Influential Visions

Meta just disclosed in federal court that it faces up to $1.4 trillion in penalties for building addictive algorithms. If you lead a team, this is not a tech story — it is an operating cost you are already paying. Twenty-three minutes and fifteen seconds: that is how long it takes your best people to fully recover from one interruption, according to two decades of research from UC Irvine. This epi...

Steven J. Manning built a $47 billion career by doing the one thing everyone around him refused to do — staying. At 21 he went to work for a tiny company heading toward insolvency. His friends were changing jobs every eighteen months. Lawyers, Stanford MBAs, people with better degrees and better options — all moving on. Steven stayed. Twenty years later he was running a major business with thousan...

Why New AI Roles Won't Fill the Jobs We're About to Lose. US white-collar payrolls have contracted for 31 consecutive months. While tech optimists point to a projected 78 million net gain in global jobs by 2030, a staggering 95% of those new roles require a Master's degree or a Doctorate. The brutal reality? AI is creating new jobs, just not for the people whose livelihoods are being actively disr...

Anthropic has disabled its top-tier models for every customer on the planet. In this episode, I detail the national security directive that forced the sudden shutdown, the reality behind the zero-workaround policy, and a critical lesson in cognitive health for business leaders. Discover what a controlled study from Texas A&M and Purdue reveals about how low-quality data creates permanent reaso...

The US government just shut down access to Anthropic's two most powerful AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, days after launch. Steven J. Manning joins Nathaniel Schooler to close the AI in Government series and ask the only question that matters: national security, or the costliest competitive takedown in tech history. Different place. Same question. Visit the shownotes here: https://www.natschooler...

Sovereign AI: The Geopolitical Weapon Being Built Right Now Influential Visions with Nat Schooler The foundation model era is over. The sovereign AI era has begun. Every serious nation on the planet is now racing to build its own AI stack — controlling the energy, the compute, the data, and the rules. Because relying on foreign AI infrastructure is no longer a tech decision. It is a national secur...

Global data centers now consume more electricity than the entire United Kingdom. While most boardrooms treat AI as a software decision, the world's superpowers are realizing the truth: AI is an energy decision. In this episode, we explore how the grid crisis is forcing a radical split in tech infrastructure. While Europe is engineering practical ways to capture data center waste heat to warm thous...

The UK is spending half a billion pounds on sovereign AI and sitting sixth in the world for real deployment. Something structural is broken — and Darrell Mann knows exactly what it is. Darrell is a former Chief Engineer of Rolls Royce and one of the world's leading systematic innovation experts. We strip away the political PR and get into why 98% of R&D spending fails, why engineers need to be...

Governments are making decisions about artificial intelligence right now. You were not consulted. But the consequences are heading for your career regardless. This series brings together four of the most credible voices on the planet — Tushar Kansal on India's national AI ambition, Nicolas Babin on what the EU AI Act actually does to working people, Darrell Mann on where human leadership becomes i...

AI job losses in 2026 have passed 142,000 in tech alone. Chatbots have been directly linked to multiple deaths. The FDA has issued its first ever warning letter citing AI misuse. The data is in — and it is worse than you think. Re-released due to the audio not meeting our standards. Nat Schooler breaks down the verified facts on what AI is actually doing to people and to the workforce right now. N...

The world's biggest AI conversation is happening without India in the room. That is a mistake. One in eight of ChatGPT's weekly users sits in India. Eighty per cent of Indian professionals use AI at work — against fifty per cent in the US. And the country is quietly building its own sovereign language models, frugal AI tools, and healthcare diagnostics at a scale the West has not begun to absorb....

Sovereign AI is the race for every nation to control its own artificial intelligence — and the US versus China money war just exposed why spending more is not winning. Fresh data from the 2026 Stanford AI Index reveals a staggering reality: the United States poured $285.9 billion of private AI money into the race in 2025, compared to China’s $12.4 billion . That is a massive 23-to-1 spending gap ....

Who Really Controls Your AI? Two of the biggest moments in AI this year happened in the same fortnight and almost nobody noticed. Five companies quietly agreed to let the US government look at their newest models before anyone else. Days later, the President walked away from the order that would have made it mandatory. So we are left with a halfway house. Government has a foot in the door. The doo...

"Governments Are Running on AI at Scale" Guest: Nicolas Babin, EU Deputy Mayor & Digital Ambassador What if I told you that your government is running on AI systems that operate at speeds humans cannot match? Not chatbots. Not theoretical. Real systems detecting fraud across millions of accounts, predicting security threats before they happen, accelerating healthcare innovation, and shaping po...

Every country is running a different AI experiment on itself right now. Most people only see one of them. For five years, the AI story had four postcodes — San Francisco, Brussels, Beijing, and maybe London on a slow news day. That era just ended. In this opening episode of Series 14, Nat Schooler — ex-IBM futurist and host of Influential Visions — maps the new global AI landscape through three le...

In this episode, I sit down with Shayna Davis, founder of the Executive Signals Group, to break down why executive presence needs a complete reframe — and what to build instead: external influence. Most leaders are told they need "executive presence" — but nobody can define what that actually means. In this episode, host Nat Schooler sits down with Shayna Davis, founder of the Executive Signals Gr...

Stop signing your own resignation letter by staying comfortable. . In the Great Detachment of 2026, the only "job for life" is the one you architect yourself. We aren't just surviving the AI Revolution; we are leading the Creative Revolution by leveraging the one thing AI cannot replicate: Your unique humanity. Guest Bio: Nicolas Babin is an AI expert, EU Digital Ambassador, and former Head of Son...

AI is coming for the middle managers—here’s why that might actually be a good thing if you’re human. In this briefing, Francisco Marin (CEO of Cognitive Talent Solutions) reveals how Fortune 500 giants are using Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) to find the "invisible" influencers who actually run their companies.  We dive into why a 500-person AI experiment failed, how to slash onboarding tim...

While most people fear that AI is coming for their jobs, the real disruption isn't the technology—it’s the culture behind it. In this episode, Nathaniel Schooler sits down with leadership expert Tom Schin to discuss why AI won’t necessarily replace workers, but it will definitely replace "weak managers" who refuse to adapt. They dive deep into why 85% of AI projects fail due to poisonous cultures...

Beyond the Golden Rule with Dr. R. Karl Hebenstreit The "Golden Rule" is a career killer. Treating people "how you want to be treated" is a lazy strategy that guarantees you’ll be replaced by an algorithm. In the AI era, technical skills are commodities. The only competitive advantage left is Strategic Empathy. In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. R. Karl Hebenstreit—a PhD-level Organizational Devel...

Join the 1% who survive the AI shift: Get 1/11 Seats  Nat Schooler.com  Is "Executive Presence" a lie in 2026? In this episode, Nat Schooler (Ex-IBM Futurist) dismantles the outdated advice killing your career. While most professionals polish their "image," AI is rendering the traditional polished executive obsolete. We reveal why the "plastic" corporate look is a liability and how authentic, grit...

Is your HR career obsolescence-proof? By 2026, the "People Function" will effectively be a "Data Function." The way we manage talent today is about to be wiped out by AI1, and most leaders aren't ready for the shift. If you think your job is safe just because it involves "people skills," you are missing the signal. In this critical episode on the Future of Work, ex-IBM Futurist Nat Schooler sits d...

300 million jobs will disappear by 2030. Is yours on the list? The "AI Displacement" wave is here, and middle management is the primary target. In this executive briefing, David Asarnow (Founder, Business Nitrogen) breaks down exactly who gets fired first and who survives. With a track record of building multiple 8-figure companies and generating $745M in client results, David doesn’t guess—he kno...

The greatest constraint on your company's revenue isn't capital; it is human overhead. The old playbook taught that to grow bigger, you had to hire more. That dogma is now obsolete. We are entering the era of the "Augmented CEO," where high-leverage individuals utilizing advanced AI infrastructure can outperform traditional organizations of 100+ people. Ex-IBM Futurist Nat Schooler is Joined by Ri...

By 2025, 87% of global companies and 99% of Fortune 500 firms will use artificial intelligence for candidate screening, fundamentally changing the recruitment landscape. This advanced hr tool evaluates job applications in seconds, assessing personal brand signals and impacting the hiring process significantly. Without these signals, job security is at risk, making ai scoring a critical factor in m...