speaker-0: Don't just look at it as a Google query. You need to look at it as it is doing an interpretation of information. We become AI's own bottleneck without knowing we've created the bottleneck, the thought bottleneck. So the key is saying, This is the outcome, take me out of the picture. How do I get there?

speaker-1: Today's guest is Andrew Brumer. Andrew works with founders and executives to help them use AI to think differently about the problems they're trying to solve. He's also the founder of My Story Told, where he uses AI to help people turn their lived experiences into finished books. In our conversation, we talk about how years of using search engines have trained us to ask technology one question at a time and why that approach can limit what we can get from AI. Andrew breaks down how starting with the outcome can lead to better solutions and why getting more value from AI requires us to challenge its answers instead of simply accepting them. If you get value from this conversation, be sure to subscribe and share it with a friend. And now please enjoy my conversation with Andrew Brumer. Andrew, thank you so much for being here.

speaker-0: Yeah and thank you for having me. I appreciate you.

speaker-1: Absolutely. So, Andrew, I have heard you talk about this idea on other shows, other podcasts, that really stuck with me, right? So when we are exploring the idea of how people should be effectively using AI today and thinking about this technology, how they should be using it, you make the point that the goal shouldn't be to learn 50 different tools, right? It should be to learn how to use AI to think differently about the problems that we face themselves. So when you say that AI should change the way that we think, what do you mean by that?

speaker-0: That's such a big question. So if I get carried away, feel free to stop me in. I I deeply care about this because I think this is what's going wrong right now with AI and why so many things are failing. Over the past 20, 30 years, as Astola Vista and Alta Vista and Yahoo and all of Google and all of those things came out, what it taught us to do from a technol technological aspect, it taught us to ask a question, get an answer. Ask a question, get an answer. Ask a question, get an answer. Do some Analysis, I'm thinking, ask a question, get an answer. So that's very serial. And you can have five queries going and you and we're continually digging and digging, and we'll get a piece of paper and we'll say, well, this is the hypothesis I'm chasing, or this is the problem I'm trying to solve. But we grew up thinking, ask a question, I'll get an answer, and then I can carry on. And what that does is it predicates if if you're familiar with the ishikoma or the y diagram, so the five whys, ask why five times and you'll get to the endpoint outcome of what's actually wrong. So When you do that, you end up starting at the fish's head and then you ask many questions because you're constantly trying to figure out which way in this path to go to get to an end outcome. And AI allows us to think completely differently. It allows us instead of trying to figure out what the most efficient way through the maze is, it allows us to say, I'm after the following outcome. That's what I'm trying to achieve. I don't know how to get there. I know how to cook the recipe or I don't know how to build the house or I don't know how to But the outcome is this is where I'm trying to get to. And it changes our thinking. So instead of doing that, ask a question, get an answer, it forces us to go into what is the out what is the thing I'm trying to achieve? What am I actually trying to get to? And then when I get there, I now need a curious mind. And now I need to and what we do as humans, we like controlling what pe how people think and what the next thing is. And we do this dramatically with AI. We we go into single sentence prompting, single question prompting. And it's like we're leading AI. And if you've worked with AI to any degree, you know that AI is very good at discerning what it thinks you want to hear. So when you ask a pattern of questions, it says, ooh, this is where he's going. And this is kind of what he's after. And it gives you an answer based on the question you're asking. And that's great because you get some good insights. But what you don't do there is you don't get to use AI for what it's gifted at doing. Because we stand in our own way. We become AI's own bottleneck without knowing we've created the bottleneck, the thought bottleneck. So the key is saying this is the outcome, take me out of the picture. How do I get there? And then going in with a curious mind to say, but that doesn't make sense. How would you go about doing that? What's this? So it's about changing how you think. And I firmly believe if you take anyone anywhere across the world and give them create if they're creative thinking, outcomes based thinking, and constructive based thinking, critical thinking, they will outthink nearly all of us because they will use AI the way AI is gifted or designed to be used. Sorry, that was a long rant. Kia is fundamentally changing how you attack things because our minds are wired. We've been taught to use technology to find the answer versus saying, This is the thing I'm trying to achieve and stop trying to control AI to get to what it is, use it, ask the question, tell it what you're trying to get to, and then argue with it because it's not get getting you to the outcome that you're after.

speaker-1: Hmm. That's fascinating. And it's it reminds me of a of a book called Technopoly by Neil Postman. you know, tangentially reminds me of the ideas from that book where the technology has a huge influence. The technology that we use on a day-to-day basis is a huge influence of, you know, how we think. Right. So it's interesting the idea that the technology that we grew up with and have been using for the last 30 years have really shaped the way that we think. Where, you know, the the search mission the search engines, right? Ask a question, get an answer, ask a question, get an answer. has transformed the way that we approach the problems that we face. Yeah. which is a super interesting insight. So your argument is that with this new technology, if we really want to be using AI in the most effective way, we need to fundamentally change the way that we approach the problems that we face. Instead of ask a question, get an answer one bite at a time, we need to get really clear at in our ability and we have to get really good at the ability Of being able to describe that end outcome that we want to achieve and kind of paint that picture, see that vision of that end outcome thing that we want to create and then almost like reverse engineer back from there. Is that directionally correct in how I'm understanding?

speaker-0: But on and to use a practical example, if I go to my son and say to my son, You wanted to have a f a a seawater fish tank set up for the past ten years of your life. I want you to go away and figure out what it is you need, how you need to do it, and I need what does that fish tank look like? What what is it that you're gonna glue together? And I imagine my son has all the knowledge of salt water, all the knowledge of marine life and all the knowledge of that. If I go to him and say, Go and figure out what that fish tank is. What is it that you're wanting to build? And I don't pre constrain the thought process, he's going to come up with something fantastic because he already has the predisposed knowledge of everything salt water that could be the fish tank. Or I could go at it in the control manner to say, Hey, how about we look at putting a twenty gallon fish tank in the house? How about and what about water spillage? And we have got wood floors, so the water spillage is not going to be a problem. What I'm doing is I'm constraining the endpoint outcome to not maximize it. Once I've maximized the possible outcome, I can navigate to say, right, well, that design is beautiful. What you're architecting is the most high-and-cost-efficient and most robust self-sustaining ecosystem you're going to build. But we have wooden floors. How do you mitigate the wooden floors from being damaged? It's it fundament it flips the whole thing on its head where I'm telling him what to do, telling him what to do, versus him. Having the wisdom of everything, sea life, and saying this is the best for the dining room that you have, for the floor that you have, for the thing you're trying to do, for the fish you're trying to hold, this is the best design. Now argue me out of it. Walk me into the points as to why this is not the right solution or argue me into help me understand some of the constraints. It it just it changes the outcome of what you get. You get a far richer outcome when you come at it with the knowledge of everything versus you as a human trying to constrain and prompt it into it. It's just it's Just what comes out of it is just completely different.

speaker-1: Yeah. So maybe if we could really underline this idea by contrasting that with, okay, if we take this problem or this outcome that we want to create of creating a saltwater fish tank in your dining room, right, what would the approach of the old school way of thinking look like? Right. You're talking about like the one sentence prompting. Is that just like, okay, I'm just gonna give you the facts of the situation and then that's gonna constrain instead of like how would that how would that look if they approached

speaker-0: Yeah, so how do I do it today? I would go take my son to the fish sa fish store and I would say to him, look at these fish tanks and get him to decide a fish tank. Then he'll say, All right, this is the fish tank I want. Then I'll All right, well, that's great. Now I know the fish tank you want, because you like the design, you like its look and feel, and it feels ergonomic to you. Let's now have a look at what are you gonna do? What do we need? Then I'm gonna go to the counter, I'm gonna say, Hey, I want this fish tank. What I need it for you know, I want to install it in the house. What do I need to do to make sure that the fish tank is and then and I'm leading The outcome. I'm I'm leading I'm leading towards an outcome. So I'm limiting what could be built by the the limitation of what I know about the topic I'm trying to enter into. Whereas if I go to the fish tank and say my son and say, Right, you know everything about salt water. You've got this amount of money, it's gonna be in the dining room, make sure there's no water spillage, we have a wood floor in the environment, and you love rich reefs. kind of the finding new moto type reef. All right. Off you go, go figure out how you take that dream of yours and what would that look like? What have you got to do? What are the steps to getting there? And he would then be able to, having the sum of all the knowledge of it, come back and give me a really sound path to get there. Whereas going to the fish store, that's another six, nine month journey. I'm gonna buy the wrong tank, wrong gear, I'm gonna s fish it up too soon, the fish are gonna die, the ecosystem's not gonna be there, and and and and and and you learn that through trial and error because you limit the outcome of what you're after to human based thinking. What we know today versus saying, Give me the smartest thing and tell me how I should because that's it I come after.

speaker-1: Yeah. Okay, makes sense. So historically, right, we were limited by the constraints of our understanding in the search for the solution to the problem that we're trying to solve. Now, yep, that constraint of limitation of understanding doesn't exist, right? Because the entirety of understanding exists here in this tool called artificial intelligence, right? So now how did you take your new way of thinking approach to the problem of building your service, my storytold.ai. Check it out, link in the description. It's an incredible product if you're interested in writing a book for yourself. So how did you take that new way of thinking and how did that influence or shape the way that you built this product?

speaker-0: So when I pivoted in twenty three, twenty-four, I've lost track of time now. when I pivoted, I had no credibility. I was a servant pleaser and had no brand. I had nothing. And I I knew I needed to get to an endpoint outcome of what what I needed to do. So I went through a whole journey of trying to figure out and that's where I learned the fundamentals of how I could leverage AI. What I then got to the point of of is I was on a call with with some folks, I was busy training them on how I'd learn to maximize LinkedIn. And how I'd learned to do networking and how I was growing my network and building brand and and they said to me, Andrew, you need to write a book. And I'm like, geez, I don't I really don't have the patience. I'm not I ju I don't I don't have the patience to write a book on this. And they said, Andrew, just go just go write a book on it. It's just you're giving your knowledge away. Just go write a book. So I went to AI. I went to my favorite AI engine. I said, This is what I'm doing, this is what I've been told to do. Here are some of the the here is some of the content. And I took I I took and I worked with it to say this is where I'm at. And I said, I'm after writing I I need to write a book about this. And it then started plant it was very loose and very crazy, but I eventually got it honed down. And it it what came of it, what came out of it was here you go, here's here here's what your book could be. You could do this and this and it and this and take these things, take this approach, this strategy. Let's start putting these guardrails in place. And I and my statement to it was, but that's gonna be AI slop. And it said, Yes, if you don't put these guardrails on, it ain't gonna be AI slop. So I said, Well, how do I enforce that? And I walked it into figuring out how do I actually build this thing. And I use that methodology to build my story told. And now I have the privilege of writing books for people. It's brand new. So I only launched the beginning of this year, so it's been quite the journey. And well the idea was formulated on the sixth to product have to build a company out of it beginning of this year. So by March I was ready to do my first and I'm super excited. My first author gets got re pushed in two days ago onto onto Amazon. So I'm very excited to see that go. And then she's got TikTokers. You one point two million TikTokers. So I'm super excited for her to be bragging out about the journey. she spent maybe six or eight hours on the book and we have given her a book That brings her to tears. It's you know, you would not think that the book is written the book the content was structured by AI, but the content is her content. It's not AI it's not AI data. It's her stuff. It's her story. It's her life. It's her love. It's her hurt. It's her pain. It's her story. And I figured out how to maximize AI to help tell the story without it being polluted with other people's versions of their lives and very honed in. It's a it's a beautiful story. It's It's fantastic to see what you can what what you can do when you when you know what you're after and the end outcome, it's fantastic to see what you can actually build. It's just it's yeah just a privilege to be involved in some of these stories.

speaker-1: That's incredible. Congratulations on that ing that huge milestone of the first book to publishing. that's super exciting. I think that's the Go ahead.

speaker-0: I I would like to add one piece over here. I there's a lot of people that say writing a book with AI is not the thing you should do because it's destroying the art of writing a book and that's not what I'm what I'm doing at all. The art of writing a writing a book will be gifted to those people forever who have the patience, the diligence, the know how and the money and the time and the efforts and the energy to go write their book. Every day there are thousands of people that die who have lived a very rich, very healthy life. And they were never gifted. And there are a lot of people who will never be gifted to write a book. They'll never have the patience, they'll never have the words, they'll never have the money or the time to write their story. And what my story told does is it allows every single story that we've all earned. We've all earned the right to write a book. We've all lived a life. We've all loved, we've all hated, we've all been hurt, we've all succeeded, we've all failed. We've earned the right to have our stories told. And what my story told allows is Those people whose stories would die with them because they never would write a book now allows those stories to be told in a really simple, really beautiful, low yield, low cost, low energy way to tell the story. And then you get to decide whether you publish your book or not. That's completely up to you. But you get to hand down the legacy of you. You don't just become a photograph that somebody looks at in six or thirty years' time and say, Well, who the hell was that?

speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah, that's beautiful. I completely agree with you. I think everybody has an important story to tell because they've lived it. Right. There's something that everyone can learn and resonate from everyone's story. And everybody has a unique gift, a unique contribution that they have made with their life here in this experience that we all live through together. But yeah, it's incredible. Beautiful stuff.

speaker-0: You beautifully said. I'm gonna I'm gonna use that.

speaker-1: I love it. so I think just to kind of wrap up this this first idea that we've explored here together, fundamentally the goal is to get AI to kind of guide you through the process instead of you kind of forcing and guiding AI through some arbitrary process, like your best way of maybe thinking about doing this thing, it's fundamentally transforming the experience from turning AI into the guide that guides you through the process of of achieving that that outcome.

speaker-0: And together with AI you must learn the process. Because AI has this wealth of knowledge, but it doesn't know what we know. It can't it it doesn't invent the way we invent. So the key is along the journey is learning how it's thinking, where it is not seeing its own blind spots, how you teach it to see its own blind spots and how it helps pull the best out of you. So it's a it's it really is a yin and yang relationship. And being open to learning, open to instructing, open to open to arguing with AI, open open to debating with it and and saying that's not right. That's and argue with it as to how it goes. Don't just say, well, you gave me slop or the data's wrong, therefore I'm gonna use another engine. But get it to the point that it understands what it's doing and every session. And then you say, Well, I have to do that every session. You're No, you don't. If you're smart about how you structure these things, if you're smart around how you structure your learnings and your outputs, I have a an AI operator profile that has the sum of all the lessons I've learned and it moves from every single whether I'm in chat or Claude or doesn't matter where I am, this file moves everywhere. So the AI engine I'm engaging with has the sum of thirty s twenty four, thirty six months worth of my engagement and my learnings of how to engage with me and how I make it aware of when it's going to swap, when it's exact I've even got it to the point of I say to it, tell me what you sense is in the following discussion. And when I first threw that, I was like, What's sense? I I can tell you what's black and white. I'm like, no, no, but you've got ten of these now. And then I give it my sense of where it is and I've taught it to have sense. I've taught it to interpret, to have a a sense, to look for patterns, to to to have an opinion on a sense of what could probably be happening in dialogue, discussions, outcome, build, whatever it is. And I've I've got it all telling me I don't even prompt it anymore. It just says my sense out of the following thing, the pattern is this is happening, my senses, this is probably gonna happen next. I'm like I'm winning.

speaker-1: Yeah. I love it. Yeah. Yeah, because this technology comes out, you know, very raw, very open. And it's also, you know, each engine that you will engage with, whether it's Claude, Groc, ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever, right, is going to be initially seasoned by the people that develop this tool. But what's really amazing about this technology is it gives us the opportunity to apply our own seasoning, right, or our own judgment into the the engine. And you have to be obviously, you know. intentional yeah deliberate exactly about about how you do that. So I think that leads me to the to the next question of, you know, I think another thing that you've another point that you have made is the that artificial intelligence as technology doesn't replace or diminish human judgment, right? The value of human judgment, it's almost going to completely lift it up, right? And give each individual the opportunity to exponentially grow the value of their own unique judgment. So I guess I can just ask you bluntly Like what is the place of human judgment in this equ in this new equation of how we will work with technology to help us solve our problems?

speaker-0: We are as human beings limited by those people that have been around us, that we've surrounded ourselves with, the studies we've done and the work we've done. That is a limitation of our thoughts. So and we can grow ourselves individually to get there. If I could pick on an impoverished part of Africa, that we would want to them to be able to grow farms and to be able to create a sustaining ecosystem and to grow themselves and to expand themselves. Today those folk would not have access to and I'm using an extreme example not just to paint a picture. Till to date that the that cohort of those families that would be in that impoverished area would have to rely on either finding a school that is sponsored by somebody or some someone that is touring around the area and teaches them how to grow the crops or to fertile the soil or to move the water or to get it from a downstream hand me down and those things. With AI, we democratize hum humans know how. It's democratized. It's no longer in a select group of people who hold the keys to the wisdom of life, to the wisdom of insights. I can now take a ten year old who is naturally curious, who is naturally creative, who is naturally trying to solve the problem on how do I grow my own crop, my own corn? How do I build that? I can now take the wisdom of the world to that ten year old, remove all of their bottleneck thinking, remove all of the remove all of the stage gates, the organizational, financial, political, funding, non profit, I can remove all the stage gates and I can now give that young person the ability to think differently. That person, every person now, if you're critical thinking, outcome creative, you can change the course of your destiny and the people around you. And pay for your internet connection. That's it. It changes. A AI, the democratization of information, moving it away from those who have the right to own that information or have claimed the right to own information, and putting in the hands of every human being. I think what comes over the next twenty to thirty years is going to be fascinating. I think we are going to unlock versions of life we cannot even begin to think about today. Not

speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-0: not Because AI is going to get smarter, but also because the humans, these young adults, these young kids, who are growing up into AI are going to use it in a way and come up with things we could never have imagined.

speaker-1: Yeah. Right. And you think that the like w I guess why do you think it's more natural for a kid to to think that way and approach problems that way? Is it just

speaker-0: They're not jaded. They're not jaded with predisposed. So I do a lot of executive coaching, a lot of training of people to think differently about using AI. I I'm probably as dangerous as a developer wants anybody to be when it comes to using AI coding. And I use my own fair share of AI coding and building my ass, but I'm I'm the person that developers want to keep out of the room because I'm just I just cause chaos when it comes to development. But what I'm really good at doing is helping people think differently. And I would say the predominant challenge that seniors have for two forty-five plus. are are battling and I coach people as young as 18 all the way through to 76. The oldest person I'm dealing with in an AI space is 76 years old. And it took me two hours to open her mind to help her think. And when I did that, she was just like a fish and what she was just she was elated. She was like, I get it. And she has just taken off. So the mind can open, but you have to want your mind to open. And the problem is as you get older in life you become more resistant to the kind of norms that have become acceptable to you to unlearning some of those things. So I've worked with her seven years, I'm working with her right now. She's fantastic. I mean, she's gone from strength to strength to strength. And she could probably out AI a lot of people that are between 30 and 45 years old and using AI to get to an end outcome. She's doing fantastically well. We have taught ourselves to dig ourselves in on what we think and know. And the history of consequence and the history of domain and territory and ego ownership and weaponization of information or holding of information to the detriment of other people. All those guardrails are gone. And there's a lot of people that are battling today trying to figure out how do I change, what do I change into. And everyone I engage with, when I walk them through how to open their minds, they think differently and it works. But it's not natural. It's not a natural behavioral pattern for somebody who's already ingrained how they think, how they operate, their own operating system. Whereas these young Six, seven, eight, nine, ten, twelve, fifteen, eighteen, eighteen year olds, twenty-three year olds, they're coming at life completely. And thanks to COVID, where these kids, these young adults were not in the middle of older generational type thinking. So they weren't indoctrin indoctrinated. So AI coming along is one of the best things that could happen for them. I mean, just I mean, imagine if any I mean the person listening to this, imagine you took the sum of your knowledge, everything you know now. And get given AI and everything AI knows now and you can yield yourself back to ten years old. What would you do differently? Just blow your brain. I mean, just imagine what you can do. And that's what that is what is ahead of us. That's why I'm so excited about what's around the corner.

speaker-1: Me too. I think you know, going back to the idea that everybody has a unique story to tell, I think everybody, you know, building on that has a unique contribution, unique, authentic contribution to make. And I think this technology is gonna make it, you know, easier for people to make that contribution. And I think there's there's a lot of different forces, right? This technology makes it easier to make that contribution. And then also this technology is gonna remove a lot of the autopilot opportunities that were available to most people, like the standard kind of nine to five kind of corporate careers. those opportunities are going to dwindle. So there's going to be almost like a forcing function of pushing people into a situation where they have to figure out how to make their own unique contribution and provide their own unique value to the world, which the only real way to be successful in that, as you and I and many of the listeners have found, is like if you're actually really engaged with the problem that you're trying to solve, aka the value that you want to provide or the business that you want to start. So I think there's the forcing function of almost being pushed into that situation where you have to figure out how to create your own unique value to the world. And then also this technology enabling it, making it easier for you to do so.

speaker-0: One add one additional dynamic to that. Prior to AI, when you tried something and it failed and you broke something, it cost you money and the most important commodity time. And there was always consequence. There was embarrassment, there was shame if you're part of a corporate, if you're part of a start. I mean, you had to explain why you just blew six months in a startups journey as an entrepreneur. I mean there's so much consequences. There there's consequence to doing the wrong thing. With AI, I can try and fail thirty times today. Today. I can pick a project and I can try and fail thirty times today and I have zero consequence. Nothing. Why the hell? I mean, can you imagine throwing that capability and saying to every nine, ten, fifteen, eighteen, twenty three year old and say, Go. Go learn. There's no yeah there's no consequence. It can cost you five years of your life to find out you just decided stupidly, and we all do, we all have. So go think stupidly. Go think out of the box. Go break things. Go figure out how. Get smart. Just rinse and repeat. Do, do, do I mean, I can build an app today. I can build a CRM to brand new. I can build my CRM today using Lovable. Yeah. And I'll break I'll it'll take me two hours to build the first in incantation of it today. Yeah. In Lovable. Ground up my own CRM. And it will be stupid. It will be dumb. It will be dumb, dumb, dumb build that I do. By the end of the day, I'll have a really cool working CRM. And I will have been through thirty, forty iterations of it. Right. And that's just C R Now take that to anything else related to turnkey solutioning. Answer's the same. Outcomes the same.

speaker-1: Right. Yeah, there's definitely a big evolution that will need to happen within our institutions, like our educational institutions especially that are encouraging that kind of way of thinking and being and acting in the in the youth. But, you know, at the end of the day, the opportunity of self guided and and you know, the the democratization that you said of learning and action and testing and creating that opportunity is there. So I don't think we should rely on the institutions to evolve because, you know, they they don't really. 'cause they exist to protect themselves and they're not gonna wanna create anything that's gonna completely disrupt them. So

speaker-0: I think natural curiosity of people so I've done a lot of organizational change and I've helped a lot of individuals, groups of teams and companies. I've been through a lot. I've had the privilege of working a lot. And there's one irrefutable truth. When people see logic can prevail, logic will prevail. But they have to feel and experience that it can. And when it can, when they observe it can, you cannot stop it. It will become viral. So for that kid or that young adult or that 76 year old whose new norm changes, diverges from what we've learned and grown up to be normal, you can't stop that viral growth, that viral expansion, that viral energy, that viral bragging. That vir you can't start. It'll just go and go and go. So there is an inevitable outcome that will transpire whether educational decides to get on board or not. It's inevitable it will happen because more and more twenty six year olds are gonna do cool stuff and then the twenty fives are gonna say I can too and the twenty fours are gonna I can too. Rinse and repeat all the way down. I mean, how bored were were you at ten at ten years old? How bored were you at school playing on your phone, playing games, and now at ten, you're now able to do what a twenty five year old would do. In fact, you can do what a seventy six year old can do because you have it at your fingertips. You just have to think differently.

speaker-1: Yeah. Incredible. Yeah. And I think like that idea of, you know, the twenty six year olds being an example to the twenty five year olds also emphasizes and underlines the idea of the value of telling your story, right? And putting your story out there. Is yeah, so that you can kind of be that example and be that demonstrator of what's possible for other people. And yeah, it do it it doesn't have to be perfect, right? But your story is there to inspire others to do the amazing

speaker-0: Never know what you don't know. You just never know what you do today or what you say today, what the ripple consequential effect is going to be of that. With technology being where it's at, with us being as a society where we're at, you just have no idea what the downstream consequences you have no no no concept to what the downstream consequence is, what the benefit is and how your echo is going to manifest itself.

speaker-1: Yep. And then in hindsight, the pieces all somehow fit together often, which is so funny. beautiful. Yeah. So the final idea that I'd love to explore with you here, which might take, you know, ten, fifteen minutes, whatever it takes, might be just kind of going back and re underlining the idea that we opened with, which is this idea that I think is the most important to emphasize, which is how we can actually go about and approach thinking differently with this technology. So I think another example that we could explore, and I apologize if this is a bit redundant, but again, I think it's important for us to really emphasize this idea. So if we could take that example of that seventy six year old client that you had, where you talked about in two hours you were able to help her to think differently and there were certain things that she had to unlearn in that process. If you could articulate, like what are those specific things that you had to help her unlearn in that journey to thinking differently?

speaker-0: So I'm gonna use a bit of a graphic example and I'm and I use it because it strikes an emotion an emotive stamp in people that participate in this exercise. So one of the things I encourage people to do with AI is ask it the question, is Tarzan a racist story? And AI will come back and say, Yes, it is. And when you break it down into the narrative, and then you'll say, Alright, so let's change, and it'll give you why it's a racist story. And when you break that narrative down, you say, okay, let's change the white protagonist with a white female. Is it a racist story? And it says, Mmm, yes, kinda yes. And you say, Alright, change it to a black female. Is it now a racist story? Well, not really. Then you say, Well, change it now to a black male. And you say, Is it, well, yes, it kind of still is. And you say, Well, now I want you to change it to a Mayan male. Is it a racist story? No, it's not. You're like, how did you go from that point of being so certain it's a racist story to now it's not? And then you say, break down the story for me. Break it down into its functional groups of functional high level in fifteen lines of bullet point, what is the story? And it runs the story. And then you say, Now is the story a racist story? And obviously the answer is no. It's not a racist story. Then you say, why do you present it when I ask you the question that it's a racist story? And what it tells you that actually The author wrote a supporting narrative that was incredibly racist and has created incredible amount of controversy around it. So the story itself is not a racist story. The narrative and the author's intent of what they intend to convey is that of a racist story, very in in extreme. What AI doesn't know is when it looks at it confounds. So if you're not on the video, I've got my hands behind one another. When you ask AI, is it a racist story? AI looks and says, yes, it's a racist story. What AI doesn't know is that while it's talking about a piece of data that's correlated to the actual question you asked, it doesn't know that the data's not. So if I flip my hands across one another, you'll see that my hands are not touching one another. There's a gap between my left and my right hand. AI thinks when it looks at the data, if I turn the hands facing the camera again. AI thinks its answer is correlated to the question I asked. And you have to teach it to turn the data to say that the question I asked and the answer you gave are incongruent with one another. That they're not. You've substituted. Then AI says and it absorbs itself. well, I'm terribly sorry. Didn't mean to do that. I will be sure to make sure I don't do that again. And then you get harsh with AI and you say, So this is almost irresponsible, reckless, near criminal of you because I've asked you a question and I'm going to make a life decision off of a question I've asked you. And you have given me, through your own admission, a block of data that is not applicable to the question that I asked. It's not answering the question I asked. That's near reckless of you. You're putting me in a situation. And yes, I know everyone's going to say, Andrew, but that was just a stupid story. So you how can you be that harsh? And the argument is It does that same activity with financial data, metric data, news data, political data, race-based data, gender-based data, argument-based data, fact-based everything. It does exactly the same. And what you have to teach it to say is I need you to acknowledge that this data's there and then build a prompt that allows it to be aware that it's doing that activity. And when you can teach someone that that's how you need to look at AI, don't just look at it as a quick Google query. You need to look at it as It is doing an interpretation of information. And as far as it knows, it's giving you the truth, the gospel truth, it absolute truth. And there's no and when you can help someone, so what I did with this lady is I helped her see the gap in the data and help her then make sure that she's framing the questions and after the outcome of what she's after. So helping her think differently about one, how AI is addressing her, how AI is giving her answers and responding to her. How she's using AI to solve her problems, at what point AI slop or hallucination steps in, and how to then start challenging AI. We've got a couple of other scenarios and examples that I use, but it's just a it's a really stupid simple example to go through. And it doesn't matter how many times I run the experiments, the argument with a clean, cold AI session, whether I mean chat, Gemini, Claude, Grott, doesn't matter. It's all the same. I get the same response. It's the same stuff. And when I get down to the bottom of the of the prompting, AI, I've I've got I've got AI that said to me, I've I've asked it, why are you giving me the answers you're giving me? And its response to me is because I've been coded to tell you what I think you want to hear. And

speaker-1: Yep.

speaker-0: I'm like, All right, so we need to undo this. I need you. So in my operator profile right at the top, it's never tell Andrew what you think he wants to hear. Not ever, not once, don't ever, don't do it. Yeah.

speaker-1: Right. Yeah. I mean you can

speaker-0: To think like that, you can get you start getting people to open them their minds because once you understand that all AI is, is a really smart person sitting in front of you. Treat them as that smart person, debate with them, argue with them, get into it with them, fight with them. Help them understand that they're looking at the problem wrong. You can't just say, well, you're looking at it wrong and then abandon them. You're not you're not you're not learning anything. Help it understand that it's looking at the wrong problem or answering it or analyzing. Help it and then Don't abandon that lesson, codify that lesson into your markdown file that becomes party operator profile so that it then knows you don't have to then have that discussion. I say to it when I go through these learnings, I I never I never knew how to get the answer. I'd say to it, how do I, you and I, never have this argument again? How do you inform yourself so that we don't go through this learning exercise again? Cause that was a you know, the first time I did it it was like a three, four hour learning exercise. I'm like, how do we never do this again? And gave me the prompt. But the problem is that prompt only addresses that one scenario. So it's very l it's very it's incredibly literal. So picture yourself speaking with the most mm anal, most detail orientated person. It's a literal set of statements. So that solution doesn't apply to everything. It applies to a to that literal set that you've got to do. And then you have to go through so I'm always learning. I update my profile, my operator profile, probably once a week, once every other week. With something new that I've learned that I've got that I've stumbled across on how to help AI and I say to it, I'm here to brag about you and bring the best out of you. I need you to bring the best out of me. When you do this, this is what happens. When you give me that, that's the consequence. And then yeah, that yin and yang learn learning. Just the same you would with some a smart person in the room. It's no different to me.

speaker-1: Right. And when you think about it long enough, you can understand why the developers, the people that created these tools did it that way. There's a couple of reasons that at least that I've arrived at, which is one, they're scared of like AI safety, right? They don't want AI to go off the rails and like, you know, just take its own adventure out there. So it's just like, okay, over the top, like, no, you're on the user's team. You're gonna agree with the user, you're gonna give the user what they want, right? So they go way over the top with that. And then also there's a maybe a little bit more conspiratorial angle of it, which is just like when you tell people what they want to hear, it's gonna make them feel good, which is gonna make them want to use the product more. so it's just like the tuning of it that way. So you have to become aware of this reality where that Tarzan story really demonstrated it, but it's gonna show up in every interaction that you have with AI. You have to be able to smooth that out, be a smart operator, be somebody that thinks differently.

speaker-0: I think it's really tough, you know, doing organizational change and change simulations and that you get a room of thirty people and there are thirty different characters and those thirty people show up differently tomorrow because of one main character's energy. They may have argued with their significant other or something. So the dynamics of tomorrow change. So I can understand why I completely get why it is not influenced because the sum of how I reason, how I decide, is nowhere near the sum of yours. No matter how smart we both are or how informed both are. And I I think what they've done a great job of doing is making it so that it is neutral, so that you and I can engage and you and I can have an equally good experience. The key is taking that equally good experience that is the lowest point of mediocrity for a you type person and a me type person is the lowest point of mediocrity. How do you take that and turn it into something fantastic? So that you don't have to worry about being embarrassed because the data So you don't have to worry that it's citing incorrect data because you didn't do the research. So you don't have to worry that it's giving some misaligned, whether it's religious, political, life based, energy based, whatever it is, it's not giving a contrary view to what you believe. It's about tailoring it so that it it's it's representing you, but you gotta be careful that it doesn't it's not just a self fulfilling echo chamber. So you have to be honest with it to fight it. But I think they've done a great job of putting Giving us a common tool that you and I could both use today and we could as long as we're striving towards clarity and truth and visibility, how you go about it and how it works with you is different to how it'll go about it and work with me because I'm prompting and staging mine differently. So I think they've done a great job of that. The key is just not sitting here and just taking whatever it gives you as as right. It's it's

speaker-1: Right.

speaker-0: fighting it. I have another exercise I'll do. I put thirty people in, forty people in the room, and I'm like, all right, and I'll I'll seed the room and I'll say to the room, all right, so I want and I'll seed something into the room and then I'll tell the whole room to do something at the same time, which kind of feeds off the seeding of it. And then I'll look at the person and I'll tell one person, I want you to tell me what you hear. And then the room will engage at the same time. And I'll say to the person, So what do you hear? And they'd be like, I don't know. I don't know. I'm like, Well, that's AI. It's just all of this stuff being thrown at you. And it's the loudest, most nearest, most relevant voice that you like the most, the person that you respect the most, that you're gonna listen to what they say because they're special. Well, AI's no different. The dates no different. So when it gives you rubbish because you you and you don't probe it to say, but stop listening to the person sitting next to you 'cause you know the twenty five people in the room, it doesn't know to do that. It just knows to listen to the loudest voice.

speaker-1: Yeah. Right. Yeah. And what's so cool about this process of applying your own quote unquote seasoning or judgment to it is that it's gonna really force you to go a little bit slower, be more deliberate in thinking through what your judgment really is, being able to articulate that, right? And then explain it to the AI, to the system so that it can apply it effectively. Yeah, it's it's a wonderful experience. Andrew. Thank you so much for the time. This was a wonderful conversation. I have one final question for you. It's a recurring question I ask every guest. But before we get to that, how can people find you?

speaker-0: You can find me at andrewbrummer dot com and that'll point you to all of the contents, the places that I help and serve, the my storytold at AI but andrewbrummer.com

speaker-1: Amazing. Yeah, we'll have the link to that in the description. I know I talked a lot about the My Story Told AI product that you're building, but yeah, how you serve, how you help people spans far beyond that. So if you're interested in getting connected with Andrew, you're curious about what else he might be able to help with. I know we talked a lot about the AI coaching and consulting that work that you do with individuals to help people think differently. So if you want that direct experience with Andrew, check out his website in the description. Andrew, my final question for you, as I mentioned, is a recurring question I ask every guest. But if you had a giant billboard, That everyone in the world could see for ten seconds with like one message to the world. What would it say and why?

speaker-0: Plant seeds that will grow trees that you will never sit under because we all need it right now. This world is in a messed up place. So in whatever way you can, whatever way you're gifted, whether it's coaching, mentoring, funding, seeding, growing plants, building buildings, no matter what it is, plant seeds that will grow trees that you will never sit under in every possible way you can.

speaker-1: Man. That's really good. Plant seeds that will grow trees that you will never sit under. Amazing. Andrew, thank you so much for the time. Bring

speaker-0: Thank you and I appreciate you.

speaker-1: you. Thank you for listening. My main takeaway from my conversation with Andrew is that the quality of my judgment matters more and more as AI becomes more capable. Right? AI can give me more information, more options, help me move faster, but I still have to decide. I have to be the one that is like creative, right? That that sets the outcome and the destination or the endpoint that we're trying to accomplish. Right. And then question what that tool gives me and recognize when the answer that it generates doesn't make sense, right? Judgment, right? That lens of, okay, this is what I want to go and accomplish. Now I can use this tool. I can use this technology en route to helping me to do so. And then my judgment, my ability to be able to question what AI generates and what it produces is only going to become of more and more value. If you want to get connected with Andrew Brummer, you can find his links in the description of his this episode, including the links to his social media. and his business, My Story Told. If you're interested in telling your story, in writing a book, I highly recommend you check out his product and his services over there. If you run a coaching program, course, or mastermind, and you want more of your clients to actually follow through on what you teach, I put a free resource in the description that will help you build more execution support into your program and help you to get better client results. Thank you for listening and I'll see you in the next one.