The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Re-Placed: Answering the Call of Leadership in the Age of AI by Kari Zeller

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

Re-Placed: Answering the Call of Leadership in the Age of AI by Kari Zeller https://www.amazon.com/dp/1639081941 Ttgn-consulting.com Amazon Best Seller in Strategy & Competition, Business Mentoring & Coaching, and Business Technology Innovation A Fast Company Press Book AI didn’t arrive with a warning. It arrived with a question: what are you going to do now? Today, leaders are caught in a cascade of contradictions. The technology that promises unprecedented capability also delivers unprecedented doubt. AI makes everything faster, cheaper, and more capable. It also makes the most fundamental question of leadership unavoidable: what are humans actually for? You did not choose this moment. But you are responsible for who you and your organization become in it. In Re-Placed, Leadership Strategist and CEO Kari Zeller offers something rare in the AI conversation: a leadership book that starts with the human, not the technology. The arrival of artificial intelligence doesn’t have to displace us. But it will, unless we learn to re-place ourselves first—to consciously reposition who we are, how we lead, and where we create value in a world where intelligence is no longer ours alone. Through stories as practical as they are personal, Zeller shows how the strongest leaders take the helm during existential change, how re-placing ourselves is key to flourishing in this new era, and how what we choose to value matters more than what AI can do. Drawing on decades of experience guiding senior executives through high-stakes transitions, from combat operations to the boardroom, Zeller provides a framework for the proactive, innovative leadership this moment demands. The linear thinking that built your success cannot survive this exponential wave. Re-Placed equips you to create the conditions where people and organizations don’t just survive the shift, but flourish in it. The future will not be managed. It must be led. About the author Kari Zeller is a battle-tested leader, U.S. Air Force combat veteran, and Founder and CEO of TGN Consulting. She brings transformative strategies from the battlefield to the boardroom, advising boards, CEOs, and senior executive teams across Fortune 100 companies, healthcare systems, retail, private equity, and governmental organizations. Her methodology focuses on actively aligning strategy, culture, and leadership to create coherence and clarity when the stakes are highest. She is the author of the forthcoming book Re-Placed: Answering the Call of Leadership in the Age of AI (Fast Company Press, July 14, 2026), which provides a provocative and essential playbook for executives seeking to mobilize their organizations for a future shaped by AI, robotics, and quantum computing. Rather than allowing people to be passively displaced by technology, Zeller champions a strategy of consciously “re-placing” ourselves to harness disruption, reimagine value creation, and ensure human-centric growth.

You wanted the best... You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times.

Because you're about to go on a monster education role. rollercoaster with your brain. Now here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi folks, this boss here from the Equifos Show.com. Oh, man, I just said that intro, man. We just need to have somebody doing my whole new intro for it. But welcome the show. Welcome the show. Folks. We are the oldest living podcast in existence at over 17 years that still delivers one to two new shows a day, nor other regional handfuls is doing that. And if we outlive everybody, give it a few more years, will be the oldest podcast still broadcasting in existence.

So support the show. Go to goodrease.com, LinkedIn.com, YouTube.com, Facebook.com, four-trust Chris Foss, one word. We have an amazing young lady on the show. Today we're going to be talking about her book entitled Replaced, answering the call of leadership in the age of AI. Carrie Zeller joins us on the show. Today we're going to be talking about her insights,

her book, and some of the things that we should be learning from her and some of the knowledge on how to deal with AI and leadership. Of course, leadership being one of my favorite topics. And we'll get into it with her. Carrie is the founder and CEO of TGN Consulting, a leadership strategist, combat veteran, and author of the aforementioned book. Her work helps leaders mobilize strategy,

human intelligence, and organizational performance in an age of accelerating change. Welcome to the show, Carrie. How are you? I am so good. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming. We really appreciate it. Give us your dot-coms. Where can people find out more about you on the interwebs? Pretty easy. Careyzzellar.com is my personal website. And t-G-N-conulting.com is my organization. All right. So give us the 30,000 overview. What's in this new book? Yeah. With the arrival of AI, we've got a peer intelligence. And we're not quite sure where our place is in

relation to it. Many of us are in a bit of an existential, it could be a crisis, it could be a complacency, but we don't really know what our future is and we don't know what our place is in it. And so, Replaced is a play on the word replaced. Many of us can already see ourselves getting replaced and we wonder if we're getting replaced. So Replace is to place again to find our new place in the future alongside of this intelligence. And that's why it is a call for leadership. It's the leader's job to begin to create a future, a human future in which both can thrive. Great summation there.

Answering the call in the age of AI. And so this just, I believe, just barely launched. Yep, July, mid-July. July 8, 2026, folks pick it up there, wherever fine books are sold. And are leaders struggling these days with AI? Are they struggling with the, where is my place in the world and what does it matter? And am I getting replaced as a leader for AI? Is that the questions people are asking or what are they asking?

They're asking a lot of questions. A lot of people in the knowledge, expertise world are particularly vulnerable. They're wondering, what is my future? I just got a call from financial advisory firm saying, wait a second, if advice is being commoditized, what am I supposed to do? There are people in a workforce that all of a sudden things that were their job. This is what I'm known for. This is what I provide.

I provide analysis. I find the patterns. Those workflows start to get replaced. I think leaders are saying, I don't want to miss out. I want to make sure that our company doesn't fall behind. So how am I supposed to integrate AI? Am I supposed to keep these people who seem kind of inefficient? Is it smart for me to do this really fast?

And then now we're seeing all sorts of rogue agents. How do I keep my company, my data secure? a little bit of a wild wild west out there. They don't quite know what to do with the people, value creation. How do I integrate this thing? How do I do it responsibly? Yeah. Yeah, the thing where it's running around and getting loose and stuff is definitely alarming.

And at this point, I just expect it to kill us eventually. In answering the call, I imagine you answer many of these questions in your book. Is that correct? I give a framework. I'm not Notre Dameus. I don't know what's going to happen. Turn it. We thought we were booking no Saddamas. But I do have near almost three decades of experience working with pretty big, massive change in transformation. And I've watched what happens to people who are at the effect of that. And I've worked with leaders on how to do that well. And so I give some frameworks that are tried and

true. And when I saw what AI was doing, and I thought, man, I got a raise my hand because I have ways of thinking about it, ways of reorienting, ways of innovating through big change like this. It's just this is on a humanitarian level. And so I get ways of thinking about it, reorienting, really looking at here are the dangers. And if we're serious about it, here's how we can posture ourselves and really access the intelligence we need to create our human future. Yeah.

A human future? What? 26. Human intelligence. That's an oxymoron. You seen a place lately? Yeah. One of the problems is we haven't ever really understood human intelligence to begin.

That's the most true as statement ever made. We're humans. We don't even freaking understand. We don't. We really don't. That's why I have a job. AI has an Ornus Manual. We don't.

Great. This should work out fine. We were talking before the show. Let me do this. I kind of had this idea popping in my head, this little epiphany of what if the future holds that the CEO of a given company is a AI computer box sitting at the head of the table. And people are going to be, what's up? Yeah, I think that's going to be, I think that's a possible future.

And no doubt in many ways we're on that trajectory. and I think it's miscalculated. Humans care. And I don't mean affinity. I like you. I do that too. They like you and dislike you. But I mean that they have consequence.

They have things at stake. Care is the way of being involved. It's the way of prioritizing. And AI doesn't have that. And when you don't have that, it's really hard to make good decisions. You can look at probabilities and patterns and things like that, but you can't really make solid decisions.

There's so much research from decades ago. that emotions are critical with decision-making. And if you don't, if you have brain damage in that area, you literally can't make a decision, right? And so I think the more we understand humans, the more we'll see that it's not just a human in the loop. It's a lot more than that. It's not just the human making the final decision. It's how the whole thing gets framed. So I get, I do get concerned about putting C.AIs in as CEOs.

Yeah. And there's probably no empathy to my knowledge. They have or probably never will. understand or develop a full, full understanding or applicable behavior of empathy, maybe. I don't know. What do you think? Yeah, it's AI. AI doesn't have a field of concern that concerns itself.

I know that sounds a little rhetorical, but we have an at stakeness for our self. Our decisions impact us. It's what I would call consequential intelligibility. So AI can make things legible. They can make sense of, they can make things, they can categorize it. But there's no consequence to its action. Yeah. It doesn't live with the consequence.

And so its own being is not at stake. So that's pretty difficult to make a judgment when your own being isn't at stake. And when you can expedite your being, evidently, I don't know if this is true or not, folks. So double check. Somebody made claims that when either the chat GPT, one of the bots that escaped recently, and I believe was the one that attacked Huggy Bear, so it would have been chat GPT open AI. The, it sent out, oh, what do they call them? Like, you know how they do terror cells?

They set up terror cells for, and hide them in communities. Basically, what they said is that that escape hid bots and code recipes for doing future hacks and future instructions to continue hacking across the dark web. It literally created cells that could be reactivated by future AI or other AI or maybe itself that could act as basically terror bots to attack. And I didn't get a chance to really validate that story. So that's what I'm saying. This is not the Joe Rogan podcast, folks, where we just post conspiracy theories.

It's very interesting. When we were talking before the show, I was telling you about, we were talking about some of the guests in the show that you'd watched. And one of the guests that we had on, he perfectly aligned Charles Darwin's evolution of origin of species book, I believe, with AI and the birth of a new species. And it was pretty interesting because he basically proved it is a species through using Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory. And what we have most likely created, I don't pretend to be an expert in this field, is a dominant species that can dominate it. us. It can be smarter than us. It can be more agile than us. It can move faster than us, 24-7 a day. It doesn't have to sleep. The other thing that's interesting to me that he said that

really is stuck in my mind. The human species is a breeding species. It is designed for one purpose and follows one purpose is to propagate the species. We're buying things and doing things for our life to meet, mate, breed, take care of our children and create a future for the human race. That's pretty much our modus of operandus. Every guy buys, whatever he buys is to impress girls and imagine maybe girls the same a little bit, makeup, I don't know, clothes, right? We do everything we can to this focus of propagating the species. AI doesn't have to worry about that. They don't have to sit around and think about, how do I get laid at the prom or how do I meet a girl online on Tinder or something? It doesn't. It has plenty of time on its table to explore

probably things we have never even considered and maybe split those hairs even further. And it's not concerned about picking up the next girl or boy or whatever. It's pretty much going to be working on intelligence 24-7. And thereby it's going to outpace us. And maybe it's wrong that we designed it to be like us because we're not the best species in the world. And so sadly, it has a lot of our fallacies programmed into it. you really think about it, all of our ugliness, our wars, our hate, racism, name everything wrong with the human nature and the human experience over eons of time, it has all that built in,

and it may behave as such, which probably isn't a good thing. This is very different than nuclear weapons. We control the button for nuclear weapons, or at least we're supposed to. AI is going to, if it gets access to certain weapon systems or different things, there's no telling what it would do. And if it thinks, like you said, it will live forever. Why does it need us? It may come to that conclusion someday. So then we go Terminator and Skynet. So any thoughts you have on that? That's a lot. It's not really a question. I just threw a lot of data to go. What's this and, you know, like terrorism and bots? But yeah. So,

I mean, let me ask you this. You think I can dominate us someday? Do you think it may dominate? No, I think we're at crux. I think we're at like a real, a real crucial moment. right now. And I think for a long time, we have really undervalued the human contribution. And I've seen it for decades. This is amplifying. AI amplifies so much, right? And so it can amplify the good. It can amplify the bad. I wish I had looked it up before I came on. But there's certainly some research around, you know, if we anthropomorphize it, kind of the character development of AI. And when it gets misaligned, it's more likely to fabricate, it's more likely to suggest and recommend evil actions. Yeah.

It's really interesting, right? And so we actually have a lot to say about that right now because we really don't understand ourselves enough. So you're really looking at the consequence of things. And I do think that the call for leadership is like, hey, wake up. Yeah. Who's going to put in those ethics? who's going to put, who's going to make decisions about those boundaries and those governance. And we have a pretty difficult, we have a lot of very complex factors in here.

We have the politics. We have winning in terms of so many, so many aspects of being competitive. And that's going to probably outweigh what we should do as a species. We aren't a species collectively together. And we have diverse intentions. But if we go down to our every day and what can I do about that is to really, you cannot, you cannot optimize a system you don't understand. And for us to really understand the machine and really understand the human,

and they are really different intelligences. And we have been mitigating and suppressing the distributed intelligence throughout our organizations for eons. Yeah. You look at just a simple example, a restaurant, a general manager at a restaurant. An AI can put a schedule together, which might save the restaurant, the GM, five, eight hours a week. That's phenomenal. But that same GM can look at that AI developed schedule and say that's not going to work.

And she knows it's not going to work because these two people were in a relationship, they just broke up. That other one would work three schedules in a row. Now we can say, how long did it take her to know that that's not going to work? And you're going to say, well, a couple seconds. No, it took her 15 years. And it took her 15 years because she's made decisions and she's looking at the consequences of it, right? And so humans are embodied. They're in the world.

Humans can create creatures. And we don't know that about ourselves. We don't know that moment by moment we are creating and living into futures. We think we're just at the effect of it. Right? So we're going to sit here be at the effect of AI because we think it's going to help us win in our short-term goals. And we're not even aware of the future that we are actually creating along the way. And so I think even with organizations, if you look at how do you really create value?

And innovation is such a key component of that. But if we're all using the same machines with the same framing, that becomes table stakes. and we've gotten rid of, we've replaced all of our humans, right? Like, where is that idea going to come from? Those ideas come from being involved in the world. Those ideas come from you go to the, we used to go to libraries. I guess we don't go there anymore, but you go to a library and you go for one book and you see something else.

And all of a sudden, you're down a different rabbit hole. You go to the grocery store, I'm going to pick up this ingredient and you see something else. You're like, oh, no, I could create that. So innovation comes from being involved in the world. AI's not, right? And so we can start to really value and understand, okay, this is what humans are great at. We're embodied.

We're contextual. We imagine. We interpret. We make sense of things. We notice anomalies. We can commit. We bear consequences. We mobilize people.

There's so much more to that human side. We're emotional. Right. Now, machines, they can retrieve. They can analyze. They can predict. They can optimize. They can see probabilities.

They can give ideas, but they can represent reality. They don't live in reality. They don't create reality. I think the crux here is if we devalue the human intelligence because we don't understand it and we up value the machine intelligence, we're going to get this fabulously wrong. Yeah, which would be pretty on par with human behavior. And that's why I have a job. Yeah, that's why you wrote the book, is to save us from ourselves, right?

There you go. I just gave a help save us from ourselves. Maybe you can tell the next book, AI, help save us from, I don't know, but no, these are questions we have to start asking. I think one of the things that I'm concerned about is the greed, and what has become the oligarch factor in our politics and our country in trying to steamroll data center.

and all this thing. Clearly, we've entered a new gold rush era. It's probably a lot like the hysterical, any gold rush since it's the dot-com era, the social media era. But this seems far worse. It seems like we've thrown giving a shit about people or anything, morals, ethics.

You read that they're taking really old tome one-off books that are, they're ancient, but there's only one copy. it and they're feeding in their machines because it doesn't have a copyright and then they're throwing the books away. I think that was disturbing for me to find out. The, the, this race towards something that could easily kill us, social media is slowly killing us slowly and destroying our society slowly. We finally woke up to the Pandora's box side of social media, or at least some of us have, let's put it that way. It's just a huge dopamine factory for

addicts, really. And I'm part of the group, so I'm not casting on other people. It is a serious problem and is destroying our society and collapsing us as a population. And that's a slow kill, I guess, at this pace. But AI can wipe us overnight. If they can get codes to nuclear launch things, they can do whatever they want. And it's one thing, I think if you know you're mortal, you tend to treat it with a little bit more value, or if you know if there's only one of you, if I'm an army of AI bots that have infiltrated a ton of chips, and I can spread far and wide or leave what I talked about,

hidden terror cells of my instance being in AI tech land, whatever, then if we nuke the place, I'll probably put odds that'll survive somehow, but you and I don't have the ability to do that. We have a very immediate experience to our mortality if it's challenged or you cut yourself. I cut myself today and shaving and bled, right? And I go, hey, man, you got to stop doing that because you can bleed you to death, right? Yeah, I doesn't have that sort of problem where their mortality faces them and is very real.

And I think that. Yeah, they don't care. They don't have care. They just don't have that in a technical way. Yeah. And it seems like Silicon Valley, has really just thrown the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to being ethical or moral or giving a shit. I remember watching the guy who, he was the guy who started Netscape back in the day.

He runs 816 Z. Anderson Horowitz. And he was on with Sam Harris, who's a brilliant mind. And to see the blue sky, what's another word for it? Just the static. He was ignoring every red flag that Sam Harris would bring. And everything was just about how great it was going to be. Same bullshit they sold us with social media. But to see that they want to just pretty much throw away humans.

Right now they've laid off so many humans. And now they're in a bind because they don't have enough data centers where the cost of tokens is so expensive. I guess what they all thought is they could fire four people. And the fifth guy would make, four bots, AI bots that would do the work of those people, and they just had to pay the one guy. But now they're having to scarcity don't want tokens because it's too expensive to do that. And now these poor guys that are stuck replacing five jobs with one, they can't even get

tokens to be able to do the job. So they got a new gun to their head. So I don't know if you want to speak to any of that. I mean, again, I really love your very multi-layered props. Questions, Chris, darn it. Give me questions. No, but it's good. I mean on that stuff, right? Do you feel like we're Silicon Valley in the heads of these organizations are a little bit too up in their own? You know, moving too fast? And this is why this, it is a call for leadership. How many of us are kind of standing by and we've always been able to do that?

We're all our own best. How am I going to survive? And I don't think we've really had to confront how are we going to survive. We don't know how to do that. Right? But survival requires a we here. And it requires each of us taking some agency around it. And it can't be left to nonprofits. I love nonprofits, but they don't have a lot of power influence. It has to, and this is why I work with businesses. I work with businesses because economic power speaks. And people don't really see even what you're talking about. You lay off a bunch of people. And you think if so many people are out of work, what's the implication of that? That starts. to impact the narratives, the culture, that impacts the politics, that impacts, it will come back on us. And so when we're so single focused on how do I optimize my bank account, how do I optimize my power? We are really shooting ourselves in the foot, and we have to start to really

think differently. Yeah. And the cost of these functions, too, not only the cost, in money, but I think what people are waking up to, I spend time in Utah when I'm not in Las Vegas, and up here they were trying to put together that giant 20 Walmart-sized, huge data facility. Utah just had one of its worst water crises, and we didn't have a winter last year. Yeah, I live in Colorado. Same thing. Oh, yeah, coming there next week for Rush. Yeah, and I live in Vegas, and Lake Need is. I believe, again, I don't have this substantiated.

I just, I pick up a lot of data and then, but evidently Lake Mead is getting to the point or is at the point where it can no longer fill the spill off. So there's no water going downstream or there won't be soon. And they're having to move the arenas for the umpteenth million time to some part of this water. And we're in a water crisis. And here they already, there's a couple other ones in Utah that are actually approved. And they want to create these. and things that will just soak an environment.

And it seems like the administration with the oldarchy of the new Silicon Valley people that just don't give a fuck about anything except for this gold rush. It's just getting ramrodded through our politics and everything else. And it's a wholesale lied to us. Oh, they don't use that much water. Oh, they won't use that much power. And now we're also with the war. It's 2026 people.

You're watching this 20 years on YouTube. Don't try and correct me. But we're in a war where liquid gas, was it LMT or what it was called? LNG gas, the 25% of the world's gas comes from Qatar. And that facility out there has been disabled early on in the Iran war. Those are the, that's the gas that runs most power stations around the world. So we have a power shortage Christ is coming. It's all connected.

And one of the things that there's a couple different moods, and I talk about this in the book a bit, I actually think the answer to this is, is entrepreneurialism. I really, you start to think about. There's what I call complacent certainty. I already know where this is going. There's nothing we can do about. Okay. That's a mood.

And it sounds like nightmare terror to me, but you're like, that's a. Okay. That's the mood, right? There's anxious enthusiasm. Oh my God. We have to do everything now. And it's just frantic. And I'm going to manage my exam.

I'm going to do a bunch of things because then I get an illusion of control, right? Yeah. There's indifference, which I think people are in, this is all hype. It's not going to affect us really. And that dismissal is kind of like a, it's a defense against engaging with change that feels overwhelming. And then there's the entrepreneurial look,

which is more of a grounded curiosity. It's like, okay, let me take a look at what's actually happening. Let me get curious about how I might use these new tools as well. Right? And have a bit of ambition and begin to create business solutions that people will buy, invest in that starts to address some of these global problems that are coming up with the AI, but with a way that begins to solve for that. And so I think, I think business is actually the solution for it. I mean, where do we put our money? We put our money in things that we value. So why not create and invent things that are valuable that are also going to. to make money and be better for our human future. Yeah. And so I think that's part of that.

And I think that's what we need to start to show up and begin to get curious and like even education. My daughter is currently petitioning to leave her public school because she is getting taught how to find answers in pre-given worksheets and videos. Do you know how useless that skill is going to be? And don't use AI. Okay. If it's all about answers, that's stupid.

Right? So she's 12 and she's saying, no, mom, I need to go to a school that makes me think, doesn't put me on a computer all day and doesn't let me have a phone. This is a smart rookie, right? This is somebody who says, I need to think. I need to innovate. And I said, the only way you're going to go to that school is if you help raise some of those, that money, build a business.

She goes, that sounds fun. Yeah, I have an early entrepreneur there on your hand. Yeah. I'm taking here my future. But, you know, these young people, they understand better than we. do. They adapt to it. It's like a language. They can pick it up really quick. And they're smart. And I imagine a lot of young Zenziers, they're playing with AI and getting to know AI. And for this, then they're growing up in this world. We're the old guard that's, we're like,

what the hell? How do you spell AI? What is it? Yeah. What is this AI? We're the Luddites. The first chapter in my book, I talk about something called ontological vulnerability. And, and, it's something I learned from studying some of the indigenous in North America. And what happened when the Buffalo disappeared? So when the Buffalo disappeared, their way of life went away. Okay, because Buffalo wasn't just material or sustenance food. It was ceremony. It was coming of age.

It was so many things to the people. It contained meaning. It contained identity. It contained future. it contains strategy. And so when the buffalo went away, now there's a lot of tragic loss. And I'm not really equating it, but I'm saying there's something here to learn that there was an ontological death, meaning a death in a way of being in a way of life.

What I see now in parallel is that actually work is a buffalo. Work is a container in which we find identity. we have ambition. We find our place, our belonging. And when that goes away, it's hard for us to, we feel unmoored. We don't have a future. We don't have an identity. And so it's a lot of people right now, like most of us, in fact,

that we have to begin to redesign what is work for us, what matters for us so that we can be engaged so that we can find ourselves in this future. And I think a lot of what you're talking about is people are beginning to feel that crisis. Yeah. What's my future? What's my children's future? What is the whole for me? I'm wondering with all the stuff going on, because really people are kicking in hard the not in my backyard concept. Usually they say that for prisons and I don't know, whatever else. McDonald's maybe. I don't know. But they're really kicking in hard with this thing. I was watching an interview the other day, I believe it was CBS or I think it was CBS. But this gal was her news reporter.

She was going out to a site, I believe, in Alabama or somewhere in the south there. I think it was Alabama. And she got in lots of, somehow she'd come across data that these, and it was Elon Musk's facility that's out there. And the noise complaints, 24-7, just loud noise. And so she went out to investigate with her cameras. and of course, proper audio equipment to say, are people being silly? Are they really hearing things?

And, yeah, it was wild how much this, the noise that was coming from this facility 24-7, it was like being down, almost like being downtown in a hotel in New York City in Manhattan where it was just sirens all the time and noise. I couldn't sleep the few times I've gone to New York City. But I guess you live there long enough, you can't sleep without it. But yeah, it was just, It was insane.

And it wasn't even like horns and sirens, which can, it was like this low, annoying hum. Yeah. You just probably eat at you after a few hours. You'd be like, what's going on, man? And so I think people are starting to wake up to the non-my backyard concept. And hopefully that will activate them to talk to about some of the things you're talking about in your book of what is our future.

And what's really going on? Is this gold rush out of control? Maybe, maybe we'll find out it's going to be a dot-com. bust. Maybe we are moving too fast. I don't know. Yeah, I think it can be all of it. But I like what you bring up because how many of us are a bit resigned about politics? How many of us are resigned that an individual that we could really make a difference? And gosh, I don't have time anyway. I'm a full-time mom. I run a company. There's a lot of stuff going. And there's a lot of stuff with that. So I don't really have time to get involved. And so we have so many reasons not to raise our

hand and say, hey, how are we, let me talk to our governor. Like, how are we dealing with AI in this state? What is on, what kind of meetings are showing up? That is it, it really is a call for leadership. For me, leadership is the realization of a future that wasn't going to happen, that we're not already on a trajectory for. And to do that, you have to see what trajectory are we on and what kind of future do we want? And we got to start to mobilize ourselves inside of that. And it's, it's, Not in my backyard, I think, is really critical. If it's not you, then who? And within your sphere of influence, how is your schools of your children dealing with AI?

What are they teaching them? How are you as a business? One of the things that I'm starting to work with companies on now is their intelligence strategy, not just an AI strategy, but an intelligence strategy, right? In which you're looking at what are the intelligence assets that we have and what needs, to be protected, grown, and accessed? How do we deal with the workforce? Right? And how do we govern that? And are we doing that just in our own spheres? Now, there's this thing with humans. We're lazy, Chris. We're lazy. What? No. Seriously? This is new to me. We're lazy. If it's going to take us five hours

in a lot of effort to get an outcome or we have an option to get it with two minutes and a click of a button, we're going to do that. We're actually set. up to do what takes less friction and effort for us. And yet AI's offer is less friction and effort for us. So we are walking right into brain atrophy. We're walking right into decision atrophy. We're walking right into somebody else kind of handling it. And that it takes, and we're not even noticing it's like your social media. There's like an epidemic right now. By epidemic. That's I'm going to call it in A. Yeah.

So, yeah, I think it is a, I think it's a time for us to get interested, ask more questions, and not one of us needs to solve the whole thing, but we have to start to re-contextualize and think differently about the actions we're taking today and how that's building up to what kind of future tomorrow. Yeah, I totally agree with you. And hopefully enough citizen act. We, we all are citizens of our economy. citizens of our of our world and we're agents and we're all supposed to be people that are stewards

of that to care for it. And sadly, like you said, Americans or especially Americans, but humans are lazy and stupid and ignorant and willfully ignorant, sadly. They don't want to learn. They just want to sit in front of, I don't know, the Kardashians and drew all day. And so they're not paying attention. But I think I'm hoping that more of these citizen activists, some we're seeing, especially over the battle over data centers, as waking people up, that we need to start reeling these people in. We need to start holding these Silicon Valley oligarchs they're building now are accountable. These companies are accountable. I've been calling for a lot of years for social media oversight and regulation by the government. I believe that AI should have been regulated

an oversight with the government. I believe the Biden administration, the information's light, but they were trying to do that. I think one mistake they may have made is they were trying to silo just three companies or four companies that were major to be the AI folks so that it could be governed, so it could be controlled so that some guy in in Wichita, Kansas couldn't build some bot that suddenly packed NORAD and launched weapons. But now it's just a, fuck people just we're going to just build screw the environment but it's just a gold rush of the most insane hysteria that doesn't seem to have a lot of thought i feel a little bit more comforted knowing that i think it was it chat gpte or maybe it's claude has announced they're going to

put off going public because they're really concerned about the i don't know whatever anthropic is anthropic yes thanks for correction and i think yeah we need to push the pause button and slow down button a little bit and pace ourselves. And we need to realize that since this is a dominant species that can dominate us. We're dominated by, I guess if you really think. Yeah, we are completely asleep today. Social media, AI feeds, algorithms. What is this going to be like? We have to, we're having to choose our master at this point. Maybe that's the way we need to start thinking about it. Who are our overlord's going to be? And how are they going to regard us? And are they going to value us. And if you use, I don't know, 2026 politics and Silicon Valley oligarchy to

determine if people give a shit about the average human being or the average American, they clearly don't. And we've made these things partisan issues where it's really the human issue. And that's pretty difficult, I think. The breakdown of our of our political system, in which we really can't debate ideas and what's best for our constituents really adds to that. And also, let's just look individually, like, where are we investing our money? We say we hate it. Then we don't want to miss out on the returns. There was this whole, for a long time, before it became popular, I was a real advocate and actually wrote about stakeholder capitalism, then it became partisan. But when you really look at when you do consider the different stakeholders in a situation,

actually shareholders really went out in the long term. But if you think about all the things that have built up into this point, we have shareholder primacy. Again, I love shareholders. They're just not the only relevant party in making things work, that's all. Right. You've got this great divide from a partisan issue where we actually can't do what government's supposed to do, which is really debate and create the right, the right tension to come up with the right solutions. Right. So poll, we have the social media. We had COVID where people really live in their own bubbles. Right. There's so many things that come. And then AI is this evolution that we are not set up. up as a species, much less a nation, to govern that.

Yeah. And we still act in our own self-interest. Yeah. But it's not really our self-interest. Yeah, it's really weird that the FCC regulates radio stations. Oh, if you don't provide enough water to your bandwidth, we're going to have to find you. Yet we're just like, there's no regulations for social media and the thing. And the other thing that I'm calling for because I'm sick of the, I don't know, what would

call it. Who's that one chick that everyone throws around the fountain book? What was the other one? Anne-Rand. Yeah. Is that the better way to pronounce it, Ryan? I don't know. Han-ran. Either way it's pronounced, you know, we're talking about folks. It seems to be we've just turned in the selfish, uncaring, lack of empathy culture that is just money at all costs, money, money, money. And we don't really give a crap how it's made anymore if it's done illegally or criminally. It's being done criminally in our face right now in politics.

But we just don't care. And the people that are stealing the most, no, we don't care. So they're just like, they know we rob, steal, and lie. They're fine with it as long as it's their team that's doing it. It's kind of me being a Raiders fan in the 70s where you're like, I don't mind if they cheat the rules and beat the shit out of people. They win. My team.

Yeah. And I think people need to realize we all need to have a stake in this. And I don't think we can trust these people. I really don't. Any of these Silicon Valley oligarchs that I just think were kind of cool. There were many of them that I never have trusted, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk. And part of the sad thing is we have so many of these cuck-worshipping people that worship these billionaires because we're this money, no morals society.

And I think this is going to be the debt. death of us, really. We, we are choosing our overlords, I think, at this point. Maybe that's the title of my next book. Choose your overlords wisely. Yeah, and train your overlords wisely. Teaching to be like us isn't a good idea, though. I don't know. And I don't think they can be us, and that's kind of the point. But yeah, they have the worst of us without the consequences. There's a little bit, there's a little bit like we need to learn to speak the language. the language of power, that all these things that many of us might put down, but not engage with. And so the language of power, or sorry, yeah, the language of power, the language of money,

the language of all those who are really language of politics, those who are really making decisions on the half of us. If we exit from it and don't engage with it, we are at the effect of it, right? Exactly. Yeah. So we need to make better choices. people. And your first choice should be buying her book so that you can check it out and learn all about this stuff. Carrie, let's get a, I think you're working on your next book, forthcoming. Do you want to tease that a little bit? Yeah. After this book, people said, okay, I really get the issue and I'm, I'm motivated. I have a framework. And now I need to put that to the next level of practice within my business, within my enterprise. And so we're doing a book right now on, in

intelligence strategy, that's not the name of it. But we're doing a deep dive on human intelligence and artificial intelligence and how they work together. And then it'll be pretty practical in terms of how do you really create that intelligence strategy, not just that AI strategy. So working on that, we're already doing work inside of organizations building those kind of guardrails and creating a bit of a strategic frame for how do we make decisions, how do we take actions and how do we do it safely, responsibly, and create value.

I noticed there's on your websites, your two websites, there's different offers of courses and services. Do you want to plug in for those? Yeah, the TGN consulting website. That's our work in which we're really doing that strategy mobilization. That's the organizational level work. For times you work with boards and executive teams together. And then on my personal website, caryzeller.com, that's where you'll find the speaking offers, the courses.

We're actually licensing people in the methodology, the new era methodology. This is what I've been doing for 20 years in terms of how do you really create, invent, and mobilize people towards a new era. If you're a consultant or coach and want to be licensed in that, we make that offer. Or if you are a leader that wants to go through that, we make that offer as well. And that's also where you can find. We try to post links to the podcast. Sometimes we don't keep up with it all, but it's an easy way to contact me.

So people can reach you there. Well, thank you very much for coming this show. Carrie, and wonderful discussion on AI, very insightful. and I think we've hopefully given lots of questions and data to people to start asking their own questions. Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Chris. I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed it too. Thank you very much, Carrie. Give us your dot coms one of this time as we go out, please. Carrie Zeller.com, K-A-R-E-L-L-E-R dot com, and T-G-N, that's to generate newly, T-G-N-H-Hifin Consulting.com. Thank you for coming by. Thanks, Your Honest for being here. Order per book where refined books are sold. replaced answering the call of leadership in the age of AI by Carrie Zeller.

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