← The ChatGPT Experiment - Simplifying Chat GPT For Curious Beginners
The ChatGPT Experiment - Simplifying Chat GPT For Curious Beginners
EP 107 - Cary's Keynote Speech | Maine Municipal Association | May 2026
00:54:02
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Hey, it's Gary.
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Hey.
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This week on the show, I'm sharing a recording of a keynote presentation that I gave to the Maine Municipal Association's Technology Summit. I opened by asking a room full of curious beginners what would happen if you had an intern sit at your desk who was capable, available, adaptable, and waiting for direction? How could it serve you best? And I walked through my goal of trying to give them a gift of clarity. Clarity on what this AI thing is, what's happening right now, and make some comparisons to things we've seen before to help folks understand and honestly relieve the pressure of trying to figure everything out right now. And gave some AI life advice on how you can navigate what's happening now to find value and best prepare yourself to make best use of whatever tool or whatever feature or whatever evolution we're going to see moving forward. Evergreen principles that will help folks navigate what we have now and what's coming forward. If that sounds interesting to you, then stick with me because the keynote starts on the other side of the music.
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With that, I would now like to introduce today's keynote speaker, Kerry Weston. Kerry's a marketing consultant, coach, and host of the ChatGPT Experiment podcast. With over 25 years as a business owner helping businesses achieve better results. Carrie is also a former city councilor and mayor in the city of Bangor and has served in a vast number of community boards, committees and roles, from Little League to economic development. Through the ChatGPT experiment, Carrie explores how tools like ChatGPT can transform the way businesses operate, offering insights and real world stories from leaders, navigating this new era of AI powered marketing. Kerry lives in Bangor with his wife, Tori, and has three kids, Maddie, Serena and Spencer.
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Good morning. I have a question for you. If AI came into your life as a capable intern, one that was adaptable and available and waiting for your direction, how could it best serve you right now? I come today hoping to leave you with a gift. I want to give you a gift of clarity. Clarity on a topic that's been causing great confusion and to many, perhaps even some of this room, anxiety. And my hope is that when you leave this room, you have a better understanding of the topic of AI as a whole and an understanding of how to approach this intern so that it can serve you in a meaningful way. And I want to start by speaking of anxiety. I want to start with my first slide on something that has caused anxiety for many, many people outside of AI, perhaps yourself. And that's this question. Where are you going to be when you grow Up. It's fitting that we're on a college campus today. This is the time of year we look at graduation, we look at where you're going. And this question comes up in a lot of folks. And the reason is relevant today is because I have three kids. Okay. This is my world. And it's also the reason I'm broke. Right. So we have parents in the room. Okay. You understand both of those I have. Madeline is to my immediate left in the photo. And we'll get technology to work here in a technology conference, which is. But I'm doing this. Maddie graduated from college last fall. She works in the municipality of Orono in the video development. Serena is a junior in high school, and we have started the college tours this year. What are you going to be when you grow up? Is the question that she's heard too much and doesn't want to hear anymore. And Spencer is a freshman and he's getting to watch all of this and hopefully soaking it in and learning. Over the last three years, I have had the privilege of working with, coaching and teaching people all over the world on tools like AI. Claude chatgpt how to approach this. And I found that there is a consistent mental roadblock, anxiety, fear unknown, that is very similar to what I'm seeing when I talk with Maddie when she went through it talking to Serena now. And I anticipate having the same conversation with Spence. And so I share this because there are parallels. And one of my goals, both in the work I do with clients and with the podcast and whatnot, is to bring technical things to a place where we can understand them in a meaningful, common sense way. In other words, take the tech out. So I think as I'm looking at this, the lesson that I'm giving Serena, Maddie, and eventually Spence is very similar to the advice I'm giving for folks on AI. Before I do that, I want to get into some data and I just want to show some details so we can all kind of understand what's happening right now. This is a graph from the Wall Street Journal that talks about AI investments as a percentage of GDP in the US and the dark blue is AI. The light blue is defense. You can see that they're predicting that by this time next year, spending on AI is going to outpace the percentage of GDP of our defense budget. And in case you're not familiar, the national defense budget is nearly half. It's the blue here of all discretionary spending, nearly a trillion dollars of discretionary spending on mandate. So what we're saying is AI is investing in a pace that's going to outdo the percentage of GDP for defense. But where's that spending going? It's building the next infrastructure of the economy that will be. Following World War II, we had massive infrastructure spending in our own country, but it was roads, bridges, highways, air forks to build what became the Industrial Revolution. And moving forth to what we know today. Same thing's happening now, but we don't see it in the same way. Okay. And I wanted to give you some clarity on what's happening and where and when I talk about AI. There are three layers of AI investment, of AI technology, of AI companies. Think of it this way. And so I try to break it down. The first one is the infrastructure layer.
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It's the power.
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In November of 2022, ChatGPT first launched. AI has been around for a while. In fact, I remember I went back and checked out MacGyver, remember the P. McGyver, remember Buck Rogers? AI has been around as a concept for a while, but it hasn't been readily available, hasn't been commercially available. It hasn't been in our pocket until 2022, pretty much. And that's because we didn't have the energy, we didn't have the power. We didn't have that base layer that was powerful enough to drive what's happening now. Okay, so that's the first thing that's needed. That's the first layer. That's an investment layer. The second layer is what we call the model layer. But think of it in terms of cars. This is the factory. This is where the cars are built. This is a lab. This is a place where things are getting created. Okay, that's that middle layer. The third layer is what we call the application layer, and that's the car. So in the terms of the car analogy, this is the car. This is the Toyota, this is the Tesla, this is the Chevy that you're driving. It's the model. It's the thing that we're touching and using as individuals. So there's three pieces to this AI investment, to this infrastructured investment. The power, the energy, the factory, the labs, and then the thing that we're actually touching and using to break it down, the power, energy level, there's three things. These are the companies that you're hearing about. This is the Nvidia, the Intel, the amd. These are where the brains, the power, the chips, the energy is coming from. You've all seen reports probably of the millions and millions of dollars that are going into these things. Trillions Right, the future. And this is the power level. This is going to be the level that controls who gets what power. The factory layer, that lab layer are companies that you may be familiar with, like OpenAI. Amazon has a lab called Nova Meta and Fropic. Google has a lab called deedmind. These are where the experiments are coming. This is where the investments are coming into the factory. This is where the tech, the tools, the technology, the brain power is going. Okay, and then that car layer, what we call LLMs, you may have heard that learning language models, that car layer, the thing that we actually have on our phone, on our computer, things like chat, GPT and Gemini and Claude, okay, they are being produced for us to use. I would argue at the moment that we are the products because we are testing and using and giving. Okay, but this is the layer that we're most familiar with. But the money is being invested and the other two. So I just wanted you to see what's happening in the landscape. So when people talk about AI and they hear things like Nvidia stock going up and you hear companies and labs, that's the relationship to what's happening right now. But it's not just ChatGPT and Claude and Anthropic. They're also investing in other tools that you're using like Netflix and Hotspots and Selfware, QuickBooks and Tesla. These companies are licensing their technology, their labs, their factories are giving power to other things. And we're entering a phase called conversational technology. So anyone have a netbook subscription? If you're like me, you probably spend far too much time scrolling through a menu trying to find something to watch. You're a half hour in, maybe you start to watch something, you bail and move on and regret the choice. Imagine that it's here, isn't being tested right now. Imagine sitting down and they say, hey Barbara, how's your day? Do you have a good day? What are you in the mood for? You want a show? Do you want a movie? Feeling happy? Sad? Are you with anybody? You alone? It's talking to you. That's happening right now. And the conversational technology phase is a two way communication to a computer that most of us are not used to. Okay, and that's what I'm going to talk about today. It's the mindset of having a two way conversation with you here. It's having a two way conversation with something that's thinking and working for you so that you can get more hype and because of readily available tools. This is a graph from A Gallup poll. It's not just private sector. This public sector uses increasing, so it's almost doubled year over year. In terms of people using AI at work and whether they use it, don't report, or vice versa, you can see the trend going up. So it's happening. How many people here, Just a quick poll. How many people here would consider themselves to be an average or casual user of a tool like Claude chatgpt in the workplace? That's the majority of the room, which is excellent. How many people that just raise their hand would consider themselves to be confident enough to teach it to somebody? It goes down. But that's great. And I'm going to talk about that today too, because you have a responsibility. But with that use comes feelings. More people are worried than hopeful. And I find this interesting, the word hope, because I think hope is kind of like the optimistic absence of confidence. You know, it's like, I hope it's good, but I don't know. So worried and hopeful are hot in the same bucket, just a different way of looking at it. And overwhelmed. There's a significant amount of people who are worried and they're worried about different things. And this is where my analogy with Serena and Maddie come into play, as much of the worry is due to not knowing, not understanding, not having a perspective, not seeing the other side and not knowing if we belong. If I'm good enough, I'm falling behind and can compete. Those things are all similar, different questions, but sustaining side. Okay, so Maddie and Serena are hearing, what are you going to be? But in the workforce we're worried about, will AI take my job? Serena and Nadia are hearing, pick the right path, don't fall behind. These are the things they worry about in the workforce is pick the right tool. Don't become obsolete. Maddie and Serena have a plan. Figure it out. These are the things they're hearing and feeling. Whether they're real or not. These are the things they're feeling and dealing with in the workplace is have an AI strategy, adopt immediately, got to catch up. You're going to fall behind. This is where we create the feelings. And when I go back to Maddie and Serena and Spence, the thing is, we don't tariff them at 17 to figure it all out, hope it. We don't tell them to pick your profession, to pick your skill, to understand everything. What we tell them is be curious, keep an open mind, respect others, communicate, say please and thank you. It'll be okay. And my advice to you today as I go through this is the same. It's not about certainty. It's not about knowing how to use the features, the functions, the menus, the software, and they exist now. It's about curiosity. It's about having the capacity to learn, the capacity to adapt and to ask questions and to use judgment and to stay grounded. I would say if you could imagine AI in a world without the AI companies that we have now. So eliminate ChatGPT as a product, eliminate Claude, eliminate Copilot. These are the things that exist now, but they only exist now because that's where we're at. Think another level, deeper. Imagine everything you're doing just has it baked in. And it's not necessarily using a product on a phone or a computer. It's just what it is. It's just how the world works. Think how many times that's happened in our life. That's what's happening in AI just very early in it. So I don't teach people to find this menu, to use this button, and to speak to things this way. Coding is where we came from, and you had to do things very specifically. In fact, Peter mentioned that I had a business I sold to my business partner a year and a half ago, but as part of my journey, I had program, which I had about 20 employees at one point, and I had programmers. And in a programming world, I've had people spend two hours trying to find a missing semicolon because it's breaking the code. Like, you have to be that specific. And that's causing issues as we talk about learning technology and AI and tools like it, because we think we have to be that specific or we think you have to be on purpose on something. And it's quite the opposite. It's just the capacity to learn about, be curious. I'm going to show you some things here. But leadership also has a role. It's not just about the worker and the person, it's about the environment. And leadership has a role. And studies have shown that leaders in the workforce have a dramatic impact on that curiosity, on that capability. The White poll here said that people are almost twice as likely to report having frequent use of AI and feeling comfortable with that if their leadership supports it, if they don't, kind of feels like a dirty secret. Maddie was still in school when I started my podcast and I had her on as a guest. And I asked her, how is tool how our tools look chat GBT being discussed in the classroom? And her answer was, thou shalt not. Thou shalt not. It was a dirty secret. And there was one professor that she had that was bucking that trend. It became almost like the dead Poet Society. It was almost like the kids got together to talk to that professor but didn't want to be caught because it was after hours and a non sanctioned activity. Thou shall not come a long way. But there's still structure roadblocks, there's still mental roadblocks, there's still uncomfortable some note. So I share this because it's not just upon us as individuals to be curious and explore. It's on leaders to allow that and to encourage it. I'm going to talk about that. 62% of people that are trained in the most loser reports have never received any reported, never received any training. So most of the folks, what the numbers tell us is most of the folks are doing it on their own and figuring out on their own. But in the workplace, if we don't allow curiosity and share and whatnot, we're keeping people stymied and not seeing the opportunity to be better and to find ways in which this can add value to our work. So there is an opportunity for leaders, there's an opportunity to talk about it out loud. There's an opportunity to find everyday tasks in which we can share and find ways to be better balance. There's a difference between AI working for you and AI working with you, not talents and keeping the human fault. So clarify. Perhaps we've heard this in the past. It's the ability of how do I use this intern that I introduced at the beginning to be more efficient, more valuable with me malformation, that's key. And most of all, much like I would tell my kids, reward curiosity. The podcast that I have now started as poppy sessions in my office. I would just try something and talk about it with the employees and ask them to do the same. And it was just an experiment. I remember being in a conference room in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. First time I heard or saw anything related to ChatGPT and it was a screen much like this. And I was just sitting in the chair much like you, and somebody brought up a demo of this thing that I'd never heard of. And in my world, in the world that I was in, much of the work that we created was creating copy for clients. So let's talk about social media. We would have clients in which we would be creating social media strategies and creating content and creating posting and all that kind of it takes time, takes thought, takes work if you do it right. And so I know how much work was involved in putting together, let's say a monthly calendar for social media posts, for a business with a specific purpose that we can measure and all that stuff. This person came up and with a few sentences instructed this thing on the computer to create what was a word, a month's worth of work in three minutes. And I don't remember the old cartoons with the arooga, you know, you got the umbilical sign, right? Like my head exploded at that point. I knew I didn't know anything about it, but I had to learn about it because this thing, just that one little thing just taps that curiosity bug. We're in the university today. I went to the University of Maine and the first paper I ever passed in at the University of Maine, I got back with a big old F. I wish I'd kept it. It was red, big old F, circled it and I went up afterwards and I said, why did I get an F? She said, you hand wrote the paper during college. Can't handwrite the paper. Said I don't know how to type. She said, well guess what, you'll figure it out. So I did. That sparked my kind of surviving advanced mentality moving through. And I feel a lot of people are doing that with chat GPT. They're, they're, they're figuring it out. Not by that same sick of swim maybe. There are studies being shown now that employers leaders are telling companies or employees to find way to be more efficient using AI. They're not training them, they're telling them. And then they're telling them they're going to compare your work to what they think AI could do. Talk about pressure. Prove your worth by using how to learn, learning how to use a tool. But I'm not going to train you how to do it. But I'm also going to hold you accountable to the results. That's a real scenario. So when I talk about leaders allowing curiosity and having conversations, that's a real thing, right? The red F may not be in front of you as an opportunity, but there may be different versions of that red F that either are real or not. Back to Maddie and Serene. There's mental red Fs that we're worried about having that are in front of us. Some of them are real and some of them are not. And most of them are clouded because we don't have the mindset, the perspective, the understanding of how to move forward. And that's one of the gifts. I wanted to try leaping with Tibet. I keep coming back to Serena and Maddie and Spence because I was the oldest kid. I have two sisters. They're Both younger. And I felt, is there any older us in the room? Any oldest in the room here, maybe like me, I felt like I was figuring everything out on my home. I didn't have a home where my dad was guiding me every step of the way. I had the opposite. And I didn't have someone to turn to. I felt like I was creating like a path, like I'm feeling down a dark hole. In fact, when I started my business, I started the same way. It took me about 10 years to find a networking group, a cohort group where I found my people. I found people who could help me. But it took a while. And then you're like, holy smokes. I wish I'd known that five years ago, I wouldn't have made this mistake or done this, this and that. There's a lot of value coming from feeling your way down a dark hallway because you learn it right. But there's also a lot of diet for people to tell you, hey, maybe you should know this, or when we get to this class or the situation of this person is a man. This might happen. Here's some things to know. In this room we have bigs and littles. And what I mean by bigs and littles are there was a few people that raised their hand that said that they are highly confident and would be comfortable in coaching, teaching the nerd. You have a responsibility. You're the big brothers and big sisters. Don't keep that to yourself. There are people in this room that could benefit from your expertise there. There are people in your office, in your workspace that could benefit from your expertise. Organizations need bigs to share and to encourage and to embark that curiosity in other folks. So good for you for having the confidence and the experience to be able to use it in meaningful way. But I charge you use that beyond your own desktop and find ways to bring people in makes a meaningful difference. So again, what I want for you today is to walk away with a better understanding of what this AI thing is, how it's working. But what we're going to cover now is some life advice, my AI life advice on how to approach this intern so that you can find meaningful value. Okay, so the first thing is soft skills matter. And in life we talk about treating other people as you want to be treated. Usually when I start talking about two way conversations, I guess and glaze the eyes because as I introduced, we're used to you talking to software, using software and programming. What's this conversation thing you're talking about? Okay, so what we Just heard is a few folks that are sharing that the feedback matters the way that which they engage matters. Quick story insurance agency that I worked with a couple years ago, those doing a workshop, somebody said I tried this thing chat GPT and it didn't work. I didn't like it. So okay, well give me some information. And she said well our website is old, we need to find somebody to build a new website. And so I used the ChatGPT to create an RFP so I could put it out or find an agency to work with. I said okay, it was horrible. She said it was just very bland, didn't work for me. I said okay, so can you tell me about well how did you go about the process? And she said Well I opened ChatGPT and I said give me a website RFP. So when should you say it? Oh it's just that speed character for me I had to, I had to change for me when I was talking and working with people I had to get away from the computer. And so I'll just say Jane, what do you think would have happened if you had brought a real person into your office and said go get me a website rfp and that's all you told them. What do you think you would have got back? Well, I would have told him a lot more than that. Exactly. How come you didn't have that conversation with the tool? Well, because I thought it knew thought it just this magic box. So soft skills matter. Treating others as you want to be treated, which means context, details, conversation. Can't break any of these things by having conversation with it but giving it more clarity, giving it more context. And we'll talk about that in the next session. I'll show you absolute formulas and mindsets and literally how to do this. But for the life lesson, treating people as you want to be treated, if you think you need to deliver more information, if you think you could be valued for more information, if someone was giving that task to you, then please give it. That's the approach that will help you get more benefit, value, meaningful output from any of these tools that you're using. And you heard a couple, a couple examples here. It's not just I don't like it or that wasn't right. You've got to give a grief just like you and a person. It's a little soft skills map. This is a big one Keeping up with the Joneses right Everyone else is doing it so I have to or the belief of if you've got anyone got a 17 year old, 16 year old at the moment, what people think matters. This is their world image. And in AI it's the same. We're all seeing things on social media with people doing all these fabulous, wonderful things and these 52 step processes that replace five people. And I'm making a million dollars while I sweep and all this stuff. And we're worried about how do I. I can't get into that. So I share. Don't worry about what other people are doing. Don't worry about what other people are thinking. Don't worry about what other people are saying. Find one thing. I open today by saying, what if you had an intern that was highly capable, available and adaptable, waiting for your direction? What would you give it? How could it serve you best? Just find one thing. In our office work, we often have what's called the busy middle. And I look at projects in three phases. There's like the ideation phase. That first phase is like ideation, what are we doing? Trying to figure it out, that kind of thing. And this is all instinctual, but what are we doing? The third phase is polishing, editing, finishing. It's making it as best as it can be. But it's that second phase that bones set business. That's where our time and our mental bandwidth gets exhausted sometimes. And I know I'm guilty of this, and I know many others are that we hire people for experience and expertise and then far too often we pay them to be busy. We pay them not to use that experience, we pay them not to use that expertise because there's so much busy work that has to be done to get to anything. That busy middle is real. And if you can find one thing in your day, personally or professionally, quite honestly, from the context of today, if you could find one thing at work that ease up your time that is repeatable and shrink somehow, the busy middle. What if you could gain an hour a week, two hours a week, because you were investing in the Internet so they can help you shrink that just find one thing you don't need to create the next XYZ super app. Wouldn't it be great? I was working with a county administrator who has an assistant, and that job of the assistant is to take meeting notes at all of the council meetings or at all of the committee meetings, and then scribe them into documents and then post them and share. I said, how long did that take? She laughed and she said, half my week. Because she's in every meeting. And some of you use a tool to say, and for some of you, again, this is where the bigs and the littles comes into play. Because this was a very simple piece of advice that I gave her and I completely changed her week. I said, are you using a tool like otter or fireflies to record these meetings? She said, no, I didn't know I could. Okay, well, here's what happens when you record the meetings. That audio file creates a transcript. You have a written log of the words that were spoken. What could you do with a transcript? Well, that would save me. Okay. The wheels start turning and what if she says, well, I have to take this transcript, I have to create the briefing notes for the website, but I also want. So we have to create this report. Great. Can you describe the report to me? Oh, yeah, I do it all the time. Great. Could you just write a report to someone else? Yeah. Okay, well, you can describe that report to ChatGPT. What if you could describe that report to your intern, Fit the structure, the logic, the reasoning behind it, feed it the transcript, it takes the transcript and it creates that report. Now, something that is taking the most of your time is turning into 10 minutes, folks. This is not rocket science, but if you don't know about it, it certainly is. One thing that could shave hours up of her week made a meaningful difference in her participating in that meeting. She's not going to leave richer or have a side hustle or start a new company, but she's going to have more hours in her week. So when I say just find one thing, find something in your day, in your week, that's owning you, that keeps you in that busy middle. If you can define it, then you can define it to a tool. If you can divide it to a tool, you can get tremendous value, survive in advance. Life is not a spreadsheet. My daughter Maddie, she very smart, got it from her mom, and she went to the University of Southern Maine when she double majored. And she was lucky enough to double major in three years because the high school that she went to, she was awarded a year's worth of college credits for her work. Very smart. I'm bragging as a dat Now I get it. She went there because she wanted to be a lawyer. And that's where the main school of law is. She graduated valedictorian, she made the speech from the stage, then she got wait listed for law school and broker because that was not the plan. The spreadsheet said, this is what I'm doing, this is what I'm doing. This is what I'm doing. It's a good dad moment, Good life Advice. But we adapted. She adapted. We worked through it. Matt is now employed in the municipality. She works in the town of Orono in the community development department. And she's looking to go get a master's to do city planning and administration and loves it. Loves it. It was never on her radar. She was going to go to law school, but she had opened into an opportunity that completely fits her and she's happy as a client. Same thing's going to happen when you test and play around with a tool like AI. You're going to open and try something. It's not going to work. It's okay. Like I said, you can't break it. Try it, test it, talk to it, just keep going. Just try different ways. Don't close your mind off to one path or it has to be this or nothing. It's not a spreadsheet. It's an opportunity for you to survive in advance and you might get good ones and you might learn some. Talk about learning. All of these experiments that you're going to have are tuition if you don't fail, right? If you learn something. That's what I tell people. You don't fail if you learn something. And most of the people that raise their hand and said that they are comfortable, confident using tool this morning, probably, I'm guessing, I don't know any of it. Didn't go through a structured formal training program to get there. It was opening and spending in hours just like I had the Aruba Moment. Trial and error, doing this and doing that and testing and learning and testing and learning. Fail if you learn something. So going through this path, you don't have to have all the answers. You just have the app, the capacity to be curious and talk and try. That's it. And it is a big world. And it was lots to see. And curiosity for me is the number one attribute for anything being successful, whether it's the red F that taught me to type or whether it's the conversation with the RFP or just learning what I'm doing now. Curiosity is fueling education in a number of different ways, but we're not given often the opportunity to be curious in the workplace. I shared with you that 62% of the people that were polled in a recent poll had never received training. And there's more data that I didn't show that says many employees are scared to use AI in the workplace because leadership doesn't understand it. And as leadership doesn't understand it, it's scorned upon. So as leaders, however you define Leaders, your opportunity, your responsibility to share and invoke. Curiosity is key to anybody learning. Be with yourself. As you move forward, it's important for you to recognize that it is a big world. There's lots you have seen, there's a lot coming. Most of the things that we are getting used to now in AI will be obsolete. I'll just say 12 months, but it could be 6. There are things that we do not know and see that will pop up and be immediate heroes, but they've been in development forever. I say that we are the product. The ability of us interacting with tools like ChatGPT and Claude and Copilot gives these labs back to the middle layer that I was talking about. Feedback, right? And it's a race. It's a race to see what feedback turns into what features. And if you notice, by the way, the money I mentioned the money and the gross investment going into the infrastructure. Have you ever seen a graph of who's giving the money to who? It looks like one of these bulletin board crime scene shows in a New York department, right? And they've got the, the rope going everywhere. It's just crisscrossing. And this company is given to four competitors and the competitors are giving new competitors and they're investing in revealing it matters because nobody knows what's going to happen in the end, but they all want to be in the room when it happens. It's amazing to watch the curiosity in the labs. Microsoft is investing in Apple, Apple's investing in Amazon. OpenAI is getting Nvidia money. Nvidia is paying Amazon AMD. It's just, they're just taking checks and passing them around to real. I don't even know if it's real money. But nobody knows where they're going to be when the aha moment, when the aruga moment when the thing happens, right? So they're giving money to everybody. It feels like the early 2000s with the e commerce.com boom, if you remember that honestly, there was a period of it, 12 to 18 months where if you had a PowerPoint and an idea and a domain name, here's a million dollars. Remember that sock puppet, the pet shop sock puppet guy. And the people that won were the ones that had the infrastructure behind it. So there's a reason that Amazon is still around, there's a reason that Walmart is still around, there's a reason that these E commerce giants have large infrastructures behind them is because they plan accordingly. That's what we're racing through now. But that curiosity is existing at all levels, you and me, It's, I wonder if I can create a picture of a dog using ChatGPT for them, it could be, I wonder if I could get a car to drive around the streets without a driver. For someone else, it might be, I wonder if I could get someone to land on the moon. You know, what's going to become of that? Nobody knows. But your own curiosity can fuel your own ventures and your own benefits. Right. As you go through. So I tell the kids all the time, just be curious. Make collisions, take a different path to school, take a different path to class, take a different path to work. Meet somebody new. By the way, we talk about the benefits of using an AI tool and I talk about computers a lot. The busy middle of doing a product project. But it helps for a lot of things in the real life too. Right? An example over here, you talked about debating. I use this all the time for brainstorming. I have configured some of my own tools to think certain ways, to challenge me in certain ways, to have certain specificity of expertise. And whether it's being married, being a dad, being a business owner, or wondering about what the heck does photosynthesis mean, you know, the ability of using a brainstorming tool that I can have a conversation with for clarity. Here's something that I do. I went for a walk recently and for 30 minutes I just talked and recorded thoughts. So I'm trying to solve a problem. And when I got back, I uploaded that to Chat GPT and I said, these are my ramblings. Organize them, make sense of them, and tell me what you see. And it does. Objectivity and empathy. And we'll talk about this in the next session, too. But objectivity and empathy, I think, are two of the greatest capacities that a tool like Claude and ChatGPT have. The ability for someone else to see what you have or look through someone else's eyes or to understand someone else's pain. How many people use the tools that they raise their hand on for things like email and communication to other humans? Yeah. Can I ask you what's the real reason you do that? Save time. Who else has a different reason Here, let's check the tone. I love that one. How many times have you yelled and swore at the computer and said, make a friendly email out of this? Never. Your nose just grew about 3 inches. I had someone over here. Same thing. Yeah. Professional, right? I have a client. Does anyone know the disc profile, like Myers Briggs disc personality profile. Okay, a couple hands. I am what's called A hard B. So I don't like detail. I get lost in detail. If you're going to give me the detail, I am checking out, okay? I know that about myself. I'm self aware. My wife tells me all the time. However, she's a C and a C means she wants to know how the hot dog is made before she has the hot dog. I just want the hot dog. Just give me the hot dog. She wants all the details. And I had employees that worked for me and thankfully I did employees that worked for me that needed all of the information, right? And one of the classic flaws in our organization, the way it was set up, we had an agency, we had salespeople, account managers, strategists, doers, you know, and the classic Dilbert was the salesperson passing off to the engineer, right? The account manager tasking the product or the project to the developer. There's probably a municipal version of this at some point, but there's the chasm. There's a deep, deep chasm between what was told to the account manager and what was delivered. There's a lot of guessing. Jurassic Park. Remember the scene in Jurassic park and they're giving the tour about how this was made. They're talking about how they went down and found dino blood and they sucked the dino blood out, did the genetic sequencing. And there was gaps though, because the blood had gaps. And so they filled in those gaps with the closest thing they could find, just frog beaten. It assumed it would work. We all know how that ended. It didn't work so well. Well, we have a lot of frog beaten egg happening in the workplace. We assume things or we guess things, right? And one of the biggest flaws in communicating with other people is I have something in my head and I gave you 60% of it. Whether it's because I wasn't listening and didn't ask the right questions or because I was impatient. I just want to pass it off or move on or not respecting what they need or any of that kind of stuff. That's a flaw that happens at many workplaces. One of the things that I did before I left was set up this personality box, knowing that Jeff, for instance, was a strong C. Jeff needs to know everything. It's great. That's how you do best work. But other people don't have that same level of grasping the details. And so the Jeff bot was, I'm going to pass this project off to Jeff. I'm going to tell you everything I know about it. Before I actually talk to Jeff, I want you to Read what I'm giving you and ask me what's missing. What do you think Jeff's gonna need? What's he gonna ask? What's he gonna wonder? Okay. By the way, if I asked you all to close your eyes and think of a blue envelope, you're all gonna think of a different shade of blue in a different size envelope. That just happens. That assumption is real. So what I did is I gave as much detail as I could to this Jeff bot. And then it would come back and say, jeff's not gonna understand this. He's gonna ask this. He's going to this, and I complete it. And guess what? The projects getting passed to Jeff became a lot more complete. Any of you in the room would consider that you have a sample of your writing in any meaningful way. Articles, emails, anything like that. Do you think you have a collection of stuff that would represent the way that you. You personally communicate in an authentic way? Yeah. If you haven't done this, by the way, share them. They are truly at ease. Tell it or ask it. Instruct it. Caddy. Read these sharing review articles that are written, I'm sure, review communications that I've created because it represents how I talk, voice, tone, thought I learned all this just by being curious. Nobody taught me this. There's no manual. I just. If I had an intern, what would I hope that person would ask me? What would I hope they'd want to note? And I think about that ahead of time. And I try to be that clear. Now, when I communicate, the instructions that I give are not prompts and they're not short sentences. There's ramblings just like you tell anybody. But imagine if that intern could listen to you for 20 minutes and then without fail, remember everything, organize everything, repeat it back to you, ask questions, and have complete understanding before they start. That's the power of the tools that are in our pocket just now. And this is the worst it's ever going to be. That race to fund the infrastructure is to get the tools that we're using now out of the way. So that Netflix situation just becomes natural. How many folks have been to San Francisco and driven in a Waymo? We did it this fall. My wife was scared to death. I had to talk her into getting into the car. One ride in, she's like, oh, this is super cool. Let's do it again. That anxiety went away fast. Our adaption to new things, our adoption to new things is shrinking at a remarkable pace. The things that would scare us and take us a long time were Just naturally adopting into a world as oh yeah, this exists now. Right. The Jetsons is more real now than ever. But tell that to your 15 year old self that someday you're going to sit in a car and they're going to drive around without a driver. Of course that brings up a whole new set of problems. I'm not sure if you saw this when you were in San Francisco, but this is the one thing that I noticed is the Wayne Will cars look different? Right. They've got a big satellite thing or a GPS to a cup of. They're all white, they're Jaguars. Well, guess what people are doing? They're jaywalking the heck out in front of WH because they know that the WH's going to stop. Yeah. So we're creating talk about municipalities, we're talking about another level have of issues to deal with. We create one, we love them to another. It's interesting. But the curiosity, the investment and the tools of who's going to be in the room when it happens and all that, that's at the macro level for you that curiosity could be as simple as solving the email problem or communicating better to Jeff or hey, I have chicken, green pepper, cheese, tomato in my refrigerator. Give me three recipes so I can make something different than what I'm used to and it will. Trust but verify though I'm gonna tell you a story. Trust but verify. I sat in front of a room like this with 50 sales reps at Dennis Food Service who if you're not familiar with the company, they are the ones that provide the recipes, the ingredients, the supplies to schools, to restaurants, the delis, institutions. And they are churning more because of AI tools. They're turning more into consultants for restaurant owners. They used to be I worked in the Dell, I worked in the Farib market in Bangor for four years during college and it's a deli, pizza, sandwiches, electrical stuff. Back then the rep used to come in with a clipboard, how many cases of tomatoes do you want? And write it down. How many cases of green pepper. That was the value of Joe. Remember his name? Oddly enough, showing up every week with a clipboard. Now you know what's happening now. The owner is getting on the computer at 10 o' clock at night when they have 10 minutes doing it online and it's all done. The value of Joe now has changed. It's no longer the busy middle. The value of Joe now is the experience and expertise of knowing what other restaurants are doing, how to maximize profit. This ingredient, this protein is going up. So if you're going to buy it, let's get four other recipes out that you can create on your menu so you don't have to buy twice as much. That kind of stuff. That's where Joe's value is now. And so I did an exercise in front of them using Chat GPT and I said watch this and I gave them a list. I gave Chat GPT a list of six or seven ingredients and I said I am a restaurant owner and I want to create a fun seasonal menu. I'm on the coast of Maine and I want to create a tourist menu. So I want to have 10 items from Maine. I want to have fun main names. I need that from my menu. I need a description so people understand what it is. And I want you to take the ingredients that I just gave you and give me some ideas as to what those items in combinations and recipes, names and descriptions could be. And it did. There's the aruda moment, right. But down there it gave me 10. And it's the stuff that you would think about, you know, the moose da da da, lobster da da da. But number seven was a clam chowder quesadilla. Right? You got it. Trust but verify. Have it work with you, not for you. Right. They're very capable, very adaptable, very available, waiting for your direction. But sometimes it gets frog DNA and clam chowder. Case of DX 1876 was the first patent for a telephone. Three years later this was happening in towns like Chicago, New York, St. Louis. This was modern technology. This was the evolution of a device that could transmit your voice and have someone in another place hear it. We are three years in to what we know AI to be. We're here now. It's not going to take 150 years to go from that to this. In AI it's going much faster. But mentally I want you to think about the things that you're curious or anxious or confused or feel behind on. You have to understand what's happening here. You have to understand that there are people that are allowing people to communicate. That's it. And if you walk away with understanding that there are tools being developed today that allows people to communicate to people, people to brainstorm and shortcut and create efficiencies and values and connect things that have never been connected before and do things that never thought before or just help you parent a 17 year old daughter, that's the curiosity, that's the mindset, that's the approach I want you to take away today. Is that you don't have to learn how to plug the cords into a hole right now. Just learn that there are basic mindsets and frameworks that will help you advance as the tool advances. It'll help you be relevant, meaningful, and help you find value no matter what the tool looks like tomorrow. These things are evergreen. And so my final question for you is, what are you going to be when AI grows out? That's the real question. Some of you are thinking, dad, I get that. But that's the real question. Where is it going? And how can I find value as to where it is right now? Okay. Okay. Was it helpful? Very good. Thank you. Appreciate it very much.