Leadership in Change with AI - Podcast

The Currency of Trust, with The Christian Post’s Dr. Christopher Chou

So this one is about trust, and why it might be the only thing left that AI can’t manufacture for you. I sat down with Dr. Christopher Chou [https://substack.com/@tcpleaders], the CEO of The [https://www.christianpost.com/] Christian Post [https://www.christianpost.com/]. We got into why people don’t adopt AI when they don’t trust the leaders handing it to them, what it cost his team to stand by a story when the platforms told them to apologize, and the one thing a human brings to the table that a model never will. If you lead anything right now, this is the conversation I’d point you to. Outline (00:00) – The value of trust (01:07) – Saying yes, and praying for the newsroom (03:03) – Translating trust from relief work to a newsroom (07:42) – Adoption is a trust problem, not a tool problem (08:53) – The team member who heard “AI” and felt fear (10:53) – Why it’s a brutal moment to run a newsroom (12:48) – Not negotiable, not adjustable, not for sale (16:39) – Op-eds from both sides, and nine months off Twitter (20:46) – When AI summaries took 20% of search traffic (23:07) – What a human brings that AI can’t (29:46) – Journalists who are Christians, not Christian journalists (32:50) – Three books worth your time My Takeaways Adoption is a trust problem before it’s a tools problem. When I talk to CEOs trying to bring AI into their organizations, the biggest misconception I see is that people will adopt a tool just because it’s good. They won’t. If your team thinks you brought in a new tool to replace them in six months, it doesn’t matter how good it is; they’re never going to touch it. Chris kept the human piece at the center of the whole thing: “Even when we’re talking about AI, it still has to be about people.” Trust gets built brick by brick, and it comes apart fast. Chris said there’s no shortcut: “It’s day by day, story by story, brick by brick, you have to build.” Then he told me what that actually costs. The Christian Post got suspended from Twitter for nine months over a post they believed was true, with 180,000 followers on the line, because they refused to apologize and call it wrong and hateful. “Those are the moments you need to stand by your convictions.” They ate the loss. That’s what a track record looks like when nobody’s watching. The fear in the room is real, so name it. Chris told me about encouraging one of his team members to use AI more, and the immediate reaction was fear that it would replace them. His read was that you can’t skip past that. “You have to address the worries. You can’t just force it.” You meet people where they are, or you don’t get to the next step at all. I’ve watched leaders try to sell their way past that fear, and it never works. The thing a human brings is the thing AI can’t. Chris framed it as a question his team keeps asking: “What is it that a human person brings to the table that AI is not going to be able to bring?” Lived experience. Relationships. Knowing what’s going to matter tomorrow. He put it in a line I’m still going over: “The Bible tells us birds don’t worry about tomorrow. But people do.” That worry, that human stake, is exactly what AI doesn’t have. It’s also the easiest way to tell whether something was written by a person. If you’re a leader trying to bring AI into your team without breaking the trust you’ve spent years building, that’s most of what I do in my coaching work. You can start here [https://jsalinas.org/]. One Question to Sit With If anybody can now produce infinite content for almost nothing, what are you putting out that someone would actually choose to trust? Watch the full conversation above, and go subscribe to TCP Leaders [https://substack.com/@tcpleaders], Chris’s Substack for Christian leaders. And check out The Christian Post [https://www.christianpost.com/], free to read, because they believe news is a public service. About Dr. Christopher Chou Dr. Christopher Chou is the CEO of The Christian Post, one of the largest Christian news outlets in the country, where he has led since 2018. He writes TCP Leaders [https://substack.com/@tcpleaders] on Substack, built to help Christian leaders navigate the work of leading. His newsroom defines itself by a simple line: journalists who are Christians, not Christian journalists, with a first duty to the facts and the truth. Subscribe to follow his work. About me Joel Salinas is an Executive AI Coach for leaders at small and mid-sized businesses and nonprofits. 1:1 coaching, team workshops, and AI strategy work built around amplifying what your team is already good at. Creator of the AI Leadership Triad. He writes Leadership in Change. If you want help thinking through your own AI strategy or online presence, start here [https://jsalinas.org/]. Written by a human, for humans. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leadershipinchange.com/subscribe [https://leadershipinchange.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

What's Content Worth When AI Can Write Anything: Live w/ Michael Schreiber

TL;DR. So this is the question I keep circling in 2026: if AI can spin up an infinite amount of content from basically nothing, what’s still worth anything? I brought on Michael Schreiber [https://substack.com/profile/24335736-michael-schreiber] to answer it, because he’s spent years inside the rooms that set the standard, New York Times, HBO, ABC, NBC, and now runs MediaFeed, a content syndication company, plus a local podcast in his New Jersey town. We got into the slop problem, why the smartest move is teaching people to do the thing you sell, what trust actually looks like now, and the moment his co-host read his AI-written draft and told him to knock it off. Watch the full conversation above. Outline (00:13) – Welcome (01:05) – From newspapers to MediaFeed (05:26) – The content funnel, top to bottom (07:23) – Why you resist the urge to sell (10:08) – Teach them to fish, they still pay you (13:43) – What trust looks like in 2026 (14:17) – Lazy AI versus strategic AI (18:33) – The tidal wave of slop (21:23) – Canonical tags and being known for something (30:06) – “This is s**t. You’re a good writer.” (43:52) – Denial of Death Subscribe to get all future episodes and articles. My Takeaways Resist the sell, or lose the trust. Michael’s whole model runs on real editorial content, and the hardest discipline in it is refusing to sell inside the piece, even when the piece only exists because you have something to sell. His reasoning landed for me because it cuts both ways. “People are smart enough to figure that out and will undermine your brand ultimately. And it also probably won’t help your sales.” So you lose the trust and you don’t even get the conversion. That’s the worst trade in content, and most people make it without noticing. Teach people to fish. Here’s the counterintuitive one. Michael talked about creating content that shows people how to do, on their own, the exact thing his client’s service provides. Sounds insane until you hear him out. “You can teach people how to fish. They’re still going to want you to go fishing for them sometimes.” A small slice does it themselves, a much larger slice reads it and goes, that sounds like a lot of work, I’ll just pay you. You become the encyclopedia Britannica of whatever it is you do, and the trust comes with it. “This is s**t. You’re a good writer.” This is the moment I’ll be telling people about. Michael tried handing his podcast write-ups to AI, fed it samples of his own writing, the whole thing. His co-host read it and said, pardon the French, “this is s**t, you’re a good writer, what the hell are you doing?” So he stopped and went back to writing them himself. I felt that one, because it’s exactly why I still write my own Monday and Thursday pieces by hand and only bring AI in afterward to check whether I’m rambling. The tool gets you efficiency, but the voice is still yours to bring. If anyone can generate the content, the only scarce thing left is the reason it’s worth trusting. What’s yours? About Michael Schreiber Michael Schreiber [https://substack.com/profile/24335736-michael-schreiber] is the CEO of MediaFeed [https://mediafeed.co/], a content syndication company that helps brands, nonprofits, and journalists develop and distribute real editorial work. A longtime journalist whose path ran through newspapers, documentaries, and financial outlets including TheStreet and Credit.com, he also hosts a local podcast covering his New Jersey town. Find his work at mediafeed.co [https://mediafeed.co/], on Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/schreibot/], and on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-schreiber-5682821/]. About me Joel Salinas is an Executive AI Coach for leaders at small and mid-sized businesses and nonprofits. 1:1 coaching, team workshops, and AI strategy work built around amplifying what your team is already good at. Creator of the AI Leadership Triad. He writes Leadership in Change. If you want help thinking through your own AI strategy or online presence, start here [https://jsalinas.org/]. Written by a human, for humans. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leadershipinchange.com/subscribe [https://leadershipinchange.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Genuine Communication in the Age of AI: with Christopher Chin

Christopher Chin [https://substack.com/profile/160488004-christopher-chin] started out as a coder, one of the jobs you’d think needs the least human communication, and somehow ended up on a TEDx stage teaching people how to speak. This conversation is about how he made that jump, and what he thinks communication actually is once you stop treating it as moving information from one head to another. The frame that I’m still going over is that communication is music. It has melody, rhythm, and silence, and once you hear it that way you start sounding like a person instead of a content machine. We also got into why authenticity is the thing that survives the age of AI slop, and the dead-simple framework he uses to never ramble again. Watch the full conversation above. Outline (00:00) – Meet Christopher Chin (02:13) – The composer who became a coder (04:25) – Head down vs. speak up (06:17) – Communication is music (08:22) – Mindset over technique (13:02) – Why silence does the work (17:37) – Standing out in the age of AI slop (20:06) – Where AI actually belongs (28:33) – Bring out your hidden speaker (32:16) – Three steps for when you freeze A Few Things That Stuck With Me Communication is music. The line I keep coming back to is when Chris stopped describing communication as information and started describing it as something you compose. He grew up wanting to write music for films, and when he finally pulled that side of himself back into how he talks, his whole delivery changed. “Music has melody and rhythm and tonality, and the voice does the same thing. By not viewing communication as just information, but as an experience you create, that’s how you engage.” I felt that one personally. I grew up speaking Spanish, my mom’s from Argentina, and there’s so much emotion baked right into the words, and I’d never really clocked that the lilt and the pacing were doing half the work. Mindset over technique. Here’s the thing most communication advice gets wrong. Chris said you can Google “three steps to executive presence” all day, and if you just copy the hand gestures and the posture, none of it lands. “The real way to achieve authentic, effortless communication is to work on your mindset and your understanding of why these things work. If I teach you the core of executive presence is coming in with a calm, steady, grounded presence, knowing that no matter what’s thrown your way you can handle it, that changes how you communicate.” It reframes the whole thing, because you stop trying to perform confidence and start building the kind of steadiness that makes the performance unnecessary. The fast-food test for AI. We got into AI slop, the wave of generic content flooding every feed, and Chris had the cleanest way of explaining why it bounces right off you. He compared it to McDonald’s fries: the same everywhere, engineered to be fine, forgotten the second you finish. “It could be saying the most brilliant things in the world, but I want to hear that from an actual person. If I sense there’s no human behind that screen, I don’t want to hear it. I want lived experience.” Honestly, this is the whole reason I run these as live conversations instead of just publishing a guest article. You’d never get Chris, the actual person, from a block of text. Nerves are the flip side of excitement. For anyone who freezes the second they have to speak, this was the reframe of the episode. Chris pointed out that the butterflies before a talk and the butterflies before a trip you’ve been dying to take are the same physical thing. “The physical sensation you experience when you’re nervous, the butterflies in the stomach, is the same exact sensation when you’re excited. The thing that differentiates them is your perception.” So you don’t actually have to calm down, you just have to decide the feeling means you’re about to do something that matters. (Quick aside: a lot of my 1:1 coaching work is exactly this, helping leaders close the gap between how good their thinking is and how clearly it lands in the room. If that’s you, here’s where to start [https://jsalinas.org/services/executive-coaching.html].) One Question to Sit With Where are you underselling yourself at work, not because your thinking isn’t strong, but because you’ve never put in the reps on saying it out loud where it counts? Watch the full conversation above, and then go subscribe to The Hidden Speaker [https://thehiddenspeaker.substack.com/]. About Christopher Chen Christopher Chen is a TEDx and international keynote speaker who coaches leaders and teams on communication, and he writes The Hidden Speaker on Substack. He started out shy, introverted, and behind a screen as a coder before building his practice around helping people speak with confidence. He’s posted around 180 videos on his YouTube channel and releases weekly previews from his upcoming book on communicating in the age of AI. Subscribe to The Hidden Speaker [https://thehiddenspeaker.substack.com/]. About me Joel Salinas is an Executive AI Coach for leaders at small and mid-sized businesses and nonprofits. 1:1 coaching, team workshops, and AI strategy work built around amplifying what your team is already good at. Creator of the AI Leadership Triad. He writes Leadership in Change. If you want help thinking through your own AI strategy or online presence, start here [https://jsalinas.org/]. Written by a human, for humans. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leadershipinchange.com/subscribe [https://leadershipinchange.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The Fear Behind Every AI Decision You’re Avoiding: With Janice Burt

Here’s where this conversation started. I keep hearing the same thing from the leaders I coach, and what they’re asking about on the surface is strategy or tools or timing, but the thing underneath it, almost every time, is fear. Here’s where this conversation started. I keep hearing the same thing from the leaders I coach, and what they’re asking about on the surface is strategy or tools or timing, but the thing underneath it, almost every time, is fear. Fear of not adapting to what’s coming, fear of getting left behind, fear of letting their team down when they’re not sure how to prepare them. I brought Janice Burt [https://substack.com/profile/440672360-janice-burt] on because she’s spent the last fourteen years walking straight into fear on purpose, one a year. She’s a two-time TEDx speaker, author of Kicking the People-Pleasing Habit, and host of the One Fear Per Year podcast. [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9TaiTxfnDLJLyWWXTyrX58U7Dewau7NX] What I didn’t expect was how cleanly her work maps onto what AI leaders are actually wrestling with right now. Outline (00:00) – Why this conversation is different (01:55) – Janice’s origin and the prison of fear (03:00) – Year one was a marathon (07:00) – What 14 years inside fear taught her (08:30) – Fear of not being good enough (12:30) – Writing Kicking the People-Pleasing Habit (14:50) – The through-line for AI leaders (19:25) – Caring vs. people-pleasing (21:30) – Awareness, choice, community (32:00) – Dropping to her knees on stage (34:00) – One fear per year, your turn A Few Things That Stuck With Me The through-line nobody names. About fifteen minutes into the conversation, I realized the leaders I coach almost never use the word “afraid.” They talk about strategy, vendor selection, team readiness, timing. But the avoidance pattern is the same one Janice has been studying for fourteen years. Here’s how she said it: “I would say an underlying thing is just the fear of not being good enough. And then there’s the fear of change. Or the fear of the unknown. None of us know what’s going to happen.” That’s why a CEO keeps deferring the AI conversation with their team, and why a director quietly pushes the rollout one more quarter. The tool is the easy thing to talk about. The harder thing is sitting in the room and saying out loud that the team isn’t ready, or that the leader isn’t sure they’re ready either. Fear lives in the future. Janice made a point that stopped me in the middle of the live. Fear is always anticipatory, which means you can only fight it from a place you’re not actually standing in. Her words: “Fear is always this anticipated thing in the future. What’s going to happen? Worst case scenario. To lay in bed last night worrying about this conversation, that’s the fear. Coming back to the present moment is taking your power back.” Read it again with AI in mind. Most of the AI anxiety I see in coaching is about an imagined version of next year, which is also why it’s almost impossible to act on. You can’t fix a future you haven’t reached yet. Year one was a marathon. I want to come back to this part. Janice went straight at the one thing she was certain she couldn’t do, ran 26.2 miles, and learned the lesson that turned the whole project into a fourteen-year practice: “Accountability is where it’s at. Community is where it’s at. We can do so many things and go so many places with the right people around us.” That’s a leadership lesson dressed up as a running story. You don’t walk through fear alone, and you don’t push your team through AI adoption alone either. The on-stage moment. A couple of years ago, in front of a room of CEOs and professional speakers, Janice had a physical fear reaction mid-talk and dropped to her knees on stage to keep from running off. Afterward, she described it as a spiritual experience, a moment of surrender where the facade dropped and the audience saw the actual Janice for the first time. Her line right after has been in my head since the live ended: “There’s nothing worse than being held back by your fear. Not even this.” I told her on the live it was the strongest line of the conversation. I still think so. (If you’re a leader sitting with one of these fears right now and the AI piece is the surface story, this is exactly the conversation I have in 1:1 executive coaching [https://jsalinas.org/services/executive-coaching.html]. Sometimes the strategy work starts with naming what you’ve been avoiding.) One Question to Sit With What’s the one fear you’d walk through this year, on purpose, if you knew you had three hundred and sixty-five days to figure it out? Watch the full conversation above. Then go subscribe to Janice at janiceburt.com [https://janiceburt.com/] and grab her book Kicking the People-Pleasing Habit [https://www.amazon.com/Kicking-People-Pleasing-Habit-6-Step-Approach-ebook/dp/B09TMDZYYW]. If you want help thinking through your own AI strategy or online presence, start here [https://jsalinas.org/]. Written by a human, for humans. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leadershipinchange.com/subscribe [https://leadershipinchange.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Live With David Allen: GTD Principles in the Age of AI

TL;DR — I just spent 49 minutes on Substack Live with David Allen, the guy who has shaped how I think about my own work for the last 25 years. Getting Things Done turns 25 in 2026, and the question I had walking in was simple: does the framework still hold up in a world full of AI agents? David’s answer was sharper than I expected. AI didn’t really change the underlying principle, it just raised the cost of ignoring it so fast that you can feel it now in a way you couldn’t ten years ago. Outline (00:00) – Welcome David Allen and the one-paragraph version of GTD (02:00) – Mind like water and the strategic case for a clear head (05:00) – The accidental career and how the five steps came together (09:00) – Why AI didn’t change the principles, just the volume (12:20) – Channel creep and the new pressure on knowledge workers (15:00) – Decision support, not decision making (19:00) – The Tesla farmer-strike story and AI already inside your life (22:00) – Critical thinking as a muscle AI quietly atrophies (26:00) – Pen and paper still wins, because your phone is a black hole (33:00) – Addiction to ambient anxiety and why GTD doesn’t stick (38:00) – Journaling as creative capture (40:00) – One integrated system, no home/work split (44:00) – Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman A Few Things That Stuck With Me Decision support, not decision making. Honestly, this is the cleanest mental model I’ve heard yet for what AI actually is in a leader’s workflow. David put it this way: “I use ChatGPT three or four times a day. Where’s the local place to buy the best old cheese here in Amsterdam? It’ll give me a lot of good data.” That’s decision support. Then he turned the screw: “Trusting it to be able to make the decision about what to buy for mom’s birthday might be the inappropriate thing to do.” That line between the two is where most leaders quietly get into trouble, because they start treating decision support like decision making and forget that they still have to be the one who chooses. (If your AI never disagrees with you, you’re using it wrong [https://leadershipinchange.com/p/ai-confirmation-bias].) Channel creep. Look, this is the one I’m still chewing on, and David coined the term live. The volume of work hasn’t really changed that much in the last 25 years, but the channels have multiplied so fast that most leaders are now checking five or six different places just to make sure they’re not missing something that matters. Slack. Outlook. Asana. Google Meets. Two phone notification streams. He asked me on camera how many things I actually have to check to feel like I’m seeing the right stuff, and I rattled them off without thinking. That’s the diagnosis. (Start 2026 with an AI tool detox [https://leadershipinchange.com/p/start-2026-with-an-ai-tool-detox].) Your phone is a black hole. Here’s the thing. David has been doing this for 40 years and he still uses pen and paper for capture, and his reasoning lands the second you hear it: “For most people, their phones are black holes. They throw stuff in there and they don’t process it. They don’t deal with it.” I caught myself agreeing with him out loud. My own setup is a double-tap on the back of my phone that fires dictation into my email, because the second I open the screen for any other reason, I’m gone, and so is the thought I was trying to keep. The phone is genuinely the worst place to put the thing you most need to think about later. (The complete Second Brain blueprint [https://leadershipinchange.com/p/the-complete-second-brain-blueprint].) Addiction to ambient anxiety. Honestly, this was the answer to a question I didn’t know I was carrying into the conversation, which was why so many leaders read Getting Things Done, get clear for a weekend, and then quietly fall off. David’s line: “Be aware of your addiction to ambient anxiety. Your comfort zone is a lot more comfortable than being out of your comfort zone, which is having absolutely nothing on your mind.” Read that twice. What looks like a discipline problem from the outside is almost always your nervous system getting bored of feeling calm and going hunting for something to worry about, which is a much harder thing to coach somebody through than a missing checklist. (Don’t outsource your thinking, even to AI [https://leadershipinchange.com/p/dont-outsource-your-thinking-to-ai].) If you’re a leader running on adrenaline and you can feel it showing up in your decisions, that’s the work I do one-on-one. Start the conversation here [https://jsalinas.org/services/executive-coaching.html]. When you check your phone right now, is it because something actually needs you, or because you’ve gotten too comfortable being needed? Watch the full conversation above. If anything from David landed for you, go subscribe to David Allen on Substack [https://davidallen.substack.com/] and read Getting Things Done [https://gettingthingsdone.com/]. 49 minutes with David is the cheapest leadership coaching you’ll find this year, and the book is the next one on top of it. Written by a human, for humans. Thank you Lynn Jericho [https://substack.com/profile/2626937-lynn-jericho], Claire Machado [https://substack.com/profile/168845660-claire-machado], Stephen V. Smith [https://substack.com/profile/28856905-stephen-v-smith], Duncan The Sage [https://substack.com/profile/254449706-duncan-the-sage], Erika Legara [https://substack.com/profile/5234265-erika-legara], and many others for tuning into my live video with David Allen [https://substack.com/profile/2458209-david-allen]! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leadershipinchange.com/subscribe [https://leadershipinchange.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]