When Innovation Becomes An Illusion

This is Jeffrey Matto and welcome to our podcast called Anything and Everything with my partner Dan Sullivan. It's interesting that to me when a major technology arrives and you can go back through history, it rarely arrives as a neutral object. there's some kind of a story around it and it's either you know utopian or devastation and when you look back I think it's interesting because the human behavior around these things doesn't change and the technologies for the most part end up being amplifications of something that already existed and or combination of things that make it have a greater reach. I think AI has some unique characteristics, but not in the way it's being assessed and looked at as either utopian or devastation. And I thought it might be interesting to talk about both the promise of past technologies and what ended up being delivered because it was never one thing or the other. — Mhm. And I thought back to one of the earliest advances was our ability to create and use fire. — Mhm. — Which goes back the furthest of anything that man interacted with, you know, because it was a control of energy, of heat, of how food could be consumed. I mean, there was all kinds of things, you know, with it. So you know I often think of television as you know it entered with two competing narratives. It would be the window on the world uh broadening horizons educating families democratizing knowledge. It would be a vast wasteland turning attention into mush flattening taste and replacing things with passive consumption. And both are true. You know both of those things happen. Oh, by the way, this is anything and everything and we're just demonstrating that right now for you live. And I'm Jeff Matto with my partner Dan Sullivan. — Mhm. — And I thought in our world of anything and everything, — I was timing how long you would take before you realized that we were in the session. — Yeah. Well, and you know, sometimes you want to like set up the action and then hit them with a title. You know, — I think we're living in a similar moment like we had with television with AI. And I'm wondering, first of all, do you agree or disagree with AI as being mostly greeted with one of two extremes? — Yeah. I think the polarization happened quite quickly after Chat GPT. I mean, first of all, AI has been around for several decades, but it wasn't in a consumer form. — I mean, scientists, the military, they've been using AI for, you know, for a couple decades anyway. So, it wasn't the capability as such that was the shocker. It was that it came in a readily available, very accessible consumer form. Because if you went back to October of 22, I don't remember anyone talking about AI. — In December, everybody was Yeah. I think that it was a faster raise in profile. — Yeah. — Than anything we've seen before because everything became about that. — Yeah. Well, that's been true about every latest breakthrough. — It happened. First of all, populations were bigger and communications were more advanced. Electrification happened faster than steam power. You know, the awareness of steam power, but it was in a more consumer available form, electricity was than steam power was. One of the really interesting just to bring up as an example of a technology that changed things in way that wasn't foreseen was that they realized right off the bat in early 1800s that they were going to need steam engineers if this was they weren't available. Steam engineers, people who knew how to work with the steam power and such that it was productive rather than destructive. And what they found out that boys orphanages was an ideal place to get your future storm. And throughout England, all of a sudden they started doing testing with boys who were orphans to see if they had the aptitude to become steam engineers. What are we going to do with our orphan boys? Well

they found one use for them. Because boys had been used already in the military, especially in the Navy, but these were welloff children for the most part. The what they call them, they called them squeakies. Their voices hadn't changed yet, so they were squeaky and they were on board ship. And they were fairly expendable. It was always possible to get new boys on ship. And it's a dangerous place to work as a child. as an adult it was dangerous to work and they would lose them. But just to say that nobody had said when they created the technology where are we going to get the future engineers because they didn't know that they were going to need future engineers when they created the technology. — So technology is not a thing unto itself. It has immediate economic, political and cultural ramifications. The moment you bring something new in, it advantages somebody and disadvantages someone else almost right off the bat or is perceived to. Well, and you brought up something interesting that AI has been around for a while and then just becoming more mass popularized in recent history. The same thing happened with, you know, the computers. Computers were around for a few decades before the personal computer became something that I think was a huge change — in how we interacted with the world. So I think there are those things that have let's call them enterprise or professional application and it may take some years before it becomes to the public. — Mhm. — I mean now you don't need a movie theater necessarily to see a movie. You just watch it at home streamed to your house. Mhm. — I mean, all these things that are the ones that have massive changes. Well, all these things changed, let's call it, host business that they're in and change them, I think, pretty dramatically. — Mhm. — You know, do you remember, I know you didn't have the TV first in your home, but that you went to people's houses and you saw television. Do you remember how you felt when you first saw a TV picture? — Not exactly. I think I adapted to it fairly quickly and I suspect that I was one of the advocates in the family who wanted TV because I had friends who were well off and we would go and we would after school we would drop in and there were afternoon programs that you could see. I certainly remember when Mickey Mouse Club came on that was a big deal. That was around 55 I think. We had just moved from the farm to a small town. Wasn't a city, but it was 10,000 people. But I remember I had a friend and they were prominent entrepreneurs. They were landscapers and their specialty was the landscaping then went with a Ohio turnpike. — You mean to enhance the look of the turnpike or — So everything got landscaped next to the turnpike. You know, there weren't billboards, so they had lawns, especially where the interchanges were. You had the clover leaf like that. Well, that was a vast area that was under grass. And they had one of the contracts for that for certain number of miles of the turnpike. So, they were well off. So, we would go over and watch television. You would have full meal. You would have a Hostess Twinkie, you would have potato chips, and you would have a Pepsi. — Yeah. All the major flavors. It was balanced, you know, different textures. It's so funny with Hostess Twinkies. So, this was the ' 50s and we were at Canyon Ranch 50 years later in the 2000s and we had a meeting with a nutritionist and I don't know how we got on to the topic, but he said, "You know, the neat thing about a Hostess Twinkie," he says, "If you had saved one of the Hostess Twinkies when you were watching the Mickey Mouse Club, didn't eat it, kept it in its package, and you had it now and you brought it in with you to this meeting, if you open it up, it'll be just as fresh as It was in 1955. — Yeah. There's something about the ingredients in that. I'm sure that they would survive a nuclear attack. — Yeah. He said it would be like off the shelf. They said wouldn't lose any taste. If you were satisfied back then, you'd be satisfied today. But, you know, I'm kind of interested in new things, you know. So, I mean, I don't have an inborn negativity. I don't see the dark side of new things. I'm at the point now where I've read enough history to know that when you introduce something new into society, it doesn't change one thing, it changes a hundred things if it becomes popular. And a lot of the uses were unpredicted. — Well, right. I mean, you know, in

business, the television business, money was in selling televisions. — Magnavox. — Yeah, — that was our first television was a Magnavox. — I don't remember what ours was, but I do remember when the television repair guy would come over, which I thought was, you know, interesting with his tool kit. I remember getting close and looking down into the picture tube to see if I could see any more of the picture, which I couldn't. But you know that an example of nobody really knew what the business model was. — Mhm. And then what they did is basically take the business model from print magazines and newspapers and realize that the real money was in selling their audience to advertisers, not in selling TVs. — Mhm. — And you could, you know, make money selling TVs because nobody had them. But it wasn't the growth business and gave advertising a reach it never had before. Mhm. — So there were major shifts in what the business of TV became from what they thought it was going to be initially, which is selling that appliance. — Mhm. — But when we look at AI, there's accelerated learning, pattern recognition, better pharmaceuticals and potential for medical diagnosis and so on. new creative tools and entrepreneurial lever that turns small teams into powerful examples of what that small team can do. And on the other side, there's the concerns about mass scale misinformation, job displacement and unemployment, surveillance, deepening inequality, and an erosion of trust because the notion of seeing is believing with deep fakes and everything else is no longer holds. So I think what makes AI distinctive is something you touched on which is the scale and speed that it hit the general population I think is unprecedented. — Mhm. Yeah. Very much so. — And people that I know in private equity and so on or who were trying to get businesses financed they said you had to stick at the end of your business and then you would get interest. Mhm. — So I think there's that twostory pattern of something you know the uplift story — more access more efficiency more creativity more connection and the decline story distraction manipulation disliking social decay power concentrating in new hands I think reveals a certain structural truth in these things and I think it has more to do with human nature than the actual platform of AI. — Yeah. Well, one of the things that's occurred to me, I think over the last probably the last decade, the extraordinary population growth on the planet, — you know, and I think it was 1940, four years before I was born, the world population was 2. 2 billion, and now it's somewhere, you know, between 8 1/2 and 9. So that's a quadrupling of the world population in 80 years. And along with it was the structures that existed for a 2. 2 billion world population were not up to dealing with four times the population. And there's never been a time in history when you had that sudden explosion of population. Everybody says, you know, we're trying to keep up with technology. And I said, maybe you should look at it from the standpoint is that we're creating new technologies to keep up with the sheer complexity of human interactivity on the planet. That's happened because you have so many more humans. Each gets up every morning with a different idea in mind about what they're going to do for the rest of the day and who they're going to do it with and everything like that. And you know some of the predictions in the 50s there was going to be massive starvation. Paul Erling he's famous for being wrong about everything. He's a professor from Stanford University and I think he's made 50 predictions. None of them have happened. He was predicting global freezing in you know 1950s and 1960s. But this sheer human complexity and then all the empires had been falling apart since the first world war. You know these were sort of discrete units and you know the British Empire, the French had an empire, the Germans Russians had an empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Austrohungarian Empire and they all fell apart within about a 50-year period. And you got all these little nation states, most of whom didn't like each other. So I think there

was a human complexity that happened during our life. I mean we'll never see that growth in population again that we saw just within our lifetime. Yeah. Well, you know, I guess there is a reason that it's the only one that was described as a boom which means explosive growth than our generation the baby boomers. — Yeah. Yeah. I mean that was considered big because it happened in the United States and the United States was economically was the top dog pretty well. The US was about half the world economy when the second world war ended because there had been so much destruction of a lot of the developed countries during the Second World War. The US the mainland never was damaged at all by the war. Well, I think that's why there were such shock waves when 911 happened — and we were no longer impenetrable and the oceans between us and the others wasn't enough to keep them away anymore — because of advances in technology. — Mhm. — So, I think you know, it was interesting. I was talking to an Israeli friend around 911 after, you know, when they were building the monument, there was all the conversations about the memorial, 9/11 memorial. And I met Michael Arad, who was the architect who won the competition and designed the 9/11 memorial. And he said, you know, I want to be clear from the beginning that on one hand, we were dealing with a tremendous tragedy, number of people killed and so on. He said, "But that also created a tremendous opportunity for builders — because there were millions of square feet of office and residential space that had to be rebuilt. " And he said, "Don't think for a minute that people did not recognize those the tremendous financial opportunity that was in front of them. " Yep. — And my Israeli friend said, you know, it's interesting because the United States has the luxury of building a huge monument and new buildings in memoriam of that attack. We're dealing with that all the time. — Yeah. It's really interesting because the distance doesn't discourage anymore. — Well, I think it does. There hasn't been one since 2001. It didn't start something where the US I mean, generally speaking, the two oceans make a big difference. — Well, yes, they do. They do, but they're not insurmountable. — Yeah. This was an asymmetric strategy that worked once. — Yeah. After that, everything clamped down on the transportation system and, you know, flight schools were instructed to kind of be more scrutinizing who your students are. — Yeah. Yeah. You know, not to mention adding locks to the cockpit so that — people couldn't enter it and so on. But, — you know, I think that breakthroughs create capabilities. — They also create breakdowns. — Right. But they create capabilities faster than society can build the norms and the guard rails and the institutions to direct those capabilities responsibly. So these things happen and we don't quite know what to do to establish those guardrails because it's all moving so fast. quickly. — Uh — well speaking of I mean how have you adapted to AI personally? Well, I'm going through a whole lot of different adaptation and the way that I have adapted to it is that because a lot of my work required research in my production work and you know also the book our book but the book I did before that which I didn't use AI for research then because in 2020 it wasn't around I mean 2019. So, you know, I've used it as a research assistant — where I know that I have to be careful and vet the information. — You can't assume that anything I get is accurate until it's been verified. — Mhm. — So, you know, I'm using it in that way. I mean, I think about how God think about when I did, you know, college term papers and stuff like that. God forbid you went to an actual library, you know, to research something. Even the internet made it so much easier — to find things. And I think that, you know, one of the things that AI did that nothing else has done before, which I think makes it distinctive, is it's disrupting cognition, how we process information. And some of it, I think, is really insidious. I mean now when you go to

write an email, there's a suggested response to an email you get where you don't even have to think about it. You can just click on it if you want to be that the — but you know it's and you can summarize previous emails and conversations you've got and all these things which the part that bothers me is it's really hard to opt out of those things and it becomes very everpresent no matter what you're doing. — Yeah. Yeah, mine doesn't do that. So, I never had the experience. I mean, — so don't you have like you have Gmail, right? — I have Gmail, but there's no suggestions on anything. — Maybe there's a way I can because they're like kind of the default. I'd like to figure out and I haven't tried yet. Yeah. — To figure out, you know, because I don't want to see — Well, I adapted that. I was just going to treat emails like they were a letter. Me, too. You'll notice I always start with your name and I sign off, you know, and everything else. You know, I learned how to write letters early in grade school, so I've just stuck with it. And people will compliment me. They say, you know, your emails are like getting a letter from someone. — You know, the one thing I had to cut back is the size of the email that I was sending because I'd send a whole page and I realized that people don't like whole page emails. So you put the larger thing that you want to communicate into a download. So if they want to read it, they can read the download. First of all, I don't get that many emails. I mean, I would say you would be in the top five people over the last three years that I've gotten emails from. — Do I win anything? — Just my continued presence. I respond. — Yeah. Well, the big thing is that I tend not to follow the crowd on anything. — Mhm. — You know, so what's becoming trendy or anything else, the opposite would be interesting to me. Well, in your world, and when I'm talking about your world, not just strategic coach, but Joe's world with Genius Network, Joe Polish, and others, there's I don't know what the percentage of people is, but it's a lot because I get an awful lot of emails about people who are trying to sell you different ways to build your business by using AI and to be more productive successful by using AI and on and on I think you have built a very effective moat around yourself so that you're not bothered with most of that stuff. — Yeah. — But I think there's a lot of the entrepreneurial community which you obviously are dealing with all the time that that's their pursuit. — Mhm. — Well, they think they're obligated. One of the things I've observed that when somebody gets the idea to contact you, does that entail any obligation to you to respond to them? — Interesting you say that. Yeah. Go ahead. — Well, for example, in the simplest form, this isn't technology. It's 7:00 at night and somebody knocks on the front door. Immediately, I know it's not for my benefit. — Uh-huh. They're not doing that for any mutual thing. And Babs will sometimes because it bothers her more than it bothers me. And you know, we don't receive our packages if they're delivery. We have a driveway up and all the delivery service knows that you have to go up the driveway and drop it at the kitchen door if you're, you know, if you're going to do that. But I don't feel obligated to respond unless it's someone I know. And as part of what's going on in my life right now that there's communication back and forth. But for example, even in with my own company with the team members that you know and when we're in the office, we have certain days when everybody's in the office. Nobody would come and knock on my door or interrupt me if we have cafes in both of our Chicago and Toronto offices. We have cafes. They're like 30 to 50 seat cafes because we're on three floors and if you didn't have a cafe, people could go for half a year without seeing each other. And generally everybody's in the cafe. If I'm at a table in the cafe and I'm working, nobody would interrupt me because we've set down some rules that you don't interrupt Dan when he's working, — you know. But the other thing is that if somebody wants my email number, I say, "Here's Becca Miller's email number. If you want to contact me, you can send an email. " And Becca, you know, Becca lives in that world. She loves that

world and she she's very responsive. So the big thing is I was aware that all of a sudden there was this big thing. Everybody's connected to everybody at any time of the day. And I said, "Well, I don't want to live in that world. " But the other thing is it doesn't cost me anything, — right? — That I'm aware of. That I'm aware of, — right? — Other than time. — Yeah. I mean, I don't feel an obligation to answer, you know, if some if it's a real query about the business opportunity or something, we're fine. But most of it is, you know, the equivalent of junk mail. It's just now email junk mail instead of hard copy junk mail trying to sell me something. And I never felt obligated to write back to anybody that sent me junk mail trying to sell me something. And you know at the end of these saying and if you don't wish to receive these unsubscribing does nothing. You don't get unsubscribed. They just keep sending you the crap anyhow. — And I think as part of a I don't think it's bad manners not to respond. I didn't ask you for your query. I did follow up four times. That could be a message in itself if you thought about it that I'm not interested. So don't bother me, but I don't feel like I need to respond. — You know, it's why? Because you sent me something. I have to respond. I didn't request it. — Yeah. — And it's for your good, not mine. But I think that interconnectivity, that 247 connectivity invites those kinds of intrusions. — Well, and the technology companies encourage it. Mhm. — I mean, they're going on the basis that everybody should be available all the time or something. And the other thing is that there's no such thing as privacy anyway, so don't worry about privacy. And I said, well, you know, if you don't tell someone else, it's private. — Mhm. — You know, I have thoughts in my head that I haven't told anybody, so nobody knows about the thoughts in my head. I know that bothers Mark Zuckerberg, but it doesn't bother me. Yeah, I did a Perplexity. That's my AP. For those who don't know, I use Perplexity. I've never been on chat GPT, so I don't really know how it works. I mean, I generally know how it works, but I'm not familiar with that particular form. And I did Perplexity and they said which technologies have had the greatest impact in the last 200 years. And by far railroads was number one economic, political, social, cultural, cultural change. And it changed people's perception of time and distance in a very short period of time. And you know, I study these things. I'm always interested in the past. How did something similar to what's taking place now, how did it play out over several decades that you could say it, you know, for example, the railroads never made money? — Never made money. — As an industry, they've never made money. It's what you could do with railroads that made all the money, — right? Transport goods, service, and people. Same thing with the airline industry as an industry has never made money, but lots of other money-making activities were possible because of the airlines. And I wouldn't be surprised if computers are the same thing. I would say as an entire industry, that means everybody involved in making computers, trying to come up with new computers and that they still haven't made money, but they've enabled enormous money making in other industries. So the big thing I think with AI, it's not the AI companies that you should be looking at. It's what are people doing with AI where they are making money, you know, and that means it's more productive, it's more creative, and it's more profitable. Those are the three indicators that you're moving ahead. And I would say my use of AI for writing has improved enormously in 22 months. You mean the way you write or what? — The way I write, the speed with which I get things done. Oh, yeah. That's phenomenal. One of my quarterly books I laid out in two hours start to finish. I laid out usually it takes me two weeks. — Yeah. And are you happy with the quality that you're getting or have you trained it in your voice and done enough stuff that you like what's coming back? Yeah, there's about 50 prompts built up that customs it, you know, and you know, I have some rules. I only do one thing and then it does something and then I do something and every time I do something, I'm expanding context or I'm introducing new content. But it's very useful for certain things and I I've just done one thing. I haven't tried any other AI programs or applications. I'm strictly

interested in what does it do to writing. — Mhm. Yeah. Well, it's, you know, you can become a house painter or fine artist. It depends on the brush and the material and your ideas and execution and so on. And so, it's a tool that you're using in a particular way. — Mhm. — But I think what's interesting about AI is it's affecting how people design, code, write, coordinate, how you plug it into the workflow to make that workflow more efficient. Some of the ideas we'll be exploring in our book that you've written about is the idea of AI is the backstage — of the casting not hiring of any business. It should be the backstage. It's not the front stage. It should in the ideal world free up the front stage — for those creative pursuits that make it faster, — more creative, and more possible. — Yeah. I think I've told you in some of our podcasts that the clients, especially the ones I don't coach, they'll ask me when they're doing their workshop, but the meal time I make myself available for level one, level two clients, I'm the level three coach, but level one, two, they'll come and they'll have lunch with me. And the last three lunches I had over the last three weeks, the entire conversation for the entire lunch hour was on AI. — Mhm. In what way? — No, they're just asking about AI. You know, they're talking about AI. They're using AI. They're wondering, you know, what's it do to creating teamwork in the future? You know, they're there's a lot of questions, you know, and they're hearing things. This woman asked me the question. She says, "Well, how do you think about AI? " And I said, "Front stage, backstage. " — I said, "If AI is going to have a place in my company, it's going to be backstage. It's not going to be front stage, — right? — Front stage is for humans. Backstage is for technology. " And she said, "Wow, that simplifies things. " So then I gave her several examples of good example of that and bad example of that you know just from my own experience where somebody had let technology interfere with the hospitality that should being provided by humans with a QR code and I said well I don't feel well taken care of with a QR code. I like menus when I go into a restaurant. — Mhm. — But I have noticed about three or four restaurants that were experimenting with QR codes have gone back to paper or laminated or whatever they're using. But it's actually something you can hold in your hands and read and you know ask questions about. And so I think that when a new technology comes along they say we can apply this everywhere but there's push back where certain places like when Google brought out their glasses what was that 15 years ago they brought out the glasses immediately they were banned in every bar and restaurant in San Francisco which is near the center of the technological revolution because you could take pictures with your glasses and they said no there's no picture taking going on in this realm, you know. So my sense is that I believe in Newton's third law for every action there's an opposite and equal reaction. And there are some things where we just said nope you can't. You know I go to Canyon Ranch you can't have a phone except in your room. — Mhm. — You can't be in the restaurant with a phone. You can't be and doing any of the activities with a phone. You have to leave your phone in your room. Well, that's a rule. And people say, "Well, I'm not coming back here again. " I said, 'Well, that's a choice you can make. But I think people are just establishing rules on where technology is allowed and where it won't be allowed. I mean, I think that's true. I think it's also the QR code in the restaurant. I did very informal research where I came across the QR codes. some very nice expensive restaurants. And when they gave me the QR code, I said, I know I'm maybe older than your average customer, but do people actually like having to get their phone out and look at a menu on their phone? And he said, they hate it. — Yeah. — And I said, why are you doing it? He said, we have to, but I think we're going to go off it because you're are far from unique. So many people complain about this, and I don't blame them. And to me as a business person, it's also that does nothing to enhance the hospitality aspect. In fact, it distances me — from it. I've got to bring the tool to decode your menu, you know, and a menu is also a marketing tool. — There's an aesthetic to it, a presentation. It's the story book of the restaurant, — but also it's trial and error. It may seem like a good idea, but it's not

because people don't like it. Yeah. And you know, and I'm sure at Canyon Ranch with the phones, part of their thing is you come here to get away from all that. — So, we don't want people walking down the hallways with their phones, talking loud into their phones and all that. If you're in a room and the door shut, fine. Otherwise, this is not just for you. This is the community we're setting up while you're here. — So, you know, I mean, it's amazing what people can sit. They don't want their rudeness interrupted, you know. I think they sort themselves out over time, you know, — eventually. Yeah, I think so. — Yeah. And we're still in the early days of AI, you know, we're just a little bit beyond 3 years since it started. So, this is I mean, one of the reasons I focus on entrepreneurs is because entrepreneurs based on their success can design all sorts of environments which most people can't — in larger businesses, right? No, it's just a function of how much money you make because you can buy privacy, you can buy time, you can buy service, you can buy all sorts of things. You know, my attitude is people don't like things then change them, you know. — Yeah. I mean, that's a complicated proposition because change doesn't come easily or quickly. — No, I'm saying entrepreneurs with money can change a lot of things really fast. — Yeah. I mean depending on the nature of the investment, the size of the investment and what their stake is in it. — I think that's true. I mean I think that the most important operating principle and we go into this in our book and this is true. This I think is a fundamental thing with AI is human in the loop. You have to have people that are forming that bridge to the front stage. — Mhm. — Where things are fact checked before they're put out there or somehow vetted. And this isn't just for veracity. This is also to the four seasons, not their slogan, but you know what you had talked about many times which you know I really like is you know systematize — they're predictable. — Yes. But you need the human in the loop to be checking things because it's like having an assistant if you don't check their output — and you just put it out there. And the thing about AI is it can sound authoritative but you can't assume that it's correct. Well, I think fast things are magical things. You know, things that happen real fast have a magic to them, but they can be magically wrong. — Right. That's right. — Yeah. That's what I hear you saying. I hear you saying that. I mean, movies are magic because, you know, in the old days anyway, they were individual frames that were just presented to you um you know, in a very fast sequence and looked like they were moving, you know. Yeah. So it was there's a magic to speed but if the magic is meaningless then after a while things that can happen real fast you know it's like 1h hour delivery you know with when prime came in it would be same day delivery or if it was local it could be 3-hour delivery and what they find is not everybody needs it in three hours — right — they don't need three hours like if I got it in a couple days that would be okay. — Well, I was talking to someone sort of a variation on that point is say, you know, I had the most amazing experience. I walked into this place, saw something I like, tried it on, paid for it, and left with it immediately. — Wow. — Yeah. Isn't that amazing? — Wow. Yeah. And it was without a delivery person. — That's correct. Yeah. — And I mean, thank goodness, at least as of yet, Amazon doesn't have drones flying around New York City, but that drone delivery was part of their three. — Yeah. And they're finding enormous Not in my backyard. It's not — I'm sure. — No, I mean, it'll never happen in Toronto. It'll never happen. — Yeah. I don't think that any of the major markets it's going to happen. There's enough people out there with baseball bats or their hunting rifles shooting drones down. — But yeah, there's also the aspect of crime that criminals can follow where the drones are going, right? — You know, if it's dropped, you can send someone up and pick up the package. That's the drones can't take it inside your house. They'll put it on a front porch or something. But you know the fact is that the people who create technology they're doubling down on what their technology can do and they're trying to most of them haven't paid for

themselves. All the research and the development went in. They haven't paid for themselves. So they're a little bit desperate to get a payback for the original investment. And so they create a story that morally you're required to agree with their schedule on how fast the technology could go. And I said, "No, I have no moral obligation to your risk whatsoever. " — Now, — how do you mean that? — Well, some of the big AI companies, the amount of money it's required to get their product out isn't being paid back. — Mhm. — You know, and you know, the stock market is downgrading them. This is not an happy easy time for the big technology firms that see AI as the way of the future. — Yeah. Well, I've been reading some things lately. Morgan Stanley said that there's panic in the investment world and the AI world where people thought this was going to happen way faster than it's actually happened. Yeah. I don't know if anybody is making money at it. You might have made money if you invested and got in and got out or in long-term investment or whatever. I don't know. But I think that there are the human qualities that can't be overlooked. And one of those main qualities is trust. Can you trust the outcome of the efforts? — Yeah. — And I don't think people are going to have a loyalty to AI, but they will a person. — Mhm. — And I think that there are certain things again, it's how you use the tool. — Mhm. — That's going to make the biggest difference. And I think trust is really fragile. — Mhm. I mean the trust that Uber lost because of its CEO lasted for f years — and you know I think that AI is there are certain things it's not good at because the only way they can increase trust is through consistency but trust between humans and trust between a human and a machine are two very different things. — Yeah. Well, I think for example, I get investors Business Daily on weekends and they're strictly an investment newspaper. That's all they talk about. And they were saying that, and this was a conversation that we had yesterday, but Tesla was down 15% over the last year. Their sales were down 15%. — I'm sorry, which sales? — Their sales Tesla's, — right? Yes. — Like the EV sales were down 15%. And if you measured it before the end of September, they were up. The last 3 months, they just dropped enormously because the subsidies and mandates weren't there anymore. — Okay. Everything got cut off on September 30th. So, everybody who was going to buy bought during August and September, and it looked like sales were going way up, but they stopped and fell off a cliff. And they said that it has to be he has to get his money now. he has to go into robots and self-driving cars. You know, they were saying it's a big gamble on their part because it's now that the EV market is now probably going into the future is a niche market. Will they disappear? No, they won't disappear, but they're a niche market. And one of the reasons they haven't gotten the prices down and the other thing is the charging stations haven't gone in. There's no money in charging stations. So, it has to be a government effort to do it. And then you got to make them good for any car if they're going to be used, — right? — Gas stations are good for any car. — Right. — Yeah. But charging stations have been made for particular cars. You know, it takes 3 minutes to fill your car with gas, you know, and everybody knows that. So my sense is that there are people who are big risktakers, you know, I mean their basic operation in life is to be involved in a big risk, — right? — And sometimes the risks pay off don't pay off, but nobody else is obligated to support someone else's risk, — right? Yeah. I mean, if it doesn't fulfill a need or desire that you have. — Yeah. — You know, it's interesting. Earlier we were talking about, you know, I was mentioning the replies that are built into Gmail — and I think that on one hand, you know, you can summarize things faster. You can automate responses. You can standardize a lot of things to make it, you know, all of that quick. The downside is all the bot walls that exist that block real help and degrade the customer experience. I mean, have you ever experienced calling customer service and all the different prompts that you have to go through to get anybody and try getting an actual person from the airlines if there's a question on your — schedule? I think there's a lot of these things that are turning more and more

people off. Mhm. — Now, I can't back that up with data, but I can say that I've read an awful lot about how frustrated people are with those things — and, you know, getting actual customer service and somebody who you can understand. I'm curious to see, you know, in the big wave technology shifts that we are seeing that are happening with the unique proposition of AI, which is the building up of cognitive responses to mimic human beings. — Mhm. — You know, I mean, that's basically what it is. I think that law firms going over cases, finding patterns, all these kinds of things, it can be a very, very powerful tool. What I wonder is, and there's so many conflicting thoughts going on in my head, but I think that things have to be easy to use, but then you can't be lazy about using them in the sense that you can be passing on things that don't reinforce your brand. — Mhm. — That confuse your customers or alienate your customers. — And alienating them is the same thing as never having any human contact with them. I mean, the whole thing that we're about in our book, Casting, hiring, is front stage, backstage. — Mhm. — And the human support that is necessary to be in front of other humans. — Mhm. — No matter what business you're in. — Yeah. — And the agnostic nature of what we're doing is that model has worked for thousands of years. Well, the other thing is that you have enough examples and you gave a lot of them in part one of the book is that anytime someone differentiates themselves with live persontoperson theater, it works. — Mhm. Why do you think it works? — We like people. People like stories. — Mhm. — People like humor. They like unpredictability in human conversation. They like the unpredictability in stories, you know. And I think there's just part of our entire nervous system is that the very fundamental thing that we figure out really fast this is a good situation or this is a bad situation, you know. And I think, you know, I mean, that's just I like this, I don't like it. We walked out of a play, you know, we were in London and we walked out at the interval and we were seated so that two of us were in one row and sitting in front and I stood up and I said, "You know what would feel good right now is a good half hour walk. I would just like to get out and walk. " And everybody looked at me and they said, "Are you thinking what I'm thinking? " And I said, "Yes, I think I'm thinking what you're thinking and everything else. " And we all four of us said, "Let's get out of here. This is terrible. " But what were we picking up on? And part of it is that all of us have a pretty solid background and going to really interesting plays. And somewhere in our brain, there's about five checks of whether this is a good play and this is not a good play. But I don't know if anybody else was leaving, but we were leaving and we just walked out. And one of our friends said, "You know, I've been in that situation 20 times in my life where I didn't walk out of the play or performance or game or whatever it was. " He said, "But I didn't do it. " And I always felt very badly about myself the next day. And I said, "Well, that's a very useful criteria. you just project 24 hours into the future and say, "Do I feel good about myself for not making a decision to leave as a result of that? " But that's sort of a human thing, you know, that's I don't think AI could make a determination of whether to stay or to walk out of the play. — Yeah. Well, I think Yeah. What would that look like if AI walked out of the play? But I think that you know what you're talking about is the nuancing of a decision. — Mhm. — And can you get that kind of nuance around a decision? — Yeah. — And again, I think that if you're the type of person who wants to offload everything into something else, you're putting an awful lot of unfounded trust into the ability of something that you don't yet know can deliver. And I think that's a problem. The other night we're watching this comedian Nate Bargatesy. I don't know if you know who he is. He's very funny, great delivery, and he's been around for a while. I just learned about him maybe two and a half years ago. He's been, you know, he had his first Netflix special in 2019. He's now playing almost like stadiums. And I thought, well, this is interesting. there's probably 8,000 people and it's this one guy walking

around, you know, telling clever, funny stories speaking into a microphone. I thought, wow, that's really interesting because this could have taken place 50 years ago, 80 years ago, — 2,000 years ago. — Yeah. And I thought this is really fascinating because this — Oh, yeah. This guy is really he's gotten very popular and people connect to his humanity and when you see him he's very funny and he's a master at some of these stories that then have a very funny twist or repetition that repeats throughout the evening of his comedy or whatever. And then I think the same thing when I see a singer perform and there are people that spend lots and lots of money to see that performance. — Mhm. Now, there are lots of people who will pay to watch somebody play video games, which I have no comprehension of why anybody would be willing to pay to watch somebody else play a video game. — It's not like you're seeing a sport that — Well, it's not your thing. — It's not. No, — it's not. But it's extremely popular. — Oh, yeah. Well, gaming is now the number one sport in the world. You know, it's in the billions. People who I know watch this. Well, first of all, it's competition. You know, it's happening in the moment and competition is very interesting. It's a very interesting phenomenon. — Yeah. And the people that go know who the competitors are and who they're rooting for. — Yeah. — I understand that. I just find it — Well, it's not your thing. — No. — Yeah. Me either. — Well, — we really went everything this time. Sometimes we emphasize anything, but I think we went everything right now. I think that we did. — Thanks for joining us today on our show, Anything and Everything. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend. For more about me and my work, visit a creativecareer. com and mattosproductions. com. To learn more about Dan and Strategic Coach, visit strategiccoach. com.