The AI Lessons That Will Change How You Operate

24:16Also, I'm exhausted. Like you want me to constantly remind the AI system who I am and what my background is? No, I have one document that says these are Ali's 2026 goals. Now, I might consistently update that document maybe once every quarter or something. But now if I'm developing a new productivity system, you know, I have like a morning briefing where every single morning I get a download of my calendar. All right. Well, Ali, we are going to, first of all, You just said two things that for everyone listening to Aspire, they're just, wait a minute, morning briefing and you spoke about goals.

24:51We're coming back there. But before we move on, what I want people to understand, because I think that there are just so many, and I'm not going to call them tools, systems, whatever they are right out there, from chat to Gemini to Grok to perplexity, like, you know, Claude, on and on and on. People don't know what to use for what. And so when you are thinking about what tool or what platforms you use for each thing, like how are you contextualizing that? And should we all be using more than one thing? Because something that, you know, I think we've all heard is the more you use it, the more it understands you, the better and more nuanced the information you get out.

25:25So how are you thinking about that? So the more that you use one, I'll just say like master tool. So that's kind of the ChatwT, Claude Gemini. It's like these everything machines that have coding and images and conversation back and forth and the ability to create spreadsheets and revenue models. All of those large tools, let's just say, large systems can help you and are building up memory on you. So for pretty much everyone, I'm going to say, pick one master tool that you just like the style of response of. And so some people are going to pick Claude, some people are going to pick Chachi Biti, et cetera.

25:59But just pick one that you can anchor a lot of your experiences around. you're going to connect it into a lot of other systems. So my Claude, my ChatGPT, all of those are connected into my Gmail, into my Google Calendar, into my Notion. So you're giving full visibility to those systems to connect into everything else that you use every day. And you recommend that people actually do that. Assuming that you don't work in extremely high... You're not working for MI5, it's like you're good. Yeah, exactly. And if you are, talk to me because it sounds pretty cool and I want to learn more. I think like if it's very high risk, be smart about it.

26:34But for the most part, we have thousands of really top enterprises making those connections and they're opting out of data sharing. So what are the benefits of you attaching like your email to whatever system it is that you're using for AI the most? So just like we talked about with context hunting, you want that context to be updated in real time. So the ability for me to say like, hey, can you go ahead and look at my recent two weeks of email? Can you come back with like what you think my energy score is? And based on that, can you figure out whether I should take a vacation next week or four weeks after?

27:10And you can look at my upcoming calendar to see how feasible that is. Like that sort of visibility into how your whole business or whole life is happening. That's definitely one. You know, I know a guy that set up an entire app that just gives him. He calls it Family OS. and it just gives him a readout for his like kids, his wife. It tells him like all the emails that he got from his school. It uses the shared calendar. And so, but it just puts it all in one place. Yeah. I do it for the school emails because I'm famous for not reading school emails. And I tend to sit there on a Sunday and scroll through and try to get the gist of it.

27:44So now it's like I bundle together the whole week's school emails. And I'm like, tell me anything I need to know. And it's actually amazing at just summarizing that. And I'm like, maybe the school should have done that for me. Can I ask you, do you have like a modality or a cheat code that you use to kind of approach every interaction that you have with AI? A very important thing that is like making me stay humble is that AI is a lot better at coming up with its own prompts and at coming up with its own reasoning steps than I am at telling it. So you asked about metaprompting. I am very infrequently going to a system and say, do this exact thing because I have done it the last way for 20 years and you will copy me.

28:29Just assume that you're wrong. Assume that you're doing something inefficiently. Assume that it's not as good as it could be. And so you're going to go to these systems and say, listen, here's the general thing I want to do. Help me help you figure out how to get this done. So that interview mode, that is a very common first step. And I'm 99 % of the time right now, and maybe it'll change by the time this comes out. I'm using Claude Code for 99 % of my work. And so just the ability to talk back and forth and then for me to say, okay, go solve that. Show me what it would look like to go solve that.

29:04I can, in the span of an hour, start to get a prototype of like whatever it is that solves my problem. Just ask it to be your co-pilot on these problems and like really treat it as a first class employee. Like don't treat it as this little thing to hide in the corner. Imagine if it was a supportive mechanism for your entire team, your entire business and put too much responsibility on it. Put too much onus on it and see what it comes back with. Like really truly try and break it. That is such an interesting way to even think about it. And I never thought about that before. This is the one thing in your life that you can totally overload without any sense of guilt, any worry.

29:52You're like, this is just a resource that is at your disposal and there's no limit, essentially. Totally. And there are, you know, risk scenarios, right? It could, there's data privacy concerns. So obviously you want to be safe on that. You could run out of your tokens and it'll say, sorry, you know, come back in four hours when I have more brain power. It could give you maybe the wrong answer, not the best answer, but I am pushing back going, are you sure that's the right answer? I even, this is going to get really weird, but if I solved it with one AI and I get this perfect outcome and I go, ah, this is the plan.

30:25This is how I'm going to do my daily competitive research. Anyone would normally just launch that thing. No, you've got to go over to the other one. I'm going to go to a second AI and go, hey, can you judge the hell out of this? And I'm going to say, can you check it for this? Can you check it for this? And I will have these AI systems battle to make sure that they've been tested to improve. 100%. I do exactly the same thing. I think especially when you are feeding information in, like financial information or data, to then look at like multiple systems and see what they give you back is pretty interesting, actually.

31:00And I, so I do a lot of revenue modeling. I do a lot of forecasting. You can say, I want you to, this is now going to be very advanced, but again, every single person can do this. You can say, spin up four different agents. You're just literally in natural language. There's no coding. Hey, spin up four agents. I want you to build out this model. In one method, I want you to go and research and find best in class for McKinsey. In the second one, I want you to find best in class, Mr. Beast. Third, I want you to find best in class, Emma Greed. And fourth, I just want you to pretend like you're my mom and you're scared of, you know, high risk and do it from that angle.

31:35Me, your mom, Mr. Beast and Mackenzie. I mean, it's a motley crew. Let's go. And then you have these four answers. And again, you couldn't do that five years ago because we just didn't have the time. And now I can run any single highly critical business task by like 10 different personalities and in the span of 20 minutes make it 2x 5x more robust so like i'm all for productivity i think productivity is great i think if we didn't have productivity no one would be using this thing right but creating higher quality work work that's been seen by more second set of eyes like that is where ai really shines i feel like we've all had that moment where we've seen something or we've read something or we hear something that we just know is AI generated and we immediately kind of get this feeling like it really bothers people.

32:27And I wonder what you think about that. That's a super intentional thought. I love that. I too feel icky when I read it. And I'll say I feel ickier in really human situations. So if I'm talking to a therapist, let's say, and they're very clearly reading off their screen, wow, oh, comma, Allie, comma. That sounds really difficult. The landscape of what you're dealing with. I'm like, ugh. You're like, come on. I mean, there was one so disturbing circulating online the other day, the priest that was very clearly giving this sermon and then they read out the end of the prompt. It's not just a sermon.

33:04It's a reinvention. Would you like another version? And I was like, no, she didn't say that. You know, that just is horrifying, right? People are using it for wedding vows. People are using it for things that I wouldn't. And so I think it's fine using it for things like, I don't know, Google ads or something that just feels lower risk. And by the way, there might be some businesses that say, I want to show up authentically no matter what. But people are using AI to, you know, transcribe their podcast to be able to turn it into helpful transcripts. They're turning their newsletters into audio overviews.

33:36There's a lot of accessibility gains from it. But if the actual core writing, if the first draft was written by AI, yeah, it's low quality. The best thing that people can do is take their own first pass and then have AI do some of the review, do some of the poking and prodding and review it from five different points of view and try and, you know, twist it and figure out what's going wrong. But we are best off if we are still the first draft. I couldn't agree with you more. I think that there is some stuff that you just can't AI your way to, right? Like having a taste level. Like there is so much within the world of podcasting that we use AI tools for.

34:17But at the end of the day, it's like the guests are who I want to speak to, right? There has to be a taste level and there has to be an energy and there has to be a connection and a level of interest. And that stuff is all innately human. Like you can't fake that piece of it. And also you would have a way worse interview if you were hitting me with AI generated questions. People think about just the one-off moment of like, oh, I wrote my email faster and I got it out. But they kind of forget about the domino effect. Like maybe you lose trust with one of your customers. Maybe that person that was going to share your newsletter to 10 family members isn't going to.

34:54And so people are so caught up in that first short-term gain that they're missing the long-term play of like what it means to build a business in the AI age. And is that all just very personal? Like how are you drawing lines? How do you speak to both individuals and companies about where you draw that line? So everyone has their own point of view. And it's definitely a spectrum. For me, writing your wedding vows with AI, I would say no, unless you're getting married to an AI, then they probably love it. I think every single business has their own corporate values. And so if you are an entrepreneur, like really take a step back without AI and start to ask yourself, like, what are the core values of my business?

35:32and then think about how does that interact with or overlap with or not overlap with AI. The way that we thought about this in our businesses is that there is just, it's almost like the other way around. As opposed to thinking about what AI should do, we think about what should AI not do? What are the places and the spaces that we need to protect? Whether that's creative or it's specific to product design or it's elements of marketing, but it's like these are places where human touch just can't be replicated and then everything else should be AI. That's a really fantastic approach. The extra layer that I want to add on and again I work with fortune 500 companies private financial institutions startups what I want to also advocate for is to review your rules.

36:17There might be a reason that you didn't use it it might be because AI performed too poorly on that task and you come back six months later or a year later and suddenly AI would have been a massive help in that space. You have to maintain flexibility. You have to have people on your team that are willing to have that open mind. You know, one thing that we don't use it for is like writing client thank yous. That's just, it still would feel very weird to have AI write that. I want to talk to you a bit about trust because for so many people, the question is not necessarily about the appetite for usage.

36:48Is the information I'm getting correct? Can I trust this information? So how do you think about that right now? A couple of things. One, we talked about having multiple AIs weigh in on things. And I know that sounds like you're multiplying the errors, but actually you are reducing it as long as they're not in the same room. Right, because you're looking for the similarities, you're looking for where there's differences, and you're actually saying, okay, what is my experience telling me? And by the way, so I've worked at IBM, I've worked at Amazon. When I was at IBM and we had to have people label images to say, you know, what's in this image, what's in this image?

37:22What we learned was that to make it go a lot faster, instead of checking every single image, you could just give that same image to five different people. And if four out of the five agreed, right, just like those recaptures, like where's the bicycle? Yes. If a whole lot of people agree, you should feel pretty confident that that is, you know, directionally accurate. Start using it with things that you know very, very well. To get a sense of that bullshit. And anchor it to grounded data. Like give it access to the internet. Give it context documents. That's always going to improve it. The majority of errors that people show me where they go, see, Ali, I knew it.

37:56AI doesn't know anything. I open it up and I go, it didn't browse the Internet. You're asking it a question about like the Mario movie and it's giving you, you know, answers based on data from 2024. Of course, it's just making stuff up. That is one. And then the last tip is going back to it and saying, no, I found an error. Even if you didn't find anything and just saying, no, a lot of this is wrong. Go and read through it again. and just kind of poking and prodding and not settling for a first go is also going to be super helpful. But you're right. The hallucination rate is still, you know, it's very low.

38:27It's under 1%, but it's enough that on very high risk things, I am poking and prodding too. You have to. What do you think is the most common way that you see really smart people misuse AI? Misuse AI? Yeah. Almost like the biggest mistakes that you see people make when they're trying to use AI really productively. Definitely using it for the first draft of things tends to lead to over-reliance. I think that is great advice, by the way. Having the first draft be you and something that you came up with and then getting AI to critique and go back and make it better. It's like, that's just to me a no-brainer.

39:03It should be the starting point of everything. The number of executives who are making so much money, they come to me and they ask about their kids and they're worried about their high school kid just using Chachipiti or Claude or whatever to just cheat and write their essay. There was a study out of MIT done that basically if you had AI write your essay, even if you then wrote your own essay, the originality, the creativity, the brain activity that second time around, even though you are only using your own brain and fingers, was worse. If those two were switched, if you worked on your own, you're in your own world and saying, ooh, this is the perfect essay.

39:38And then you wrote with AI. It was completely flopped. Brain activity went up, creativity went up, and it was even better than not using AI at all. Wow. I mean, that's just all you need to hear, isn't it? Yeah. Over-reliance is one of the biggest fears. If I'm talking to anyone under 30, right, people who maybe haven't yet developed their really deep expertise in a field, like someone who has worked for 10, 20, 30 years in of field, over-reliance might lead to being less valuable in the workforce. So people just need to rewind that and listen again, because that is such an important starting point because none of us want to lose what it is that makes us great conversationalists or what like inspires our learning.

40:22We don't want to dumb ourselves down. We want to use this tool to lift ourselves up. And so that starting point is really, really, really important. So for people that run businesses, whether it's like a company, it's a side hustle, creative practice, whatever it is, I want to ask you, like, what's the sort of highest impact starting point? If you're starting something, you're like, you know, in the early throes of a business, what should people be thinking about? The first thing that I'm going to say to do, which does not have immediate value, but is a lot of like measure twice, cut 800 times, is you have to write up a context doc on your business.

40:57Maybe you have AI interview you, whatever. But I want an entire document. Mine is about 500 lines. All right, talk to me. What is a context, Doc? What are we doing? Just like a description. So for you, you might have one on Skims. You might have one on Aspire. You might have one on Good American. What's going in the concept, Doc? It literally is like, here's what we do. This is what we sell. This is where we sell it. This is what we price it at. These are our customers. Are you AI? Yeah, this is great. That is literally what it is. It's like, here's our business and here's how it works. things that are not written down, things that are not codified anywhere.

41:30So maybe your pricing, maybe what you sell all over your SKUs, those are on your website. Give me the behind the scenes, what I don't know. Like tell me your struggles. Hey, we've tried to hire five different growth marketing people. Here's why it didn't work. Here's why my team is 100 people instead of 20. Whatever the thing is, you wanna give things that are not written down. Or else I would just say, go onto the SKIMS website and pull stuff down. So things like, here's what I've struggled with, or I've tried three times to run a conference and here's why it didn't go well, or I've always wanted to expand into Asia, but here's the three things that are holding me back.

42:05Things that you've never written down, things that if you were talking to an executive coach and they pulled out, they unearthed these questions of like the deep-seated feelings, what would that say? That's how these docs get to be pretty long. So again, 500 lines. Yours is 500 lines? Yeah, but AI wrote the vast majority. I was on my tread desk walking and just like la la la talking. Shutting away. Having another 45-minute conversation with AI. I feel like there's like a through line in your life. You're doing a lot of long conversations. Yeah. But that is what people are not maybe doing. Do you think?

42:38Like we're giving like really pissy, short-ass prompts. And you are sitting there giving the full kit and caboodle background, everything that's in your head, everything that happened, why it happened, full context, that is creating a document. You're feeding that to AI and then you're using it, that background to solve all the problems. There are times where I don't do that, right? If it's like, write me a baseline NDA and put it between me and Johnny Smith. But if it is make me a PowerPoint that is going to impress every VC that I walk in front of and I give it three sentences that says I'm, you know, one of the best AI advisors in the world, go.

43:15Are you joking me? Like, what do you think it's going to do? There was a research paper done that basically said the people who are really good at their job without AI are not necessarily the same ones who are good at their job with AI. And they studied these two groups of people and they figured out that one thing separates the two. What is AI theory of mind? So can you picture yourself in the AI's, you know, shoes? Can you picture yourself in there and go, what would the AI agent need if it were trying to make the VC deck, if it were trying to make an entire financial statement, make an entire hiring and growth plan for the next year.

43:53How amazing is that to think about? So you could be sitting there right now in a job where you're struggling, where you're not the number one golden, you know, employee of the company, and you could have this complete turnaround because you figure out how to utilize AI properly. The playbook is being rewritten. if you are someone that has been overlooked, if you are someone who for the last three promotions, someone's like, you're good, but sometimes you pay too much attention to all the other departments around you. You don't go deep enough. Oh my God, a generalist with AI on that? Like there's so much that can be done.

44:30Amazing. So, so, so much, yeah. God, I feel like that must just be so satisfying for people to hear because I think the prevailing wisdom that's out there right now is that AI is scary and AI is coming to get you. And if you don't know it, you're never going to know it. And you're saying the absolute opposite. This is a tool that can supercharge even if you are not somebody who's like really thriving in your professional life right now. I want to both say the scary things and say, yes, it can amplify you. This is how I'm wired. But whether you're an optimist or a pessimist or whatever, the fact that you're afraid is not the same thing as feeling stuck, right?

45:09Taking one small step in the direction, like that is still movement. And so I meet a lot of people who are afraid and I go, that doesn't mean you can't do something about it. Learning how to use these tools, again, figuring out a Claude Code codec sort of thing, scheduling one thing to run automatically. Like I'm happy to walk you through just like a little bit of an AI first work week that I have. Give me an AI first work week. So in all of these tools, including by the way, in just normal ChatGPT or Claude Cowork, you can schedule things to happen. So let's say that every single Monday, you're on a hunt or your team is on a hunt trying to figure out what new podcast guests should we have.

45:50And so maybe the first step is looking at things that are trending and then within that, experts that are in those fields. So if you knew that AI was trending, you would look up experts, you would find whoever. Yeah, maybe. Perfect. That sort of thing. Why do you have to kick that off? Why are you the first domino? you know it's going to happen every single Monday morning. That should run without you. So I have my morning briefing scheduled for me every single morning at 7 a.m. And again, going back to these context docs, I don't just say summarize my emails because who cares? Like I could have a human do that for me.

46:23The reason I want AI involved in this because I want to take in a million things of context that a human just wouldn't have time for. So I'm not just summarizing my emails. I'm summarizing my emails and maybe pre-drafting some replies. I'm pulling in my calendar and it's giving me a sentence description of everyone I'm about to meet with. Or it's pre-making some of the decks that I have to present. Or because I feel like I have no social life in New York, it's finding me things to do in New York that night that I can book last minute tickets for that are aligned with the types of things that I want to do.

46:57And then even after that, it is going through all these things that are working on my list. and it has the 2026 goals of what I want to get done. And every single day, it's giving me two things to say, you gotta hit your weekly goal of this and this. And it's like a double check of alignment. The theme for my year is alignment. I wanna make sure that the actions that I'm taking are aligned to the type of impact that I wanna make on this world. I wanna teach a billion people how to use AI. If I am stuck responding to emails about support tickets, am I doing the thing that I need to do? And so this AI is calling me out.

47:31but it can only do that because it's connected to these systems. It has that goal document. And I could have done this on my own but I am reallocating my deep intelligence and expertise and trust and authenticity into client conversations, into one-on-one conversations instead of summarizing my own calendar.

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50:14I constantly talk to people about going after your goals and writing them down and then saying no to everything that isn't getting you closer to your goals. But then there is this struggle of prioritization, everything else that's happening in your life, a bad hair day, like a migraine, like whatever it might be. What you're talking about here is so incredible because what you're doing is taking all of the thinking piece out of it. Like I have to do this. Okay. The prioritization. You're actually delegating so much of the decision making so that you're freeing your brain and you're freeing your energy to actually focus in on the things that are going to move the needle, the things that are going to get you closer to your goals.

50:57It's also, I'm a people pleaser. Oh, not me, babes. I'm sure you should have an entire episode just dedicated to - Listen, with you and your automations, me and my lack of people pleasing, we can take over the world. I think at my core, I want to help everyone. It's a lovely trait, by the way. Oh, of course. It's better to be, it's almost better and nicer to be a people pleaser. It will do. But I think what AI gives me the second look into is really calling into question whether helping everyone means helping people in the right way. Yeah. And you getting to this goal of reaching a billion people, because if every time you please somebody, you could actually see what it subtracts from what you're trying to do.

51:36Exactly. You would think about it differently, but you don't have that. And so the AI is actually helping you be so much better at getting to what it is that you wanted to do. It's this like maintenance system. And I find myself staying more on track because I'm not delegating large thinking. I'm delegating these mini moments so that my brain can be reallocated to the best work that I can do. And almost like, and I hate to kind of be the spiritual person that, you know, is in the room, but it's like those menial small tasks are not the highest and best use of your time. So you are actually elevating your entire self by being able to put your goals right at the top of your list and then actually get to them.

52:20And I also want to call out a lot of people, and I've met them, are really proud of the work that they're able to complete on what I would think of as, you know, tasks that I can help with. Their work identity is based on these tasks. They go, I'm the best person at reviewing our blog posts, whatever the thing is. I'm the best person there is. And it's really hard to come to terms with the fact that AI might be better at that task now. And so like, yes, I agree with every single thing we've said for the last hour and a half, whatever. But I still want to acknowledge that there are going to be people where it takes them several months to walk away from some of those tasks because you're going to be very good at that task.

52:58You've probably done that task for years. Everyone praises you for being great at that task. And I'm still telling you to walk away from that task Every time I've left something that I have been really good at, I've kind of opened up new pathways and new things for me and grown and stretched myself and become more confident and more resilient. Because as humans, like human nature is that we have to progress, right? And so if you stay in that place of comfort for too long, you end up getting stuck. And I think that I speak to so many people who are frankly really good at their jobs, but they're bored.

53:34They're not challenged. And so I would try to reframe that and think about how you can supercharge the job that you're in and almost like shift what it is that you're good at in a new direction. Right. There's so many different ways that you can think about this. And as an optimist, I would be like, let's go 10. Like, let's go in and see what you can shift and see what you can change, because that's going to be really life altering. And I think in the best ways. Forget like just the professional part of this. if you think about growth as a human, there's some really good stuff here. Yes. Some really good stuff here.

54:07I talked to like one of the best exec coaches in the world, bestseller or whatever. And I said, what is the number one thing that you keep coming back to in all these conversations? And they basically said that for all of these execs that they advise and help with, that the vast majority of them leave their roles or pivot out of their roles too late. That when they feel like they are finally ready, they look back on it two years later, they go, why didn't I do it six months earlier? Yeah, I wasted. And that when you leave at the right time, it feels like you left too early. And only in hindsight do you go, oh my God, I needed that discomfort.

54:38Yeah. I would do the same thing with AI. If you feel like right now is a little too early to pivot your role, a little too early to walk away from that task, again, not 80 % early, but 30 % early, that means it's the right time. It's the right time. Let's talk about something important because I feel like there's such a growing concern and a conversation about women being left behind when it comes to the conversation in AI. I'd really like to understand what are you seeing and what does that gap look like? We talked about this a little earlier, which is around gatekeeping. And gatekeeping is a powerful drug and a lot of people are using it in AI.

55:16And you realize that when you use some of these platforms and systems and you build out, you know, a chief of staff that's working on your behalf and flagging things to you, you realize that you are gaining 10x on that task. Why would you tell anyone about that if you are gaining all of that value? So what I'm seeing a lot, especially right now, is uneven leverage because these early adopters are largely men, because a lot of them are engineers, a lot of them come out. They're not opening up the pathways for women. Right. Sorry. A lot of like women have higher, these are scientific studies. In 75 countries studied, women outperformed men on verbal ability in all 75.

55:58Women go to therapy more than men, journal more than men, which helps with that goal-oriented stuff that we were talking about. Higher empathy than men, again, might help with some of that, how to work back and forth with AI. Women have the skill sets in spades, especially because of how we work with AI agents today. But these systems are being adopted by largely technical young men. And because of the power of leverage and gatekeeping as a result, you might just not see these stories being told because they're getting done in private group texts. And so you kind of have to acknowledge that there are going to be people who are going to keep all of their cards close to their chest and that they're disincentivized to share this information with you and that you have to work twice as hard to grab and find that information.

56:45It's one of the reasons that I post online all the time. All the time. No, and I see that from you. You post all the time. And listen, this isn't just a reserve of AI, right? That's a bigger, broader business conversation. And you could take the whole of tech. You could take, you know, politics at large and really apply the same type of thought to it. But I want to talk about women specifically and the uptake of AI. Like what's at stake if women don't change the behavior and become more comfortable with using AI? So stats-wise, there's 8 billion people in the world. Something like 1 billion-ish have adopted AI at all.

57:21Out of that, you know, maybe a smaller percent are actually paying for it. And a tiny, tiny percent, less than one one-thousandth of the world, are using some of these agentic tools like Cloud Code or Codex. So it's somewhere between like 2 and 10 million people out of a base of 8 billion. Wow. A lot of people look at that number and they go, oh, I have so much time. It's only, you know, 0.1%. Fine. I'm good. What I want to share with the world, having seen the inside of companies that are leveraging this, the inside of solopreneur shops that are leveraging this, is that the power that you get out of using that type of tool is the highest amount of leverage I've ever seen in my entire life compared to any other tech release ever.

58:07So you can look at these numbers and go, oh, I have plenty of time. Or you can look at it and say, oh my God, these 10 million are going to lap us before we even realize what's happening. The businesses of tomorrow that are being made by one person, five people, that needs to be started today. And they're being started with these tools that, again, only a couple million people are even using. And are they being started by women as equally as they're being started by men? No, absolutely not. No, women adopt AI 25 % less than men. Only 25 %? Yeah. You think that that could have been bigger? I think it's bigger.

58:43I think, listen, I only have like a tiny data pool, right? I have a few hundred people that work here and I am, my team will tell you, pretty consistent in asking who's using what. Oh, they're using. But let's be honest, it's like when I get the list from the girls, it's shorter than the list of things that are coming from the boys. Do you also think the quality is different or is it just by number? No, I think it's just about adoption rate. It's just about a level of, and listen, and I think a lot of this is happening socially. If you're a guy in your group chats, in your text chains, in your DMs, you're getting sent stuff, your bros are sharing it, and it's just a different level of socialization.

59:20And for women, perhaps that's not happening so much. And so that's like another one of the million reasons that I wanted you on today, because I think there is so much stuff here that women are going to be able to grasp onto. So long as we like have the conversation, we share the information, not gatekeeping any information. And you do that so beautifully because I read your newsletter that comes on LinkedIn. And honestly, largely, that's where I'm getting like, you know, I'm going to try this. I didn't know that was happening. It will prompt me to read something else that you've linked out to.

59:50It's just that encouragement to be on it. And I guess beyond systemic change, my question is, if you're a woman right now and you're thinking about like, how do I close the gap for myself? What's your suggestion? What should we do today? First, you're reminding me that in my inbox, I am getting DMs. And it's like a very common template, right? Where people are going, my name is XYZ. I am so-and-so years old. Usually it's like older than 30, somewhere between like 35 and 55. I've been using AI every single day. And everyone around me thinks that I am crazy. I agree with you on the socialization, but I have a theory that a lot of people listening to this are using AI a lot, but they're surrounded by people who have no idea what's happening.

1:00:34You might be better off instead of finding the people, you know, that you went to high school with or college with, you might be better off going to like an AI meetup and finding people who are in this space where they go, oh, I understand we're in act two. I understand we're in act three. I understand what is needed from business professionals in this moment and are willing to dive in. So just, you know, thinking about your circle, you should always surround yourself with people that you want to be more like. What is that beautiful quote that I love? You become the average of the people you surround yourself with.

1:01:01So it's like, check out who's around you. By the way, let's go a little weird with that. You are the average of the five people around you. Maybe two of those people are AI. Like, maybe you decide. Oh, one second. You just changed that one for me. Say it with it. Ha! Wait a minute. You're like, just switch a bitch out and bring in an agent. Okay. Really? But maybe you're, like, I'm mostly against AI companions and whatever, but, like, they're amazing. We didn't even get there. As a sparring partner, when we get down to this, you're really thinking about this from a time point of view, right? It's like if you're going to surround yourself with people, then you need to surround yourself with...

1:01:39Do it now. Yeah, do it now. I think AI is making me feel weird about time and that I think time is a construct and no longer exists. But anyways, I think that urgency exists, particularly as it means learning AI. You kind of just touched on it. I feel like there are so many people that use AI for therapy or for companionship. What do you actually make of that? I really want everyone to be able to get the help that they need. And I'm disappointed in our health care system that not everyone has access to that. So on the one hand, I'm like very pro people getting the help that they need. You also have states like New York who are working to ban people asking questions about health into these systems.

1:02:16I think we're at a stage where people are still learning what is right, what is wrong. My bigger worry is with children. I am very loudly against, you know, AI toys without any sort of parent supervision. We're in just like the muddy muck of it. I personally really get concerned about AI as a therapist, but AI as a coach, I think, is a totally different thing. So I think it's a really fine line. What about when, you know, because you just mentioned kids, when we think about AI being so like not, you know, accepted in schools. Like my kids are at a school where AI is absolutely not allowed. They're young.

1:02:55Obviously, they're not of kind of test taking age. But what are your thoughts on that not being an accessible moment for learning in schools for the most part? I think it's a very helpful tool to bring into the classroom when it makes sense. High school age? Yeah, definitely at high school at least. I see people cheating on all of their tests and essays with AI. So my biggest thing that I haven't yet seen from teachers at large is changing the way that they test students because AI is there. So maybe you have, you know, essays being written by AI and then you have your actual students edit and talk about how it's bad or how it sounds like AI.

1:03:34Maybe you do more oral exams. Maybe you do more group projects. There are a lot of ways to test our children and make sure that they're progressing and growing that make more sense in the AI age. That's one of the biggest changes that I want to have happen. And then again, just having that constant thread of, am I teaching over reliance or am I allowing over reliance or have I given people AI access as a system of support? education in general is always a bit behind enterprise. So they're still catching up a bit. Parents, unfortunately, have a lot of burden right now. I would have healthy conversations with your children.

1:04:12I would not advocate for AI as a companion. I would make sure that they are putting down their phone and talking to friends, human friends. But parents are going to have a tough two to five years. How do you think about that in terms of your own AI consumption? Like, because you do this for a living, you've been in it for years, you arguably have an unbelievable understanding of where it's all going, where it's headed. How do you balance that and make sure that you're being healthy, that you're doing other things? Is that even a concern of yours? It is definitely a concern. There are some nights, like, this is, now we're designated, this is a therapy session.

1:04:47There are nights where I am using Cloud Code and I get so go into the thing that I'm building and just the magic of me actually solving my problems. I will all of a sudden look at the clock and it's 530 in the morning. We're in the unhealthy stage of Allie using harnesses to be able to. Thanks for being honest about that because you go in a rabbit hole with these things. Oh yeah. And I go to AI meetups and I'm not alone. It's not like I'm a weirdo. All these people are suffering from sleep issues. And I think it's a variety of things, just AI is not helping. So one is you might find yourself addicted to what you are capable of doing.

1:05:24And that can be a really self-reinforcing thing that you just want to keep going and going. I think one of the best things that you can do, because again, there's always more that you can do, always more that you can build, always hours that you can take out of your sleep. One of the best things you can do is just carve out time to be non-tech. So I have a of friends in AI. There's about seven of us, like, I guess, 11 with partners. And we're renting out a home in a city that none of us live in. And it is a tech-free weekend. And we have like an arts and crafts thing and like a performance hour.

1:05:57I advocate for people proactively blocking this time out to learn AI, yeah, but also proactively blocking out time and breaks. Some of my most creative AI solutions or thoughts or business ideas come from the off times. And you have to give your brain sort of some of these waves or else you're going to just completely burn out.

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1:07:53So before we wrap, a quick reminder that Start With Yourself is available for pre-order and tickets for the live shows are available now. Starting April 15th, we're coming to New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, DC, Boston, Atlanta, and London. Visit emagreed.com for tickets and full tour details. I cannot wait. I love that you have this like giant mission of, you know, like reaching a billion people and turning this idea of like anxiety into agency. Will you talk a little bit more about that and just tell me what that type of progress actually looks like? So a lot of people have anxiety related to AI and a lot of people have anxiety related to all other parts of their life.

1:08:35What I have found is that one of the best solves for anxiety related to AI is actually testing the tool. Like when I really dig into it with people that have anxiety on it, it's because they haven't yet tested at the level. It's like a fear of unknown more than anything. And that once they actually test these systems, they go, oh, my God, I can't do this part of my job at all. Like, what was I worried about? And so I want people to start to reduce anxiety by having at least exposure to it and at least deciding that you hate the tool or you don't want to use the tool after that test. That's a big one.

1:09:06Second is definitely having that kind of group effort toward it and not feeling like you are alone. That is another big common source of anxiety. And then I think the third one is this like identity work that people are having to go through. I've spoken with tons of people, educated millions. Those are the three core sources of anxiety. They all chime very, very true. Yeah. Yeah. That's what you hear from people. Yeah. Which is like, I'm a seller. Now AI is making calls or I'm a marketer, but now AI is managing an 80 country campaign at scale. And a lot of people are having to look inside and go like, what is my role in this future?

1:09:49And the complex answer is that that answer is still being figured out. But the bigger answer and why I talk about agency is because the answer is being figured out and it's being decided by people who are involved. Beautiful. It's like you have to be in it to win it. It's like don't ignore it because that's not going to be helpful at all. When you think about just your biggest challenges and your biggest concerns right now, what are they? As it relates to like my individual work or just as I'm looking at AI? A little bit of both, really. Oh, there are so many challenges. I think like education is still a massive challenge, especially as these new types of systems come out.

1:10:26All of this has kind of happened in the last couple months. So like, how do you manage a multi-agent file system with self-learning capability? That is just a hard thing to bring into the world. Also, cost right now is starting to become an issue. And the way that I think about money and the way that I think about time has literally changed since end of 2022. So I used to think of what is my hourly rate or this is how I should calculate the cost of software and the cost of my time. And we had ways of measuring these things over the course of decades. Right. What is the worth of your hour like your lawyer?

1:11:01Yeah. Or what is the worth of this tool? And I think one of the biggest challenges, and this relates to education, relates to all these other smaller pieces, is what is the value of time in the AI age? Yeah. Because if you're a lawyer. How do you charge for it? Exactly. Oh, yeah. No one listening should be charging by the hour anymore. Like, that should be obvious. That should be dead. I mean, that's not kind of the right. Yeah. That's just like. Charge by outcome. Charge by retainer. Charge by outcome. Yeah. Charge by project. like, I hope my lawyers ain't listening. The shift that's happening, so that's on the time side, and on the money side, people are not looking at these tools going, oh, but it's$20 a month, and I don't know, or$200 a month, or$10 ,000 a month.

1:11:50They're looking at it compared to the outcome and the value that these things can generate. That's why I'm talking about that productivity is kind of a trap. Like, it's obviously important, but the idea that you can have AI help you create a brand new business line. Like, I'll give you this as an enterprise example, but IKEA, they released an AI chatbot that was able to answer 47 % of their questions, and they did not need the humans that they had before. They didn't need all of those humans. So 8 ,500 customer support agents were no longer needed in the customer support role, but they had 8 ,500 people that were crazy smart on the Ikea catalog, which is insane, as you know.

1:12:30And they had always wanted to create an interior design business line. So they re-skilled them into interior designers that were AI supported. And so AI is coaching them in the process. AI is helping generate these new interior designs. And hey, put this tool over here and this table over here. This new business line generated$1.4 billion in the first year. That's crazy. If you hadn't thought about time and money in the new age way, in the outcome and growth and top line type way, you would have never started that business line. Time and money, the way that your parents taught you about it, the way that your accountant's probably thinking about it, it is completely different than it was five years ago.

1:13:14Wow. That's, yeah, I mean, that's insane. Yeah, Einstein was right. Yeah, literally, literally. When you think about your legacy, you personally, and what you're put here to uniquely do, what does that mean to you and what does that look like right now? It's something I'm like always kind of thinking about, always tweaking a little. The North Star is definitely bringing up non-technical, non-coders, business professionals into this age because I think the best work of humanity is done when everyone's involved, not just amazing PhDs in science or incredible software engineers. Like, we need everyone.

1:13:54And so I want to get this into the hands of, you know, a billion business professionals. I just, I see the future of humanity as net better if I can do that. I have had two near-death experiences. And just like every time that I have come out of that, I'm like, this is the time to double down. Like I am dedicating my life to this, even if it means losing a little bit of sleep, even if it means sweating in a podcast room, like even if it means all these things, I have to do it because that is why I'm still alive. I mean, how have we got to all of this time that you've just spent? What happened to you?

1:14:33Like, we're talking about that. What happened to you? I was in a, this sounds weird to be casual about it, but it's like my way of, you know, dealing with it. I was in one terrorist attack. I was in the Boston Marathon bombing. And then I was in a hotel shooting about a year ago. Oh my goodness. But look at me now. All right, we're going to move to rapid fire really quickly. What is the one AI tool that you personally can't live without? Whisperflow, because I'm dictating nonstop. Typing makes me feel like I am a cavewoman. What's the last thing you asked AI to do or answer? I was on a walk this morning and I did ask it to like tell me what tree it was in front of me.

1:15:14But then I asked weird questions and I was like, how many people do you think in all of eternity have climbed trees? And just was like getting to talk to an AI. She is a curious Kathy over here. My head is like that view of the numbers all circulating around. I can literally see it now. It's an outlet for my weirdness. I can see it now. If AI didn't exist, what career would you have pursued? Game show host. Is that weird? I'm like obsessed with game show network. No, I can see it actually. Oh my God. You would have done a great job. I like love trivia. I love the crosswords. My like dad was in the crossword championships.

1:15:48Like we are a games family. I feel like it would be a really complicated game show though. Do you know what I mean? What is a book that changed your perspective? Crucial Conversations, Thinking Fast and Slow, Atomic Habits. Those are probably my top three. You're wonderful. This was absolutely amazing. And I just am so grateful for the work that you're doing, actually. I think it's really, really important. And I think that, yeah, I just, I find you so, I feel like everyone that listens to this podcast needs to follow you, needs to read your newsletter, needs to keep up with what you're saying and what you're teaching.

1:16:25You really are a wonderful teacher. Thank you. Really first class. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you for that human compliment. There you go. Thanks for joining me on the Aspire podcast. For more strategies on how to build the life of your dreams, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

1:16:45If you're loving this podcast, be sure to click follow on your favorite listening platform. While you're there, give us a review and a five-star rating and share an episode you loved with a friend. We'll be so grateful. A Spy with Emma Greed is presented by Odyssey. I'm your host, Emma Greed. Executive producer, Ashley McShann. Derek Brown and me. Our executive producers from Odyssey, Leah Reece-Dennis, Asha Saluja, Lauren LaGrasso. Producer, KK Sublime. Stephen Key is our senior producer. Sound design and engineering by Bill Schultz. Angela Peluso is our booker. Original music by Charles Black.

1:17:21Video production by Evan Cox, Kurt Courtney, Andrew Steele, and Carlos Delgado. Social media by Olivia Homan, Catherine Bale. Special thanks to Brittany Smith, Sydney Ford, my teams at The Lead Company and WME. Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Hilary Schuff, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchinson-Rose, Tim Meekle, Sean Cherry, and Lauren Vieira. If you have questions for me, you can DM me at aspirewithemagreed. Emma Greed. Greed is spelled G-R-E-D-E. That's Aspire, A-S-P-I-R-E, with Emma Greed. Or you can submit a question to me on my website, emmagreed.me. The Bleacher Report app is your destination for sports.

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