Laziness, Agency, and a Second Brain for Work

AI can feel like a cold calculator until you realize the “human” part was never in the machine. It was in the way you ask, the way you react, and the space you give yourself to think. Seth Wylie - Owner of The Wild Edge - and I start in a surprising place: summer heat, showers, naps, and why calling rest “lazy” is often just your inner critic replaying an old script. That thread matters because the same pressure to always be on shows up in how we use technology at work.

Then we move into a practical, human-centered approach to AI in the workplace. Instead of treating ChatGPT or Claude like a magical intern that spits out answers, we talk about using it as a thought partner: Socratic questioning, creative reframes, and prompts that help you choose the kind of thinking you need. We also get real about “agency” and the modern temptation to abdicate it, like leaving a job for freedom and immediately asking AI what business to start. The goal is not blind trust or total rejection, it is using AI as a lever that expands your options without stealing your judgment.

We close with what this looks like for leaders and teams: executives often use AI to challenge their own strategy, but roll it out to everyone else as a workflow and ROI problem. Adoption changes when people have room to explore meaning, motivation, and how they want their work to feel. If you’re building a second brain, reinventing your career, or trying to lead AI adoption without losing the plot, this conversation gives you language and frameworks you can actually use. Subscribe, share this with a teammate, and leave a review, then tell us: what would you ask AI if you started with purpose first?

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Transcript

Cold Open On Heat And Naps

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Because most of the time I think I do this last time the best content comes when you're like, hey, let's crap. Next thing you know, all it's after podcasts, and as soon as you hit hit play or record, you're like, Hello. My name is Josh. 100%. Yeah, all the good stuff comes early. You ever listen to podcasts? I'm sure expert. I've listed like one episode, honestly, a long time ago.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

The they always start with people sort of wandering through the room, kind of not being close to the mics, and it's yeah, it's the perfect way to ease into the thing.

SPEAKER_03 0:30

Right. Exactly. Call it a software. Well, how are you stuck?

SPEAKER_00 0:34

Have you been currently a field like of like 108 bots in right now? So it is a yeah, big summer energy.

SPEAKER_03 0:41

Yeah, hate makes everything worse. I was just telling somebody about this. Like, I was sitting here and I'm hot, and I'm just like, why does everything feel so overwhelming? Took a shower, fixed it. Felt great.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

Either a shower or a nap does wonders.

SPEAKER_03 1:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you a napper?

SPEAKER_00 1:03

Oh, yes. I'm an enthusiastic proponent of the nap.

SPEAKER_03 1:07

I love it. I hate when people are like, only lazy people nap. I'm like, no, actually, people who work hard need naps.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

Well, I haven't gotten the lazy people take naps. I have gotten the naps don't work for me. Like if you like people who take a nap and they just like their brain just don't doesn't work right for the rest of the day, which I can appreciate that being a thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

I guess I have a problem with the concept of laziness. I think that all of us have a natural propensity to do things that matter to us. And sometimes rest matters. And so if you sort of denigrate that rest, it just sets you up to be burned out. Um and so I feel like people who if someone is against the concept of naps, then they probably feel a great deal of pressure themselves to always be on, always be doing things. And if I have enough presence of mind in those moments to think of that, then I, you know, feel compassion towards them and the pressure that they're always feeling. But um, when I need a nap, it's because I need a nap. And then when I wake up, I'm like three times as ready to do the thing that was next that I wanted to do anyway. Or I realized that that thing was actually the wrong thing to do, and this other thing is going to be 12 times better. So it gives me a pivot moment too.

SPEAKER_03 2:17

That sets us up for this podcast because everything you just said is very Seth Wiley, right? I was talking to Carl Moscovian the other day. I reached out to him and I told him that we met, and he was like, Seth is a great guy. I would love to join you guys on the podcast because I said, Hey, let's let's just the three of us do something. And he goes, Seth has such a unique worldview that I don't want to step on his toes. I don't want to mess it up. So it might be better for you guys to do this and then bring me in later. And I was like, you know what? I respect that. I was gonna push back on it, but everything that you just said is very human-centric. You're like, let me put myself in the shoes of someone who's criticizing me and see where they're coming from. Is that something that you've had to work on over time? I've been working on building the instinct, I would say.

SPEAKER_00 3:10

It starts with doing that for yourself. It starts with or doing it for myself, sort of realizing that when like those critical voices, like voices that say napping is

Rest, Laziness, And The Inner Critic

SPEAKER_00 3:20

lazy, like those don't start coming from other people, or maybe they did once upon a time when you were, you know, five years old or something. But now the call is coming from inside the house. And so the first voice that you need to reckon with is the one inside. And if you have something like that that's like saying, like, you're not good enough, you should be pushing harder or something, there's something in your head that's not just being critical, but trying to be critical for a reason. It's like trying to be like, you want to be what, respected, you want to be what, a good person, whatever the sort of like underlying value that you think you're going to get by performing at the top of your game or something. It's just using an old script for what the way is of getting that. And like you and I know now that, at least for the two of us, the way that our cerebrums work is taking a nap makes us better at doing the work. So that is the like wise knowledge that we've built over time. The shortcut of never nap, just work harder that we built at the age of like five through nine or something, not so relevant anymore, but it's but you have to sort of reckon with that. So it started, started internally, thanks like, you know, hat tip to therapy, hat tip to meditation. Now I'm trying to, when possible, apply it to other people as well, whether they are friends or people who I'm married to or the next car over in traffic.

SPEAKER_03 4:37

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you bring a lot of that insight into the AI world. Right? So, first off, thanks for being so gracious with your time and coming on cybernomics. And second, how do you take something that's as cold and calculating as AI and humanize it, specifically within the workplace?

SPEAKER_00 5:01

Well, the first thing I would say is that I have a strong reaction to um to the framing of it as cold and calculating. Because I found that some of the earliest ways that I thought it was most sort of sparkly and interesting felt very like felt very warm, or whatever the opposite of cold and calculating is, it felt very um exciting and like it gave me new exciting waters to dive into. So in particular, I'm thinking of a time when, you know, this is probably two, three years ago now, which is ancient, you know, ancient history and AI in AI timeline. But we're talking, you know, Chat GPT 3.5 days, uh, like that sort of era. And just at the time when people are starting to talk about, oh, you can ask it to act like a therapist, ask it to act like a painter, ask it, etc. And someone had put out a GitHub repo of basically just like a text file of 300 ideas like this, which of course now my instinct would be go straight to AI to generate that list of ideas. But at the time it was helpful to have that pre-made. And some of the ones like act as a Socratic thinker, for example, these kinds of things that uh, or you know, I'm working on a very technical problem, but act as an artist. And therefore, how would that a kind of person think about this situation or challenge that I'm working on? Those kinds of approaches to using AI felt like they unlocked like new avenues of thought for me, as opposed to it doing work for me. And there's certainly ways that you can use AI that are that are in the cold and calculating zone, that are in the, you know, compile the expense report summary for the month by pulling the right statistics and descriptions from each of these different files and you know, converting the descriptions to the right format and those kinds of things that require some require an LLM model, not just a old style automation. But I'm most interested where AI helps you to be more of your human self, whatever that means to you or looks like to you. And I think a lot of that starts in work for people because that's where we put a lot of our sort of mental energy. But there's also people who start with AI planning their kids' birthday party or, you know, figuring out how to plant grass in their lawn, those kinds of things which uh which not aren't necessarily work-related, but whatever the entry point is, it having a conversation about something that's actually meaningful to you and getting a chance to explore it in a different way with a thought partner, whereas previously it was just you in your own head, that feels um so enticing to me, as opposed to it feeling purely like a cold calculator.

SPEAKER_03 7:44

Right. So instead of the human becoming more calculating and cold and having to adopt the AI persona, you're taking a different approach where you're anthropomorphizing to an extent, not in the everyday sense. I mean, we anth you can anthropomorphize anything, right? And we do that all the time, but I think it's a little bit deeper than that. You're kind of looking at the human element that is in the robot per se, right? Just for lack of better terms. The human element in the robot is not it's not coming from the machine, it's coming from you in the same way that the beauty in the painting isn't in the painting, it's in your mind. And so you apprehend the painting and it becomes human. Is that a fair way to frame that?

SPEAKER_00 8:35

It is. I think in the AI world, it goes a step deeper because you get to decide what paint. It's equivalent to like deciding what painting you want to look at, but instead of having you know a wall of options, you have all possible options. Like your explanation to AI of how you want it to behave could be anything. And so sometimes anthropomorphization, you know, like act like Charles Darwin or, you know, like the extreme versions of anthropomorphization or most sort of distilled versions of those can help be a shortcut to getting the AI to act in the way that's more most useful to you. But um more broadly, how I would describe it is if you can figure out the sort of cognitive work that would be most helpful to you in this particular situation, you probably would be able to do that care that that work on your own. Like having AI

Making AI Feel More Human

SPEAKER_00 9:30

act as a Socratic thinker, say to like challenge me on my own thinking in preparation for this podcast. I could read a book about Socratic thinking, sit down with a pen and paper, and you know, do it all by hand, much the same way you can do long division. But if you can pick out that that's the kind of thinking that would be most helpful to you, then with you know, potentially just a few words, you're able to shape the uh AI that is coming back at you, the um, the painting, to whatever the thing is that you need. And I think a big challenge for people then is slowing down enough to think about what is the kind of thinking that would be most helpful to me in this situation. It's much more common for people to say, like, hey, AI, do this thing for me, as opposed to, okay, there are parts of this that I want to do that are good for me to think about, there are parts that are hard for me to do about that I want AI to do for me, you know, like scanning through 50 pages of a file or something. There are parts of it that sort of sit in between, but thinking about something you previously thought about as like a monolithic thought exercise actually has all these different components where if you're able to recruit AI to help with some of them, then you're able to do some things you couldn't, some types of thinking that weren't practical to do before. So, anyways, I kind of went off, went off running with your, your, with your prompt there. But that's how I think about the sort of shaping of AI to whatever the cognitive exercise is of the moment. And it's a very different way of engaging with a cognitive exercise versus just sitting down and saying, like, all right, I'm just gonna start to throw my brain at this.

SPEAKER_03 11:07

Would you categorize yourself as a postmodernist thinker or post-structuralist or anything that might be influenced by that movement? I don't know because I don't really know anything about those movements. Tell me more about what they mean to you. Okay, so this is so interesting. I'll give you the two-minute version of poststructuralism, and you'll and this will sound really familiar to you, I'm guessing, because we hear it so much in political circles and just on the news and whatever, but we don't know that this is where it comes from. But post-structuralism is basically the critique of modernity, right? And says that modernity basically puts things into categories, and that's what it does best. It doesn't give you knowledge, it gives you an episteme. So that's where we get epistemology, right? So, how do you create knowledge and how do you know things? And is everything concrete? Well, no, everything's not concrete, everything's kind of relative because of a power structure that basically categorizes things and creates these concepts around things, and um, you can think of the concepts in terms of their opposites. So, male, female, you know, woman, man, child, adult, and these are concepts that were, you know, we hear this all the time, that were constructed socially. So people in school think that they're going to school to learn biology because they're learning about animals, and animals are the thing that exist, but those things aren't really things, they're just concepts, right? And you can easily subvert them. And depending on the lens or the frame, like you said, so you said frame, this is why you're using a few of the buzzwords that come from the post-structuralist movement, depending on how it is framed, that's how people see reality. So there's no objective realities, there's pure subjectivity. Um, we also talked about the concept of agency, and that's really what we were gonna dive into today. And I think that this is a really good segue into that. It's the concept of agency is false, right? Because if you live in a power structure where concepts are basically manufactured by the reigning power and the powers that be, the institutions like churches, schools, government, then are you really an agent? Do you really have the ability to go out into the world and do exactly what you want it to do, knowing that every concept that is in your mind or your idea of reality is just relative. It can easily be subverted, and you can just as equally be a communist one day, but in a different life and a different time and space, you could be the staunchest capitalist, right? So it does away with this idea of agency. Now, that's kind of like the terrible cliff note version of what post-structuralism is, but the things that come out of poststructuralism are things like literary criticism, critical race theory, women's studies, gender studies, all that stuff comes from post-structuralism. And the only reason I know all of this is because I studied at the U of M, my degrees in English literature, I studied under a Time magazine journalist from Sri Lanka. His name was um it was Kadri Ishmael, rest in peace. He died a couple years ago, and he was my mentor, and he wrote a book called Eurocentrism. And I studied decolonization because somebody's always there first. Again, our structure is being subverted. That has given way to a lot of the way that we think about race and the way we think about people and society. Now, when it comes to AI, aha, see what I did there, I brought it all the way back. We think of these agents as going off and doing things on their own. Is that the right way to think about AI? Given the fact that you put so much of the human into the AI, does the AI truly have agency? And in my case, a lot of times I'm telling the AI to tell me what to do. Do I have agency? Go.

SPEAKER_00 15:16

Um so many directions I could go at once. Um plus this is a fun moment to capture on to capture on tape is you know, Seth's Seth's hot take first plush reaction to the characterization of anti-structuralist postmodernism, um, which I am sure was woven so deeply into my college education, especially, you know, I went to I went to Brown, which is a place that I'm sure that this is just like in the water, um, but I don't remember it coming up explicitly, but it probably did.

SPEAKER_03 15:46

Anyways, um, yeah, I was gonna ask, I was gonna go I I I was gonna guess Columbia, uh, and my second guess was gonna be Harvard.

SPEAKER_00 15:54

Yeah, no, I uh Harvard way too structuralist for my tastes. Um the campus tour that I took there was more of a history tour. Um it's like this building burned down in 17 something and was rebuilt in 18, and I'm like, this isn't telling you about student life. Anyways, I personally feel a enormous degree of increased agency thanks to AI and the way that I use it. One of my primary use cases for AI is maintaining a wiki of all of the information that comes up in my call transcripts. So it is a and in addition, like material that I've fed in from journaling and personal reflections and my report cards from preschool through seventh grade. There's a lot of material in there. And so it becomes this corpus of information about who I am, what matters to me, who matters to the me, what matters to them, what's going on with these people, both in like a tactical sense and sort of a personal sense. Like it it acts as a corpus of information that's able to have better recall about the things that are important in my life than I am myself. But when I interact with it, if I try to get it to tell me what's relevant to the thing, it's not great at it. I think it'll become better at it with better models. And I've done

Post-Structuralism Meets AI Agency

SPEAKER_00 17:20

some work to set it up to be able to use semantic search and embedding so that it can like do something other than keyword searching when navigating this, these sort of like millions of words of text. But it's most useful in that it gives me stuff to react to. So that could be something like jogging my memory. It could also be telling me something that I don't agree with. Because by telling me, like, oh, this, for example, prepping for this podcast, well, this is the thing that you might want to bring up on the call. And for me to say to myself, oh no, I don't want to bring that up at all. That's not relevant for this reason. And I would ra that helps me realize that, oh, I would love this podcast conversation to actually be more about this stuff, this other stuff. And so it is a experience of using AI that is not taking its message as gospel, but as a tool that we get to decide how how hard we we use that tool and what and what we hammer with it, which is a different way of prompting. It's a different way of deciding what kinds of questions to ask or or what kinds of tasks to charge it with. There's a different philosophical question about in asking those questions, am I already and am I like acting as a just like a cog in the machine of the world order? I think that my interest in being separate from the machine and having the full latitude of movement is part of why I'm going about my current career situation by building my own solopreneurship entrepreneurial advisory and consulting and coaching business because that gives me the like a fuller freedom of movement than being part of a large company or even a startup where a lot of those things have been predetermined and you're signing up for some of that more sort of overlord thing to be part of your life. It's a choice to make. It makes life harder in other ways, but it gains me something that I choose to optimize for. So I this is all a long way of saying that I think that depending on the way that you choose to AI, use AI, it can be a force for greater agency and not just in terms of, you know, now I can build an app or something, but greater access to my own sort of creativity in which direction I want to go. Or you can use it, and people who you work with and who have power over you can who can use it in a way to restrict your agency. And sometimes that's helpful because it's doing them, doing like use like I would put things in that category of doing useful work for you that you don't want to do. Great. Like tell the machine exactly what to do, and it will go off and you know, summarize your call recordings or whatever so that you don't have to. You're explicitly making the choice to sign up for abdicating agency in that concept. You're abdicating agency for what this what this um what this call summary in that example looks like, but you've also hopefully been part of describing what you would like for it to look like. And you're also signing up for the concept of call recordings summaries being valuable. You're signing up for, hey, a follow-up email to a customer helps foster this relationship with this customer. And that is a whole other set of stuff to sign up for, but this gets into a whole other domain of the humanistic element of using AI, I think, which is having the space to talk about what something like a call summary means to you. What do you want that to do? Is it about just providing tactical information to the client or to yourself? Or is it about trying to build a greater relationship with the client? Those types of call summaries look different, but having the space to step back and a space where you feel most made to feel safe enough and explorational enough to even look at the question of what do I want a call summary to be, or what do I want an expense report thing to be, or what do I want my own good thinking to look like when I'm making strategic choices or when I'm coaching people who report to me, or all those things. AI gives us a chance to take stock of what we want those things to mean to us, if we're able to give ourselves space, or if we're able to hopefully work with people who um create that space for us or are able to sort of join us as peers in creating that space and diving in those waters together.

SPEAKER_03 21:24

Sounds like what you're saying is what really matters at the end of the day is what you feel. If I feel like I can do more work and I can do more of what I want to do, and AI opens up those opportunities, those those avenues for me to do more. Well, who cares if you call it agency or not? You know, and and I'll put it another way to just by the way, I rejected most of post structuralism and postmodernism when I left college because it has no bearing to the real world. And this is exactly kind of what you're you're pointing out.

SPEAKER_00 22:01

That's what your college is for.

SPEAKER_03 22:03

Yes, exactly. Exactly. And it drives me nuts that these kids at Columbia are being driven off a cliff by these stupid professors. But anyways, that's not neither here nor there. Soapbox to the side. That's fine. Yes. Let's put that off to the side. But the way that I I I use AI and you mentioned abdicating your agency. This is why agency doesn't matter. So I use AI in a lot of ways to abdicate my agency, right? It's like you you quit your job. Some people are probably in this boat. They quit their job. I'm going to start an AI firm. I I don't want a boss telling me what to do. I don't want people telling me what to do. I want more agency. So they get to the AI and the first thing they do is what business should I start? You've just abdicated all of the agency that you said that you wanted by leaving this job and now you've handed it over to a different entity. So maybe there's something about human beings that like we crave agency but we also crave authority and direction. And so agency itself I guess can't be the the the end goal. It's got to be something else and I think you're hitting on it.

SPEAKER_00 23:15

I think that for some people agency is an important end goal. I think that has to do with upbringing and um you know for me getting sort of seized by achievement culture as a way to in like seventh grade as a way to earn praise that sort of seemed to counteract the bullying that I was being subjected to like I spent a number of years when I was very young and and strongly impressionable with fully abdicated agency to like the the assignment for the paper to write or the test to study for. And so now at this point in my life there is still sort of like a furious fire that is grasping for more agency. And I think there are a lot of people whether it's achievement culture or other things or you know Lord knows like a religious upbringing or what have you where later on in life a like furious grasping for agency is a thing to optimize for. I think that other people have less of a sort of like fury for that than I do,

Second Brain Systems And Better Prompting

SPEAKER_00 24:10

a healthy version of fury, not necessarily infused with anger, but a like furious pursuit of that can be lesser for them. And so something else though is going to be the thing that they're going to want to pursue. So there's that sort of aspect. Another thing about the example you just gave is there's a also there are a couple other dynamics in addition to the agency thing and the abdication of like, hey, what business should I start? One is reaching for the fast answer. And another is like prompting strategy, not even like prompt quality, but if I were to want to use AI to figure out what kind of business I should start, I would back up several steps from the actual question and start with how would I go about trying to take stock of what businesses would be valuable in the market and interesting to me. Like now we're starting to talk about the concept of Ikagai and then you're like really taking stock of what does it even look like to define what a good business for me looks like. And then there's you know having a conversation with it about what it looks like to do the ideation, to do the ex to do the research, to have like the explorational conversations, yada yada. So like you can do all of that work before you would get to okay, let's put start to put some ideas on paper. And this is how I designed doing my own sort of like graphic design for my brand as I started by building a skill with Cloud Code of what do brand designers do? What are the skills that are part of what they bring to the table? What do they help people think about, et cetera, et cetera? So anyways, there's this also component of using AI to answer, a sec effectively answer the same kind of question of like what business should I start? But you're using it more as like a stepladder or a lever or something as opposed to an abdication approach. And I think that there are many AI use cases that people take the abdication approach onto where if they had the sort of presence of mind and the right sort of inspiration in the moment that they wouldn't need to go about it that way.

SPEAKER_03 26:09

Interesting. So now that you're off on your own, do you feel like you have too many options? Whereas before we didn't have a lot of options if you're just a regular person you want to be a solo premier. You didn't have a ton of options but AI has opened up so many possibilities and I find myself sometimes thinking that there are too many options and I'm paralyzed like paralysis by analysis sometimes. Is that something that you ever experience?

SPEAKER_00 26:34

I am awash in options. Yes. This is my greatest challenge right now. I have thanks to my you know giant corpus of millions of words the other like a few weeks ago I think actually it was way back in April I asked it to compile all of my ideas that I'd had about different types of content I could create like do I want to start a podcast? Do I want to start a newsletter? Do I want to keep posting on LinkedIn? Do I want to do articles versus small posts? Yeah like so that's just content stuff. Then there's the different kind of offerings I could offer some to businesses, some to individuals. They could be one-on-one, they could be in a group setting different like breadth of topic around AI, because a lot of people are interested I think in having these sort of more humanistic conversations. Some people are interested in very tactile conversations. People need just straight up AI training like hey what's the difference between ChatGPT and Claude when I asked AI to pull together all of my options it came up with a list of like 60 or 70 that it wrote into a document for me that I had already thought of before. So a huge part of my needed skill right now to navigate such an option-rich environment is the skill of noticing what people respond to and where that overlaps with what I actually appreciate doing. And so that means fostering environments for myself where I am good at noticing and good at taking stock and good at experimenting. And I was just talking with a friend over lunch and friend and and uh former client are you like a fancy board game kind of person, like where Catan is level zero and it goes up from there?

SPEAKER_03 28:10

I can't I don't have the brain cells. I wish I I had a lot of friends who would invite me over to do games and there's a special place in hell for people who invite you to do board games and at the same time offer you beer.

SPEAKER_00 28:23

It just doesn't but anyways well then there's the version of that where it's like please come over board games we offer beer and before you come please watch this 45 minute YouTube video that describes how to play the game. It's the short version. Yeah. So I've I've I've played some of those games I don't play it often but my the general idea is you have a fancy board game on the table and there are different ways to earn points. There's pros and cons to taking different approaches etc. And so there are a couple of different ways to approach this my default approach is I build sort of I'm sort of like architecting the perfect system to earn points. Like I'm not earning too many points from one place, the places that I'm earning them from sort of trade off of each like play off each other in effective ways, yada yada. And just as soon as I have the perfect system set up, someone else wins because they've just been like throwing themselves at the challenge of earning points and just like doing opportunistically what's a what's appropriate. And so the reason that's relevant to my career situation right now is I have that full spectrum of ways that I could operate and some of the things I do could be more towards one of the spectrum or other. I don't have to I don't have to pick just like one spot, but having the presence of mind to notice what's needed and sort of scan my list of ideas and opportunities for the right balance of these things and to put some of that out there and then rebalance as I see how it plays out in the real world. Maybe it's structuralist but it is giving yourself the full structure to play in and even putting words to the structure that you're playing in so that you're able to navigate within it as opposed to just taking unstated assumptions as the beta compliance you're a modern human being and that was my thing I was like well maybe modernity is bad because you categorize stuff but I want to see you live in a world where things don't have categories or order or structure good luck.

SPEAKER_03 30:10

Let's close with this where have you arrived what are you working on right now and where do you see yourself and your business in the next year or so when we're doing this podcast again.

SPEAKER_00 30:24

I have been independently by several people referred to as a work therapist even though not a therapist, no official training but this idea of helping people to better understand themselves and that's led me into some work that is also like right at the center of that. I'm also a founding facilitator for a program slash company called the Purpose Project where I walk people through a forward cohort where we use AI to help them

Too Many Options As A Solopreneur

SPEAKER_00 30:50

put words to their sense of like meaning and purpose and work in life, which is a real, real interesting exploration, but there's a lot of work to be done there also that's just like purely distilled into this like using AI for like delving into self kind of motion. So that's where I am at right now and I'm constantly sort of scanning the landscape of where on this spectrum of types of work or spectra of types of work do I want to do I want to operate and do people ultimately need because I can come and have conversations all day about philosophy of AI that's super interesting to me. Not a lot of people seem to be willing to pay for it but if they are I'm a you know professional facilitator and would love to facilitate that conversation. But anyway, so I'm like navigating what the what the current demand is in the market and constantly tweaking adapting trying new things seeing how they work that's where I'm at right now.

SPEAKER_03 31:47

Interesting. I wish I had this conversation with you years ago when I started using AI. I've been prompting for probably the last five years or so I was one of those early adopters just like you and you're making me want to go back in a time machine and the first thing that I probably should have prompted was help me develop a vision for myself in the age of AI. I mean obviously I didn't know how big it was going to be back then and how integrated into everyday life it was going to be but I get the sense that just like you know instead of going in saying hey what business should I start you seem to start with the introspection just as much as what's out there and the demand because what I'm hearing from you is that both of those things are equally important and now in the age of AI they're both under greater scrutiny. So it's not just what do the people want give it to them. Now you can truly ask yourself what do I want and that's a really really hard question to ask and a really really hard question to get answers to so I wish I could go back and just go, hey, before I start using you, I need clarity of vision I need wisdom and need direction what are the tools that others who have those skill sets and those capabilities, what did they use to arrive at that? And then once you've established okay a vision I have I know how what I want and know how to get it then you go about building did I butcher everything you said or is that on the money?

SPEAKER_00 33:20

I think I think two things. One is it feels very on the money. It feels like a um very natural reaction to doing this kind of thinking and you know as they say you know the first best time to start thinking something is yesterday the second best time is today. So especially if you have you know already a second brain set up or something asking it that question now could take you in very interesting places.

SPEAKER_03 33:46

Yeah yeah that's good that's good I'm gonna do that. Do it I can see I can see why clients would want to work with you why businesses want would want to work with you. I can also see why if you just want to focus on the ph philosophical stuff why they won't hire you because I go through these workshops with folks almost every day at this point and one of the things that we do in our kickoff is we try to rate or rank our priorities and almost always the thing that comes in dead last is people and adoption and is it's not that businesses don't care about people it's just that it's so messy and so vague and so hard to understand. So I think that your skill set is much needed and it's something that we lack on our team honestly I would love to bring you into some of our engagements is that ability to take the messy humanness that is in the workplace and obviously like everything's built on humanity in the workplace and in a corporate setting and distilling it down to um down to wisdom right I work with my clients and we talk about use cases and workflows and business outcomes and ROI and those things but we never really talk about how can we use this technology to better understand ourselves in order to better use the technology.

SPEAKER_00 35:09

That's fabulous I think you would get farther with that by starting with the executives expand. I what I've noticed is that when executives think about adopting AI for themselves they use it to challenge their thinking I mean they use it for you know summarizing their emails and whatever but they also use it in a way that is more sort of strategic thought partner and they're more likely to if they want to learn it better sort of like learn from experts ask a coach you know like get advice about how to in an explorational way use it. But as soon as they start talking about how AI can be useful for their team, they're thinking as though they're trying to like roll out Slack to their organization. They're like, okay, what workflows, what ROI, et cetera so it's not unhealthy. That's a helpful structuralist approach to thinking about like the work that the team is doing, but it leaves out of the conversation

Purpose, Executive Adoption, And Where To Find Seth

SPEAKER_00 36:10

the fact that your team is made up of wonderful humans with enormous creative capability and who are driven in powerful, far more powerful than their desire for a pain for for a pain check, a paycheck, far more powerful than that their sort of intrinsic interest in why they do this work. And so if you're able to able to create a space where they're able to explore how does AI help me do this work better in a way that matters to me, that gives you something that you as an executive can't provide. But I think it starts with the executives because then they get to see it. They're like, oh, now I have a better relationship with why I like running a customer success team, a finance team, whatever it is about that that most motivates me. And I can imagine that leading to I want this for the people in my team. I want them to be motivated in this way. And I can just imagine that if they're motivated in this way, we wouldn't have to like be so like on top of tracking usage metrics or what have you we would that like it would be a we'd be rowing with the current as opposed to rowing against it or like at least rowing in a sort of stagnant current.

SPEAKER_03 37:16

Yeah yeah and I I agree I think the companies that win are going to be going to be the ones that are led by executives that do just that. All right well if people do want to find you Seth how do they do that?

SPEAKER_00 37:30

My uh my little business my my my self business um is called the wild edge I'm at the wildedge.ai um different than wildedge.ai which apparently is a different site that hasn't launched yet um not related to me.

SPEAKER_03 37:43

And not safe for work?

SPEAKER_00 37:46

Uh no no thankfully not just very vague. Maybe it's not safe for work. Uh but the um uh but also I've done an enormous amount of posting potentially two deep thoughts on LinkedIn uh ranging from deep thoughts to tactical thoughts so if people want to understand more about the kinds of things I think about then they can dive into LinkedIn. But otherwise my website does a good summary of what's available and that's for companies, you know, leaders who are interested in bringing me in and or just having an exploratory conversation about the challenges that they would love to surmount. It's also true for individuals. You know I offer one-on-one coaching to normal humans happy to do group coaching if there's a group of friends that want to get together I host these meetup series where either twice a month or four times a month there are meetups that are focused on topics around AI and there's one that's kind of not even AI related at all that's called Career Reinventors. So there's a scope of um scope of ways for people to to have conversations with me whether you are uh whether it's part of your work or sort of work adjacent or even outside of work. To say nothing of the purpose project um I would also encourage people to go there and check that out which is the purposeproject.world