that was strategy talk or monetization advice, just two real people talking shop on a Monday morning, occasionally laughing about their kids and their dogs. That’s the part AI can’t reproduce yet, and honestly probably never will. That’s the moat. I work with leaders on exactly this, executives, marketing VPs, nonprofit CEOs trying to figure out how to show up in the AI era without sounding like every other person on Substack. If it would help to talk this through, here’s my calendar. Let us know in the comments… Are you better at your craft than you were a year ago? If the answer’s no, what’s AI actually doing for you? Look, if you write or build anything online, watch the full conversation above. And honestly, go subscribe to Write × Build × Scale. Philip Hofmacher, Sinem Günel, and Jari Roomer are running the most useful creator-economy publication I’ve found, and most of what I’ve actually figured out about Substack in the last six months traces back to their work. Joel Salinas is a Fractional Chief AI Officer for small and mid-sized businesses and nonprofits. Strategy, hands-on builds, and change management. He writes Leadership in Change and offers 1:1 coaching for individual leaders. If you want help thinking through your own AI strategy or online presence, start here. Written by a human, for humans. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leadershipinchange.com/subscribe

    51 min
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