The Truth About AI, Leadership & the Future of Work | Negotiate Anything

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Welcome to this negotiation masterclass edition of negotiate anything, with over 1600 episodes featuring some of the world's brightest minds.

We've carefully curated three powerful conversations for you.

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Dave, thanks for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

Hey, man, it is my pleasure.

So how would you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Yeah, so again, thanks for having me.

My primary shtick right now is I'm an AI YouTuber.

I've been researching AI off and on for about the last 15, 14 to 15 years.

Started doing it full time earlier this year, and I focus on everything from fine tuning to AI alignment, everything in between.

I also do some consulting.

I have about 600 supporters on Patreon, a few dozen of which I talk to on a regular basis to help coach them on deploying AI in their businesses.

This is great.

And listeners, I always say it.

My friends who come on the podcast, they are very humble.

Let me pump you up a little bit, Dave.

So Dave's YouTube channel is the best channel out there for artificial intelligence.

It's exceptional.

And so if you want to learn more about AI, this is the guy to follow, because you've been growing at an astronomical pace over the past three to six months.

And it's just great to see you continue to shine because your work is exceptional.

Well, thank you.

Yeah.

Yeah, my pleasure.

And listen, so for this episode, we're going to keep this simple at the beginning.

And then we're just going to we're going to build.

And so this is.

This is going to start off almost like a there's a primer, getting everybody started understanding what AI is and then building up to the implications for society in the future.

And there's been a lot of extremism on all sides when it comes to this.

And it's hard to tell the, you know, separate the wheat from the chaff here.

So that's what you have, Dave.

And you know, let's go back to the beginning, because you said you've been working on this for the last 14 to 15 years.

And I think for a lot of people that would be surprising because they might say didn't AI come about last year?

So let's just start off with the simple question of what is AI and tell us a little bit of the history about it.

Yeah.

So from a from the biggest perspective, AI is you might also have heard machine learning.

So the idea is that you use computers to learn from data.

That's like the simplest, highest level version.

And but that what that learning looks like has changed over time.

Historically, most machine learning was about mathematical optimization, linear regression, that sort of stuff, a lot of statistics.

With the last decade or so, as computers became a lot more powerful.

Basically, we could throw a lot more math at it.

And when you do that you can have larger mathematical models, which we now call neural networks or deep neural networks.

And so all the rage right now.

Probably most of your listeners have heard about chat gpt.

Chat gpt, at its heart is just a large language model which is a artificial neural network, and so an artificial neural network that's a really fancy term for saying that it does a lot of linear algebra really really fast, and i mean like billions and billions of calculations every every uh, you know conversation that you have with it.

So it's at its heart, it's a lot of math and it's predicting your next character.

This is great.

First of all, impressive synopsis for something so complex.

And now when we think about artificial intelligence, we can say, OK, Dave, I'm following.

So what's the big deal?

Every this is taking over the news cycle.

What is the big deal?

How would you conceptualize that?

Yeah.

So, I mean, at its heart, artificial intelligence is a form of automation, right?

And automation itself is not new.

We've had electromechanical automation since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution 150 years ago.

It's also a force amplifier.

So a way to think of force amplifiers like the steam engine, right?

Steam engines put out a lot more work than humans, a lot more work than oxes and cows.

Internal combustion engines ditto.

For all that.

So you can think of it as kind of two parts, right?

It's that automation engine, which allows you to do more cognitive work faster, cheaper, better.

It also is a force amplifier in that it allows one person to do more at one time or do more faster.

So from a brass tacks standpoint, that's kind of how to look at AI.

It's just the next evolution of automation and industrialization.

Okay, this is great.

So as a force amplifier, and it's a form of automation, this is great.

So we can understand.

Essentially, we can do the things that we want to do using artificial intelligence with much more efficiency and precision because of these large language models, right?

Yep.

That's the heart of it.

Yeah, and now let's let's try to paint a vision of the future, because people are starting to say okay great, maybe that sounds to them as smarter computers.

Computers have been getting smarter and faster and smaller, and every year, so what's different about this?

This is what, in the industry, is called a step change.

In many cases, you have a smooth trend line.

Cars get X amount more efficient every year.

We deploy X percentage more solar every year.

That's a nice smooth growth curve.

But what artificial neural networks, especially large language models like ChatGPT, do?

That's a step change, which is there's suddenly a whole bunch of new abilities that were not there before.

That's like going from an electric typewriter to Microsoft Word, right?

It still fundamentally does the same thing, but it comes with a thousand features that typewriters just are not capable of.

And so this is taking that to the next level, at least in terms of language generation and manipulating language.

Absolutely.

And I think that's one of the things that's so difficult about explaining this technology, because when you think about our human cognitive capacity, we're limited.

So, for instance, when you think about numbers, we're limited in our ability to appreciate large numbers.

So it goes from one to ten to one hundred to a thousand to a lot.

OK, and we can't really fathom much beyond a lot.

And I think I think it might have been on your channel or some other channel.

They were talking about kind of giving an idea of how rapidly this was advancing.

And when you think about the iPhone, it was advancing what.

Every year, or every few years, we're waiting for the new iPhone to come out.

It was a big deal.

But here with AI, it's like these advancements are happening in a matter of days, not years.

Can you kind of give a conceptualize just how rapid this advancement is?

Yeah.

So, having having been like keeping my finger on the pulse of this particular technology thread, which started in about 2015,

And of course that back then it was you know a new version, a new model would come out every one or two years.

And then, you know, a year or two ago was about every six to nine months.

And now, of course, as you said, it's weekly.

Right.

Where where we get new advancements.

And not only is. like individual companies are churning out results faster.

There are now more companies participating.

So we're getting this broadening of the field as well as this acceleration.

And so we get these compounding returns, as results are shared and the economic incentives are there as well.

Right,

Because we've seen for the first time companies have gone under or had their market undercut, biggest one being Google.

With ChatGPT came out, Google lost $100 billion of valuation in a couple months.

It was incredible.

A lot of people see the writing on the wall.

What we're entering is what's called a race condition, where one company has to race another company in order to just keep up.

It's keep up or die at this point, at least for some companies.

Not all companies are in the same, but that's one of the driving forces of seeing this acceleration in AI.

That's why ChatGPT, they come out with a new version about every other week now.

Then, of course, there's competitors trying to break into the market, but they're way out ahead still.

Absolutely.

I think one of the concepts that can help people to get a better understanding of How significant this technology could be just in the context of the entirety of our species, is the concept of the singularity.

Can you tell them about that too?

The singularity was a hypothetical eventuality, an end state that was proposed by Ray Kurzweil, a futurist and researcher where basically, these compounding returns that we're seeing, that we're starting to see today, if acceleration continues, it's kind of like you drop a penny off the Empire State Building right.

The myth is you drop it and by the time it gets to the bottom, it's moving so fast that it could, like shatter a car windshield or kill someone, right?

And so gravity is probably the most familiar exponential acceleration that anyone's familiar with right.

You drop something from space, it burns up on the way down because of how fast it's going.

That is kind of the data equivalent of the singularity where the idea, and there's lots of different ways to explain it.

But the idea is that the compounding returns of more data, more AI, better computers you get these this, this reinforcement, this virtuous cycle, where it keeps going faster and faster and faster until it reaches, basically like infinite growth rate, which obviously there's still going to be constraints of physics, right.

We only have so much electricity.

There's only so much water to cool the data centers.

There's always going to be some constraints, but the hypothetical limit of computation is much higher than we've even come close to.

So the high end... end is still way out there.

But if this rate of acceleration continues, we might get close to that.

You know those thermodynamic limits sooner rather than later.

That's the singularity.

And the idea is that once you basically solve all of science, all of math, all of chemistry, we don't even know what's possible.

And so the idea of the singularity is that there's the event horizon, right?

Which you can't see beyond the event horizon of a singularity.

That's the point of the 2045 to 2035, or even I think some people have revised it down to like 2028.

So, like five years at the soonest, we're going to get to this point of compounding returns and compounding acceleration that we don't really know how life is going to be like beyond that.

Yes.

And as you say, we don't know what life is going to be like.

I am going to ask you to try to explain what life is going to be like, because I think people are understanding.

They're saying, OK, this is a big deal.

Solving science is a very big statement, because we think about just the technological advances from 1900 to 2000.

It's it's astronomical, it's a completely different world.

And now to even posit that we're at a point where we could create a technology to essentially end all technologies like this is the platform that just spurs humanity to a place that we can't even conceptualize.

Can you get and i give us an idea of what the potential outcomes could be yeah, so i guess.

Well, on a sliding scale, on the low end, due to some of those constraints of physics, right?

The planet is only so big.

There's only so much energy that we can use on the low end.

You're looking at um, what i call kind of a post labor economy where, because these machines are getting smarter and more efficient like think about how powerful chat gpt is twenty dollars a month and it i mean, i don't know about you, but it accelerated everything that i do on youtube um, anything that i want to do like uh, i was working on a project with people and i wrote a 32 000 word book in three days with the help of chat gpt, Right.

So I'm going 100 times faster than I used to before.

Right.

So on the low end, everyone goes 100 or 1000 times faster at whatever it is that they're trying to do, at least for at least for intellectual labor.

Now that is going to change that.

That alone would create new economic paradigms that we're not quite ready for, because the thing is is are very expensive to employ, right.

You need health insurance, you need benefits, you need HR.

But if you can replace 100 people with a chat GPT subscription and that's today, that's version one.

What is version two, three, four of these things with all their integrations?

How many human labors are they going to be able to replace?

And then the big question is, that economic boost, is that going to translate to other new jobs?

It's a big open question.

And there's a lot of debate about that.

So the very least we're looking at a major shift in you know the way that we think about economics.

If you look at 200 years ago, 95 of people were farmers.

Right, and that's just because of how inefficient it was right.

Farming was not particularly efficient because we didn't have steam engines and internal combustion engines.

You had to do most of it by hand or with the aid of large animals.

So the industrial revolution gave us that new force multiplier steam engines, internal combustion engines.

This is the next labor force multiplier.

So what if 95% of jobs today, right?

Like you take that same paradigm, 95% of jobs today go away because you don't need it.

So what's left?

You know, and it's pretty scary to think like okay well, only 5 of jobs will remain.

And, historically speaking, those jobs have always been replaced by new jobs.

We don't know if that's going to happen this time, and there's good reason.

There's good reason arguments on both sides right, like it has always happened up to this point.

We'll discover new demands for human labor.

It might not happen though because, like i said earlier, humans are expensive.

So that's like the low end.

We're looking at that level of economic disruption even before the singularity right that's coming in the next five to ten years.

On the high end, you have everything possible from.

You know people are working on brain computer interfaces.

So like I don't personally believe this is possible, but some people think like, oh well, you get those brain computer interfaces sophisticated enough.

You could upload your brain to live in a computer for the next four million years or whatever.

So and that sounds like pure science fiction.

You know, there's all kinds of other possibilities.

You know, you solve faster than light travel, high energy physics, and then we start colonizing the entire galaxy after the singularity.

So The truth is probably somewhere between those two extremes of economic disruption, and you know, we invent Star Wars technology.

Incredible.

Great synopsis because you're absolutely right, because I agree with you.

I think the conservative estimation is the fact that we.

We get to that post labor society, the leisure class as you describe, and then it creates this, this really challenging, almost philosophical conundrum.

Where we are really, we almost have no choice but to explore what the meaning of life is because we have nothing else to do.

Right.

And so this disrupts the whole philosophy. fabric of society.

Notice I say disrupts.

It doesn't mean good or bad.

It will significantly change it.

And so, in order to be able to be ready for these outcomes, we have to be able to have conversations about this.

And I think one of the most important conversations is about AI regulation.

And I think this is notable because, again, this is Listeners, let me say something.

If I ever say anything smart about AI, just know that I'm saying what Dave has already said to me months in the past on YouTube.

Okay,

Don't give me any credit here, right?

But you and your team brought up a really great point where you said this is the only time in history in the United States where corporate interests have come to the government and said what we've created is so powerful.

You need to regulate us.

Let's work on how to do that.

So let's talk about why meaningful regulation is so important.

And then later we can talk about what that actually looks like.

Yeah, absolutely.

So earlier I mentioned that race condition, right?

So Google is terrified.

Microsoft is terrified.

A whole bunch of other startups and other tech companies, they're all terrified.

They have a lot of inertia, right?

They have a lot of market capital that is going to be difficult to dislodge.

That being said, we've seen it before.

Tech companies can collapse relatively quickly.

So that race condition means that they're all incentivized right now to go as fast as possible.

Because it's adapt or die, right?

And so the only thing that can slow that down, that race condition down, is a systemic change that affects all of them equally.

And that is regulation.

So the best model that we have for effective regulation is GDPR in Europe um, and so gdpr in europe.

One of the it's basically data privacy right.

That's a very broad uh data privacy and many, many companies took it very, very seriously.

Uh, going so far as uh gdpr tells you about things like where data is allowed to be housed, who is allowed to have access to it, and so like, if your user, if you're a german citizen, for instance your data, you have a right one to have that data deleted, but you also have a right for it to stay within german jurisdiction, and that that uh policy was so powerful that like, people abide by it, and so that's the kind of systemic change that changes the rules of the game right, and so that is why people like sam alvin from openai and, um i apologize, christina montgomery from ibm why they're saying hey, like we are advocating for this national, like blanket regulation policy, because that will force everyone to slow down.

They're still incentivized to compete.

Capitalism isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

That competition, that race will still be there, but it'll be constrained.

It's like stock car racing.

You're not allowed to put nitro in your stock car.

Everyone has the same basic parts in their car, so they're limited in speed.

That keeps the rules fair, but also safer for everyone.

I actually like that analogy.

I like that too.

That was really good.

And now, again, that makes sense.

Why is that so hard?

Hypothetically, it's not hard, right?

Because we've done it before, right?

We've got the FDA.

We've got plenty of regulatory bodies all over the world.

We've even got international regulatory bodies, right?

There's nuclear inspectors that will inspect all the enrichment reactors all over the planet.

So we have a model for it.

We have succeeded at this problem because the only other time that we've ever created something.

There's been two other times that we've created things this dangerous.

One, bioweapons and two, nuclear weapons, right?

So we have a model for regulating these existential technologies.

Now, that being said, one of the hardest problems is actually what's called the Overton window.

That is the range of conversation that you can talk about without getting laughed off the stage, right.

Right.

And so, because of the Senate hearing that we're alluding to, because of Chad GPT, because of Google and Microsoft, that Overton window is shifting.

So now people are saying, oh, OK, we're allowed to talk about these existential risks.

And you know, on the one hand it's maybe not a full existential risk, but we are at risk for that economic disruption.

And on the more extreme end is that existential risk.

But now we're allowed to talk about it.

And so now it's time to evaluate, OK, what are the what are the lessons from history?

Right.

And one of the kind of darkest chapters of human history was a policy called mutually assured destruction.

So for many people who were alive back then, or alive as I was, at the tail end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War with the United States the, the policy of mutually assured destruction, was about the, the buildup of nuclear weapons.

So the buildup of nuclear weapons was about the idea that no nation had what's what's called first strike capability.

So first strike capability was the ability to completely cripple the other, your enemy, so that they couldn't retaliate.

So in this condition, in this, in this race condition, where you were incentivized to have as many nuclear weapons as you could, all over the planet, strike capability then nobody would shoot first because it was guaranteed that everyone would die right, and so that's like the worst kind of game to be playing.

We don't want to be playing that game again with ai.

We want to have what's called like a win-win situation, where it's like, instead of getting everything locked up in this mutually assured destruction, where companies are going as fast as they can because nations are also incentivized to go as fast as they can, There's been political leaders all over the world saying that the nation that wins at AI wins the geopolitical stage for the next century.

And that sounds very similar to mutually assured destruction.

So we want to avoid that.

So it's not that it's complex, but there's a lot of moving parts.

There's a lot of incentives, but in principle One it's relatively straightforward because the incentives are there.

It's a military and economic incentive, but it's complex because you've got a lot of people with antagonistic incentives.

So that's where the complexity comes in because we all want it, right?

We want the golden carrot of AI, giving us that post-singularity lifestyle without the mutually assured destruction component.

Threading that needle is the hard part.

That makes a lot of sense.

And one of the things that you've talked about is the strategy of national versus international types of regulations.

And so there are layers of complexity here because it's going to be tougher to get it regulated and come to some alignment here internally within the United States.

But then the only way to really make this work in a meaningful way is to get as many parties as possible hopefully the entire world on board.

And so when you think about the strategy, to actually pull that off.

What does that look like to you?

Yeah.

So the strategy that I advocate is one that is grassroots decentralized global, because one of the chief problems let me frame it this way

One of the chief problems of this is what's called a coordination failure.

And a coordination failure is we could hypothetically find an optimal solution, but only if everyone works together.

Right.

But because there's a lack of trust right, either within nations or between nations, because of that lack of trust, we tend to throw up our walls and not not cooperate.

Right.

But fortunately, we we you and me, everyday people have a really powerful tool for collaboration.

We have the Internet right, and so by using this global communication tool, we can actually solve the uh the, the coordination problem.

But then the, the question is okay, who does what and why and what's the strategy?

Right, and if you, if you distribute these ideas, these plans and you build consensus, you know, on twitter, on reddit on, you know email, on youtube right, we've got these platforms that have global reach.

Um, On my YouTube channel, only 6 of my viewers are in America.

Everyone else is global.

By using those exponential communication tools that we already have access to, having these conversations, talking with other influencers, talking with researchers, we can build consensus to say yes, we need an international regulatory body that is modeled on the nuclear regulators.

Yes, we need it.

We need a national regulator that's modeled on the FDA or the FCC or whatever.

You know, we need a national policy that's modeled on the GDPR, but updated for AI.

Right.

So by building that consensus like that's that's how democracy is supposed to work.

Right.

Is once there's a strong enough consensus, the politicians that support it get voted in.

The politicians know that, you know, because the politicians, they all look at polls, right?

What's most popular, right?

What policy is going to get them reelected?

It's all about incentives.

And so, by building consensus around these things, we can shift the rules of the game so that those incentives line up and actually incentivize solving the control problem, solving AI and creating breaks for that race condition.

But it does require broad enough consensus for the mechanisms of democracy to work like that.

This is fascinating because it makes sense.

It makes sense theoretically, because if we get enough people saying the same thing, then people would have to respond.

In your opinion, is that more of a challenge of essentially winning the messaging battle and just getting more people on board?

Or is there some kind of mechanism that you think would accelerate the process?

Messaging is absolutely critical.

First step is getting the message out, having the conversations, having the debates.

But messaging alone is necessary but not sufficient.

So that's an engineering term, necessary but not sufficient.

If you don't have a foundation, you got nothing, right?

You build a house of cards.

So what comes after that is action.

Right.

And there are going.

There are, I don't say there are going to be.

There are likely to be conflicts of interest.

Right.

There's always going to be some adversary out there that says, actually, I don't want to play nice.

I'm going to cheat.

I'm going to try and stack the deck in my favor because I want the strongest military.

So I'm going to cheat or I want to have the first quadrillion dollar company.

So I'm going to cheat.

Right.

There's there's all kinds of in economics, what's called a perverse incentive.

Right. there are rewards for that.

So what we have to do is create a system that is so robust, so comprehensive, that cheating, that breaking the rules, is worse than actually following the rules, and so that's what, in game theory, that's called a nash equilibrium.

So i don't know if you've ever played the game monopoly.

Right, you want to wheel and deal you, you get all.

You get all the, all the properties.

You build your hotels.

That's your strategy, right?

That's everyone's strategy, but the the the difference is that in a competitive game like that, it's designed for there only to be one winner, Right.

It's a winner take all strategy.

So that is still true globally.

Right.

Apple dominates.

You know the smartphone area that they probably it's their neck and neck with Android.

Right.

And then on the military front, you know, the United States and the European Union, like the Western allies, dominate in terms of military power.

So globally, we do have this condition where it's still winner takes all.

But how do we create a situation that brings everyone else to the table so that everyone is able to win right?

Not just people that are ideologically aligned to you know, using Apple over Android or ideologically aligned to the United States and Western allies and liberalized democracies.

So there's a lot of work to do, even above and beyond just getting the message out.

But getting the message out is certainly the first step.

Yeah, I love this.

It's really helpful to have a clearer roadmap because essentially, it's amplifying voices like yours, helping people to see what options are out there and spreading the message.

There's no way to know this for sure, but I'm just interested in your perspective.

When you think about the risk of challenges and problems with AI versus the rate at which the United States is regulating, do you think we'd be able to get meaningful regulation in place before something bad happens?

Or does something bad happen need to happen in order for us to make that move?

There have been a few times in history where the perceived danger was there.

There's a movie that's about to come out called Oppenheimer.

This movie, it stars on Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer.

The back story.

For anyone who doesn't know, this is the story of the development of the nuclear bomb.

One of the events that precipitated the Manhattan Project was Albert Einstein wrote a letter to Congress Saying because what basically, what he did was he ran the calculation.

He said, OK, let me look at a pound of plutonium.

Look at how much energy it radiates per day, per hour, per year, and calculate out how much energy is total in a pound of uranium and a pound of plutonium.

And he realized there is more energy in a pound of this stuff.

And so he wrote a letter to Congress saying you need to pay attention to this, because there is so much energy locked into this.

If you can unleash that energy, it can change the world.

Right.

And so then the Manhattan Project came in and, you know, the rest is history.

Right.

It was all very, very secret.

It's all going to be, you know, dramatized in the movie Oppenheimer, which I will be there day one because it looks real good.

And I don't know if they'll have the Albert Einstein aspect in that, but but you can actually find it.

There's a copy of the letter online.

So we probably are.

Hopefully, what happened was that Senate hearing with Sam Altman and IBM.

Hopefully that was that letter to Congress saying there is something here you need to pay attention to it.

And so there's been calls online for like, we need the equivalent of the Manhattan Project for AI.

So maybe that call has happened, but maybe not.

So hopefully we'll see.

This is great.

Dave, I could talk to you all day about this.

I know this because I've listened to your videos all day.

And, before you go, just remind the listeners about your YouTube channel, the Patreon, and how they can get in touch with you.

Yeah, yeah, thanks.

So real quick, obviously, I've got a YouTube channel.

It's growing easy enough to find David Shapiro Automator.

I've been an automation engineer for many years, and AI is just the next evolution of that.

I've also got a Patreon, so patreon.com slash Dave Schapp. which has a private Discord server.

So if you want to chat with me, just jump on there.

I have limited time, but every now and then a slot will open up if someone wants to have a consultation.

I'm really good at figuring out how to solve business problems with AI.

Yeah, and I'm also available on LinkedIn and Twitter.

I'm pretty picky about LinkedIn just because sometimes people, they want to sell me something.

So I want to make sure that no one's trying to sell me anything before I accept their connection on LinkedIn.

But other than that, yeah, I'm happy to connect with people on pretty much any of those platforms.

I should be pretty easy to find.

Love it.

Dave, thank you again.

This was really, really enlightening.

Yeah, thank you.

Thank you so much.

This is good talk.

That was the first part of today's masterclass.

Up.

Next we'll hear from another expert with a different approach, giving you even more strategies to add to your toolkit.

Let's keep it rolling.

At this stage in life I think I am stronger, more physically fit than I've ever been in my life, because five days a week,

I'm either doing Pilates, I'm going to boxing, I'm doing bar classes.

So I get out of the house almost every single morning to do something physical, which is good for the mind, it's good for the body and it just gives me some peace.

So I've created a little bit of a schedule for myself and I'm also just reading everything from pure craft detective novels to Barry Dillard's who knew and everything in between.

So it's um, it's an.

It's interesting for me because it's a.

It's the first time I've really had to get my arms around change that I have created and or has been created by, you know for me, just based on, in a sense, an ageism in our world.

Um, And partly just trying to understand what free time is.

And at my age you're also at a point where others around you aren't doing as well.

Aren't it physically healthy at this stage?

So the other side of it is I just feel lucky blessed, whatever the word is you would use in your own vocabulary that hey, I'm still kicking here.

And I, you know, I just see, you know, I have this weird thing in the back of my head.

I am my father's daughter in a all lived actively healthily till months of 100.

Wow.

In my mind.

I just see this runway, which I hope turns out to be true, but it is so neatly seated because in so many other ways, I am my dad.

The man can do so well in his family, but the women, they were like, yeah, yeah.

That's really refreshing to see how much you've been able to learn about yourself in this new chapter of life too, because i think it's important to understand who you are and also accept who you are.

Because it's not a bad thing to want to run on a schedule.

It can be bad if you say no.

The right thing to do is for me to just stay idle completely.

I feel like that i would lose it.

I could not.

I imagine you doing that, having listened to you on various podcasts and also coming to terms with your own self and your own confidence at a young age, but nevertheless you're still not 90.

It is interesting, for the first time, to have to redefine yourself outside of the definition of that your work identity created for you.

And so long it was my work identity that was seen way before anybody knew who the hell I was for real.

It was just the conceit, the image, the perception was out there before I ever entered a room.

Now I'm just Bonnie.

But no kidding.

Let's talk about that Bonnie, because you're a legend in the industry than it is to just say hey, this is who I am as an individual.

And let's talk about that, those different identities and how it's shifted over the years for you.

How have you managed that balance between authenticity and being who you want to be and then being seen as somebody who has accomplished so much?

Well, I think, I mean, there are a lot of different pieces of it that I think all come together.

When I first started out in the business, I kind of tripped into it.

And I think it was my attitude of willing to do anything, any grunt work.

Literally, my first real job in the industry was picking up dog crap.

Happily, I like dogs.

But literally I was in charge of a cast member that was a dog, because I was the youngest, most junior production assistant.

So that's what I got.

And I survived because of attitude.

I was smiling.

I always said yes.

I had no confidence whatsoever in the business because I'd never done television.

But it was attitudinal.

And then when I learned was surrounding myself by really good people and creating.

Even before I understood what it was to hire or create a team, I was very sensitive about bringing in people around me who had similar positive attitudes, more collaborative than singularity.

And I've learned with time that my way of dealing with the industry was caring more about my team, the people around me, the individuals who worked with alongside.

Under I had no control of the ones above me, but creating an environment or culture around me that was healthy and sound and grounded that in my day-to-day stuff.

Everybody knew who I was.

I knew who everybody else was.

It was collaborative.

We all trusted one another.

There was a huge amount of loyalty.

It was very unusual.

So the perception of the outside world was a little less important to me, but I also knew resonated pretty well because every time I talked it was about our team, my team, the team.

And I think that's been...

My hindsight of my success has all to do, or so much to do, with a team spirit of collaboration and never putting me out there as I did.

It was we did or the team did or the success was theirs.

Ultimately, it always comes back to the one who's leading it anyway.

So I never needed to grab for it.

But I learned that in hindsight as opposed to was consciously doing that along the way.

And when I really go back and think about where that came from.

I was at summer camp in a very very, very early age.

My mom had a heart attack.

My father didn't know what to do with me.

So they knew the owners of this small summer camp up in the Borscht Belt, McCatskills.

So the summer before I turned six, I was away at summer camp.

The youngest kids were called Mohawks.

I was called a Schmohawk.

And so I learned very young how to live with others, play sports.

What did I know at five or six?

I couldn't play anything.

But I got the notion of what living with other kids and playing different games with other kids was all about.

I don't think that ever left me.

Hmm.

This is.

I love this because you've been able to track the origin of your ability to collaborate effectively.

And then also a bit of that humility as well, because in your story you've highlighted what I think are the two sides of humility.

There's the the character side of it.

Like, OK, this is just a good pro social way of navigating the world.

But then also we have the strategic side of it too, because being humble is truly endearing and inspiring counterintuitively.

You can use it authentically in a way that helps you to still do well in your career in advance without putting other people down in the process, and it shows how important it is to have people around you who actually who you're willing to kind of let that guard down with, who you can be you as a leader, you can still hold them accountable, but they also hold you accountable to your performance and your standards as well.

Yeah, but and you learn how to hire that way.

I mean For me, of course, you're going to look at skill set.

If somebody is coming in in a marketing position or in a finance, whatever it is, you're going to look at their resume, you're going to look at their skill set and say, oh fine.

But that was secondary to me in terms of the conversation I would have.

It's how much did they speak? versus ask questions.

How much did they give credit to other people on former jobs, as opposed to talk about how fabulous they were?

So my hiring process also brought in at least in the beginning, and more so than less actually work where I would surround myself with people who had that humility within themselves that they were able to say you know.

I worked with Kwame before and you know he was so good about blah blah, blah as opposed to yeah.

I helped create him.

You know the very different way, especially in my industry, where ego where wanting to take credit for a show that you know was a top 10 show.

That is no one show.

It takes, you know, thousands of people to create an episode of a show.

And yet there are people who say, oh, that was my show.

I did that.

I would charge, you know, excuse me.

I don't think so.

Yes.

Oh, that's so good.

And this is a perfect segue for us to talk about your industry because in so many ways, when it comes to media, all the different types of media they, they shape so much of society.

When you think about just culturally, obviously there's a really strong cultural component, but we can even track back to times where it has shifted politics, policies and things like that.

It's incredibly powerful.

So let's talk about your time in media and talk about your perspective of the role that the media plays in society.

You know, it plays a huge role.

I must admit, I was lucky that in a lot of ways, my world was about fiction.

Yeah, we also had reality shows like The Real Housewives and crazy stuff like that.

But it was creating stories about a world for the most part USA sci-fi.

The stuff that I was responsible for created worlds with values and storylines and characters that that were fictional representations of our world.

But we created a brand that was referred to as Blue Skies.

And that was my way of creating a brand that I felt was important, when so much around us was getting more bleak darker complicated, almost brutal at times, that we created likable characters.

We created relationships.

Yes, there were complications and there was interaction and there was some ugliness within, but the blue skies always won out.

And I think we created that.

We started...

That brand started in 2005 when we brought Tony Shalhoub and created Monk on our air.

And then we had Psych and Burn Notice.

But they were all shows that had you know, not Cinderella characters but flawed but likable characters.

And so that was our way of kind of counteracting some of the darker stuff and darker networks that were kind of bleeding into both the cable world and even some broadcast.

And we were also giant steps away from news.

That it was, at that time, too kind of the beginning of the conflict of news that was extremely right going against news that was extremely left.

And anything in the middle, nobody wanted to talk about.

Centrists were not a good thing.

You had to be right or you had to be left.

And it was an interesting time to try to figure out how can we succeed both having a lot of viewers, a huge audience, and also make money.

And our way was this kind of blue skies.

It wasn't happy talk because we still had complicated characters, but it was a place that got resolved, so we left people smiling rather than haunted or crying.

That is such a a novel perspective.

Now, right.

Because I feel like so many shows that exist purely are because of the negativity and toxicity that it provides.

And I remember one time, a few years back, I was trying to pitch a show to a few different networks and I made it far with one of them.

And we did some recording and things like that for a reality TV show.

And one of the pieces of feedback was they said, hey, listen, love Kwame on camera.

I think he's very charismatic, but we don't think he's going to hold the tension long enough with the audience.

And essentially the concern was I would solve the conflicts too soon and the drama would not be sufficient to get the ROI that they're looking for.

See, I don't know you from a whole head.

I'm just watching you in a tiny little image on my big screen.

You would make a great television personality.

I mean, your smile, the image of you, seriously, who's not going to take you seriously?

And yet, your warmth, your smile, you have this interesting combination of strength and body type that's Oh, my God.

And then you smile.

That's like, oh, I want to hug him.

Thank you.

This is great.

Bonnie, this is the whole reason I had you on the show.

I just wanted you to say nice things about me.

If the check comes, I'll make sure to deposit it quickly.

I appreciate it.

And I still haven't given up on that dream.

I think there are a couple ideas I have, but I don't know.

Don't give up on it.

It's very hard right now.

What you should understand too, for just your own being.

The industry right now is under such pressure because the way people are watching TV.

If you think about what existed during my heyday, we were incredibly lucky.

There was broadcast.

Cable was this baby that was growing up and nobody thought.

Literally a former boss of mine said why are you going to Cable?

There's no future there.

Obviously, years later, we, the industry, proved him wrong.

It was at a height where cable was growing incredibly fast.

Broadcast was still, you know, cable was a stepchild.

Broadcast was the real thing.

And then now we have streaming.

We have all these other entities.

So everybody is trying to readjust to.

What does this mean, with cable kind of going away, but not totally going away broadcast diminished because most people are watching streaming.

But streaming is going to have to get bundled, just like cable did.

No one's going to pay 20 subscription fees, somehow they'll all be under a few umbrellas.

You pay for one umbrella and you get all these netflix amazon, everything else under one.

But Because of that, right now everyone is restructuring.

People are under such a budget crunches right now that it's very hard to say yes to new talent and new productions.

So where we could experiment and do 15, 20 a year, I would say.

Now the studios from my past are maybe down to seven.

So you can't take it personally at this point, because it's in that transition and thank you the administration right now too.

You know what's been going on with cbs, you know what does disney paid, etc.

They're rethinking how to evaluate who they are, what to be, where to put the money.

So give it a little time because things will settle down.

Because the there's no replacement for content, no matter what the distribution is, You always need content.

So don't shy away.

Just keep going for it.

I appreciate it.

That means a lot because my motto for 2025 is big swings only.

Just try to swing for the fences on everything.

And I think that could be big.

And it makes me wonder too, because like you said, the industry, just media in general is shifting.

I remember seeing an interview or something where it was a I believe it was Netflix was saying that yeah, it's not just Hulu and Amazon Prime that we consider our competitors and it's YouTube, but it's also we're competing for attention.

TikTok and Instagram, those are competing as well.

And I think about some nights where Whitney and I, we just don't know exactly what to watch.

And so we'll just sit next to each other and scroll on Instagram together.

And that's not something that we did before.

And so, when you think about the years that you have in the industry and how in the know you are, in the next five or 10 years, what are some shifts you're expecting to see?

You know, I already know, I'm out of the know because I was brought up in a very traditional media world where you had films, you had broadcasts, you had cable.

There were where you created content and how they were distributed was relatively relative to now.

Um, simple process because there are only certain forms of distribution.

You got graded every day when you saw the ratings for your show the next morning after at night and you knew how well it was doing or it wasn't doing.

Now, all of the influencers are changing what people watch, how they're watching it.

When I watch people literally watching whole shows on an iPhone, I'm like outrage because to me I want the screens to get bigger and bigger.

And now kids are completely satisfied watching an image that's this big.

I also think I have been so disconnected from the Instas and all of the online sites that are creating their own content at this point that giving people advice about how to go about working through the influencer versions of creating content is pretty fresh to me.

And I do think it has a lot of power, but I don't think it's ever going to totally replace the big screen.

And I do believe that swinging for the fences is the right way to go to get, whether it's a Netflix or the Amazons or the Paramounts or the Peacocks or whatever it is.

Getting a show placed in a little bit more traditional way gives you literally a ginormous runway to then do anything you want to on the influencer fronts of any of the sites that are out there.

But it shocks me to what degree people are creating content and having it embraced right now on these tiny online formats.

It's got to be a major paradigm shift and just like a record scratching moment too, because I think for me it's.

It's not just the like, the size of the screen and the detail.

It's also the attention to detail that the creators have put into everything that we see.

That's going to be missed on these small screens.

And I am realizing the way that we consume is changing.

People are kind of content with zoning in and out of some of the like it's a one minute video.

You can't even hold their attention for that amount of time.

But I remember just being wrapped with attention for these longer shows, being so frustrated that I missed a little detail.

And I remember back when we couldn't rewind, I'm like, I might never see this again.

That detail's gone forever.

Right.

It was interesting.

Somebody I did a podcast with a little over a year ago did a – and this was a – it came from radio –

Pretty decent, decent sized name, recognizable, etc.

Was playing with online videos to see how to break into the media world that was unfamiliar with him.

For him,

And I remember after the fact, he sent me a small little video he did that was very sci fi ish.

It was really good.

And I'm hoping that some of the connections that were given actually got him to a resource that would turn it into an Amazon or Netflix limited series.

It was that good.

But the only way he felt he could try it out was playing with it in an influencer way, doing it online and seeing what the reaction was.

Smart it's, it's.

I've seen a few shows break through.

Because of that.

They get some.

They get a little bit of exposure on online, on YouTube or whatever it is, making the show themselves and then taking it to the next level.

Like Issa Rae, I remember she had this YouTube series that she did.

That was really good, and now she's getting real opportunities and And I would be really interested to hear your perspective on this one Bonnie, because this is our first time talking, but I have a feeling that you like humans

I like humans as well.

And now we're in a world where humans and digitally created images and avatars are becoming indistinguishable with artificial intelligence.

And now we're having to wrestle with questions about what is consciousness?

What is legitimate creation as well?

Because now we are probably less than a year away before we have our full feature length movie, created entirely by AI.

When you look at artificial intelligence and the impact it'll have on the media, what are your major thoughts and feelings around it?

I'm very conflicted about it.

I think new technologies over the years have provided so many runways for success for me and stuff I've done and for life in general.

I think that any form of intelligence that can make the world better is vital.

But AI scares the hell out of me for a couple of reasons.

One.

It will replace too many jobs that I do think are vital towards creation and creativity and real emotion.

And it just worries me that if we take away the humanness in everything we create, whether it's dialogue or it's wardrobing or whether it's actual writing, we will remove some of the humanity from any and everything we do.

So I worry about it for a variety of reasons.

I also think, when you think about where AI is right now, it is information that gets to us based on a common denominator.

It's kind of a mush of information that's collated and what you get back is kind of a consensus, rather than opinionated or differing points of view, that you can then use and think for yourself about where you want to go or what a line of copy should be or what a political situation should be.

It is a consensus-driving entity.

And that makes me a little crazy too.

But to say that there are no positives about IA is naive.

But I do think that artificial intelligence versus emotional intelligence is makes me very wary.

I'm still more of an EQ, EI person than an AI, AQ person.

Yes.

And I think we have to be very protective of those areas, at least in my world and the media world that will be overtaken by it.

And I do worry that too much of AI will be replacing writers and writers' rooms.

It worries me that Actors, you know, can be replaced by, you know, full animations, if you will.

I'm an old school believer in real people doing real things, showing real emotion, writing real scripts themselves from their brains and their heart.

Yes, I'm with you.

It's.

It's the best of times and the worst of times.

Because, I mean, Hollywood's done a great job of capturing the potential concerns of AI, and they did it 20, 30 years ago, right.

And here we are careening off of this edge with very few guardrails.

And it's almost like one of the most fascinating, largest experiments of game theory and prisoner's dilemma, because the people who are developing it, they can say okay, I can see these concerns.

And also at the same time, I don't want to risk losing the advantage.

And so, company to company, they're like we have to move fast, because if we don't, the other side will.

Country to country, we're saying we have to move fast.

Yes.

And what you said before was right, was exactly on the money.

Where are the guardrails?

Who is creating?

Who will create?

Who will police?

Who will do whatever to to ensure that those guardrails don't destroy so much.

That's good about what we do in so many different professions.

I'm not seeing the guardrails right now.

No, no.

I mean, they, they don't exist for the, for the, for the large part.

I think it's the platforms themselves that are taking stands.

So for instance, YouTube, I believe said, Hey, anything that is created by AI will not be monetized.

So they're not saying, okay, platform ban, you can't use it.

It's a, if you can, you can't monetize it.

So I think that's, that is, that's a good step, but it's going to be interesting because.

Exactly.

Because right now it makes sense to do it.

And the culture, the majority of humans, are saying okay we, we don't like this.

In this case, when it comes to AI generated content,

Um, but that's one of those things that they could very sneakily pull back when we're distracted by something else.

Um, When you think about the way we may have entered the work world.

Some of those lower level jobs are now being completely taken over by AI.

How do people get experience?

How do people get exposed?

If you think about how people who are hiring right now The resumes when they get sent into larger institutions, the first going over is AI.

It is not a human being. looking at a resume.

And these resume.

AI is basically looking for certain words that have become the buzzwords for that industry, that they're checking out before it gets to a person.

And then when it gets to a person, it's this.

It's not walking into an office presenting yourself.

You know making your presence important enough so you're remembered.

So how do these young kids get started?

Think about how we started.

And I mean, when I started, everything was archaic.

So everything was physical in an office, you know, phones that were on a desk.

There was nothing portable remotely at that point.

And I think that's going to be hard for society, that these kids are not going to have the same kind of capability comfort confidence, that understanding about one-on-one relationships, because so much of it is being pushed away, pushed aside.

I agree.

And I think, at least the hypothesis I hope is true is that the people who take the time to hone their human centric skills empathy listening, the ability to articulate yourself and communicate they're going to have an outsized advantage, because when you are able to flex those skills, your peers oftentimes will be living lives where those skills, just over time, become eroded.

Because with the younger generation, we're at a point where this is the first generation where they would choose to connect digitally with somebody instead of connecting in person.

So if we are – I think about it with my son now.

Now, I know he's so annoyed, but sometimes I would walk into the room and he's playing video games.

And I said, hey, what are you doing?

Playing video games.

With who?

With my friend from down the street.

From two houses down?

Boy, get out of my house.

Go be frolic with humans.

And he would say, dad, why do you always make me do this?

And I said, Kai, because I don't want you to be weird.

I do not want you to be weird.

You need to be able to communicate with people.

And those are becoming lost.

It's becoming a lost art.

People are outsourcing every piece of thoughts or crafting every communication with precision utilizing AI.

But then when it's gone and you have to interact as a person, you don't have those skills.

My line to kids these days who are choosing to work remotely or take the interview remotely is how can you expect to be in the room if you're not in the room?

And it's to me, it says it all.

Yeah, I agree.

And now I'm interested.

I'm interested.

Now, let's see if if you had a magic wand.

And you control not just media in general, as we know it, but like social media in total too.

What changes would you make in order to put society in a better direction?

Ooh, that's a toughie.

I think...

To me, again, it goes back to learning how to interact with people.

It is making sure, I think it goes across all fields, all boards right now.

I think we, at least in our country, have grown to extremes in everything we do.

AIS, AI, no.

Democrat, Republican uh, purple orange.

Everything is so extreme that the conceit of diffusing points of views and being able to listen to one another is somehow creating media online offline, film.

You know influencers who can talk to or have conversations, where you bring people together rather than accentuate separation and points of view.

What has happened?

I think in our culture we have lost the ability to listen and to hear, which doesn't mean you have to agree.

But if you can understand people, the world, a point of view, a different aspect on media liking or hating AI, whatever it is, our world, our society will benefit tremendously.

So there's something about being able to diffuse information in a way that people can start hearing, listening and understanding, rather than choosing a position when they're probably pretty damn ignorant of what the conversation's actually about.

So that's the thing.

It's about listening, hearing, diffusing.

I agree.

And it's a challenging problem because it's something that I've thought about a lot.

How do we unring this bell?

And I think a lot of the things that have made America incredible are some of the things that can hold us back in this way, because there was no way for the founders to have foreseen what was coming down the pike.

When we talk about freedom of speech.

That has been fantastic, especially as we're breaking free from Britain.

But now when we see freedom of speech, how does that apply to social media?

How does that apply to misinformation or damaging information?

How does it apply to the algorithms that are really weaponizing the collective amygdala of the nation, where we're just pushing people down deeper into their own belief systems, weaponizing their own emotionality against them?

Because the algorithms are largely agnostic, but they are designed to give you more of the thing that will keep you hooked onto the platform.

And a lot of times that's the negativity and all of that emotionality that doesn't make us feel good, or make us not just feel good but make us mentally well.

But it does make us addicted to the content source.

You said something in a podcast relatively recently.

I don't remember if it was yours.

I don't think it was yours.

I think it was a conversation you had with Mel Robbins where you were talking about it was negotiating, but being able to say your opinion, give an opinion or question something and not worry whether you needed or wanted to be liked anymore.

Yes.

And I think our world has gone to a point where You're so afraid to disagree for all the wrong reasons because we haven't been taught how to properly disagree and have an opinion, be able to say that opinion without the fear of everything, as little as not being loved or liked at that moment, to catastrophic.

All of a sudden you're banned from society or whatever.

Yeah.

And to take this point a lot further, Bonnie, because you're spot on here.

It's even worse than the fact that we haven't been taught how to do this.

It's also that the media like social media and the trajectory of the change in media has made it so that we are learning bad habits.

Right.

So we're not watching psycho or monk.

We're watching real housewives.

We're watching people who are, you know, who are in their position because of their dysfunction.

And so when we do actually disagree with somebody.

That one is pretty high up.

Yes.

Exactly.

And so, to that point, we're realizing that, all right, these are the things that actually help you to get ahead in society.

I remember back when it was like skills and hard work and relationships and having a good reputation.

But now it's like the worst reputation you have, you will have more attention.

And then you can leverage that attention into money and fame because of the negativity.

It's such a fascinating shift.

Yes.

Yes, and it's a damaging one.

Yes.

That's a damaging one.

And that scares me for the younger kids growing up right now.

Yeah.

Yeah, that is for sure.

Because I'm thinking about it for my young boys too, being very mindful of the media that they consume.

It's ubiquitous.

It's everywhere.

Four and nine.

Yeah, you're getting to that stage.

My grandchildren are eight and 11 now.

And it's the 11-year-old now, we're like, oof.

So far, she still doesn't have her own phone.

She has an iWatch that you can only do certain things.

But there's only so long that Kime, her mom, can keep her protected.

Yeah, it's important.

And it's it's getting harder every day because you have it's like an arms race.

You can come come up with your own way to kind of lock down phones and everything like that.

They're savvy enough to figure out a way around it.

And then also, if you do a good job making sure that you can protect your kids, it doesn't mean that their friends parents, are doing the same job.

You know, it is a constant battle.

Yeah, correct.

Yeah.

Well, let's land on a nicer note, Bonnie.

They're not all doom and gloom.

So we had your summer of discovery and scheduled fitness and other activities and things like that.

And I know your type.

I know you're not going to be.

There's something.

There's got to be something.

So what do you think the next chapter looks like?

Well, I mean, I'm lucky enough that I'm on some boards.

One of the boards, which is I enjoy, it's a bit of a hoot, as well as Barry Diller's board.

And that's always alive and well and, you know, controversial in some way.

One of my desires is to get back to still photography.

That's how I started.

And I am.

We were in Africa for about three weeks and I just finished a big picture book that I put together, happily with a friend of mine that worked at NBC.

He was able to digitize it because, of course, I'm an old form analog person.

And I used to like real film like, you know, Kodachrome and Fuji.

And now it's all digital.

So it's getting back somehow in photography in a way that I can continue to tell stories.

And I'm not big in photo editing.

I was taught at a very early college how to... Photography is about seeing an image.

It's not about creating it after the fact.

And again, with all our tech tools you can take an awful picture, enhance it, change it, colorize it, do whatever you're going to do.

And lo and behold, somebody thinks you took a great shot.

And in fact, it is a manufactured shot.

I believe in the purity.

I'm like a Cartier-Bresson person.

It's the decisive moment is seeing an image, catching that image.

And that tells the story.

So my hope is I want a better education in digital photography.

I mean, I have digital cameras and I shoot digitally.

But I really need to understand more the nuance of how to get what I want in a digital world, but by seeing it, not creating it after the fact.

So that's one of my September goals from the creative.

And the other is getting back into paying it forward.

What is the best route for me, based on my experience being a woman in the industry, being a female period who's had some decent accomplishments over her life?

How do I help other women pay?

You know, how do I pay it forward to help other women? to figure out how to navigate the world now.

Granted, the world is very different.

I think I had a pretty easy time considering my timing of stuff.

I think it's so much harder for people, period, no less females right now, to navigate that world.

I think we've gone backwards a little bit in terms of women navigating the world.

Hold on.

That's a very interesting point.

Because I think a lot of times people, especially the folks who have the privilege of not having to live that life and understand those barriers that you're referring to, they might not know what you're talking about.

So I don't want to just gloss over that because it is very important.

So, when you talk about things getting tougher, what are some of the things that come to mind for you?

Well, I think and this is what my book was pretty much about, which was 15 Lies Women Are Told at Work and the Truth We Need to Succeed is understanding and learning the uncommon sense it is to navigate the world.

You know, whether it's a belief you can have it all, well...

You can only have it all in hindsight.

It's about choices, having the agency of choices.

And how do you make that choice?

Because your all and my all are very different.

The other conceit of fake it till you make it, that will destroy you in the work world right now.

It's face it till you make it.

Learn, you know, make others understand that you want to learn.

Go under somebody else's wing.

Let them help you get where you want.

It's about presence.

Again in this world right now.

You know walking in places looking completely disheveled because nobody thinks it makes a difference.

And, you know, if you think presence is important, you know, you were brought up 90 years ago.

That it's letting people, letting women understand that a first impression.

Some say seven seconds, Princeton says it's made in one second.

And the attitude about it, if you're disheveled in how you look, that's how your work's going to be.

So there are so many different cliches and different things women have been brought up to believe that if they do believe this misinformation, it will really hurt them in the work world.

It's a dangerous manual that will self-sabotage them to That's so important.

So important.

Because I think a lot of times there's almost been like an overcorrection too.

I think the advice, the well-meaning advice on being authentic can be as good as it can be bad.

Because sometimes you say, well, this is how I am just raw and unfiltered.

And if you don't accept it, it's your problem.

Well, it's like, excuse me, sir, you're wearing pajama pants and slippers in a work meeting.

How are we supposed to take you seriously?

I know that's how you feel comfortable.

We're not comfortable with this display.

And when you think about presence, and because you've been in high level meetings that are shaping society, with the media decisions that are being made, when you think about the people, the actors, the professionals who have presence, who have gravitas, what are the attributes that come to mind for you?

Well, I think the thing that's misjudged the most is we've talked about it earlier was learning how to listen, sitting in a room hearing, understanding what somebody is asking of you or you are asking of them.

So it's the ability to listen.

There's this other ridiculous adage of talk is cheap.

I think it's the most valuable commodity we have is learning how to read a room and then addressing the room and the language that that person or group of people will understand how you say something, how you ask for something, how you make your demands.

It's understanding what that room is, whether it's asking in your world, negotiating it's.

How do you ask for what you need or what you want in a way that gets people to say yes?

It's understanding somebody else's agenda.

If, whether it be an actor or producer or director, comes in and you're trying to figure out what's going on, it's trying to understand what's their agenda.

What are they really trying to get at, and how can you give them what they need so they can, in turn, deliver what you need?

It's really the art of reading a room in so many different ways from you know, physical vocabulary to emotional vocabulary, to get what you or your show or your team needs.

I love this response Bonnie, because this is a great way to put a bow on the episode, because it goes back to being human again, doubling down, tripling down on these human centric skills, because I know that there are some people who are out there who are listening and hoping that you would describe some kind of surface level things.

You should sit and steeple steepling, you know whatever little thing it happens to be where you could just check that box, and then you made it.

But what you've talked about, when it comes to reading the room, listening deeply, understanding people's agenda, that takes work and it will never not be work.

So you could do it in one meeting and not do it in another meeting and then you don't have it.

Right.

So you have to make sure that you're constantly focusing on the other person, focusing on these people skills, because even at the highest level, people get to that highest level because they understand people.

The other thing that we started the conversation with and we probably should have gone to this point then is being able to embrace change with everything that is happening right now, everything we've talked about, from analog to digital, from cable to broadcast to streaming, to podcast, to influencer content is not fearing change, but figuring out a way to embrace it.

Because it's going to come at you regardless of your age, your stage, your wage.

So fighting it, refusing to figure out your way of embracing it, is useless.

It's just a waste of energy.

It's a waste of time.

And you can't avoid it.

So the only thing you can do is figure out how to get your arms around it so you can understand it and see how you fit in to the change.

And again that takes reading the room because you have to figure out all right, everything has changed here.

The boss has changed.

The money has changed.

The environment's changed.

The culture has changed.

How do I fit into it?

They're not going to change.

I'm going to have to figure out how to negotiate my way in and then embrace my skills in a way that they can understand.

The new management, the new school, the new, whatever it is, it happens everywhere, at every stage of life.

And I think people still fear it too much.

I agree.

And I think we, just like you said, we have to come to terms that the only constant is change.

But things are changing faster than ever.

Maybe there was a time where somebody could essentially have more or less the same role and retire in that role after decades of doing more or less the same thing.

I'm struggling to think of an industry or occupation that gives that kind of luxury now.

Everything changes so quickly with society, with culture, with technology, especially.

So we have to learn how to embrace that.

The other piece of it.

That is something I give advice to almost everybody now, especially the younger kids entering the workforce.

We were brought up that there's a ladder.

I mean, I was very lucky.

I started at the lowest job possible, cleaning up dog crap and making it up to chair.

But when I look at how I did it, I really didn't climb the ladder.

I zigzagged.

I gained skills in areas when a project was done.

In the old days, you weren't a staff person.

You were hired for a project.

And once the project was over, you were laid off until the next project happened, or you found something within the company that was not necessarily a real house, but you were willing to take another job that could be below.

You could be the side up down left, right of it.

But it gave you or gave me a skill set.

That oh, I really don't like that.

But at least I need to understand budgets.

So when they made me unit manager, I hate numbers.

I hated the job, but it was a stepping stone when they gave me responsibility over a whole division.

I needed to understand finance.

So that silly job I took seven years earlier gave me a vocabulary and a knowledge which helped me get something else in a whole different lane later on.

So my advice to people forget about the ladder.

Create a spider web.

Go right, go left, go up, go down.

Create this really vast web of experience so that when the industry goes away because of AI, or your job gets restructured out, or when the companies merge, you have so many different paths you can take because you weren't on that ladder, that kind of got pushed out, because that job doesn't exist anymore.

AI took it over.

Yes, that's so good.

Okay, Bonnie, before you go, I want to bring in Simone.

He always listens in and has really great insights and great questions to ask.

I want to see, Simone, you got anything for us?

I like the title of your book, 15 Lies Women Are Told.

It's really for guys too, but Simon & Schuster wanted me to make it marketable for women.

Okay.

Which one do you think is the biggest lie that women are told at work?

You're asking me to choose from some of my favorite children, so try and choose one as hard.

I think for me, the most important one is the belief that you have friends in high places.

I am a big believer that you need mentors in all places.

And, for me, the worst piece of advice that I think people at large are given is is to have supportive mentors, people who are going to pat you on the back, people who are going to tell you oh, you're great, you're wonderful, you can do anything you want to do, when the reality for me is to find challenging mentors, find truth tellers find, you know, sparring partners, find somebody who puts the tough and tough love, because they're the person they're going to help you grow And, because of everything that's going on in our world, HR departments who no longer like managers telling somebody they're not doing something.

You know good enough that they get beaten up if they give, in a sense, tough love, because you're not supposed to not be nice to people on the job.

It's hurting people and it's hurting society.

It's changing the trajectory of people growing in business because nobody is telling them the truth openly and directly.

And it can be very nice in how it's given.

But you can't grow unless people help you grow.

And the only way you can grow is if people tell you the truth about how you're performing, what you need to do, how you need to grow, what you need to do better.

So I'm a big believer in challenging mentors.

And I think, in truth, if it wasn't for Barry Diller kicking my butt when I was younger, I would have never gone to the level I've got to.

In my mind, if I survive Barry, I can survive anybody in the industry or in the world, to the point that at the time when he was my boss, I literally was into kickboxing and I had Diller written on my kickboxing bag because every weekend I just had to kick the hell out of him because he made me so crazy.

But he also taught me how to think.

And I'm a big believer in finding challenging mentors rather than people in high places or supportive people around you.

Well, thank you.

That's great.

And I feel like it's harder than ever to find those challenging mentors too.

There's a significant deficiency in the willingness to do hard things or resilience in conversations or in general too.

So people are becoming more sensitive to feedback, which is making them less resilient and makes it harder for them to advance.

And because of that people are afraid and people are walking on eggshells in these conversations too.

So I think it was.

You know, I think one of the downsides of our overly woke world that just fed into being honest truth tellers to all people.

And I just think it's hurt a lot of people, a lot of women, a lot of guys in the industry, because no one is really telling them how to navigate the world through honest feedback.

You've just heard one powerful perspective and now we're moving on to the next.

A fresh voice with a new angle on the same challenge so you can keep expanding your skills.

Let's dive in.

I think that's a great reality that we're dealing with is that it's an age-old problem.

From the dawn of time, since we've had people congregating and having to have someone in front and someone behind is the reality that buy-in is required.

And the person responsible for communicating the buy-in is the leader.

And in order to do that, and I'll just pull off of Simon Sinek providing the why.

All right, everybody, we have a treat today.

We have Dr. and Professor Heise Gibson, who's also a retired colonel in the military.

So Professor Gibson, thank you for joining us today.

We really appreciate it.

No, thank you for having me.

I'm excited about the conversation.

Yes, likewise.

So how about you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Not a problem.

And so I think the thread, the bomb on the front is service is a part of my background, having served the nation for a quarter of a century.

And then during that time, I had the opportunity to serve the next generation by teaching at West Point a couple of times.

Which leads me to what I'm doing now at the Harvard Business School as a professor teaching the world's amazing future leaders, and then also some of the world's most amazing executives.

And so service is a high point.

And then I really focus on what I would call operational leadership, because I really care a lot about leadership people how we manage to think about talent development processes, because everything's a process and big ideas are amazing, but if you don't have anyone to actually do things, we're kind of challenged.

And then understanding in the current environment because we're operating in a volatile uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment duca environment.

Uh, technology integration is massively important, not only How do we integrate what I would call the new hotness.

But are our people internally ready for it?

And are our customers externally excited about it?

And so those are the threads that leaders have to deal with, which is why I call operational leadership.

It kind of encompasses all things.

Incredible.

And thank you for your service.

We're honored to have you.

And I think you are the perfect person to come in and talk about some of the tough conversations we have to have in the business world.

And just any time you have people congregating today, because right now, as you would say, the new hotness is artificial intelligence.

And for most companies, it's not a question of if it will be integrated, it's a question of how.

And people are rushing to do this, but we've seen instances where it hasn't gone that well.

So I think what would be good for us to do is just set the stage.

When we think about AI integration into our organizations.

What is the opportunity, but then also what are the challenges.

I think that's a great start because there's a massive amount of opportunities with the integration of AI.

And AI is not new.

I mean, we all have iPhones.

AI has been operating behind the scenes with Google Maps and search engines for a while, but now all of us have access to it.

And so I think the challenge is that the people inside the firms sometimes aren't ready for it and are apprehensive, meaning scared.

Like this is going to take my job or this is going to cause me to be irrelevant.

What I would suggest is that, in those instances, organizations are tasked with ensuring that the people inside the organization are trained and developed to integrate with and understand the benefit of there's benefit to having just AI.

There's benefit to having just people.

But the optimal ability to optimize productivity is through the human machine interaction and partnerships.

We saw the same thing in the military.

As we think about in the army, we have a platform called the A864 Apache attack helicopter.

Well, the newest helicopter that came out about a decade ago.

It was able to not only fire long range, it could connect with multiple unmanned aerial devices at the same time.

And so, which meant the pilots, who already have a lot going on, had to train to increase their own cognitive capacity to manage multiple systems while flying, while being in certain spaces all at the same time.

Well, if we take what's happening today, That's all that's happening.

Some of our teammates' cognitive capacity, we're just not there yet.

So it takes training and development.

We can get there.

It just takes a lot of work.

And so all of us are becoming what I would say just really good prompt engineers, because we don't have to start with a blank canvas.

The downside is if you're a bad prompt engineer, you're going to get bad output.

If you're scared of the system, you are going to be irrelevant because you're not trying to understand what's going on.

And so in acknowledging everything does not need AI.

I don't need an AI carpenter just yet.

I don't need an AI plumber just yet.

So there are things that are kind of, you know, a tough line to technology, but most things aren't.

And so, and those who will win will be those who are not only able to leverage the technology, but then also able to develop others who are better with the technology.

This is powerful because what we're recognizing is, yes, it's coming, right?

And it's here.

It's been here in different iterations, but now more people are recognizing the power and it's in everybody's hand with generative AI, whichever platform you decide to use.

And I think there is a lot of pressure on leaders to integrate it as fast as possible.

It feels like almost an arms race between these companies.

And So there's a tension within the decision makers of the organizations to say OK well, I want this as fast as possible.

Let's do it, do it, do it.

But then the people are like, we are not prepared, nor do we like it.

Like you said, there's a healthy dose of fear and skepticism.

So there I believe for a lot of people, there is the hey, I don't like this.

And also, if I could do something different. to kind of slow this down or frustrate this process.

Maybe I will.

And so there there has to be a bit of a big challenge for the leaders is getting people on board, but then also making sure that you can demystify it, make it less scary and help them to understand that this is the pathway to continued progress and security, because you need to adapt and evolve or you won't be able to be part of the organization anymore, because somebody who might have a lower top level capacity but a willingness to utilize ai would ultimately be more valuable.

And so how do leaders take people on this journey so they can still move quickly and take advantage of the opportunity but, at the same time, bring people along in a way that's actually sustainable?

I think that's a great reality that we're dealing with is that it's an age-old problem.

From the dawn of time, since we've had people congregating and having to have someone in front and someone behind is the reality that buy-in is required.

And the person responsible for communicating the buy-in is the leader.

And in order to do that, and I'll just pull off of...

Simon Sinek providing the why.

And if leaders are unable to communicate the why in a succinct way, there's massive skepticism.

If the leader is not invested in developing trust in the organization, there's huge skepticism.

And so there's a lot of pre-work that's required by the leader before you just come out in all hands and say we're doing X, follow me.

But do the people trust you?

Do they believe in you?

Have you illustrated the ability to have a huge amount of character?

Do you take care of people?

Do you operate in a way that inspires others?

All these are non-technical things in order to integrate a technical solution.

And I think there comes a point that we all know is that you can be smart, but being smart is not enough.

When running an organization.

That's a part of it, but that is not enough.

We all know a lot of really, really smart people who should just be in a corner.

We also know a lot of intellectual folks who are amazingly inspirational.

So i think that that problem of gaining buy-in is what's required when bringing technology, because will it eliminate jobs and positions and roles?

Yes.

Will it create new ones?

Yes.

So Just being able to help others understand those realities is really important.

I agree.

And I think when leaders are listening to this podcast episode, they're going to say okay, that makes sense.

I need to get trust in order to get buy-in.

And then they might, at the same time, be realizing i should have started this process years ago, because i should have been building trust with my team and i think, especially when bright, shiny new technologies are involved, we've focused so much on the tech that we forget about the people, we forget about the human element and that, the power of just simple human connection and demonstrating that we care, because there's a lot of skepticism, like you said, when it comes to bigger businesses with ai, because you're saying well, They're trying to eliminate me, right?

So there is a healthy dose of skepticism.

So for the leader out here listening who's saying okay, I recognize that the reason I'm feeling a lot of friction and resistance is because I don't have trust and that's getting in the way of building, getting buy-in.

What are some steps that they can take today, that they can use to start to build true, authentic trust?

I think building trust is a challenge, because trust is something that is you can't feel it, you can't see it, but you know it when you have it.

And you also know it when you don't.

So I think for leaders, it's really, one, doing some self-reflection.

We all believe we're good people.

We all believe we're amazing.

But we fail to ask the hard question because we don't want to know the answer.

How do others experience us?

Again, we believe we're amazing, but we really don't know how others experience us.

And that will tell you a lot.

And so I think for leaders really doing some reflection on how they are, how they operate, how they need to adjust is first.

And then, as they go out on their walkabouts and engage with people, do they notice themselves talking the most?

Or are they asking questions and learning?

You know, they may know what's going on in the factory, factory context.

They may know exactly what's going on on the line.

But how about go down on the line and ask someone, hey, so what are you doing?

How do you do that?

How did you learn how to do that?

What's the impact of what you're doing down the line?

You know and so just having someone explain it.

Then what's going on?

It's powerful when others are feeling that they're teaching the boss and sometimes they actually are because, if we're honest, most bosses don't know what's going on at the tactical level.

Many leaders will say i know what's going on on the line.

There's only some organizations where that's actually true mainly a factory context, a sometimes a team's context and definitely in a militaristic context.

In those areas the leaders generally have grown up in the organization.

So they can actually say, I understand what's going on on the line.

Other than that, most people need to go and learn, when they show up in an organization, what's going on.

Are they willing to learn?

Are they willing to be vulnerable?

And are they willing to acknowledge, I don't know.

And so the best leaders can acknowledge when they don't know.

And that's a very powerful statement.

Let's go deeper into that Ice, because I think a lot of people are terrified to admit that they don't know.

And so why is that such a powerful statement to make as a leader in really tough situations?

Well, I think as a leader, the best leaders, I'll just say, will always make this statement.

I always hire people better than me.

All really good leaders will say that same thing.

I have a lot of great mentors.

I read one or two books.

I know a lot of great folks who are leaders, and every one of them, who are really good, make that specific statement.

They will always hire people who are better than them, and if they feel they're the smartest person in the room, they move to a new room, because that one allows vulnerability.

There's acknowledgement of what you don't know.

There's also acknowledgement that you understand your personal gaps so, and it also acknowledges you're willing to fill your gaps with someone who's better, which means when you're in rooms because everyone is smart too you're listening, and so a a group like that is probably going to come up with, on average, better solutions, and it creates massive amount of alignment.

Leaders who don't believe that will always hire people and be in situations where folks are not as good as them.

They're just like one step down in an effort for those people to need them, to be inspired by them specifically, who will always reinforce how their thoughts like That's great boss.

That's a great idea.

You're the most smart person, smartest person in the world.

That's great for your ego, but that might not be good for the firm.

I agree.

And tell me if it's fair to wrap all of this up into one word.

It sounds like humility is what we need in these leaders.

Absolutely.

The best leaders are those who come across that way.

And some of those leaders can be in a room and you don't even know they're there.

How many times you've seen a picture of Tim Cook or Bill Gates like in a coffee shop and no one knows who they are?

They're just like, you know, hanging out.

So the ability to kind of blend in, it's also a skill.

Yeah.

No, you're absolutely right.

And I remember I saw that clip of Tim Cook and Odell last week.

It was like invisible.

That was mind-blowing.

So which one's the billionaire?

Exactly.

No, this is great.

And I also want to talk about something that you've mentioned before, which is the interpersonal deficit since COVID and the fact that we have yet to recover.

I think this is fascinating.

And also it's almost like one of the biggest liabilities that we have, not just as a like within our companies, but also within society as a whole.

We haven't recovered the skills that we lost during COVID.

So can you tell the listeners about that, too?

Well, I think every generation has a thing as a. inflection point and pivot point.

And so I think for us who all experienced the world shutting down in 2020, we're going to feel this for the next 40 years, primarily because the kids who are in school are going to grow up.

And a lot of children were hit at a critical developmental point.

But not only kids teenagers, young adults, folks in college, folks wanted their first jobs all hit this inflection point at the same time.

And then think about managers in their 30s or later, or leaders later who had an idea of how work would be done and then had to pivot to this new way of work and are now slinging it back to 2019 with returning office and so, and some of the gaps that we've experienced and this is all like uh, published and researched already interpersonal interactions, so the ability to communicate face to face, the ability to have phone calls, the ability to share, the ability to walk into a room and not look on your phone, the ability to go on a go to a restaurant to have dinner And put your phone away, because it's unfortunate that we have a group of folks who really don't know how to what to do with undirected time.

Remember when you before the Internet.

You know there was a time for the Internet.

When you go on a long ride across the country or to somebody's house for two hours, two hour ride, just sit in the back to sit there.

And look outside and be with your thoughts.

That was normal.

There's a generation now who are digital natives, who've always grown up with an iPhone or device, who've always had something to take their time.

So they really don't know what to do with this.

That translates into the workforce and individuals unable to go into a room, engage with a leader and not touch their phone.

So I think leaders who are senior have to acknowledge that we're not going to go back, that we have folks in the force and our team who operate that way.

And it's their job to help develop them around basic corporate behavior.

You know it's similar to.

Every industry has a uniform.

If we go out to california, you know it's going to be hoodies and jeans and bands or something.

If we go into private equity it's going to be a great.

You know some chinos, a vest and kohans or sneakers.

If we go in the goldman sachs it is still a suit.

I mean i have many friends at goldman, so in investment banking It's still a suit.

So every industry has its own uniform.

Well, that's one.

Every industry has its own way of interacting.

And there's certain norms that there's a two-year gap.

And so folks have to relearn what those norms are.

But the reality is, those norms were learned by observation in an office that disappeared for a while.

So I think now we will see if leaders will take on that mantle of reminding people about their cultural norms, their corporate culture and what they expect.

I agree, and i feel like that's one of the, the hidden opportunities hiding in plain sight.

It's just not as like, sexy and interesting as artificial intelligence, you know, but it's so important because, as technology improves, our ability to communicate has plummeted and it is one of the most challenging issues of our time, and my belief is that the biggest challenge to humanity as a species is our inability to resolve conflict.

We're getting significantly worse.

And then, when you think about the, the big issues of today, there are a lot of difficult conversations and negotiations that have to happen that are either not happening at all or happening at a very, very low level, and so we're thinking about, as we go into these organizations, we need to be able to solve problems, we need to be dynamic, and the ability to communicate effectively is going to be part of that.

But then, when you expand it and think at higher levels, when you're thinking about government and the military, things like that, there are incredibly difficult conversations that need to happen, and as the world gets more polarized, our ability to address those just goes down.

And for me, i'd be interested to hear your perspective on that particular issue, given your background in industry, government and military.

How are you seeing things and Is there a path forward when it comes to that?

Well, I think, one, the world is very dynamic, definitely polarized.

But the polarizations amplify through the echo chambers of our own FYPs, our own for you pages.

What we search, how the algorithms are built based on what we look at, can take you down the rabbit holes.

Whereas before, there was a time where we all got the news at the same time.

It's six o'clock and 10 o'clock.

We all got the news from the same place the local paper or, if you're really crazy, the New York Times it was delivered in your location or the Wall Street Journal.

So, but now we all get news and people are creating their own news.

So I think at least I would suggest in my personal view is that don't take things so personal.

You can't have a hard conversation if you're going to be like triggered by someone who has a dissenting opinion.

We just call that a debate.

And so if you operate in fact and don't take it personal, you can have a much more fruitful conversation.

And so folks are able to acknowledge facts listen, Understand and are mildly pliable, meaning they're not so affixed to their view that there's no other view.

There's a little bit you can actually reach a solid solution.

And so, when we think about all of the challenges that we are dealing with, real time now, that we've dealt with over the last

10 years, at least for me.

I've always been able to operate, in fact.

But that goes back to the education I learned at West Point.

That has a deep, a lot of history, a lot of civics, a lot of world policy type classes, that and then reinforce the professional military education because as a at least a US, United States military officer, you have to be exposed to a lot of stuff because you don't know what part of the globe you're going to be dropped in and you need to have some kind of context with the space that you're in.

It's not just do it our way.

You have to understand how the folks in Afghanistan operate, how someone in South Korea operates, how someone in the Indo-Pacific operates, how people in Europe, across all those countries, how folks on the continent, which a lot of people think Africa is a monolith.

It's like 52 different countries in Egypt on the continent.

They're massively different countries. from sub-saharan to the northern portion middle to the southern east and west that's a massive continent and so i think operating in fact is the most important part i think unfortunately we have because of polarization a lot of folks are operating in their own facts which is bizarre to me personally but they are and when presented with undeniable information are not willing to change.

That's hard to debate and negotiate.

And so you always have to put those folks in the corner and focus on those who are willing to get on boards.

I agree.

And it's becoming more challenging because I think there is an increasing level of fragility when it comes to our ability to stand firm in a difficult conversation in the face of somebody who has the audacity to think differently.

And then I also think we're kind of transitioning to a post-fact, post-truth world where there's so many voices putting information into the world of differing levels of credibility and influence.

And then we also have with artificial intelligence.

Now we used to be able to say hey, I'll believe it when I see it.

And now you can see whatever you want. with the ability to generate realistic images.

And so when we're in this situation, I know when we think about in military we have, sometimes the opposition might withhold information they don't want you to see, but then also sometimes they will provide you with false information to lead you astray.

And so, when you think about it with your military lens, how do we as a nation, as a people, Start to get to a point where we can align on what is real and what isn't, so we can operate from a base of common understanding to build a foundation of an effective conversation?

Well, on that one, I think the interesting part is that we have cameras everywhere.

Everyone is a sensor.

Every person is a censor, meaning we all have iPhones and devices that can record.

So there's really not any sense in arguing what is, because you can see it.

You can hear it.

It was recorded.

It was videoed.

And so in that realm, I think we're sitting in a weird scenario where there's a portion of the population who is unrelenting and will only believe what they believe, even if it's against humanity what is helpful to them.

And so again, I think that we're in an unfortunate place where we will be challenged to move them.

But there are those who are on the bubble, and that's where the focus should be aligned with those folks on the bubble, because you can waste a lot of energy on folks who are not going to change.

And not to say you just need to dismiss them, but Focus on those who are willing to be part of the solution versus part of the problem.

And the reality is, once that happens, everyone's going to benefit, even those who are on the extreme ends.

And that's OK.

Right.

Now, that's a great point.

That is a great point.

Before we wrap up, I want to finish up on the idea of not taking things personally, because now I'm recognizing we've had over 1500 episodes of the podcast and we have not explored that topic enough.

And I think you're the perfect person to talk about it.

Not, I think that people would think the obvious example is the military background and the yes, quarter century of service.

That's 100 percent the truth.

And then also your time playing D1 football.

Right.

Because you have to have some pretty direct conversations there.

And so when it comes to not taking things personally, it's that's something that's very easy to say.

But how do we actually operationalize it so we can have a little bit more grit and resilience in these conversations, so we can actually listen to what the other person is saying and understand them, rather than getting triggered and turning it into a debate?

I think we have to all acknowledge that we're all a combination of our own individual experiences, whatever those are.

You just don't wake up one day and say, you know what?

I have grit.

Like, do you?

Did you ever do anything really hard and hard?

It's relative.

You know, one person's hard and someone else is like really easy.

And so when I think about my own personal background, I mean the folks who coached high school, high schools in like the late 80s, early 90s.

If we really start to unpack it, there's going to be someone on that coaching staff who has some kind of Vietnam background.

You can't move it.

And those folks' parents were part of World War II.

Their grandparents were World War I and the Depression.

Some of them were born just after the Korean War.

So they're in a very different space and time, which translates to how they were communicated with, which means it translates to how they communicated with kids.

And so the way in which I was coached in high school would not fly today.

You can't do that.

It's not bad.

You just can't do it.

You can get away with it in college a little bit, but you definitely can't do it in high school.

So that builds resilience.

When we think about...

And then my parents always said I remember my mom telling me once when I said I couldn't do something or I couldn't go somewhere.

She said, well, why not?

Well, why not you?

So this idea of why not at least give it a try?

So she didn't say, take risks, that's what she meant.

Or or my father always saying put yourself in.

If you want to do well, you need to.

You know you need to play with the a players.

Now we don't like to say there's a players and b players and but there is a varsity team and there is a junior varsity team.

So if you want to be on the varsity, you need to work out with the varsity players until at some point you have to.

So meaning you need to be around.

People elevate your game, but in that elevation, think about it.

Folks are better than you're going to tell you you suck.

They're going to tell you you're not good and then you have to respond to that.

And it's not really, it's never about how you take it.

It's always about how you respond, because that's what you can control.

And so my idea of not taking it personal is that I have agency in how I always respond.

And so that has translated over years, even being in combat.

I've been in a lot of crisis in my life.

In a time of crisis, Those are the times when I'm the most calm.

It's like, okay, well, let me assess everything.

Let me deal with what's happening.

And let me then move with things I can't control.

Will I mess up?

Yes.

Have I been told I've messed up?

Yes.

But instead of taking it as a personal assault on my personal character, like you know.

What can I learn from this?

You know, I really didn't mess that up.

How can I do this better?

So it's almost how you flip and think about feedback.

Because we have a lot of people a lot who take everything they're told is not their amazing personal as a personal affront to them, when actually you did poorly, you did not meet the standard, you did not do well relative to others.

Now the kicker is, what do you do that information?

If you take it personal, you go down a rabbit hole.

If you take it like an ability to improve, it's a very different thing.

But again, every individual has agency to determine how they respond.

We're seeing more and more in current day many people are from teenagers to adults who are taking things very personal, which means their ability to take feedback, develop and grow is limited, which means that folks who are in positions of power will not spend time with them.

So, in effect, By taking things personal, you're actually cutting off the ability to be developed by someone who can really help you.

You know, win.

And you don't even realize it.

Right.

Oh, this is good.

Haiz, I could just keep on talking to you about this, especially this topic.

It will turn into a rant at some point, so we have to cut it off here.

But I appreciate you coming on the show, my friend.

Before you go, can you please just remind the listeners how they can get in touch with you and learn more from your work?

Well, you can.

Well, one, you can.

I'm very Googleable.

I'm one of the few high skips on the Internet.

And so that's that's like all the information.

Or you could look me up at the Matugi dot com.

So M-U-T-U-G-I dot com if they need help with anything.

But.

I'm publishing stuff all the time via LinkedIn, via Harvard Business Publishing.

And so happy to help in any way I can.

Amazing.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Really appreciate it.

No problem.

Awesome.

[Negotiation Masterclass: Navigating AI, Leadership, and Human Connection]-[The Truth About AI, Leadership & the Future of Work]

📋 Summary

Navigating the AI Revolution and Future Leadership

The AI Frontier: Force Amplifiers and Economic Shifts

Leadership, Humility, and Collaboration

The Human Deficit and Operational Leadership

Cultivating Grit and Resilience

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Negotiation Masterclass: Navigating AI, Leadership, and Human Connection]-[The Truth About AI, Leadership & the Future of Work]

📋 Summary

Navigating the AI Revolution and Future Leadership

The AI Frontier: Force Amplifiers and Economic Shifts

Leadership, Humility, and Collaboration

The Human Deficit and Operational Leadership

Cultivating Grit and Resilience

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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