ChatGPT and Claude are going direct to consumers with nostalgic commercials and friendly interfaces, but underneath the marketing is a fundamental shift in how we interact with technology. Dan, Toby, and Matthew dig into what happens when AI systems become the primary interface for everything - and whether these platforms will be truly open or just feel open while quietly controlling distribution, data, and dollars.

Details in the Show:

* Why ChatGPT's retro marketing makes us want to watch Stranger Things

* The difference between open protocols and closed ecosystems

* How agentic systems change the attention economy (and who controls it)

* Why platform dependency always ends the same way

* What Amazon's playbook tells us about AI's future

About ON_Discourse

ON_Discourse is a private community of C-suite leaders, investors, and innovators who come together to challenge assumptions, sharpen ideas, and drive transformation through discourse. 

As an experiment in modern discourse, the show’s hosts co-founders, Toby Daniels, Dan Gardner, and Head of Discourse, Matt Chmiel, explore how emerging technologies, such as AI are reshaping business, creativity, and culture, grounded in the real-world experiences that emerge from our community’s private Group Chats.

Learn more about becoming part of the community: ondiscourse.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

AI is making predictions cheaper, faster, and easier at scale. But forecasting is still guessing, and NYU Stern Professor Jamyn Edis argues that what AI can't replace is human judgment. In this conversation, we dig into why defining "intelligence" matters, how business actually works versus how we pretend it works, and what happens when we confuse prediction with decision-making.

Details in the Show:

* Why judgment and intelligence aren't the same thing

* The difference between prediction and decision-making in business

* How AI changes what we measure, not whether we should trust the measurement

* Academic vs. business discourse (and why one is afraid of being wrong)

* Putting tomatoes in fruit salad

About ON_Discourse

ON_Discourse is a private community of C-suite leaders, investors, and innovators who come together to challenge assumptions, sharpen ideas, and drive transformation through discourse. 

As an experiment in modern discourse, the show’s hosts co-founders, Toby Daniels, Dan Gardner, and Head of Discourse, Matt Chmiel, explore how emerging technologies, such as AI are reshaping business, creativity, and culture, grounded in the real-world experiences that emerge from our community’s private Group Chats.

Learn more about becoming part of the community: ondiscourse.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

ChatGPT just released Sora 2, a tool that lets you create videos starring your own digital avatar. Add that to last week's Pulse, and suddenly we're not just consuming content, we're becoming it. But who actually asked for this? And what happens when synthetic content floods the same feeds we're already exhausted by?

Details in the Show:

* The cameo feature and personalized synthetic content

* Whether people want algorithmically generated entertainment

* How OpenAI is closing the web by moving from tool to ecosystem

About ON_Discourse

ON_Discourse is a private community of C-suite leaders, investors, and innovators who come together to challenge assumptions, sharpen ideas, and drive transformation through discourse. 

As an experiment in modern discourse, the show’s hosts co-founders, Toby Daniels, Dan Gardner, and Head of Discourse, Matt Chmiel, explore how emerging technologies, such as AI are reshaping business, creativity, and culture, grounded in the real-world experiences that emerge from our community’s private Group Chats.

Learn more about becoming part of the community: ondiscourse.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

ChatGPT recently launched Pulse, a feature that reads everything you do, repackages your work back to you, as if you are the subject of a daily newsroom. It's like taking notes that talk back, or having someone present your own thoughts better than you could. Is this useful or just another feed we'll forget about in three weeks.

Details in the Show:

* Behavior-driven media vs algorithmic targeting

* The difference between relatability and utility in AI-generated content

* How context plus specificity changes your relationship with information

* Whether this is the start of something bigger or just yesterday's weather report

About ON_Discourse

ON_Discourse is a private community of C-suite leaders, investors, and innovators who come together to challenge assumptions, sharpen ideas, and drive transformation through discourse. 

As an experiment in modern discourse, the show’s hosts co-founders, Toby Daniels, Dan Gardner, and Head of Discourse, Matt Chmiel, explore how emerging technologies, such as AI are reshaping business, creativity, and culture, grounded in the real-world experiences that emerge from our community’s private Group Chats.

Learn more about becoming part of the community: ondiscourse.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The AI revolution promised to transform everything. Instead, we got chatbots that sound smart but deliver work that looks like a duck, walks like a duck, but turns out to be a goose. This episode digs into why the agentic AI hype hasn't delivered transformative experiences, and what's really holding back the next phase of human-computer interaction.

Details in the Show:

• Why "not everything needs to be a conversation" is the key insight missing from AI design
• How the volume knob reveals the flaw in invisible interface thinking
• Why better thinking doesn't equal better doing in the agentic world
• The difference between multi-step reasoning and true agency
• How the internet became static again, and where the UX designers went
• Why AI tools still require you to do your actual work

Learn more at ON_Discourse.com

About ON_Discourse

ON_Discourse is a private community of C-suite leaders, investors, and innovators who come together to challenge assumptions, sharpen ideas, and drive transformation through discourse. 

As an experiment in modern discourse, the show’s hosts co-founders, Toby Daniels, Dan Gardner, and Head of Discourse, Matt Chmiel, explore how emerging technologies, such as AI are reshaping business, creativity, and culture, grounded in the real-world experiences that emerge from our community’s private Group Chats.

Learn more about becoming part of the community: ondiscourse.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Andrew Rosen’s ESPN vs. NYT breakdown is generating headlines, not because it’s about sports or news, but because it’s about institutions facing disruption. This episode doesn’t just recap his argument, it asks a harder question: What does it look like when legacy brands adjust too slowly to seismic shifts in distribution, personalization, and participation?

Details in the Show:

* Why Rosen says NYT is adapting, and ESPN isn’t

* How personalization is breaking legacy distribution models

* What AI-native fandom reveals about the future of content

* How legacy instutions in legacy platforms should adapt to the AI revolution

Learn more at ON_Discourse.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

About ON_Discourse

ON_Discourse is a private community of C-suite leaders, investors, and innovators who come together to challenge assumptions, sharpen ideas, and drive transformation through discourse. 

As an experiment in modern discourse, the show’s hosts co-founders, Toby Daniels, Dan Gardner, and Head of Discourse, Matt Chmiel, explore how emerging technologies, such as AI are reshaping business, creativity, and culture, grounded in the real-world experiences that emerge from our community’s private Group Chats.

Learn more about becoming part of the community: ondiscourse.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Toby, Dan, and Chmiel set out to decode vibe coding but end up in a more urgent conversation about thinking. What happens when our tools get smarter, but our minds get lazier? Who wins in the battle between machine automation and human inspiration?

Details in the Show:

* How vibe coding is amazing (and frustrating)

* The rise of synthetic synthesis and what it’s doing to original thought

* How AI enables performance over understanding

* What happens when the internet becomes a memory prosthetic, and we stop remembering anything ourselves'

Learn more at ON_Discourse.com

About ON_Discourse

ON_Discourse is a private community of C-suite leaders, investors, and innovators who come together to challenge assumptions, sharpen ideas, and drive transformation through discourse. 

As an experiment in modern discourse, the show’s hosts co-founders, Toby Daniels, Dan Gardner, and Head of Discourse, Matt Chmiel, explore how emerging technologies, such as AI are reshaping business, creativity, and culture, grounded in the real-world experiences that emerge from our community’s private Group Chats.

Learn more about becoming part of the community: ondiscourse.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Toby, Dan, and Chmiel dig into the implosion of Gartner’s market cap, and what it reveals about the future of knowledge work. The conversation starts with a provocative question: if the business of certifying value no longer creates value, what’s next?

Details in the Show:

• Why Gartner lost half its value
• The crumbling authority of research firms in a world of AI-generated synthesis
• Why “knowledge work” was always a proxy for service
• If AI can truly replace what Gartner does
• Plus: the annual lobster roll competition, and what it teaches us about surf, turf, and interface friction

Learn more at ON_Discourse.com

About ON_Discourse

ON_Discourse is a private community of C-suite leaders, investors, and innovators who come together to challenge assumptions, sharpen ideas, and drive transformation through discourse. 

As an experiment in modern discourse, the show’s hosts co-founders, Toby Daniels, Dan Gardner, and Head of Discourse, Matt Chmiel, explore how emerging technologies, such as AI are reshaping business, creativity, and culture, grounded in the real-world experiences that emerge from our community’s private Group Chats.

Learn more about becoming part of the community: ondiscourse.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Toby, Dan, and Chmiel examine LinkedIn’s strange grip on our professional lives. What starts as a confession, Toby admitting to opening the app 30 times a day, turns into a bigger question: is LinkedIn a tool, a feed, or just another dopamine trap? Together, they unpack why the platform feels indispensable yet indistinguishable from TikTok or Instagram, and what that says about the state of “professional” culture online.

Details in the Show:

• Why LinkedIn use feels more like compulsion than utility
• The collapsing distinction between LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram feeds
• Dan’s take on why “professional content” isn’t as unique as it once was
• How the platform serves as both a temperature check and a time sink
• Whether compulsive usage equals value or just digital junk food
• What LinkedIn’s stickiness reveals about the broader internet economy of attention

Learn more at ON_Discourse.com

About ON_Discourse

ON_Discourse is a private community of C-suite leaders, investors, and innovators who come together to challenge assumptions, sharpen ideas, and drive transformation through discourse. 

As an experiment in modern discourse, the show’s hosts co-founders, Toby Daniels, Dan Gardner, and Head of Discourse, Matt Chmiel, explore how emerging technologies, such as AI are reshaping business, creativity, and culture, grounded in the real-world experiences that emerge from our community’s private Group Chats.

Learn more about becoming part of the community: ondiscourse.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chmiel sits down with ON_Discourse members Natalie Monbiot and Craig Elimeliah for a sharp dive into AI’s hidden cost: the erosion of human cognition. Natalie, founder of Virtual Human Economy, shares research showing how over-reliance on LLMs can short-circuit learning, while Craig, Chief Creative Officer at Code and Theory, explores how design choices can either feed (or fight) that decline. Together, they unpack why today’s AI interfaces make it too easy to bypass thinking, and how reimagined UX could keep humans in the loop without slowing progress.

Details in the Show

• Why cognitive “bypassing” is more a UX problem than an AI inevitability
• The MIT Media Lab study showing how starting with AI leads to zero recall and weaker encoding of ideas
• What “caring” means in creative work, and why instant AI answers kill it
• How better interface design could encourage iteration, reflection, and deeper engagement
• Craig’s view on designing AI experiences that empower rather than overwhelm users
• Why friction is the spark for meaning-making and growth
• A challenge to AI product teams: stop optimizing for speed at the expense of human depth

Learn more at ON_Discourse.com.

About ON_Discourse

ON_Discourse is a private community of C-suite leaders, investors, and innovators who come together to challenge assumptions, sharpen ideas, and drive transformation through discourse. 

As an experiment in modern discourse, the show’s hosts co-founders, Toby Daniels, Dan Gardner, and Head of Discourse, Matt Chmiel, explore how emerging technologies, such as AI are reshaping business, creativity, and culture, grounded in the real-world experiences that emerge from our community’s private Group Chats.

Learn more about becoming part of the community: ondiscourse.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.