What AI Is Doing To Your Brain (And Your Career) ft. Leo Sevigny

You know, AI was brought to us without our asking for it is that students actually are feeling very anti- AI. They don't feel like it's doing them a service in their education. They want to learn the way people should want to learn, right? Which is really actually reading stuff and understanding stuff and debating. Even people who are very well informed and very experienced can still be fooled. In all reality, it's a tool.

Yeah. And if we moderate it well and if we create some controls, there's no reason why this couldn't serve us instead of the big fear that we're going to end up serving them. And when I say them, it's AI, right? So

AI, is it hype or help?

Good day and welcome to the show. I'm your host Pete Cooper and our topic is AI hype or help. Today's guest is Leo See. Now, Leo has his own company called Evergreen 3, and when you listen to it, you'll find out why he called it that company. But he's about the human aspects of AI adoption, and he's helping companies come to terms with that. This is a really interesting topic. We go pretty deep into exactly what AI is doing in the workplace, doing in society. It's fascinating. Leo is an expert in this area, and I suggest you stick around to the end. Let's get into it. Okay, welcome Leo, welcome to the show. Um, thanks for joining us today.

Um, you are in a very interesting space that we're going to talk about much more and that is about AI and how it's affecting you know people um, companies, people and how that plays out.

Yeah.

Leo, tell us a little bit about your business and about yourself and we'll we'll get into it.

Sure. My name is Leo Cevini and I am the founder and principal consultant for Evergreen 3 consulting which you can see over there above my head. Um I spent a significant number of years in sort of big four consulting decided to take leave and really focus in on AI enablement how it impacts culture how it impacts people and a lot of integration and facilitation work.

But the most interesting thing is where's that intersection between what AI is bringing to the table, what it's allowing us to do that it's never allowed us to do before, and the temptation to depend and lean on that so much that we start to lose a bit of our humanity.

We start to look for those quick answers. We start to look for easy way outs. Um, we no longer want to go in and do the coding because everything all the coding gets done for us. But when we do that, we dull ourselves a little bit. It's all a balancing act.

Some people would completely disagree with me. Some people think AI should be ended right now.

So, I love the conversation and and that's really what u I've been focusing on is helping clients and individuals come to grips with what is this AI stuff

and what does it mean for me? What does it mean for my business? And what does it mean for the world?

All right.

Yeah.

Wonderful. So, you said something right at the start there and that's the big four. Just for the audience, what are the big four consulting firms?

Well, the big four consulting firms are uh Deote, McKenzie, I think it's Boston Consulting Group, and honestly, I can't remember the fourth. Sorry. Um I actually worked for Accenture, which isn't considered big four. Go figure. 850, 000 employees.

You think it'd be big enough. But basically, my expertise while I was a consultant was in the talent and organization space.

I had a great opportunity during co to do work around resilience. I've done cultural assessments. I've done a lot of training work. A lot of working with sea suite to synchronize around vision, northstar, whatever consulty term you want to use.

Yes.

But yeah, but in my last 18 months when AI was starting to really eclipse everything, I hyperfocused on working with clients around that because it really is the change of our time.

Yeah, 100% agree, Leo.

So when I think about a a big consulting group, I think of McKenzie and I think of them going into some of these other massive big organizations, let's take Meta or you know Google and they

for millions of dollars uh sometimes just play back what you know and give reinforcement to the seuite or other times they say okay we'll roll out some kind of change and of course the change is AI

and I think you know I can see that working. Um, is that a good way to sort of see these big consulting groups? Have I missed something?

No, I mean I think that's what they're trying to do.

I think they're trying to go in understand what happening uh within that given organization and to help them make better steps and use better tools and create better processes, what are their workflows, what are their use cases. A lot of jargon, but basically how the heck do we use this and how do we use it? Well,

I think that the big consulting firms are struggling a little bit with um the basics to be honest with you. What they want to do, my own experience, I'm not saying it's what everyone's doing. So, anyone listening if no judgment there, but

put their notes in the com in the comments below.

Right. Right. Right.

So the the the point is that

they want to go deep quick because there's a lot of assumption in the AI practitioner world that everyone has this basic level of knowledge and basic level of comfort

with this tool and I don't think that's true when I work with clients and I ask questions like how do you feel about AI and that's not a typical you know that doesn't sound strategic it doesn't sound deep

but when I ask that question I hear everything from it's going to save the world to it's going to destroy destroy the world. I hear things like the Matrix. I hear things like the Terminator.

It's it can be kind of ridiculous, but in all reality, it's it's the fears and the concerns that people have. Am I going to lose my job? It's it that stuff is very very real.

So, I've always thought I'm a Maslo fan. Abraham Maslo, you know, the hierarchy of needs.

Yes. Yes.

And and we go when as even when we're doing change management for an SAP or workday implementation oftentimes what these consultancies will do is they'll start right at the intellectual level oh let's talk about the problems let's talk about what we can solve

before really talking about safety and security you know what are the relationships that are involved who are the super users really that stakeholder analysis and whatnot so I think it's a typical thing might be, oh, we need help with AI. All right. Well, here's our 7-hour course on AI. No, I don't need a sevenhour course. I need some help

understanding it at a basic level. Well, we don't really do that.

And heaven forbid your company be a little too small.

Can't do a $100 million contract. That's a little bit high, but whatever. So,

not any, right? You can't bring a McKenzie into a small business. Yeah.

And and the work is the work they do is phenomenal. I whenever you work at one of these uh companies, you're surrounded by the smartest people

Mhm.

in the room and everyone wants to be that.

So, it's very exciting.

But um I think sometimes uh people in those fields and I was guilty of this at times too. I just fell into my own traps. This is what we do.

And I think that's not going to work in the AI uh experience because I think in the AI experience, every organization, every person is bringing in their own unique point of view

and we have to dig even deeper to get to that. And then we have to dig even deeper to help them understand why this could be a beneficial thing,

but also let's make sure we're reinforcing the skills and the qualities that really make human beings unique and important in the equation. So that um Maslo's hierarchy of needs. Now I don't remember it all that well, but I think it starts at the very bottom with something like uh food uh being able to get oxygen, water, and then it goes up and up.

And I think that the topper levels are actualization or or

um living out your legacy, you know, that type of thing, aspirational things.

And there's a few things in between. I've forgotten exactly how. Do you remember? Do you remember it? Well, just for so everyone knows what we mean by the Maslo hierarchy,

I think you said it perfectly. It the best way to think of it is a pyramid

and at the bottom of that pyramid are are those things that make us feel safe, secure, satiated um and breathing and you know all those sorts of things,

right?

And it moves up into things like what are the relationships that you have? What are your esteem needs?

Like what kind of career do you want to have? What kind of family do you want to raise?

Right? And then at the very top is this concept of self actualization which most people of course never achieve. Maybe Gandhi, maybe Lasu, maybe Jesus Christ, whatever. Right? These are these mythical ideas of

I'm able to take in the world and balance it out on a consistent level and really understand the broader implications of everything. Right? That's sort of the that's sort of uh my interpretation. The other important thing about Maslo is if you're in that safety needs area, you can't go up. You can't go up that pyramid until you meet the comfort level of that level.

So if suddenly your job is in danger or suddenly your, you know, community is in danger because they're going to put in a data center or or you feel whatever it might be,

it'll pull you down to those lower levels and it makes learning very very difficult. It makes forging new relationships very very difficult because hey look, I'm just trying to figure out how to eat.

I'm not thinking about who my friends are right now. Maybe I'll be able to next week. So that idea is is pretty fundamental in my opinion to how humans interact.

I I I understand and agree with that.

So to paraphrase that um that principle is that if you if you're a drowning man,

you're going to be struggling to survive. You're not going to be thinking about

Yes. Perhaps you know uh your next big project at home which which would be something you know much higher up the needs and you have to get that those needs kind of met in a kind of layered way. You got to get those lower needs met before you can move to the next level.

Absolutely.

And I think what you said about AI and I can resonate with this is that people are worried about to be frank worried about their jobs and someone comes in and says hey AI is coming that that the first reaction is hey AI can do my job

and then that now they've moved down on the the they're now got a security issue they're not listening to the learning they're not thinking aspirational they're in protection mode

y and a lot of change management tries to get to those points where if we don't understand what's at the core or we're not really going to help them make effective change.

But I think with AI, what we're seeing is,

hey, look, if we're going to put in a new system, you and I work at a company, we're going to put a new system in to track our HR processes.

All right. Well, that means we're going to shut down the 6, 000 spreadsheets that we used before. We're now going to have this great system we're going to use. We do have to learn how to use the system. We do need to learn how to log in differently. We do need to learn all those different steps. But in the end, the rest of our life might be operating just like it always has.

Artificial intelligence has brought in this deeper concern where okay, you're telling me I need to learn this stuff, but what you're unlike a lot of those other implementations, if I learn it, I might actually make myself obsolete. Now, that existed with with big system imple imple implementations as well where

you might have 30 people that handle data plugging in the data into an old system and now you just don't need those 30 people. So, I'm not going to pretend that's not true.

But I think it's um that fear uh those past implementations might have brought you down one level.

I think AI brings you right to the bottom

for a lot of people because they have such a to be honest a mythical thought or a mystical thought of of what it is and what it isn't. And the best thing we could be doing for people is just sitting down with them and saying, "Look, let's just spend an hour walking through how these things work, what they're intended to be, what they're not intended to be, and how and pick one area where you can use it to make your life easier. "

Y

and harness it like a tool. Don't harness it like a threat.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's uh that's a really good approach. I mean, I think AI and people is the future.

Uh it's not AI as and we of course you and I hear the news all the time about this, you know, these big the big three or five or six, however many you want to count the big ones.

What they're doing is so

incredible technology. I think just this week we were talk anthropic released that it's got code building its own self again. So, it's learning to build itself better.

I mean, that's fantastic technology, but what does it mean to me?

Yeah. You know,

if you're watching that news at all, and it's always interesting to see what CNN or ABC or whatever will pick up, but we all have now very self curated news feeds.

So, unfortunately, most people get a lot of their news in the most unfortunate places, right? Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. That's not really always as as good as it could be,

right? But, you know, in one week you could hear about incredible abilities that AI can offer.

And then you might hear that Grock, which is the Elon Musk um X AI,

they allowed it to run its own experiment and it pretty much eliminated humans within a certain number of days.

Like it's so the logic brought to that point and then

you so and then you hear about you know communities having data centers where the electrical rates double

or you know they're using all of our so there's just so many things and our politicians in the US anyway and I think globally although a lot of other countries are putting some boundaries in governance which I think is good

but the even in our political realm it's either stop it all or run really fast. M

and that's just a reality here. So I think that's a big challenge as well is that people just don't know how to get their heads around it.

Yeah.

And um they try to listen to someone

and usually those someone's maybe are not bringing what they need to hear.

Yeah. Right. Well, it's it's a it's one of those wonderful news par um I guess vicious cycle. You know, you look you you're attracted to the drama, but the drama just feeds your anxiety.

Yeah. And so you go looking, as you said, you go looking for something to soo the anxiety and you get trapped into another anxietyprovoking um bit of news because that's just kind of the way the whole thing works.

Uh you know, it's it self-perpetuates.

Um so um where where is there some tips that you've got for people?

Where where are you think where can we sort of soothe some of these feelings? Where can we go for that? Well, I think the I mean that's a really good question because it's such an emotional response that

listing out step one and two and three doesn't doesn't work for a lot of people. So I think

and I'm thinking about my incredibly intelligent wife and my my two daughters who are 14. I have twin daughters.

Oh no.

To quote them,

I hate AI. Is that what they said?

Yeah.

And there's some irony of course because I'm running a business trying to help people with AI and so I I poke at that a lot and I ask a lot of questions and it's usually around,

you know, AI was brought to us without our asking for it.

For example, if I wanted email, I could sign up for email and I could have an email address. If you think back, if I want to use a certain piece of software, I pay for the software. I can use the software.

AI when you did a Google search you received AI responses you received Bing responses right so the the AI has brought itself into people's world without their asking

one thing I feel very very true about all people is you never want to do anything to them without them

and that's exactly how AI was brought in so

there's this feeling that big business these billionaires whatever are infusing AI into things that no one ever asked for And in some cases that ends up being something incredibly great, but in other cases it just feels really obtrusive and it is offensive and once again because we launched AI in all these ways before it was ready for prime time.

I mean think about the difference between you know 4. 0 and 5. 5 and in in ChatGPT.

It's a whole different world but

people started maybe tried it out 18 16 15 months ago and they're like this doesn't work and that stuck with them.

The other thing that's fascinating is young people and I haven't done anything formal but there's a lot of evidence percolating that there's this revulsion that's a strong word there's they're repulsed by AI because it's threatening their future

right now that's yes I can definitely resonate with that more though than the other thing you said but I did want to riff off that

one area that I witnessed myself which I get that feeling of hey you're imposing yourself on me is in YouTube now I signed up for YouTube Premium years years ago

and I liked it because it took the ad most of the ads out and I had the people that I liked uh informing me it was like a big part of my entertainment

program. Now that's been pushed aside and I'm getting so much AI generated content.

Now how do I know it's AI generated content? Well, there's certain signs about it. Mhm.

I'm not necessarily saying it's bad, but the thing that it is imposed on me and it's getting me between me and another person. So, there was a person that I felt in a way I had a relationship with, they were telling me things that I wanted to know about the particular engineering field or the pyramids or whatever it was that I was interested in. And when they said it, I believe them because I felt well, you know, it's a person. They're person they're representing themselves with those facts.

When that AI comes in between, you think, well, It's not the person anymore. It's a rendition of them. Are they saying things that are truthful? And am I just wasting my time? Am I getting information which is not represented by them?

Mhm.

It's so true. And I think if we start digging more into why people are very very shady around AI is you could you know that we're about to enter a major political season. We know that AI video is better than it was even two years ago. Um, sorry. Political season in the US. We're about to hit our midterms. I you I'm assuming you have an international population.

Y

and we have no way of knowing other than people who are really paying attention to the screen or what's happening whether a message is genuine, not genuine.

We know that we can take sports figures, celebrities, whoever, and make them look like they've said things they haven't even said. And it looks pretty convincing, much more convincing than it did even 6 months ago.

And they continue to work on making that better. So again,

you you don't know if, to your point, you don't know if what you're seeing is real. And I know YouTube has just put in some new controls.

It's supposed to they're supposed to be implementing this is AI content and they're trying to filter that better so people know.

But it's a horse race, right? Because if my job is to create video production software that's better and better that's AI,

I'm certainly going to pay attention to how Google is tracking and try to go around that. So these are the kinds of things that feel

shady. They feel they they're concerning for people because no one really knows what they're seeing anymore.

Yeah.

And even people who are very well informed and very experienced can still be fooled.

M

and you know I mean listen to the top 40 songs globally right now and fortunately or unfortunately

a chunk of those songs were either aided by or are completely artificial intelligence

I did not know that

created yeah so if you look into the music industry and that's a big concern right now

heaven forbid you're an author who actually writes

and someone's writing books using AI it's pulling from their voice in some cases so there's all these betrayals and frustrations

uh that I people are struggling with. In a way, it's like allegory of the cave, right? We've all been in this cave and now we're coming out and nobody likes it.

They want to go back in the cave, but it's never going to stop.

It's just going to keep progressing, right? So, we go out of the cave. You need to figure out how to do it.

Yeah. So, just for our audience about the the the midterms, um

I probably can tell I'm not a na native American. I'm from Australia, but we still are very aware of American politics.

Yeah.

Um and I don't want to get political, but just the process. So, we have this cycle of every four years, but then there's these things called the midterms. Explain to the audience what what's the significance of a midterm.

Really, I mean, in many cases, there's not a lot of significance because I think a lot of our voting constituency is so polarized that we kind of know where some states and some districts are going to vote. But the idea of the midterms is it's usually um halfway through a given president's um term in office, which is a four-year term. We have different houses in our government. In the House of Representatives, every two years you have to be reelected.

And then in the Senate, every six years you have to be reelected and as a president, it's every four.

So a midterm is anything in between the presidential election that is vying for seats in those other two parts of our government,

right?

Um so that's best way I can think to explain it. It's just and and the the significance is like a lot of other democracies and governments um the majority party tends to have the power.

So in the midterms quote unquote there's this thought that well if the power shifts from Republican to Democrat, Democrat to Republican or whatever party

then that will change the agenda.

Right? So, from an AI perspective, there are certainly it seems like members of our Democratic party are more in favor of slowing this thing down.

Let's make sure we know what we're doing. Let's worry about the environment. Not not super surprising.

And then you have a more um Republican conservative base, business encouragement type base that is more like, look, we need to stay ahead of other countries in their development. We need to be competitive.

You know, we're a capitalistic society. So AI, I think, is driving this intensity and polarizing people because they hear their politicians and their celebrities. I I keep I hate keep bringing that up, but it's true in our culture.

Oh, this is bad and here's 27 reasons why it's bad and over here it's good and here's the 27 reasons why it's good. In all reality, it's a tool.

Yeah. Yeah.

And if we moderate it well and if we create some controls, there's no reason why this couldn't serve us instead of the big fear that we're going to end up serving them. And when I say them, it's AI, right? So,

it's just it's a balancing act.

I've been I don't know if you want me to talk about this, but I've been working on this self assessment. I call it humankind where people can go in and they can answer some questions. I create a chance to do it, but I did see your web page with that on it. Yeah.

Yeah. So the idea is you go in and you assess because what's happening

as human beings, we're depending more and more on the instant answer.

And it's not just with AI. We've been doing this for years. You know

what what song is going to play? Well, Spotify is going to tell me or you know what news am I going to see? Well, Facebook's going to scroll it past me. That's that's we've been dealing with that for a long time. But it's getting more and more significant. And because we have AI native youngsters who are coming up, even though they're very anti- AAI, which is a whole other great topic, um, not I shouldn't say all, but there's a bunch. Um, the the dependency and the skill base that we used to expect people to have is, I think, starting to fade a little bit.

So, a great example of that is, you know, uh, AI is extremely efficient. If you ask it a question, it'll get you information. You got to make sure it's right, but it'll get you information. Versus something like presence, which as humans, we understand that we're in a room. You read the room,

you understand the context of things that are being said and done.

And that's something, at least currently, that AI, for the most part, can't do. And there are some very human things. So that balancing act between

AI capability and human skills and talent, I think, is an important thing to think about moving forward.

And if people can understand those human skills and talents and develop those in a more strong way

while also building competency around how to use AI.

I think those are the folks that are really going to own they're going to own it. They're going to they're going to get it. They're going to stay human, but they're going to use the tool for what it was intended and that'll make them pretty unstoppable.

So does so does that assessment put them on a sort of a spectrum from sort of continuum. So, there's 10 continuums.

You kind of do a little slider thing and then it gives you some suggestions at the end for what you can do, different activities, how human or how non-human you're becoming. Are you sliding? Are you tilting? That kind of thing.

So, it's pretty interesting. Um,

well, I'd like to do that and we'll have to put that link in the description in case anybody wants to do that.

Yeah, I appreciate that. That's great.

But to go back to the young people, some of my clients are in higher education and I'm working with VPs of student affairs and other kinds of titles who went into this whole thing kind of assuming that students were going to embrace AI because it kind of makes things easier, right? Oh, write my papers for all those cliches. I'll write my papers for me. It'll do my research for me. What what we're really finding more and more is that students actually are feeling very antiAI. They don't feel like it's doing them a service in their education. They want to learn the way people should want to learn, right?

Which is really actually reading stuff and understanding stuff and debating um instead of just typing in a question, getting an answer, and just maybe assuming that's the correct thing.

Yeah.

So, I think there's a lot of a struggle. You know, we've had some graduation speakers this year who are luminaries in the AI field who are booed when they talk about AI is coming into your life. So there's there's a lot of tension

um which in a way is a little sad because it is an amazing tool.

You know I I really feel for the younger generation too. Um I grew up in a world where there was no computer, right? Um you know and

oh we just aged ourselves.

Yeah, I know. I don't care.

I'm gray. Whatever. Um but the point I'm going to make is that there wasn't a digital world. There was a there was the look if I wanted to I wasn't allowed to watch TV more than a couple of hours at night. So I would get on my bike and I'd go and play with my friends in the street and I'd play soccer and sports and you know we had a very controlled amount of media.

Um we didn't really have newspapers in the house. How did I get information? I used to think about this.

I used to get information from my peers, my family, occasionally from books because but it was very very small across school and then if I really wanted to know something I couldn't I would go to the library and I would front up and try to figure out the Jewey decimal system so I could find a book which I could find the page where it had this one piece like that's how fast does the Concord go, right? That might be one question I had for myself. That would take me a morning's work to find it out. Now I can get it in about 3 seconds.

Yes. Yes. And what you're describing is exactly what I'm saying.

And it's it's a temptation for fellows like us and other people maybe of our relative age group.

Yeah.

Um to long for the days and that's not and I'm not saying that's what you're doing but I hear a lot of that as well. You know well before Facebook or and the irony now of course is the biggest user of Facebook tends to be an older population.

Yeah. You know, where for a while it was like I'll never use that and now it's driven by. So that's not you never you just can't make this stuff up. So I think what we don't want to do and I don't think you're doing this, but what we could do is wax nostalgic around how great it was and we had to go to the library to look things up.

But in all reality, the benefits of being able to get information almost instantly is phenomenal. I mean, we literally have encyclopedias, libraries, global knowledge at our fingertips.

And with a little bit of work, you can far it out what's not real

with a little bit of work.

Yeah.

I mean, that's the dream.

As a learning professional, the idea that anyone can get to anything and learn from it is an amazing thing.

So, it's not so much what we're learning, it's how we're learning it. And I think that's the problem is that if you're always relying on

AI to give you um this statistic or that statistic and you never have to go search in a web page.

I mean I' I heard on a really good podcast that I listen to wasn't yours. Yours is the best one. Um that that um websites are going to be obsolete

because the content that's being pulled into the AI search results comes right from web pages or comes right from direct content.

And the amount of people who click through to web pages now has decreased significantly over the past few years because they're getting what they think they need in that initial blurb of AI,

right?

And as the technology gets better, they're right. It is going to get better and better at giving that really good information.

So that's a whole other huge shift that we're going to have to deal with probably soon. Like do we even do you even keep a web page anymore?

It's it's a good question.

That's a good question. Yeah. So I wanted to finish off the thought that that I was starting and about about the younger generation and I have the empathy because

it's a trying to think of an analogy here where if you train to run, you have to go and do the hard work, right? You have to run a lot to train a lot to be good at running a running. I say running a marathon. Uh and it takes dedication and effort over a long period of time in the real world. There's no substitute.

Um and I think our generation have kind of had that. We've run that sort of training exercise in the real world. We know what the real world actually really looks like as we've lived it for so long. If you're just coming into the AI world, you can't distinguish between what is the AI telling you is the real world and what the real world is. You just take it all at face value.

Yeah.

Many times I'm using the tools and I'll see a small error.

The smallest of things. It's just one word and I go, that's not the right word in the right place. I just know that's not right. And I automatically fix it.

And I wonder if the younger generation are not seeing the errors that it makes because they haven't lived, you know, that life in the real world.

Yeah.

And I think that's what these students are are saying very clearly that they don't want to lose that ability to catch those things or understand those things, be critical thinkers. Um, you know, the the ability to c that your your example is spot on. The ability to catch that odd word

is not something that AI is good at. And it probably will always make some mistakes. Although they're get it's getting better and better.

Humans with some base knowledge have an incredible ability to just be like, "Ah, that doesn't sound right.

" Like, how many times have you said that out loud? That just doesn't sound right to me.

Yeah.

That

gut feeling, that intuition, that um weighing it against the knowledge that you've built over years

helps to break down, assuming, and just relying on this technology all the time. Um, and I would agree with you that I think if a person were to really just use these tools constantly, not only as a native, as a young person, they not only will they not develop those skills, but the concern, I think, really is will they ever even have the opportunity to.

And that's that's scary.

I mean there's all kinds of dystopian thoughts around kids in front of computers learning that way instead of in classrooms or you just enders game or I don't know Star Trek. I mean Vulcans the way you I'm just it's ridiculous but there's a lot of this futuristic thinking around

AI is incredibly efficient. It can feed you the information you need to know and it can feed you it in a sequence that's better for human learning,

but it can't really teach in the way that we've always known to be great teaching, which is the experience,

right?

Or the humor

or um they sneeze.

As silly as that sounds, a sneeze in the middle of a lecture is something we remember

because it's human, right? It's something that's real.

Um so I think it's fascinating. Um,

you know, I

100% agree. There's

And you know what was refreshing in what you said is that it's the younger people recognizing the problem that they actually haven't really w like I can recognize the problem because I witnessed it, right?

I know what it was like to have the world before computers, before the internet, before AI. But younger people are coming into this world with AI and then recognizing it straight away. So

that's refreshing to me. I wasn't expecting you to say that.

Well, I I also I've always held great admiration for younger people and as I've grown older, it's it's only grown more because

I absolutely believe that the reality that shaped their thinking is what's going to shape the next reality of thinking. And that that sounded like it ate itself. But what I mean by that is as a x number of yearear-old person I have context. My context is not as valid as someone who was has grown up with these systems in their brains every single day.

Y

there's a well I shouldn't say it's valid. That's not fair. It's just very different.

Yeah. Yeah.

And potentially I think for the general person who's who's um I don't know second half of their life versus half first half of their life their ability their the plasticity of the brain to be able to just rethink everything tends to diminish. We all know that.

So we're going to get stuck in our ways more likely. We're going to have a harder time with these kinds of things. And that's why I'm so inspired by

young people that are like you know what this is not the reality I want. I actually want to do the hard work. I actually want to go read the book. I actually want to listen to real music.

I actually

And that's super fascinating because it's not I think for the most part it's not what many people expected.

Yeah. Right.

So, good for them, right? Good for them for saying, "Hey, I don't like this world you're setting up for me. "

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think when we talk about the future, I think we're going to find this, I think, refreshing balance between, okay, there's just no there's no AI in this space, but I definitely need AI in this space.

Yeah. I mean there's just some of the tools that I started using more and more over the years in terms of writing my ability to write and that's I was not a great writer.

I was better you know in person than I ever was at writing. People used to say to me your brain seems to switch off when you start to write. Well, in a way a II kind of fixed that because it it helped me express myself and and write really well by putting that that front piece on it.

Like it really fixed up u I guess a a limitation that I had you know a weakness or a limitation

and what's better even better than that is that when I read what's been generated for me I go oh that is better than how I would do it and and I'm actually going okay that's the way I should do it next time so I'm actually getting

trained to do something better which is you know already a weakness so I can see that spiraling in a very positive way um because we've been talking very negative Um,

but I think the point that you make is that you brought your experience, your wisdom, and your ideas

to a tool that helped you to find a way that you were struggling, not struggling, that you

didn't feel like you were as good at to make that better.

Yeah.

Honestly, I think that's what we want these kinds of tools for. Bring what you know, bring your expertise, bring your knowledge, and then use the tool to make yourself a little bit sharper. And honestly, the best use of AI anyway is strategic partnership. I mean, I know we used to rewrite emails and we use it for things, but

if you can have a conversation with AI and it'll give you new ideas because it's just synthesizing stuff,

but it takes the human brain to see that idea and think, "Oh, that kind of connects to when I was mowing the lawn yesterday.

"

And that kind of connects to when I was

fixing my car and all of a sudden you have this Eureka moment.

And that's not as much what AI is going to do for you. It's not going to have a Eureka moment, but it might give you the fuel in the information to help you get inspired. And I think that's an important thing. I'll give you a great example.

I this this humankind thing or even in my consultancy, I have um you know, I would say that I have a lot of expertise and experience and all those good things. And I was trying to think how do I best represent these ideas to other people.

Well, it clicked for me yesterday that you can go to most people may not even know this.

You can go to a GPT and say to it, create an app in HTML that does these 10 things

and within 3 minutes you have an app that you can load into a website and it just works.

Mhm.

So the humankind assessment that you said you want to go look at.

Yep.

I can't code.

But I entered all the information that I had researched and written and this is my life's work, right? I've done a lot of work around I wrote a book, personal vision workbook. I've been doing this kind of intros in introspective stuff my whole life. So I was able to pile all this information into the brain of the GPT and then say create this app

and all the answers are in my voice. All the answers are my material.

But to create an app that would have taken months of developer time in the past

tens of thousands of dollars. Yeah.

If not more. So um it's taking what you have, what experiences you have, what expertise you have, what knowledge you have, leveraging a tool to do something really miraculous.

Yeah.

To then create something that enhances learning even better. Because

y

if even 10 people take this, they're like, "Wow, that was really helpful.

I didn't have another way to build it. " So I think there are real positives to all this. We just have to keep thinking about, you know, how do we balance it between our own human being and and the technical being.

Yeah.

I have an interesting example about that. Do you know that game Wheel of Fortune?

Yeah.

Uh for the audience, it's a game where you kind of guess uh the words or the phrases. Um and I was uh I was on a a networking session where the guy said, "We're going to play Wheel of Fortune. " I swung over to my LLM. I won't tell you which one. And I started writing prompting it to make this game Wheel of Fortune. Before he finished playing the game, I already had the game implemented on my computer and I was able to share the you say the HTML file.

Isn't that crazy?

It's nuts.

I mean, it's no wonder that that introductory software um developers are not able to get jobs or they're losing their jobs.

Yeah. Yeah,

but the issue we're dealing with there, of course, is

when you remove that whole first level,

I guess it's a pyramid cuz I'm thinking of like a staffing pyramid now instead of Maslo,

but you know, you always need to have say a thousand people at this level

to get your 100 people at this level to get your 10 people at this level, right? Because you want to have that talent

pyramid arc, whatever.

And when companies are saying things like we're going to let go of 20, 000 of our developers who are at that first level,

well, where are you going? Through that experience, they build the competence to become the leader.

Yeah.

So, what are you going to do when you don't have now instead of 10, 000, you have 3, 500 to get to your 100 next levels. It's going to be a lot harder to find that. And it's going to be harder to find anyone because there won't be people who have had that human experience.

Yeah.

So, I think and that's we could go on for that for another whole hour, but it's a fascinating example of where even if it can say it's it's long-term versus short-term thinking. Yeah, I'm going to lay off a thousand people and my stock's going to go up and my shareholders are going to be really really happy and they're going to talk about me on CNBC, but

um in five years when I need to find my next director of fill in the blank, I don't have a candidate pool and when I go out to find a candidate, no one else has a candidate pool either,

right?

What is going to happen then? Um and I'm not being doom and gloom.

I'm just saying we need to keep investing in our interns and our early career people because they literally are what we're going to build the next generation of business commerce education on their backs, right? So yeah.

Yeah. So I mean we have on our books tech talented technical people and we were not quick at jumping on to the the tools that enabled us to write write code quickly but as soon as we did we had an enormous you know um boost in uh capability and speed. So from a junior developer who um who couldn't uh didn't have access to the tools might have taken him a week.

He's doing it in in a day and has a junior developer doing stuff that's way above his level and way above his his the time frame of getting so much done. But do you know what hasn't changed is if we go and talk to a client and say, "Oh, we'll we'll we'll build you an app. " They're going to say, "Okay, go and build it. "

Well, what is it? Explain it to me.

Yes.

What what how does it work?

What how does the user that all needs to be synthesized? That piece has not changed. So maybe there's tools we can talk about that help that.

But what the value creation thing for me on software has changed dramatically from a big chunk of technical software development writing which would have been let's just take a block like that. Let's call it 80%. I don't know 80% as a guide.

Yeah.

Now that's come down to say 20%. Which but the pieces on the outside are still remain the same.

So yes, you've you've made the block smaller, so it's cheaper to to create that thing, but the value that's being created in the requirements and the delivery hasn't changed because you still need people to create the the requirements gathering material and give it to the coders and then the back end where you're testing and deploying and rolling it out. It's still the people piece hasn't changed.

And some of the biggest discoveries of any generation are mistakes,

right?

So

it's human beings fuddling around in a room or in a lab or in a conference space or whatever and someone just said some says something outlandish and everyone's like oh let's let's think about that for a second and suddenly you have these moments where the next generation of that field gets shaped by it. Now obviously we have some deep thinkers who also do that on their own

but that idea of bringing people together

in creating some unusual way of thinking about a problem design thinking whatever you want to call it brings unique things to bear.

Now, you can ask an AI to do that, but I still feel really strongly that the difference between having 10 people in a room, having lunch, going out to dinner that night, meeting again the next day,

that camaraderie and that building of togetherness

creates a different kind of humanity. And it also creates a different kind of creativity.

And you know,

we we we're even at a point now where if AI makes a mistake, we just want to erase the mistake. And I think that's a problem because I actually do think some of our most important discoveries were initially mistakes and I think

you depend on AI too much.

I think you start to eliminate

that happen stance.

Yeah. Yeah.

I think I guess the other way I I think about it and just to go with that idea is that the the LLM are being trained on digital data which is already there

and it statistically predicts I mean there is some randomization but statistically predicts the next word.

So there's a natural migration of everything to one sort of common hive mind or everything is being harmonized into one mono mono I call it a monoculture right where we're all going in the same direction we're all getting the same input we're all heading in the same direction where's the out of the box thinking going to come from now we're going to have to really step out from from the norm whereas you know the the diversity is being reduced as we're being pulled down this common set of understandings.

I agree. And you know the models, this is a little out of my depth, but I feel like there's some validity around these models gobble up information that's emerging over time.

So, initially it was let's dump everything, the billions and trillions and quadrillions of pieces of information into this massive brain and just literally use so much electricity you can't even imagine it. But now the GPTs and AI are creating information that's being brought back out into the world, but then it's recapturing all that information and bringing it back into the LLM. So you're exactly right. If the LLMs are starting to fixate on certain points of information,

as they read that back, they're going to reinforce that fix on that piece of information. And you start to get this really unfortunate echo chamber,

right?

Where so it's exactly what you're saying and it's very systemic.

It's almost like one of the things we should be thinking about is how do you instill chaos

into the AI brain so

it doesn't do that anymore.

Right. Right.

Or or just expect that we're going to become less and less diverse in our thinking over time,

which Lord, I hope that doesn't happen. And I think again, I think the young people are pushing that. I think they're saying, "Wait, we we don't want this. " It's funny when I shared this app with my 14-year-old twins this morning, like, "So, you could have hired a developer to do this and you took their job? " I'm like, "Damn. " But that's true.

It's true, right?

I didn't pay anyone.

No.

So, it's interesting stuff. Yeah.

So, you know, there's this great uh insight about science and and and the way we used to see the world before someone invented the lens, the telescope, and the microscope because we just had this world that we could see around us. And so, you know, yeah, the world's flat. Yeah. Yeah. The stars go around the flat world. And then we invented this telescope and we could see things in more detail. And then we said, well, you know, we're we're just pretty much all the same inside. You know, you know, the the the brain's down here, the soul is up here, whatever they decided.

And then, of course, the microscope opened up a world that was beyond our our realm. Now AI is isn't going to help us with extending our knowledge and making breakthroughs into the real world. It's it's it's going to only be contained within where the information sphere is. And and we already as humans, there's a a part of our population that already makes it difficult for ourselves because there's still people walking around insisting that the world is flat.

And there are still people insisting that we should be doing massive bloodletting or or or and and I know that's kind of become in minor depends what you believe, but there are some fundamental truths that there are still a part of the population no for some reason just refuse to believe or try to fight against. Yeah.

Um, so if you combine that with a narrowing of the learning band,

you can see how that might, this is getting awfully philosophical, but you can see how that could create an existence where

we're all kind of thinking the same thing.

Yeah.

Because that's all we know

after five, six, seven generations.

Uh, that's that's that's dark.

That's just dark.

So, I've been looking at your logo up the top there, Evergreen. Uh, I wondered if there was a story to how you come up with that name.

So, years ago, I mentioned earlier that I two colleagues and I wrote a a personal vision workbook with Thompson Delmare and, you know, we sold our 2, 000 copies. It didn't make a ton, but we did a little bit of consulting. There were three of us.

Mhm.

And we're all sort of um

nature junkies. So the evergreen represents, you know, rebirth. The the wonderful thing about the evergreen also is that it never fall it never goes dormant. It doesn't lose its needles in the winter. I'm in a winter climate or even in extreme heat.

It holds on

and even it slows down. So there's a lot of um resilience and

and um adaptation that happens with the evergreen. So when we created that initial name

evergreen 3, it was because we had a strong feeling around that nature piece and there were three of us, so it made sense. Yeah.

Fast forward to now. Um, I've always kept the URL. I love the name. It does represent something core to me, which is nature. And even as I think about AI in this balancing act, I mean, there's nothing better we can do than go out in our bare feet and touch the bare earth. There's nothing better we can do than to walk on the ocean or to go to the forest or to go to a musical.

These are distinctly human experiences that will never be replaced hopefully

by artificial intelligence. So I do

want to hearken back to this Henry David Thorough I'm in the woods, you know, whatever kind of thing. I want to make sure we hold on to that. So that's where that comes from.

Yeah. And I think maybe that's a you know, one of the things I was going to ask you about were, you know, how how can as us as just individuals try to manage this um this change, this inevitable change. And you mentioned, you know, being out with nature. Um, do you have any other tips for us to embrace?

I think the key thing is self-awareness

and I won't mention it again, but that thing I mentioned earlier where you can go and answer some questions. Um, I'm not going to say that's the best one, but

people are not assessing how their habits have changed over the years. Um, what they're now doing that they weren't doing even six months ago.

Yeah.

How dependent humans become. Um, we know this because we we carry these things around and we stare at them all day long and it's even socially acceptable now to do that when you're having a conversation with another human. It's a bizarre reality, right?

M

but I think it we have to assess and understand what is it that we're doing that that is bringing us down a path of complacency or bringing down bringing us down a path where not again not to be too dystopian but we become subservient where we're just like oh I'm always going to depend on this technology I now don't have to think as much I don't have to work anymore and I'm just coming up with a bunch of tropes it's not really that true but it's how do we remind ourselves that there are those distinct experiences that that are truly human. So

yeah, nature interaction with human beings, even though you were not I would rather be in the room with you right now.

That would be fantastic, but we couldn't make that happen. But at least we're looking at each other.

A lot of times people do these calls and they don't turn the video on. So even that kind of thing can make a big difference.

Right. Right. 100%.

Hard for AI to fake a true discussion. Although it's getting better, you know.

Yeah. I mean, there is actually a tool out there. You can make a completely fake podcast, but this is not one of those,

right? So, like spirituality, um, nature, relationships, intimacy,

uh, all those things are distinctly human qualities that we need ourselves or another human being to help us do.

Y

and that's the kind of thing that I think people have to make time for.

Yeah. And I also think that we we multitask. And for the majority of us, if you're doing two things at once, you're doing one of those things poorly.

Yeah,

that's almost always the case. So,

how can we even teach people I think it'd be a big step if we could just teach people to not do two things at once all the time.

That would create more humanity because it forces you to focus. And we're not forced to focus anymore.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, it it's it's actually rather simple.

But when I work with businesses, you take that to the business level and you talk about things like, well, we never bring the team together anymore.

I understand there's a budget issue and I understand that co taught us that we don't have to do that.

But what are you losing by not doing that or,

you know, we want 30% of our workflows to be AI enabled. Okay. Do you mean AI enabled or are you trying to, you know, what's your real motive? And having that conversation around how do we pair what your human beings in the business are super super good at with the capabilities of this technology instead of just the capabilities of that technology.

So how would somebody like in business how would they interact with you?

Um what's do you have a process? Is there a way you've done things in the past that that would be a good point to intersect? Yeah, a lot of it is not that I would assume everyone to know who might be listening, but you know there are some classic change management kinds of things like stakeholder analysis where you go out and you talk to different people and you literally ask the question, hey, what do you think of AI? How's it impacting your work and where do you see it going in five years?

Buckle up, buddy. You're going to get a really good conversation on that one.

If you do that 25 times, again, very human, right? I could send a survey.

I could even go to AI and say,

"Create 10 fictional people and tell me what their attitudes would be. " and it'd probably be 80% there.

Mhm.

But the fact that I go out or we go out and meet with people,

they now know that they're important.

They know that they're a part of the process. So when we come back and have a discussion about what we learned, they're like, I was a part of that learning

instead of some synthetic thing that did it. So I think even helping people to come back

and say, how are you um how are you doing more of this?

How are you bringing people together

in very very human experiences? I actually think that we're going to see more retreats, more camps, more I think people are so hungry for something that's not synthetic.

That's a good insight. I hadn't hadn't I was in the 90s when there was a big surge in the kind of team building offsite type things and from my perspective that sort of seems to have settled down again. Maybe we are going to see that coming back again.

I think it is because I think one thing that we know about humans is when when they feel like something's lacking, they're going to work really hard to get it. That's a distinctly human thing. AI just does what you tell it.

But as a human, when we feel like something is missing in our life, we either give it up, which is always a little bit sad,

or we fight it and we fight to get it back. And that fight to get it back is what you want businesses doing when they're thinking about their survival.

So do you what do you think is there a universal thing we are giving up with AI?

I don't know if it's universal. Um, my biggest that's a really good question.

I think my biggest concern is that we're substituting interaction with plugging in

and it's it's so basic, but

um tonight I could sit in front of my computer and I could play with AI for four hours or I could go for I'm not going to go for a 4-hour walk or I could go for a walk with my wife or I could go feed the chickens in my backyard with my kids. These are all choices, right? And every time we make a choice

to do something that's not what I would refer to as really human,

we're literally making a choice to do something that's not.

Yeah. Right.

And that's probably way too glorified. And when I listen to that later on, I'm like, not quite.

But I think it's worth thinking about like what active choices are we making in our businesses and our society and even in our relationships

that pull us away from what makes being human a gift.

That's amazing insight, Leo. You've sparked me to do something I talked about earlier. I had never actually well not for a long time actually taken the pen and paper and tried to write

something right just a short page of something. I haven't done that in so long now I just go write this better for me.

I mean, I have scraps of paper on the back of envelopes when I meet with people because

I can bring out One Note, and One Note's really efficient, or I can record, you know, you can buy these gizmos now that record everything and summarize everything,

but

and I'm not saying I'm special, and I think it's partially my age, but I think I have a desire to have, and I like pencils,

okay?

Because they feel different to me when you write on them,

right?

I bought this fancy phone. It has the little,

you know, the little stylus built in, right? Y

you think it just doesn't it doesn't do it for me. I don't like it.

You know, it's just different.

But for some people, it really does. So, there you go.

Well, this has been fantastic, Leo. Um, we're going to come to the end. Uh, running out of time now, but there's one key question I have for you which every guest answers, and that is AI, is it hype or help?

Yes.

Um, I mean, I that's a tough question for me because I think it is hype. I think there's um when I think of the word hype, I think of like overstated obsession and and everyone's talking about everyone seems to have a bent on it. Everyone wants to write about it. Ironically, everyone writing about it is using AI to write their articles. It's incredible.

Um, so the hype is huge,

but I do think if taken with the right attitude, it can be incredibly helpful, at least currently before it starts taking over some of the human abilities that are distinctly ours.

Yeah. Well, this has been a great We went in deep on some really important topics about the intersection between human and and AI. Topic close to my heart and yours, too, Leo. This has been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for being on on the show.

All right. Talk anytime. Bye.

Well, that was a great chat I had with Leo. There were some really key insights in there. Number one, get away from AI computers. Leave the things aside and get out into nature. Get out with friends.

Be in the moment living life. Life is experiences. Number two, the young people are actually craving this. They want to get away from AI and they want the real life experiences. I wasn't expecting him to say that from young people. That's that's what his research is showing. And number three, AI is affecting all of us. We're all affected by this incredible change. This is the change of our generation and we get fearful of it. Your job might be impacted by this. And what that does is it forces us down the hierarchy of needs. Maslo's hierarchy of needs down to survival. We need to get out of that and just remember, you know, stay grounded because we have potential that goes beyond our fears.

That potential is not realized when we're in a fearful state. We can't learn when we're in a fearful state. So important aspects of psychology. Look, AI is here. It's coming. Um my advice is just to stay positive, stay grounded. I hope that helps.