Hans Peter Brøndmo, who led Google X's Everyday Robots moonshot for seven years. Most conversations about AI stop at the screen.

This one starts where the screen ends. Hans Peter Brøndmo spent seven years at Google X trying to answer a question nobody had solved: how do you build a machine that can live alongside people rather than behind a factory cage? His answer reframes the whole field. You cannot program a robot to live amongst us, you have to teach it.

From there the conversation opens outward, into demographics, policy, aging parents, and the New Deal. Brøndmo argues that the AI debate has narrowed to safety legislation and the future of work, and that both are a sliver of something far larger: a societal transition on the scale of the industrial revolution, compressed into a fraction of the time, hitting eight and a half billion people instead of one billion. If you want the version of this conversation that is neither doom nor hype, this is it.

Guest: Hans Peter Brøndmo. Led Everyday Robots, Google X's AI-meets-robotics moonshot, for seven years (2016 to 2023) as a VP at X. Currently writing a book on what it means to be human in the age of intelligent machines.

Core topic: what happens when AI stops living on a screen and starts acting in the physical world, and who gets to decide what that society looks like.

What you will learn

• Why Brøndmo's team concluded you cannot program a robot to live among us, using Google Translate as the proof that teaching beats rule-writing
• The hurricane model for AI forecasting: stop predicting where it lands, start improving the infrastructure before it does
• Why China is moving to outlaw romantic relationships with AI, and how that connects to a population projected to fall from 1.4 billion to roughly 750 million by 2100
  
  About the guest

Hans Peter Brøndmo is a serial technology entrepreneur who joined Google X in January 2016 and went on to found and lead Everyday Robots, the moonshot that bet on AI as the path to general-purpose robotics years before large language models made that bet look obvious. He has founded and sold companies, advises startups, and is writing a book on what it means to be human in the age of intelligent machines. He grew up in Norway and is based in San Francisco.

Connect with Hans Peter Brøndmo

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hanspeter/
• Website: https://www.brondmo.com/

Connect with Mykel Salomon and The Human Protocol

• Mykel Salomon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mykelsalomon/
• Website: https://thehumanprotocolgroup.com
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@THEHUMANPROTOCOLPODCAST
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0tOWJPoD4oDe4pULSnqMF9
• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-human-protocol/id1843402023
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-human-protocol

Most conversations about AI start with the same question:

“What can I do that a machine can't?”

Vivienne Ming argues that this is the wrong question.

There is no single magic skill that will remain permanently “robot-proof.” If humans can clearly define a task and determine what the right answer looks like, machines will increasingly become better, faster, and cheaper at performing it.

Instead, we need to focus on the deeper qualities that make people uniquely capable.

Drawing on research involving 122 million people, Vivienne explains how qualities such as curiosity, resilience, fluid intelligence, and perspective-taking can be more meaningful predictors of positive life outcomes than traditional credentials or individual technical skills.

That insight becomes even more important in the age of AI.

The strongest performers were a small group Vivienne calls “cyborgs.”

These people didn't simply accept AI answers. They combined the machine's capabilities with their own reasoning, curiosity, and judgment. The result was something neither human nor AI could achieve alone: hybrid intelligence.

But there is a serious warning.

What You Will Learn

• Why “What can I do that AI can't?” is the wrong question

• Why there is no single robot-proof skill

• Why traditional degrees and hard skills may not predict future success

• The deeper human capabilities that matter: curiosity, resilience, fluid intelligence, intellectual humility, and perspective-taking
About the Guest

Dr. Vivienne Ming is a theoretical neuroscientist, entrepreneur, AI researcher, and author working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and human potential.

Her book Robot-Proof explores what humans need to develop as machines become increasingly capable.

Her work ultimately comes back to one question:

How can technology make us more human — not less?

Connect with Vivienne Ming

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vivienneming/

SOCOS Labs: https://www.socos.org/

Connect with The Human Protocol

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mykelsalomon/

Website: https://thehumanprotocolgroup.com

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0tOWJPoD4oDe4pULSnqMF9

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-human-protocol/id1843402023

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-human-protocol

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thehumanprotocolpodcast/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thehumanprotocol

Steve Brown is an AI futurist and keynote speaker who gave 55 talks across three continents last year, spent ten plus years at Intel Labs, and served as an in-house futurist at Google DeepMind in London. His new book is The AI Ultimatum.

Every company is racing to use AI to cut costs, and Steve Brown thinks most of them are about to lose the one thing they cannot get back: their people, their culture, and the reason anyone chose them in the first place. In this conversation with Mykel Salomon, Steve makes the case that AI is not another tool out of the IT department. It is the first technology in fifty years that rewards labor amplification over labor substitution, and the leaders who reach for the old efficiency playbook will end up indistinguishable from their competitors, competing on nothing but price.

From there it gets practical. Steve lays out his three phases of AI transformation, the offload, elevate and extend framework for splitting work between humans and machines, and the one metric he tells every CEO to stop worshipping. He also goes into the hard constraints nobody can spend their way past, watts and wafers, why he does not believe there is an AI bubble, the shift toward good-enough and open-weight models, and the training data experiment that turned a blackmailing AI into a well-behaved one.

For CEOs, boards, operators and anyone who has been handed an AI strategy to write this quarter, this is the version of the conversation that goes past the headlines.

What you will learn

• Why AI is the first technology in fifty years that punishes the cost-cutting playbook, and what "labor amplification, not labor substitution" actually looks like in practice
• The company A, B and C thought experiment: how two cost-cutters end up identical and race each other to the bottom on price while the amplifier redefines the game entirely
• Steve's three phases of AI transformation, AI as a tool, AI as a coworker, AI as the operating system of the business, and why you cannot skip straight to phase three
• The offload, elevate, extend framework for dividing work between humans, agents and robots, and why most leaders never get past offload
• The metric he tells leaders to stop chasing, and the vectors of performance that should replace it: quality, creativity, intuition, decision making
• Why he is not an AI bubble believer, and how Gavin Baker's watts and wafers constraint plus Jevons Paradox shape the next decade of demand
  
  About the guest

  Steve Brown is an AI futurist, keynote speaker and author who works with boards and leadership teams on AI transformation. He spent over a decade at Intel, including Intel Labs, and was later an in-house futurist at Google DeepMind in London. Last year he delivered 55 talks across three continents.

  His book, The AI Ultimatum, argues that leaders have no choice about embracing AI, and no excuse for doing it irresponsibly.

  
  Connect with Steve Brown

  • Website : https://www.stevebrown.ai
  • Book - The AI Ultimatum : https://a.co/d/02PkQvjc
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/futuresteve/
    
    Connect with Mykel Salomon
    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mykelsalomon/
    Website: https://thehumanprotocolgroup.com/

Dr. Marcelo Bigliassi, neuroscientist at Florida International University and Chief Scientist at NeuroSmart

Mykel Salomon sits down with neuroscientist Dr. Marcelo Bigliassi with a real human brain on the table between them, and asks the question everyone is circling around: if brain chips became mass available tomorrow, would you get one? The answer is a flat no, and the reason has nothing to do with the technology. Bigliassi spends his days building machine learning models of the brain, so when he says the organ running your life cannot be replicated, it comes from the data side of the argument, not the sentimental one. Along the way he explains what stress actually is and how to run its four phases, why brain size has nothing to do with intelligence, why he thinks the PhD itself is at risk, and why the single biggest threat of AI is not job loss but something he calls rationale building. If you have ever wondered whether the machines are catching up to us, this hour is the reality check.

About the guest

Dr. Marcelo Bigliassi is a newly tenured neuroscientist at Florida International University and Chief Scientist at NeuroSmart. His work sits at the intersection of psychophysiology and data science, decoding what happens inside the brain and body under stress, effort and performance using brain imaging, wearables, EEG and machine learning. He runs 30 plus studies across the globe and builds the neural network models in his own lab, which is what makes his skepticism about brain chips worth hearing: he is not an outsider warning about AI, he is one of the people building it.

• Why a working neuroscientist who builds AI models says no to a brain chip, and the one-word answer he gives before explaining it
• The four phases of the stress cycle (identify, act, exercise, recover) and why skipping the exercise phase makes stress almost impossible to clear
• Why psychological stress and physical stress cancel each other out, traced down to which sweat glands each one activates
• Why brain size has nothing to do with intelligence, and the cognitive function he says is the real indicator
• Rationale building: how you can get an AI to produce 1000 pages proving a correlation that does not exist, and why he calls this the biggest threat of AI
• Why he says the PhD is at risk, and the simple question that collapses his AI-assisted students
• Why AI did not shift the intelligence curve at all, and why experts are making ten times more money because of it
• What to do when your sleep score says 60 percent but you feel fully recovered, and why the wearable is probably wrong
• Why "if you need motivation to go to the gym, then do not go to the gym" is a neuroscience argument, not tough love
• The symmetry of life: why every upgrade to your life has a cost you may not see for years
  
  Connect with Dr. Marcelo Bigliassi

  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcelo-bigliassi/
  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bigliassi/
  
  Connect with Mykel Salomon
  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mykelsalomon/
  Website: https://thehumanprotocolgroup.com/

Why AI adoption fails and how to actually change people's behavior, with behavioral scientist JonRobert Tartaglione on The Human Protocol with Mykel Salomon.

Everyone is racing to adopt AI. Almost nobody is asking the harder question: how do you get humans to change? Cambridge-trained psychologist and Influence 51 founder JonRobert Tartaglione breaks down the behavioral science of leadership influence, why change management fails when leaders treat the brain like a computer, and where persuasion crosses the line into manipulation. We also get into loss aversion, psychological safety at work, and the neuroscience of belonging.

In this episode:

•     Why authority and charm buy compliance, and why compliance disappears the second the pressure does

•     Why humans are rationalizing creatures, not rational ones, and what that means for your data-backed business case

•     The one engagement survey question that exposes the misperceived norms shaping your team

•     How framing AI as a replacement versus an extension changes whether people adopt it

•     The $10,000 coin flip that 80 to 90 percent of people refuse, and what loss aversion costs your rollout

•     The two lines that separate influence from manipulation: coercion and deception

•     Why social rejection registers in the brain almost identically to physical pain

Chapters:

00:00:00 Managing tasks vs changing beliefs

00:03:30 Why compliance is not change

00:06:48 What McDonald's and trial lawyers share

00:08:41 Principle 1: your brain is not a computer

00:16:30 What AI genuinely cannot do

00:23:16 Belonging is a survival instinct

00:24:47 The binge drinking number students get wrong

00:29:22 Persuasion is jiu jitsu, not wrestling

00:35:09 One tool vs a full toolkit

00:40:12 80% fat free vs 20% fat

00:42:27 Why AI rollouts stall on people

00:45:21 The $10,000 coin flip nobody takes

00:50:51 Where influence becomes manipulation

00:54:37 Rejection registers like physical pain

00:59:51 Belonging is a tax on your talent

01:02:53 The one skill he won't outsource

Dr. JonRobert Tartaglione

LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonrobert-tartaglione-ph-d-21b26770/

LinkedIn:
linkedin.com/in/mykelsalomon

Website:
https://thehumanprotocolgroup.com/

#Leadership #AIAdoption #TheHumanProtocol

In this episode of The Human Protocol, host Mykel Salomon sits down with Minyang Jiang, Chief Strategy Officer at fintech leader Credibly, to unpack why most AI rollouts fail before they even start. MJ makes the case that adopting AI is not a technology problem but a leadership and change-management problem, and that the way you frame it determines everything. Call it cost-cutting, and your people hear layoffs. Call it growth and they start building with you.

She shares hard-won lessons from years of leading AI transformation, including why she runs a "Skunk Works" innovation lab, why she expects most small AI projects to fail, and why real learning only happens through friction. If you lead a team and feel stuck on AI adoption, this conversation gives you a clearer, more human path forward.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why framing AI as cost cutting quietly destroys employee trust, and what to say instead
• What "lazy leadership" looks like and the three ways leaders fall into it
• Why cost savings alone is a weak strategy that any competitor can copy
• How to build AI culture through small teams, real projects, and permission to fail
• Why AI adds complexity instead of just automating, and what that means for your people
• The metrics that actually matter for AI, including learning and proficiency, not just output
  
  

Connect with Minyang Jiang
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/minyang-jiang-6981a148/
Website: https://www.credibly.com/

Connect with Mykel Salomon
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mykelsalomon/
Website: https://thehumanprotocolgroup.com/

In a world where anyone can generate a resume, a portfolio, a voice, or a whole reputation in seconds, the real question is no longer who can produce something, but who can prove it.

In this episode, Mykel Salomon sits down with Dan Pratl, founder and CEO of Quadrant, to talk about why verification is becoming the most valuable resource we have. Drawing on a career that spans the SEC, open source software, crowdfunding, and crypto, along with a personal medical crisis that exposed how broken incentives fail real people, Dan makes the case that expertise is now an asset class. He explains how portable, verified proof of your work could replace the dying resume, why our intellectual property systems no longer fit the AI era, and how a bottoms-up approach can let individuals own and monetize their credibility instead of handing it to centralized platforms.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why "who can produce it" is being replaced by "who can prove it" as AI floods the world with high-quality noise
• How treating expertise as an asset class lets people own, control, and get paid for their credibility
• Why the resume and old-style social proof (ex-Google, ex-Meta, top schools) are losing their meaning
• How gradual disclosure and trade secrets can protect creators before ideas ever reach the patent stage
• Why trust has to be portable to work as a real market, instead of being locked inside platforms like LinkedIn or Upwork
• What individuals, companies, and policymakers should start doing now to prepare for verified expertise

Connect with Dan Pratl:
Website: https://quadron.tech/

X: https://x.com/QuadronAI

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danpratl/

Connect with Mykel Salomon
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mykelsalomon/
Website: https://thehumanprotocolgroup.com/

In this episode of The Human Protocol, host Mykel Salomon sits down with Harvard trained social scientist and technologist Alexandra Samuel to explore a fresh take on AI at work, one that skips the fear and the hype. Alexandra shares how the technology finally caught up to a prediction she made 30 years ago, why the real story of AI is about people and economics rather than the tools themselves, and how the neurodiversity movement offers a powerful lens for understanding our own strengths. The conversation gets refreshingly honest about the pull of AI, from late night vibe coding sessions to the strange joy of doing twelve things at once, and lands on practical habits for staying grounded, embodied, and true to yourself. If you have ever wondered how to use AI as a real collaborator without losing what makes you human, this one is for you.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why the biggest questions about AI are about economics and human behavior, not the technology itself
• How to find your "off center" human skills, the places where you sit far from the middle of the curve and can't be replaced by a machine
• What the neurodiversity movement teaches all of us about working with different kinds of brains and thinking styles
• How AI can pull you out of your body and why that embodied awareness matters for creativity and well-being
• Three simple habits for a healthier relationship with AI: set a clear intention, notice what is happening in your body, and pack your week with real human connection
• What Alexandra wants policymakers to actually do before making decisions about the future of AI

Connect with Alexandra Samuel
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/awsamuel/
Website: https://www.alexandrasamuel.com/

Connect with Mykel Salomon
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mykelsalomon/
Website: https://thehumanprotocolgroup.com/

In this episode, Mykel Salomon sits down with Ted Yang, MIT engineer, entrepreneur, former finance executive at Bridgewater and Citadel, and author of Ageless Peak Performance. Together they challenge the popular story that AI is here to replace people. Ted makes the case that AI is a cognitive tool built by humans that can actually extend your best years rather than end your career. They explore why raw speed peaks in your twenties but judgment keeps growing with age, why experience may be the ultimate AI advantage, and how anyone can move from casually poking at chatbots to truly adopting AI as a teammate.

The conversation covers mentorship, education, job displacement, and the difference between doing more and doing better. The big takeaway is simple: it's early, no one is an expert yet, and it's not too late to start.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why your judgment and experience become more valuable with AI, not less, since raw speed fades but wisdom and pattern recognition grow with time
• The difference between using AI to get answers versus using it to actually learn, and why one makes you weaker while the other makes you sharper
• How to shift from being a casual AI user to a real AI adopter who works with the tool like a teammate
• Why peak performance in the AI age is about quality and intention, not just producing more output
• How AI can act as a personal mentor and tutor that is available around the clock, patient with your questions, and customized to how you learn
• Practical, low pressure ways to get started even if you feel behind, intimidated, or worried about looking foolish

Connect with Ted Yang
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tedsensei/

Connect with Mykel Salomon
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mykelsalomon/
Website: https://thehumanprotocolgroup.com/

AI is moving fast, but most companies are failing to adopt it well, and the reason usually has nothing to do with the technology itself. In this episode, host Mykel Salomon sits down with Ryan Drumheller, a 20-year IT veteran and founder of StellarHorn Group, to talk about what leaders are getting wrong about AI adoption and why it always comes back to people. Ryan shares real stories from the field about companies that rushed AI rollouts without a strategy, tied it to employee KPIs, or used it as cover to cut costs, and why those decisions backfire. They dig into why communication, trust, and involving your team early make or break AI adoption, and why bad leadership gets exposed faster than ever in this new era. If you're a leader trying to figure out how to bring AI into your organization without losing your people along the way, this conversation is for you.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why AI adoption fails most often because of people problems, not technology problems
• What leaders consistently underestimate about rolling out AI in their organization
• Why forcing AI adoption through KPIs backfires and how to build real buy-in instead
• How to identify your internal AI champions and why involving them early changes everything
• Why clean data and a clear governance plan matter more than which AI tool you pick
• How bad leadership is getting exposed faster in the AI era, and what to do about it
  

Connect with Ryan Drumheller
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-drumheller/
Website: https://www.stellarhorn.com/

Connect with Mykel Salomon
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mykelsalomon/
Website: https://thehumanprotocolgroup.com/