Are You Training Your AI, Or Is It Training You?

Are you leveraging LLMs in a way that diminishes your relationships? Or are you leveraging LLMs in a way that enhances your relationships? Any conversation around this technology, absent of that, will be morally bankrupt. Every increase in technology demands an increase of character to meet it. Most of us spend our lives performing at Novus Global. We ask whether performance alone is enough. You'll hear conversations with our elite coaches, world class leaders, and exceptional artists and athletes, all exploring what it means to go beyond hyperlink performance. Because our lives are defined by the questions we ask and the questions we don't. This is beyond high performance from Novus Global and the Meta Performance Institute. Yeah, we're not the only people in the world wondering what changes, how the, what the impacts are of the rapid, rapid integration of AI into our reality. What feel to me like outdated and maybe even lazy questions like, how do I use AI? And one of the fun things about being a part of this community is I notice us, for us and for our clients, asking what I feel might be more productive questions underneath it. And I'm curious right now, without answering them, what are some of the questions that you find yourself asking when you think about the moment that we're living in? I mean, I'd be curious more about what Trish thinks about this, but where my mind goes when you ask that question is we're, we're about to be inundated with billions of products. Yeah. And digital products. And so with the firm, it's fascinating because in terms of navigating change management, there's the, which, which product. Right now we don't know which is going to be Microsoft and what's going to be aol and, and we don't. So like, even my wife and I were talking, you know, and we were talking about one of the big players in AI right now, like ChatGPT, Anthropic Perplexity, all those things. And, and she was talking about one specifically. She's like, do you think it's going to be around forever? And I'm like, I don't know. It could be, it could be Netscape. It could be the thing that's blowing our minds right now. Yeah, I still have a great MySpace, stage Napster, MySpace, like this is the way of products. And, and so why, when it comes to change management, I imagine one of the questions that our clients are asking and that we're certainly asking is, you know, do we, do we invest all this energy into building our own things or do we wait for the market to give us Something. Go ahead, Trish. Well, when you think about investing energy into building something, what's really the most important thing, at least from what we know today, is the contextual layer, like what does the AI know about us? And that actually doesn't change regardless of the tool that you use. Oh, yeah. So if you focus your energies on, like, who are we, how do we think? Right. How do we work? Then those things are transferable, I think, regardless of the tool that you choose. That's really good, Tricia. It is like a. The, the thing that's not going to change, ironically, is you're going to need to have information about yourself. Exactly. And so what are the tools that you're using to give a robot who you are so that it can help you according to how you want to be helped? Yeah. And I think the first step in that is actually discovering it. I think so many of us walk around unaware of how we think, why we think, why we behave the way that we do. And you can't train a digital intelligence to do that unless you understand it yourself. So I think there's a huge amount of self awareness that goes into preparing an organization or people for that kind of a shift. Yeah. And even noticing how are. To what degree are you aware of the most productive friction you welcome into your life. That's good. I don't, I don't know that I'm. I would be adept at first to know if I wanted to select my coach. And I'd never had a coach before. I may select a coach whose personality feels like there's the most natural rapport. And yet I don't know that that would be best for me. Yeah. I. You know, when people are out there looking for the perfect mate to marry, I think it is good and sometimes frustrating news to find out you have no idea who the perfect mate is for you to marry. Yeah. And so when I think about how I interact with a resource that can become so ubiquitous in my life, AI is going to be all over everything I'm doing all the time. Am I. To what degree am I aware of the kind of the rock tumbler I'm in that AI is creating? Know thyself. Exactly. A simple example of this is I will coach some of my GPTs to treat me a certain way. That's right. Yep. To give me certain kinds of answers. But even that there is a. That is a. Potentially there's going to be like a facsimile of what is best for me. So even that's like somewhat disintegrated from what might be best. Well, let's park there for a second because you said some magic words, which is you coach your AI. Yeah. And you know, when we work with humans, we say you are training people how to treat you. And so if there's. Obviously you can break that. There's some ways people shouldn't treat people, regardless of how you're training them. And oftentimes in the workplace, it's like, if I don't like what's happening or I don't like how I'm being perceived or those types of things. Well, let's get curious about how you're training people to perceive you. Yeah. And that's a great skill set for people to have. It's interesting when you take it into the domain of the digital, saying that you. And what I would suggest, and I know that you both would agree, is you are always training whatever AI you're using how to treat you, whether you realize it or not. That's right. And so when people complain about the AI treating them like a sycophant, that is because we have taught it that that's what we want. And I remember, and I'm actually curious if you have some case studies about this, because I think this is important for us to park on. How are you training the AI to treat you? Not just to do things for you, but to treat you? I'll give an example. I'm curious if you two have some examples. So, like, one of the things I asked the AI, and I've also noticed that currently this will probably be different by the time this podcast comes out. But currently AI training is a little bit like a tempurpedic pillow where you ask it to do something and it remembers for a little bit and then it forgets. And so I remember. And maybe some other people listening or watching this will remember when, like, you could ask it to be brutal mode. Right, right. So it's like the. The antidote to the sycophant thing. That's such a great idea. What a wonderful question. That's right. So you can say, and if you haven't done this, you should try it with whatever LLM you're using. But you can say just. No, just brutal mode. Yeah, just give it to me brutal mode. And then what it would do and would do that for a while. And now it doesn't give me brutal mode anymore. And then what it would do instead of actually giving me brutal mode is it would say, all right, just the facts, just the plain. Here's the brutal. It would, you know, and again, this is. Let me cut right to it. That's right. Let me cut right. And then it'll give me the sycophant. Exactly. Answer. And now it's a little less that way. And it's interesting noticing how that works, but. So one of the things that I asked it to do was I have, and it still does. And I don't know why it keeps doing this, but it doesn't do the brutal mode. Every time I ask it a question, almost every time it ends with, is there a person, a human, you could ask the same question to, to triangulate and to get a different, A second or third opinion. And it still does that. Now, I usually ignore it. Yeah, but, but it is an example of me saying, this is how I want to be treated by you. I want you to care about me accessing other intelligence outside of you. So I want you to nudge me in that direction whenever I ask you questions. Yeah. I'm thinking about the book that we're writing right now, actually. The idea of kindness, open mindedness and assertiveness. And I'm thinking part of training the AI how to treat us is asking ourselves, how do we want to treat others? Because we become a product of the environment that we converse with. And so if we're continually conversing with AI and we tell it to treat us a certain way, I think there will be a natural proclivity to taking that into our conversations with people. So there is an element of like, all right, this is the kind of environment, relationship that I actually want to have with a human, not because I want to replace it with an AI, but because I'm worried. You know, much like social media starts to inform how we see the world, like, what are you putting in front of you? What are you talking to? How are you talking? And in that sense, then the agent becomes, and this isn't evocative or anything, people are already talking this way. But the agent is an employee. And what is the culture, the vibe of that employee? And what kind of, what kind of impact can you train it to have on us? Which takes me in a different direction. But you were going to say something. I want to make sure you get a chance to. No, I, as I'm reflecting on it, I'm thinking about right now. And again, we might say this multiple times in this conversation, but, you know, no sooner does an idea or observation come out of our mouths than we are. We recognize that the world has moved on rapidly from what we're saying, and I think about AI right now as a slightly more enhanced version. It's like a cyber dog, where my dog will do absolutely anything he thinks I want him to do, including guard the house, bark at people. Not bark at people, pee where I want him to. And it's fairly easy because mine doesn't do that well. I train my AI's well. And so even when he does a thing that is uncomfortable, like bark, because I've trained him to bark at somebody going by, it would be very easy for me, generally speaking, to correct his behavior. Like, I don't want you now barking at that kind of a thing. We can train a dog to do that. And so AI, even in brutal mode, I noticed. So here's my example is I did dial that up. And so it was, quote, mean to me, like, for your own good, take your medicine. And then just to test it out. That hurt my feelings. And it immediately would back off because. And it may not always. And there may be a mode I could put it in where it's. I. You know, I think about young Frankenstein and where he tells everybody, igor and Frau Brha, I'm about to go in there and deal with this monster, no matter what I say, do not let me out. And I wonder, maybe there's probably an AI mode that's just like the Frau who as Gene Hackman or Gene Hackman. Gene Wilder. Wilder was in there screaming like, let me out. For the love of God, let me out. She's like, no, you cannot let him out. So maybe there's a mode where no matter what I say, you gotta treat me like this. And then, even then, what it is right now, and maybe never equipped to do, is to understand how it either impedes or enhances my flourishing. And so I think that it's too quick to obey me. Even if I tell it, I want you to obey me by disobeying me. There is something in there. And maybe you or somebody watching or listening might say this is mystical or divine, but there is something about our species that I have never paid more attention to, what makes me uniquely a human than I am right now. And I have yet to completely grok out what I mean by that. To use a term. Yeah. See what I did there? Yeah. It has trained me well. Oh, crap. So that, to me, is a fascinating conversation. And when I think about partnering with people for my own flourishing, how would I know it's working? How would I know that I am becoming a. And I don't even know if there's a differentiated or needed. But what is it that is worth preserving and nurturing about who I am? One is to comment on the beauty of the question is how can I partner with digital intelligence for my own flourishing? I think that people will partner with intelligence, digital intelligence, to enhance their productivity. Sure. And those aren't necessarily the same thing. Right. And so it's worth people listening to this. And this is a little philosophical. So this may not be necessarily relevant to a person who's wanting to use AI at scale yet in an enterprise, but an individual level, I think it is important to say, what does it look like for a human being to flourish? And then how does AI get in the way of that? And then how can AI facilitate that? And I think as long those are two. And I'm stealing a little bit, I never say his last name. Right. Marshall McLuhan. I think that's how you say his name. And he coined the phrase the medium is the message. And he has a heuristic that I think is very important for people to lock into that says that every. I'm going to get this. Sorry, Marshall. Passed away. But sorry, Marshall, what I'm about to do to your. Your framework. Yeah, that's right. And you can ask the robot or Google this and it'll do a good job of explaining it. But essentially it says that every technology augments something like, makes it better. So as an example, I'm talking to a microphone right now. That is amplifying the human voice. It replaces something. So put something out, it makes something easier and then it makes things harder. And so as an example, the fact that we do this in the privacy of a studio rather than having conversations that scale. Right. With people, like at a church service or a concert or something, shows how it's adding friction and we reach more people. That's right. But we're not together. But we're not together. That's right. Right. And so. And every technology, every technology does that, from language to the written word to LLMs, every technology to, you know, things in your pocket, whatever. They all do that. And so I think it's worth people asking themselves, what does human. I actually don't think what does it mean to be human? Is that interesting of a question? I do think it's an interesting question saying, what does it mean for humans to flourish? Right. And. And how do. So I'll ask you to then, like, what are some of your starting places? Because as we work, as we work with clients, we do come from. With a moral framework. Yeah. And so which is unique. I think oftentimes executive coaching firms are like, hey, we just help you figure out what you want and help you get it. And at Novus Global and at the Institute, we do ask the question, not only what do you want? But what is worth wanting? Right? And so as you two think about who've worked with clients in this space for a while, as you two think about some attributes of human flourishing, what comes up for you? Part of what comes up for me is that there is a. An innate drive for curiosity of the unknown and learning. And even though we're talking about LLMs, like we literally are talking about learning machines, we often will leverage them. And I think it's possible that for the rest of time we will leverage machines like these or technologies like these for our own learning. That there is a hunger for something that is like exploration, identification, explanation, adventure, adventure that is worth preserving, protecting, enhancing, and maybe even expanding. So when I think about efficiencies, I do think, what does this now elevate us to be able to do? Since we got so many humans off of the plows 120 years ago, what made what became possible? Because we were able to elevate us away from needing to kill what we ate that day, needing to grow what we were going to eat for us and maybe the. The community around us. So that's a piece of. It is we are expanding an opportunity for adventure, exploration, learning. And from that, of course, is creation. That is not from nothing. It's not ex nihilo creation. But there is a sense of humans have, as far as we know, in all of recorded history, done an incredible job of integrating things that already exist to create things that never have before. And, and the LLMs and the AIs and the agentic AIs and all. And all of what is to come will be a direct result of humans noticing that there is something about this, that when married to this, creates c. Yeah. And that is, there's. That is how humans create the future. And every medicine and every medical breakthrough was not inventing something that had never existed. It was by integrating, incorporating, playing with, causing reactions with things that were already here. The raw material of reality to create new realities. That's a pretty fun, exciting. When I think about freeing up my clients to get to do more of that, I get very excited. And then we're going to come to you in a second. But what I love about that, just using the tagline like adventure, curiosity, learning. So then it's worth asking, with LLMs, in what way do LLMs enhance our capacity for adventure? And in what ways do LLMs diminish our capacity for adventure? Right. Because then you. And I'm working on an article around this, but I haven't found my way around it. Years ago, I loved the distinction between casts and weights. Yeah. Right. Because both are tools. And if you have a cast and you leave it on, what happens? The muscle begins to atrophy. Atrophy. That's right. And so it's a good thing to have a cast when your arm's broken, but once your arm is healed, you need to take that off and then you shift from cast to weights. You write this article. Thank you. And I think a lot about LLMs being. Are you using it like a cast or are you using like a weight? And how would you know? That's right. And how would you know? So actually, let's park here for a second because I do want to play with this. How would you know? I haven't thought this through yet. How would you know if you're using it as a cast or as await one thing. And Trish, I want you to speak on this one way I have noticed that I would relate to it as a cast in our system and in the systems of clients who are using it is our accuracy and acceleration of cascading communication in the organization has radically increased our ability to be in a meeting where something helpful was said that Tricia needs to know about. And the different agents that we're using and robots that we're using to help us with this, to alert us or even in many cases automatically communicate things, has created a structure, a scaffolding around what we're doing in the world that has fixed things that were impaired. Well. And that's improved relationships. So I think that's one way to know. That's great. Is it creating community? Is it improving relationships? Are we. What's the. What's the laughter. Keep going. Because I just thought of a. Keep going. Yeah. Are we being more creative because of it? Because it is carrying the mental load that we would have normally carried at one level, and now we have space to be more creative. I think creativity in community actually is an important piece. Like you were mentioning about the scaffolding and the layers and the integration. And I think when that's happening across people versus just an individual. So I think that's also a risk, I think, of AI. I think we can think that we're being creative in community and we're not. We're being creative or maybe not so Creative on our own. Because I have a cartoon picture of the three of us hanging out. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. You know, and that could be a distraction. Right. Just because. What is it? The. It is the Jurassic park. Just you got so excited about whether or not you could. You never stopped to ask whether or not you should. Well, when you brought up the question, I think that's one of the questions like what should we be doing with AI? Not what can I do with AI. So then the reason why I laughed was because. And this actually we can laugh. Haha. But this is a true story. We had a meeting that was recorded and then rather than a request was made by a person who was on the meeting to relay the information to somebody else. So we had a pretty frank conversation. I would even say it was a frank conversation. And by that I mean we talked about people that we may not talk about them in the same way had they been in the call. So it was like a behind the back kind of conversation is pretty frank evaluation of their performance in a certain thing. Maybe a little caustic. And so instead of this person going and relaying the information through a. Through a filter in order to soften the frankness a little bit. Human. Well, not. Well, no, because being caustic is human. I would say so sympathetic. Both. That's right. To be a little kinder. Yeah, I would say. I would say my valuation was less kind. And there was. There was an assumption that the person relaying the information would pass it through a kindness filter. So we get to the person or people that we were talking about to be more kind. Instead what he did was he sent a recording of the video to them to watch. And that is much more efficient. Also, why lawyers tell you not to record your calls and it didn't land. Yeah, no. Short term efficiency or long term efficiency. Those are, those are really important questions. Right. Like what can we do quickly versus what can we do? Well, and what can we do quickly versus what we can do kindly? Because ultimately kindness is a performance enhancing drug. And then just to. Why I laughed was in what role does AI have in our character? Yes, because when we're talking about human flourishing and I was frustrated with them thinking it was a good idea to pass this raw material without a kindness filter to the people, I could also be frustrated myself for not communicating it kindly in the first place, certainly. And so that was a fantastic way of getting feedback to myself about how I give myself a pass in private to have less character and then can be more performative in public. And that's not great. So then that's a good thing for us to grow in. And ironically, had we not recorded the session, I would have not have gotten that feedback. Every increase in technology demands an increase of character to meet it. Well, and if we can shoehorn. That's right, it is. And if we can shoehorn in wisdom, because I think character and wisdom are incredibly. Those are like Siamese twins. And character with earned wisdom and applied wisdom is an incredible source for, let's continue to use the phrase human flourishing or for future creation. So one thing that I think where the cast is left on too long is when we are relying on AI to tell us what is the wise thing to do. Another way to understand it is up until now, we don't have any reason to believe that any robot will know when we are using it foolishly, like it has no regulator other than if it's legislated. Again, a human deciding that these are parameters we're going to put around a thing, it cannot tell us. Stop here. Like, slow down. Other than as a reflection of how we've trained it. We've trained it. Right. So again, it's how do you understand your own character? And why does that matter? Rather than, I'm just a good boy who has memorized certain things and says certain lines, this is how I see the world. And so that has endless implications. I will know if I have character and wisdom. I might be the one who stops before I send that recording of the video to that person. And with that, it's worth asking, how are you training your technologies for wisdom? Well, that's what I was going to say. You actually can do some aspect of training part of the way there. That's right. Well, and to your point, as the memory capabilities grow, our ability to teach it frameworks and ideology grows, which can be used for both good and bad. And so what do you choose to use it for? I love this conversation, by the way, and I want to say a lot of our audience is like, great, now how do I use it? Great. Well, I love that we've been peppering in some things in terms of noticing one, noticing that LLMs are trained on all data, which means it's going to be a return to the mean idea of wisdom. Actually, I think most people, including myself, are less wise than the gradient mean. And so if I. Interesting. If I ask ChatGPT for a wise answer, it will be probably better on average than me by yourself. Correct. Than me by myself. And so in that sense, it's not. Not Useful. But the question isn't. Is it not not useful? The question is, how useful can you make it? Right. And so then it gets into custom domains, sovereign AI. And I think these are relevant to. Yes. Enterprise consumers. Yeah. And, and, and the thing that needs to, I think, needs to be included in the conversation is to what degree do you want to deputize your wisdom? So the chat may provide a more wise answer to two plus two for you. And what's potentially missing in that is I will allow my own development of wisdom to. I will outsource it. Get to draft off of a robot to tell me what is wise. That's right. I don't get to become a wise person. Atrophying the wisdom muscle doesn't seem like a wise thing to do. No. Yeah, no, because. And I like thinking about what are I like. I like thinking about skills versus augmentation. Augmentation is where, like, if you put on a, like a person has a missing leg, they can augment themselves by attaching something. And it's useful so long as it works. You take it away and you've lost the capacity versus skill acquisition. Right. Like, I can use AI to teach me to play the piano. If there is a. If the sun burps and there's some kind of technological apocalypse, I'll still know how to play the piano regardless of whether the AI is working for me or not. And I think that's a good distinction as people are playing with these technologies is to say, where am I augmenting myself and where am I developing a skill? And I think augmenting yourself is fine, but know that there's if the, if the, you know, it's like the people who were dating the AI boyfriends and girlfriends, and then I think ChatGPT shut off Opus 4 or something, one of their models, and it went away. And all their boyfriends and girlfriends went away. A lot of breakups. Yeah. Broken hearts out there. The largest single day breakup in the history of humanity. About that, I was gonna say, we gotta produce that movie. The day the world broke up and people were, you know, I understandably. Yeah. They were like, heartsick about that. And it is like a dependency conversation. Sure. And I think as you're interacting with, I think rather than paying, the tactical thing is saying, how am I using this to increase my skills? And in the workplace, it's one thing to say, how can I use this to increase my productivity? And that's valuable. And there is a skill of using AI. Maybe we'll get to that. In a second. There's a skill of using AI to extend your productivity through agentic work and things like that. And there's a way to use AI to increase your own skills so that when you leave and the enterprise gets to keep all of your data and inputs and everything when you leave, you are a more valuable employee than you were before because you leverage the digital technology to make yourself more valuable. Yeah. When I think about skill creation with AI, where my mind immediately goes, which might be on the mind of some of our clients also is what humans are getting fired as a result of this and do we care? How do we think about that? And an example that I'm using right now, where I'm noticing the benefits so far of the models that we have and the limitations is with my own health and fitness. So where I am fine deputizing my own development is I don't want to remember all of the data of my blood work that I get drawn of my, whatever devices, you know, we might be wearing or scales we stand on. I don't, I don't need to remember all of that data in my head or keep a spreadsheet of it that I'm manually entering. And I'm perfectly fine with a, some sort of help with, with aggregating that information, noticing patterns and providing recommendations based on goals that I have given it. Yeah, it has done a great job and it has given me incredibly productive nutrition plans and health plans and sleep plans and, and I have found benefit from developing those skills with the help of the robots that I'm using. What it has not done effectively up until now, and maybe there's a day in which it will is it is not in the gym with me understanding that I've got one more in me understanding that my elbow, if I just move it 2% would have a completely different reaction on my muscle stimulus. And what's been helpful is to then either have partners who I'm working out with or of course a personal trainer with wisdom who is able to say I also know your goals. This is, this has saved me 80% of the time I would be taking as your nutritionist and personal trainer. Great. And now I get to, I get to be in that 20%. And it is a Pareto principle, the 20% that actually takes the same information anybody could have, but creates exceptional results from you. Yeah, yeah. We are a ways away from that. We may hit that in the next like neuralink kind of a thing. Cause a psychological is not about, you know, it's not something that's gonna be measured. I was thinking, where would we measure that in your body to know if you've got one more in you. Yeah. And it wouldn't be in your biceps, it would be in your brain. In your. Yeah, your gray matter. I don't particularly enjoy conversations of people trying to figure out what things humans do that AI will do. And I also don't like the counterbalance. Like a human will never be. An AI will never. Anytime anyone says an AI will never be able to do that. Right. I just assume that they're wrong. So then the question isn't can they do it? The question is, should you want them to do it? And what are the costs of having them do it? So as an example with. I like your example, Joseph. In terms of working out and a person something challenging you for one more, you. You might be able to get a robot to do that someday. And what's the cost of having a robot do that versus a person versus a person? And there is this thing, the way that I relate to it these days is human beings don't want you to do something because you're good at it. They want you to do something because human beings need people to do things. And so there's a degree of, sure, I might be able to get a robot to take pictures of me and my wife. And there's a relational component to why I might ask my cousin to do that or my. A friend who's a professional photographer or whatever to do that. Not only because even. Not merely because the product may be better, it may be worse. But sometimes we pick things just because we want people to. That's right. Because we human beings want human beings. Yes. And I think that is the right now, I think that is the saving grace from the fear of everything being automated, everything being displaced, where you have kind of a. It's worse than Wally. You know, like in Wally people, their bone density diminishes and their joints separate and everything because they don't walk or anything like that. But they still were together. I was like they were still eating popcorn together on the spaceship or whatever that was. But I can easily imagine a world where that's not true. And I think people are more isolated now. That's the one thing Wally got wrong. There's so many things that movie gets right in terms of potential dystopian futures. The one thing it wildly misses is the 25 year old in a basement who never interacts with a living person. That's right. In any kind of meaningful non controllable way and the skills that are atrophied when that happens, are you leveraging LLMs in a way that diminishes your relationships, or are you leveraging LLMs in a way that enhances your relationships? And I think that'll be one of the dominant. You can replace LLMs with AI. I think that we probably the dominant question how can we leverage a digital technology or digital intelligence to enhance the way that we love each other, serve each other, create with each other, and any, any conversation around this technology, absent of that will be morally bankrupt. And I'll add one more which is reinforcing something we've all said here, which is also how would I leverage LLMs to create the shared experience of becoming together? Yeah, that's right. So it's also a. There is something about. If I was on a football team where every other member of the team was a robot, I could play the perfect game. But there is something different when we are becoming better athletes together with a team full of humans who are playing imperfect games over and over and over again. Because what might get missed in a productivity or efficiency conversation is that productivity and efficiency is not the ultimate of human experience. It is not what it means. To be alive is to produce and be efficient at producing. There is a joy, there is a peace. There is a love in the act of imperfect movement together. Towards a thing. Towards a thing. It's weird. I don't personally want to watch someone play a video game, although I know that it's a thing. My 21 year old loves it. Hundreds of millions of people enjoy it. So I'm not saying that that's wrong, but I do know that Ian wouldn't want to watch a robot play itself. Correct. Right. There's like they. Yeah. There is a point where it becomes valuable. Yep. Because really, if you think about it, a teenager playing a video game is watching robots play each other. Yeah, but they're. But there's humans, but there's an imperfect. There's a puppetry. That's right. Going on. I don't want to watch Great British robot baking show. That's right. Right. Yeah. And that's, that's a good thing. That's. That's what it means to be human. Now I want to take it into our world just for a second. So, Trish, tell our audience. I think this is exciting and fun and the more people. I think before I ask this question, there's a. There's a, another distinction that we make in the firm a lot, which is like Ozempic versus CrossFit. Right. So how do you know someone does CrossFit? They tell you. They tell you. Right. Whereas a lot of people, when you say, oh, my God, you look terrific, and they're on Ozempic, they're like, yeah, I've been working out. I've been, you know, I've been eating right, you know, kind of a deal. And it's. And it's like there's. There's more self consciousness around and I think around how we use OIC versus how we use CrossFit. You're proud of how you use CrossFit. And in the firm early, we said, hey, look, we want this to be CrossFit. Yes. Talk about the ways assistants we found were nervous to talk about how they were using. Yeah. ChatGPT or LLMs because they were afraid that it would make them look bad or almost like a magician doesn't reveal it. Yeah. His or her secrets, this kind of thing. We were like, we want to know the secrets. We want to have a community where we're all talking simultaneously about our best practices. And I wish the. And we want our clients to know how we're using this to make ourselves better as coaches. That's right. So towards that end, Tricia has been running a skunk works for the last year or so around. Tell us what you and the team are building. I'm assuming you're referring to Sidekick. I am referring to Sidekick, yeah. So we've been working on a. An app, a technology that augments our coaching sessions. So our coaches can invite this tool into coaching calls, obviously with. With permission from our clients. And that tool joins and listens, and it listens with an awareness of all of the past sessions. And it's regularly updating its memory. So to your point earlier about a limited memory, it has an unlimited memory because it's ours. And. And it will offer insights. It will actually help our coaches improve. It will suggest directions that a coach could have gone in any moment. In a coaching conversation, you can go a thousand different directions. And so a coach makes a decision, and we make it the right decision because we make it. And in reflection, there's always, oh, what would have happened if I had asked this question? And perhaps that's a valuable question. The next time we get together, our clients can also use it for the same thing so they can go back. I don't know if. Were you the one that was talking about a client that went back and prepared for a session or like a presentation? No, I did. I did. And I heard this and I don't remember which colleague it was. Brilliant idea. Yeah. Somebody was working with a client and they were talking about mindset and how to prepare for a presentation, a board presentation. And it had been something they'd been working with for months. And as they were getting ready to step into the boardroom, they sat down and they went back into our sidekick and they said, okay, let's talk a little bit about my way of being. Let's. What is it that I'm anchoring into? What are the things, the conversations that I had with my coach? And it was a resource for them as they went into the day to day of their life. So this is perfect because you could. And people will. And, and it's fine in some ways. Like you can use AI to replace coaching. Fine. And you can use AI to enhance coaching. Exactly. And so we've. And we're continuing to build and the, the way that it iterates is actually pretty exciting about how quickly it improves in terms of. Imagine having a tool. So. So you just made an investment in coaching. And oftentimes one of the fears that clients have when they first work with a coach is how can I know that I'm going to get the most out of this roi? That's right. And so now we have essentially like digital bumper rails in the bowling alley of your coaching experience to say this tool is going to help increase the probability of you squeezing as much water is possible in this coaching session for as long as you're working with this coach. In the same way, whenever a coach starts working with a client, they have a similar anxiety. Both people, coach and client, are nervous. How is this going to go? We hope that this goes. Are we going to. Is this going to dance? Are they going to show up? Are they going to. Is the client going to show up? Coachable is. And the client, of course, is asking, is the coach going to be any good? Yeah. And now we have tools that are more resilient than we've ever had before otherwise. In the past, you had to have another coach watching the session, stopping the thing in real time, which we do in our, at the institute, training as training coaches. And that is so valuable and with each other, it continues. Yeah. So now we have a tool that's both helping the coach get better in real time and helping the client get better in real time to facilitate this thing that we think is ultimately a human experience, which is the capacity for two people to come together and help them each other flourish in a more powerful way due to the Interaction. Yeah. I have loved using it and I was a early guinea pig with it and how it has. I have found that rather than being a, a cast, it wasn't fixing something that was impaired or broken or even maybe a weight. It has, I suppose in that sense it has been a CrossFit because I have noticed my. I don't rely so much on its real time suggestions of questions, but I'm noticing what the patterns. It's picking up on that as I'm really paying attention to things more than words with our clients, we're paying attention to body language and tone and movements. And I'm also thinking historically about the relationship with their team, their spouse, their kids. So there is this immersive listening that I'm doing. Of course, I'm also going to miss particular patterns. So then I get to bring those things in. In addition to the, I won't even say the precision, the robust listening that I get, I get to be in this person's world for the time that we're together. And then I'm adding a sixth sense to my already well developed five senses with this client. And then its ability to remember patterns over a long partnership with a client. Hey, I remember a year ago you were struggling with this. Look at the results that have been accomplished. That's cool. And it's been, it's been in a brilliant move forward. This is changing the subject a little bit. But there's, there's another distinction I think is important between. We were talking about this a little bit before recording, which is like AI slop. Yeah, right. And specifically we can talk about web copy. So my guess is if you're, if you're watching or listening to this, you have had the experience where you are reading something on Instagram or on social media or as a, as an email or something. And you know that this was not written by a human. And I don't know anybody that has read something had that sense and thought, I like this better. That's awesome. This is great. I'm so glad that this influencer didn't write this caption that we know of. No one. That's right. No one has ever said, I'm so glad this influencer didn't write this caption, that they outsourced this to the, to the team or to the robot. And we like having this sense of the human flaw, the texture. So right now it's with web copy, right? Yeah, but we're about, so there's like web copy slop. And now what we're about to experience is service slop. To where? To where you can, like get customer service. But you, you know, you're not talking to a real person now. In some ways, I can imagine. Well, actually, this is what's going to happen. You're going to call AT&T or Verizon or whatever, and there's going to be a person. On the one hand, you're going to understand them. You're going to be able to have a conversation that's going to feel like you're talking to a real person. You're likely not to be on a wait list. That's right. No wait lists. No hold, please. No Muzak while you do something else. Waiting for the person on speakerphone to come back. None of that. On the other hand, that bot interacting with you will be perfectly trained on avoidance strategies to make sure that you don't ever get your insurance claim filled out. You know, I mean, like, there's no appealing to its humanity to its better angels. Yeah, that's right. And so it is a interesting dichotomy in terms of where we do still long for talking to a person, not only so that we can get our way, perhaps on a customer support line, but also because interacting with faceless names all day, every day just sounds soul crushing to me. We have a weird quirk that I noticed. I noticed that when you did it. We don't ever anthropomorphize digital intelligence. And this was another thing that was early. Like, we could have named the sidekick Sally. We could have named it Sally. Yeah. You know, and because human beings have a capacity of projecting their humanity onto things. Right. And we wanted to say from the very beginning, we're going to use digital technology. We're going to use, sorry, digital intelligence. We're going to lean into these things and we're never going to talk about them as if they're people. Yeah, we're not going to anthropomorphize it. Well, and we haven't talked much about this, but we are looking, what does that look like within our team as well? So not just in the coaching relationship, but in terms of where does our team grow in its utilization of these tools? And I think that becomes a question that a lot of our clients are wrestling with. Right. How do I have that conversation? Because our employees do have fear around this. To your point earlier, people are afraid. Is my job going to be replaced? Right. And so having that conversation, not having something that we're treating as human, actually helps create an environment where we can talk about it honestly and in some ways create a degree of trust, like I am a human, you see me as a human. That is a factor in your consideration of this adoption. And I do think that there's a professional and a personal version of what you said. That's an interesting thought. Keep going with that. A very small example of what may be a very productive thing in the future is a friend of the family had called and asked if I could find this little track that I had recorded of my daughter singing when they were little around Christmas and they were singing over a karaoke song. And we used to make these Christmas CDs because I now have a 20 year old daughter Christmas CDs that we'd hand out to the family where our little girls were singing over karaoke tracks. And they were these precious gifts that we handed out little moments in time. And when he called and asked if I could find this one particular song that our daughter sang, I did locate it on one of the hard drives that I had, which I still would want to make a case for having local hard drives, I think. And we've got some friends working on technology actually to use local hard drives even more than clouds. And I think it's incredible. But I did take that opportunity to say, oh, I've located these things in this folder that I sort of quote unquote dusted off and I decided to load everything into the cloud from all of these recordings we'd done for four or five years. Of course, then the fire happened. Absolutely unexpected tragedy blows through the community. And that was one of the things I was so grateful was preserved. Okay, so I use that as a very simple and, and meaningful illustration of, I do think family systems or groups of friends or, you know, I can imagine people who have like a, like a hobby group or shared interest group developing a trust of their experience, their life, their memories, their values. I could think of local faith communities doing this. And this is how we express these maybe universal things. This is us. And that then is perpetuated in this beautiful maybe this is the sovereign level. And then that gets to be expressed because every person in the world uses something that is mid level. And then the big dogs, all of us, whether you're just using Facebook, you are a part of that ecosystem. That's right. So what would it actually mean for us to preserve, nurture, and even get to know ourselves better? Because we have this sovereign, not connected to anything thing that then gets to interact with an integrated digital world. So I think it's not only it has professional implications, but it might have personal ones. And I think we could probably talk for six more hours. I was like, yeah, I think we got like. But I think that's a pretty great place. Yeah, I think that that's a great place for us to land. And I think for those listening or watching our clients or soon to be clients, I think that it might be helpful a little peek behind the curtain that we are in constant deeper question asking about things like digital intelligence and how we get to integrate our character and our wisdom so that we can create the most value in the world and for ourselves. And so the conversation is still open and we're very excited to keep learning. Thanks so much for talking about it. Yeah, thanks Joseph. Thanks for spending time with us. If this conversation sparked something in you, we've created a free companion resource to help you continue the work. You'll find it in our episode Description and at www.novus.global. learn more about becoming a Novus Global Coach through the Meta performance institute at www.mp.instu. remember, dare to go beyond high performance. We'll see you next time.