I recently sat down with my old friend Dave Duarte for the 42courses podcast. Dave spends his days teaching companies how to actually use AI, and lectures at a few universities too, so he sees what’s happening at both the boardroom end and the lecture-hall end. We hadn’t talked about AI on the podcast for a couple of months, which in AI terms is roughly two decades. There was rather a lot to catch up on. Prefer to listen? It’s also on Spotify. The daily habit that makes me more curious Every morning, a little automation I set up in Claude sends me one story about something I love. Behavioural science, advertising, the odd corners of history. It’s random, and it’s different every day. One morning it told me about Sylvan Goldman, a supermarket owner who put wheels on a shopping basket in 1937 and discovered that nobody wanted to be seen pushing one. Men thought it looked feeble. Women felt they’d pushed quite enough prams already, thank you very much. So Goldman hired people to push full trolleys around his shop until using one looked perfectly normal. I’d never have gone looking for that story. It ended up as a whole Weekday Wisdom. Dave reckons that’s exactly why it sticks. A fact of the day slides straight off you. A story makes you slow down and pay attention, and that’s when your curiosity kicks in. As he put it: “Stories are the original unit of learning and transformation.” Dave Duarte Is AI making us lazy? Dave shared some slightly alarming news. At the universities where he lectures, he’s seeing students’ marks rise on take-home assignments, while their marks in the exam hall fall. Some are even asking why they should bother building skills of their own when AI can do it for them. His answer is that we need to invest in what he calls authentic intelligence alongside the artificial kind. So the useful question is what you point AI at. Point it at your homework and you get better homework and a slightly worse brain. Point it at your curiosity and you start collecting stories from well outside your job, which have a lovely habit of turning up at exactly the right moment in a meeting. Why talking beats typing We’re both big fans of dictating rather than typing. Every time you hunt for a key or go back to fix a typo, you break your train of thought. Talk it out and the idea keeps moving. Dave describes keyboard thinking as rather “percussive”, and I know what he means. My favourite way to crack a tricky brief now is to go for a walk and talk it into Wispr Flow, which tidies my rambling into clean text. That link gets you three months of Wispr Flow Pro for free, by the way. Getting a team to actually have a go Dave’s clients kept booking time for their teams to experiment with AI. The teams then spent that time talking about experimenting with AI. So he now runs hackathons with strict rules: talking is allowed at the start, show-and-tell happens at the end, and in between everyone makes something. If anyone gets stuck, the only permitted answer is “ask the AI how.” Three things to try Get a surprising story every day. Ask your AI assistant to send you one fascinating story or piece of research each morning from a subject you love. Make at least one of them nothing to do with your job. Say it before you type it. Next time you’re stuck, go for a walk and talk the idea through out loud. Take turns teaching. Dave’s teams take it in turns to find a two-minute how-to video. They watch it together, then all have a go. The whole conversation is well worth a listen. We also get into the Easter eggs hidden on the 42courses website, and a Rolls-Royce idea that saved the company. If you’d like the structured version, our AI for Marketers course is a marvellous place to start. And if you’d like more stories like Goldman’s in your inbox every Tuesday, sign up to Weekday Wisdom.