• 55 minutes 18 seconds
    396: Trond Undheim, Author of The Platinum Workforce, on Why Knowledge Is Becoming Superfluous and System Awareness Is the Skill That Lasts

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    Trond Undheim is a futurist, innovation expert, and research scholar at Stanford University whose work spans governments, startups, and leading academic institutions. His ideas have been featured in outlets including Forbes, The Boston Globe, Fast Company, Fortune, and MIT News, and he previously hosted the Futurized podcast.

    He holds a PhD in AI and cognition from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and is the author of eight books, including The Platinum Workforce, which explores how to train and hire for the twenty-first century’s industrial transitions. 

    In this episode, Trond draws on decades of interdisciplinary work on emerging technologies, systemic risk, and workforce transitions to argue that system awareness, not traditional knowledge, will determine who thrives in an AI-defined economy.

    In this conversation, we discuss:

    • Why Trond says knowledge has become superfluous, and what that claim means for how we define expertise in an AI era.
    • Why cutting junior hires to cash in on AI efficiencies bakes a failure mode into your organization.
    • What “system awareness” looks like in practice, and how it changes the way leaders think about skills and careers.
    • Why socio-technical thinking matters, and how treating humans and machines as mutually constitutive systems reshapes AI design and governance.
    • Why humanity is unprepared to operate at gigascale, and what megaproject research suggests about the cost of that gap.
    • How The Platinum Workforce maps twelve durable skill domains, from socio-technical capabilities to maker and maintenance skills, that will outlast multiple AI waves.

    Explore this conversation:

    00:00 Intro and AI Fun Fact: Pew Research Americans More Concerned Than Excited About AI

    04:22 Introducing Trond Undheim, Futurist and Author of The Platinum Workforce

    05:09 Why the Workforce Is the Single Biggest Lever for Human Survival

    09:08 System Awareness: The Only Knowledge That Matters in the AI Era

    15:06 Socio-technical Systems: Co-Evolution of Humans and Technology

    17:54 Human Agency Over Technology: Who Really Sets the Rules

    23:24 The Human Skills AI Cannot Replace: Making, Maintaining and Place Maximizing

    31:12 Workforce Preparation for the AI Era: Training Juniors and Experimentation

    34:08 Macro Challenges: Giga-Scale Projects and Management at Scale

    45:33 The Augmented Workforce: What AI Integration Must Look Like in 10 Years

    54:39 Where to Connect with Trond Undheim and Learn More About The Platinum Workforce


    Resources:

    6 July 2026, 1:00 pm
  • 41 minutes 1 second
    395: Lev Gonick, CIO at Arizona State University: Why Higher Education Must Disrupt Itself and the New Definition of AI Literacy

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    Lev Gonick is the CIO at Arizona State University, one of the largest and fastest-growing universities in the United States, with over 200,000 students across campuses in Phoenix, Los Angeles, Washington, and 35 partner institutions around the world. He won an ORBIE Award in 2023 as a top large Enterprise CIO, was named a Top 50 Educational Technology Influencer by EdScoop in 2022, and holds a PhD in International Political Economy from York University.

    Before joining ASU, he was one of the rare CIOs who came from the classroom, having spent the first decade of his career as a teacher and researcher before pioneering online learning in the 1990s, long before it became an industry. 

    In this episode, Lev draws on more than 40 years at the intersection of technology and education to make the case that AI is not the disruptor of higher education, it is the accelerant, and that the institutions treating it that way are already building what everyone else is still debating.

    In this conversation, we discuss:

    • Why AI is not the disruptor of higher education, and what has actually been driving the disruption for decades
    • How ASU went from survival mode during the 2009 financial crisis to building the largest online learning operation in the country, and why the same instinct is now driving its AI strategy
    • What ASU's data from 200,000 students using AI daily actually reveals about which skills will endure and which ones will not
    • How the role of university faculty is fundamentally changing in the AI era, and why the hardest question has nothing to do with cheating
    • What the "Agentic self" means for creatives, and how a unique course taught by Will.i.am is helping students protect and amplify their creative futures.
    • How the traditional responsibilities of the Chief Information Officer are expanding beyond basic operations to actively shaping institutional strategy and innovation.

     

    Explore this conversation:

    • 00:00 Intro and AI Fun Fact: Blue Books vs AI Rethinking Academic Integrity
    • 04:25 Introducing Lev Gonick, CIO at Arizona State University
    • 05:17 From Classroom Teacher to Academic Disruptor at ASU
    • 08:16 ASU Principled Innovation and the Design Build Approach to AI
    • 13:23 Co-Creating with Industry: AWS Zoom and the GSV Summit at ASU
    • 17:35 Soft Skills Are Smart Skills: Rethinking AI Literacy in Higher Ed
    • 23:25 Rethinking Assessment: What Faculty Must Adapt to in the AI Era
    • 27:01 Why a College Degree Still Matters in the Age of AI
    • 30:37 From YouTube to ASU: Meeting Learners Where They Are
    • 34:22 Disrupt or Be Disrupted: ASU Mission to Reach 300000 Students
    • 35:57 From Operator to Strategist: The New Playbook for the Modern CIO
    • 40:26 Connect with Lev Gonick and Arizona State University

     

    RESOURCES

    29 June 2026, 1:00 pm
  • 37 minutes 27 seconds
    394: Dr. Muthu Alagappan, CEO of Counsel Health: Democratizing Primary Care with Semi-Autonomous AI

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    Dr. Muthu Alagappan is the Founder and CEO of Counsel Health, the company automating access to high-quality, personalized medical advice from doctors. Counsel recently closed a $25M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures, following an $11M seed round that included A16Z, Asymmetric Capital Partners, Floodgate Fund, and Pear VC.

    He holds an MD from Stanford Medicine and a B.S. in Biomechanical Engineering from Stanford, and was among the earliest AI researchers to publish on clinical applications of machine intelligence.

    In this episode, Muthu draws on 15 years at the intersection of AI research and frontline clinical medicine to explore the shift toward semi-autonomous care.

    In this conversation, we discuss:

    • How AI addresses the limitations of traditional primary care by offering a highly personalized, knowledgeable, and always available medical experience.
    • Why patients might leapfrog clinicians in their willingness to adopt AI for medical advice, and how this shift challenges the traditional identity of physicians.
    • What semi-autonomous care actually looks like in practice, and how Counsel Health uses a clinician cockpit to augment human compassion with real-time machine intelligence.
    • How to leverage population-level patterns without compromising patient privacy.
    • Why the double standard applied to AI is misplaced, and why Muthu argues we should hold AI to a much higher benchmark than human doctors simply.
    • What the future of global healthcare could look like when cognitive medical expertise is fully democratized, ensuring that a patient's zip code no longer dictates the quality of care they receive.

    Explore the Conversation

    00:00 Intro & AI Fun Fact: Big Data Limitations and Bias in Clinical AI
    03:52 Meet Dr. Muthu Alagappan: From Stanford AI Researcher to Counsel Health CEO
    06:51 Why Primary Care Falls Short: The Case for AI-Augmented Medicine
    09:05 Human Doctors Are Human: How Patients Are Adopting AI Medical Advice
    12:20 Patient Privacy and Population Health: Learning Without Training on Data
    14:17 Inside the Clinician Cockpit: Real-Time AI Support for Doctors
    16:17 Why Counsel Health Employs Its Own Physicians: Messaging-Based Care
    19:00 From Semi-Autonomous to Fully Autonomous Care: Healthcare's Next Era
    24:19 AI Ethics in Medicine: Safety Standards, Model Values, and Data Ownership
    27:22 The AI Double Standard: Why Machines Deserve a Higher Benchmark Than Doctors
    31:07 Founder Lessons: Building a Category-Defining Healthcare AI Company
    33:53 Rewriting the Commencement Address: Medicine as Lifelong Learning
    35:37 Where to Connect with Dr. Muthu Alagappan and Counsel Health


    Resources


    22 June 2026, 1:00 pm
  • 18 minutes 12 seconds
    Christine Yen, CEO and Co-Founder of Honeycomb | Live from HumanX 2026

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    Christine Yen is the CEO and co-founder of Honeycomb, the observability platform that helps engineering teams understand what their software is actually doing. A developer by background, she built products at Facebook before co-founding Honeycomb to bring fast, flexible observability to the rest of the world. 

    Recorded live from the floor of HumanX 2026, this lightning round explores what observability means now that both humans and agents are writing, shipping, and debugging code.

    Christine and host Dan Turchin dig into why the code was never the real source of truth, why "more" has become the watchword of the agentic era, and what it takes for teams to agree on what good actually looks like before they build it.

    What You'll Learn

    • Why the code was never the real source of truth, and what to observe instead
    • How the software development lifecycle is collapsing as PMs, designers, and engineers become builders
    • Why the system that writes the code should not be the one that judges it
    • How defining "good" in plain English keeps quality measurable, whether people or agents build it
    • What responsible AI looks like in practice, from disclosure norms to protecting human attention

    🎙️ Part of our HumanX 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19363520

    Resources

     

    18 June 2026, 1:00 pm
  • 20 minutes 7 seconds
    Dr. Ali Agha, CEO and Co-Founder of FieldAI | Live from HumanX 2026

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    Dr. Ali Agha is the CEO and co-founder of FieldAI, where he is building general-purpose "brains" for robots across different forms, environments, and tasks. He has spent nearly two decades in AI autonomy, including years at NASA JPL and research roots at MIT, putting software and intelligence on drones, legged robots, and other platforms. 

    Recorded live from the floor of HumanX 2026, this lightning round explores what it takes to bring AI safely into the physical world, where people already live and work.

    Ali and host Dan Turchin dig into why reliability is the overlooked challenge of physical AI, why a robot should communicate how confident it is before it acts, and where the line sits between the tasks machines should take on and the ones that should always stay human.

    What You'll Learn

    • Why reliability, not lab demos, is the real test for AI in the physical world
    • How robots that measure and share their own uncertainty earn human trust on the job site
    • Why the future of robotics is hundreds of specialized form factors, not one humanoid
    • How FieldAI targets the dirty, dull, and dangerous work to keep people out of harm's way
    • Where the boundary sits: the creative, strategic, and human-touch decisions that stay with people

    🎙️ Part of our HumanX 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19363520

    Resources

     

    18 June 2026, 1:00 pm
  • 21 minutes 59 seconds
    Dr. Jaime Lien, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist of Archetype AI | Live from HumanX 2026

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    Dr. Jaime Lien is the Chief Scientist and a co-founder of Archetype AI, where she is building a foundation model that turns complex sensor data into meaning people can actually act on. A signal processing scientist by training, she earned her PhD working on RF imaging from satellites and later helped develop the first radar embedded in consumer smartphones at Google, before leaving with four colleagues to start Archetype AI. 

    Recorded live from the floor of HumanX 2026, this lightning round explores how AI can read the rich, non-human signals all around us and translate them for the people who rely on them.

    Jaime and host Dan Turchin dig into how machines distill signal from noise, why a reasoning and communication model matters more than a straight-to-action one, and why keeping a human in the loop is a requirement, not a feature, when the stakes are physical.

    What You'll Learn

    • How AI separates meaningful signal from noise across the sensors already around us
    • Why Archetype builds a reasoning and communication model, not a straight-to-action one
    • Why keeping a human in the loop is treated as a requirement, not an optional feature
    • How interpretability and explainability have to be designed in from the start, not added later
    • Why discovering something new about the physical world matters more than automation alone

    🎙️ Part of our HumanX 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19363520

    Resources

     

    18 June 2026, 1:00 pm
  • 22 minutes 2 seconds
    XD Huang, CTO at Zoom | Live from HumanX 2026

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    XD Huang is the CTO of Zoom, where he is leading the company's shift from hosting meetings to completing work, a vision he calls conversation to completion. He joined Zoom after 30 years at Microsoft, where he served as Azure AI CTO and a Technical Fellow and helped ship Azure OpenAI Services. A pioneer in speech recognition for four decades, he led the Microsoft team that first reached human parity in transcribing conversational speech. 

    Recorded live from the floor of HumanX 2026, this lightning round explores what it takes to turn everyday conversation into finished work.

    XD and host Dan Turchin dig into Zoom's federated approach to AI, the cost and accuracy tradeoffs hidden inside every model decision, and why, after a career spent solving the hardest technical problems, he believes taste and judgment are the qualities that still belong to people.

    What You'll Learn

    • What "conversation to completion" means for the way work actually gets done
    • How Zoom's federated approach combines multiple frontier models into one stronger result
    • Why every AI decision is a tradeoff between cost and accuracy, and how to control for it
    • How an open ecosystem lets the same AI work across Zoom, Google, Microsoft, and in-person meetings
    • Why taste and judgment are the qualities XD hires for that AI cannot replace

    🎙️ Part of our HumanX 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19363520

    Resources

     

    18 June 2026, 1:00 pm
  • 29 minutes 47 seconds
    SE 26: Designing AI for Accountability and Harmony with Leaders from Honeycomb, FieldAI, Archetype AI, and Zoom | Live from HumanX 2026 Special Episode

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    In this special compilation episode of AI and the Future of Work, we are bringing you four conversations recorded live on the show floor at HumanX 2026. This is the second and final compilation of our three-part HumanX Live series.

    Our first compilation explored how AI amplifies the human potential it can never replace. This one turns to the technical side, and to a question that gets harder the more these systems touch our lives: how do you build AI you can actually trust not to fail when it matters most? 

    As technology reaches further into the moments that count (the systems that monitor our health, drive our cars, and work alongside us on the job), these four builders share how they design for accountability, safety, and harmony between people and machines.

    What You'll Learn

    • Why reading code is no longer enough, and how observing real outcomes (not system metrics alone) is the only way to know whether AI is actually serving the people who depend on it
    • What "AI values" are, and why companies will soon need shared norms for how people disclose, review, and engage with work produced by agentic systems
    • How robots earn trust on a job site by measuring their own uncertainty, asking questions, and communicating their intentions before they act
    • Why the most valuable place for automation is the dirty, dull, and dangerous work humans were never meant to do, and what that means for keeping people safe
    • Why physical AI should be built first as a reasoning and communication model that can explain its thinking to people, rather than one that jumps straight to action
    • How "harness engineering" moves teams beyond prompt and context engineering, and why orchestrating several frontier models together can outperform any single one

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    Explore the Full HumanX 2026 Series

    This episode is part of a special three-part series recorded live at HumanX 2026:


    18 June 2026, 1:00 pm
  • 37 minutes 9 seconds
    393: Dan Roth, Editor in Chief at LinkedIn, on Career Skills Rewarded in the AI Age

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    Dan Roth is the Editor in Chief and a Vice President at LinkedIn, where he has led the world's largest professional editorial operation since 2011. Business Insider once called him the most powerful business journalist on the internet, and over more than a decade he has helped turn LinkedIn from a networking site into a global media platform, building out its editorial team, top voices, and Influencer Program. He also hosts the popular This Is Working podcast.

    Over 15 years watching professionals navigate every major shift in the workplace, from the rise of social media to the agentic AI era, Dan has developed a clear and counterintuitive view of what actually drives a durable career. In this episode, he draws on LinkedIn's data from over a billion members to make the case that the skills employers are hunting for right now are not the ones most professionals are building, and that the gap between what AI can produce and what humans can offer is closing faster than anyone is prepared for.

    In this conversation, we discuss:

    • Why AI has commoditized knowledge itself, and what professionals actually come to LinkedIn for that no chatbot can give them
    • What separates content that spreads beyond your network from content that stays stuck inside it, and what LinkedIn's systems are really looking for
    • Why AI is a great tool for getting your voice out, and the exact moment it starts working against you instead
    • The mindset Dan drills into his team about passion and failure, and the one thing he says you are never allowed to get wrong
    • How a mission-driven company resists the pull to chase clicks and ad revenue, and what Dan's old-world instincts taught him to unlearn
    • The two categories of skills surging in demand right now, and why the second list is the one most people overlook

     

    Explore this conversation:

    00:00 Intro and AI Fun Fact: Stop Giving AI Human Adjectives 

    04:10 Introducing Dan Roth, Editor in Chief at LinkedIn 

    05:50 Leadership Lessons from 15 Years at LinkedIn Mission and Failure

    12:30 LinkedIn Authenticity AI Content and Protecting Community Integrity

    18:27 Moderation vs Distribution: What LinkedIn Promotes and Why 

    23:55 Ad Revenue vs Mission: The Cost of Chasing Clicks 

    28:24 Skills on the Rise: What to Build in an AI World 

    34:29 Going Undercover and Staying Flexible in Your Career 


    Resources:

    15 June 2026, 1:00 pm
  • 23 minutes 2 seconds
    392: Sophia Kianni, CEO of Phia, on Scaling to 1.4 Million Users Through Feedback, Experimentation, and AI-Driven Efficiency

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    Sophia Kianni is the co-founder and CEO of Phia, an AI shopping agent with more than 1.4 million users that has raised over $43 million from an investor list that includes Kris Jenner, Sara Blakely, and Hailey Bieber. Sophia and her co-founder built the company out of their Stanford dorm room on a single thesis: in the future, every consumer will have a personal AI shopping assistant.

    Sophia is also the co-host of The Burnouts, a podcast with more than 600,000 followers and over 200 million downloads. Earlier in her career, she founded Climate Cardinals, the world's largest youth-led climate nonprofit with more than 20,000 volunteers, and became the youngest United Nations advisor in U.S. history.

    In this episode, Sophia draws on her experience building high-velocity ventures before the age of 25 to challenge how founders think about feedback, team culture, content creation, experimentation, and workflow efficiency. She also makes a compelling argument for how AI should be used at work: removing friction from the parts of a workflow that drain time and energy without adding value.


    In this conversation, we discuss:

    • Why the intersection of social and shopping looked like a solved problem to most founders, and the gap that Sophia and her co-founder saw inside their Stanford dorm room
    • How Sophia thinks about team building as company building, and the specific qualities she screens for before resumes, credentials, or experience
    • How a consumer-first mindset and relentless customer feedback help Phia iterate faster and build a product users love
    • Why building close to your user is still the most underrated advantage in AI, and what most founders miss when they try to scale it 
    • Why Phia and The Burnouts built data-oriented content engines that operate like scientific labs, testing hooks, fonts, retention curves, and B-roll as measurable variables rather than relying on creative instincts alone
    • How Sophia uses AI tools like Adobe Firefly to increase workflow efficiency by removing friction from repetitive tasks, not to replace creative work, but to protect it
    • The framework Sophia uses to decide whose feedback shapes her decisions and whose she treats as noise


    Resources

    8 June 2026, 1:00 pm
  • 20 minutes 10 seconds
    Robin Daniels, Chief Business Officer at Zensai | Live from HumanX 2026

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    Robin Daniels is the Chief Business Officer at Zensai and a seasoned tech executive with stints at Salesforce, LinkedIn, Box and WeWork. Recorded live from the floor of HumanX 2026, this lightning round explores what it really takes to create an environment where people are motivated to grow, learn and do their best work every day.

    Robin and host Dan Turchin dig into why most LMS platforms have failed employees, how AI is changing the relationship between learning and performance, and why investing in people is not just the right thing to do but a proven path to better business outcomes.

    What You'll Learn

    • Why 80% of employees are disengaged and what organizations can do about it
    • How AI-powered learning delivers the right skills at the right moment, not generic compliance training
    • How Zensai uses AI to coach managers and strengthen the employee-manager relationship
    • Why proving the link between learning and performance is the key to making L&D a strategic priority
    • Why the future belongs to humans who combine technical skills with taste, judgment and soft skills

     🎙️ Part of our HumanX 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19257142 

    Resources

    4 June 2026, 1:00 pm
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