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In today’s episode of Fortune Daily, we dive into the evolving relationship between business and the next generation. Ziad Ahmed, SVP, UTA Advisory, joins us to break down what companies get right—and critically wrong—about Gen Z, and how those dynamics can change.
Next, Senior AI Reporter Emily Forlini shares her latest reporting on the leadership shakeup at OpenAI. We discuss Brad Lightcap’s departure and the wave of employee exits following recent share sales.
Finally, Editor Nick Lichtenberg joins the show to break down Kalshi’s newest partnership and what it means for the future of prediction markets.


Additional images courtesy of Getty Images




Has Business Got the Creator Economy All Wrong?

Features

fortunedaily

AI has moved beyond the chat window to the physical world. Emboldened by world models and enabled by new hardware, machines can see and act and operate in real environments. The landscape is shifting fast. Cathy Hackl breaks down where spatial intelligence is going and what it takes to compete.

Cathy Hackl, Founder and CEO, Future Dynamics

Here in the Real World

Conferences

That that's a hard, that's, that's a hard channel to follow, guys. OK, uh, I am a hyper specialist in spatial computing, gaming, and simulation, so that's what we're gonna be talking about. I am gonna keep it in the real world, but we're gonna talk about AI and everything happening in that space. That was, let's go. See, um, I think many of us can agree that the next, the next AI revolution won't happen in chat windows. It's going to happen in the physical world. Obviously, many of you guys are fixated in large language models and agentic AI, but I'm gonna take you guys a little bit further when we talk about expanding computing into the physical world. Um, how many of you have seen this slide before? Did you see some people, OK, uh, I like showing this slide because it kind of sets the tone because you've heard a lot of terms being thrown out here, right? Agentic, you've heard physical world models, all sorts of things. Just kind of level sets kind of where at least Jensen and where Nvidia thinks this is going. I think most people agree generative AI, you know, no longer necessarily the talk of the town except for IPOs. Agentic AI is the darling of the moment. Um, and then where we're heading is physical AI. You heard a lot about physical AI here on stage. Um, I focus specifically on that agentic to physical AI moment. So, LLMs, um, I love that we had a panel here on robotics, uh, humanoid robots, and, and thinking through, you know, who would you trust? Would you trust to have a robot in your house? If I ask you right now, if you can have a, a robot at home to fold your laundry, how many of you would, you know, raise your hands? Most people, would you give that robot a knife? No, would you have that robot take care of your newborn? No, right? Because it hallucinates. So, a lot of what is happening right now is LLMs can predict the next word, but what we need with physical AI is AI that can predict the next action. And this is where a lot of this is slowly heading. For that physical AI moment that we're heading into, we need a completely new AI stack of sorts. It's going to need a body, we need an interface, we will have tons of new hardware. And here's what I'm here to tell you, the moat will no longer be in the models. Alright, maybe some specific models, but the mode is moving away from models. We're going to have tons of hardware. I'm going to get into that in a little bit. And also we're going to have a moment of data scarcity depending on the models that are needed to get us to that new physical AI moment. We're also going to talk about connectivity. So agentic AI, you know, no tech no tech conversation would be, you know, would be OK if I didn't mention agentic because everyone wants to talk about gentic. I see agentic as the nervous system of where we're heading with physical AI. Agentic eventually will need a body, right? Whether it's a hologram, a humanoid robot robot, or something, it's gonna need some type of body, and it's gonna need some type of interface beyond just a chat window. Right, I see that as the connective tissue, the nervous system that gets us into that next phase of physical AI. Uh, this is a, this is something that I love to show because I think most people are not even understanding kind of where this is headed. This is from my friends at Niantic Spatial. Um, if you talk to anyone working in deep tech and in deep AI, we will all agree that in order to get to that next stage of AI, you need new models and new architectures. And some of these, these new models and architectures are foundational models, so world foundation models, and then also large geospatial models, which are at the top there. Most people don't, don't really think about large geospatial models. I am going to talk about that, but as you go up in this pyramid, there's more data scarcity. And this kind of explains, this is also from my friends at Niantic, that explains a little bit where the models are. This is a great slide to take a picture of, if you want to better understand where the models are heading and who's doing what. So world models, show of hands, how many of you here know what a world model is? I mean, you've heard the terms, OK. All right, but pretty much, I'm not gonna kind of dig into it 100%, but I will tell you it's about simulation, but it's about simulating the next frame of reality. Right now, you have tons of capital. Slowly going into this area, so Doctor Fayei Lee, who many of you guys know, she's the godmother of AI. I'm known in tech circles as the godmother of the metaverse. I know it's not sexy to talk about the metaverse anymore, but I feel a certain sisterhood with her. Uh, she's working on this. You've got Jan LeCun, who used to run AI at Meta, now, uh, running his company. He raised, get this, most of you guys know this, but he raised $1.1 billion seed round. That's unheard of. Right, in the age of AI. So, a lot of money flowing into world models, because they can predict the next, uh, the next part of reality. It is about simulation. So, most of what's happening with world models is creating simulation, and there'll be simulation in virtual spaces, also simulation in the physical world. So, you've got a lot of agents. You might have seen a lot of work around agents, uh, doing different types of modeling and simulation. Uh, you also start, start to move from language to physics. That's why a lot of the money is going into physical AI into world models. It's because we're moving away from language to physics. OK. And anyone that has kids recognizes this Roblox. You know, we all work for Roblox. Roblox is actually entering the world models space. You've got Waymo also talking a lot about world models, and you also have the company Runway, which many of you know for video. They're also now a world model company. So, geospatial AI, this might be the first time you guys ever hear about geospatial AI models, but this is a very important part in order to have those humanoid robots, uh, autonomous vehicles, drones in large quantities, because it's going to allow creating that layer of AI that connects, connects us to the physical world. So AI that understands language is powerful, but AI that understands place is transformative. Place in real time. There is something called the ground truth advantage. So, a world model can predict plausible outcomes, you know, what might, what might happen in a street corner, but when you have real-world data, that actually tells you in real time what is happening, that gives you an even better outcome. And this is the type of data that is irreplaceable. And there's, there's going to be a huge, and I'll tell you this, there's going to be a huge economic incentive towards more real world data. So for example, the information that Ryan might have from real estate or booking might have about the physical world, that they're sitting on a treasured trove of data. That leads us into spatial computing, where I spent the last decade. It's expanding computing into the physical world. And why are you starting to see spatial pop-up everywhere? Because robots need to have spatial intelligence. They need to be able to understand the physics of the space, whether you're a car, a robot, a hologram, a drone. You need to understand the physics of the space. Here's where we get into smart glasses. Is anyone here wearing like the Meta Ray-Bans? I see a couple of people I get asked this question all the time. Why in the world are all these companies rushing towards new wearables and new devices? It's because slowly, someone, we need to replace the mobile phone. And for several reasons, they want to replace the mobile phone, because whoever owns the hardware has access to that real-world data to train those newer models to get you to physical AI. Right? So, whoever owns those, those wearables has access to that. And also, if you add to that wearables as the interface and you add neurosymbolic AI that actually helps to reason, you can start to eliminate hallucination. The reason many of you guys would not give that robot a knife or have him take care of your newborn is because this technology still hallucinates hallucinates. We need to get to a point where AI is actually getting everything right with extreme precision, and in order to do that, you need spatial computing, you need geospatial models, and you need world models and LLMs. So, slowly, everything's going to start to move from the cloud to the edge. Right now, there is, the, the connectivity does not exist for us to be able to power millions if not billions of devices altogether. That is being built. The infrastructure is being built, but it's no longer, it's not here yet. Um, I love that we had Peggy Johnson here. I actually spent some time with her in Doha at an event there and had a chance to talk to her about humanoid robotics and the big rush that's moving towards humanoid robots. And this is not me, this is Jensen Huang saying humanoid robots are going to be the next consumer market. Just for a show of hands, how many of you agree with that sentiment? Alright, alright, so there's a lot of skeptics. Uh, we'll have to see really what happens, but I do truly believe we're at a like kind of a, a dawn of new hardware. And this is the big thing, intelligence is slowly entering the physical world, and it is becoming spatial. So, the spatial understanding that we have, that we gain as children, for example, you wouldn't put your newborn, you wouldn't put your 3 year old in front of the stairs and be like, hey, go at it, right? Slowly, children learn to go down the stairs and understand the physics. That's kind of where we're at right now, with a lot of these robots and a lot of these devices, is they're starting to understand the physics of the space. Right? So, we're moving from language into understanding physics, and that's the only way we can actually get to physical AI. A holograms is also some of the work I've been doing for a long time. When we talk about agenttic AI, like for example, when we were talking about, you know, talking to an agent about booking something for you, eventually you're going to want to see that agent, and that's going to come in the form of potentially a hologram or some device. Also from a communication standpoint, we will stop eventually doing phone calls necessarily and start doing hologram calls, which is very sci-fi, but it's truly being worked on once we have the right connectivity. So, the infrastructure is currently being built. The networks are being built to be able to power these systems. The interface is arriving. And this is not me trying to replace the mobile phone. This is everyone in Silicon Valley. For example, Apple is going to be bringing AirPods with cameras. Why are they doing that? Because once they have cameras, they can start to map the physical world. Right, Google's back in the market with glasses as well, so the moat is moving from the models to the hardware. Why? Because that's how you get the training data for the newer models. So I truly do believe that the next advantage and where a lot of the opportunity is going to lie is in building for the physical world. Thank you.

The org structures and roles that today’s companies rely on won’t get them where they need to go next. As AI, an evolving consumer, and shifting market dynamics redefine how work gets done, leaders must rethink job titles, career pathways, and value creation. In this fireside chat, Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar explores emerging interdisciplinary skills in an AI era, how jobs are evolving, and how to redesign work to amplify human potential alongside AI, turning workforce transformation into a competitive advantage. 

Ravi Kumar, Chief Executive Officer, Cognizant
In conversation with: Moderator: Diane Brady, Executive Editorial Director, Fortune; Co-Chair, Fortune COO Summit 

The Great Restructuring: Rethinking Talent Strategy in the Age of AI

I want to start with what I read this morning, which is that you've created two new job categories frontier certified Engineer and Frontier Business operator. So I have to ask, sir, what is that and am I eligible to apply? What are these new jobs you've created? You always have excitement when there's a new technology which is disrupting us, so thank you for the invite. Um, you know, I, I used to be a chief operating officer before, so I'm so excited to see a community you've established. So thank you for that. It's also one of the most undervalued. Jobs. Um, you said widespread agreement. Look, yes, yes. You know, did you do it? Nobody thanks you. When you're not around, a lot of people look out for you and they start to ask for work, you know, what, what's going on. So, you know, actually till 2007. 58% of the Fortune 500 did not have a chief operating officer. And I believe it's the most important role in any company. It kind of sits in the hustle of the company. OK, so coming back to your question, no, but, but it's, it's related because it's about how jobs change and, you know, the function of the COO, and now you've created these new functional roles for the age of AI. Yeah, I mean, you know, we, we lived in an era where Intelligence was kind of a premium. Expertise was a premium. The deeper you go into a job, uh, you get paid more, and that was the asymmetry between enterprises and the symmetry between individuals. We're now getting into an era, or rather we're in an era where intelligence is going to be on our fingertips. It's probably going to be at a throwaway price. It's not gonna be the symmetry. How you apply it is going to be the symmetry. So the two roles we have established are roles where they sit at the intersection of technology and a domain or technology and operations, uh, technology and the domain because this is software engineering, it is contextual, it's not deterministic like the classical software we wrote so far. It's contextual, so it's a different science. So we need lean, leaner 1% teams, 1% parts or squads as we call it, which has intersection of technology and domain. It could be a history major with skills to identify and use agentic work. It could be a biology major who does life sciences. It could be a chartered accountant who can use agentic cloud terminals around them and actually deliver work. The business operator is like a BPO plus plus plus. Once you integrate the workflows with, with digital labor and human labor, once you've reinvented those flows, somebody has to operate them. And that is the frontier operator. We have in a loosely packed way used the word forward deployed engineers in the last one year. I mean, forward deployed engineers were built for an era which was very different. Forward deployed engineers were built. It was used by Palantir. Palantir built this because they had a machine learning ontology, which was a black box. They got an engineer. The worldview was everything is broken in a company we're going to bring it together. That's not the worldview today. The worldview is how do I integrate digital labor into the flows of a company. That's why we build these two roads. Well, and when you and I met um probably about a year and a half ago, we talked, and there's been a lot of talk since about these flattenings of the pyramid, the Hollywood studio model. Let's start with how you. Hire and who you hire you mentioned biologists, history majors makes me think, first of all, what business are you in and is that changing, but the entry level worker is the worker that traditionally we look at now is not getting those jobs. Talk about how you see that entry level worker. Yeah, so our universe as a company is no longer software engineering. We want to embed. Into the operations of companies digital labor as they call it, which is gentic in nature, so the universe goes from just tech span of enterprises to oppan of enterprises, um, you know, way back in last year, you and I wrote something together. We believed that the pyramids of work will be flatter. In fact, people said there could be a diamond, there could be a reverse pyramid. We actually felt you need more early careers because you could create significantly more throughput at the bottom of the pyramid. In fact, the entry barriers to new jobs is significantly lower. So you, you create much broader pyramids and shorter pyramids. So the, so the path to expertise is much shorter. The number of people you could hire at the bottom of the pyramid is much higher. So this is counter, it's a counter narrative to what everybody was saying so far, and it's actually a counter narrative also to people who actually said there'll be lesser number of jobs in the future. In fact, in the last one week, the narrative has changed again. Everybody now thinks we need more jobs. There'll be more jobs done by, yeah, in the last one week. Why, why in the last one week? Because now, because now everybody is seeing it. I mean Sam Altman said what I said a year ago is no longer true. I mean, if there was a little bit of fear mongering, drum beating about the fact that there's going to be a collapse of jobs, and I think they're gonna be more jobs. AI is gonna be in the middle of the floor. You're gonna have a ton of jobs in the front. You, you'll have a ton of jobs in the back. These are gonna be validation and verification jobs, and those are gonna be authentication jobs. Now when you have a flatter pyramid, the biggest challenge is. The middle layers. are going to be leaner. So with 15 smaller teams. You're going to have player coaches. You're not going to have people who are coordinating. And pushing information up and down and reducing the symmetry. You're not gonna have them. You're gonna have a broader pyramid with player coaches in the middle. Then how do the people at the bottom. Get heritage of companies. How do they learn? How do they walk the corridors, which is what we did learning in companies. The nodes in a company are going to be more real-time. And those nodes are going to be more genic and that's the Hollywood model so which essentially means if these nodes are more real time and more agentic and you have people who are player coaches, you can actually build harnesses around the tokenization. And you could capture the digital, you could capture the digital labor because it leaves traces. And that has to be your new learning opportunities. So people who walk the corridors have to now watch for people. Who are like them and watch for digital labor which is trapped in the workings of the company and learn out of it and that's the only way you could actually build expertise because if you're doing validation and verification jobs you need experience. That experience is not going to come from just human labor, it's actually gonna come from human and digital labor. So Ravi, I want you talked about this audience and it's, you know, when you're in an operating role you have tough choices, you know, to spark joy. You have to take some pain. You have to, you know, to reinvent. You have to not do the things you did before. So you just put aside up to $270 million for restructuring, layoffs, and yet you're, you said you're hiring more people. Talk a little bit about that process and those choices that you have to make. Look, you know, we're broadening the pyramid. Which means I'm gonna hire more entry level school graduates than last year. Last year we hired 20,000. This year we're gonna have more than 20,000. The year before we hired 12,000 school graduates. So as you broaden the pyramid and restructure, you're hiring more entry level. You're hiring more non-STEM disciplines. I spoke about historians. I spoke about biologists. We only hired engineers before. So we are hiring non-STEM disciplines. We're hiring player coaches. What we want to do is to give people a chance. Wherever they're actually working on coordination orchestration kind of jobs, we have something called an AI fluency leader in the company we kind of ask people to navigate through the process and become player coaches. I mean player coaches higher productivity, having small teams, interdisciplinary talent is what the future is gonna look like and as long as you are in that mix. Uh, you're gonna, you're gonna do well. We will hire significantly more number of people than last year, but we're going to hire broader at the bottom, and we're gonna hire interdisciplinary talent. So you mentioned tokens. I want to get to a headline you had recently that it is not billable hours or a measure of value. What are we getting wrong in your mind about tokens and how that's impacting the way we do business? I mean, for the last two years. How you consumed tokens? How much tokens you consume? was a vanity metric. I think it still is. I mean, people on a drink are talking about, oh, I've spent $500 this month on tokens. Somebody else has spent $1000 on tokens, and we incentivize people. I actually know about a company which has offer letters with token amounts attached to in the offer now. It doesn't tell you what's the outcome, what's the value. So, I don't think you should equate this to number of billing hours. I don't think you should equate this to productivity. So we believe. Tokenization is going to be a science. It's a contextual science. This is a contextual, uh, you know, technology. It has to be grounded in the company's hustle. In fact, that's why the chief operating officer is so important. The capability of this, of the, of the technologies is right out there. The production value of the technology is here. And the bridge to that production value is what is going to make companies successful. That bridge is going to come from grounding the technology into the rules of the company, grounding the technology into the hustle of the company. In fact, we have a science called context engineering. I've actually written two HBR articles on it. If you get a chance, you should read it. I've actually said how to teach AI to be a part of your team. Brewing coffee in Starbucks is very different to brewing coffee elsewhere. Now, the deterministic parts of The company has already been absorbed by the classical software, which we wrote for the last 50 years. The probabilistic part of work is what we're trying to capture. And that context is inside companies. It has to be embedded into the companies. It has to be embedded into the agentic work you do and the tribal knowledge, the, the, the context, the heritage, the culture, it is, it has to be captured in some form, and you have to apply that to digital labor in a way. You have to reinvent the flows and integrate that back in. You know, one of my favorite examples here is autonomous cars. The technology was smart. Back in 2006. We are in 2026. 0.5% of the car rides in the United States are on autonomous cars, because we're trying to ride it on infrastructure which was built for humans to make it more complex, it's humans and machines working together. So, The reinvention of flows in a company. Integrating this digital labor, which is, you know, it's, it's, uh, you know, it is very jagged. It does things which are not as good as humans. It does things better than humans in some cases. So how do you put all of that in place? I think is a lot of heavy lift. We are underestimating that heavy lift. So I want to get, uh, in terms of the philosophy of you as a leader, that Peter Drucker question of what business you're in. Let's go back to imagining what business is cognizant in today and if we're sitting here this time next year, pick a timeline, what business will you be in? Because I think these new tools change how you go to market, they change your relationship with customers. How are you thinking about the business? So we, you know, look, every company, every industry, was born for a purpose. It kind of addressed the white space. The purpose we were built for is to deliver expertise. When there was a disruption. And the way we delivered that expertise was. You know, to be honest, billable hours. I mean we did fixed price work we did outcome based work, but the real thing was billable us software companies. Delivered the value on per seat models and we delivered the value on billable hours. We have to reforge our first principles. For the first time after many, many years we get a chance to build this as bespoke. I mean, we were system builders. We went to system integrators. Now we are bespoke AI builders. We went from delivering on a pyramid with deep expertise to delivering interdisciplinary skills. That's a science we have to build. It's a contextual science because this is a technology which is probabilistic. So you can build that experience, you know, I actually strongly believe we have built a harness on tokenization. You flow the tokens through companies like us, we should be able to deliver better than you delivering digital labor on your own. So going from Deep expertise to interdisciplinary skills. We were a services company. Our clients bought infrastructure. They bought software. They bought services. They owned the agency of outcomes. Clients are now saying, wait a minute. I mean enterprises are saying, why are we owning the outcomes? We've got a company to come and own outcomes for us, so we should be able to own the outcomes we have to go from delivering projects. Delivering billable arts to owning outcomes. And finally, we have to underwrite those outcomes and be paid for those outcomes. I think that is the future. I believe we are going to reforge and whoever reforges this future is going to be a winner on the other side. And very briefly, advice to your fellow, I know you're a former CEO. What advice do you have to COOs? I mean, you know, the bridge to enterprise value is huge. The capability is going up and up. And the production value is right out there. And chief operating officers, chief technology officers, and there's a lot of, a lot of people who do dual roles, they play a big role in bridging this gap. I mean, I sit on two public boards. You know, when I'm on a board, you're pushing all these executives saying, oh, there's no AI in this company. And when I flip and I become an executive, my board is actually pushing me and saying the same thing to me. So the capability is right out there. Everybody is reading it, but the real value of production value is much lower. The velocity to bridge the gap is actually, you know, it is urgent. And the reason it's urgent, unlike in the past, every time there was a disruption, railroad disruption, You go to the digital disruption, the Internet, we got years and years and years to get there. In this case, the scaling loss for this technology is only 6 months, which means, which means, if you can't, if you can't actually get the value by then this is going to go obsolete. So there is an urgency for the velocity to be bridged. The velocity of technology capability is very high. And the production value is here I think chief operating officers are probably the most important people to bridge that gap and if we can't bridge that gap, this will be a bubble because it'll be an industrial bubble it'll, you know, you will have an extraordinary technology, but you're not gonna get value out of it.

Toxic cultures, unchecked power, and pressure-cooker leadership have become Hollywood's favorite raw material. But what those stories can teach us about diagnosing and fixing the real thing in our own workplaces? Former CNN journalist Brian Stelter, whose book Top of the Morning inspired the Emmy-winning series The Morning Show , joins Denise Shull, the performance coach who inspired a character on the Showtime drama Billions, to discuss how fiction can be formed by real organizational dynamics—and the concrete lessons on culture leaders can take back to their own fast-paced environments.

Denise Shull, Founder and CEO, The ReThink Group
Brian Stelter, Analyst, CNN; Producer, The Morning Show
Moderator: Indrani Sen, Senior Features Editor, Fortune;, Co-Chair, Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit

When Workplace Culture Becomes a Hollywood Story

So both of you have had roles in creating hit workplace dramas that delve into the ways that high performance sometimes comes hand in hand with tension, drama, even toxicity. Denise, you've been described as the real-life inspiration for Wendy Rhodes, the psychiatrist and in-house performance coach of the fictional hedge fund depicted in Millions. In your professional life, you advise people in extremely high pressure environments, traders, investors, athletes, coaching them on risk, decision making, emotion, and performance under pressure. Hopefully not yelling at them like the clip we just saw. Um, what did Billions reveal about the work that you do that surprised you, if you have any specific examples I'd love to hear them. I'm actually having a little trouble hearing you or understand what was the end of that? Oh, what, what did Billions reveal about the work that you do? There's a lot more to a good decision than we think there is, um, you know, in short, it does reveal the emotion behind the decision. We're always talking about take the emotion out, behave rationally, like, you know, use your head, all of that. Like, the show does demonstrate how much emotion there is even in a financial decision, which is where everyone thinks at a minimum there's not. It's not true, not true. Um, Brian, you're an accomplished journalist and your book Top of the Morning inspired the Morning Show, which you've consulted on. What has it been like to see your own workplace, perhaps some of your own experiences in newsrooms transposed onto the screen for entertainment? Has watching that fictionalized version of a TV news operation given you any Insights into the real thing. It definitely has, and you know, I will be the first to say the morning show on Apple, it's a soap opera, you know, it is not entirely true to what really happens behind the scenes at morning television shows, but the tension is real, the drama is real, the stakes are real, the human relationships are real, and I think that's what we bring to life on the show. When I wrote this book a long time ago on morning TV, I had not worked in television yet. I was still at the New York Times. Now I'm at CNN and I have a better understanding as a former anchor myself of why anchors are sometimes called anchor monsters. Like there's a reason why some of these TV egos get so inflated. There's a reason why, you know, those heads sometimes explode in TV. So I think we have certainly dramatize that and we have fun with that on the morning show, but it's getting at something very real about how to manage talent, about what talent even is in 2026. The question for both of you, um, we're watching these high-pressure TV shows and these workplace settings. They, they tend to, they feel recognizable to any of us, even if we've never worked in a venture fund or or a newsroom. Um, are all companies on some level hives of drama and, and if so, why, why is there so much drama in the workplace? Well, for one, we're human beings, right? And like human beings. We don't know this, but like I just said, you have to have emotion to make a decision. We all have a whole variety of fear, frustration, disappointment, desire, like longing, jealousy, and so we recognize it, right? And it's everywhere. So it happens in these two venues. There are a lot of really quick decisions like the, the pressure is right now. So I think it intensifies the, the demonstration of those emotions as opposed to when you at least get 5 or 10 minutes to like make a decision, you know, um. But yeah, it's that we show real human feelings. We all relate to them and we get to see these powerful, successful people experience these difficulties, conflicts that we experienced that we sort of thought, you know, maybe they've got it all together. Right, and we find out the opposite is true, and that makes us kind of happy, right? As a media beat reporter, I always operate from this sense that nobody knows anything, right, that everyone's kind of faking it, that nobody really knows what to do, that even the top, you know, people who seem to have it all figured out don't, and that's what these shows are expressing in different ways. I also look, I think about my first job in high school, and even that was a hive of drama, working at an ice cream shop, yes. Yes, I mean, even, even the, you know, even the emotions there. So you know it's such a through line, and I actually think it's wild that there aren't more shows that dramatize this. You know, we can count on our hands like the number of great workplace dramas, and then there's maybe one more hand of great workplace comedies. There's not that many of these given that we spend most of our waking hours at a workplace with colleagues and everybody can relate to those feelings and emotions, right? We're obsessed with it, right? Yes, yes. Um, Denise, one of the themes, uh, in both of these shows actually and probably in most workplaces is secrets, what people know, what people don't know, and what eventually comes out in a work setting. What happens psychologically inside an organization when some people know something important and others don't? Wow, that's a really interesting question. One is that intuition is a real thing. So like you'll see, you'll hear it called intuition or you'll hear it denigrated by the behavioral finance people. It's real. There's a ton of academic research that shows it's real. And we all kind of know when we're being lied to, um, like we have that spidey sense, right? Like that's a real thing and we don't like it. Why don't we like it? The brain is always predicting if something is good or bad for us. So if we know someone is lying to us, it's a threat. We're like there's something we don't know that's creating a threat and then we may even overreact because maybe it's a little lie, but your brain is gonna say this is a threat. And people then react to threats, you know, I mean that we, we have an audience here with a lot of HR people, professionals. I wonder if you could talk about the difference between necessary confidentiality and, and when secrecy becomes a toxic culture. Well, I think by the same token, everyone understands that certain things do need to be confidential, that you don't need to know everything, you know, about a colleague or their salary or their whatever bad behavior they might be engaged in. Um, so there's a way to deliver the, the fact that it's confidential with respect and kindness, so you know you're not knowing. As opposed to being lied to when you're being told something that you get that spidey sense it's not true. I mean, at its core, it's like if you actually really listen to people and the person feels respected, they'll react better no matter what the subject, right? So it's almost like don't be secretive about the fact that there are secrets. Don't be, yeah, and don't be dismissive and don't be denigrating. Like why would you think that, you know, like so much is in tone delivery. That communicates like respect and hearing what the person asked maybe, right, right. I'll tell you what I can, I can, you know, I can say this, I can't say that. I hope you understand that it's not personal to you, right, right. Um, and Brian, I want to go back to something you said earlier about performing confidence and authority, which is a, is a thing that we do a lot in media, um, and it's certainly a big theme in the morning show. It's probably true in other fields too. How much of workplace dysfunction in your opinion comes from people faking it? Pretending to know more or control more than they really do. Yes, I sometimes like to ask folks, you know, who are, you know, kind of middle or rank and file, you know, actually, you know, keeping, keeping a channel on the air or keeping a website online, how many bosses do you feel like you have, you know, and do you feel like any of them are actually in charge, and you get really interestingly different answers sometimes, right, if folks feel like there's a dozen people who might think they They are in charge, but actually no one is in those cases. I think we see versions of that in the morning show. And as the seasons have gone on, I'm still a producer on the show. We're in the 5th season now. We're working on season 5 right now, and it's a great side hustle for me because the writers will come and ask me, we want X to happen, then we want Y and Z to happen. Can you help us get there? Can you help us make that plausible? Is there a plausible way for it to happen? And by the way, I would say, you know, oftentimes there's not, and so it's fun for me to try to brainstorm ways to make it possible, you know, I think that ultimately they are trying to depict a business that is In secular decline, right, broadcast television in all its ways, and in that environment, you know, it's a little bit, what's the line about academia, you know, the stakes are so low and so people behave a certain way. Like there's a little bit of that going on about people clinging on to what they have and trying not to change in an environment where it's slowly, gradually, but clearly declining. And I think in that environment hopefully people see through the calls for authority and the calls to fake confidence, but I certainly think that that's what we're seeing that for the last gosh, 20 years now at the actual big networks as they try to recreate themselves and rebuild themselves in real time. And but ultimately knowing that it's in decline creates, I think, even more pressure on those egos I mentioned. It makes some of those anchor monsters even bigger monsters sometimes. I'd let's talk more about Anchor Monster. Um, it's just something about the red light on the camera. Yes, you know, some people would die without the radio, you know, without, but that's what it is. It's not just in, in TV newsrooms, right, Denise? You've talked about the rainmaker, the hedge fund star who makes money but treats people badly. Every industry has some version of that kind of person, like the, you know, the brilliant jerk. Um, what should lead us do when the person creating the most value is also creating a huge amount of damage. Well, isn't that actually the question, like, really, no matter what environment, what show, like the person who creates the most value is creating the most damage. I mean, there's the, is the person at all interested in creating less damage or do they have some psychological need to create damage. Um, there's, you know, I'm always like, what are they feeling? Why are they feeling it? Can I know that? Do they want to know it? Because the problem is basically like we don't need to regulate emotions. We need to regulate behavior. Like what people feel is what they feel. Like, and the more they understand about it, the less they need to like act out onto other people. So I mean, in practicality, that's what I end up doing is helping them understand that whether it's against their team or their market. But like how do we do that in a world that thinks cognition is the most important thing, who, you know, overvalues rationality. Like you're acting out. Because it does something for you. So how do you interrupt that doing? I mean, the research, you all know the research says psychological safety is the most important thing on a team, but like the people leading the team sort of think, OK, well, it doesn't matter, you know, uh, I'm just gonna, I guess you could summarize that and say it's a different approach to both the conscious and the unconscious emotions going on in all of the people, but particularly the leader that's behaving badly. I realized. Yeah I mean I guess what do you do with that, but I. The manager has to be empowered, I guess, to, to be able to make that distinction. Say that again. The manager has to be empowered from the top to be able to make that distinction about a player on their team who is, um, perhaps, you know, helping them meet all their goals, but, uh, but it's making everyone else miserable. Yeah, I mean, I'll say it again, I forgive me for sounding like a broken record, but I think the more we understand how human emotion actually works. It's not this leftover thing from like evolution. It's a real thing with information. We need it now. It's exaggerated and distorted by our past and by situations, but like if, if the workplace began to really understand how emotion works, I think there would be less bad behavior and more strategies to address it. Right. How about you, Brian? Anchor monsters, how do we deal with them and anchor monsters in ice cream shops as well? Yes, right, exactly. Well, you know, I'm thinking about the biggest news this week on my beat is Stephen Colbert signing off The Late Show, and he's been choosing to be so positive. He's radiated gratitude. He has said, I'd rather be grateful for the time I had on air than be angry that it's ending, even though he thinks he's probably the victim of a political hit and he thinks that there's all sorts of shenanigans going on behind the scenes. I really admire that and I found myself wanting to lift that up in my reports because we need those kind of role models, you know, we need, I mean, as someone who was canceled by CNN years ago and now I'm back at CNN, you know, you need role models in every phase of your career, phase of your life, about how to go about living a certain way, and I'm thinking about Colbert as exactly what you want to be. As opposed to I have someone in mind for what I just heard is the opposite about the kind of people who are fearful, who are acting out of fear, who are acting out of, you know, self, you know, protection, but those, but you're right, they're in every company. It just happens to be in my case in television with the morning show where we're dramatizing and making it real. I love that you brought up Stephen Colbert. I think he's actually kind of a great example, Denise, of what you're talking about, about emotion at work too. Like he's someone who you can kind of see his emotion constantly, um, you've said, Denise, that, um, you know, as you just mentioned. Taking the emotion out of it is a mess. And even that some of the emotions we think of as kind of banned in the workplace like fear, desire, jealousy, frustration, you're kind of not allowed to express a lot of these feelings in the in the workplace. What would it look like for a workplace to acknowledge these emotions without excusing bad behavior. I mean. You know, I come from a modern psychoanalytic background, which is not Freud, which is not you did this because your dad did that. It's, it's more about like what's your emotional experience? How do we help you have a different emotional experience, and everyone knows the value of being able to just say how they feel without fear of retribution, like in no judgment, not judging yourself and not judging the person. Like if we literally could give people the ability to talk to someone, you know, maybe it's your group, um, or it's a coach, where they can say what they really think and what they really feel, so they can find the feelings that help them make the decisions in their jobs, like it would be a radical change. It would literally be a radical change because all that happens is the emotion gets acted out. Like that's all that happens, you know, um, it gets, you know. Perpetrated onto some junior person or um yeah. We need real conversa we need to be able to have real conversations and like To take it one step further. My thing is that what we do. Like we need a real conversation about sexual desire and power. It's not as much in millions as it is in the morning show, but like we don't talk about it, you know, all human beings have sexual desire, and ones that have power may misapply that. Like we need to talk about it without judgment. The benefits will be astonishing. Last thought, um, for, for our audience here, HR leaders, um, what should HR leaders take seriously in workplace TV and our obsession with it as audiences, even if we know that it's exaggerated, sometimes satirical or surreal. Hm. I take that first. I was talking a lot. I was thinking you could say, yeah, but I'm learning a lot listening to you. I mean what comes to my mind is that idea that those secrets which eventually always come out and blow up in at least on the morning show, we're showing those blowing up and taking you in ways that are out of control in ways that I find really interesting, you know, but that's in a dramatic way. What's yours? What was the question again? What, what should, what should HR leaders take seriously about how obsessed we are with the drama of workplace TV? Well, that this stuff is actually real. Like we can know that it's dramatized, but like this stuff really happens. So let's like not pretend that it doesn't and then actually think about like, OK, how can we make a difference like. As opposed to just viewing it as entertainment. I mean, it's definitely dramatized, but. Also, we like it because it's real. And there are times where for me as a consultant on the morning show, we've worked on plot lines and ideas that I thought were kind of too outrageous, and then I swear they've come true two or three years later. It is breathtaking how often that happens. I was just in Washington when the dinner shooting happened. And by the way, the HR folks were so good to us afterwards. I was so grateful to work at an institution that knew how to support folks who had been through traumatic stress, but I'm not joking when I say we've talked about one of those plot lines for the morning show, and then I found myself in that ballroom. So it's constantly art imitating life and life imitating art, and so that is why there's a lot we can learn from these shows. Truth is. Truth is stranger than fiction. That's right. Yes. Thank you so much. Thank you for such a rich conversation.

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