Marshall Goldsmith: Empowering Remarkable Lives Through AI

0:00From October 7th to 9th in San Francisco, the Masters of Scale Summit returns. It's where the boldest minds in business, tech, and beyond gather to build the future. And we want you to join us. Hear from the CEO of the New York Times, scientists using cutting-edge technology to find cures, the leader of crypto powerhouse Coinbase, a retired four-star general, and many, many more. They're all on the same stage, and it's not just another conference. It is the gathering for remarkable people. Apply to attend at mastersofscale.com slash remarkable. That's mastersofscale.com slash remarkable.

0:49I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. We are on a mission to make you remarkable. And for his second appearance on this podcast, we have today Marshall Goldsmith. Marshall is basically the top dog, numero uno. Kerry Walsh Jennings, LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali. God, these are all sports analogies. I got to come up with those. Stephen Wolfram, Carol Dweck, Angela Duckworth, all those great goats. Kelly Slater, all goats. He's the GOAT of executive coaching. Last time, he focused on his book, The Earned Life, Lose Regret, Choose Fulfillment, as well as his revolutionary leadership advice.

1:38In today's conversation, we're going to discuss Marshall's aim to democratize leadership and enable people to learn through artificial intelligence. In other words, Marshall is going to explain how he has achieved immortality. And I would bet that this is going to be one of the more humorous and it's hard to describe what you're about to hear. This is a conversation between two friends and we're both in love with artificial intelligence and it's going to go all over the map. So his new venture is called Marshall Goldsmith dot AI and it lets anyone access his wisdom and expertise through a chat bot.

2:23There's Marshall Goldsmith dot AI and there's Kawasaki GPT dot com. Marshall is all about what he calls knowledge philanthropy. And basically he's using his technology to spread out his expertise that anybody, anybody, you don't have to be a foreword. $400 ,000 client. You'll learn about that in this podcast too. You don't have to be a$400 ,000 client to get to Marshall's brain. So join me now with Marshall Goldsmith and also with some cameo appearances, brief as they may be, with marshallgoldsmith.ai. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. And here we go.

3:12Why do you wear a green polo shirt? That's an important question. People might require minds don't want to know that. Why do you wear a green polo shirt? I'm asking my friend. You're asking Goldsmith GPT. The New Yorker magazine years ago wrote a wonderful profile about my life, authored by Larissa McFarquhar. In the profile, Larissa noted that I always wore a green polo shirt. While I didn't actually always wear a green polo shirt, that's what she remembered. So in other words, we don't need you. We can just ask Goldsmith GPT and record the answer. You didn't ask my friend here. My hearing is not good enough to tell.

4:03So is that your actual simulation of your voice or is it just a computer voice? No, it's a simulation of my voice. So how do you feel being immortal now? Oh, I like it. I like it. It's been a journey. I am being somewhat facetious here, but conceptually, we could go to Goldsmiths GPT and have the audio play back to us and record it, and we will have interviewed you. Yeah, and smarter, nicer, and more articulate, but I'm funnier. I have Kawasaki GPT and I am also convinced that Kawasaki GPT is better at being me than me. Mine is a better version of me. I won't say it's better than me. It's just, well, it's better in some ways.

4:50If I can combine Kawasaki GPT and Madison GPT, I truly am immortal. I'm immortal and improved. I love this topic. We might go off the rails a few times in this particular episode. I loved our last session. Okay. I loved our last podcast we did. And as I said, I was going to do my own podcast until after I did yours. And I said, I'll never do that because you're too good at it. So I said, I'm not going to work that much. Oh, Marsha. I don't know if I agree with the reason for your decision, but I think your decision is good nonetheless. Marsha, the hardest part of a podcast is not the podcast. The podcast is hard, but it's getting the audience.

5:34Now, maybe you can magically send out an email and get, you know, a million people to subscribe. But I certainly can't do that. Are we getting ready to roll now? No, we've been rolling already. We're already rolling. So listen, one of your books, I love this. What got you here won't get you there. So if you were to use that test, how does someone who believes that what got them there won't get them to the next level? How does that person optimally approach AI? Well, I think AI is a great case study of what got you here won't get you there. Neither you nor I a year ago would have had a clue what we're doing right now with AI.

6:18So this is a total surprise to me. On the other hand, this train has left the station. Option A, we can sit there and go, well, when I was a little boy, we didn't have them things. Or we can actually make some good out of it. My vote is let's do something good here. And aren't you worried about the paranoid people who spend hours and they say to the Washington Post, I spent a few hours on Chachapiti and it convinced me to leave my spouse and go live in Bali. and then it said, I'm going to launch a nuclear war. And what about those horror stories that you hear? Really, I am not an expert on those horror stories.

6:58And in my elderly years, I've decided basically if I'm not going to change it, I'm not going to worry about it. What am I going to do about the Washington Post? Absolutely nothing. What am I going to do about these horror stories? Absolutely nothing. How much worried am I? Don't really care. Okay. That works for me too. But let's say, okay, your kids or your grandkids or something, they're copywriters, and they see their peers being replaced by AI. What's your advice to them? Hey, my advice to them is get with the plan. Look, the new world is a new world. That's saying I had a photographic memory for math, and now they have calculators.

7:36Grow up. Hey, it's a new world. It's a new world. Just make peace. It is what it is. And you can sit there and say, you know, back in the old days, well, back in the old days, we didn't have computers, we didn't have the Internet, we didn't have a lot of things. So that's just the way it was. So I think to me, look, it's going to happen. Now, how old are you? I am 70. Yeah, hell, I'm 75. So let's face it, for two old guys like you and me, this is cool. I think it's the biggest deal since the Industrial Revolution, maybe bigger than the Industrial Revolution. Look, I love it. I am a total fan of this stuff.

8:13I have been trying to figure out how to give away everything I know for 20 years with total and abject failure up until now. I tried interactive video, which is clunky$3 ,000 machines, which didn't work. I tried computer programs that had branching and all kinds of nonsense. We're talking complete and abject failure here for 20 years. This thing has just gone through the roof in the last year. And what's in the data set of Goldsmith GPT? Let me give you a little history. My original goal, which by the way, my original goal was far too small. My original goal was that MarshallBot, that's what his name is.

8:56MarshallBot could answer about 80 % of the questions you would ask me about as well as me or close. That was my goal. That is long gone. Now, what I have fed MarshallBot is, I've fed Marshall about a million and a half words. So what I do is it's everything I've ever written, videos, all kinds of stuff have been transcribed to put in this thing, but knows me very well. Then if you ask it a question and it can't answer it, then I use the other bots to train it. So what I do is this, let's say, how is your work related to something that Marshallbot doesn't know. I will go to, say, ChatGPT or Claude or one of the other ones, and they'll answer it.

9:41I will then review their answer, the parts I like, I put into MarshallBot, and the parts I don't like, I leave out. And when you say you will review, you mean manually? Yeah, manually. But couldn't people come and ask infinite questions like, explain to me astrophysics, Marshall Goldsmith? Well, a very good point. Marshall Bot doesn't answer questions like that. It doesn't do politics. If you say, who is Donald Trump? You know what it says? I don't know. It doesn't do politics. It doesn't do medicine. It doesn't do therapy. And it doesn't do financial advice. So any question about what I do, philosophy, life, that kind of stuff, it'll answer.

10:25But outside of that, it's pretty good about having guardrails. I asked it a question and it said, this is not in my area of expertise, which is the same answer that Kawasaki GPT would give if it's not a subject I cover. So are you therefore very confident that it's not going to make shit up? ungodly good. The history of this is it started out with what I knew, but it's gone way beyond that. So what it does now is if you ask Marshall Bhatt, I'll ask it a question. For example, I just came back from India. How is your coaching philosophy? My coaching philosophy is deeply related to the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita, particularly in the areas of duty, action, detachment, and self-improvement.

11:14The Gita emphasizes the importance of performing one's duty without attachment to the results which aligns with my approach to leadership and personal development. I encourage leaders to focus on what they can control, their efforts and behaviors, rather than becoming overly fixated on outcomes which are often beyond their direct control. The concept of nishkama karma or selfless action from the Gita is a principle I integrate into my coaching. It's about doing the right thing for its own sake, not for the rewards it might bring. This goes on and on and on. So basically, I just came back from India.

11:53And so again, in India, this is Hindu philosophy, the Bhagavad Gita is a big deal. So somebody asked me, how's your coaching philosophy related to the Gita. Boom. There's the answer. But the answer isn't trivial. The answer isn't trivial. The answer is good. My daughter got me thinking about this. She said she wanted to trick it. How's your coaching philosophy related to utilitarian philosophy? I don't even know what utilitarian philosophy is, right? I have no clue what that is. All of a sudden, it studies utilitarian philosophy. It studies my coaching. It knows me. And it says, gee, how would Marshall answer that question?

12:32And it answers it as if it were me in my voice in five seconds.

12:52So at this point, do you believe that it's sentient? It just depends how you define it. That's just a definitional argument. The answer is depends how you define it. I know one thing. It's smarter than I am. It's smarter than I am. Look, if you go to Marshall, I'd start asking him questions and you actually thought I knew that much, I would be smarter than damn Albert Einstein.

13:19Oh, Marshall, you and I, we agree so much because Kawasaki GPT has all my writing, all my videos, all that stuff. Plus, it has the transcript of every interview I've done for my podcast. So in a sense, Kawasaki GPT is not just my brain, but it's 250 other brains because of the transcript. So if I were to ask, how do you embrace the grit mindset? It would have what my thoughts are, plus Angela Duckworth's, because I interviewed Angela Duckworth. Sure. You interviewed me. So you could probably ask it, what's the relationship between achievement and happiness? It would answer it. And it would cite you.

14:03I got to tell you, Marshall, every day, once a day, I say to myself, how the hell did I do this before? When people ask me to write blurbs and forewords and contribute to journals, I go to Kawasaki GPT to get the first draft. Of course. You think that's cheating? According to who? Washington Post. I don't know. The thing is, a lot of life, my old mentor, Dr. Paul Hersey said, look, never argue about the definitions of words. Because people define words in different ways. Now, maybe the Washington Post would define it as cheating, and you wouldn't. I don't think it's cheating. If you had to write a report and you went to the encyclopedia, is that cheating?

14:48I don't think so. This, to me, is the same thing. It's just a new world. And my daughter has to deal with this. My daughter's a professor at Vanderbilt. And existential question, do you, quote, allow students to do this or not? She basically said grow up students can do it anyway so option a just get with the plan or option b sit back and stick your head in the ground and pretend just turn them all into liars i don't know they're gonna do it anyway who cares okay now at some level and when i ask you this question you'll know what my answer is but at some level does it just boggle your mind when you're told all it is is a large language model and it's just using math to predict the next syllable and the next syllable and the next syllable and you hear that explanation you say how the hell does it seem so sentient that totally blows my mind yeah yeah now again i love this stuff but i've got to say that part just blows my mind and as a coach by the way i use with every client now every client i use in in front of them.

15:52I'm not ashamed. I'm not ashamed to use this. Look, one of my clients is Patrick Frius. Dr. Frius, he's the CEO of Rady Children's Hospital. They're merging with another children's hospital. He's going to be a co-CEO. He asked me, what's it like to be a co-CEO? There aren't that many co-CEOs in the world. KKR has co-CEOs, but not too many. And by a lot of them don't work. So I asked Marshall, but what's it like to be a co-CEO? What's good? What's bad? What are your ideas. It was brilliant. Then he said, I'd like to know more about this boundary setting idea. How about that? Brilliant again. Then he said, Marshall, do you have any ideas yourself on top of that?

16:29I made up some really weak crap or any kind of patent. Oh, your idea is good too, Marshall. I'm sure he's thinking, what a moron. I'll just ask Marshall about it. Look, who am I kidding here? My idea is around half as good as Marshall Bott's ideas. I mean, Marshall, seriously, in a sense, it is immortality, right? Only I'd say probably a little better because, again, I'm not putting myself down here, but this thing is way smarter than I am. I truly do believe that too. And so with my podcast, because I interview somebody, every week I add to the data set in Kawasaki GPT. So that's 52 more pieces of data a year.

17:16And then if I ever stop being the interviewer and Madison picks it up, then Madison is good for another 50 years. We could go for a long time. That's right. And, you know, why not? Now, does yours have audio yet? No. And in fact, this is a good question. When I saw audio on yours, I sent a screenshot to the person who's doing Kawasaki GPT. And I said, how come I don't have audio? What's the story here? By the way, all right, get ready to get more jealous. What's coming down the road for me? First, we had text. We're going to have the battle of the bots. What's coming up next is video. Yeah. You can see this green shirt guy that looks and sounds like me on video, but we're not done yet.

18:01What's coming up after that? Video in multiple languages. Yeah. And I don't know about you, but actually, you're 75. I'm 70. that could happen in our lifetimes easily happen in our lifetimes sure oh no i think that will happen in my lifetime yeah it'll happen next year the rate of progress on this stuff is astronomical i got lucky so what happens to me is i'm coaching these guys are that our founders are coming called fractal analytics and i've got eight engineers in india working on this thing they have donated the money behind this thing. This is expensive. And this thing is great. So it's very fast.

18:41Mine goes well beyond me though. Mine goes way beyond what I know. And anything related to what I know, what's eerie about it is it knows me and it can study any question. It then says, how would Marshall, had he read all this stuff and knew as much as I do, which of course he doesn't, How would he answer this question? And with almost 98 % accuracy, it gets it right. Wow. And you know what? It's never sick. It's never cranky. It's never hungry. It's never sleepy. It doesn't swear as much as me. And I asked a couple of my clients, this thing is smarter than me. Is there anything I do different or better than it?

19:32You know what

19:38so marshall are you still a guest for a lot of people's podcasts oh yeah i still do podcasts every now and again okay so it seems to me i don't know if you do this but it just occurred to me that you should ask the podcaster for the transcript so that you can get the transcript back and put it into your bot that's a good idea right i've said that's a very good idea thank you Hey, I'm a value-add podcaster. What can I say? Oh, yeah. This thing is great. There's a guy named Stephen Balabot. Now, this guy, he owns an AI company. So, he was going to trick it. So, he said, I was going to hire an executive coach, but I'm doing this Series C thing, and I'm a founder.

20:26And it got really busy, and I didn't even return his phone calls. I feel embarrassed. What should I do? And he put it in MarshallBot as a joke. MarshallBot said, oh, well, I can understand that. This Series C thing is very important. I see why your founder is so busy. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It gives him some perfect answer of what to do. He's an AI person. He goes, I don't even believe this. He didn't believe it himself. I don't even believe this thing. He just did what it told him to. Wow. See, I think every medical doctor is going to have one of these. Come on, let's get real. Every medical doctor has got to have an AI bot.

21:00If they don't, they should be fired. Come in, look, I'm taking this medicine. What about that medicine? Is there a drug in there? They answer this stuff off the top of their head. They don't know what they're talking about. Let's get real here. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. How do you know? There are studies. There are computers. People have numbers. Why are you sitting here guessing? Also, if some brain specialist in Croatia wrote a medical journal article in Croatian, And what's the odds of even a brain surgeon at Stanford Medical Center knowing that someone in Croatia just put this in a medical journal, right?

21:34Not in English. They can't know that stuff. Yeah. Now, I think this is exciting. I think this is the new world. And I feel just very happy to be able to be on the positive edge of this stuff. Now, I still have one question about this, because if someone asks a question that you have not specifically talked about and you said that it knows what you would probably say, how do you draw the boundaries? If someone went to your bot and said, what do you think of the leadership qualities of Donald Trump? Are you saying that it would say nothing? As soon as it says, here's Donald Trump, it says, I don't know.

22:17It doesn't answer anything related to politics. But Marshall, I could make the case that politics is in great need of leadership. So why are you avoiding that? You know why? Because I don't want to deal with it. There are 2 ,700 million problems in my older years. I've decided I'm not going to fix them. I'm going to delegate that to you. I hope you don't mean me, Guy Kawasaki. I mean you, listeners, right? Let me give you my mission in life as an old man. My mission is to try to help people have a little better life. That's it. If I can help anybody have a little better life today, you know what I'm doing?

22:58I'm declaring victory here. And you know those people I coach? I always say now when I coach people, I say, look, I hope I help you be a better leader. End of the day, I just want to have a little better life for you. And I always ask them a question, is that okay? Is that all right? You might be shocked to learn that 100 % of everyone I've ever coached about how famous and wonderful they are, you know what they said? That's a good idea. That's a good idea. Let's do that, right? In a sense, you are exemplifying the principle of under-promise and over-deliver, right? Yeah. I'm serious. I'm not going to do everything.

23:36Peter Drucker said, our mission in life is to make a positive difference, not to prove we're smart and let's prove I'm right. A lot of this arguing about stuff is let's prove I'm smart and let's prove I'm right. If it's not going to help make a positive difference, why are you even wasting your time doing it? This is the gospel according to Marshall.

24:12do you just no longer care that the bot can cannibalize you and maybe you're not gonna get some coaching gigs or something you just don't give a shit then you just want to help the world wait a minute let do you know my coaching fees are i have no idea well i'd say i'm starting at about 400 ,000 bucks a pop. So do you really think anybody's going to pay me$400 ,000 a pop? Is it going to sit there and talk to a computer? No. I'm not really threatened by this. Wait, wait, wait. So you're telling me that the entry point for getting coached by you is 400 grand. That would be it. Madison, take note of this, Madison.

24:56We're going to up our prices. Jesus, Jesus. I just asked people to buy 25 copies of my book and you're asking for 400 grand. What the hell? That's why you're Marshall Goldsmith and I'm Guy Kawasaki. Hey, whatever. You've been undercharging. Now, I do a lot of work for free. So for example, I'm working right now with the nice woman who's head of the DEA. I don't charge her money. I don't charge money to the children's hospital people or all those people. I do that for nothing. I have two fees, either nothing or a lot.

25:30It sounds to me like nothing or infinite. What does it matter? If you're a multi-billionaire, the amount of money is irrelevant anyway. I don't have that problem, so yeah.

25:47So basically, I'm not threatened that I'm going to be replaced by my computer bot. And the other thing is my computer bot has already answered 60 ,000 questions. And how did you get the word out such that? I'm just starting to get the word out. And basically, it's already answered 60 ,000 questions. I can't answer 60 ,000 questions. How long has it been out? It's been out for a little bit, but it's just getting better and better. We're just starting to release it right now to the world. The problem is I have so much demand that if I'm not careful, I can crash the system. You're going to be worse than crypto.

26:27Your bot is going to affect climate change. Now, the nice thing about me, though, it's all free. I'm not charging any money for mine. Now, are you charging money for a guy bot? No, not at all. See, you're a nice guy. You're like me. We're nice old men. Just giving things away here. I don't know if I'm a nice guy or I just can't get away with it because I'm not charging anybody 400 grand either. But you know what? We talked about this our last one. I would tell you something, there's no amount of money in the world that make you any happier than you are now. That's probably true. Yeah. I can give you 25 million bucks tomorrow.