ON_Discourse

Ten days out from Cannes Lions, Dan, Toby, and Chmiel try to work out whether anything has changed in the year since AI took over every panel and pitch deck. Their answer: not really. To make the point, they ran hundreds of Cannes sessions through Doma and pulled the ten platitudes the industry is about to repeat for a week straight — "AI will augment, not replace creativity," "trust is the new cu...

For the 50th episode of ON_Discourse, Dan, Toby, and Chmiel walk back through the running arguments that have shaped the show — and check which ones aged well, which got dumber, and which still don't have an answer. The smart fridge is still a bad idea, but the home-as-interface thesis underneath it looks better than ever. Bordy is an elegant solution to a problem that may not exist. The internet...

Dan, Toby, and Chmiel get riled by a LinkedIn post that contributes to the AI exhaustion it claims to diagnose, and use it as a jumping-off point to ask why everything in the AI conversation is starting to sound the same. They flip the "human in the loop" framing on its head, argue Anthropic's recent Claude Code throttling is just the latest in a long lineage of platform rug pulls (RIP Facebook or...

Dan, Toby, and Chmiel break down the Silicon Valley flex nobody's asking enough questions about: burning tokens as a workplace KPI. Is maxing your token usage a signal of genuine AI-first thinking — or just a new way to dress up the same old productivity theater? Details of the show: Jensen Huang's "$500K in tokens or you're not doing it right" interview and why it's both a marketing stunt and a r...

Dan, Toby, and Chmiel are joined by Carlos "Mare139" Rodriguez — OG ON_Discourse member, graffiti pioneer, fine artist, and cultural theorist — to dig into the question that lit up the ON_Discourse WhatsApp group: when a member called an AI-generated Spotify track the work of "a new artist," it set off a debate about art, authorship, economics, and who gets to hold the gate. Carlos brings five dec...

In this episode, Dan, Toby, and Chmiel try to explain what it actually feels like when AI stops being a tool you use in isolation and starts being the connective tissue of how a team works together. The conversation wanders through vibe coding failures, the difference between content and context, what it means to actually be an AI-first company (spoiler: not what most people think), and why the ri...

Dan, Toby, and Chmiel confront a hard truth: a listener reached out last week and said they were completely lost. So this week, the trio tries to strip away the gobbledygook and explain — in plain language — what OpenClaw actually means, why it matters even though it barely works, and why none of them can confidently explain what they're building anymore. Along the way, Toby uses his therapist as...

Dan, Toby, and Chmiel pick up where last week's LSD-level excitement left off — except now they're burned out. After a frenetic week building with their AI agent DOMA, the Domain co-founders are processing what it means to develop software that isn't designed but trained, where behavior is the interface and features might be beside the point. Along the way, Toby accidentally discovers DOMA can mak...

Dan, Toby, and Chmiel are still processing the implications of last week's conversation with Sam and the rollout of OpenClaw — and why it's changing the way they think about the web. This week, the team reveals what happened when they deployed their AI agent DOMA into the Signal group chat where they actually work, and why it felt less like a product demo and more like hiring a new teammate. Detai...

Dan, Toby, and Chmiel welcome Sam Broe, career technologist and architect of (domain), to unpack why Claude Code and the open-source project Claudebot (now OpenClaw) represent something far bigger than a better coding tool. Sam makes the case that giving an AI agent root-level access to your computer fundamentally changes how the internet works — and that the platforms trying to lock down their AP...

Dan, Toby, and Chmiel reunite after a long January to unpack what happened when ON_Discourse members went hands-on with Moltbot (formerly Claudebot, now OpenClaw) — an open-source AI agent with full shell access to your computer, your email, your calendar, and everything else. What started as an emergency Group Chat turned into one of the most unsettling Follow My Flow sessions yet, with even the...

Dr. Ami Bhatt—practicing cardiologist, chief innovation officer, and chair of the FDA's digital health committee—joins Toby and a group of ON_Discourse members who to talk (privately) about what AI can and can't do in medicine. She argues that context, nuance, and edge cases will always belong to humans, while AI handles the compute-heavy work our brains can't do alone. The conversation spans wear...

Toby sits down with Segun Oduolowu—journalist, media veteran, and executive communications coach—at CES to talk about what AI is doing to communication, editorial judgment, and slop. Segun has worked across CNN, network TV, and digital, and now coaches C-suite executives on how to actually sound like themselves. He's pessimistic. The algorithm rewards clicks over facts. TikTokers with no credentia...

Our first podcast in 2026 is a joint episode. Toby and Dan join Matt Britton, host of the Speed of Culture podcast and CEO of Suzy, at CES to debate who wins when everyone can make. They clash on how fast AI is actually reshaping the labor market, whether big tech layoffs are really AI-driven, and what happens to creative careers when craft gets democratized. Dan pushes back. Matt doubles down. No...

Dan, Toby, and Chmiel end the year by flipping the script. After letting Dan respond to everyone else's provocations in a previous episode, this time Toby and Chmiel throw Dan's hottest takes, weirdest perspectives, and biggest contradictions right back in his face. From his prediction that linear TV advertising would be dead by now to his thoughts on gobbledygook and autonomous cars, Dan defends...

Dan, Toby, and Chmiel invite two last-minute guests with competing perspectives about the future of IP and AI. On one side is Craig Elimeliah, Chief Creative Officer at Code and Theory who wrote a provocative LinkedIn post that Eriq Gardner, Founding Partner at Puck (and Dan's brother) called "gobbledygook spit out by a machine." Details of the show: Why Craig thinks Disney's Sora deal represents...

Dan, Toby, and Chmiel break down their 3rd annual Provocations Not Predictions event, where ON_Discourse members submit their most challenging questions for the year ahead. In this episode, they debate whether AI will actually deliver transformative change in 2026 or if we're stuck automating yesterday's workflows with tomorrow's tools. Details in the show: Why provocations force harder thinking t...

We are broadcasting Toby’s panel at Web Summit in Lisbon, featuring Dan and Don McGuire, CMO of Qualcomm. Don and Dan think the future of marketing is "human-led, technology-powered.” Behind that concept is a new org-chart, workflow, and a concept called PTSB - permission to sh*t the bed. It sounds a lot different than automation… Details in the show: The problem with the traditional compartmental...

Dan, Toby, and Matthew announce the launch of new company and product called (domain) - a collaboration platform that connects your work to your network. It is built on the thesis that the future of work isn't about AI giving you answers, it's about AI helping humans collaborate better. In this episode they break down why they think we're on the edge of a collaboration revolution. Details in the s...

Everyone agrees customer experience matters. Everyone agrees AI will transform business. So why is almost nobody actually doing anything about it? Dan and Matthew dig into new research showing that 93% of C-suite leaders say their digital CX needs improvement - even though they know it drives revenue. The problem isn't technology as much as it is imagination. While companies chase efficiency gains...

ChatGPT and Claude are going direct to consumers with nostalgic commercials and friendly interfaces, but underneath the marketing is a fundamental shift in how we interact with technology. Dan, Toby, and Matthew dig into what happens when AI systems become the primary interface for everything - and whether these platforms will be truly open or just feel open while quietly controlling distribution,...

AI is making predictions cheaper, faster, and easier at scale. But forecasting is still guessing, and NYU Stern Professor Jamyn Edis argues that what AI can't replace is human judgment. In this conversation, we dig into why defining "intelligence" matters, how business actually works versus how we pretend it works, and what happens when we confuse prediction with decision-making. Details in the Sh...

ChatGPT just released Sora 2, a tool that lets you create videos starring your own digital avatar. Add that to last week's Pulse, and suddenly we're not just consuming content, we're becoming it. But who actually asked for this? And what happens when synthetic content floods the same feeds we're already exhausted by? Details in the Show: * The cameo feature and personalized synthetic content * Whe...

ChatGPT recently launched Pulse, a feature that reads everything you do, repackages your work back to you, as if you are the subject of a daily newsroom. It's like taking notes that talk back, or having someone present your own thoughts better than you could. Is this useful or just another feed we'll forget about in three weeks. Details in the Show: * Behavior-driven media vs algorithmic targeting...

The AI revolution promised to transform everything. Instead, we got chatbots that sound smart but deliver work that looks like a duck, walks like a duck, but turns out to be a goose. This episode digs into why the agentic AI hype hasn't delivered transformative experiences, and what's really holding back the next phase of human-computer interaction. Details in the Show: Why "not everything needs t...