EP 257 What My 30-Episode Sprint Is Teaching Me About AI, Energy, and Experimenting in Public
Release Date: 12/10/2025
EP281 Your Team's Nervous System Is Infrastructure - Sira Laurel on Load-Bearing Trust
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
Most of the leaders Sira Laurel works with look like they're winning. Inside, they're exhausted. Sira is an executive coach and facilitator who works on leadership, organizational design, cognitive load, trust and nervous system capacity. She has watched organizations get very good at making work faster while getting worse at deciding what the speed is for. AI raises the stakes on that question. Her starting point is that capacity covers far more than time. It includes attention, decision-making, emotional bandwidth and creative energy. A tool can hand back hours on the calendar while draining...
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EP280 Faster Than a Generation - Ian Alden Russell on Change That Outruns Us
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
This episode skips the tools, the prompts, and the latest model release. It goes somewhere more philosophical. started out as an archaeologist and anthropologist. He was the kid who loved museums and Indiana Jones. Since then he has worked across history, contemporary art and culture in Dublin, Istanbul, Beijing, Hong Kong, Pittsburgh and Doha. Now he works as a strategist helping organizations make sense of complexity and line up around change. His starting point is that change itself is old news. Humanity has absorbed huge technological shifts again and again. The new part is the speed....
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EP279 How higher ed moves from AI interest to governed use with James Hutson
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
A previous president from Lindenwood University (a former IBM executive) stands up in town halls and tells people he uses Claude - that it helped him organize the financial report. HR follows and says they used Gemini for an employee questionnaire. Then James Hutson PhD. goes and asks employees whether they understood that as permission. The answer? 'No. The policy says I'll get fired if I use it.' That gap is the subject of this episode. James is Senior Professor and Director of AI-Enabled Academic Transformation at Lindenwood University, with two PhDs - the first in art history, the second...
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EP278 AI Governance in Higher Ed with Dr. Eugene Chan
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
Most organizations govern AI the same way cities govern speeding. They set a rule, then punish people who break it. Dr. Eugene Chan thinks that's the least interesting tool available. He's a behavioural scientist - founder of the consultancy Behavieural and Professor of Business at Tyndale University - and his argument is that punishment is a lagging response to a problem you could have designed out. His analogy is a speed camera versus a speed bump. Both reduce speeding. The camera does it by fining you after the fact, and it needs maintenance forever. The speed bump does it by making the...
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EP277 Is AI Going to Take the Gift of Failure Away? asks Julie Cole
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
Episode description Julie Cole and her co-founders started Mabel's Labels in a Hamilton basement 23 years ago, back when customers were still nervous about typing a credit card number into a computer. They figured out early that they weren't really running a label company - they were running a tech company that happened to make labels. Nothing off the shelf did what they needed, so they built it themselves. Which is why her read on this moment carries some weight. She's watched every technology wave since. She's not a skeptic and she's not a cheerleader. She uses AI, has a clear personal rule...
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EP276 Your AI Strategy Is a Hammer. Where's the Nail? - with David Cohen
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
"We need AI" is the most common brief in business right now. David Cohen's read on what it means: usually nothing in particular. David is the founder of Superposition, a consultancy for data and AI consultancies - a meta consultancy, as he calls it. He's spent his career inside both big and boutique consulting shops, which makes him refreshingly blunt about what's actually happening in the services world right now. His diagnosis is that we're still in the solution-in-search-of-a-problem stage. Everybody's curious. Everybody's excited. There's enormous movement, enormous hype, and very few real...
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EP 275 "Do I Trust Myself?" Grace Gravestock on the Real Reason AI Adoption Stalls
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
Episode description Everyone's arguing about whether AI can be trusted. Almost nobody's asking the harder question underneath it. Grace Gravestock has spent more than twenty years leading change management on some of the highest-profile technology projects around - including the team that set the stage for the $67B Dell EMC integration. Her verdict on why AI pilots stall is unsentimental: it's the same reason ERP stalled, and CRM before that. People aren't using the technology the way it was intended. You can have the best tools in the world, and if people don't use them, it doesn't matter....
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EP 274 The Human OS - AI Adoption With Curiosity, Safety, and Monday Ease ft. Melissa Penton
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
In the final episode of the Podcast-to-Book series, host sits down with change leader and AI education lead (Sun Life) for a human-first conversation about what actually makes AI adoption work. They talk productivity vs room-for-life, why one-prompt culture is snake oil, the shift from prompt engineering to context engineering, and the simplest enterprise question that changes everything: “What would make Monday easier for employees?” Episode summary Susan closes out the Podcast-to-Book sprint with a conversation that feels like the point of the whole series: AI isn’t a tool problem....
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273 - Future-proofing your organization through continuing AI literacy
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
Most companies do a few AI trainings, run some pilots, and then stall. In this episode, host argues the only real future-proofing strategy is continuous AI literacy. She breaks down what “continuous literacy” actually includes (skill, judgment, workflow, norms), the predictable failure modes of the AI literacy divide, and a simple flywheel you can run monthly so capability keeps compounding. Episode summary Susan opens with a familiar pattern: a burst of AI excitement, a deck called “AI Strategy 2025” a few clever workflows… and then reality hits. Tools change. Policies shift....
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EP 272 - Mindset, Sales, and AI That Actually Helps with Gazzy Amin
AI Literacy for Entrepreneurs
Host sits down with sales strategist , founder of Sales Beyond Scripts, to talk about the real ways AI is changing revenue, planning, and scale. They cover AI as a thinking partner, how to use it across departments in a small business, why audits matter more than hype, and how mindset quietly determines whether you treat AI as a threat or an advantage. Episode summary This episode is part of Susan’s 30-episodes-in-30-days “podcast to book” sprint for Swan Dive Backwards. Susan and Gazzy zoom in on the selling process first. Then they zoom out to the whole business. They talk about three...
info_outlineMidway through a 30-episodes-in-30-days podcast-to-book sprint, host Susan Diaz gets honest about what’s working, what’s hard, and how she’s actually using AI as a thinking partner, draft machine, pattern spotter, and quiet project manager - plus what leaders can learn from this for their own AI experiments.
Episode summary
This solo episode is a behind-the-scenes check-in from Susan’s “completely unhinged” (her words) experiment to record 30 episodes in 30 days as the raw material for her next book.
Nine episodes into twelve days, she talks candidly about fatigue, capacity, and why she refused to skip this recording even though she could have. She pulls back the curtain on the very practical ways she’s using AI to structure ideas, draft assets, spot patterns across episodes, and manage the subtle project/energy load of a sprint like this.
Then she zooms out to translate those lessons for founders and teams: why consistency beats intensity, why experiments are allowed to be small and honest, and why capacity has to be part of your AI strategy instead of an afterthought.
Key takeaways
This sprint is a live experiment in sustainability, not heroics. The goal isn’t to “win” 30 episodes perfectly, it’s to see what pace, support, and structure actually make ambitious AI-powered work sustainable for a real human.
AI is a thinking partner first. Susan uses voice input in her LLM to dump messy thoughts, then asks it to shape them into outlines, angles, and talking points so she’s never facing a blank page. (Pro tip: the built-in mic usually cuts off around five minutes - annoying but survivable.)
Drafting support is where AI shines next. From show notes to extra research points to contextualising guest insights, custom GPTs help expand and refine ideas so she can focus on judgement and voice instead of first drafts.
Pattern spotting turns episodes into chapters. By feeding multiple conversations into AI and asking for common threads or how ideas map to her core pillars, she can see where book chapters naturally want to live - and build something far more cohesive than her first, fully manual book.
AI also helps with energy management. It quietly supports the admin around the sprint: drafting guest emails, summarizing notes, organizing ideas, and helping her see where there’s too much on the go so she can re-plan.
For organizations, three big lessons emerge:
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Consistency beats intensity - small, steady steps with AI are better than unsustainable bursts.
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Experiments can be small and honest - you don’t need a centre of excellence to start. A one-hour training or a tiny workflow tweak counts.
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Capacity is strategy - pretending people have unlimited time and energy guarantees failure. Designing AI work around real capacity gives it a chance to stick.
Good AI literacy lowers the cost of entry and raises the quality of thinking. Used well, AI doesn’t replace your brain, it gives your best ideas a better chance of making it out of your head and into the world.
Episode highlights
[00:02] Setting the scene: a 30-episode sprint at the end of 2025 to get the book out of her head.
[01:43] Nine episodes in twelve days, fatigue, and choosing to show up anyway.
[03:21] Why the sprint mirrors how leaders feel about AI: “We know it matters… but keeping the pace is hard.”
[05:02] Using AI as a structure-building thinking partner via voice dumps and outlines.
[05:30] The five-minute mic limit, word-vomit sessions, and how AI turns fuzz into flows.
[07:02] Drafting support: research, context around guests, and custom GPTs for show assets.
[07:44] Pattern spotting across episodes to find the book’s real chapters and through-lines.
[09:18] Why this AI-supported book will be “twice, thrice, ten times” better than the first one.
[10:24] Energy and project management: emails, reflections, and organising all the moving pieces.
[11:46] Lesson 1 – consistency over intensity for teams experimenting with AI.
[13:29] Lesson 2 – small, honest experiments beat grand, delayed programs.
[13:59] Lesson 3 – capacity as a core part of AI strategy, not a footnote.
[15:01] Gentle prompts for listeners: where you’re already experimenting, where AI can remove friction, and who your inside champions are.
Use this episode as a mirror, not a mandate.
Ask yourself and your team:
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Where are we already experimenting with AI, even in tiny ways?
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How could AI remove friction from that work instead of adding pressure?
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Who are our quiet inside champions - and what support or validation could we offer them this week?
Answer even one of those honestly, and you’re already moving from vague AI interest to real AI literacy.
Connect with Susan Diaz on LinkedIn to get a conversation started.
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