Summary

In this episode, Andy sits down with Owen Fitzpatrick, a psychologist, speaker, and author of Inner Propaganda: Leading Hearts and Minds through Turbulent Times. Owen has spent close to 30 years studying how beliefs form and change, interviewing people everywhere from North Korea to Rwanda to Afghanistan. His thesis is unsettling: our brains do not simply take in facts and reach objective conclusions. They build a story we then experience as reality.

Owen and Andy work through what that means on real projects. You'll hear how a warning from a colleague can quietly harden into a conviction about a teammate, and how Bayesian reasoning gives you a way out. You'll learn Owen's five types of truth, how to tell courageous conviction from dangerous denial, and what leaders can actually make stable when they cannot promise a stable outcome. Owen also explains why pushing harder for buy-in is often the very reason people resist, and how an antifragile identity helps teams face uncertainty like AI without denial or panic.

If you're looking for a fresh way to think about belief, influence, and leading through turbulent times, this episode is for you!

Sound Bites

• "We all live in that world where we think we're the one person that isn't the victim of propaganda, and my point or my thesis is we're all victims of our own inner propaganda."
• "We're not necessarily just convinced by others. We convince ourselves."
• "Because I think when we say, 'I'm no good at something,' we lock ourselves into it."
• "Well, if you're not great at communicating with people, get great."
• "Most of the time our beliefs just create a sort of a reality for us, and that reality can help us or harm us."
• "So our brains are prediction machines."
• "Whenever we talk about belief, believing in your ability to succeed in the future is critical if you want to succeed in the future, but that doesn't mean you deny the present."
• "It, it's not that we think negatively, it's we believe negatively, and we see the world through those lenses."
• "So I think we want to be able to challenge our beliefs and build a bit more and get more comfortable with uncertainty away from the table, but when we're at the table with our team, that's when we bring the certainty."
• "We like the idea that we are making this decision of our own free will."
• "And when you look at what a belief is, a belief is an idea we feel certain about, and that word feel is the most important word of that sentence."
• "It's okay to believe less in certain things. It's okay to believe more in certain things. It's okay to believe better."

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction
• 02:29 Start of Interview
• 02:40 The Belief About Himself Owen Took Too Long to Update
• 05:56 A Sweaty Debate Speech and What Came After
• 08:28 Not Good at Something Is a Skill Gap, Not an Identity
• 09:45 The Belief Growth Mindset
• 12:55 The Sandra Story: When a Warning Becomes a Conviction
• 14:07 Why the Brain Craves Cognitive Closure
• 17:15 Using Bayesian Reasoning to Loosen a Belief
• 21:00 Melanie Perkins and Alan Mulally: Conviction or Denial?
• 21:36 The Five Types of Truth
• 26:24 Just Because It Is Your Truth Does Not Make It True
• 28:41 Where Objective Truth Actually Belongs
• 31:47 What "Leadership Is Propaganda" Does Not Mean
• 34:45 Why Change Management and AI Adoption Stall
• 36:30 Why Owen Chose Propaganda Over Self-Talk
• 37:57 Do I Believe It Because It Makes Me Look Good?
• 38:49 Answering the AI Question Without Denial or Hype
• 40:15 Building an Antifragile Identity
• 44:27 Certainty Is Contagious, and When to Change Course
• 45:20 What Leaders Can Make Stable in a Volatile Period
• 47:45 Control What You Can, Influence What You Can, Accept the Rest
• 51:01 When Pushing for Buy-In Creates the Resistance
• 52:45 You're Asking the Wrong Question About Persuasion
• 54:30 Reading the Person Before You Make the Ask
• 57:30 Helping Kids Hold Strong Beliefs Without Contempt
• 1:01:46 End of Interview
• 1:02:15 Andy Comments After the Interview
• 1:05:09 Outtakes

Learn More

You can learn more about Owen and his work at InnerPropaganda.com.

For more learning on this topic, check out:

• Episode 370 with Chantel Prat. One of the smartest, clearest, and funniest books on the brain, and why all of it matters for how you lead.
• Episodes 59 and 60 with Cathy Davidson. She explains how the brain science of attention changes everything.
• Episode 32 with Brad Kolar. A look at the direct implications of neuroscience for leadership.
• Owen's TED Talk, available here on YouTube.

Chat with PMeLa

You can chat directly with PMeLa, the podcast's AI persona, to get episode recommendations and answers to your project management and leadership questions. Visit PeopleAndProjectsPodcast.com/PMeLa to chat with her.

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Thank you for joining me for this episode of The People and Projects Podcast!

Talent Triangle: Power Skills

Topics: Leadership, Belief, Persuasion, Influence, Uncertainty, Change Management, Growth Mindset, Psychological Reactance, Buy-In, Artificial Intelligence, Resilience, Project Management

The following music was used for this episode:

Music: The Fantastical Ferret by Tim Kulig
License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Music: Funny by Frank Schroeter
License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

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Here’s an uncomfortable admission from a Microsoft guy. The agent I want to win is not the agent I rely on. And the one I rely on may not have the highest ceiling. That tension says more about the state of AI agents in 2026 than any benchmark. It’s also why we’re building the remote Scout is missing.

Here’s what actually inspired this piece. I had been living in Codex. Then I finally got Scout running, then hooked it to Grok 4.6, and that’s where it started to sing. Codex is my go-to today, but once our remote is in place, we’re moving fully over to Scout. The winning combination, as I see it, is Grok 4.6 or a newer model, combined with Scout, Work IQ, and native plugins, which are now an industry standard.

Add Cursor, and you have the three agents that currently define how I think about AI in Microsoft 365 collaboration. They’re excellent for very different reasons, and this ranking doesn’t use intelligence as its criterion. It uses the only benchmark that has ever mattered in my thirty years of shipping technology into real organizations. Which agent becomes part of the way you work?

One disclosure before we start. We have skin in this game. My team is building the remote-control surface Scout doesn’t have, and we’re publishing that work in the coming weeks. Read the Scout section knowing we’re not neutral about the outcome.

Subscribe now

Microsoft Scout: The One I Want to Win

Scout’s positioning is the strongest of the three. Introduced at Build 2026 as the first of Microsoft’s always-on “Autopilot” agents, it’s a desktop AI that acts across files, shell, browser, and dev tools. Through Work IQ, it also reaches Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint, the Microsoft 365 data that defines my customers’ days. It sits closest to where collaboration work actually lives. For those of us inside the Microsoft graph all day, that isn’t a feature. It’s home-field advantage.

The dealbreaker is simple. Scout has no remote. Microsoft’s own FAQ says it plainly. Scout is a desktop application for Windows and macOS because it needs the local file, shell, and browser control that phones can’t provide. Teams on mobile is the interim surface, and it’s a workaround, not a workflow. When I step away from the machine, I can’t hand Scout work. In 2026, an agent I can only delegate to from a desk has one hand tied behind its back. (And getting to the desk isn’t free, either. Scout is a Frontier preview today, sitting behind an Intune policy, an admin attestation, and both a Microsoft 365 Copilot and a GitHub Copilot license.)

So rather than wait, we’re building our own remote for Scout, a way to hand it work, watch its progress, and approve its actions from wherever I happen to be. We’ll publish what we’re building soon. Weeks, not months. With a remote in place, Scout becomes a very different proposition.

Codex: It Just Works

It just works.

That line has survived every draft of this piece, because it’s the whole review. Codex is the agent I rely on right now, and the reason is the shape of the workflow, not the spec sheet. Give it a job, let it work, come back, inspect, adjust, keep moving. Delegation instead of babysitting.

The real hand-off for me is Dynamics 365. I give Codex a list of people, and it runs them through an enrichment pipeline we built in Azure on Claude Fable 5, then lands the results in our CRM and our line-of-business systems. We connect Codex to that pipeline through a skill, and we’ll do the same with the other agents.

Codex doesn’t need to win every feature comparison, and it doesn’t. It wins the loop. Assign, walk away, return, review. The entire workflow holds together end to end, and that matters more than any benchmark score. The agents that change how you work are the ones you stop thinking about.

Cursor: Maybe the Most Powerful

Cursor may have the highest ceiling of the three. When I push agents across a full project (multi-file changes, refactors, tests, the whole board at once), it’s the most flexible instrument I’ve used. Capability has never been Cursor’s problem.

The story around that capability changed while I was writing. SpaceX announced its $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Anysphere, Cursor’s parent, on June 16, and completed it on August 14, the day I finished this piece. Cursor is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the newly public SpaceX.

A side note on Grok Bot. SpaceXAI, the division formerly known as xAI, opened the Grok Bot beta on August 11, and in the workflows I’ve pushed through it, it’s holding its own with Cursor’s agents. We connected Grok Bot to Microsoft 365 and ran real Dynamics workflows through it. Impressive is the honest word. Notice the wiring, though. Access runs through SuperGrok Heavy, Cursor Ultra, or Cursor Teams Premium. That’s Cursor’s subscription ladder, not a standalone xAI plan. With the Anysphere deal closed, one family now owns the most powerful IDE agent and a general agent that already works my Microsoft stack. One more detail stung. Grok Bot shipped with an iOS app on day one, and Android is on the way. A brand-new agent launched with exactly the surface Scout is missing.

The honest caveat is that potential isn’t the only thing that matters. Cursor’s ceiling is the highest here. Whether it becomes part of my daily loop is a different test, and it hasn’t passed that one yet.

Honorable Mention: The Coworks

One entry, two products. Anthropic’s Claude Cowork and Microsoft’s Copilot Cowork share a line because they share an engine. When Microsoft shipped Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot in March, it said so itself, describing a product built in close collaboration with Anthropic that brings the technology behind Claude Cowork into Copilot. Same engine, two wrappers.

The wrappers matter. Claude Cowork is desktop-first, with reach into local files and the browser. Since July, its sessions also follow you to the web and the Claude mobile app, running in the cloud while your laptop stays shut. Copilot Cowork runs cloud-side inside your Microsoft 365 tenant, with Work IQ context, Enterprise Data Protection, and admin controls; Gartner notes it gives up local computer use in the trade. Tenant-first shops will happily make that trade. And fair is fair. With mobile in place, the honorable mention already runs a version of the remote loop I’m chasing for Scout.

So why aren’t the Coworks in the top three? Because neither has earned a slot in my daily loop yet, and that’s the only ranking criterion this article uses. This list is a snapshot, not a verdict.

The Pattern Worth Naming

Step back and the ranking reveals something bigger. Microsoft increasingly ships the governed layer on someone else’s engine. Scout runs on the open-source OpenClaw runtime, with Microsoft contributing policy conformance back upstream. Scout’s own release notes even list Claude Sonnet 5 and Claude Opus 4.8 among its models. Copilot Cowork runs on the technology behind Claude Cowork. And on my own desk, Scout runs Grok 4.6, a Microsoft agent on a Musk model, quietly handing the pattern its third engine. In each case, Microsoft’s contribution is the part enterprises actually buy: Entra identity, compliance, auditability, admin control. The runtime and the model are commoditizing; the governed wrapper is the product. I’m not the only one reading it this way, but if you’re wondering where the moat moved, that’s where.

The Real Competition Is the Agent Workflow

So reframe the question. Not “which model is smartest.” They’re all smart, and they leapfrog each other monthly. The question is which agent can actually become part of the way you work. Scout has the natural advantage of where it lives. Cursor may have the highest ceiling, and its new owners are consolidating fast. Codex is the one I rely on, because the delegate-and-return workflow simply works.

Today’s Ranking

Scout is the one I want.
Cursor may be the most powerful.
Codex is the one that just works.

Once the remote works the way I want, we move to Scout full time, and this competition gets a lot more interesting. Everyone else has shipped the loop, with Grok Bot on day one and the Coworks in July. Scout is the holdout, and the opportunity. Follow along. The Scout Remote publication lands in the coming weeks.

The Agents in This Piece

• Microsoft Scout (Frontier preview, get started on Microsoft Learn)

• OpenAI Codex

• Cursor

• Grok Bot (beta announcement from SpaceXAI)

• Claude Cowork (getting started guide)

• Copilot Cowork (now in Microsoft’s Frontier program)

Paul J. Swider is CEO and Chief AI Officer at RealActivity, a Microsoft Partner specializing in mission-critical AI for healthcare systems. He has 30+ years in healthcare technology, has trained over 3,000 engineers across GE, IDX, and Microsoft, and is the founder of BOSHUG, the Boston Healthcare Cloud & AI Community spanning 50+ countries.

There’s a lot of agent content today. But it’s about fairly leading-edge topics, so give them a scan.

[blog] Introducing Neocloud And NeoPaaS: The Next Frontiers Of The AI-Native Cloud. Do we need new terms? Our analyst friends think so. And this doesn’t even include the “accidental clouds” like xAI and Meta.

[article] The Two Pillars of Post-training: Reinforcement Learning and Supervised Fine-Tuning. Here’s another great post-training article in this series. If you want to understand how models get better without training an entirely new model from scratch.

[blog] Speeding up generative UI with async A2UI. This is top-2 on my “need to play with” list of technologies. Andrew is ensuring it stays there.

[blog] Patterns and problems in emerging multiagent systems. What a fascinating read from Anthropic. Looks like agents don’t naturally coordinate any better than humans do.

[article] Can software factories actually work? You’ve heard the term, maybe you’re even building (or running?) one of these. But are we capable today of running lights-off software lifecycles where AI does literally everything from deciding what to work on, to shipping the final software?

[article] How does AI-assisted coding impact code comprehension? We comprehend less when the AI does more. Not shocking. There are ways to mitigate, as called out here.

[blog] Building Deterministic Agent Graphs with ADK 2.0. We don’t have to leave every decision up to the agent. Steering, along with persistence, is helping agents grow up.

[blog] Agentic Engineering Is Just Everything We Haven’t Been Doing. Are we rediscovering (or just getting reminded of) work that is a traditional part of a given workflow?

[blog] AGENTS.md vs. skills: How to steer a coding agent. Each operate at a different level, and steers in different ways. Eval this yourself.

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Windows App Development CLI v0.6.0 has just shipped and contains a ton of new features. Much of the changes in this release focus on getting from zero to a running app faster: scaffold a fresh WinUI project with a single command, search real WinUI controls and samples without leaving the terminal, and run your app straight from a .csproj with no manual build step first. It also adds cloud-based artifact signing, sparse-package workflows, and agent-friendly UI recordings. Grab it with winget install Microsoft.WinAppCLI, or head to the repo for npm and other install options.

Here’s a tour of the highlights.

Scaffold a New App with winapp new

# See every template available in your installed pack
 winapp new --list
 
 # Create a blank WinUI 3 app (the default template)
 winapp new --name MyApp
 
 # Start from a richer template, such as a NavigationView or MVVM app
 winapp new --name MyApp --template winui-navview
 winapp new --name MyApp --template winui-mvvm

Find Real WinUI Code with winapp find-ui

# Search by intent, returning matching controls with scenario ids 
winapp find-ui "tabbed layout" 

# Narrow to a single source 
winapp find-ui "settings card" --source toolkit 

# Pull the full XAML + C# for a specific scenario 
winapp find-ui --id gallery-tabview-1

Run Straight from a .csproj

# Build and run the project in the current directory (like dotnet run)
winapp run

# Or point at a specific project
winapp run .\src\MyApp\MyApp.csproj

# Pick a configuration/runtime and pass MSBuild properties through
winapp run . -c Release -r win-arm64 -p WindowsPackageType=None

Cloud Signing with winapp az-sign

# Interactive: discover and select subscription, account, and profile
winapp az-sign .\app.msix

# Fully specified, no prompting (ideal for CI/CD)
winapp az-sign .\app.msix --subscription <sub-id> --resource-group <rg> --account <account> --profile <profile>

# Reuse an existing metadata.json (skips resource discovery)
winapp az-sign .\app.msix --metadata-file .\metadata.json

Sparse Packaging Support

# 1. Generate an identity-only sparse manifest for an existing exe (no SDK install)
winapp init --exe .\bin\Release\net8.0-windows\MyApp.exe --sparse --use-defaults

# 2. Pack the sparse manifest into an identity-only .msix
winapp pack .\sparse\appxmanifest.xml

# 3. Link the exe to its sparse identity package
winapp embed-identity .\bin\Release\net8.0-windows\MyApp.exe

Other Notable Changes

• Agent-readable UI recordings: winapp ui record --frames now emits a sidecar bundle alongside the MP4: timestamped JPEG frames, a frames.ndjson index, and a manifest.json, so agents can reason over a recording frame by frame.
• Native WinUI 3 from Node.js: A new sample shows driving a native WinUI 3 Application and Window from Node.js.
• Unified plugin & new skills: The GitHub Copilot and Claude Code plugins are now a single shared plugin, and a new winapp-maui skill covers the MAUI resizetizer manifest dependency.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed MSIX bundle version generation
• Backfilled MS Learn documentation fixes and added a validation gate to keep docs in sync
• Mapped the remaining winapp run options to MSBuild properties in project mode
• Only show the folder-mode discovery breadcrumb at debug verbosity
• Fixed a flaky tree-kill test by retrying the PID file read

Security & Infrastructure

• Pinned all GitHub Actions to full-length commit SHAs and adopted the CodeQL security-extended suite
• Extended Dependabot coverage to NuGet and npm
• Used -EncodedCommand for the elevated Developer Mode script

Get started today

That’s v0.6.0: faster project setup, real sample code on tap, one-step run from source, and cloud signing to round it out. It’s in public preview today, and we build these releases around the feedback we get. Tell us what’s working (and what isn’t) by filing issues on our GitHub repository, where you’ll also find the docs and guides.

Install via WinGet:

winget install microsoft.winappcli

Install via npm:

npm install --save-dev @microsoft/winappcli

Happy building!

The post Windows App Development CLI v0.6 – create new WinUI applications, sign packages with Azure, and more appeared first on #ifdef Windows.