More Human Than Ever: Summer Special 2026

Every August, I offer you something different. Not a new conversation, but a pause. 

This was the year AI stopped being a headline and became part of our daily lives as leaders. I dedicated a whole series to it, from robotics to education to medicine to trust. And one paradox kept coming back, conversation after conversation: the more powerful the technology becomes, the more the difference is made by what is deeply, irreducibly human. 

So for this summer special I went back through the season and selected seven moments around one conviction. This era demands that we show up with our humanity at its best. More human than ever. 

We explore four powers together. 

→ Power one, prepare your mind. Ethan Kross on chatter, the voice inside your head, and the toolbox to master it. The brain does not come with a user's manual, so you build your own. 

→ Power two, own your story. Nicholas Thompson on recognising the generational patterns he inherited, and Raj Sisodia on why trauma cannot heal in silence and in shame. Know yourself, love yourself, be yourself. 

→ Power three, magnify your purpose with AI. Stéphane Bancel on why the CEO has to be the chief AI officer and must not delegate it, and MacKenzie Price on the school where children learn academics in two hours a day. 

→ Power four, keep humans at the center. Rana el Kaliouby on emotional intelligence and privacy by principle, and Raffi Krikorian on the hardest question of all: who owns your window to the world? 

I close with four lessons, one per power, and one practice I want to leave you with for the summer. I call it the summer walk. Fifteen minutes a day, no phone, no podcast, not even mine. Just you and four questions. 

Pick one tool, one idea from this episode, and practice it before September. 

Thank you for listening, for your messages and your ideas for guests. This community of positive leaders across so many countries is what keeps this podcast alive and growing. If this episode resonates, share it with one person who needs a spark this summer. 

I will see you in early September with a brand new season. 

New here? Subscribe to Positive Leadership & You for one edition a month, written for leaders who want to build companies and communities people thrive in. https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/positive-leadership-you-6970390170017669121/

Want to go deeper? Listen to the Positive Leadership Podcast on your favourite platform. 130+ conversations with the leaders, founders and thinkers shaping a more human future of work.

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🎤 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1EdnJcYgh9nXPTFJ5euOBf 

Transcript

Jean-Philippe Courtois (00:02.622)
Hello and welcome to Positive Leadership Podcast, the podcast that helps you grow as an individual, as a leader, and ultimately as a global citizen. I'm Jean-Philippe Courtois, and this is our special summer episode. Every August, I like to offer you something different. Not a new conversation, but a pause. A moment to look back at the season together and ask, out of all these hours of conversations, what truly matters? What should we carry into next year? And what a season it's been. This was the year AI stopped being a headline and became part of daily lives as leaders. I dedicated a whole series to it, from robotics to education to medicine to trust. But here's the paradox I kept running into, conversation after conversation. The more powerful the technology becomes, the more difference is made by what is deeply irreducibly human. So this summer, I've selected seven moments from the past season, plus one from my archives as well, around one simple conviction. More than ever. This new era demands that we show up with our humanity at its best, more human than ever, and that is the name of the episode. We'll explore together four powers. Power number one, prepare your mind. Master the voice inside your head. Power number two, own your story. Turn your wounds into strengths. Power number three, magnify your purpose with AI, the entrepreneur's multiplier. And power number four, keep humans at the center. Make sure AI stays on our side. So wherever you are, on a beach, on a trail, on a train, put your headphones on, take a breath, and let's press play on the best of this season. And we'll ask you just one thing. Pick one tool, one idea from this episode, and practice it during the summer. Let's get started. Power number one. Before you lead anyone, you have to lead the conversation happening inside your own head. My first guest is the world's leading scientist of the inner life, Ethan Cross, psychologist at the University of Michigan, author of Chatter and Shift. Ethan has advised the White House, Fortune 500 leaders, Navy SEALs. But the moment I want you to hear is personal. He starts with a hand-addressed envelope on his desk. The death threat. And at 3 o'clock in the morning, pacing his house, the scientist who studies the inner voice discovers in himself... the tool that will define his entire career. Listen to what happens when your own name becomes your best coach. So in Chatter, Ethan, you share a deeply personal story. The moment you receive a death threat from a stalker and cut yourself thinking, Ethan, what are you doing? Bodyguards for academics? Are you serious? That instant when your own name punctured a spiral of fear became one of your most studied phenomena. What does it mean to be a scientist who discovers one of their most important findings? on themselves, by the way, and how did that terrifying personal experience reshape your research?

Ethan Kross (03:40.738)
Well, so just to recap what happened, I was a few years into an assistant professorship here at Michigan, had just published this... high impact paper, or it was a paper published in a high impact journal, which is scientists, junior scientists, that's the goal. And, you know, it was a remarkable moment, it was an unpredictable moment. The study looked at the overlap between the experience of social and physical pain. So social pain being rejected, for example, by someone else. And At the time, people had noted, hey, there's this puzzling phenomenon when people are socially rejected, they use the language of physical pain to describe how they feel like, oh, my heart hurts. I'm in pain. I'm suffering. And it had led many people to wonder, is there a unique relationship between physical and social pain experiences? And so what we did in this study is we demonstrated that when people experience rejection, it actually activates parts of their brain that are involved in physical pain sensation. So that was a big deal, kind of gave new meaning to this notion that rejection hurts. And I remember I was one moment teaching 300 undergrads about the psychology of attraction. And on the break, I checked my email, and there was a note from a producer. I think it was CBS Evening News saying, can you be available for an interview? I don't know if it was live or not, but later today. And so I'm rushing to a TV studio, and it's on every newspaper. And... life is pretty good for a couple of days. I'm walking around with my chest high and I just got my first kid and it's all working out. And then I walk into my office one day, maybe it was a couple of days later, and there's this envelope. that's hand addressed to me kind of strange even back when this happened yeah yeah and address notes and i open it up and i i don't know about you jean-philippe but there are moments where i interpret something as a threat and i immediately have a fight or flight reaction like you know i sweat yeah i have to go to the bathroom And that's what happened because I opened this up and it's this ugly letter with threats and drawings and ethnic slurs. And I remember showing it to my assistant just to get some perspective. Do you think this is as bad as I think it is? And they're like, you need to call someone. And so I ended up at a police station. And it really caused a chatter spell within me. So I really worried and ruminated. I Googled the return address. I saw it wasn't far from where I live. And so for several nights, I'm not sleeping. I'm pacing my house. I'm thinking to myself, why did I go on television? Why did I do these interviews? I screwed it all up. I'm being exceptionally self-critical, which is very out of character for me. And then I had this moment where at one point where I was really, it was like three in the morning and I was really just spinning, hadn't slept well for several nights before, I start typing bodyguards for academics. And I didn't hit the send button because in my head, I literally typed it because I had this awareness number one. Yeah. You are out of your goddamn mind. What industry has bodyguards for academics? This is not a high need. And number two, I thought to myself, if anyone sees that I've searched for this, they'll think I've lost my mind. So I go ahead and write a book that lots of people read to publicize the story. But what snapped me out in that moment was this automatic response, right? Ethan, what are you doing? I said it to myself using my name. I directed myself like I would my best friend. You know, Jean-Philippe, what are you doing? Get your act together. That linguistic shift ended up rerouting my psychological experience. And then we went into the lab and started doing the research on this. And it turns out this is a useful tool that anyone can use to get some psychological space from their experience. So I think it was a lesson in just being open to finding new phenomena around you.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (08:19.990)
Thanks so much for sharing that very particular moment when you became aware of that chatter. I want the two of us to dig down into that now a little bit more, Ethan, because you've given this name, you've measured it, you've mapped its effects on the brand, and your research shows that chatter obviously impairs performance by consuming attention. damages relationships, and even degrades physical health. So what is your own definition of chatter precisely? And why does a healthy mind actually produce it as well?

Ethan Kross (08:58.690)
So chatter is a phrase I use to refer to getting stuck in a negative thought loop. So you've got a problem. It's either something out there in the world, something you imagine in your mind. You're motivated to work through it. You start to do so, but you keep looping over and over, not making forward progress. If it's chatter about the past, we tend to call that rumination. If it's about the present or future, we sometimes say that's worry. the idea is that there's a common mechanism this looping that characterizes those states uh and it's you know as i've i've argued many times or not argued i've just stated the literature here it's one of the big problems we face as a species it's a universal predicament it's likely affected us as long as we've been roaming the planet in our present form And it undermines us in three areas of life that I think most of us care a lot about. It makes it hard to think and perform. It creates friction in our relationships and it undermines our health and well-being. Now, the question is, well, why do we get stuck in this? It's a phenomenally interesting question. On the one hand, our brains evolve to allow us to do these extraordinary things. Your inner voice, for example, is an evolved tool that lets us use language silently in our minds to... keep information active so jean-philippe i'm guessing like you go to the grocery store sometimes you think to yourself hey what was i supposed to get and you go down the list that's your inner voice or you know you want to memorize someone's name or phone number 209-0501 that's your inner voice uh Have you ever gone over what you're going to say before an important presentation you have to give or an important meeting? Sure, absolutely, yes. That's your inner voice. Do you exercise?

Jean-Philippe Courtois (10:58.398)
I do.

Ethan Kross (10:59.318)
What do you do?

Jean-Philippe Courtois (11:01.399)
I exercise. I run. I do some jogging as well. I do some swimming from time to time as well.

Ethan Kross (11:09.101)
Do you ever talk to yourself while you're running?

Jean-Philippe Courtois (11:11.759)
A little bit. Yes, for sure. It's probably one of the times we got some of the best ideas or thinking. Yes.

Ethan Kross (11:17.581)
That's very, very common to talk to yourself, to brainstorm, to motivate. And of course, when we struggle with our lives, we turn inward to try to make meaning. Your inner voice helps you do all of those things. It is a remarkable tool. Now, here's the problem. And here's how we get to chatter. Chatter is the dark side of your inner voice. And the problem is we are conditioned. to focus very narrowly on our problems to make sense of them when we're struggling. One of the first... things we're taught to do as kids is you got a problem, roll up your sleeves and focus. Focus. The problem is when you focus on an emotional issue, those emotional elements cloud your ability to think reasonably. What we've learned is that in those instances, and that's what leads us to get stuck in chatter because you get trapped by the emotion and then the emotion metastasizes in ways that where you know it's extraordinary within a few seconds people often feel like the world is caving in i'll often ask folks and this is from the c-suite to the mail room and everyone in between hey have you ever ever ever had any um problems with chatter in the middle of the night every hand goes up you know 2 a.m 3 a.m chatter and and then i ask okay so just tell me if this sounds right middle of the night you wake up and when you went to bed life was great but in the middle of the night you know you've just lost your job your family your bank account all within a matter of six seconds and everyone just breathes a sigh of relief that's how quickly this can go the wrong way and it's an example of a very powerful tool that is miscalibrated. Let me be concrete there and then I'll give you an example. Our ability to game out worst case scenarios, vitally important. Jean-Philippe, you are not where you are in life without the ability to be strategic in that way. Our ability to go back and reflect on the misfires in our lives and learn from them, crucially important for success. The problem is, it's very easy to take those exercises to an extreme. And if you get stuck in the, what if this happens, what if that, but can't bring yourself out, that's when you get really stuck. It's kind of like nuclear energy. We think of nuclear weapons are... one of the most destructive forces on the planet. The nuclear energy which underlies it is actually one of the greatest innovations that exists. It's clean energy. And it's the same thing with this brain over here, and it does not come with a user's manual. One way that I think about... My mission is to use science to help develop a user's manual for allowing people to be agentic and control their emotions and mind rather than the other way around.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (14:28.827)
The brain does not come with a user's manual. I love that. And the good news is you can build your own. Ethan talks about the toolbox, distance, self-talk, mental time, travel, or walks. Other guests of this show have shared theirs as well, like the neuroscientist Caroline Leaf and her five-step neuropsycho. The point is not which tool you're going to choose. The point is that your mind can be trained. And that is, this training is a leader's job, not a luxury. And if you want proof that it holds under the most extreme conditions, earlier this year, I spoke in French with the explorer Mathieu Tordeur. At 27, he became the youngest person to ski solo Unsupported to the South Pole. Weeks alone on the ice. No coach, no team, no network. Just his inner compass. Ethan's science and Mathieu's ice tell the same story. Your mind is your first territory of leadership. Which brings us to pearl number two, owning your story. Because the voice in your head has an author, and it's not always you. My next guest is Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, former editor-in-chief of White, an ultra marathon runner who set an American 50K record at 45. On his 40th birthday, his father posted a public message on his Facebook wall. Not a loving one, a warning. All men's lives fall apart at 40. What Nick did with that message is one of the most powerful lessons of this anti-season. There's a particularly moving scene where you describe around your 40th birthday. where your dad publicly warned you that all men's lives fall apart at this age, reflecting on his own life, I understand. And you resolved not to let that happen to you. Can you tell us more about that story? What you learned deeply from it?

Nicholas Thompson (16:35.205)
Yeah, so my dad, we talked about it a little bit early on, but my dad at this point, so when I was 40 years old, my dad was 73. And his life had been... He had not lived up to what he had thought he was going to. I have his old letters. He thought he was going to be President of the United States. He was a Rhodes Scholar. The Stanford Provost had said he was the best student since Herbert Hoover. John F. Kennedy had said he was going to get to the White House before him. And his life hadn't quite worked out that way. And by the time he was in his 70s, he was bankrupt. He's an expat. He's living in Southeast Asia. He's dealing with alcoholism. He's dealing with sexual addiction. He's running something like a brothel. It's kind of a very complicated, messy life, but amazing guy, loving to me. And I turned 40, and he puts his note on my Facebook page, like public note, right? And I have like, I don't know, 70,000 followers there or something at the time. And he's like, hey, Nick, happy birthday, right? Things are going well for you. You have great kids, great wife, happy job. You should know that all men's lives fall apart at 40, right? And his life, that's when he divorced my mother and come out of the closet. His father started really struggling with alcohol and professional anxiety then. And 40 is a hard age because you're still taking care of your kids. You can't use youth as an excuse if your life hasn't really, you don't have the professional aspirations that you wanted to hit. you probably have sick parents and your body, your own body is starting to break down. Right. And so in some ways it's a great age, but in other ways it's a really hard age because you have pressure from people younger than you pressure older than you pressure from the side. And, you know, my dad's view was that it's at that age that men crack, you know, many of them like get divorced. They, you know, they can't handle aging. Right. And man, he, to my father dealt with aging and like his the frustration of his body breaking down by you know dating ever increasingly younger men right like totally like 22 year olds in the philippines like totally inappropriate um people he just met on manjammer.com or whatever website he's on right like not not the folks you should have a date And so he puts that on my website. I'm sorry, on Facebook. I'm like, Dad, send me a text message. But what I also, it made me think about why his life had come undone like this and what had happened to him. And I'm very similar to him in a lot of ways. And part of my realization was that he had just let his... either he'd let his discipline slip or he'd never quite had it. And I decided like that, I have to be very focused to not let that happen. And part of that, though not all of it, but a part of it was running, right? Where he had kind of, when he'd been running, his life had been more disciplined and contained. He had like a little centripetal force in his life. And when he stopped, he didn't have it. And so part of my resolution to not become my father was to keep running.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (19:31.831)
Wow. So in a way that post on Facebook was a big kicker for you in your life.

Nicholas Thompson (19:37.556)
It was a big, it was a big, it was a, it was a real reset. I read it. I read it a lot. I think he may have deleted it when I went to fact check the book. Really? I did it online. Yeah.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (19:50.332)
There's actually something deeply moving in how you describe recognizing generational patterns, Nick. Your grandfather's scandal as well. We didn't discuss that. I think yet your father's breakdown that you talked about and then consciously choosing a very different path. Reminds me actually of a very powerful idea shared by a French journalist called Natasha Calestreme who I had on this show. She's an author who blends science, spirituality, even shamanic traditions to help people heal emotional wounds. So, you know, one of our protocols helps people release inherited trauma. to identify and cut the thread of a parent of an ancestral unresolved pain so it doesn't soundly shape their own lives, which happens to many people, it turns out. So it struck me that running seems to be your own therapeutic protocol beyond, of course, this very healthy habit you have every day. The way maybe of processing pain, reclaiming identity, and healing across generations. Do you see actually your writing as a kind of emotional release or just that ritual and discipline, daily discipline for you that you just talked about?

Nicholas Thompson (21:07.955)
It's definitely the latter. I think it's probably the former. You know, the other element of running that's so important is that it's a sport that I had started because of my father, right? And I had watched him run a marathon and he had taken me on runs when I was six or seven. And I have very strong memories of watching him run. And then when I was in my teenage years, in my 20s, I would run with him. I do think it's a way... You know, as you said, it's a way that I've like both tried to hold him close, like do this, do this thing that we love doing together. And also a way to not become him. I do think that when someone dies and someone who's close to you, a good way to mourn, right? You can mourn by like, you know, praying and thinking and reading their letters. But a good way to mourn is to do the thing that you did together, the thing that you associate with them. If you went for walks, to go for walks. If you skied, go ski. and it just allows you this sort of the the way um memory works it happens in your brain it happens in your body um and the way you know processing information works happens in your brain and in your body i think is one of the most interesting differences between humans and ai and you can go like someone you love to use to ski with right and you go skiing and i think certain things happen with the way you process those memories in a way that's healthy and so for me Running, particularly in the year after he died, was a way of thinking through this incredibly complicated man who died all of a sudden. I didn't have a chance to mourn him before he left. I knew he was old. I knew he was sick, but he wasn't supposed to die that year or even the next five years. Running was a way to process his death. In a way, it is both this healthy habits, but also this spiritual connection.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (22:53.250)
Running from and running towards, sometimes the healthiest things we do carries both. A few weeks after Nick, I sat down with Raj Sisodia, co-founder of the Country's Capitalism Movement. And I even told him about Nick's story because their journeys echo each other so deeply. Raj is the man who proved with data that companies built on love outperformed the market. But beyond the 16 books, there was a boy whose father told him everything about him was defective. But father one day pointed a gun at him. At 60, Raj finally stopped running. Here's what happened when he turned around and faced his story.

Raj Sisodia (23:38.888)
Well, so the book Awakened is really my memoir. came out in 2023, but the seeds of that were planted in 2018, which is the year I turned 60. And that felt like a big milestone in my life. And I think for many of us, it's kind of the end of the second act of your life and the beginning of the final phase. And I was writing the healing organization that year. So even though I knew that this was kind of a big moment, but I was busy in my work and I just had, you know, the entire summer was for writing that book. And I had done all the research. And then four women that were friends of mine that I had talked to about this project, they essentially asked me the same question. They said, you're writing a book about healing. What about your own healing? Have you worked on yourself? And I said, well, I don't have time for that. I have a book deadline, October 5th. This book is due. They said, no, you have to make time for that. It's very, very important. I said, well, I don't think I need healing. I'm okay. They said, no, we know your story. There's definitely a lot that you have to work on that you have to heal. And so I had the good sense to listen to them. I delayed that book by five months, and I said yes to all these experiences. As you mentioned, I went to the Himalayas, the high Himalayas, literally 22,000 feet at the border of India and Tibet, which is the seat of some of the deepest Buddhist wisdom in the world. And I went there with a group called the Shakti Spiritual Journeys. There's a book I wrote called Shakti Leadership, which is about the feminine integrating with the masculine. And my co-author organizes these spiritual journeys to these meaningful places around the world. So that's where I had my 60th birthday, immersed in that deep Buddhist wisdom around suffering, around healing. How do we learn about that? I also went to a silent retreat in upstate New York. for four days with Peter Senge and David Cooperrider and many other interesting people. And that was a very profound experience. And in fact, these seven steps came to me in that silent retreat, which I subsequently wrote in the book Healing Leaders. I learned a lot about myself and about life in general. I also worked with a coach for the first time and she helped me reframe my life. What had my life really been about? What was I doing here? What was the meta-narrative around my life? What she said to me basically was that you spent 45 years, the first 45 years of your life, trying to impress your father. Even after my father cut me off and basically banished me, I was still deep down trying to prove myself worthy of him. And she said, now you've spent the last 15 years honoring your mother with your work. That everything you've done with firms of endearment and conscious capitalism and Shakti leadership and everybody matters. That's bringing this mother energy, the love, the compassion, the acceptance, the inclusion, the nurturing, the gentleness. That is missing in the world of business and leadership. And that's your mother's core energy, right? And that's the core teaching. So that was a big aha moment because I had not thought of it that way. I am more like my mother. And in many ways, I do channel some of those things in that way. And I also went to the Amazon rainforest with a group called the Pachamama Alliance. I went to Ecuador. Spent 10 days with the indigenous people there, the Achuar and the Zapara tribes, and did a lot of healing work with the shamans, including an ayahuasca experience, a plant journey. And that was very profound, and it opened up things for me and gave me insights about my own life and about healing. I went there to learn about healing, and all night long I was given visions in my mind about what healing is really about. And so all of that... became pretty profound. And that was sort of the, I call it my year of conscious awakening, 2018. I consciously decided to work on myself, you know, five months off and focusing on these kinds of things. And that was not completed in that year. That's been an ongoing process ever since. And uncovering, for example, traumas. I did not realize that I had trauma. I did not frame it as such that when my father threatened to kill himself in front of me, that was traumatic. And later on, when he pointed a gun at me, because I would not give in to him, basically threatening me. That was traumatic, so traumatic that I actually erased that memory. I don't have conscious memory of that, but other people in the room told me. It's called disassociative amnesia. And I realized that there's a lot of trauma, and I became familiar with the work of Gabor Mate and his incredible documentary, The Wisdom of Trauma, and that we all have trauma. 13 million Americans have PTSD. post-traumatic stress disorder, but all of us have post-traumatic stress injury. And most of us deny it. We refuse to acknowledge that we have trauma. We just say things like, I didn't go to Afghanistan and I didn't go to Iraq and I was not a first responder. And so why should I complain about my little problems? Life is hard, suck it up, right? Don't worry about it. But that doesn't do anything. Just because somebody else had a bigger trauma doesn't mean that your trauma didn't matter. And the fact is that you are living your life in a reactive state. And you get triggered by things and you don't even know why. You're not in charge of your own emotions and your own actions and reactions. And you end up inflicting a lot of suffering on yourself and others. And so once you start to identify those and you start to, as you say, you have to reveal it and feel it in order to begin to heal it. You have to talk about it. In my case, I wrote about it in the book, but you have to talk. Trauma cannot heal in silence and in shame, which is what most people do. And when you do that work, you have the gift on the other side, which is post-traumatic growth. You are stronger because you had a trauma and you healed it. And now you become the source of healing for others. That's why healing leaders has two meanings, healing the leader and then becoming a leader who heals in the world for others. So that's the gift of it, ultimately. So that was kind of my journey beginning in 2018. I wrote the memoir, but then I realized that these seven steps that came to me They had some weight and some profoundness to them. Because I think something that comes to you from the source, wherever you think of the source, that has more power than something you just say, okay, let me brainstorm some steps here, right? That's different than saying, wow, this is received wisdom. So these seven steps, which I then wrote the book Healing Leaders, is know yourself. Who are you? You have to know yourself. That's the beginning of all meaningful life is self-knowledge, understanding yourself.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (30:17.783)
Self-knowledge, self-awareness, yeah.

Raj Sisodia (30:20.124)
Because there are 117 billion humans who have walked this earth. 8 billion today, but 109 billion that have died. Everyone is different. Everyone is unique. We have to understand what that uniqueness is. What's your nature? Not your identity. I'm an Indian, and I'm an engineer, and I'm a PhD in this, and I'm a Hindu, and I'm whatever. Those are all tags. That's not you. Who were you as a child? What was your essence, your true nature? What defines you as a being? And then love yourself. For me, it was a huge challenge to love myself because the messaging I got from my father was that I'm defective. I'm not equipped to face this world. I need to change everything about myself. You can't change your core nature. So getting to that place not only of self-acceptance, self-forgiveness, self-compassion, but ultimately self-appreciation and self-love.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (31:11.451)
Trauma cannot heal in silence and in shame. Know yourself, love yourself, be yourself. And by the way, this is not just a story of men and their fathers. Last spring in one of my French episodes, the author, Natasha Calistreme, reminded us that we all carry stories and wounds that we are never ours to carry. Identifying them and giving them back is how you finally write your own story. Reveal it. Feed it. Heal it. So your mind is now prepared. Your story is yours. Now what do you do with all that energy? Well, let's get to power number three. Magnify your purpose with AI. This is the entrepreneur's power. Entrepreneurs of our lives. And nobody embodies it like Stéphane Bancel, the CEO of Moderna. In 2011, Stéphane walked away from the security of leading a 6,000-person company to join a startup of 50 people. built on an idea most scientists dismissed at the time. He told me he gave it a 5% chance of success. He bet anyway because if it worked, he would change medicine forever. And you know the end of the story, the COVID vaccine designed within days by Moderna. But listen to what's next. Today, Moderna is developing personalized cancer vaccines in phase three trials for melanoma with Merck, cutting the risk of recurrence by 49% with a treatment bill for your tumor, for you, in under 30 days. And when I asked Stefan what AI is actually doing at Moderna, not the hype, the reality, his answer should be required listening for every CEO or every leader. So shifting gears now, I'd love to talk about the combo of, again, biotech, pharma, and AI. I think you've been announcing already a couple of years ago a partnership with OpenAI to accelerate drug discovery. And there's obviously a lot of hype around AI in biotech right now. So what is AI actually doing at Moderna today? Not in the future, but right now? And how do you separate AI hype from AI impact in your operations today, Stéphane?

Stéphane Bancel (33:33.795)
Yeah, it's a great question. So I think in our world, there's two big applications of AI. There's AI for science, making new medicine, and AI for... accelerating business processes, like work reinvention around AI, so we can serve a customer faster. Those are two very different views. On the innovation side of the house, we at Moderna have had a few innovations that have come from AI that have been put in place in terms of the molecules we are developing. This is just the beginning of a huge tsunami coming for the industry and for Moderna. But most consumers will only see the benefit in years from now because you need to invent a new molecule and then you need to test them in the clinic.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (34:15.392)
Of course.

Stéphane Bancel (34:16.512)
Where there's already impact on the consumer positively with AI in our case is shrinking business process time. Because then you can develop a drug faster and it can be available to patients faster and cheaper. And that's what we're trying to do with work reinvention. And that has already example in Moderna in manufacturing, where the team have used AI or using AI every day in quality to improve quality. Like we build an agent. that when there's when there's a mistake happening on the manufacturing floor by law and some good business practice but by law in my industry we need to document what happened as a deviation and you need to document a corrective action I was getting frustrated that our corrective action was not really improving. It was repeating corrective action. So I told the team, let's build an agent that will refuse a corrective action submission if it's not good enough because the agent finds a hole in the corrective action that it could still happen again. So we built an agent to do that, and our quality has improved. So it's another example. We use it in marketing, we use it in finance, we use it in HR. So I think you're going to see mid to short term, but already today, impact on the speed at which medicine can be developed through business process reinvention. The science will take longer, but the science will be very profound. We're going to be able to invent medicine that my best scientists cannot think about because the human body has 20,000 genes, as we spoke about, has 40,000 metabolites, think glucose and other things in your body. And you have trillions of cells in your body. And those things are talking to each other, sometimes in nonlinear ways. So there's no human who can have the functioning of a human body in their brain like a good engineer can have a functioning of an engine of a car in their brain.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (36:12.640)
Wow. Those are amazing examples. Just from a pure kind of people talent standpoint, I mean, how do you make that happen? In other words, do you have like a chief AI officer working hand in hand with the different business units? I mean, from discovery to sales and manufacturing on AI capacity, how does it work to make it so effective?

Stéphane Bancel (36:35.370)
I'm de facto the chief AI officer because I really think given... the impact the technology has already had, it will never improve again. And given we know the compute is doubling every six months, I think any company that's serious in AI, the CEO has to be the chief AI officer in terms of understanding the technology and driving the change in the business. Then, of course, I have teams helping me do that. I'm not alone. So, of course, we have a tech team. We're spending a lot of time understanding what the technology can do. As you said, we have a partnership with OpenAI. We're also working, for example, with Entropic on coding a lot. We vibe coding. Actually, this morning, I was on a call with the leadership of DeepMind at Google on the science side of things. We're also developing our own machine learning system for doing some biology where LLM is not the right tool for doing machine learning. And then for the work reinvention, we actually started with my head of HR, a work reinvention team. where we're basically prioritizing what are the few, we have three right now, big enterprise-wide projects that we want to redo from scratch, business process, reinvent AI first. We have same thing happening in each of the big functions of the company. For example, my CFO has four or five projects within finance to totally reinvent how you do things in finance and same thing across each function. And then we are trying to really help managers at the department level to think about what they can do in the department. And then at the individual level, we are doing a lot of work in terms of training. Every employee of Moderna has access to a GPT enterprise from OpenAI. We are doing training on how to use tasks, how to use projects, how to write GPTs. So all those things we have done. We deployed GPT at Moderna in the spring of 2023, just after OpenAI GPT came in November 2022. uh with a modern version in the amazon cloud with only modern data coming in and the data not going back educating you know the rest of the world with all confidential information so we have been at it early and we're trying to stay on the frontier of what can be done with ai by having deep partnership with those you know frontier companies like open air i was with leadership open air on the phone last friday and again with somebody here at moderna on tuesday this week so this is a permanent uh reinvention and the permanent learning from all of us starting with me i even have tasks set up to keep me updated uh several times a week on whatever every morning use case outside the company

Jean-Philippe Courtois (39:21.538)
The CEO has to be the chief AI officer. Do not delegate it, own it. That sentence, stay with me. I would add, it's true of the CEO of your own life too, by the way. Now take that same combination, both purpose plus AI, and point it to education. Mackenzie Price co-founded Alpha School in Texas. Two hours of academics a day with an AI tutor that meets every child exactly where they are, The results are in the top 1% nationally. The rest of the day, life skills, grit, public speaking, entrepreneurship, cooking is what a school day looks like when you dare to reinvent it. I've heard you humorously describe the start of an Alpha Day as Tony Robbins for kids, right? For listeners who don't know who Tony Robbins is because they've got listeners across the globe, he's a best-selling personal development author, unlimited power book, and a life coach, very famous in the U.S., actually beyond as well. So to set the stage again for our listeners, Mackenzie, could you walk us through what a typical day is like for an Alpha student? Starting in the morning, I arrive in the school, what happens?

MacKenzie Price (40:36.977)
Alpha is a full day school experience. So it's not online programming. It's not homeschool. It's a full day school. So kids are dropped off in the morning. They're with other kids their same age. And they start out the day with what we call a limitless launch. This is a 15 minute exercise that's done with a group where often they're doing some sort of physical challenge. It might be an obstacle course. It might be some sort of a puzzle where they have to see who can build the tallest tower. something that they're working on that's challenging and kind of gets their blood going in the morning. It's also a time when our teachers, we call them guides, are teaching some sort of growth mindset principle that they are going to be able to then take into the rest of their day. we start every day with this get excited kind of group activity that helps them get really fired up to go into the next period of time. Then at that point, they go into what we call our two-hour learning block. This is the time when we focus on core academics. And so at this point, if you walked into one of our schools, you would see kids sitting next to each other. You would see adults in the classroom with them, but they would be on their computers. And what they're doing is when it's time for them to do math, they go onto a dashboard, they click the math subject, and it takes them directly to the app and the level of academic knowledge that they need to be at. What we've done is our AI tutor at this point has been able to assess what a student knows, what don't they know, and then put them on the right level and pace of academic lessons for them. And so then what the child is doing during that time is they're spending basically 25 minutes in each of the core subjects working at their own pace. And then they take a break and they go back and do that about five times for a total of two hours of school period. By the time lunch comes, they're done with their academics for the day. And what we're seeing from an academic perspective during that time is our students are learning twice as much in only two hours a day as students that are sitting in a classroom for six hours a day around the country. Our classes are performing the top 1% in all subjects and all grade levels. In the country, we measure them with something called NWEA map assessments. And so what we really show is that when kids are met at the level that they need to be met at, and they're allowed to go at the pace that works for them, we are able to truly unlock learning. So after lunch, then it's time to get into the part of the day that I think most people are most excited about, which is life skills development. And during this time, we are teaching life skills like grit. and leadership and teamwork and relationship building and storytelling and entrepreneurship through group project workshops. And so our students can be doing all kinds of things from building businesses to learning how to hunt, learning how to do archery and build fires and outdoor activities. to participating in physical challenges, giving and receiving feedback, all kinds of different experiences. And at the end of the school day, what we find is our kids get in the car at the end of the school day, and they love school. They're excited about what they're doing, how they're spending their time, and they're connected to the goals that they have for themselves academically, as well as what they're working on.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (44:15.561)
It sounds like an incredible Disneyland for education, right, for the kids.

MacKenzie Price (44:23.388)
Well, it's funny you say Disneyland because one of the things that I think can often be mistaken is our first commitment is that kids will love school. And when you think about what love school, what does that really mean? And what it doesn't mean is it doesn't mean that every day is a day of Disneyland. There are many days when kids are going to fail. They're going to be challenged. They're going to do something really hard. They're going to be in a major debate. Something's going to happen. But what we fundamentally kind of locked in on is how do you get kids passionate and engaged? Because even on those hard days, You can love something, you know, when it's hard. And the other thing to note, we don't say that kids will love learning. We say kids will love school because when we build an environment where kids are so excited to show up, then that actually enables us to help them do the hard things. Right. And sometimes, you know, learning to read is hard, but knowing how to read is really exciting and fun. Right. Getting the 99th percentile in math is hard. But being 99th percentile and realizing, wow, I am capable. I can do anything I set my mind to. And it's not about how smart I am or how good I am at a subject. It's really about putting the time and the effort in. Those are the things that are so magical that just completely change the way a kid sees themselves.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (45:45.525)
Kids who love school. Leaders who bet their company on a 5% chance. That's what purpose multiplied by AI looks like. But, and this is power number four, none of it matters if AI doesn't stay on our side. Keep humans at the center. This was the heart of my special AI series this season. Peggy Johnson and human-centric robotics. Navrila Singh on trust and governance. Navrila shared a number I can't forget. Less than a tiny fraction of 1% of AI investment goes into safety and trust today. Our message, the future is not innovation or trust, it's innovation and trust. The pioneer who saw all of this coming is Ryan Kaluby. From Cairo to Cambridge to MIT, Rana spent her career teaching machines to understand human emotions because 90% of how we communicate is non-verbal. Listen to her defining moment and to the story of how bias quietly creeps into an algorithm and how you can catch it. MIT, you helped establish the Autism and Communication Technology Initiative and contribute to the development of emotion-reading wearable glasses. You built one of the very first emotionally intelligent machines, a system that can identify people's facial expressions and map that into a number of cognitive emotional states. And this provided the impetus for starting Affectiva 2009 as a spin-off from MIT Media Lab. You created the company, I think, with Dr. Rosalind Picard to bring emotional intelligence to technology and change the way people make decisions by incorporating emotional data. So what was the defining moment that made you realize that merging technology with human emotions was your true calling personally?

Rana el Kaliouby (47:45.775)
That brings us back to my PhD days because when I first got to Cambridge and I was feeling lonely and it was my first experience away from home, I would literally sit down on my machine and start. At the time, the messaging app was called ICQ. Yeah, I remember that. And if you're listeners who like remember that. And sometimes I would literally be in tears, like literally so homesick and just so down. And all I could send was a sad emoji face. Yes. And I felt like the richness of our emotional experiences as humans was just reduced to this like very... rudimentary communication language, right? Yes. And that sparked the idea. I was like, wow, like we are focused so much on the IQ of technology and AI, and nobody's really thinking about the EQ. And of course, right, in our human-to-human connection and communication, actually over 90% of how we communicate is... um is non-verbal it's facial expressions it's hand gestures right vocal intonation you're nodding your head kind of in agreement um and this all really gets lost when it's computer mediated. And so I wanted to apply machine learning and computer vision to ironically kind of quantify these emotional experiences that we have. And that was the spark for the idea. I still think it's extremely needed and relevant, especially in the age of AI today with AI becoming so ubiquitous. So it's still relevant.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (49:30.408)
No, it is super relevant. Actually, again, one of my guests, probably last year, actually, her name is Guy-Laclaire Kessou. She's a French PhD in positive psychology. She's also an artist. She's also a social entrepreneur. She's a United Nations activist as well. She's doing so many things. And she and I had a wonderful discussion about facial expressions because she's also... She's done also theater to talk about some of the drama that happened in Rwanda and some of those countries and genocides and help and use theater as a therapy for women. And because of that, she's worked so much on the body expressions, but also, of course, the mind. And so I'm fascinated about the way, it's a question to you, Rohana, how AI can accurately capture these very human nuances on our faces that we can see on YouTube right now between you and I. And how do you ensure that the technology interprets them ethically, respectfully, and with integrity using your values and words, right? How do we do that, technology and AI?

Rana el Kaliouby (50:42.152)
Oh, absolutely. That was a big part of, you know, my PhD and postdoc work at MIT. And then later when we started the company, it's not easy. A lot of people, I remember in the very first days of Affectiva, when we spun out they would say like how tough is that you know how hard is this problem anyway if a person's smiling it's my and actually we have about 22 different facial muscles and they combine to create thousands of potential expressions And then to map these expressions to meaning requires a lot of context, understanding the person, marrying it with other modalities, like what you're saying. So it's a very complex problem. And you're right. It's so easy to get biased. I remember, can I share a story about how we accidentally built bias? We were training our machine learning algorithm with facial expressions from all over the world. But we had one model basically that represented a smile. And one of our biggest clients was actually a company based in China. And they said, your algorithm doesn't work because it just shows a flat line all the time. And so we have to look at all the data. And it turns out, Chinese people smile, but the magnitude of the smile is a little different than like Egyptian Rana smiling, right? But we were comparing everybody on the same baseline. And so the algorithm was... And so we started to create like versions of the model that incorporated... kind of different facial compositions, different areas of the world, gender, you know, there's gender differences in how we express emotion. So it is so important to to be intentional and thoughtful about kind of data and algorithmic bias. I think it's also really important to respect people's privacy. So to this day, we have never collected any piece of data without people knowing that it's being collected. Super important.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (52:59.837)
Emotional intelligence, intentional data, privacy by principle, that's AI as a human face. My last extract asked the hardest question of all. Who owns your window to the world? Rafi Krikorian spent his career at Twitter, Uber, and the heart of American democracy. Today, he's the CTO of Mozilla. When I asked him why he chose a mission-driven foundation over a frontier air lab, his answer gave me chills. Really. Four minutes that concern every single one of us. You join Mozilla as CTO. For listeners, who are not all tech, by the way, Mozilla has a unique origin story. It traces back to 1988 when Netscape open-sourced its brother... code to defend an open web. And today's structure is just as very distinctive, right? I think there's a Mozilla Foundation that safeguards the public interest mission, while the Mozilla Corporation, if I understand well, builds products like Firefox to fund and advance it. In that sense, it's a real mission It's a rare first tech mission, you could argue. Somewhat comparable, you could argue, to OpenAI, because there's this kind of structure, and I know we can debate that, of non-profit on top of commercial. So what specifically first, Rafi, pulled you toward Mozilla? Its mission, open source DNA, and why was that, again, the right platform for you now versus joining a frontier lab

Raffi Krikorian (54:34.475)
yeah or open ai right any one of those companies today why did you make that choice yeah no that's a great question i mean like so i view i view mozilla in a similar way like i mentioned signal earlier that like what we do is we build technology on behalf of people Like, so in your story of Netscape open searching the browser, which then became Firefox, which I hope some of your users use, like the real goal of Firefox became to take on Microsoft when Microsoft wanted to control the web. So if you remember in the 90s with Internet Explorer and ActiveX and all these things,

Jean-Philippe Courtois (55:16.947)
I used to build some ActiveX components, so I understand too.

Raffi Krikorian (55:22.770)
But I was also a Firefox user at that time too, on my desktop Linux box and everything. Microsoft was trying to exert power over the web and make the web an extension of the Microsoft ecosystem. You could buy a Microsoft web serving stack, you can do all the stuff on your server closet on Microsoft environment, etc. and what firefox did was to provide a credible alternative which forced microsoft to the table to talk about standards to talk about interoperability to make sure the web remained open because we had a credible alternative that pushed the conversation and so like i think about that moment a lot because like i feel like we are in the similar spot right now so like You know, the term user agent is usually used to describe your web browser. Like your web browser is your user agent on the open web. It protects your privacy. It blocks ads. It does all this stuff on your behalf. And the user agent we're starting to all turn to is no longer the browser, but these chat agents or these chat prompts or other things. but those user agents aren't on your side they're on the side of someone else who has different incentives than you do they're on the side of a company like chat gpt is talking about running or open ads talking about running ads inside it so like which again makes you wonder about like the results that they're providing like are they being incentivized in different ways or are they for me And so like that, I feel is actually one of the biggest questions that we all have to tackle with. Like our portal to information could potentially be owned by a company. And is that the right thing or should it be owned by me? So like I use this phrase owners, not renters. Like I think we should own our knowledge portal, not rent it from someone else. And so like that's why I think Mozilla for me was the right place. Like, yeah, I mean- I'd like to think I could have gotten a job at the Frontier Labs. I don't know if I'm smart enough, but I'd like to think I could. But this is the place where I really want to build technology for people. Like, I don't want seven AGIs in the world by the time all the big companies duke it out. I want a billion AGIs. I want seven billion AGIs. I want all of us to have our own AGI that works for me. And that's I think what the fight, that's I think the fight for the soul of our civilization kind of looks like right now. Owners, not renters.

Jean-Philippe Courtois (57:57.706)
What a way to end this journey. So what do I take away from this season? Four lessons, one for each power, one leader to another. Lesson one, master your inner voice or it will master you. When the 3M charter starts, do what Ethan does. Step back, use your name, talk to yourself like you would talk to your best friend. Your mind is your first territory of leadership. Lesson two, you cannot choose your wounds, but you can choose the story you tell about them. Nick runs, Raj writes, reveal it, feel it, heal it, and watch your deepest wound become your superpower. Lesson three, purpose is your algorithm. AI multiplies whatever you point it at. So point it as a mission. bigger than yourself, and make Stefan's 5% bets. And yes, be the chief AI officer of your own life. Do not delegate your learning. Lesson four, keep humans at the center. Demand AI with emotional intelligence like Rainer. Demand innovation and trust like Navrina. And remember, Rafi, be an owner, not a renter of your digital mind. And now, before I let you go, one last thing. Not a fifth lesson, an invitation. Because here's what I've come to believe. Regeneration is not a break from leadership. It is leadership. And summer is not a pause in your growth. It is where your growth happens. If you give it space. So here's the one practice I want to leave you with. I call it the summer walk. 15 minutes a day, no phone, no podcast. Yes, not even my podcast. Just you walking by the sea in a forest down your street asking yourself four questions. And ask them the way Ethan taught us. By your own name, like your own best coach. One, what is the voice in my head telling me today? Is it coaching me? Or is it sabotaging me? Two, what story am I telling about myself? And is it truly mine? Three, where will I point AI at my purpose this week? Choose one experiment, just one. Four, where did I keep the human at the center today? And where did I lose it? Four questions, 15 minutes every day until September. That's the whole practice. Work it daily and you won't just have listened to this episode, you will have lived it. And when the new season starts, you will show up exactly as this era needs you, more human than ever. Before we close, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. Thank you for listening, for your messages, your feedback, your encouragement, even your ideas for guests. This community of positive leaders in so many countries around the world is what keeps this podcast alive and growing 140 episodes in. And if this episode resonated with you, share it with one person who needs a spark this summer. Subscribe to my newsletter, Positive Leadership Avenue on LinkedIn, and leave us a review. It truly makes a difference. I wish you a very exciting and joyful summer. A summer that reconnects you with your own quest to grow as a positive leader. Take care of yourself and take care of the people around you. And I will see you in early September with a brand new season of extraordinary conversations. This is Jean-Philippe Courtois. This was the Positive Leadership Podcast. Have a great summer. Thank you. Merci.