Don’t just read about AI, lead it. Get the weekly playbook for leaders who want to supercharge their expertise and multiply their impact. <br/><br/><a href="https://leadershipinchange.com?utm_medium=podcast">leadershipinchange.com</a>
Leadership in Change with AI - Podcast
Claim This Podcastby Joel Salinas
35 episodes
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Don’t just read about AI, lead it. Get the weekly playbook for leaders who want to supercharge their expertise and multiply their impact. <br/><br/><a href="https://leadershipinchange.com?utm_medium=podcast">leadershipinchange.com</a>
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Recent Episodes
July 31, 2026
Nir Eyal: Indistractable, Timeboxing, and Why To-Do Lists Are Broken
<p><strong>TL;DR - </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/251321-nir-eyal">Nir Eyal</a> wrote Hooked, the book a generation of product teams used to build habit-forming apps, and then wrote <a target="_blank" href="http://geni.us/indistractable">Indistractable</a> to hand the rest of us the counter-move. In this Substack Live, he made a case I wasn’t expecting: only about 10% of our distraction comes from pings and notifications, the other 90% comes from inside us, and the fix isn’t more willpower but a calendar. We got into why to-do lists are broken, why checking email is the most dangerous distraction there is, and why he thinks self-regulation is the skill of the century.</p><p><strong>What to Remember</strong></p><p>* The one-sentence test Nir uses to tell traction from distraction, which has nothing to do with what the activity actually is</p><p>* Why he calls the to-do list a broken tool, and the timeboxing move he replaced it with</p><p>🎥 Catch all future interviews, <a target="_blank" href="https://leadershipinchange.com/subscribe">subscribe</a>!</p><p>🎧 Prefer audio? <a target="_blank" href="https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/leadership-in-change-with-ai-podcast/id1884921599">Listen on Apple Podcasts</a></p><p><strong>Outline</strong></p><p>(1:19) – Hooked and Indistractable are complements, not opposites</p><p>(5:07) – Internal triggers, and the month I deleted every news app</p><p>(6:24) – The book about focus Nir can’t stand</p><p>(7:22) – Only 10% of distraction comes from the pings</p><p>(8:56) – Traction, distraction, and the Latin root of both</p><p>(10:49) – The email trap: work that isn’t the work</p><p>(12:27) – Name one product built to help you use it less</p><p>(14:20) – Effort pacts, and Viktor Frankl’s space</p><p>(15:43) – Why to-do lists are broken</p><p>(17:22) – Timeboxing, and the real metric of success</p><p>(22:30) – Self-regulation is the skill of the century</p><p>(28:36) – Persistence, belief, and Beyond Belief</p><p><strong>My Takeaways</strong></p><p><strong>Ninety percent of it is coming from inside the house</strong></p><p>So this is the number I had to go back and check twice. We blame the pings, the dings, and the rings, and Nir puts those at roughly 10% of the problem. The other 90% is an internal trigger, which is really just a feeling: </p><p>“Loneliness, boredom, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety.” </p><p>Then he closes the escape hatch. </p><p>“It’s not your fault. You didn’t create these digital technologies. But it is your responsibility because who else is responsible?”</p><p><strong>Traction and distraction are the same word</strong></p><p>Here’s the reframe I’ll actually use. Both come from the Latin root trahere, to pull, and both end in the same six letters, action. So the test is simple: </p><p>“anything that is not what you said you were going to do in advance is by definition a distraction.” </p><p>Watching football isn’t a distraction if you planned it, and answering email is one if you didn’t. That second half is what got me, because Nir says the work-shaped distractions are the worst kind, “because you don’t even realize you’re distracted.” I said on the recording that this was hitting close to home, and I meant it.</p><p><strong>The to-do list is a register of things you failed to do</strong></p><p>Honestly, this is the part I didn’t want to hear because I tend to live by my to do list. A to-do list has no constraints, so you always add more and you always pick the easy item over the important one, and then you read back the leftovers night after night until you’ve built a fairly convincing case against yourself. </p><p>“There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not broken. It’s this stupid time management technique we call to-do list that’s broken.” </p><p>His replacement is <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nirandfar.com/timeboxing/">timeboxing</a>, and it moves the finish line: success isn’t the checked box but “did I work on what I said I was going to work on for as long as I said I would without distractions?” </p><p><strong>Be stingy with your time and generous with your money</strong></p><p>This is the line I’d put on a wall. We clip coupons, we split checks at lunch, we hunt for deals, and then we hand our hours to whoever asks. “You can’t make more time. I don’t care if you’re Bill Gates or Elon Musk.” He carries it into parenting, calls self-regulation “the skill of the century,” and describes sitting down with his six-year-old to build her calendar, video games included. My version is a Bloom card that locks my work apps at 8 p.m., so getting back in means walking to my bedroom and tapping my phone against it. That walk is the whole point.</p><p><strong>One Question to Sit With</strong></p><p><p>What’s on your calendar this week that’s still only on your to-do list?</p></p><p>Then watch the full conversation above, and <strong>go subscribe to </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://nir.substack.com/"><strong>Nir And Far</strong></a><strong>, grab </strong><a target="_blank" href="http://geni.us/indistractable"><strong>Indistractable</strong></a><strong>, and pick up his new one, </strong><a target="_blank" href="http://geni.us/beyondbelief"><strong>Beyond Belief</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p><p><strong>About Nir Eyal</strong></p><p>Nir Eyal is the author of Hooked, <a target="_blank" href="http://geni.us/indistractable">Indistractable</a>, and <a target="_blank" href="http://geni.us/beyondbelief">Beyond Belief,</a> which are built on his work in behavioral design and human motivation. Hooked and Indistractable have sold more than a million copies in over 30 languages, and Beyond Belief is an instant New York Times bestseller. He’s a former lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and The Atlantic. He writes <a target="_blank" href="https://nir.substack.com/">Nir And Far</a> on Substack and gives away a deep library of free tools at <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nirandfar.com/best-articles/">nirandfar.com</a>, including a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nirandfar.com/schedule-maker/">schedule maker</a> and a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nirandfar.com/habit-tracker/">habit tracker</a>.</p><p><strong>About me</strong></p><p>Joel Salinas is an <a target="_blank" href="https://jsalinas.org/#services">AI Strategy Coach</a> for founders and leaders, from solopreneurs to teams. AI is everywhere; judgment is scarce. Joel helps leaders adopt AI without outsourcing their judgment to it, through the <a target="_blank" href="https://jsalinas.org/services/ai-judgment-workshop.html">AI Judgment Workshop</a> and the <a target="_blank" href="https://jsalinas.org/services/engagement.html">90-Day Judgment Engagement</a>. Creator of the AI Leadership Triad. He writes Leadership in Change.</p><p>Written by a human, for humans.</p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://leadershipinchange.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">leadershipinchange.com/subscribe</a>
July 28, 2026
Keeping up with the pace of AI - With Charlene Li
<p><strong>TL;DR:</strong> Charlene Li has been standing at the front of every big technology shift since newspapers went online in the early nineties, and she just published Winning with AI with Dr. Katia Walsh. We spent most of this conversation on the thing most of us won’t say out loud, which is the fear that we already missed it. Her answer is that we are all absurdly early, that fluency is the whole game, and that the only way to get it is to be bad at this in public for a while. Watch this one if you’ve been measuring yourself against everybody on LinkedIn who looks like they have AI figured out already.</p><p>🎥 Catch all future interviews, <a target="_blank" href="https://leadershipinchange.com/subscribe">subscribe</a>!</p><p>🎧 Prefer audio? <a target="_blank" href="https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/leadership-in-change-with-ai-podcast/id1884921599">Listen on Apple Podcasts</a></p><p><strong>Outline</strong></p><p>(00:25) – Who <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/739391-charlene-li">Charlene Li</a> is, and why it’s never about the technology</p><p>(01:39) – From the newsroom to Forrester to Altimeter Group</p><p>(03:41) – Electricity, steam-powered factories, and why AI moves faster</p><p>(06:24) – The biggest misconception, and “you’re not even close to beginning”</p><p>(08:44) – Fluency vs. literacy, and why the only way through is through</p><p>(11:36) – The trust wall, and how a leader destigmatizes AI in one meeting</p><p>(13:48) – Why write a book on AI when everything keeps changing</p><p>(16:42) – Step one, and the one line to add to the end of every prompt</p><p>(19:27) – Pick your lane, and the board member who owned ethical AI</p><p>(25:35) – “You’re not behind. You’re just getting started.”</p><p>(33:09) – Curiosity, imagination, and using AI to find your blind spots</p><p><strong>My Takeaways</strong></p><p><strong>You’re not behind.</strong> So this is the piece I keep coming back to, because I hear that fear from almost every leader I sit with and I’ve felt it in myself. Charlene has been in this since she helped a newspaper go online in 1993, she wrote the book on it, and she still took three weeks off in January to care for loved ones, came back to Claude Cowork, and had no idea what had happened while she was gone. She felt behind too. Then she took a breath and turned it around on the rest of us.</p><p>“You’re not behind. Just look around you. How many people haven’t even started yet? So if you start today and just do one thing, you’ll be ahead of the vast majority of people.”</p><p>One of my clients is a CEO with over 45 years of practice who started sending me links to artifacts he’d built in Claude, and he could not believe he made them himself with nobody helping him. That’s what starting looks like.</p><p><strong>Fluency is a practice, and practice is the only door.</strong> Honestly, this is where most AI advice falls apart, because it tells you what the thing is and then leaves you standing there. Charlene splits AI literacy, knowing what it is, from AI fluency, which is what happens once you’ve used it enough that you stop thinking about it. There’s one way to get there and she doesn’t pretend otherwise.</p><p>“It will feel messy. It will feel like you don’t know what you’re doing... But there is no way around it. You have to go through it. The only way through it is through it.”</p><p>I said something close to this on the live about electricity, that plugging AI into an organization nobody wired for it does nothing, but hers is the harder version, because wiring a house is a project you finish and this is a thing you only get by being bad at it for a while. She also gave the best beginner tip of the night: add “before you start, ask me any clarifying questions you may have” to the end of your prompt, and the whole thing turns from a vending machine into a conversation.</p><p><strong>Mindset comes before tools, and before governance.</strong> Look, most of us hand AI to the CIO, buy everyone a license, and call that a rollout, and I keep watching it play out the same way. Her line on it was the sharpest thing she said all evening.</p><p>“This is not something you delegate. And what I’ve seen now is that leaders are abdicating this role.”</p><p>The fix she gave is almost embarrassingly small. Use AI to prep for your next meeting, tell the room you did it, then ask them how they used it, which sets the expectation and takes the shame out of it in the same breath. If your people think using AI counts as cheating, no tool budget on earth saves the rollout. That’s the same wall I wrote about in <a target="_blank" href="https://leadershipinchange.com/p/the-empathy-gap-in-ai-implementation">the empathy gap in AI implementation</a>.</p><p><strong>The thing I’m stealing from her.</strong> Here’s the part I hadn’t thought of, and I said so on air. Charlene feeds her own meeting recordings to AI and asks it what went wrong in the room.</p><p>“Take a transcript of my last meeting because something in it didn’t feel right. Something went off the rails and I’m not sure what’s happening. Diagnose that and give me suggestions.”</p><p>It comes back and tells her she never set an agenda, or that she talked for 70% of a call she should have been listening through. I’ve fed transcripts into Claude plenty of times to build a post out of them, and it never once occurred to me to point that back at myself and ask where I got in my own way. I use <a target="_blank" href="https://www.granola.ai/?via=joel-salinas">Granola</a> to capture the calls, so the raw material has been sitting there the whole time, which is really the argument for why none of us is behind. The thing that moves you forward this week is probably already open on your screen, and you just haven’t pointed it at anything that matters yet.</p><p><p>The mindset work Charlene is describing, getting your own hands dirty before you ask your team to, is exactly what I walk leaders through in the <a target="_blank" href="https://jsalinas.org/services/ai-judgment-workshop.html">AI Judgment Workshop</a>, which is open for registration now. If you’d rather go deeper inside your organization, that’s the <a target="_blank" href="https://jsalinas.org/services/engagement.html">90-Day Judgment Engagement</a>.</p></p><p><strong>One Question to Sit With</strong></p><p>Charlene left this one hanging and I haven’t been able to put it down: </p><p><p>What could you actually do if everybody in your company was fluent with AI, not licensed, fluent? What would you build that you’ve already talked yourself out of?</p></p><p>Watch the full conversation above for her answer, and for the line I keep repeating to myself, that you’ve never been in control anyway. When you’re done, <strong>go subscribe to </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://charleneli.substack.com/"><strong>Charlene Li on Substack</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p><p><strong>About Charlene Li</strong></p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/739391-charlene-li">Charlene Li</a> is a New York Times bestselling author whose books include Groundswell, Open Leadership, and The Disruption Mindset. Her latest, Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success, is co-written with Dr. Katia Walsh, one of the world’s first chief AI officers, and it’s a leadership and strategy book rather than a technology book. She founded Altimeter Group in 2008, spent years as a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research covering the rise of social media, served as Chief Research Officer at PA Consulting, and now leads her own firm, Quantum Networks Group. She’s just moved her newsletter to Substack, and the book is at <a target="_blank" href="https://winningwithaibook.com/">winningwithaibook.com</a>.</p><p><strong>About me</strong></p><p>Joel Salinas is an <a target="_blank" href="https://jsalinas.org/#services">AI Strategy Coach</a> for leaders at small and mid-sized businesses and nonprofits. AI is everywhere; judgment is scarce. Joel helps leaders adopt AI without outsourcing their judgment to it, through a monthly live workshop and 90-day engagements. Creator of the AI Leadership Triad. He writes Leadership in Change.</p><p>Affiliate links included.</p><p>Written by a human, for humans.</p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://leadershipinchange.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">leadershipinchange.com/subscribe</a>
July 23, 2026
Phil Powis: Sacred Business, AI, and What You Truly Want
<p><strong>TL;DR:</strong> <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/181219008-phil-powis">Phil Powis ❤️⚡️</a> and I have been going back and forth on Substack for over a year, and his writing lands in my feed like a breath of fresh air, so this one felt less like an interview and more like two friends comparing notes. We got into why AI is nobody’s goal, why your team’s trust matters more than the tool, and the one question he keeps coming back to that can reorganize a whole business. Worth the watch if work has started to feel hollow.</p><p>🎥 Catch all future interviews, <a target="_blank" href="https://leadershipinchange.com/subscribe">subscribe</a>!</p><p>🎧 Prefer audio? <a target="_blank" href="https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/leadership-in-change-with-ai-podcast/id1884921599">Listen on Apple Podcasts</a></p><p><strong>Outline</strong></p><p>(00:30) – Friends across Substack, a breath of fresh air</p><p>(01:23) – Burnout, a tumor, and the business he walked away from</p><p>(07:35) – Quality of life vs. lifestyle</p><p>(09:07) – Sacred business vs. opportunistic business</p><p>(11:15) – Why AI is nobody’s goal</p><p>(16:48) – The AI Judgment Workshop and reading your team</p><p>(19:18) – The Harmony Map, and slowing down in the AI era</p><p>(27:40) – The eco rat race: old identity, new context</p><p>(29:46) – We’re all toddlers with AI</p><p>(31:48) – “What do you truly want?”</p><p>(35:39) – The Golden Sequence: connection, growth, belonging</p><p><strong>My Takeaways</strong></p><p><strong>Sacred business vs. opportunistic business.</strong> So Phil opened with the story I keep thinking about. He built a boutique advertising business doing over $100,000 a month with basically him and a virtual assistant, and it nearly cost him everything, autoimmune problems, a health scare, time essentially bedridden. He walked away because his heart was never in it, and out of that came the distinction the whole conversation runs on.</p><p>“When we talk about sacred business, it’s honoring all of who you are, your gifts, your talents, your failures, your victories, and it’s tied to service. The opportunistic business is chasing the trend. It’s not really looking at who am I and what wants to come through.”</p><p>When you chase the trend, you spend your life playing catch-up on somebody else’s dream. I’ve watched leaders do it with AI too, grab the shiny thing because everyone else did, and then wonder why it drains them.</p><p><strong>AI is nobody’s goal.</strong> Here’s where I jumped in, because I see the same thing coaching leaders on AI. I’ll ask why they’re bringing it in, and a lot of the time the honest answer is “we just want to be an AI-forward business.” That’s the trap Phil is describing, and it’s why I keep saying AI is nobody’s goal.</p><p>“So much of what I’m doing is just following my own threads of curiosity and wonder, and asking the questions I’m looking to answer for myself, and then allowing people a window into that.”</p><p>AI is the means to whatever your goal always was. Marry that goal to something you actually care about and the work stops feeling like burnout, which is the whole discipline behind <a target="_blank" href="https://leadershipinchange.com/p/the-ai-leadership-triad-3-skills">the AI Leadership Triad</a>. The tool moves you toward what you wanted, it doesn’t get to become the thing you want.</p><p><strong>The eco rat race.</strong> Phil lived in Costa Rica for three years, and he had the funniest, truest line of the whole talk, about the founders and VCs who burn out, move there to build a wellness center, and change absolutely nothing.</p><p>“They bring the same New York energy to the picture. They’re sitting in the most beautiful locations in the world and they’re still the most stressed out people you’ll ever meet. They’re bringing that old identity to a new context.”</p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/262727079-carolina-wilke">Carolina Wilke</a> nailed it in the chat, you can build a new business with an old identity and hit the same walls.</p><p><strong>You can’t relocate your way out of who you are, and you can’t AI your way out of it either.</strong></p><p><strong>We’re all toddlers with AI.</strong> The thing I keep coming back to is how humble Phil is about all of this. He refuses to look down on anyone’s messy AI use, and he put the reason plainly.</p><p>“With AI specifically, we’re all kind of like toddlers. And I include myself in that, and even you, because how far are we really into this? We’re a couple years into this journey.”</p><p>I study this for a living and I still bring in a new expert every Thursday, because none of us has it figured out. <strong>Phil’s antidote to the noise is one question he and Carolina ask their clients: what do you truly want.</strong> Ask it enough times and it gets dangerous in the best way, because it’ll take you down a rabbit hole if you let it. That question is the human work AI can’t do for you, and it’s the same reason I keep telling leaders <a target="_blank" href="https://leadershipinchange.com/p/dont-outsource-your-thinking-to-ai">not to outsource their thinking to it</a>.</p><p><p>Reading your team before you buy the tool is exactly what I run leaders through in my <a target="_blank" href="https://jsalinas.org/services/ai-judgment-workshop.html">AI Judgment Workshop</a>, which is open for registration now. If you’d rather go deeper one-on-one or with your organization, <a target="_blank" href="https://jsalinas.org/#services">just let me know! </a></p></p><p><strong>One Question to Sit With</strong></p><p>Phil ended on the question I want to leave you with too: what’s the why behind where you’re putting your hours, and does it marry where your passions lie?</p><p>Watch the full conversation above for how Phil and Carolina help people sit with that. And when you’re done, <strong>go subscribe to </strong><a target="_blank" href="https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/"><strong>Sacred Business Flow</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p><p><strong>About Phil Powis</strong></p><p>Phil Powis is the creator of Sacred Business Flow, a Substack with more than 33,000 subscribers that he writes with his partner Carolina. He teaches founders and creators to build what he calls a sacred business, one that honors who you are and stays profitable, instead of an opportunistic business that just chases the trend. His work pairs business and marketing strategy with inner work, including the Harmony Map assessment, which reads what he calls your nine fundamental frequencies and points you to the one “breakthrough frequency” worth building around. Subscribe to his writing at <a target="_blank" href="https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/">Sacred Business Flow</a>, and take the free Harmony Map assessment at <a target="_blank" href="https://sacredbusiness.com/">sacredbusiness.com</a>.</p><p><strong>About me</strong></p><p>Joel Salinas is an <a target="_blank" href="https://jsalinas.org/#services">AI Strategy Coach</a> for leaders at small and mid-sized businesses and nonprofits. AI is everywhere; judgment is scarce. Joel helps leaders adopt AI without outsourcing their judgment to it, through a monthly live workshop and 90-day engagements. Creator of the AI Leadership Triad. He writes Leadership in Change.</p><p>Written by a human, for humans.</p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://leadershipinchange.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">leadershipinchange.com/subscribe</a>
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