{"id":2528,"date":"2026-07-20T10:58:19","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T10:58:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/petermbach.com\/?page_id=2528"},"modified":"2026-07-20T22:09:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T22:09:08","slug":"067-anastassia-lauterbach","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/petermbach.com\/index.php\/podcast\/067-anastassia-lauterbach\/","title":{"rendered":"TGC Podcast Episode 067 – Anastassia Lauterbach"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The Grand Challengers Podcast Episode #67<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Literacy before fluency, why AI is not a religion and the brain needs training<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Guest: Anastassia Lauterbach<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

July 21st, 2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Overview<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Most of us now use AI every day. Very few of us could explain what it is actually doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anastassia Lauterbach thinks that gap is the most dangerous thing about this technology, and she has built a company to close it. She is a linguist, a trained clinical psychologist, a former senior executive at Qualcomm and Deutsche Telekom, a former non-executive director at easyJet, Dun & Bradstreet and Wirecard, and now founder and CEO of AI Edutainment in Basel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this episode she draws a line that most companies and governments have quietly erased. AI literacy is not AI fluency. Fluency is knowing how to prompt, and it is what almost every corporate and government programme now teaches. Literacy is understanding why every large language model hallucinates and why that cannot be engineered away, where your data goes when you upload it, and when the honest answer is to not use AI at all. Understanding gives you the power to question, and questioning, as she puts it, is precisely what consultancies and AI vendors would rather you did not do. Invest only in fluency and what you scale is mediocrity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We work through the four principles of her Responsible AI white paper. First, changing the architecture itself, so that machines can reason about cause and effect, model the world and understand other minds. Second, radical transparency, where failures are reported as clearly as successes. Third, literacy as understanding rather than tool training. And fourth, the fusion of STEM with the humanities to defend the human creative purpose. She makes the case that writing is a thinking technology rather than a communication tool, that cognitive capital belongs next to human capital on the balance sheet, and that the brain, like any muscle, needs resistance training. Anastassia is also unsparing about the elevation of AI into a religion, complete with its own popes, its own churches, and its own heretics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But this is a biographical show, and Anastassia’s own story is remarkable. We begin at a grand piano in Basel, with absolute pitch and a childhood spent in a two-room Moscow apartment with four people and a dog. We travel through simultaneous translation on Yugoslav construction sites, a broadcasting career at Deutsche Welle, three decades in the boardrooms of European technology, and the collapse of Wirecard, which cost her almost everything she owned. What she rebuilt from it is an AI literacy company, a series of children’s books, and a ginger cat who serves as Chief Marketing Officer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Episode Teaser<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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