979 Tallulah Le Merle:

Wings of Inspired Business Podcast EP 979—Host Melinda Wittstock Interviews Tallulah Le Merle

Melinda Wittstock:

Coming up on Wings of Inspired Business:

Tallulah Le Merle:

How is what you’re building contributing to a more flourishing human future? And to try to educate both the capital allocators and the teams looking for funding and to also only partner with and collaborate with other allocators, investors, managers. I work with a lot of the VCs in the ecosystem that also are taking this lens to it because I don’t want to look back at this moment and have the kind of guilty conscience of having backed things that weren’t heading in this trajectory. And then the other thing I’m really thinking about individually, I have the Case for Hope platform and all these sort of things, but it’s like, at what point am I called to step into a position of actually building a solution or a platform that stands in direct opposition to the ones that maybe are only looking at it with a more commercial, short sighted perspective?

Melinda Wittstock:

Public opinion on AI is increasingly cautious, anxious and outright hostile, with 55% of Americans saying it will do more harm than good in daily life. Big Tech’s “move fast break things” ethos is eroding trust, particularly as concerns grow about surveillance tech, and many fear job market disruption, erosion of human creativity, and the seeming inability or unwillingness of the government of effectively regulate AI.  But Tallulah Le Merle says there is a “case of hope” and today she challenges doomsday narratives while also emphasizing the critical importance of intention, ethics, and a more disciplined focus on aligning AI with our humanity.

Melinda Wittstock:

Hi, I’m your host Melinda Wittstock and I hope all is well with you today—your business is humming, you’re feeling great, and you’re taking time to smell the roses. It’s easy to put everyone else ahead of yourself, so make sure you’re prioritizing your own wellbeing in these crazy times.  Ok, so today on the show we’re going deep on AI, our role as women in influencing its development and usage, and so much more. If you’re new here, this is the place where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m all about paying it forward as a five-time serial entrepreneur, so I started this podcast to catalyze an ecosystem where women entrepreneurs mentor, promote, buy from, and invest in each other. Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together and lift as we climb. If you’ve been listening to any of the past 978 episodes, please help us get the word out about the show. Please subscribe so you never miss an episode. Tell your friends and colleagues, share the episode and leave a quick 5-star rating and review on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We really appreciate it. Thank you! 

Melinda Wittstock:

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur and investor who lives and breathes at the 

intersection of technology, business, and human flourishing. Tallulah Le Merle believes AI and technology will reshape the fabric of work and society, and she guides leaders to ensure this inevitable shift drives innovation that remains deeply human, conscious, and connected. Tallulah leads AI investment strategy and vehicles for Fifth Era & Blockchain Coinvestors, the asset management company focused on exponential technologies. Fifth Era’s track record is unmatched, with a portfolio spanning 1,500+ startups (including 80+ unicorns like Chainalysis, Coinbase, Kraken, Opensea and Tether). She’s also an AI advisor and fractional COO, helping companies scale without losing sight of culture, integrity, and well-being. 

Melinda Wittstock:

Tallulah believes women must play a central leading role in charting the future course of AI development and implementation. That means stepping up as visionaries to build towards a more flourishing human future and addressing the complex questions needed to get us there – from ethics to alignment, values to bias. Tallulah is well-known in the AI space for her keynote talk, “The Case for Hope in the Age of AI”, delivered recently both in San Francisco and at the UK Parliament in London. She’s also got a book coming out soon on the same topic.

Melinda Wittstock:

Today we talk about ethics, transparency and the intentionality around AI, as well as regulation, the need for diverse voices, and the role of conscious capital in investing in and guiding ethical uses of AI in the startups they invest in. After all, what would it look like if artificial intelligence was used to amplify human creativity, community and the human soul.

Melinda Wittstock:

Let’s find out. Tallulah Le Merle has her wings on now.

[INTERVIEW]

Melinda Wittstock:

Tallulah, welcome to Wings.

Tallulah Le Merle:

Thank you so much, Melinda. I’m excited for this conversation.

Melinda Wittstock:

You’re all about the case for hope in the age of AI, and you’ve been all around the world talking about this. And so just to start at the basics, what is the case for hope when we think of our AI world?

Tallulah Le Merle:

Yeah. So, you know, we’re in this moment where AI, the technology has been around for 50 years, almost as old as the Internet, but we’ve reached this coming-of-age moment where everyone’s now interfacing with this technology, et cetera, but still a lot of unknowns. And so, as a result, I mean, everyone sees these doomsday narratives, fear-based messaging, headlines, it’s tech taking our jobs, it’s disrupting entire industries, it’s making us less intelligent. And I actually come from a very grounded place to say there is truth to all of those narratives. Right. But it misses a lot of nuance. I like to bring grounded reframes to, you know, any, any, any of those questions, any of those topics. Why? Because hope, for me, it’s not this frivolous.

Tallulah Le Merle:

Nice to have term like, oh, hope, let’s be hopeful. Is this kind of like pedantic thing. I actually, you know, our collective focus is incredibly powerful and where we focus, our energy will flow. If we’re all imagining these dystopian doomsday futures, we are much more likely to build for them. So, in this moment, hope is actually an imperative, deeply important perspective to be taking, especially because there is so much potential and opportunity with this technology. I always say AI is just a tool, and like a hammer, it could be used to build a house or as a murder weapon, right. So, it’s all in how we use it, who’s using it, for what purposes.

Tallulah Le Merle:

And so, for me, you know, the, the hopeful perspective that’s still grounded in fact and lucid about the risks is really important.

Melinda Wittstock:

I think some of the fear around it is you just look at 90-year-old senators who don’t understand it and that is just like, okay, there are no rules, just go for it, right? Move fast, break things. And in that context, I think gives people a lot of fear. Because what are the guardrails? Because you’re right, it is how we choose to use it and the intention around it. So, in that sense, for all the people who are worried about big tech and things like bias in the AI, or it being used in ways that can be harmful, like the weapons side of AI. What’s your perspective on, like, how it should be or could be regulated or how we could infuse that positive intention around it? Because you’re right. I mean, it has tremendous potential if used correctly. So where do we need the state? Where do we need.

Melinda Wittstock:

How do you see that, that whole regulatory aspect of it?

Tallulah Le Merle:

Yeah, yeah. I love that we’re actually diving in straight to the macro risks because often I go the opposite route. You know, people want to hear first about jobs and specific industries, like kind of micro. But what you’re talking about is AI in the hands of bad actors. AI, you know, monopolization by certain organizations, corporates, institutions that are using it for commercial gain or political purposes to oppress or, you know.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, and with little transparency. I think it’s so interesting just using different models, whether you’re using Claude CoWork or ChatGPT. After a while, like, ChatGPT was driving me crazy because it was sycophantic and it seemed like it was designed with a social media intent to just kind of keep you in these chats. Like, would you like this? Would you like that? Would you like this? How about more of this? And oh, you’re amazing. And it’s like, oh, come on.

Tallulah Le Merle:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. And I completely agree with all of this. And it makes so much sense that collectively we are very low trust at the moment. A. Because we’ve lived through what I, you know, the, I call it the failed promise of, of the social media tech cycle, right?

Tallulah Le Merle:

Like the promise there was, we’re going to connect the world, we’re going to deepen community, and social media can be used for all those purposes. In fact, the reality has been that social media for many of us is, you know, you could argue it’s kind of a net negative. Right. Like those platforms are designed to retain you, as you say. And we’re seeing the Same now with ChatGPT, other AI platforms. They keep us scrolling. It’s kind of. It exploits our collective psychology with, you know, constant dopamine hits and comparison.

Tallulah Le Merle:

And, and, and so as a result, it hasn’t necessarily been a net positive and it sort of failed on the, on the initial promise, although there have, of course been benefits. And then those big tech companies that are behind many of these platforms, there’s a lot of rightful questioning of their motives and the commercial gain here. And so, in this early moment we’re in with AI in terms of the inflection point we’ve reached, so many of those same questions are still there. Plus add to that then the political moment we’re in where there’s low trust of kind of government and other. You think, yeah, that’s putting it lightly, right? I so understand where this is coming from and I agree actually with so much of it. And especially like you just touched on AI and the impact of AI and warfare and weaponry to almost scale lethal decision making or replace human decision making when it comes to lethal decisions and Project Lavender.

Tallulah Le Merle:

And then this like very sensitive political moment we’re in, seeing a lot of conflict bubble to the surface. I 100% understand why people are. So, then it’s like, okay, how are you going to. Where’s the hope in this? I always say hope is a discipline. So, if I discipline myself to find the hopeful linings in this when it comes to technology, I see a couple things and maybe I’ll just touch on three. One, we are seeing whether it’s talked about in the headlines or not, there is unprecedented global cooperation underway to try to address some of these points. And it’s the same like whenever we have innovation that we create as a species that becomes this powerful, it forces global cooperation. We saw the same with nuclear, with biotech.

Tallulah Le Merle:

So, there are initiatives, conferences, Countries coming to the table who are rivals in other fronts, but they’re forced to coordinate and cooperate when it comes to decision making around AI. And it’s also very cross functional. It’s not just policymakers and governance parties coming together, but also social scientists, psychologists, ethicists gathering to figure out like what are human values? And if we have this small window of opportunity to try to figure out how we encode that into this very powerful new technology that we’re designing, how are we going to do that? And so, I see that as one hopeful point and I’m personally getting involved in. There’s a UNESCO committee on AI and human flourishing and talking also a subcommittee around kind of conscious capital and, and what do we fund? And getting involved in that. The question of course going to be if it happens fast enough.

Melinda Wittstock:

The conscious capital piece is something that really interests me because I, you know, we touched briefly on the intentionality around this. And so, VCs, private equity and whatnot are choosing the companies that they’re going to back right now. So, what are the values of those companies? Right? Because in those investments we’re inventing the future. We’re picking the winners.

Tallulah Le Merle:

We are. I’m a partner in investment management firm leading our AI strategy and I’m trying to, you know, I care really deeply about this particular topic and I think that the question, if you’re talking to a builder or a founder, whatever it may be, I think that a prerequisite to unlock funding should be that they can compellingly and convincingly answer the question how does what you’re building contribute to a more flourishing human future?

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Tallulah Le Merle:

If they don’t have a good answer or they haven’t thought through the kind of ethics data privacy bias that you mentioned within the tool or platform that they’re using, if they’re work, you know, if they’re using some mix of LLMs or foundation models and they’re building an app on top of that, or they’re establishing something themselves from scratch, whatever they’re doing, I think that should be a prerequisite to unlocking funding. And I’m trying to do this both top down with investors, with corporates, you know, corporate venture capital, arms, etc., but also bottom up and letting the founders and builders know or even giving them permission to build with soul because it’s not what they’re taught to do. Right. It’s like all the dialogue is this, the moment is now. You need to have an immediate go to market. So, look for something that, that has, that often, that’s an enterprise AI. So not thinking with the kind of humanity x tech hat. Right, like that intersection.

Melinda Wittstock:

No, they’re not. I mean you get back to just sort of the basics of business. Are you solving a real problem for real people? And how is AI being used? And there are a lot of founders who say the obligatory Silicon Valley, like I’m doing this, improve the world. But people see through that. There’s a cynicism kind of that, that doesn’t really like they, they’re saying it, but they, they’re not really that their words and actions don’t match.

Tallulah Le Merle:

Yeah, no, exactly.

Melinda Wittstock:

I see a lot of women in particular though that are approaching AI in the way that you describe. You know, I’m not ruling out that all, you know, that men aren’t either, but I think women are not more and really focusing on the why, like the mission, like how can we use this to improve lives? Like, and, and what’s your policy? Do you have an ethics AI policy in your company? Do you? I mean, why, you know, and women sort of seem to be Thinking about that more. I mean, maybe that’s a big generalization, I don’t know, but it feels like that to me.

Tallulah Le Merle:

No, I agree. There’s a huge move and especially because we live through that social media, these former tech cycles, we are so much warier. And I like to say we worry wisely now much more about AI and how we’re approaching now, this tech cycle. And it brings me back, I mean, I want to like this point. We’re talking about bad actors and all these things. AI does enable, or has the possibility to, to enable bad actors, but it also improves visibility and monitoring of those same systems, so they become more observable by us wary worriers, if you want to call us that. Right. So, it’s then harder for those bad actors to act totally invisibly.

[PROMO CREDIT]

Wings of Inspired Business is brought to you by the podcast, Zero Limits Business Growth Secrets where Steve Little – serial entrepreneur, investor and mergers & acquisitions maestro – shares the little-known 24 value drivers that spell the difference between a $5m business, and a $50mm even $500 mm business. It always pays to understand what’s driving the underlying enterprise value of your business. So, check out Zero Limits Business Growth Secrets at zerolimitsradio.com – that’s zerolimitsradio.com and available wherever you get your podcasts. More information about valuation growth at Zero Limits Ventures.com

Melinda Wittstock:

And we’re back with Tallulah Le Merle, AI thought leader and investor, leading AI investment strategy and vehicles for Fifth Era & Blockchain Coinvestors.

[INTERVIEW CONTINUES]

Tallulah Le Merle:

And I think that’s another hopeful frame alongside the point that AI can put power into more hands. I talk, I, I talk about it often as a great democratizer on many fronts. So yes, there’s, you know, you talk about governments and nation states and large corps and ways in which that they could be leveraging this technology less than ideal uses, but it also allows individuals and collectives who have this more humanist, or Ben, you know, tech for good outlook to have more leverage more than ever before. So, of course, then there’s a question of which one is, you know, can we get the latter, those latter groups up to speed fast enough. But fundamentally I think that that’s another hopeful angle as well.

Melinda Wittstock:

I think it’s interesting actually when we talk about like diverse voices in the AI. AI has been trained on historic data, so there’s inherently bias in it because, you know, humans, we like to think that humans progress, right, become more aware of things and the, you know, the diversity of voices and perspectives from, you know, where you’re from or your culture, indigenous culture, or how women think as opposed to men, all these different things. And, there’s this potential, I think, in these large language models because it’s historic to have historic biases, biases in them that can be corrected to a point depending on who’s correcting it. So that’s tricky because where’s the transparency in that? So, say Claude Cowork, so it actually knows you and your voice and the body of your work, and it’s not just giving you generic stuff, right? That’s one aspect of it, but the other aspect is just the core data. And how is that data? Like, I guess what I’m getting to really, it’s kind of deeply philosophical, where the human begins and ends.

Tallulah Le Merle:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

Like what’s uniquely human to us? So, you don’t want AI to replace humans. And in all these debates about AGI and such, there’s the human soul that the AI, it doesn’t have a soul. Like it’s not, it doesn’t have an embodiment. There are all kinds of work on robotics and kind of functional things, right? But how can humanity especially for young people, their sense of their, themselves, their true differentiation.

Tallulah Le Merle:

Yes, right. I’m literally, I know that this isn’t filmed, but I’m like punching the air right now because I love whenever the dialog goes in this direction, the intersection of like tech and soul and tech. Okay, because what you’re saying is absolutely true. When we, this technology, it kind of holds a mirror up to humanity because as you say, it’s trained on kind of the, what I like to call the ego representation of our species based on historical data. Right. But it forces the question, what remains uniquely human in an AI enabled future? And when I start to really dive deep into that question and try to answer it, all I see is incredibly hopeful things. Why what we, what we’re doing, we’ve designed a technology that we, that effectively does cognition better than we as a species do. Right.

Tallulah Le Merle:

It’s an artificial intelligence. And therefore, we offload our cognitive intelligence to this tool that now can do it much better and faster. So, and then of course we have this identity crisis because in this moment we’re in as, as, as a species, we’re very over index on our cognition and what our brains can do. We live in the realm of the psyche. We spend all of our time like above the neck because that’s been our evolutionary competitive advantage as a species. So, what happens when you offload it? Of course, a lot of fear because we’re like, what does that, you know, what, what are, what do we then become? And this is where I get so excited because as you say, there is, and I talk about, you know, waylaid forms of intelligence that we now have the ability to reconnect with, including our somatic intelligence. When you talk about embodiment, our soma, our physical body, our animal bodies that we’ve gotten so out of touch with, have deep wisdom and signaling inherent in them. And those codes now have the, you know, we, we were forced to get back in touch with that because it is unique versus AI.

Tallulah Le Merle:

The second thing. Well then I’ll pause in a second because we can go deeper on any of these. But I also talk about ecological intelligence and collective or communal intelligence. Ecological intelligence being our knowing of the land and how deeply in tune we used to be with it. I mean there was no separation, right? We lived in it, of it, with it, on it, we navigated by it, we knew what to eat. And when we one with the natural world around us, we’ve lost so much connectivity with that. I mean kids today spend nine times more time on screens than outdoors. It’s actually deeply dystopian.

Tallulah Le Merle:

And there’s an ability now to reconnect us with that because again, AI is not going to have an embodiment and interaction with the natural world the way we still will. And the third is our collective or communal intelligence that we used to live communally, tribally. We had rituals, ceremony ceremonies, rites of passage from, you know, boy to man, adult to elder. We, we regulated our nervous system as a collective. We grieve together, we celebrated together, we all these things that we’ve again lost. We live more and more isolated and individualistically also as a result of the fact that we’ve over index on cognition and the individual brain. Right. So anyway, I’m going to pause there because I could just go on and on and on about.

Melinda Wittstock:

I mean what you’re saying is, it’s so true and I think it sets up the opportunity for businesses that can leverage AI to allow more time and more intentional focus on the community and the belonging and that connectedness that we all have as human intelligences and human souls. So, like I see some businesses now, including the one my 19-year-old son is developing, using, leveraging AI but using it to connect people in local communities around their dogs. Like your dog sort of introduces you to people, right. So, he’s leveraging that to really create these, I guess you could almost describe it as ‘blue zones of wellness’ because all those blue zone studies show that people live a lot longer and live better longer when they have true community belonging.

Melinda Wittstock:

So how can the AI be used to set that up in communities everywhere? So, his business is kind of interesting because he’s developing it in AI. It’s using AI to connect people, but for a purpose, to bring them together in real life, in real community. So, like that’s one example, but I’ve seen others and that’s human. That to me is a case for hope.

Tallulah Le Merle:

There I this intersection of AI and what I call human flourishing. My conviction is that the industries that arise as a result of this technology will be in that intersection. The same way at the dawn of the Internet, we couldn’t have fathomed social media as an industry or E commerce. My belief is that right now this intersection is being not ignored. I mean, you said, you know, your son is building in this space and there’s other people as well who are looking at empathetic AI, emotional use cases of AI, communal use cases of AI to, you know, with the intersection of AI and the environment is another deeply hopeful one we could talk about. But the point is, for the most part in people’s immediate thought is what we started this conversation with sycophantic AI, what is it going to, it’s going to be your coach and your therapist and even your lover. And you know, like there’s a lot…

Melinda Wittstock:

…of that, like where people. It’s so dangerous actually, but, and they’re…

Tallulah Le Merle:

very quick to dismiss it, but I saw this amazing bubble map where someone had mapped the possible emotional use cases of this technology and the fact that already with ChatGPT, we were seeing people feeling deeply seen and heard and validated by this tool. And that bubble map was showing things like, you know, neurodivergent academic support, doula, shadow work coach, you know, like all these sorts of things. And I looked at that and thought there are hundreds of real products that exist here that have just not been built for yet. Yet.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, this is, this is interesting too because when someone has an expertise or a body of work, like you mentioned things shadow work or it could be, it could be any, anything. Right, that’s, that’s deeply like that really helps the human. And when the AI is trained and can be trained kind of locally on that real expertise, then yes, I mean it can be incredibly helpful.

Tallulah Le Merle:

Yeah, but we’re just not there yet. Right? People are again extrapolating based on what we’re seeing in this current moment, which are always going to be early and thus less than ideal use cases of the technology. It’s called, you know, shadow AI usage because ChatGPT and Claude and others don’t have therapists and psychologists etc. behind them. Who’ve helped craft it, et cetera. But we’re going to see that start to arise. So, it’s going to improve. And I think there’s a real possibility here for the democratization of care. I mean, people, you know, now there’s a possibility to have at your fingertips 24, 7, in real time, in your language, a free resource that can support you in anything you’re going through in life.

Tallulah Le Merle:

And people forget that typically that type, those services were limited to people who could afford them and who had the time and the privilege and the luxury to be able to seek them out. So, what does it do to us as a species when that’s now ubiquitous globally, to anyone who has access to the Internet for free? I mean, it’s like so profound. I think we’re being way too quick to dismiss it. And the other thing that’s cool about that is the best people to build for these type of use cases. And I don’t know what background your son has, for example, but is not necessarily technical engineers, et cetera. And in fact, the barrier to entry on the technical side is lowering every day. But actually, it’s the people who deeply understand those needs.

Melinda Wittstock:

He grew up in a sort of like almost entrepreneurial accelerator environment, watching, you know, his mom, me, build five businesses, and all the ups and downs of that. But also, I’m a dog freak, right? He noticed that, like my successive golden retrievers introduced me to lots of people in the neighborhood. And, you know, gregarious dogs with a gregarious person, you know, and just the dog gave you an excuse to chat with anybody. Any strangers develop so many relationships and so many experiences around the dog. 

Melinda Wittstock:

And that was the germ of his idea. He experienced that himself in his own life. And also, his generation, he noticed that everybody’s really isolated. No one knows how to talk to each other. Just at a very base level, if you’re walking a young man or a young woman walking around with a dog, there’s a safety to that, but there’s also a permission slip to have a conversation with someone you don’t know.

Tallulah Le Merle:

Yeah, exactly. This is sort of the point. Anyone now who has a deep lived experience, passion to solve for a particular human pain point like that, they have the opportunity to do so. And I Think it’s an important rallying call because a lot of, I guess like humanists or people who care about the human condition right now don’t want to touch AI with a 20-foot pole because all they’re hearing is doomsday messaging about how it’s going to be the worst thing that ever happened to us as a species. It’s not necessarily true. So, I just invite those people to really lean in and I say, see yourself in this equation the same way your son’s doing.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s interesting though with young people. I’m curious your perspective on this because there’s sort of a lack of really strong critical thinking skills. Like kids are merging from school and with call and from college, not necessarily being great critical thinkers or not necessarily knowing much about the world or the humanities or whatever. And if you’re, I guess we’re in the realm of sort of prompt engineering, but like it’s kind of like garbage in, garbage out. So, if you don’t have good critical thinking skills or enough knowledge beyond it, you don’t even know necessarily what to ask it or how to prompt it or how to use it. And, and for a younger generation or for people that haven’t really developed, you know what I mean by like critical thinking, that concerns me a little bit. Right? Like how the schools are dealing with this and how we come to that as individuals. How do we come to that relationship with AI? So, like in my case I bring this long history of like award-winning journalism. So, the way I prompt is going to be different from someone who doesn’t have those kind of inherent skills or just the, the knowledge of lived experience. So much lived experience. So, if you’re younger and you don’t have that lived experience, for instance, how are you interacting with it?

Tallulah Le Merle:

Yeah, it’s an interesting take. I see actually a lot of real potential and possibility here and I think that. So, you mentioned like critical thinking many times and it goes back to this point of what is intelligence? And the fact we’re really over index on cognition. And it’s like, you know, what’s valuable is to have a ton of knowledge in a certain space or, and I think there’s truth to that. But we’re, but the world is going to shift and there’s a lot of discussion about shifting from valuing skills to valuing capabilities like that. Leadership will become more about attunement to individuals, the ability to get the best out of a group to get them to cooperate and collaborate in a focused direction. Skills like empathy and intuition and openness, self-awareness. And I actually think so, Gen Z in particular, coming to the workforce, of course they’re sort of, we’re in this messy, complex, painful transition moment where I believe they’re actually designed for a world that doesn’t exist yet.

Tallulah Le Merle:

Like they’re going to be the builders of this new moment we’re stepping into. So, of course, they feel disillusioned and at odds with kind of big corporate culture or these expectations of what work was in the past because it’s changing right now and the world is the rugs getting pulled out from under their feet. But they’re also here for what comes next and for the industries that will arise and all these, this value of new capabilities and traits rather than some of the skills that you’re mentioning. And I think that that’s, that’s kind of what we’re moving into. So, you know, and I in education as well, you mentioned education for sure. There’s a lot of concern about shadow AI usage and kids using it to cheat and plagiarize and all these sorts of things. AI is deeply disruptive to the mode of academia and education that we’ve been in. But is that a bad thing? I mean, academia has been the same for centuries and for the most part it’s a, it’s a, it’s a passive learn by listening model which teaches us to soak up, soak up information and then pretty much regurgitate it as near to possible as what we heard in order to get an A on a test.

Tallulah Le Merle:

Which by the way is not rooted in the science and psychology of how we actually learn as humans. So that model is being massively disrupted right now. And I understand that that generates a lot of fear and teachers kind of wrestling with how to use it and student, you know, but it’s going to force classrooms to adapt and become something completely different. Rather than valuing knowledge alone, which now will be at our fingertips, we’re forced to value the application of knowledge. So, hands on project-based learning classrooms becoming for, you know, hands on building teamwork, debate and dynamism. Like, okay, we both learned the same thing from our AI tutor in an hour. Now we spend the time in the classroom actually discussing, debating. Let me get curious about my fellow students.

Tallulah Le Merle:

How does their lived experience change how they feel about this topic versus mine? Right. None of that exists in classic academia right now. And so, I see this could potentially be incredibly valuable and positive as well.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, 100%. I mean, you’re making the case for hope. Yeah, really well, right. Because there is like it’s what we choose as a society to do with it and what the entrepreneurs right now and future entrepreneurs, you know, kids who are thinking about businesses, women who now just in that trend towards democratization, I mean anyone now can quickly and at a low cost spin up a highly scalable business because of AI, right. And combining these processes. So, there’s tremendous, there’s so much, you know, tremendous potential.

Tallulah Le Merle:

There’s so much. Yeah, like this is, this is what I’m here trying to, trying to convey to people, right Is like if we can just be afforded the grace to navigate the next few years, which will be painful and messy transition. There’s so much potential here. And on the job front, right, People focus on, for example, the statistic from the World Economic forum that around 90 million jobs will be replaced by 2030 in the next four years. Now but in that same report, the WEF anticipated 170 million new jobs would be created, which is a, which is a net of around 80 million jobs created. And it’s like, why isn’t anyone talking about that point? The industries that will arise here, the hybrid human AI careers and the fact that it creates agency for people to build almost anything they want their own businesses to work for themselves, to create, to put something into the world. This creativity point, there’s a lot of focus also in creative arts on AI disrupting and replacing human content, human art, human music.

Tallulah Le Merle:

I think we’re doing a disservice there to creativity as an innate human trait that is not something that can ever be disrupted. It’s just going to change form again. The same way that the radio, CGI and film, you know, photography disrupted live portrait artists and things. It’s changing form. But we’re seeing the birth of a whole crea-tech industry, and it has the possibility to lower the barrier to entry for anyone to create anything, which I don’t think is inherently bad, although I understand it’s disruptive to people who’ve trained their whole lives in a specific craft. And I understand their, their feeling around this. It removes all the admin burden on creative so they can focus on the creation. They can iterate rapidly now.

Tallulah Le Merle:

Whereas, you know, they could create hundreds of prototypes or, or concepts and explore those routes in an hour, whereas before it would have taken them days or weeks to do that. And it then puts an onus or premium on authentic authenticity and on Authentic human art. Like, again, you asked the question, what can humans uniquely create that AI can’t? Well, when they pour their soul into something, that resonance is felt. It’s incredibly high frequency. And we’re seeing it in music already with hyperlocal albums and deeply resonant authentic art from the likes of Rosalia and Ray and Bad Bunny. I’m very musical, by the way, so I get really excited about. And by the way, artists across every medium have so long been forced to create art that they didn’t want to. It wasn’t in alignment with what their soul was screaming out to create, because they were forced to create it for commercial uses or for to get plays or to get hits or streams or clicks or whatever.

Tallulah Le Merle:

Now let AI do that stuff, the kind of commoditized stuff so humans can get back to the creation of deeply human art. So, anyway, I’ve taken us into such a direction there, but I love this.

Melinda Wittstock:

I think these are the conversations that need to be happening. It’s really so important. And obviously it’s very nuanced. But the thing that’s interesting about this, in all times in history where there’s been, like, a new game changing technology, there’s always periods of social disruption, right? Because there’s all kinds of fears and uncertainty. Like, you were mentioning the job thing, like, oh, I’m going to be replaced. Humans don’t necessarily like change, but, like something I learned very early in my life is the one thing you can take for granted is change. So, you may as well embrace it. Right? There are always opportunity and change.

Melinda Wittstock:

This is like an entrepreneur speaks, right? Like, people who are entrepreneurial just are like, change is kind of, like, cool, you know, it’s just. It’s inevitable. It’s part of it. So, you may as well harness it, you know? But not everybody thinks like that.

Tallulah Le Merle:

No. And it’s so natural because we have our brain, we have the amygdala, which is designed for this very purpose, to fear the unknown.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Tallulah Le Merle:

Keep us safe. Right. And so, it’s an incredibly human response, but I do see that it’s being exploited by news, which now needs to get clicks and shares and engagement, so on our fear and our anger. And it’s trying to incite those feelings in us, to get us to engage. And it’s so. And that ends up being really almost irresponsible because it’s not bringing the nuance into the dialogue. And I do think it’s so important, like, this sliver of openness, this posture of Curiosity to what good could be done. That’s to me, what hope is.

Tallulah Le Merle:

It’s not techno optimism; it’s not enthusiasm or blind positivity. It’s like just the belief that something good may happen. That’s it.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. It’s even a challenge now for AI companies to market themselves because people have been trained to be afraid of it. I mean, a lot of this is because the same companies that brought us social media and all the data downside of social media. I’m just going to backtrack for a moment. At the dawn of social media, I was one of the biggest cheerleaders for it because I saw the potential in it. Like, oh, this is great. This can really connect us. There’s just like the democratization of it.

Melinda Wittstock:

How wonderful. But then, you know, once all the behavioral psychologists figured out that the way to keep people on these platforms and monetize people is to keep them in a constant state of rage and division and fear and all of that. It is, yeah, like you were saying earlier in our conversation, it’s like sort of like a net negative, like kids with self-harm or isolation or being driven into these rabbit holes of extremism or like whatever it is, right? And so how to prevent AI from going down that same track. And I think that is really the root of the distrust that it’s a lot of the same people or the same culture.

Tallulah Le Merle:

Exactly.

Melinda Wittstock:

And I do think this is like it’s become a woman’s job. Okay, we got to come in and clean this up, right?

Tallulah Le Merle:

Yes, we do. I love that you and I are having this conversation. And then for everyone listening, it’s like, please, I don’t want to use the Sheryl Sandberg quote, but like ‘lean in’. You know, I feel sometimes kind of lonely in this space on this intersection front. Or I go to conferences and it’s largely men talking about the, the technology itself in great detail. It’s getting very technical, the jargon. I’m like, where’s the soul? Where’s the humanity? Where’s the empathy? Where’s the people who deeply care about a human future? And, and the visionaries who can potentially see that that positive, flourishing future which I, you know, I, and I consider myself one of them.

Tallulah Le Merle:

Where are we? And like, and there’s, and there are, you know, there is a pocket of us and it’s growing every day. And I feel very hopeful about that. But I’m like, risk for me Is that the very people we need in this dialogue are leaning out because of the concerns and the fear. And I’m like, well then there’s no hope then.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, that’s exactly, it’s, it’s the wrong trajectory. Exactly. Like it’s up to us. So, if you put on your hat as an investor, you know, with FifthEra and you’re looking at all these different companies and whatnot, I mean, how does that impact your sort of investment thesis?

Tallulah Le Merle:

Well, yeah, and it’s what I mentioned up front, like the prerequisite to unlocking any funding or capital is that answer to that question, how is what you’re building contribute to a more flourishing human future? And to try to educate both the capital allocators and the teams looking for funding and to also only partner with and collaborate with other allocators, investors, managers, like we. I work with a lot of the VCs in the ecosystem that also are taking this lens to it because I don’t want, you know, in a few years or a few decades, I don’t want to look back at this moment and have the kind of guilty conscience of having backed things that weren’t heading in this trajectory. And then the other thing I’m really thinking about individually, and this is to your entrepreneur point, like, you know, I have the case for hope platform and all these sort of things, but it’s like, at what point am I called to step into a position of actually building a solution or a platform that stands in direct opposition to the ones that maybe are only looking at it with a more commercial, short sighted perspective?

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, I mean on that point, I envision women who are aligned on this getting together to support each other in this effort. Because that’s, I think it needs the, it needs that, the scalability of the network. Like instead of going it alone, we really need to step up and support each other in this, elevate each other’s voices, support and invest in each other’s businesses, work together. Like create businesses that collaborate to lift up other aligned businesses, for instance. Like that’s kind of, that’s kind of what I see. I think it’s easier, it’s easier said than done. It’s a mission of mine to get women to like meaningfully really support each other. Like, you know, like invest in each other by each other’s products and whatnot.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s part of the reason I started the show. But I. What does that look like? I mean.

Tallulah Le Merle:

Well, I think, and maybe this is even a conversation we should take offline because it’s like let’s build that ecosystem. You know, a red thread through my career alongside of it has been gathering and hosting and bringing people together. You know, I had an initiative called Elevate I scaled in Europe, which was for young professionals and, and, and, and, and many other kind of events, experiences off sites, retreats that bridge professional and personal well-being. And I’m thinking about that now. Like how do we just bring together people who share, we’re almost like mission mates around this intersection to come together. And it doesn’t matter what we do. It’s just like let’s have the focused intent gathered in one place around this topic and it will arise organically from there. And this is superpower for sure that women especially have.

Tallulah Le Merle:

Right. We have always played the glue of and the connective fabric of society, community, the tribes we used to be a part of. That was our role. And so, let’s remember and reconnect with that in this moment that so deeply needs it.

Melinda Wittstock:

I couldn’t agree with you more. My, my goodness, Tallulah, I could talk to you for a lot longer. I have a feeling you’ll be a recurring guest on this show if, if you want to be. I’d love to be able to obviously stay in touch offline as well. I want to make sure that people know the best, best way to find you, connect with you. Especially if you’re a woman in AI or thinking of using AI or aligned with this, you know, what’s the best way? How can we galvanize this and how can people get in touch with you?

Tallulah Le Merle:

Yeah, well right now I actually just started being more active on social media. That’s not something I ever did before. I was more top-down working with corporates. So please support me in that. It’s on Instagram is the Case for Hope. I’m also obviously on LinkedIn and my website which is just tallulahlemerle.com has a whole section on the Case for Hope and this impact work where you can also sign up to get notified when the book comes out eventually that I’ve been working on which is also called the Case for Hope in the Age of AI. So yeah, I’d say those are the best places for now.

Melinda Wittstock:

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us and keep us updated. It’ll be great to see women led AI companies really making a difference here, which I think we can.

Tallulah Le Merle:

Let’s do it. Let’s start to build the future that we want to see.

Melinda Wittstock:

Wonderful.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

Tallulah Le Merle is a globally recognized thought leader in AI and an investor leading AI investment strategy and vehicles for Fifth Era & Blockchain Coinvestors. And make sure you follow her on Instagram at Case for Hope.

Melinda Wittstock:

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Melinda Wittstock:

That’s it for today’s episode. Head on over to WingsPodcast.com – and subscribe to the show. When you subscribe, you’ll instantly get my special gift, the WINGS Success Formula. Women … Innovating … Networking … Growing …Scaling … IS the WINGS of Inspired Business Formula …for daily success in your business and life. Miss a Wings episode? We’ve got hundreds in the vault, all with actionable advice and epiphanies. Check them out at MelindaWittstock.com or wingspodcast.com. You can also catch me on LinkedIn or Instagram @MelindaAnneWittstock. We also love it when you share your feedback with a 5-star rating and review on Apple, Spotify or wherever else you listen, including Podopolo where you can interact with me and share your favorite clips.