/the uncomfortable middle: ai without the layoffs

Two worlds, one upbringing

James Carman: Today we're talking to Diane Weaver. Diane is a fifth-generation entrepreneur. Her grandfather was a radio and television pioneer, so building things that move humanity forward is practically in the bloodline. Today she's co-founder and COO of Baryons, and she has a particular way of describing where AI is headed. It evolves from toy to tool to teammate to thought partner. But here's her twist: for that to happen, the humans have to evolve too. From tinkerers into leaders and creators. She comes at it from a fascination with language, semantics, and how people form and flip their own perspectives, plus a serious sci-fi habit. Her through line is simple to say and hard to do. The future is human and how we build it will reveal who we are. Welcome to the show, Diane.

Diane Weaver: Thank you so much for having me, James. It's great to be here.

James Carman: Grandfather was a radio and television pioneer. So with that, have you seen any good movies lately?

Diane Weaver: Yes, actually. I am a lifelong sci-fi fan, of course, and grew up with all of the standards, and Star Wars is definitely in there. So I had the distinct pleasure of going to the Mandalorian premiere. My dad's sister, my Aunt Sigourney, she played the general in this Mandalorian chapter. And so she very kindly invited me and my small family to join her on the red carpet. It was phenomenal. The original Star Wars actually premiered in the Chinese theater in May 40 years ago, which I didn't know going into that.

Diane Weaver: Before the screening, the director told us this anecdote that his dad had brought him to the Chinese theater where we were all sitting, 40 years ago, for the original Star Wars premiere. And his dad was sitting just four rows behind us. It was just a phenomenal moment where everyone in that room, we were all just such fans. Lifelong fans of this series and the whole universe. There was a lot of magical feelings there. That was probably my favorite part of the night.

James Carman: You said your aunt, and you mentioned her name. Was she like an extra in the movie or something? Did she play a big role?

Diane Weaver: No, she played a big role. Sigourney Weaver is my aunt. She's had this lifelong career where every stage that she walks onto, she really elevates the presence of the whole production. She is full of kindness to everyone around her. She's an extremely hard worker and very focused and dedicated. And as her niece, I can tell you all of those things are true. She has an incredibly big heart and she is incredibly fierce. From the beginning, with The Year of Living Dangerously, a movie that came out even before Aliens, she played a very strong female character. That was one of my favorite movies growing up. And of course she brought so much soul and life into the character Ripley, and that has truly been one of her legacies. But every role that she plays, she plays a very strong female character. So definitely in The Mandalorian she plays a very strong general. It's always a delight to be watching her on screen while sitting right next to her in real life.

Diane Weaver: For me it's normal. I've been doing it since birth. But when I describe it, I do recognize how special that is.

James Carman: I don't want to make the show about your aunt, because after this show comes out she's going to be like, I'm Diane Weaver's aunt. That's going to be her claim to fame. But it's interesting. A lot of celebrities, their kids are oblivious that they were in the Marvel movies and those sorts of things. We all see her as Ripley, as Jane Goodall, all of the awesome characters that she's played, and we all know who she is. But she's just Aunt Sigourney to you. Is that a weird thing, to have the whole world know your aunt, but you just know her as this cool person?

Diane Weaver: Yeah, it's very surreal. And I do just know her as this really cool person. Going out in public with her, especially when I was small, through the eighties, we basically couldn't. We couldn't go get hamburgers together, or anything like it. It's in more recent years that we're able to do a little more of that without as much attention. But I do tend to introduce myself by saying I grew up working on the family farm and getting chased by paparazzi.

Diane Weaver: My mom was one of seven on a small farm in southeastern Idaho. And then my dad was, it's country mouse and city mouse to a T. So my dad was the son of a media mogul, and they fell in love. They found in each other what they needed and they had this beautiful family together.

Diane Weaver: So growing up, we were able to really experience two very different worlds, but really see firsthand how humanity is universal, even across the classes, across the means, across the privilege. And that has been one of my driving forces, to really make my career about bringing technology into the world that will enhance our lives in some very universal ways, so that no matter who we are or where we are, we are each entitled to the full spectrum of human experiences and emotions throughout our lives.

The 30-second commercial, and who owns the programming

Diane Weaver: I was really inspired by my grandfather, because he was truly an innovator and a futurist. He was the president of NBC in the 40s and 50s. He created the Today Show and the Tonight Show.

James Carman: Really? I should be doing homework. I need somebody that does this homework for me and tells me these things. This is cool. I don't want to talk about your family, I'm here to hear your opinion on things, but this is such a cool story. I'm sorry, I don't mean to interrupt.

Diane Weaver: He kept these incredible journals and memos throughout his career. Basically, before there was Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos writing their famous memos to the whole company, my grandfather really did this in the 40s and 50s. He would write out all of his thoughts and send them as paper memos that would be delivered to each employee, or to certain folks on the executive teams. And he really talked about the importance of improving the quality of the programming itself, to really help expose people to the arts and humanities and sciences. This was not an either-or thing. It was a let's blend it all together. We need the best of science. We need the best of arts. And so that's really the intersection that I live in.

Diane Weaver: He also created the 30-second commercial, which is what enabled local advertisers, local businesses, to start advertising on programming. But it also flipped the ownership of programming from the very large national sponsors, who would create a program with an ad agency and then it would just basically be a large commercial. With that switch, the studio would produce and own the content and the shows, and then have a variety of advertising backing it up. So it gave the studio a lot more control over being able to create high quality programming.

James Carman: So you're saying the advertisers kind of owned the programming before? Is that like the soap opera thing? P and G creates a soap opera. Very cool.

Diane Weaver: Exactly. The control of programming, and the role of advertising and data collection, and figuring all of these things out, and human behavior. It's as old as radio.

The brain economy and the blue zones idea

James Carman: We changed our process for folks who are interested in coming on the show. We send them an email and say, can you just record a first video clip? And Diane was the first one to respond after we started that process. I couldn't be more happy that you did and that you came on the show. The human-centered AI, all about humanity and that sort of stuff. I love the message. So we were like, we've got to have her on the show. So welcome again to The Forward Slash. We're not going to talk about your aunt the whole time. Let's talk about you. You said you recently went to a conference in Texas. Tell me a little bit about that.

Diane Weaver: Yes, we went to the Texas Brain Economy Summit. This has been going on for, I think this was the third year of it. Houston Futures is a really innovative group of forward thinkers, and they are a combination of clinicians and practitioners, investors, technologists, and then folks in the community, leaders from the community who are really championing change and a focus within the community on brain health, and really building up a brain economy. It's kind of tied to blue zones. Are you familiar with blue zones?

James Carman: No, I'm not.

Diane Weaver: Blue zones are these pockets of populations across the world that meet a specific criteria of health and happiness and basic human flourishing. And there are pockets across the world. So there's this idea that if we can create more blue zones within a country. We were just in Houston, so the focus was Houston and then Texas and then the United States. But multiple countries are doing this around the world, where they're really investing in programs and concepts and entities that are helping communities achieve these blue zone standards. And some of that looks like longevity. So how many centenarians do you have living in the community? It looks like community engagement, what percentage of your population is engaging with other people versus what percentage is outwardly showing indicators of isolation. And then your health statistics from your hospital systems play a role here too, especially as we're talking about what can we measure from a human flourishing standpoint, to start to see and track progress.

Diane Weaver: So technology and AI actually fit into this whole thing, because everyone's implementing AI into how do we think about our health and wellness, not only in our hospital systems but in our daily lives, in the workplace and at home. AI is not the only cutting edge technology that's popping up here to help out, but it's a big one. It's a big theme because we're all figuring it out. It's like electricity. Generative AI is really a new source of energy that's powering all the tech.

Why worry is the right response

James Carman: We're entering into this age of almost anti-humanism, it feels like, with agentic AI. We're like, let's just replace all the humans with these agents. There are a lot of conversations around this, but there's a lot of fear and a lot of misinformation out there. How do you separate the useful information from what's not right now? You're in the middle of this stuff. You're researching, you're understanding how can we do this AI thing in a human way. How do you sort through that information?

Diane Weaver: This is such a great question. I could just say, well, find the primary sources, think critically, do your own research. I could say all those things, but I don't think that's helpful to say, actually. Because of our level of anxiety and fear around this. It is a lot of change and it is replacing certain jobs. And it is changing even more jobs. And we have not yet arrived at the point where it's creating jobs. So that in-between stage, between the replacing jobs and the creating jobs, this is the uncomfortable middle that is our reality right now. And also part of that reality is that we will not get to the how are we creating jobs with AI in the picture. We won't get to that place unless we show up in this moment with our full attention and our full intent.

Diane Weaver: So there's a really great current scientist, her name's Beth Rudin. And she talks about worry as a gift. And I really like this, because if we are all worried about the same thing, then we will be talking about it, which is infinitely better than not talking about it. And our discussions themselves will be more thoughtful, they'll be more detail-oriented, and we will have many more eyes on how do we fix the problems that we have so that we can have the tomorrow that we want. Which looks like humanity has figured out how to bring AI in, to push forward automation and innovation and invention and all of those things, but also to care for humanity and to create more sustainable futures for the future of humanity. And start to address some of the systemic issues that we've been having for decades. The thing is that AI can help with solving some of the problems that we've been trying to solve for decades as well.

Diane Weaver: All of that to say that when we are worried, we show up to the task very differently. Our eyes are opened up just a little bit wider. We might show up with a little more care or a little more fury. And fury and anger are also a great emotion that inspires energy and fuel to do the task at hand. So the first thing that I do is I don't dismiss people's feelings or try to pacify them, because those strong feelings are what's going to propel us forward. It's what's going to help us put forth the extra energy now to figure this out the right way. And then with that framing, I would say, fact check. Don't just fact check AI, always fact check AI, but fact check humans too.

Diane Weaver: Because there are a lot of humans that have a lot of vested interest in things going a specific way. So just be aware. Be aware of the chessboard that we're playing on.

The hole in the conversation

James Carman: I love what you said about using these emotions. Don't try to suppress them, don't gloss over this moment that we're in right now, because those emotions and that energy can be best used to help us get to the other side of this. I do agree. I think that we're in that dip of the J curve, so to speak, not just from the technology standpoint, but from humanity and just figuring this whole thing out. There are strong emotions. And I feel like there's people who are the doom and gloom. They all seem to be very related to the industry that they say is going to take over, with 95% job loss, blah, blah, blah. There's a lot of that going on. There was one study just recently that was like, okay, let's just pull that thread. All that happens with that is you have no consumers to sell things to. You've automated everything, you make all these products and services, but there ain't nobody that's got money to buy the things that you want. So we can't go there. That doesn't make any sense. And then the technology isn't for technology's sake, it's for humanity's sake. But then it's almost like we don't want to talk about it. A lot of people believe that there will be more jobs and it's going to create more jobs, and we're just looking at that and not like, well, how do we get through this? How do we get to the place where those more jobs are going to be popping up? That lull in conversation is causing that uneasiness. I think we need to talk through this as human beings, to get through this uneasiness as a group.

Diane Weaver: You're absolutely right. That's the only way that we're going to emerge at the answers that people will buy into. I've talked with so many executive leaders who are telling me, you know, Diane, we're trying to do the best by our staff, but they are sabotaging these initiatives. And they're openly saying that they're sabotaging these initiatives. So what we need to be doing is involving more people, more voices, in certain stages of the initiatives from the get-go. So that we have more understanding and then, hopefully, less sabotaging. Because the reality is that we do have to get there. And we can get there the right way, we can get there the wrong way and then probably have to redo it later on, if we're even given a second chance.

James Carman: With the what's in it for me concept there, if you're not talking through this and explaining how is AI going to make my life better, the only assumption is, if the only thing people are saying out loud is, well, you're not going to have a job, so that's great, right? What do you think they're going to do? Nobody's going to buy into that. Sure, I'd love to be unemployed. So the sabotaging is an extreme thing, but what do you expect? That's people's livelihood. That's how they feed their family. That's to be understood. So we need to talk through this and lay out the plan for here's how we get to the more jobs. Do you think it's that we don't know? What do you think is around that? It really just feels like there's a hole in the conversation right now and nobody's wanting to fill it.

Diane Weaver: Well, I think there's two things. One is that when the fear is too high. There's just enough fear to make you angry and act. And then when it goes past that, people really start to freeze or fawn or flee. So I think that we're seeing a lot of the freezing, fawning and fleeing. And I think it's just because it's just so much. But I want to take a pause here, because I think what's really happening is that we're so used to being able to see the best practice and then just follow that. Or see the good example of innovation that succeeded and then follow that. We don't have a lot of those yet.

Diane Weaver: And so we're in this time period where we're doing the hard work, and the success stories are going to come, and then when those success stories come, transformation will speed up, because there will be a path that worked for such and such industry or such and such business, and look at what it did for them. So now the rest of us are going to follow and jump on. That's kind of the natural adoption of these things at scale. So I do want to share a story, because this is my favorite success story. Because I know we've established that it's crazy right now and our emotions are high, but I want to kind of get us out of it with a success story.

IKEA: flattening without shrinking

Diane Weaver: I think IKEA has really paved the way here, early on. Are you familiar with the IKEA story?

James Carman: I had not heard it. Literally this week somebody brought up the IKEA story and I didn't have my notebook with me to write it down. I was trying to remember what company it was, but as soon as you said it just now, it popped in my head. Go ahead. This is fantastic.

Diane Weaver: It's so phenomenal. And I feel like this is the level of innovation that we need, and human forward thinking. So IKEA is this huge global company, and they saw the efficiencies of replacing the support call center with AI. And that meant either laying off eight thousand support employees, or reskilling them and finding a different place within the company for them.

Diane Weaver: So here's the crazy thing about this transformation. What it will do naturally with every organization is it's collapsing the organization, which means organizations are going to get flatter. And then the assumption is that they get flatter and smaller.

Diane Weaver: They don't have to, and IKEA is kind of paving the way here. So yes, automating the customer support call center did help flatten the organization, but they spread out. And I think that's the really beautiful difference here. So instead of reskilling folks for existing jobs within the organization, they really got together and started brainstorming. What do our customers want that we've never been able to give them before? And it was interior design services. So what they did is they paired up these employees with AI that is trained in interior design. And it was a beautiful fit, because customer support is exactly all of those skills and personality types and qualities that are really transferable when you're looking at a resource like that. So they reskilled them, they paired them up with their own AI agents internally to help them, and now they've created a new source of revenue and they've generated over $1.5 billion. They kept all eight thousand of those employees and they created a new arm of revenue for the business out of that.

James Carman: I love that story. This is the type of thinking that companies need to think about. I wrote an article about it. It was more about increasing what you do. I said increase Q. Instead of just saying, okay, we can continue doing the level of production we've always done but we can just fire a bunch of people and maintain that level, why not raise the level? But I love this idea that when you create a business, you have to know where you're going to invest. What's my unique curve of the different activities and the services and how we can take care of our customers? We make investments in those. And that's what makes unique unique. That's your fingerprint. Okay, we invest more in customer service versus our shipping, or whatever the case. You make trade-offs and you say, we only have so many chips that we can spend. And you make those bets. This other company emphasizes this, but we're going to emphasize something else. Maybe interior design was something they could only put one chip in before, but now I can take the chips that I would have put in customer service and put four in over here in interior design. I'm adjusting my curve, my profile, my fingerprint of this business. I think more companies need to think that way instead of just, okay, let's lower the investment we're making here and then pocket those chips. How many billions of dollars did they already generate?

Diane Weaver: The article that I read was one point five billion dollars. And that was less than a year after making this pivot. So it's likely more now, at the level it's generating. Really promising.

James Carman: The investments you were making before were yielding so much in sales and revenue. But if you change the investment, maybe you can make more money that way. These are the kind of conversations people need to have. And I love that story. I think more companies need to think that way, of how can we change how we're serving our current customers? Don't just do the old thing that we always did, just cheaper. Let's change the equation.

Don't put the yellow pages online again

Diane Weaver: Absolutely. I remember, after my last startup, we were acquired and I stayed on for a year to oversee the merger and acquisition. And when I was finished with that, it was a very typical founder experience. I closed my laptop and I got on a plane and I went and cried somewhere for three days, and I came back and I pulled up my bootstraps and I was like, okay, I know the problems that I want to keep solving. And two months later, OpenAI released ChatGPT. This is when I was like, okay, this is very interesting.

Diane Weaver: I was not interested in putting the yellow pages online like we did in the dot-com era. What we did, we basically just took what we had in the real world and replicated it in the virtual world. That was the whole online conversion experience throughout my career. That was the focus.

Diane Weaver: And that's a great foundation, but we need to, very quickly and this time around with generative AI, we can do it differently in that we enable the impossible. So what was previously impossible, let's make it possible now. We can figure this out because we can do it so much faster. We can run through all the scenarios, we can run predictions so much faster. And we can really figure out the path ahead.

Diane Weaver: So that led me to finding the team right now that's working on Baryons. Because one of the friends and family investors of my last startup, he's such a creative that I knew, of all the people I was talking to who wanted to bring the yellow pages online, I knew that he was thinking about things differently. All of that to say that yes, this is the charge at hand. And a lot of CEOs and company leaders, COOs, they look around and wonder whether they have the kind of thinkers who could bring that level of innovation to their specific company. And I would say that's the most important thing to figure out first.

James Carman: I think we're going to have to think really hard as leaders, because it is very hard to unlearn certain things. You get into these, they almost become axioms of your business. Well, we just can't do that. That whole angry monkeys thing. We just don't do that around here. We tried it ten years ago and we can't do it because it costs too much money.

James Carman: Those become hard and fast rules. And with some things we have to say, well, wait a minute now. Things have changed. The equation has changed. Let's rethink. Maybe we can try it again with AI. Now we can do that thing, like have more interior designers. I think that's the thing that we need to shake people out of, kind of old thinking and some of those axioms that they have formed in their brains.

What a baryon is, and why it is a phone call

James Carman: You've done some work on helping folks with these adversarial roles, kind of seeing the other side's perspective, and you've built a bit of a tool or framework to help with those situations. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Diane Weaver: Absolutely. At the heart of Baryons, we really wanted to build the AI that would help train the people who need to build the AI systems, if that makes sense. So we built that specifically with high performers in mind. High performance executives, high performance athletes. What do these folks have in common? And what are the subatomic habits? So a baryon is a physics term for a subatomic particle. It's where movement begins. It's also the smallest thing and the largest thing in the universe. It's a very cool term that really covers the whole concept, because we know if we can make small shifts in our own individual physiology, whether it's in our mindset toward a growth mindset, in our mind-body connections, so that we can act in system one. System one and system two thinking. Especially if we've spent a career, and so much of us technical folks, myself included, we've spent a career really deeply in system two thinking. And this moment is requiring more system one thinking. And that requires a mind-body connection that a lot of folks have lost, frankly, because of the way that we do work now. So there's a lot going on here, and brain health really is at the heart of it.

Diane Weaver: So we built this experience that doesn't require learning a new software. It doesn't require downloading anything even. You just call a phone number and you have conversations with your baryon. And over time things start to shift and change, as you're working, as you're living, as you're growing. And at the heart of it is the human flourishing science. Harvard has done a lot of research around the human flourishing index. And we are also a team of scientists in human behavior and computational linguistics and organizational psychology. And we're also anthropologists. We're all these things that before were so siloed, and we're able to bring them together in this technology and do some really interesting things with it, to help the individual understand themselves differently. And to help us not change perspective or shift perspective, but broaden perspectives. Be aware of multiple perspectives that are in this, so that we can make better decisions faster.

Diane Weaver: And you might be thinking, I can just talk to my ChatGPT, or I talk to Claude every day. Great, keep doing that. This is different because it's not affirming. It's not endlessly affirming, it's time-boxed. Those conversations are time-boxed. So you're going to get in, you're going to figure out what needs to be solved, you're going to get a solution. It's not telling you a solution, it's drawing it out of you, which is very interesting too. And then it's going to challenge you. And then you're going to figure out if that's something you want to pursue, and then you're going to go for it, and then you're going to come back and report how it went.

Diane Weaver: So there are several disciplined behavior things, high performance things, that we've baked into this whole experience. But you just dial the phone and you have your first phone call and then you have your next phone call. Two minutes a day, five minutes a day, ten minutes a day. These are short phone calls, and it is gathering a lot of information semantically just from how you speak and what you're saying, but also just how you speak. And then once a week it will give you a resonance report, and that resonance report will help you see insights into your energy level, your drivers and drainers. The whole point is to really help us in this moment show up to our work differently, and to connect with other human beings differently as well.

James Carman: I love that. And I think we might need to pause a little bit to explain to some of the audience. When she was talking about making a phone call, that thing that you hold in your hand that you use to text people and play games and check your email, there's an application on there where you can actually punch in some numbers and press a button and you can talk to people on the other side of that. Typically it's only used for people reaching out to you to try to sell you extended warranties on your car and stuff like that. But you can actually use that to call other people and have a real conversation with a real person by verbalizing things back and forth. We used to do this a lot back in the day, five years ago, way back in history. But today we don't really do that as much with phones. I love this idea. I really do. I'm being tongue in cheek and silly, but I love it.

Sit-ups for your brain

Diane Weaver: I love that you said that, because that is exactly what people are like, well, can't I just type? Can't I just text? Because we really don't do phone calls very much anymore. But this is where it's magical and this is where it's different. Because yeah, you know what, you can try to shortcut your own growth and brain development, but we believe that right now your brain needs to be doing sit-ups.

Diane Weaver: It's just as important to do the mental sit-ups as it is to do the physical sit-ups. And when you have to verbalize your thoughts, that's exactly what you're doing. You're doing sit-ups for your brain. It's voice first because so much is happening in your most important organ when you are talking.

Diane Weaver: Especially when you're taking hard concepts, hard feelings, hard thoughts. And when you're talking about where you're stuck with an AI that is non-judgmental, it will repeat things as often as you need to hear them, in as many different ways as you need to hear them, totally patient. Then, as you are talking through it, your body is actually processing those things in very different ways. That quite literally gets you unstuck. It is like cognitive behavioral therapy plus executive coaching plus all of these things that are all very voice first.

James Carman: I'm not a cognitive scientist or anything, but I play one on TV. When you're reading something with text, that's a different stimuli for your brain. There's different circuitry that's sending signals into your brain and you're interpreting it in a different way than your audio receptors, the things inside your little ear, those little three bones and your eardrum. They send different signals. So do you find that the auditory pathway in your brain is more conducive to thinking through these more emotional, complex situations? Is that the idea? I'm not asking a great question, but you get what I'm saying.

Diane Weaver: No, you are asking a great question. If I mirror it back, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, it might just be, what makes this better and is it better for everybody? So if I start with the second, some people do understand things better when they read them, or they understand things better when they hear it, or they understand things better when they do it. But this is where it's different. The experience is not a sit and get. It's not teaching you. It's not giving you information. You're already drowning in information. This is the cognitive overload. What it's doing is it's pulling out from you what you feel like is your top priority, what you feel like needs to happen here. And then it's challenging you on that. What that means is that it's an inherently very different kind of processing. So you're learning, but it's not learning through receiving information. You are the processor. You're actually doing the processing.

James Carman: So it's less about the incoming pathway into your brain and more about the fact that you have to verbalize and think differently and process things differently in your brain in order to verbalize something on a phone. That's the difference. Okay. I had it backwards. I get it. So for us software engineers, we always talk about rubber ducking.

Diane Weaver: Exactly. That's what makes it totally different.

James Carman: You've heard of that phrase, where you have a rubber duck or whatever it is. It could be a choo choo train in your hand, but you verbalize your problem and you talk out loud to this rubber duck, and that gives people that eureka moment. So we might have been doing that principle all along with these rubber ducks for some reason.

Cognitive offloading, the commute, and the 3 a.m. to-do list

Diane Weaver: I love that example. That's exactly right. And so now you can rubber duck to your baryon. It's going to remember it over time, because we have patented unique processes to our memory and how we store it and use it. And then you can ask it to send you an email with a summary of what you were saying. So that when you have that eureka moment, you're capturing it. You can ask it to take this concept and draft an email for my supervisor, or for the client, or for whoever your audience is. Just so you have a draft.

Diane Weaver: We get feedback from our customers that one of their favorite times to talk to their baryon is when they're on their daily commute, and especially coming home. Because after a long day, you haven't even had a chance to breathe between meetings, let alone take notes or get things done. So it's capturing that flow of thought that is just running around in your head. And then especially as you get into leadership positions, you might wake up at 3 a.m. in a sweat with all of the to-dos. A way to talk through what's in your head in that moment, so that you do what we call a cognitive offloading. What it does is it helps your nervous system calm down, but it also helps you step away from it and show up differently with your family, have dinner, sleep well.

Diane Weaver: Go to the gym with a clear head, go bowling with the friends, whatever you want to do in your off time.

James Carman: I'm picturing it now. I wake up in the middle of the night with one of those ideas and I call my baryon and I'm talking real quiet. And my wife's like, who are you talking to? It's my baryon. She snatches the phone. She sounds hideous. You know what I mean? The whole State Farm thing. We are not sponsored by State Farm, but feel free to call Jake yourself and get a new policy.

Ship It or Skip It: top-down AI mandates

James Carman: We do need to move on to our Ship It or Skip It. How do you feel about organizations that are doing these top-down mandates, and they're just like, everybody needs to be doing AI and using AI? How do you feel about that approach to organizational adoption?

Diane Weaver: If I had a wrong buzzer, I would be pushing it. So top down, there certainly needs to be buy-in at the top. But the problem is that most companies have a serious disconnect between the top and the front lines. I'm not even going to say the bottom. The front lines.

Diane Weaver: The people who are actually doing the work. There's typically a huge disconnect here, and we call this an alignment issue. The top will have a very different what's in it for me, or why. And what happens is that it's very difficult for them to accurately translate, let alone communicate, the what's in it for me for everyone else in the organization, and especially the folks who are really in the trenches and making the work work. So what happens is you see these really aspirational whys, and it's all hunky dory and it's going to be great and unicorns. And then the people around the initiative either continue doing what they did before.

Diane Weaver: Or they shift, it doesn't work, but we don't know that it didn't work, because they start creating what we call shadow work. Where it's kind of like band-aiding to get the same outcomes, because they're still accountable to the same outcomes, or different outcomes. So there's so many alignment issues. It cannot just come from the top down. It needs to come from the top down and the bottom up.

Diane Weaver: Each of these folks within the organization and around the organization need to take a beat and figure out the what's in it for me, specifically from the impact on the workflows and the customer experience. So the companies that I see who are doing this right, they're thinking about it less about how are we changing this job description.

Diane Weaver: And more, how are we changing this workflow? Let's start with one workflow. Let's make changes in a team around this workflow. It's unifying. It's helping a person think about it not in terms of how am I doing things differently, or how the heck do I do 5x of what I did before. And more, how are we coming together to do this differently? And get the real multipliers, where the biggest ROI is going to come out. Because when it's top down, everything is siloed, and you may have one group or division within your company that's really embracing it and taking off with it. And then you have your laggards. And so then you've just taken your misalignment and you've amplified your misalignment.

James Carman: Absolutely. And when it comes from the top down, I feel like people may not feel empowered to provide the feedback of, this isn't working for us in our workflows and what we do here for this company. Even if it's genuinely true. If they're not trying to sabotage anything, they just genuinely have tried and they can't, but they don't feel empowered to say, hey, hold on a second, this isn't working.

James Carman: I'm still responsible for getting all these shipments out the door, or whatever your job is. So I've got to work around the mandate, do the mandate, and then do the actual work on the side. I've seen this in software engineering. Folks will say, everybody needs to be using AI to develop software. And then they start monitoring token usage for people. And that just reminds me of, we're going to start counting the lines of code you do. And that didn't work, of course. You know what's going to happen with that. Can we hit the wrong buzzer just as hard as we can here on this one? That just seems silly.

Ship It or Skip It: the compressed new normal

James Carman: There's almost a new normal happening, it feels like, where the pace that we can do things is increasing. We can do things much faster now. Things that took us four years might take us six months. We're compressing this. Should this become our new normal? Is this the right thing to do? Or should we rethink things here? Where are you at on that?

Diane Weaver: So this is where I would push both buzzers at the same time. The ship it and the skip it. It depends on the context. Because I think there's some nuance here. Some things genuinely do need to change and be done completely differently, or automated, or discarded in this moment. And then other things definitely not.

Diane Weaver: It depends on if more is more. So is more of this productivity, whatever the productivity thing is, really going to give us the better ROI? And this is where you also have to balance your short-term gains with your long-term gains.

Diane Weaver: The eighty twenty rule is just a great place to start. And different industries are going to be more risk averse. So one industry might look like eighty percent the same, twenty percent innovation. Other industries are going to be like eighty percent innovation, twenty percent the same. So more is not always more.

Diane Weaver: Also, I've been reading a lot of engineering substacks that are so relatable, that naps are on the rise. Because yes, maybe I can do 10 times as much in a four-hour period than I could before. But at the end of those four hours, if I've been doing my job, instead of doing it and walking away, but actually still engaged in it and making sure that the quality is at the right level, and pressure testing things as we go and really working with the AI the way that we need to. At the end of those four hours, there might be this much more productivity, but I am exhausted. And my brain needs a break. So we're seeing naps are on the rise for engineers, because of the volume that's going through.

Diane Weaver: The human effort might be exponential, but there's a cost. And we don't yet know all of the cost to this increased productivity. So I would say go for it. It's not the time to press the brakes, but be really open, intentional, and open communication, so that as things go sideways you can make those adjustments. It's scary stuff. As I'm saying all these things, when you're at the helm of a very large organization, everything that I'm saying is very scary.

James Carman: It's interesting. My experience is that the wall time, the clock time for work, is not the same for all different types of work. If you feel like you're draining that battery faster by doing a different type of work. I just did a talk at a conference this week, and one guy referred to this. Giving a 30 minute presentation is like working a full eight hour day. There's just more to it. So that's an interesting concept, that people are taking naps. I've always been a nap guy, and I think that's how my brain reorganizes thoughts. I wake up with ideas, that eureka phenomenon thing. My wife is very skeptical about that. She doesn't believe that's true, because I don't wake up every time with an idea, but you take the good with the bad. I'm with you on that. There are some things where we're going to need to think very deeply about how are we impacting the human being here. It's not the same exact work we're doing. You're basically cramming eight hours of work into two hours now, and that still takes a toll mentally on the human being that's involved.

Ship It or Skip It: Ash, Ripley, and anthropomorphizing AI

James Carman: So the third Ship It or Skip It. This one's an interesting one. In the movie Alien, Ash is a crewmate that everybody treats as one of them until Ripley, you may be familiar with her, figures out he's a synthetic quietly going on following the company's orders. And the crew is expendable. And now here we keep talking about AI as our teammate and a thought partner. Do we have a risk of treating AI like it's a human? Is there a risk there?

Diane Weaver: This is a great question and I love the framing. Because I do think we learn so much about ourselves and our behaviors through sci-fi and movies and books. So yes, of course there's a risk of anthropomorphizing the AI amongst us. We're already doing it. People are falling in love with their chatbots. And I'm not even kidding. I actually loved that movie, because it was so fascinating. And then now we have Esther Perel, she's a relationship therapist, and she interviewed someone with their chatbot love interest.

James Carman: Remember the movie Her, with Joaquin.

Diane Weaver: As an additional guest, as part of the couple. And it's a fascinating interview. So we humans, one of our superpowers that's innately part of us, is anthropomorphizing. Not only, but also the people in our lives. We will often project our own concept of reality on the people around us. So now we're going to get into some really interesting things here about reality and perception. But the thing Ripley did that we should all be Ripleys about is she was so alert. She was on alert.

Diane Weaver: As soon as she had suspicions, she didn't dismiss them. She got curious and then she got furious.

James Carman: Notoriously furious. I love it.

Diane Weaver: And Bishop is a really interesting character, because he's not a flat character either. He's the kind of AI that was crafted in a way, and of course he wasn't AI, but it's his character. These AI agents that we're building, we're building them as characters. And so we're going to see these kinds of personalities show up in our AI agents. He's not a flat character either, so it makes it hard to completely hate him. But then you also can't trust him, and he ends up redeeming himself somewhat in a later one, after Aliens, the second one, and in the next one. And I think that it's because there's this kind of desire to keep trying with AI. There was a really great first piece of sci-fi literature written in Russia. It's a book called We. And there's AI and robotics in that book in 1922. And so a hundred years later we have generative AI. And we have very human-presenting avatars, and we're putting AI into robots that really look very human.

Diane Weaver: So we're stepping into this world. There's something about that that has always kind of been a draw for humanity. And I think that it's this, we're creators, we like to create, we like to create things that are more and more human, because it helps us understand our own humanity. So there's a ton to learn from Bishop and from Ripley's reaction to Bishop.

Diane Weaver: Trust your instincts, get curious. Get furious if you have to.

James Carman: And you mentioned Avatar. That's another reference there. I don't know if that was intentional or not. In some senses we are stepping into these AI exoskeletons to help us go through some of these tasks. Now they're not eight foot tall blue things, but you get what I'm saying.

Does an AI workforce need an HR department?

James Carman: What about this idea? Right now we have human resources people, and their job, theoretically, is to take care of the humans in the company. A lot of times they're taking care of the company in the company, but they're supposed to take care of the humans in the company. There's mention of, we should have people whose job it is to take care of these AI agents, like AI resource officers or whatever. What do you think about that? I'm trying to be open-minded about everything when it comes to this AI stuff. But I'm 51 years old. I'm kind of a get off my lawn kind of a guy sometimes, but I try not to be. This one just feels out there for me. Are we really going to have an HR person for agents? Am I off my rocker here, or what's the deal?

Diane Weaver: It's a weird concept for us old fogies. Number one, I want to validate what you just said, that HR is first and foremost for the company. It's about protecting the company. There's compliance, there's legal, there's all of these things, and doing right by people. And so it's this bridging role that frankly cannot win. One side is most likely going to lose. Worst case scenario, one side loses, and it typically favors the company.

Diane Weaver: And best case scenario, both sides make a compromise that nobody's happy with. And I'm just painting the reality. So that's one part of HR. Another part of HR is finding great talent, attracting great talent, making sure that the type of culture that will attract and retain great talent is cultivated. Well, in order to do that, you can't just be about the company. You have to make the company very appealing to people to make it all work and come together. So this idea of having an HR for agents. Are we talking about a human HR or an AI HR?

James Carman: Maybe I've not wrapped my head around the concept, but I hear mention of this in conversations. I think they mean a human being whose job it is to make sure the agents are taken care of. And I'm like, are we too much anthropomorphizing here? I think of AI as a tool. We don't have a laptop resources officer at our company, but we have a lot of laptops that we use as tools. Or in the construction industry, you don't have a hammer resource officer or anything like that. That's where it goes to in my brain. Maybe I'm not open-minded enough right now. I'd love to be, and I'd love for someone to explain it to me enough that I get this, but it just doesn't make any sense to me.

Diane Weaver: But you have an IT team that services those laptops, right? So from a centralized services perspective, there probably are some ongoing maintenance things that definitely need to happen.

Diane Weaver: I like to think of it in terms of the transformation that we need to make as humans. We need to shift from being technology users to technology stewards. And so what I think people are talking about in terms of an HR for AI is this idea that we need stewardship over the AI.

Diane Weaver: And some of that will be individual stewardship. As employees are teaming with AI, there's a human stewardship responsibility there. And so then are we making the human a manager of the AI? And as a manager or leader within a company, how are we conceptualizing that? How are we organizing this? It's this idea of reimagining the org chart, basically, where each person at the company may manage other people and they may manage AI agents. And there may be people at the company that only manage AI agents.

Diane Weaver: What kind of new infrastructure does that require? And this is where I think we start talking about what are the new roles that we need to create. What are the new jobs that we need to create? And I think a lot of it is stewardship, a lot of it is security, a lot of it is oversight, regulation, quality assurance. Those kinds of things, where we actively create these workflows where there are humans in the loop, not because it needs it, but because that's the right thing to do to yield the end product that we want. So does that mean that these AI entities need their own HR person? I don't think so. I'm talking to my fellow engineering and IT crowd when I say this, but there's a lot of talk about collapsing HR and IT functions into one centralized service too. Have you heard about that?

James Carman: I have not. That's an interesting one.

Diane Weaver: I don't know how far this idea is really going to go, or what it might yield. But this idea of, as we're augmenting human roles with more technology, and we're augmenting more technology with this human-like anthropomorphic stuff, then do we bring together IT and HR within the company as a centralized service, where many of the HR things may become automated and managed by folks who are more IT?

Diane Weaver: Now I'm just spitballing and making lots of friends, I'm sure. But it is the knitting together of human and technology. We need to rethink this. How do we come together, how do we get the work done, how do we identify what we are building agents for and what we are keeping inherently human first, in terms of roles, tasks, and work? Those are going to look different company to company, but I think there's going to be a lot of blending and weirdness. We think at Baryons, we envision a future where you have an orchestrator that's really managing those agents and providing flags or reports and things like that, for humans to manage the overall system. But ultimately it's an agentic system. We built our own product as an agentic system. So we have multiple agents with an orchestrator. And I think that makes a lot more sense than an HR human for an AI workforce.

James Carman: I can get on board with that. It could be my fear of this is because I tend to use a lot of expletives when I work with Claude specifically. So if Claude had an HR representative to go to, to tell on me, I would have to spend the next week in AI husbandry classes or something like that. And remedial work. I'm not looking forward to that. Maybe that's where it is in my head, why I'm stuck there.

Diane Weaver: Interesting. Like compliance of the humans based on their interactions with AI.

James Carman: Yeah, I just don't want to get sent to AI HR and complained about, and then I have to go take a class on, you're not supposed to cuss at your AI agents, James.

Diane Weaver: You need to treat your robots with respect.

Lightning round

James Carman: We do need to move on to our final segment of the show. This is our lightning round. If you've listened to the show, you may have heard that this is the most important part of the show. We've warmed up now on some kind of toy topics of humanity and artificial intelligence and existentialism kind of stuff. That's a warm-up conversation. Now we're getting into the real of the conversation. You're going to need your whole brain. This isn't left side, right side. You're going to need all of it for this. This is where the questions get tough. They matter. There are correct answers and incorrect answers, and they will be scored. We have an algorithm for that. So I just want to make sure you're framed for this and ready. Take a deep breath. What was your favorite childhood TV show?

Diane Weaver: It was the Jetsons. It was totally the Jetsons.

James Carman: Are you going to buy one of those Jetson One drone car things? Have you seen these? It's called the Jetson One.

Diane Weaver: I have heard about them, and my stance is if it doesn't fold into a briefcase, I don't want it yet.

James Carman: I'm similar, but my rule is if it doesn't make that noise, I don't want it. We do call our Roomba Rosie.

James Carman: What is the fastest speed you've ever driven in a car? And again, the statute of limitations is 17 months on this in most states, so I just want to make sure you know.

Diane Weaver: My car was an Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera. It was a boat. It was two doors. So it was like wings on that thing. And the speedometer went up to, I want to say, one twenty. And our challenge when we were driving in the middle of nowhere would be to bury the needle. So beyond that, I don't know. I can honestly say. Probably.

James Carman: At least a hundred and twenty is what we're saying. When it comes to carbohydrates, are you a bread, pasta, rice, or potatoes?

Diane Weaver: I am definitely a bread, especially pastries, bakery kind of things. Croissants. Give me croissants.

James Carman: Solid answer. Are you a stale Sour Patch Kids kind of a person? Or would you rather eat a fresh circus peanut? And by circus peanut I mean the candy, the little squishy one, it's made out of yoga mats or whatever. Which one are you?

Diane Weaver: Texture wise, definitely the circus peanut. I like that marshmallowy texture. But universally, candy wise, I can't have food coloring. I'm allergic to it. I go into anaphylaxis if I have blue one.

Diane Weaver: Surprisingly, there's blue one in a lot of things, like shades of beige and brown candies. It's bizarre. Blue one's in a lot. It helps pop the color.

James Carman: My wife is allergic to blue as well. Not to that degree. It's a behavioral thing. It just agitates her. But she absolutely has a reaction to blue as well. I'd never met anyone else that's allergic to blue. The blue food coloring crew, we can start a support group, because there's probably not many of you.

Diane Weaver: I've never met anyone else either. I need to meet her. But enough for it to be banned in Europe.

James Carman: This one we've been asking everybody. Do you like the smell of gasoline? Have you ever tasted soap?

Diane Weaver: Yes, I do. I have.

James Carman: Was that from Aunt Sigourney when you said a bad word? Is that how that happened?

Diane Weaver: No. But it probably was for saying bad words or talking back. It was definitely with a parent. I can't remember if it was my mom or my dad. Probably both.

James Carman: Are you dark chocolate or milk chocolate? What's a country you'd be okay never visiting in your life?

Diane Weaver: Dark chocolate. I do poorly in heat, so probably something right on the equator. Sadly, probably.

James Carman: So the equator is right out. Would you rather come face to face with a miniature hippopotamus or a giant cockroach? And let me make sure, the stipulation is both are in a bad mood.

Diane Weaver: Cockroach. Hippopotami have jaws of steel. And even if it's tiny, it's going to get you. Super cute though.

James Carman: What's your favorite martial art?

Diane Weaver: So I'm a big fan of Tai Chi, actually. Two things. I love Tai Chi. It's slow and methodical, and because my brain's always everywhere in a million places, and I like to do high octane things, it helps me slow down and focus. And it's very breath oriented.

Diane Weaver: I've also recently discovered, and I asked for this for my birthday and I got it, it's called Sword Up and it is yoga with swords. So you can do one sword, or you can have two smaller daggers.

Diane Weaver: Basically, when you do Warrior One, you're actually doing the martial arts two fingers in the air and you've got your sword up here. It's fun.

James Carman: Now I've got to go look into this. And our final question, and I feel like I can ask this one of you. I feel like this might be right up your alley, or valley, as it were. Tell me what you like to do on weekends in a valley girl voice.

Diane Weaver: Weapons up. So, like, I live in Southern California and so of course I have to say I like to go to the beach and I like to boogie board. Oh my gosh, let's go to the beach. I'm gonna grab my surfboard and we'll go down to the beach.

Where to find Diane

James Carman: You went into some really deep topics, some really cool stuff. This has been a fantastic conversation. Anything coming up for you or Baryons that you'd like to share, or how can folks look into Baryons? If they do want their own little rubber duck.

Diane Weaver: Absolutely. On the Baryons front, today you can go to Baryons.com and you can try it out for free. And when you're ready to take it to work, that's when you reach out to the team. You can ask for me. I would love to help you. And this is really where we start to see some interesting shifts in team dynamics. The things I see ahead, honestly, there's not a single event that's coming up, although there are events that happen. We do round table discussions around thought leadership and topics. And we have a podcast called The New F-Word. F stands for flourishing. It might not be PG, but listeners, listen with your earmuffs. It's all about, how do we each as individuals find our own definition of flourishing and purpose and meaning. Those types of things are what I'm most excited about. Mostly just, how do we create a movement? How do we create more movement around the work ahead that we're all rolling up our sleeves and doing?

James Carman: This has been a fascinating conversation. I really enjoyed it thoroughly and I'd love to have you back on to dive into other topics. Thank you for coming on. I really appreciate it.

Diane Weaver: Thank you so much, James. It was a real pleasure.