Are Our Digital Twins Ourselves?

Cory Corrine:
Natalie Monbiot is one of the clearest and most visionary voices working in AI today. She's a strategist, technologist, and pioneer in the so-called virtual human economy. A term she's helped define through years of building at the forefront of media, digital identity, and intelligent agents. She's worked across advertising and AI innovation, including Universal McCann, where she led the digital practice. And at Hour One, one of the earliest avatar startups.
Natalie's now advising companies and individuals on how to build custom AI twins. Digital counterparts that can represent, extend, and even evolve a person's knowledge and presence across platforms. I first met Natalie about a decade ago and have long been a fan of her work and approach. She has a rare ability to move in step with the most advanced technologies while staying rooted in the human story behind them. In this conversation, we get into what that actually means. What is an AI twin? What is it replicating? Who gets to build one? And what does it enable that we couldn't do before?
Natalie argues that our AI twins can become not just replicas of how we look or sound, but amplifiers of how we think. For most of us, the greatest value isn't in our appearance, it's in our body of work, our ideas, our knowledge. What gets unlocked when you train an AI agent, not just on your face or voice, but on your way of thinking? We also talk about something that's already happening. The rise of what Natalie calls micro global corporations. Small teams, sometimes just individuals, equipped with AI agents who act as full stack extensions of their founders. We explore whether our digital twins are in fact ourselves, along with the micro global companies we're going to build with them.
This isn't science fiction. Natalie has already built these tools for major executives. Like a healthcare CEO who wanted to personally onboard 2,500 new employees. And Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, who now speaks with his own AI twin trained on his books, voice, and mannerisms. It's not just about cloning someone's communication, it's about scaling a kind of presence, a philosophy, a mission. Or so we say. What grounds Natalie's thinking and what drew me to this conversation is her insistence that AI must be human centered. That its greatest potential lies not in replacing us, but in recentering us. In her words, "AI should unlock human ingenuity. It should free us to become more fully ourselves." So, that's where we begin. Let's talk to Natalie. Natalie Monbiot.

Natalie Monbiot:
Cory.

Cory Corrine:
Welcome to The Intersect.

Natalie Monbiot:
Thank you so much.

Cory Corrine:
Happy to see you again.

Natalie Monbiot:
Me too.

Cory Corrine:
Yeah. You are a pioneer in the emerging field of AI twins and virtual humans. Your mission, which is, and this is my own summary, to ensure humans remain central as AI advances. Given that mission, I'd love to tack through, and throughout our conversation to pick at what remaining central actually means. Because that's the question I'm struggling with a little bit. I have long had admiration for you, watching you from afar over the years. You've done a lot of very thoughtful and very interesting disruptive thinking in digital brand and ad strategy. Anyway, because of your background, you're very real bona fides in this. To get into the philosophy of what's happening is why I wanted to really talk to you. And really what you believe, what you think, how you are thinking about an AI twin is every professional's partner.
So, what really, really did get me excited to talk is that when we had our pre convo you had these real business cases. You've actually done this. This isn't theoretical. And really on the show I want to talk to the people that are doing... You have real insight out of this. We've never done this before. This is new. So, okay, you say virtual humans catalyze a new wave of entrepreneurship and creative expression. Or I'm summarizing, you said something like that. Just as YouTube and social media let individuals become content creators, this next phase could let anyone create a digital workforce of their AI selves and benefit economically, make a living, make a business.
So, today I really want to explore that and how your work with AI twins is, one, amplifying human creativity, and honestly moving leadership through technology, continuing to enable leadership through technology. How I see it. So, let's start by defining what this virtual human economy is. So, you've said everyone with a LinkedIn profile should have an AI twin. Your headshots will be your agent, which is like, whoa, okay. It feels like a very natural progression and a smart use case. But what does all of this mean? So, let's just start with what is it? What is this thing that I'm talking about, these AI twins as virtual human economy?

Natalie Monbiot:
Absolutely. So, an AI twin is a replica of a real human being. And this can be a visual replica, it can manifest itself in lots of ways. It can be a replica of your voice, it can be how you look. But what interests me the most these days is how you think and your body of knowledge. For a few people, they trade on how they look. Right? And so, if you're a Hollywood star your AI replica has value. But actually for most people how they look isn't where their greatest value is stored. For many people it is in their work. In their body of work, in their knowledge, in their wisdom.
And so, what I'm especially interested in these days, because I started in the avatar space, I co-founded one of the early AI avatar companies back in 2019. And what really fascinated me then, the most fascinating thing to me about the company and how we built the company was that behind every AI avatar was a real human being that was making a passive income from the appearances of their avatar. Right? So, their avatar would be teaching German, a language that you might not speak, and part of a large language learning project while you were asleep, or studying, or working in some other capacity, or having fun. And so, that little kernel of this idea that you could create an AI twin and put it to work on your behalf has really become the foundation of what I call the virtual human economy. Which is this world in which we can have these AI replicas of ourselves work on our behalf.

Cory Corrine:
Is that what you call it? Is that your preferred, AI replica, is that the right official... Yeah.

Natalie Monbiot:
Do you know what? We've been playing around with these terms. There's no fixed nomenclature. I can tell you how I've arrived at AI twin. Actually, I think that's probably my preferred language, though AI replica is a sort of descriptive way. Right? Basically using language to help people get a sense of what we're talking about. Replica is helpful in the sense that people can start to imagine what an AI twin looks and feels like. But I think it falls short because it's not designed to just replicate you. Okay? It's not just designed to scale you, but it's designed to do more for you. The things that you couldn't do, places you couldn't be.

Cory Corrine:
Additive. To be additive.

Natalie Monbiot:
Yeah. Languages you don't speak. I think it gets really exciting when your AI twin can actually have skills that you don't possess in real life. Right? So, if we actually combine you, your knowledge, your expertise, your personal brand, your persona, what people know and value about you, and enrich that with the unique properties of AI. Right? So, what can AI do? AI can translate anything. AI has access to all the world's knowledge. So, what can we do when we combine ourselves, as we want to define ourselves, with the properties of AI to create extensions of ourselves that are truly useful?
But quite honestly, all of that is really a means to re-empowering human beings in their human bodies and their human selves. And back then, and through those years, I was always fascinated by how emerging technologies, and especially AI, and especially a special brand of AI, human-centered AI, I was obsessed with emotion AI, which is teaching computers how to recognize emotion and respond accordingly. Or swarm AI, which was the ability for real human brains to come together to augment decision making in the way that bees come together to augment their decision making. But of course, a bee's brain, individual brain, is not capable of doing anything on its own. A human's is. But if you applied the frameworks from nature to human brains, what can you unlock for humans? Right? So, I've always been really interested in all of that. And then in early 2019 I broke away from the agency world. I was like... I was a disruptor.

Cory Corrine:
I want to unpack that. What empowering humans to be more human, or this idea that we can now focus on more meaningful work. What is that meaningful work? I imagine if you're going to your, and I'm just jumping ahead, but if you're AI twin, unless you are bringing the tooling, something uniquely you, what is it then replicating I suppose? So, I suppose I inherently believe your digital twin is an enhancement off of you in some way. It couldn't just be... It has to be programmed in some way with what is uniquely you. It gets me in circles in my brain. But you got into... So, you joined in 2019 this startup that was doing this, or that attempted to do this.
Tell me how you've moved it forward. And did you join that company because they were on a mission toward that? How did you come to this idea that everybody, I mean, you say it so succinctly, everyone that has a LinkedIn, that will be their agent. It seems kind of obvious, and I think we're accelerating there quickly, but what got you into this path or this idea? I'm really curious. Yeah.

Natalie Monbiot:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, when we met way back when, and I think I was leading the digital practice at an agency, Universal McCann. And I'd done as much disrupting, I think, as was palatable at the time.

Cory Corrine:
You disrupted. You disrupted.

Natalie Monbiot:
Done.

Cory Corrine:
Yeah. Yeah.

Natalie Monbiot:
So, I left thinking, right, well, I'm going to just do something different. And I almost immediately stumbled across this very, very early stage startup. And at that point the founder had worked out how to replicate a real person, the image of a real person in video. And replicate that image, that moving image in video, and create endless amounts of video without having to use a camera.

Cory Corrine:
You've said something where it's just 30 seconds of tape, or 30 seconds can create. I had not thought about it that way, and I am a content person. But, yeah, talk to me about... Was that happening at this company?

Natalie Monbiot:
Yeah. So, this was the very beginning of what was then called synthetic media and has now evolved in terms of terminology to generative media. Right? As a subset of generative AI. But this was one of the earliest examples of AI being used for this purpose. Which was to basically replace cameras with code. Right? So, think about what you do with a camera when you're capturing footage. You don't need that anymore. You don't need any of that apparatus actually that comes with that camera. The crew being synchronously together on site and all the work, costs of doing that. Right? So, it's not to say that that wouldn't continue to happen, but now video creation was suddenly open to so many more people just sitting at their desktops. And so, that was a real unlock for me. It's like, wow, we can now scale and unlock creativity through AI video in new ways.
So, what made me jump onto that is I came from the world of media and advertising and we were always thinking about how do we personalize content? How do we unlock the capacity of personalization and the promise of personalization? It was like, oh, my goodness, it's sitting right here. It took many years for it to arrive at advertising and marketing for a number of different reasons. The economics of the space, just readiness in all sorts of ways. But that's what got me into it. But it was really also the fact that it was human centered AI. Right? There was a human behind each of these avatars. So, we had about a few hundred avatars that you could select off the platform, off the shelf avatars. And each one of those had a real consenting human behind it that was compensated when their likeness was used in all of these projects.
And to me, that was the definition of human centered AI. And it gave me a vision for how humans could participate in this rich future of AI. That humans wouldn't be sidelined. It's like, wait a minute, if we center AI around humans, quite literally, if we are the source of the AI and the beneficiaries of that AI, then that is really exciting. So, since 2019 been super inspired around that concept. And now, as of the last year, I've been really focused on being an advisor in this space and creating custom AI twins. Which, look, they morph into different modalities according to the need state. They're not always avatars. Sometimes they're a persona in your Slack channel if that's how you tend to engage with co-workers or in the course of your day. Or it could be a WhatsApp chat.
One project I'm working on is with a healthcare CEO who wants to be able to communicate on a one-to-one basis with his thousands of employees. And has just acquired another company of 2,500 employees and wants to be able to personally welcome and onboard each of these people. And communicate the playbook of the company and the culture of the company. And it starts with chat. It's going to move to voice. On the commute to work, call the CEO, ask me anything. And he's got things like, in the first 90 days you better be asking all the questions. Because if you ask that question a year in people will think you are dumb. Stuff like that.

Cory Corrine:
Stuff like that.

Natalie Monbiot:
Stuff that's very real and useful, but also part of the flavor and the personality of the CEO and the company. So, I'm really into focusing on how can AI twins enable humans flourishing in different contexts. So, in this case, with this healthcare CEO, it's enabling him to communicate on a one-to-one basis with the real people in the organization, and to give those individuals a head start so that they can maximize their chances of flourishing in that organization.

Cory Corrine:
This healthcare CEO example I think is just so interesting. I mean, healthcare, whatever sector the CEO is in. But I'm thinking about my own CEO leadership roles and this... Companies are built off of ideas. People have the ideas, there's a founder energy, hey, why do you want to come work in my company? Because I'm talking to you about my idea, you're excited, you want people to buy in. But then scaling that. Founders have this problem... The first 100 employees, I mean, you know this, you do this for a living, but they get it. They're around, they can hear the ideas, they talk it through. But as you scale you lose that. And the founder, if only they can understand my ideas and the vision, and if I could just scale my brilliance. But really it's scaling your thought leadership and the why of the company, and you don't want to lose that juice.
That is very important. Can an AI do that? As a leader I've spent a lot of time... Honestly, my leadership style is communication. It's through communicating. And I'm just constantly thinking about what am I saying? Where am I saying it? And repeating repeat... Because you want to get everybody on the same story, because you have to believe the same story to work together.
I was so taken by what you're doing because of this notion of I'm not just building an AI for productivity on the line, but in the executive layer where... I mean, well, do we need all these executives? I think we know the answer to that. So, how many do you really need? But if you can actually replicate the jouz of the company and get people to be on board with that and connect with it, I think that's a very powerful thing. And you probably still don't need as many employees as you used to, so you're not scaling yourself to that many. I just believe that to be a very, very powerful... And I would say, don't sleep on that idea. Don't sleep on the power of that idea. Am I getting it right what the CEO is trying to do?

Natalie Monbiot:
Yeah. I would say... Okay. So, like you, his whole MO is communication. And boy does he have a playbook. And boy does he have a huge personality. And he has so many projects and just so much vision. Right? And so, the first thing is, I don't think it's really designed to communicate the jouz, or take the place of that. Right? He is the jouz. So, it frees him to commit to that more freely. Right? And so, it's almost his AI twin can plant the seeds. Right? And create a base layer and just... Sort of a constant always on means of communication and presence. But I think it's just the foundations. Right? So, he's offloaded work to his AI twin. He's offloaded work and the twin is doing stuff that he couldn't do. And by the way, people are going to be more comfortable asking his twin supposedly stupid questions-

Cory Corrine:
Are they?

Natalie Monbiot:
... than him. Asking him himself.

Cory Corrine:
Are they asking the questions? I'm curious how it's working. Yeah, tell me.

Natalie Monbiot:
Yeah. Sp, it's in early stages right now. But in testing, yes, that's the idea. It's basically ask some basic questions. The twin will prompt. These are the types of things you can ask me. It's your first 90 days, here are some things you should be thinking about. What questions do you have for me? And where this is going to go is that the twin will employ computer vision to be able to review stuff and provide feedback on emails, on meetings that are going to be set up, get input from the CEO essentially-

Cory Corrine:
Whoa, whoa.

Natalie Monbiot:
And there are certain things like never, ever show up to a meeting without being prepared. That is just very clear in just working with him. Right? And so, for him to be able to communicate that to everybody, but also in a really constructive way, like this is how you prepare for a meeting. Okay, so this is your meeting prep. Okay, here's some feedback on it. So, that's where this idea of it becomes more agentic as we go along, in baby steps. Right? So, the other thing about it, that the CEO could not do himself, is to collect a lot of data on the company. Get a pulse of the company.

Cory Corrine:
It's the old, I need you to do an employee survey. And HR is like, we did one of those.

Natalie Monbiot:
Right.

Cory Corrine:
So, this is a very different... I'm talking to the people all the time.

Natalie Monbiot:
Yeah, exactly. It's this always on more natural interface. And I guess that's the thing about these AI twins, in their various guises. The idea is that it is a more natural interface. And it's natural to the environment. So, if it's in Slack, it's just another persona in the Slack. And by the way, he's explicitly his AI twin. Right? I think that's really important.

Cory Corrine:
No one is confused. Everyone knows.

Natalie Monbiot:
No one is confused. No one is confused.

Cory Corrine:
Okay. Okay.

Natalie Monbiot:
Yeah. And I think research has shown, just more generally, people are more comfortable sharing stuff with a non-human entity. Right? They don't feel like they're getting judged in the same way. So, of course you need to be explicit with employees that if that data is going to be used for feedback, et cetera, how that data is going to be used if it is going to be used. And so, all of these things just need to be really transparent. Because at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is create a positive culture. And the bedrock of any positive culture or business is trust. So, everything needs to be a trust... Every aspect of this needs to be trust building.

Cory Corrine:
Because otherwise it's just a joke. I have more questions about this. But you also built one of these for Reid Hoffman.

Natalie Monbiot:
Mm-hmm. Yes.

Cory Corrine:
I mean, famously, he of LinkedIn, the co-founder of LinkedIn, but also he's such a thought leader in the AI space. I was listening to his podcast over the weekend. How did that... And how long ago was that? And also, I'm interested in any lessons learned. Has anything gone wrong? Talk to me about something, maybe it's gone right, gone wrong. I don't know.

Natalie Monbiot:
Yeah. So, the project with Reid probably started about 18 months ago. And what's really great about how he has approached his avatar is that he's really using it as a vehicle with purpose. Right? So, his avatar is designed to be his thought partner. Okay? It's trained on all of his books. It's trained on all of his talks. And it's also trained on his mannerisms. So, that by the way is one of the breakthroughs in the avatar space is how realistic his mannerisms are. It's actually pretty funny. After the original Reid AI came out there was just a lot of press around it. And there was this one article that was basically a forensic analysis of how real he was. And they took a screenshot of what looked like him flicking a booger across his desk. That might've been a slight over extrapolation.

Cory Corrine:
But did it look real?

Natalie Monbiot:
Yeah. It looked real. It looked real.

Cory Corrine:
Okay.

Natalie Monbiot:
And by the way, not everything is purely AI generated. Right? So, some of it is art. So, it's in the shoot. So, as you alluded to earlier, there is a shoot. When you create an avatar there is a shoot. Right? So, you're capturing that person. And you're capturing certain mannerisms and expressions. And some things are captured and they remain video. Right? So, they're built into the loop of the avatar. So, yes, there's definitely art that goes into it. And actually, Reid was so successful because he also has an incredible video team. Right? That's doing artful video editing. Right? Without artful video editing nothing is nearly as good or compelling to watch. Right?
So, it's a real combination of different things. And so, I think the reason that it works so well is that he gave his twin purpose, as this thought partner to explore this topic of AI. Right? Can AI... And I also love his angle. Right? So, can AI enable human flourishing? That's basically his talk track. Right? That's his mission to uncover. And so, what was brilliant about what he did is, so he had gave it purpose, it was trained on this purpose. Right? So, making sure that his twin was trained on the right kind of data. And he used it in a way that was novel. Right? So, think back to when newspapers went online. It was literally like-

Cory Corrine:
I remember.

Natalie Monbiot:
Yes.

Cory Corrine:
They didn't really care, but I was like, "We're online."

Natalie Monbiot:
Right. And also, it was just slapping the front page onto the home page.

Cory Corrine:
We updated it once in the morning. I updated it at 6:00 AM with the newspaper, it hit my door, and then I made up the homepage.

Natalie Monbiot:
From the horse's mouth. There you go.

Cory Corrine:
We didn't update it until the next day.

Natalie Monbiot:
Right, exactly. It wasn't clickable or anything, it was just there on the screen. Right?

Cory Corrine:
Just on the screen.

Natalie Monbiot:
And I think up until Reid, that's what avatars were. They were just slapped on a screen. Right? Without any thought to the fact that it is natively AI. So, what can we now do with this? Right? And so, Reid and his team had this brilliant idea to be able to be in conversation with... Him to be in conversation with his AI twin and to have this-

Cory Corrine:
Right. He famously interviewed his AI twin.

Natalie Monbiot:
Yeah.

Cory Corrine:
Right. Okay.

Natalie Monbiot:
That's a new format. Right? You could never have interviewed yourself.

Cory Corrine:
Who would have thought about that?

Natalie Monbiot:
You could never have done that before. Right? So, what does, and this is what I throughout my career have been obsessed with is, what does emerging technology unlock that's great, that wasn't possible before? And how do we play to those native properties? So, I think that really captured people's imagination. Right? And also, it captured the debate. He's not preaching to people, he's exploring stuff. And he's also played with de-aging his twin. He sent his twin back. Then he had a conversation with his twin as the founder, early days of founding LinkedIn.

Cory Corrine:
Oh, wow.

Natalie Monbiot:
Right. And so, then you can start playing with these things and create new conversations that spark a lot of inspiration. And then there was a huge number of questions that came his way.

Cory Corrine:
Like the nature of time. Like what...

Natalie Monbiot:
Right.

Cory Corrine:
Okay.

Natalie Monbiot:
Right. It's just a new way-

Cory Corrine:
But is he doing his live chats? Is he still doing these, are these active things now?

Natalie Monbiot:
Yeah, Reid AI is still active. Okay, so back to what didn't work.

Cory Corrine:
Yes, tell me. Right, go.

Natalie Monbiot:
So, actually everything with Reid worked, but we got so many requests from other CEOs wanting their version of Reid AI.

Cory Corrine:
They want-

Natalie Monbiot:
They just wanted that.

Cory Corrine:
It totally makes sense to me. [inaudible 00:27:03].

Natalie Monbiot:
They just wanted that. And I was like... Unfortunately, we ended up disappointing quite a few of them. Because it isn't just about the AI avatar. Right? It's not just like, oh, let me just recreate you using AI. I mean, you've got to breathe life into it. What is the purpose of this thing? How is it going to... It still needs to capture human's imagination.

Cory Corrine:
Well, that is my first question. It's like, what are you programming it with then? Right? So, all these CEOs were just like, hey, I want to be able to do a chat with my digital twin that.

Natalie Monbiot:
I just want that. That was really cool, I want that. And also, as I mentioned, Reid AI is created by an artful team with brilliant video editing. It wasn't purely a live conversation that was just taped. It was a conversation that was then edited, and the timing was optimized, and it felt really great. In the end it was was a brilliant piece of production, but using AI and its native properties in a way to deliver something completely new. So, a lot of people just thought, oh, I'll get an avatar and I'll have that. Do you see what I mean? It goes back to-

Cory Corrine:
I'm going to have a podcast now because I have an AI twin to talk to.

Natalie Monbiot:
Right.

Cory Corrine:
This is not right.

Natalie Monbiot:
I've got a podcast, why isn't it really popular?

Cory Corrine:
Right. Right.

Natalie Monbiot:
Do you know what I mean?

Cory Corrine:
Yes. Yes.

Natalie Monbiot:
What's it for? Why is it different? What's it going to make people feel? Right? All of these same rules apply.

Cory Corrine:
It's just a format. It's just a tool. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Natalie Monbiot:
It's just a format. So, this is when I talk about AI unlocking human ingenuity. By the way, it definitely does not do that automatically. In fact, if you don't think about-

Cory Corrine:
Probably does the opposite.

Natalie Monbiot:
... how to use it... Exactly. If you don't think actively how am I going to use AI to unlock my ingenuity, then it's probably going to have the opposite effect. There are many studies out there which are shocking but not surprising, that when workers use LLMs, large language models, like ChatGPT and Claude, and they use them extensively, they actually become cognitively dumber.

Cory Corrine:
You have access to all the world's knowledge. It feels like as a starting point it's going to level us all up in some way. But you're not using your own cognitive function in the same way. I mean, we went to school and we sat in classrooms and wrote memorization. Which as a kid I was always like, "Is this helping me? Am I a good memorizer?" I was actually very existential about that. You have an example of someone who's doing this in education. I don't want to jump us around, but it strikes me here that that's very salient. And if we are... Are we getting dumber? No, we have to do something different here. Right?

Natalie Monbiot:
Mm-hmm.

Cory Corrine:
Right. Okay.

Natalie Monbiot:
So, the stakes are very high with AI and humans. Right? So, I think it does have the potential to unlock human ingenuity if we do it very intentionally. Right? So, I've got AI doing things for me that I ordinarily had to do myself, and now I'm just going to sit back and just let it do all the work. Right? That's one approach. Another one is, oh, my goodness, because of these AI tools I can run 10 experiments at the same time. And with that data I can conjure up new ideas. Right? So, that is the difference in those two outcomes. Right? So, I think it takes a certain type of person, first of all. A certain kind of mindset to want to do that. And I think we need to do the second thing. And I think we need to educate people, and particularly the stakes couldn't be higher in schools, to approach AI with that mindset.

Cory Corrine:
That these are tools. You need to employ these tools. I keep saying, put the robots to work for you.

Natalie Monbiot:
First of all, AI in schools is generally something that is very concerning. Okay? So, I actually recently spoke at South by Southwest EDU, and had the opportunity to speak to all kinds of teachers and educators. And I heard some pretty interesting stories. One story is a teacher who, in the effort to not have her students cheat or just have ChatGPT write their entire essay, had all the students write their essays in class. Okay?

Cory Corrine:
Long form?

Natalie Monbiot:
Long form. Long form.

Cory Corrine:
Oh. Oh.

Natalie Monbiot:
And gave them structure to give them the confidence to be able to do it. And then for the final write-up they just had to type it up. But what came back in many more than one case was a complete rewrite using ChatGPT. Right? So, people worry about AI and ChatGPT and cheating. Right? It really optimizes for laziness. Right? It can just write this really smart sounding thing and I can be done with it. But this particular example was especially concerning because what it showed was a lack of self-confidence in their own abilities versus AI. Right? They'd already done the work, but then when it came to submitting it they were like, "I don't trust myself. I don't have the confidence in my own abilities."

Cory Corrine:
So, they didn't turn it... They wrote it in class and then they had to refine it and bring it back.

Natalie Monbiot:
Yeah. They had to type it up, it had to be submitted digitally.

Cory Corrine:
[inaudible 00:32:12]. I see.

Natalie Monbiot:
And so, instead of just typing it up they just put the title in ChatGPT and submitted that.

Cory Corrine:
Wow.

Natalie Monbiot:
I think that's extremely concerning. And some of the issues around that are we need to teach kids self-confidence. Right? And we need to teach them self-reliance. Right? And we need to teach them to have an idea of themselves that they're really confident about, and to discover things they're really passionate about and encourage them to do that. So, those are some of the misuses of AI in education.

Cory Corrine:
It's like they're not showing up at all. They're just sinking into a further... Yeah.

Natalie Monbiot:
Yeah.

Cory Corrine:
Okay, that's concerning.

Natalie Monbiot:
And actually, one of the issues around that is also structural around schools. The fact that school is test-based.

Cory Corrine:
Right.

Natalie Monbiot:
So, it's optimizing for the right answer. And you can see why you'd believe that ChatGPT has the right answer. Right? Because it's fed on all the world's data, and all the brain power that's available from all the human beings and all their work that's on the internet. That's got to be better than me, right? Okay, but there is no right or wrong answer with an essay. And so, I think students are trained to believe that there is a right answer. And at the end of the day all that matters is their test score. Because that's all that counts at school. And so, AI is extremely dangerous in that setting and with those benchmarks.

Cory Corrine:
I see. Because AI can just get it right. AI knows the right answer.

Natalie Monbiot:
Yeah.

Cory Corrine:
Ah. Ah. Okay. So, the goal has to be different.

Natalie Monbiot:
Mm-hmm. Yes.

Cory Corrine:
Yeah. Yeah.

Natalie Monbiot:
So, how is AI being used well in schools? School needs to be rewritten in order for AI to have this positive role in education. And I think there is a case for that. So, there's a school called Alpha School, and my development partners that I work on, on all this AI twin work, are the technical team behind this. So, they're absolutely brilliant.

Cory Corrine:
The school has a technical team.

Natalie Monbiot:
Oh, yeah.

Cory Corrine:
I think that's just really interesting.

Natalie Monbiot:
There you go. There you go. Okay, well, let me tell you what it is and you'll see why.

Cory Corrine:
Yeah. Yeah.

Natalie Monbiot:
So, the whole premise is a two-hour learning program at school, in the classroom, but with an AI tutor. Okay? So, that's just two hours of the day, and each child has an individualized learning pathway. Okay, so they're doing math. And one will be doing grade two math, another one will be doing grade four math. And they'll be doing math at their own pace. And their progress will be monitored. And they have transparency into how they're doing. Until they all get into the 97th percentile of performance.
And this use of AI in this highly personalized way gets every kid into that top percentile. And actually, they just had a study that came out recently that proved that they were able to do that and create that shift in just the two hours. Okay? But it's not actually about that. What it's about is the rest of the day, which now can be unlocked and committed to fueling self-confidence, entrepreneurship, hands-on projects, having the drive to do something-

Cory Corrine:
Like how we do life, how we do jobs, how we... Because school, the classroom is not the real world. Wow. I'm making assumptions here, but I want to go to this school. Amazing. How many students are in this program? Is this a beta, or what does it look like?

Natalie Monbiot:
No, I actually know someone... I got introduced to it because I know someone that moved to Austin, which is where it's based, to send their kids to this school. And it's now expanded to different states and it's expanding. And the two-hour learning component that this curriculum is based on is also making its way into some charter schools as well.
So, what I really like about that is that there is this AI curriculum, AI-driven curriculum, that's basically designed to empower every child to perform better, to learn better what needs to be learned. Right? From a technical perspective. Check those boxes and give each child that confidence that they can do that and they can take control of their own learning journey. But then unlock all of that other time for life skills. And the thing is, we just don't know what the future is going to look like. I mean, at any given moment, but certainly not when these kids are actually adults and in the workforce. What does a job look like? And I think being trained or empowered to be self-confident, and just capable, and to believe yourself to be capable, and to be able to make your way, is the best thing that we can be teaching our kids.

Cory Corrine:
I was talking with Katie Drummond, global editorial director of Wired, on the pod, and we were talking about... She's a philosophy undergrad. And she went into journalism. And the upshot is that... The idea that thinking critically, it's more important than ever. And I was just saying that her degree in philosophy has prepared her for this moment in a lot of ways. But I like what you're saying here about this idea of the use of AI and then allowing the human unlock, and us for actually to be more ourselves. I mean, that seems like that gives children an environment to be more human than maybe they've even gotten a chance to be now. Because right now you're just studying your ass off because you got to get the score so you can get da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da.

Natalie Monbiot:
And homework and just... Yeah. So, for me, it's like how can AI unlock human ingenuity in different sectors and pockets and for different demographics? And I think for school, this is a great model. An example of that.

Cory Corrine:
I'm going to throw a question at you which is really... I came across this word as I was doing research here. And AI twins as better, question mark, versions of ourselves. I'm just throwing that out because they can act as these creative amplifiers. And in your own words, virtual versions of ourselves that are our augmented selves, the best we can possibly be. And you really got me thinking about your AI twin could have all of your knowledge plus speak different languages while you're sleeping. I'm like, oh, what a great way to get content in the universe.
But this is what got me. You suggest that your AI twin could be even more expressive on camera than you are. Essentially a better communicator. And I think about just in my own career and what's required to be successful in business in our world is communicating actually. Because you can have great ideas, but what are you doing with them? Do other people know about them? How do you... And many great communicators, what is backing them up? Sometimes it's just they're just great communicators. Do they have good ideas?
But if everyone will have this ability, that's just an interesting thing. Right? Because the folks that maybe haven't been so great at communicating. But just the idea that it could be a better version of something that you're missing, because people are naturally gifted at X and Y, and maybe aren't as great at the other, and then someone else is. And then they come together to form a brilliant team. But if your AI can augment these things that you're not so super at... It's just interesting. But better than you? I don't know. It struck me.

Natalie Monbiot:
Yeah. No, I think the best way to think of that... I think maybe where that came from is... So, the AI avatar startup that I was part of for many years is an Israeli startup. And many in the company spoke English, but with a very thick accent. And they weren't very comfortable on camera, or even projecting themselves on social media because they just weren't super comfortable with their communication skills.
And so, for people who are shy, or for people that don't like being on camera, having an AI twin can compensate for something that they lack. Self perceived or as perceived by others. So, I think that's where it originally came from. But actually I think where it's going is really interesting. So, a collaborator of mine, a very smart builder of Gemini, so one of the... Google's large language model.

Cory Corrine:
I've heard of it.

Natalie Monbiot:
Right.

Cory Corrine:
It's not bad.

Natalie Monbiot:
It's not bad, right? Especially now. It's beating all the benchmarks. As of the time of this recording.

Cory Corrine:
That's right.

Natalie Monbiot:
Anyway. So, he has ADHD. And he's using, and these are his words, he's using AI as a cognitive prosthetic to help compensate for his ADHD. So, thinking about what you want or could need in terms of compensation, how can AI, that's one way to think about it, how can AI help you up level in those respects? But I think there's little cases like that, but I think the thing that excites me the most is what it unlocks for you as a human being. What it enables you to do that you couldn't or didn't have time to do before. Or because all of this stuff is out there, what is that now leading to? What new ideas, new connections? I'll just give you a very small example from my own life. So, I started writing a blog about six months ago.

Cory Corrine:
Is this your newsletter?

Natalie Monbiot:
Yes. Now on Substack, at natlikethat.

Cory Corrine:
I subscribed.

Natalie Monbiot:
Oh, thank you very much. And so, I started writing this blog about six months ago. And actually, funnily enough, because I knew that AI tools existed I felt like I could commit to writing it. Right? In actual fact, it takes me much longer to write with AI because I feel like it constantly gets things wrong. But actually, in a way it getting it wrong refines what I think. And so, it's almost just having a chisel and chiseling away at what it came up with to actually deliver what you truly mean. So, in that sense, in a sort of roundabout way, it becomes a thought partner.

Cory Corrine:
I agree with that, just in my own writing. I mean, I write for living and I'm very excited about the idea. And I consider myself a not bad writer. I aspire to be a great writer. I don't think AI makes me a better writer it just helps me with my own writing process in that... Because I very much, I still want to write in my own style, my own voice. But it's like having an editor working with me almost. And then I can just... It's a refining partner. It's very different. It's an exercise that I would normally do almost with another human that was very good, that understood the knowledge. So, it's a different form factor of that, but it can compensate in places where... I just think volume. The idea of writing volume.

Natalie Monbiot:
It makes me more prolific. In fact, it made me write. Right? It's like I wasn't writing before. I actually think that if I was just on my own and I wrote something just on my own, it would be better. Right? But I wouldn't be doing anything else.

Cory Corrine:
That's right. That's all you could do.

Natalie Monbiot:
Yeah.

Cory Corrine:
That's right. That's right.

Natalie Monbiot:
Right. And so, I think this is a good way of getting my ideas out, that doesn't necessarily take less time, but feels less lonely. Right?

Cory Corrine:
Ooh, less lonely. That's interesting.

Natalie Monbiot:
Yeah. It's more of an active process versus a lonely process. Which writing can be.

Cory Corrine:
Yeah, I have to go up in a cabin and spend a couple of [inaudible 00:44:19] by myself and it... Yeah, exactly.

Natalie Monbiot:
Yeah.

Cory Corrine:
Exactly.

Natalie Monbiot:
Yeah. And I would say that because I started writing and putting stuff out there on a regular basis, and I put my ideas out there that I've been very excited about for a while, and then... So, it got me more excited about my ideas because that's what happens when you write. But then I met people through my writing who also connected over these ideas.

Cory Corrine:
That are humans. That are real people.

Natalie Monbiot:
That are real people, yes. Like this Gemini engineer. And he recommended some writing to me that has taken me on a completely different tangent and has really expanded my thinking. It made me feel very inspired as a human being. Right? So, I think it's the return to human, and the profit to us, that is the real opportunity.

Cory Corrine:
I think that's right. Yes, I believe that to be right. Will that manifest? Let's see. Our greatest power, or just humanity, is our ability to work together. I'm addicted to building teams and being entrepreneurial because it doesn't have to be my idea, it's somebody else's idea. We have an idea and we love it, and then we get together and we do it. And, oh, my God, how did we do it? You work on something, a project, and then six months later, a year later, you manifest something that you could not have done by yourself. And it started as an idea that did not exist. That's powerful.
And it's actually how we've survived as a species. We've just adapted and we can communicate and work together. What strikes me about AI, the opportunity, if we do not cooperate in this moment and use the tooling to be able to put our brains together to cooperate, we are not going to solve... We will not solve climate change. We will not solve these existential issues. But it could actually enable us to do that, to your... I totally agree with you. So, I'm very, very interested in use cases around the ability to have this tooling allow us to better collaborate for outcomes. I mean, even you're collaborating with yourself for a more powerful outcome of what you could... But just together as teams. So, I want to get to this idea, and I don't know if you coined this, I love it, but micro global corporation concept where, I don't know if anyone can coin that, but just that idea.
I've been thinking a lot about, just in my own... We're launching The Intersect. You don't need as many people as you used to but I'm a full stack executive. We talked about that. Because I have this tooling. These micro global corporations, small empowered teams where AI is effectively the force multiplier, and you cite these trends like organization shrinking because AI enables these micro teams to achieve what large teams used to do. The idea is that a few people, each augmented with their own AI tools or twins, can basically run a global operation. I'm seeing that happen. You must be seeing that happen. I feel like this is just going to light up and keep going. Yeah?

Natalie Monbiot:
I think we're both kind of doing it. Right?

Cory Corrine:
We're both doing it.

Natalie Monbiot:
We're both doing it. And it isn't about, oh, I'm now not working with people. I'm working with people I want to be working with, and we're doing incredible things in a very short time. And all the things that we're doing are extremely human. Like I'm putting on a summit next week. An AI and creativity summit. And basically we've been working on it for about six months and it's just turned into this... Like we're doing a big thing. And there's just very few of us doing it. And that is not because of AI, that is because of our passion and finding people that you want to collaborate with and feeling energized. But the AI tooling is enabling that.

Cory Corrine:
How many people will be at that conference?

Natalie Monbiot:
250.

Cory Corrine:
How many people are working on putting together the conference?

Natalie Monbiot:
About five.

Cory Corrine:
I think back to my days of the Online News Association, which I was very active very early in my career, and it had a board, and then it had all these committees and we had to meet all the time, and a big annual conference. It still goes on. It's a great time. But my own experience of putting on events and what is required, and just the labor, and the logistics, and you can basically pop up an ideas conference for a couple of hundred people with a couple of people.

Natalie Monbiot:
Yeah. I mean, the logistics and all of that are still there. Right?

Cory Corrine:
They're still there.

Natalie Monbiot:
But just think about just coming up with all the blurbs for every single talk on two stages and just managing all of that. Okay, so I wrote one. I love the style of this one. Here are the talking points of the next one, give that to me in the same style. That could have taken me all day. And a lot of summoning up the creativity, but not really creativity it's just summoning up the energy to have to do that.

Cory Corrine:
The AI is never tired. It always has the baseline of energy that you wish you had when you woke... Or you have when you wake up in the morning.

Natalie Monbiot:
Right.

Cory Corrine:
It's always ready.

Natalie Monbiot:
But I think you... To make it good... What are you going to scale? Right? So, to make it good you need to come up with something really good. A really great idea that other people are going to connect with.

Cory Corrine:
Yes.

Natalie Monbiot:
And so, AI enables us to think about that and make those things happen and put them into the world. That's what I think.

Cory Corrine:
Where does your brain go on things like that? Does it worry you?

Natalie Monbiot:
My personal reaction to this era of AI that we're in was to try to double down on myself in terms of who I am as a human. My ability to think and write, my ability to make things happen and come up with ideas. That was my instinct. It was like, there's a lot of just sameness out there. And it's very easy to get diluted. And so, in the era of AI, who are humans? Who are we? That is a question that I've been scratching the surface on for a while in my work, but also I have felt this instinct to be my most human self.

Cory Corrine:
I love that. I love that you're saying that. I also do too, by the way.

Natalie Monbiot:
So, social media, I think we, your audience, we are aware that social media hasn't been great for people. Right?

Cory Corrine:
Teen girls... It's not working.

Natalie Monbiot:
The date is out. There's absolutely-

Cory Corrine:
This hasn't been great. This is not that great.

Natalie Monbiot:
... a known crisis. Right? The anxious generation that Jonathan Haidt has written extensively about. And a lot of what went wrong there is the incentives. Right? So, it's like attention at all costs to feed the algorithms to be able to monetize that social media. I think it is a little concerning that... With AI, which is going to be just a lot more powerful, how are we rethinking the incentives around AI to actually... How can they be rethought to benefit humans? Right?
And so, again, the stakes are extremely high. If we just let it follow its course and just do what social media did, we're going to end up in a really bad place. I think the good thing is people are much more aware right now than they were at the beginning of social media where I think everyone had innocent ideas about how connected everyone was going to feel and all of that.

Cory Corrine:
I think that's fair. There's much more awareness. I think that's fair. The lessons of social media. But the incentives, who are building these incentives? I don't run these tech companies.

Natalie Monbiot:
I just came back from a symposium at the MIT Media Lab. And extremely bright people, but not just bright they're actually doers and builders. And the whole symposium was dedicated to human flourishing in the age of AI. And so, it explored all the things that were concerning. But then also a project that's coming out of this is to set benchmarks for human flourishing. Right? For humanity. It's quite difficult to think about ideas and products that we can build that are good for humans without knowing how to measure that. What we're really good at is knowing how to optimize for users. Right? And so, if we have new benchmarks, new metrics optimized for humanity, then people can start to build within that framework.

Cory Corrine:
So, basically the product managers need to have different goals. The product managers need to build for human flourishing. And we have to establish what those benchmarks are.

Natalie Monbiot:
Or at least bear them both in mind.

Cory Corrine:
Bear them both in mind.

Natalie Monbiot:
Right?

Cory Corrine:
Yeah.

Natalie Monbiot:
And maybe there could be some business model innovation once we know what the human flourishing benchmarks are. Are there ways for corporations to make money by optimizing for human flourishing? I think that's an open question. But some people are going to try. And so, I'm really excited about that. I think that is much needed is actually a framework. KPIs, what can we optimize for? And I think that I am hopeful that work like that, that sets a big frame, can help.

Cory Corrine:
AI is part of the cognitive... This is the cognitive revolution.

Natalie Monbiot:
Yeah. So, basically what does AI represent for humans? Is it just simply a threat to humans, something that we've created, this monster that we've created that it is going to take over and that's it for the human race? But in reading the work of this cognitive scientist, John Vervaeke, not that he talks about this explicitly, but it planted an idea in my mind that actually human beings, as part of who we are, we actually create tools. Right? That is what we do. And then we create these tools and then these tools shape us. Okay?
So, in the same way that language was a construct. It's a tool that we created. And language enabled us to self-reflect. Before language we had no capacity for self-reflection as human beings. So, language shaped our evolution as a species. And then little optimizations in language, like the introduction of vowels in Ancient Greece, led to deeper thinking and spreading of ideas and led to the foundation of democracy. So, what if we applied that framework to AI? We created AI. AI will shape us. But we have an opportunity to co-evolve with AI if we use it right, to take us into the next era of the human race potentially.

Cory Corrine:
I think about this a lot. I really do. I mean, I think about I'm communicating to you right now through these sound waves and these microphones and then they will go out into the world and people will know things, and will share ideas, and... How those ideas and how the tooling shapes us is not reflected necessarily in just... You'd have to read someone like Vervaeke to understand that. Right? And I did a little digging, and you're on him when you've referenced him. But that's generally not how your everyday person thinks about technology. In that we create it, we create tooling, tools or tech, whatever it is, we create it and then it shapes us. And then we create it again and it shapes us. Because we're only living in a specific... But we've seen so much change in our... I think our generations and coming up in this world of constant change, we've just seen it. We've seen these tools actually change us, very much.
My path could have been much different, would've been much different had the tools that I employed not changed and shaped me. And so, it is an open question on what it will do to humanity. Do you think it's Pollyannish to think that we actually have the power? Because there were those that say we actually lost that power. I mean, Trump is president for the second time. These are algorithms that are effectively early AIs that move information around. It's already creating tectonic shifts that we, in fact, feel like we're not in control of. You strike me as someone who, and I respect it so deeply, you are leaned in and optimistic in some way about the possibility for us to continue to shape this and we have not lost. We haven't lost the fight yet, I guess is what I'm saying.

Natalie Monbiot:
AI as a potential partner in our evolution as a species isn't just a rosy story. Not everybody gets to evolve. Right? So, I think there's a path where people collaborate, certain people, collaborate with AI in the right way. And that will create the forces of evolution.

Cory Corrine:
I have a final and fun question for you. I want you to tell me about a piece of content that you've consumed recently. I don't care where it came from. It could be short form, long form. It could be lean back, it could be a show, it doesn't matter. But within the last 28, 48 hours ish, and why it stuck with you. It could have nothing to do with AI. It could have been generated by AI. I just want to talk... What have you consumed and what's sticking?

Natalie Monbiot:
So, I've taken to transcribing, or at least recording events that I'm at. And when I was at the MIT Media Lab I recorded the sessions. So, I have this data that I can refer to. And be able to quote people if I'm inspired by what they said. And actually I'd forgotten that I'd left it on during lunch. And I had this conversation with this Google DeepMind engineer. And I said, just making conversation, "I'm just so glad this is happening, this symposium. Just asking the big question, can humans flourish in the age of AI?" And he said, "Oh, I don't think we know what the questions are yet." I was like, we're just at the beginning, I was like, "Yeah, I agree with that. But the question is how can humans flourish in the age of AI? Right?" He's like, "No. I mean, we optimize users not for humanity."
And that really stuck with me. Not just because I was like, ooh, God, that's so weird and wrong and all these things. I've been sitting with it ever since. Because that is genuinely his reality. But also his reality is that he came to this symposium, stepped out of his comfort zone and his skepticism to hear what the other side, or the people that believe in AI for human flourishing, have to say. So, I really respect him.

Cory Corrine:
Yeah. And I do as well now. And this is now implanted in my mind, and I'm going to be thinking about this piece of content that you captured. Well, I'm very excited to be on this continued journey with you. I feel like if I'm sitting next to you and evolving I'll be all right. So, thank you. Thank you again for this time.
The Intersect is distributed exclusively by our partner, Dear Media. Today's episode was produced by yours truly, Cory Corrine. With technical production led by Chad Peresman, coordination by Haley Duffy, and production assistance by Anna Corrine-Haik. Caitlyn Durkin, an executive producer on the show, oversaw communications. Original show music created by Tom Peele. Thank you to Music For A While and the Alameda Hotel for the use of their beautiful studio space. If you liked our show today, please subscribe right here, wherever you were listening or watching. We'll be back here next week at The Intersect.