If your team believes AI can think, why would they keep doing the thinking themselves?

In this episode of the What Juices You Podcast, Brady Wilson sits down with Aaron Barth, PhD, founder and president of Dialectic, a learning company focused on soft skills and critical thinking. A former philosophy professor at Western University who specialized in human reasoning and decision theory, Aaron now helps leaders understand how AI actually works so they can judge when to trust it. In this second conversation of our Leading Humans in the Age of AI series, he explains why the story we tell about AI is raising anxiety at work, and why understanding the technology is the best way he's found to bring that anxiety down.

Aaron's central argument is that one of the most important things a leader can do right now is learn how AI actually works. Once people see it as a statistical tool predicting the next word, the facade of intelligence falls away and they start trusting their own judgment again.

In this conversation, you'll hear:

• Why the dominant story about AI drains the empathy, critical thinking, and relationship effort teams depend on, and how leaders can bring the temperature down
• Aaron's GPS analogy for how a large language model builds its answers, and why hallucinations are built into the way it works
• What "human first" looks like in practice: write it, design it, or think it through yourself first, then bring AI in as an editor and give it no more weight than another perspective
• Why AI tools are built to tell you you're right, and two quick tests for pressure-testing any answer: run the same prompt in three fresh tabs, and ask it about something you know deeply
• How an AI-written email from someone he respected changed the way Aaron felt about that relationship, and why he recommends writing your own

If you're leading a team that's already using AI, or quietly uneasy about it, this conversation will give you a clear way to talk about what the technology is and isn't, so your people can use it well and keep doing their best thinking.

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