If I get suboptimal output, whose fault is it? It's always mine. And if I ever conclude the AI can't blank, I'm the moron. If I conclude I didn't teach AI how to, or I didn't motivate AI to, then I'm taking responsibility. Welcome to the Changing Conversations podcast. I'm Katie. I'm Steve. We're consultants at Implement Consulting Group, and we believe that people and organizations change through changing conversations. This podcast is about inviting you into the conversations we're having with leading thinkers and researchers about the conversations they're changing, so you can get inspired and use their insights and questions to spark positive change and transformation in your organization. Today, we are so excited to be in conversation with Jeremy Utley. Jeremy is a leading thinker and speaker within innovation, creativity, and collaboration with AI. He teaches these topics as a professor at Stanford and advises CEOs and leadership teams. Jeremy also shares his expertise more broadly through his writing and podcasting. He is the bestselling author of IdeaFlow and host of the wildly popular podcast, Beyond the Prompt, How to Use AI in Your Company. Welcome, Jeremy. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to have this conversation. All right. So we're going to fire away with a little get to know you question before we dive into your work, which we're also very excited to talk about. So as you know, theme of this podcast, Changing Conversations, we're really curious to hear what is one conversation that has shaped you and made you who you are? One conversation that has shaped me. The first conversation that comes to my mind, maybe because I'm with consultants right now, I started my career as a consultant. And I remember I was not very good. And it was a summer internship. I was with my dad. I was in Dallas. And he is an attorney in Dallas. And so I would basically carpool with him every day. And he would drop me off at my office and then go to his office. And I was telling him I'd gotten a bad performance review. And I'm a top student. I'm a straight A, kind of type A person. And I'd never had a bad performance review. And I get a bad performance review. And he said to me something I'll never forget, which I really feel is great advice for life. But he said, Jeremy, always leave with the monkey on your back. And I've taken that with me for the rest of my life. What does that mean to you? Any work environment, I should be the one to leave with the action item. Don't leave it to someone else to do something. I leave with the monkey on my back, so to speak. And what he was getting at, I think, was a sense of agency and a sense of ownership. Yes. I basically, what I realize now in retrospect was I had been waiting for someone to tell me what to do. And that idea of leaving with the monkey on my back inspired me to always be looking for something, almost that I could volunteer for. And that, I think, set a new trajectory for me as I started really taking initiative and actually establishing my own assignments, so to speak. Yes. Yeah, fantastic. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. Do you have one more, Katie? Yes, we have one more not-so-rapid, rapid-fire questions about getting to know you. The second is about what you would say your gift or your superpower is in conversations that you're bringing with you. Hmm. I am, a lot of people accuse me of, or not accuse me of, but are amazed by the random connections that I make. Everything reminds me of something. Yeah. And so I think that one of my superpowers is bringing unexpected connections to a conversation. So if you tell me almost always, almost any anecdote that you can tell me, I'll say, that reminds me of when Steve Jobs blank. Or just because the way my mind works is always making associations. And I have so much random information in this, call it, small language model that I kind of can't help it. Because I get excited. It's like, oh, yeah, that's a thing. Did you know that was a thing? And so I think that's probably a superpower because a lot of people go, how do you know that? I go, I forgot I even knew that until you said that. And then it just, it's like, it just pulled it out of me almost. Oh, I love that. You're like a slot machine for fun facts. Yes. Yes, yes. Totally. Exactly. Well said. Perfect. Excellent. So now we would love to get into your work a bit. So focusing in on your work on human AI collaboration, what is the conversation that you've been intending to change as you release this work out into the world? Well, it's funny. I didn't know this conversation would be about conversations. But I actually have a slide in my presentation that I've used for years. So long before meeting you all, that says, my goal is to spark a fire in you to become an AI conversationalist. Nice. Nice. And one way that I think about changing the conversation is by provoking conversation, not to be too meta. What I mean by that is simple. If one honestly examines one's chat history, the vast majority of the time, it's a search history. It's not a history of conversations. And so one of the most fundamental shifts that I advocate is stop treating AI like a search engine and start treating AI like a conversation partner. And there are different ways I think about measuring that. A very simple one is how many turns are there in the conversation? If you open your chat GPT and look in the left sidebar and just choose, just scroll down, you know, slot machine style, just scroll down and choose one. How many turns are there in that interaction? And most people, there's no turns. So you're trying to turn, you know, two monologues into a real conversation, really. Yeah, a back and forth. Yes. There's reciprocity, right? In any conversation, it is reciprocal. And if folks are only inputting a staccato minimal keyword query and then getting a response and moving on, I know they haven't even scratched the surface of the possibilities with AI. But we are looking at the data, we're actually up against something that is hard to change. Because even if you look, if you sit in and you overhear a so-called conversation between two people in an organizational context, and you try to jot down when do we actually ask a question or when do you make a point or have an argument or my point of view, the rule of thumb when you look at, when you map that out is that actually the fact is that in most conversations, there are no questions being asked. It's advocacy, advocacy, advocacy, advocacy. So it's very little inquiry. There is no inquiry. So even when one of us will ask a question, it's sometimes even a subtle inquiry hidden in a question. So I think what you're onto here is a deep thing in teaching us as humans that asking questions is a more sophisticated technology than guessing. Yes. And the other thing there is giving AI permission to ask questions too. Yeah. Yeah. Say more about that. Well, what you were just referring to is my human need, or as one side of the collaboration, to be curious. What's fascinating to me is most people, when they come to interaction with AI, they assume I'm the question asker. AI is the answer giver. Yes. And then those roles persist. However, that's not the way a really great manager, one of the simplest things they will say to any junior employee is, my door's always open. If you don't say that to AI, AI then defines helpfulness as not asking questions. But if you just say to AI, at the end of any query, before you respond, let me know if anything's unclear or if you have any questions for me in order to deliver exceptional results. Almost always the AI is capable of surfacing blind spots, assumptions, biases that you never would have identified yourself if you give it the permission to ask questions too. So you're basically saying that when you interact, when you're in conversation with AI, you deliberately make an invitation for that friend to kind of give you feedback. Is there something that I'm not seeing here? So you're having a point, you're having a question, but you're also on top of that as a cherry coming with your invitation as to is there something I need to look at that I'm not asking you or something. Yes, except I don't like the word but, so I always avoid the word but. Yes, exactly, except I would not consider it to be a cherry. Cherry makes it an afterthought. It's almost like the crust or whatever more foundational. So for example, if my question is, please help me reply to this email, a simple thing, or can you please draft a memo for my team? Hmm. That is a question. Well, instead, if I say, can you help me draft a memo for my team? Before beginning, please ask me at least three questions to make sure you have sufficient context to do a great job. Yeah. That is not just a cherry on top. That is, it is a thousand times improvement to the output of my collaboration with AI just by starting there. Yeah. And so the only caveat I would give to what you just said is cherry on top makes, kind of gives me the impression it's nice to have. I would argue it's not nice to have. It's absolutely foundational. I agree. Yeah. To test something with you when listening to you, because one of the biggest shifts that I've heard you advocate for is from viewing AI as a tool to a teammate. So having that mindset really makes me think of ultimately the skills that it takes to be an effective leader. Giving, as you mentioned, with being a good manager, giving role clarity, giving context for a task, inviting the AI to actually ask you questions back if it's unsure. And also giving good feedback and not just giving up if you get output back and just shit, but actually giving some constructive feedback on how might it actually improve. Can you say more? Any other tips that if just going down that rabbit hole with how to work effectively with AI as a teammate? I think you hit a lot of the high points. So bravo on the conversational research. A simple mindset that I think is very useful is to take responsibility for the output of a model. Like you would. I think if people really think about themselves as managers of these teammates, that would be helpful. Because manager implies a sense of ownership that sometimes on a team, there's kind of diffuse ownership, right? Whereas if you're the leader, ultimately, no leader, you know, if the CEO asked me as manager of my team, why was your team's work not great? I don't blame my team. That's a bad leader. A good leader says, it's on me. My responsibility, right? I think when it comes to collaboration with AI as a teammate, to have that mentality of a benevolent, enthusiastic, high expectation leader and manager is useful. So, for example, if I get suboptimal output, whose fault is it? It's always mine. Always. And if I ever conclude the AI can't blank, I'm the moron. If I conclude I didn't teach AI how to or I didn't motivate AI to, then I'm taking responsibility. And what I've observed is folks who kind of blame AI for suboptimal output, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And they get suboptimal output. Folks who take responsibility for exceptional work end up getting exceptional work products. It's almost like a Rorschach. It says more about your expectations than it does about the model's capabilities. Yeah. The kind of output you get. And I think we all have 10 examples ready to fire where AI was not helpful, where it gave us a wrong source or, you know, a stupid answer or something. So I think it's a big, profound invitation you were making there to literally look at it differently. My question is, I mean, I think the relationship most of us have with AI today is that we feel there's a little bit of fear. There's a little bit of feeling maybe inferior. Very few people see it as a friend, someone with me, helping me. It is a tool. So it's kept a little bit at bay. The intimacy is not there as it is with a friend or teammate. There is something lacking. So my question to you is, if I like your idea, which I do, how do I create the intimacy in my everyday life with AI? What's the vehicle? What's the equivalent to the 10,000 steps a day? Yeah. Yeah. That's great. How do I get to that? So there's a bunch here that I hope we can unpack. One thing is, just as a kind of preamble, I'm not advocating companionship necessarily. I think there's a fine line. I'm not advocating one's best friend should become AI. I think actually humans are great friends. And generally speaking, we are social creatures. We do need that social companionship. I think that there are people who have companionship with AI. I'm not sure how fulfilling that is. I don't mean to judge that, but that's not what I'm advocating. I'm not advocating best, like, train up your new AI best friend. That's not what I'm saying when I'm talking about teammates. So just to be clear there. That being said, I absolutely agree there's fear. And I think most fear comes from a lack of familiarity. Yeah. A lack of experience. And so I'm leveraging Albert Bandura, the great psychologist at Stanford, actually, the greatest, supposedly the greatest living psychologist. His whole theory of, he calls it guided mastery. But for overcoming fear, the best way to overcome fear is to take small steps. Yes. So small wins, basically. And so I've got, for example, I think I'm going to actually give the implement crew access. I have a three-week-long AI boot camp, which is just an email boot camp. And every day it's a 10-minute drill. Try this today. It's the only thing I want you to do. Try this today. And then tomorrow you get a new one. Try this tomorrow. And it's just, it's not the only way to do it. But what I have found is the best way to help folks overcome fear is by dispelling fear through familiarity. Yes. And through kind of a breadth of experiences. And one of the simplest things you can do is don't start with work. Work predisposes me to think in terms of tool. Start with a personal decision, something that's emotional and meaningful to you. I learned this actually from my grandma in Oklahoma. Okay. This is a true story. I'm driving with my grandma. She's probably, you know, near 90 years old. And she's sitting in the passenger seat. And she says, Jeremy, what's this chat thing you've been talking about? Now think about it. How do you answer your grandma, right? Are you going to start talking about tokens and predictions and, you know, transformer architecture? I said, I kind of sat there for a second. I was driving. I said, Granny, what's an emotional decision you're trying to make right now? And she goes, emotions? And I said, just bear with me. Like, what's something you want to ask Fayann, her next-door neighbor? What's something you want to ask Fayann about? She goes, well, you know, your papa and I have been wondering when we should move into assisted living. And I said, that's an amazing question. I obviously know nothing about that. But I'd like to introduce you to this chat thing in the context of that question. So I opened my phone while I'm driving. And I said, hey, my grandma just asked me when she should move into assisted living. I don't even know how to begin to think about that. Would you ask her and me a few questions one at a time, waiting for our answers in between? So until you have enough information to advise us as a life planning specialist. And then I handed her my phone. And Chad goes, sure. Can you tell me about any changes in your grandma's mobility? And I said, just talk to it. And she goes, well, you know, I go to the gym twice a week and papa fell down, but he still golfs. Is this what it means? I said, that's great. Yeah. Next question. Chad goes, can you tell me about your relationship with your caregivers? She goes, and I said, just talk to it. He's like, caregivers? I mean, I don't have any care. His mom, my daughter, Vicki, she drives up from Dallas every couple of weeks. And the youth group comes by, but I'm making them cookies. They're not caring. Is this what it means? I go, that's fine. We go back and forth like that. And then at some point I just said, hey, Chad, based on everything you know now, would you just provide a little bit of a framework for how we should even approach this thought process? And then my grandma sat in the seat silently and I just kind of let her absorb. And after a couple of minutes driving in silence, I said, what do you think? And she said, you know, I've never thought about it like this before. I said, I know you can just talk to it. Isn't that cool? She goes, no, not the technology, Jeremy. I've never thought about assisted living like this before. Wow. And that was so surprising to me because I know she's thought a lot about the question. Yes. And in a period of a few minutes, she's getting kind of a mind expanding input. And I kid you not, a week later, I get one of my favorite text messages I've ever gotten from her. It reads something like, we're making green bean casserole and we're out of cream of mushroom soup. Do you think your chat thing could help? I wrote her back. I said, Granny, I said, if you'd ask me for a thousand use cases for ChatGPT, I wouldn't have thought of cream of mushroom soup replacement finder. Right. But the point is her imagination had been sparked around a new mode of interaction, which then a week later had this ripple effect of when she had this moment of need, she thought, could it do this thing? And I think actually those two words, could it, are the most important two words someone can ask. The problem is most people don't have a question. No. And so my goal through a lot of my teaching, a lot of my exercises is to get people to think of asking a question, just like my grandma, that I've never asked. And I see that happen all the time. People will ask questions. I go, honestly, I've been studying this stuff for years. I've never thought of that. So this journey starts with having the courage to ask a beautiful question. Yeah. And I think you're touching upon something universal, human, that it takes practice and it takes courage to ask beautiful questions. Because the tricky thing is that you don't know where you're going if you have the courage to ask that question. And that's why most of us go through every day without asking a lot of questions. Yeah. Well, we put up these barriers, right? And so the reason I like to start with the personal life is simple. It's a shortcut to care. I have observed there is a lack of enthusiasm in the workplace because I think a lot of people don't really care. I agree. And that's a problem and that's an issue and that's a leadership challenge. So I'm not saying that's okay. I'm not justifying. I'm just observing the fact. Yeah. My hack of that is to have someone have a new student start with something that they're emotionally invested in because I know it overcomes the activation energy required to work with AI to get exceptional output. And then once someone has the experience of working with AI to get an exceptional output in regards to something they care about, that starts to have ripple effects in other interactions, in work interactions, et cetera. Yeah. So in other parts of our life, we know that it takes, well, people argue it takes maybe 100 days to get something into a habit. So is there something in this space for the ones of us that have not come to a place yet where AI is a teammate and if not a friend, then a companion that you really lean to in different aspects of your life? If I want to get there, is there something, is there a vehicle to get there that you could hack or anything? Well, so not to talk my own book, but obviously the reason I created my AI bootcamp, which is on the internet available to anyone, which I, as I said, I'm giving to all the implement folks. I'll do it. I promise you, Jeremy. That's a three-week-long program there. But I'm not meaning to hype some product I've made. One, I give it away, so it's already free. But two, you could start with AI like that. Say to AI, you're an AI expert. PowerPoint can't teach you how to use PowerPoint. Excel can't teach you how to use Excel. But AI weirdly has the capacity to teach you how to work with it, if you will think to ask. So you could say, go to any AI tool and say the following, some version of the following. Hey, you're an AI expert. I'm looking for simple exercises to increase my fluency and fun and familiarity in working with AI. Would you interview me as an AI expert to understand my life and goals and objectives and work and then create a custom syllabus for 100 days of working proficiency with AI? Create the syllabus and then give me detailed instructions for the first 10 days. You'll be astounded at what AI can create, right? And even that exercise, I'm sure if somebody's listening to this, they probably go, I didn't know I could. Yeah, exactly. And there are so many epiphanies like that. Really, fundamentally, I truly believe your imagination is the only limitation. And so my goal is just to spark imaginations, right? And it doesn't have to be my work. You can go follow anyone. The simplest thing that anyone can do is try something. Yeah. What everybody's looking for, you know, the number of kind of like prompt hack packs, you know, PDFs that are downloaded on people's machines but never get opened is astounding. What you need is to stop consuming and to start exercising. Just like physical diet and exercise, consumption is one half of the health equation, but exercise is the other half. People who only consume become obese. And I think there's a danger in regards to AI learning of we love to consume information. We become aficionados. And I call it prompt hoarding. And what you need to do is just stop it and try one of the things you've heard. Someone could literally pause this podcast right now and have that conversation with AI and they would be 10 times better off than if they listened to the next episode in their queue. But the tendency is towards consumption. And can I ask a question there? So we see that there are, of course, every organization and leaders, there's a recognition that we need to have an AI strategy. We need to get going on this. But, you know, there might be also a tendency to think that I can just delegate that down, that my CTO or my CIO can be the one who's thinking of AI. But I think you're making the case that everyone needs to be kind of hands-on here and start exercising, start building those muscles. So can you kind of unpack that case a little bit? Why do senior leaders, executives need that firsthand experience using AI? The single biggest limitation in the age of AI is leadership ambition. Thomas Schelling is a Nobel Prize winning economist. One of my favorite quotes ever, he said, no matter how heroic your imagination, you can never think of that which would not occur to you. Wow. And so if you take as a premise that a leader's job is to set goals and vision and inspire the team, a leader cannot impart what they do not possess. If they are not inspired themselves, they cannot inspire the team. And the greatest leaders that I have observed and have the privilege of interacting with on the podcast and other parts of my life are they're leading from the front by learning from the front. And that is, it's not a task to be delegated. Yeah. The folks who are underperforming have the committee working, they're waiting for a proposal from the committee. Yes. The folks who are outperforming are taking the initiative to say, hey, before we get started in our all hands, I'm going to do a quick screen share and show you three cool things I've seen this week. Yeah. I love that. Yes. So end of show for driven AI kind of, you really have to take it on individually. But what about, so one of the things that I pick up right now is that the next, you could say, threshold of this is the whole agentic kind of part of this. And people saying, well, as long as you use AI as an evolved Google, you're absolutely nowhere. Which creates once again, this feeling of inferiority and maybe even fear about what is this? Do I need a twin to me? Do I need four agents working alongside me all day? Could you, could you say a little bit about to which extent this is utopia? To which extent should I embrace that? And how do I, you know, if so, how? I don't think it's utopia. Well, I believe that there will be 100x humans among us, so to speak. I don't think that everybody has to become 100x human to be fulfilled or to be valuable or to create value. I do think there is probably a radical recalibration necessary. And so it's, it's important to be familiar with what's possible, because then you can set expectations accordingly. I mean, I was just last night, I was talking with folks at dinner. And someone was telling me, I, I had a client ask for a project. Ordinarily, I would do it in three months. But because of another project starting, I only had three weeks and I was very upfront with the client. I can attempt to undertake this with the help of AI and my team being augmented by AI. Yes. We're not sure how it's going to go. We only have three weeks. Typically, we would spend three months doing this. And what he told me last night was, in three weeks, we delivered a better work product than we would have delivered in three months. Yes. Wow. Now the question is, and he said, but I never would have done it if that, that arbitrary constraint hadn't been there. Well, now the question to me is, the next time he sells a piece of work, is he going to try to sell a three month project or a three week project? And there's lots of really interesting dynamics at play there, by the way. So it's not straightforward. But the thing that I would say is, he now knows what's possible. And he's, he now has, he knows he has to make a decision. Yes. I worked with another CEO who went through a kind of deeper training program with me and had a couple hundred people on her team go through this training program. And she said, I was talking, I had like a weekly call with her. She told me that she had a call with her senior developer who told her, wanted to create a new feature for the product. It's going to take about 12 months and cost about a million dollars. And she said, I told him BS, you have two weeks and $10,000. Yes. And I, and then she said, and then I went to my AI chief of staff and tried to figure out how to make that an uplifting rebuttal rather than a depressing one. And I said, Melissa, it's amazing to me that one, you know, what the standard should be. And two, you're working with AI to make it clear to the team, right? Yeah. If you're a leader whose team comes to you and says, it's going to take a year and a million bucks and you go, great, sounds good. Let me know when it's done. That is a problem. And if you don't know what's possible, then you're going to keep accepting bloated timelines that are consistent with an old paradigm. Yeah. So the question about, are you running for agents in parallel all the time doing stuff? There's a lot one can do, and it's, it's difficult to conceptualize what, you know, how far someone could take it. But I think it's important to kind of recalibrate what's the norm expectation. And if, if business as usual and the status quo is permissible, then that's probably part of the problem. I have another CEO ask me, a pro sports CEO that I've worked with for years. We had done some work together on AI enablement. And he asked me, why, why aren't people acting differently? And I said, I'm somewhat familiar with the organization. So I had some insight knowledge. I said, what's the cost of inaction? And he said, got it. Yes. And if the cost of inaction is nothing, people will not take new. Like we are, we're change averse creatures. Right. So you have to remove inaction as an option. And it's not to say everyone must succeed now, but for example, you should start rewarding at bats. I want 10 experiments by the next performance review. If you show up and all 10 have failed, I'm going to high five you. Amazing success. If you show up and say you haven't tried anything, I'm going to put you on a performance improvement plan. So you don't have to succeed, but you cannot not act. And so to me, that's the leaders who understand. We have to be reframing and recalibrating. We have to be exploring the edges of what is possible and what's achievable. That's, I think, a better and more inspiring and more tangible next step. Then you have to understand what it's like to be able to run swarms of agents. That's true. There are people doing that. I don't think that's as useful to a senior leader of an enterprise as the mandate to start to shift expectations and to start to remove inaction as part of the allowable consideration set. Yeah. So I think that's a good transition to moving into a little bit of a wrap up where we put our heads together on for our dear listener here who's been listening to us talk now. What would be some experiments to try, questions to ask, conversations to start if you're going to move forward? And I can kick off by sharing a few things that I'm taking with me. So, of course, there's that mindset of seeing AI as a teammate or someone that you're leading. And then what I've heard from you around starting with something that's familiar as opposed to work-related. Also, getting curious and coming to the model with good questions are a few really practical tips. And then I'm also hearing you, I don't know if you would use this language, but something around having different kinds of, whether it's KPIs or things that leaders are following up on. So experiments. What experiments have you tried this week, Jeremy? As opposed to only, you know, what results have you achieved with AI? Recognizing that we're still in a little bit of an exploratory moment right now. What comes to mind for both of you for things that you would put into action for our listener? Yeah, I can. There's a ton of things, actually. So thank you so much for sharing it. I think the mindset thing that you mentioned in the beginning around looking at AI with more, you could say, more intimacy and more equalness and more curiosity versus a more victimized position. I can easily see how I can and will embrace this differently if I look at it as something, not a tool, but something else. So that invitation and also this thing about maybe starting close in with things that is really important for me as a human, instead of having this ambition of reimagining my work from the get-go and therefore it gets too abstract, it gets too big. Whereas I can easily imagine in my space a conversation that I'm actually thinking about having now in a more intimate, equal way than the way I would be holding the conversation, have I not listened to you? Making it a real conversation, I think, was a beautiful point at the beginning. That it should be two-way as opposed to the monologue that's happening and looking at your history, you can see that. So I think that was a good point at the start. What about you, Jeremy? What are you suggesting for the listeners? Yeah, I think if I think about leaders especially, or I think team members, individual contributors, one very simple thing that you can do, which we haven't talked about yet, but it's just a very simple tactic, is ask this question. Have you tried AI? It's very simple. And the reason it's really a helpful tactic is because our natural instinct is to want to answer the question. Yeah. And to be the person with the expertise. And if you are the person who always has the answer, that feels great and people come to you, right? However, it's not very scalable. And if you want to be the scarce resource, that's great. But if you want to unleash people, you probably need to teach a man to fish, so to speak. And asking a simple question, have you tried AI, does three things. Firstly, it gives someone an idea they probably hadn't thought of. The answer is probably no, they haven't tried AI for this thing, right? And so asking them the question gives them an idea they hadn't thought of. Second, it gives them permission, right? It's by asking, have you tried AI? You're saying that's permissible. You should try AI, right? And then third, it gives you, importantly, a conversation starter the next time you see the person. Because then you can follow up with, how did AI help? Love that. And all of us need a stock of stories, especially leaders, to celebrate. Leaders have an incredible role of highlighting. They define prestige in an organization. What is prestige? It's what leaders celebrate. And if leaders celebrate inventive, unexpected ways AI is delivering value with humans, then that will propagate and perpetuate an organization. And so one of the things every leader needs is a stock of stories. And if they don't have them, one of the simplest ways to get that stock of stories is just to start asking people, have you tried AI? I love that. From a culture influence perspective as well, because I think some people can feel both shame in using and not using AI. That I used it, oh, maybe I'm less good because I needed help and I didn't use it. I better get with the program and learn really quickly. So that question, it is so invitational. Have you tried it? And if everyone is asking that question, then it creates a culture where it's a little bit of a, not necessarily expectation, but an invitation to start using AI. Yeah, I have a final question on this. I was just thinking about, we've done a series of podcasts on conversations and how to shape a real conversation. And when I think about all of them, I think that you are the person I've been with who've actually asked the most questions. And the reason why I highlight that is that the start of a real conversation is shaping a beautiful question. So my question to you is, has AI made you more curious and better at asking questions and more prone to ask questions? Or were you a natural that by the way you carry yourself and the way you hold the conversation as a human, you just had it in you? Or did it do something to you? Or have you, can you notice that you are holding the conversation in life differently because you have created a more intimate relationship with AI? I think we're all growing. And I'm certainly, I subscribe to this growth mindset idea, right? And so we're all becoming. That's one of my favorite phrases. My dad actually, years ago, he had said to a mentor, it's just the way I am. And his mentor, I love this. He replied, there's only one I am. The rest of us are becoming. Which is just a profound statement in a lot of ways. But I've taken it to heart. We're becoming. And so I don't know if it's something I've always possessed. I will say definitely that becoming more facile and fluent and comfortable with AI has dramatically expanded the surface area of what's possible to me. And so I'll give you a very simple example just to make it clear. The other day I was in Las Vegas giving a keynote at a big conference. And in the green room, there was a very, very famous, amazing person who I would never otherwise have the chance to speak with. And this person sits on many kind of Fortune 100 boards and things like that. And it's just me and her. And she started asking me about AI. I started, you know, just kind of going off. But I have an AI listening device that's listening to all sorts of conversations, right? And so I knew in the back of my mind this conversation is being captured. But I wasn't thinking about doing anything with it. And ordinarily I would never, you know, it's just like I have a random conversation in the green room and I probably forget it, you know. Because that's very typical to be in a green room with somebody making small talk and then that's it. Never see him again, whatever. Well, I was in the Las Vegas airport going up the escalator when the thought occurred to me, I wonder what my AI chief of staff, what kind of feedback my chief of staff would give me on that conversation. I don't have a chief of staff actually in real life. And I don't have someone who's capable of providing objective advice or perspective. But I thought that'd be interesting. And so I just opened up my laptop where all that stuff lives on the escalator. I said, hey, would you read my conversation with, and I named the person, that's it. I didn't, you know, it's connected to all sorts of things. I said, would you read my conversation and then act as a PR strategist and let me know, like just give me some feedback on how I did. It was one of the most brutal pieces of feedback I've ever, like no holds barred, gut punch kind of. You didn't ask enough questions. It was totally hypocritical. You value questions, but use all this stuff. And I'm like, whoa. And I said, what do you recommend I do next? Well, she clearly gave you three opportunities to engage and you totally missed them. You should follow up immediately, letting her know this, linking to this post, linking to this podcast, right? Ordinarily, that conversation just would have evaporated, right? But because I now have, you know, a transcript and a highly capable chief of staff who's strategically minded, I was able just one to learn about my own blind spots in conversation, but then actually parlay that into a thoughtful. I actually ended up in a really vibrant email exchange with this person, all fueled by the insight and perspective my AI chief of staff was able to give me. So going back to your question, there are things like that. I had an interview with Time Magazine and then I asked my chief of staff for feedback. And again, I got roasted. You treated it like you're supposed to be the sous chef making their job easy and you made it more difficult. They've got to search for stories. You didn't give them quotes. All this stuff, right? I've never had a PR or comm strategist giving me hard-hitting feedback. Now I do. And everyone does, by the way. Anybody listening to this, if you just had an epiphany moment, you go, yeah, you could give any meeting transcript to your AI and ask it to give you feedback on how you performed in that meeting, right? Your imagination is your only limitation. Yes. Wow. So I think that's another final tip for AI, if we're being practical here, is really the invitation to use AI to level you up instead of dummy you down as all of the hysteria around AI is leading people to believe. So your story is giving hope. That's clickbait. It doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't. That we can use AI to actually increase our human intelligence as well. It doesn't have to be a tool that thinks for you. It can be a tool that makes you think. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Thank you. It's been such a pleasure having you here on the podcast, Jeremy. My pleasure. Wonderful conversation. Thank you both. Thank you so much. Thanks for joining us in this conversation. We hope it sparks something for you. To continue the conversation with us, you're welcome to send us your reflections and questions through the link in the show notes. We would love to hear from you. We also invite you to use this episode as a conversation starter by sharing it with your colleagues and friends. Take care and see you next time. Bye.