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.

Toby and Chmiel continue last week’s conversation on human ingenuity with a founder who’s putting it to the test. Katherine von Jan (KVJ to those who know her) joins the pod to talk about her new venture, Tough Day, and its mission to unlock the best of human potential in an AI-saturated workplace. As a longtime ON_Discourse member and former Salesforce exec turned startup founder, KVJ has a sharp perspective on where AI helps, where it hurts, and why the future of work depends on not automating away what makes us human.

Details in the Show

• Why KVJ believes the next wave of AI should elevate human problem-solving, not replace it
• The overlooked cost of frictionless workflows, and why some struggle is essential to great ideas
• How “human ingenuity gaps” show up inside organizations, and what tools can close them
• Lessons KVJ carried from big tech leadership into startup building in the AI era
• Why today’s obsession with scale blinds us to the micro-moments that define good work
• A challenge to AI founders: build tech that makes people better, not just faster

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, Matt, and Dan wrestle with what it means to have a “voice” in an AI-mediated world, and what happens when that voice gets flattened, filtered, or faked. This episode digs into the paradox of human ingenuity in the age of synthetic output, the strange intimacy of talking to machines, and why friction, not fluency, might be the future of AI design.

Details in the Show

• Why AI-generated content feels increasingly soulless and how “sludge” became the internet’s new texture
• The performance of trust: how we signal presence in an era of invisible agents
• A defense of friction: what gets lost when AI makes things too easy
• How real-time collaboration with AI can sharpen and not replace human ideas
• Why product interfaces may need less wizardry and more humanity

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 guest Craig Hepburn step inside the AI browser wars, and ask if the future of the internet is being quietly rewritten not by models, but by interfaces. This episode zooms in on Perplexity’s new agentic browser Comet, the real promise (and limits) of context-aware assistants, and what gets lost when AI "helps" too much.

Details in the Show

• Why “the browser” might be AI’s most important battlefield, and what Perplexity’s big bet reveals
• The rise of agentic interfaces and the myth of productivity-as-progress
• The paradox of better UX: does frictionless mean future-proof, or forgettable?
• Why Google is still sleeping at the wheel, and how fast that could change
• What Craig learned from testing five AI browsers, and which one might actually stick
• The power (and danger) of right-click reversal: what happens when the browser starts prompting you
• A little “closed system vs. open protocol” debate
• How context layers could finally fix the broken web… or break it entirely

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 interrogate the quiet crisis hiding inside the AI boom: we’re offloading too much thinking and calling it strategy. This episode explores what gets lost when cognitive offloading becomes the norm, and why the future of leadership may depend on friction, not flow.

Details in the Show

• Why “upstream of strategy” isn’t just a catchphrase—it’s a call to rethink how we think
• Cognitive offloading, groupthink, and the invisible atrophy of over-automated ideas
• What AI can't replicate: disagreement, unpredictability, and taste
• Why trust, vulnerability, and gut-checks still outperform generative polish
• The difference between provocation and prompting—and why AI doesn’t know the difference
• How “the weak ties” in your network might be your sharpest strategic inputs
• The real value of feeling dumb: learning, not performance, is the point

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.

Dan, Toby, and Chmiel go behind the scenes of Cannes Lions to unpack the real programming, posturing, and potential shaping the creative industry’s biggest week. Is the future of advertising being written on the main stage or whispered behind closed doors?

Details in the Show

• Why the most important conversations at Cannes don’t happen on stage
• How closed-door programming became the sharpest tool for industry change
• The AI content hype loop: tools, platitudes, and the myth of mastery
• Automation vs. creativity: why the exciting stuff is still the unknown
• “Implementation isn’t innovation”—and other Cannes heresies
• The honest (and uneasy) truth about AI’s impact on labor, ads, and originality

Learn more about ON_Discourse.

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.

In this episode, we’re joined by Taylor Halsted of Shamrock Capital to interrogate the illusion of AI efficiency. What if the mess we’re trying to automate out of work is actually where creativity, connection, and culture live?

Details in the Show

• Why “Head of AI” might be the new “Webmaster”—and just as misguided
• The difference between performing productivity and producing outcomes
• Whether AI is making us more emotionally honest—or just better at faking it
• “AI guilt,” last-mile problems, and the hidden costs of over-orchestration
• Messy work, vibecoding, and the underrated value of creative friction
• What it takes to build AI culture without losing the human core

Learn more about ON_Discourse.

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 sits down with Henrik Werdelin and Nicholas Thorne, co-authors of Me, My Customer, and AI, to interrogate the optimistic thesis at the heart of their book, and the paradoxes it reveals. From donkeycorns to Dunbar numbers, this session explores what happens when everyone is an entrepreneur, and no one stands out.

Details in the episode:

• Why founder–customer fit matters more than product–market fit
• The illusion of scale and the power of intimacy
• Donkeycorns, not unicorns: redefining success in the AI era
• The creative danger of agreeable AI (and why we need disagreeable bots)
• What it means to “solve small” and why feedback loops must get weird

Learn more about ON_Discourse.

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 and Dan track the decline of Google Search, the end of SEO, and what’s replacing it: group chats, agentic systems, and personalized internets built around behavior, not clicks.

Details in the episode:

• Why search is collapsing (and what’s replacing it)
• How generative AI is reshaping discovery and intent
• What the “human internet” might look like
• Why the future isn’t conversational—it’s contextual
• Blockchain, Web3, and the portability of “your internet”

Learn more about ON_Discourse.

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.

We have been hosting closed-door, private Group Chats at ON_Discourse for 2 years. In this episode, Toby and Chmiel talk about the ON_Discourse version of group chats and how they are different than the contentious, political experience that was recently profiled by Ben Smith at Semafor.

Details in the episode:

• How the pandemic inspired group chats
• How group chats are the future of media
• Why trust matters more than security in private chats

Learn more about ON_Discourse.

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.