Staying Human in the Era of AI: Storytelling, Grief & Change with Patrice Poltzer

What does it mean to stay human in a world increasingly run by AI? 

In this episode, Nina sits down with Patrice Poltzer — Gracie Award–winning former TODAY Show producer and co-founder of My Story Pro — about the everyday griefs and shifts of our era: the loss of certainty, the erosion of critical thinking, and the disappearing line between who we are and the tools we rely on.

Patrice shares how a cross-continental move from New York to Lisbon, a vanished family income, and a launch that flopped led her to "accidentally" build an AI storytelling company. But this isn't just a hustle story. It's a conversation about agency. Why our active participation in building the future is required, especially for women and people from historically excluded communities.

In this episode, we explore:

• How loss and uncertainty can become the ground for reinvention
• Why "being more human" is the most valuable skill in the AI era
• The trust crisis, and why storytelling is the only marketing that neurologically changes a stranger's mind
• Whether outsourcing our thinking to AI is dulling the very traits that make us human
• How grievers, living in liminality, can use their lived experience to define what's next
• Practical, low-fear entry points for women curious about AI

Connect with Patrice Poltzer:

• Instagram: @PatricePoltzer
• LinkedIn
• My Story Pro (free trial, workshops & community)

This is a both/and conversation; the and of fear and agency, grief and possibility, technology and humanity.

Transcript

If we allow our fear about AI. If we bury our head in the sand, as females, minorities of people from historically excluded communities, if we just say it's not a big deal, I'm going to let other people worry about it. The "tech people," we are setting ourselves up for a world that we don't want. And I actually don't think most people want because they are not looking out for us, the people that are at the helm right now. The majority of the builders, the majority of the people who are running this show, they are not thinking about humanity. There's not as many females building. There's not as many people in my lane. So if I'm like, this is too hard, I'm going to tap out who's going to do it? And I don't mean that as a hero complex, but I truly mean like, we need to galvanize the troops. You just lost your loved one. Now what? Welcome to the Grief and Light

We allow our fear about AI. We bury our head in the sand. As females, minorities of people from historically excluded communities, if we just say it's not a big deal, I'm going to let other people worry about it. The tech people, we are setting ourselves up for a world that we don't want. And I actually don't think most people want because they are not looking out for us, the people that are at the helm right now. The majority of the builders, the majority of the people who are running this show, they are not thinking about humanity. There's not as many females building. There's not as many people in my lane. So if I'm like, this is too hard, I'm going to tap out who's going to do it? And I don't mean that as a hero complex, but I truly mean like, we need to galvanize the troops. You just lost your loved one. Now what? Welcome to the Grief and Light podcast, where we explore this new reality through grief colored lenses openly, authentically. I'm your host, Nina Rodriguez. Let's get started as we face an increasingly uncertain future, how can we create the world that we want to live in? How do we lead with our humanity in a world increasingly ruled by AI? Hello and welcome back to the Grief and Light podcast. My name is Nina Rodriguez and I'm your host. And today's guest is a Gracie Award winning former Today Show producer who spent fifteen years teaching storytelling to brands like Netflix, Apple, Lululemon, and many others. She co-founded My Story Pro, a storytelling thought partner built to protect what makes you unmistakably you. She's now based in Lisbon with her three sons and husband, navigating tech as a woman in a male dominated field and reminding us that our active participation is required in building the future that we want to see. Patrice, welcome to the Grief and Light podcast. What a what an amazing intro. My God, I gotta like, I gotta lift that from you. That was good. It's all you And I'm thrilled about this conversation. It's a little bit different for our listeners. Grief is anything related to loss and life altering change. But today, we're approaching the conversation from the angle of the grief that shows up in our everyday life, especially in the context of the times that we're living in. There's a lot of uncertainty, and I really admire the way that you are embracing change as a woman in a field that you know is not necessarily the friendliest to women now. And you're keeping our humanity at the forefront of what you do. So I would love for people to get to know some of your story about my story. Pro, you became an accidental tech entrepreneur slash developer. What led you there? And, you know, tell us a little bit about that journey. Let me sort of break it down because actually what led me to this exact moment in time professionally, if we're talking about the AI tech, my story pro build, it actually came out of a loss. So when I moved my family from New York to Lisbon in twenty twenty three, I had storytelling in video agency in New York City, and I shut down those studios in Brooklyn because we were embarking on this new chapter in our life. And, you know, I was living in New York, three children, anyone who knows anyone who has children just knows the grind, right? Especially in New York City, you can't even celebrate a client win because you're on to the next and everything is just so expensive. So my plan when I moved to Lisbon was like, take my foot just off the gas for just a little bit, like keep my business. But what do I want out of my business? I was shutting down my studios, which was a big chunk of my income, but my husband was able to keep his job out of New York, and I was at least going to be like, okay, apparel Patrice on a Lisboa Beach might be possible. Maybe a couple days a week, I don't know yet. Well, I was very, very, very wrong. So life never goes as planned. And so when we got here, my husband actually wasn't able to keep his job. So all of a sudden we went from, you know, and we're in a new country, new culture, three kids don't know the language, etc., trying to get people in schools. We did this very fast and we did everything online. And all of a sudden my husband's like, so about that whole job that I've always had, you know, like we've always been a double income family. He didn't have it. I think when you're backed in a corner and you're backed in scenarios where you have not a lot of time to think of the downside because you just got to go, like, I need to keep this, this thing pumping, I need to well, I guess I'm not taking a break off my business right now. I guess I am going like full throttle, but I need to figure what that is because now I'm in Lisbon, I'm not in New York City. I'm not going to do a video shoot, and I need to make all of my revenue now, either online or figure something else. That was my mindset. And so I think it's important because I was in a mode of, let's just try things. So this is twenty twenty three. And so I was already into AI before I came out here. I was very early on, and I am a curious person. I was a journalist for a decade. And so when AI came out, I got into it because I actually had students in my storytelling mastermind turning in like horrific ChatGPT scripts and thinking it was good because it was it was structurally good, but it was soulless. So I was already being like, all right, I need to get involved here. And so I, when I came to Lisbon, I started running naturally. Just come to this workshop here, how I'm thinking about AI. We get that it's fast. We get that it can do content quick, but who cares because the content's not good. And actually, you know, a robot wrote it, so who cares? Like if it's fast and it's in a structurally sound format. If it's actually not moving figuratively, literally anyone. Right. Um, and so fast forward, I figured out and me, my, and my husband, like figuring out like his whole thing. And I thought, you know what? I am going to package all of these workshops I'm doing and I am going to do the classic, put it on a landing page and sell digital products. I already have credibility in this space. I've always been more premium. So I had high level masterminds. I was one on one. I'm not a digital product girly, but I was like, you know what, let's let's try this. And so ahead of this decision, I had this launch and I thought I was going to crush it. I'm like, oh, this is going to be amazing. Because now all my followers who maybe didn't, couldn't join, you know, my higher ticket programs or it wasn't the right timing for their business. Now they can access this knowledge and it's going to be great at a lower price point. The launch did not go like the launch did not go as planned. And so all of a sudden, and in a normal time, it wouldn't have been that big of a deal because I had my agency clients running in the background. So I had fallback, but I had no fallback. So when that launch didn't go well and my husband had still didn't have a job, it, it got really like, oh my God, like I need to actually think outside the box here because this is this, this launch is people don't want these packaged workshops on a landing page. And so it fast forward, I, you know, this is in the spring now of twenty twenty four. And I didn't have a lead magnet. So I'm like, you know, maybe it's just a list problem. I need to grow my list because a lot of people will tell you, well, if you're not selling stuff, you're either selling to the wrong audience or your list isn't big enough. And I knew I had a loyal audience, but I didn't have a big audience. You know, my email list was was small ish. And so I thought, well, I just need to get a lead magnet and then I'll grow my list and then that'll, that'll be the end of it. And so I, I had the wherewithal to know that I wanted to do something different. And so during that time, I started getting into. Zapier. So I don't know if how familiar. Okay. So for those of you listening, Zapier, um, you know, back in the top of twenty twenty four, it was sort of revolutionary and you can connect, uh, it's an AI basically API connective tool. And so I was playing around with it and, um, me and my business operations business girl in my business who's now my co-founder, uh, we were experimenting with this bot. We're like, let's make a bot that's a storytelling bot. And they give me their email. I ask them some questions because I was a producer for a decade, so I know the cadence of questions on how to sort of get someone to give you the real answer, right? Not the surface, right. As a journalist and a producer in the field, I couldn't go back to the Today show with a surface level story, but I was on a deadline, so I had to learn really quickly how to structure the cadence of an interview, you know, and you can't skip. You can't just go to question nine. And the good answers are always on. As you know, as an interview with the podcast, the beginning of a most podcasts are like, all right, the good stuff, I guarantee you with most of your guests lies in the last ten minutes of the interview, but you cannot start in the last ten minutes of your interview. You just can't, right? People need to get rid of their veneer. People need to feel safe with you. People need to feel like, okay, this is a conversation. And so I know that. And so when I was creating this bot, it was all this math methodology and IP into this bot. This was not a product. This was just a cute little carrot to get emails. So then I could lead people down to my programs that I thought I wasn't selling before because they just, I needed new people. And so I released this bot and I've never experienced anything like this in my business. People went mental and I was getting all these emails like, what is this? Like, you know, and I had thousands of new people and I'm like, this is amazing. I'm in like, you know, they're going to buy all my programs. Not one person went down my beautiful funnel, you know, that I made with emails, not no one. They all wanted this free bot, but it wasn't a product. So this whole time I am emailing these people that I do not know, being like I am a storytelling expert. Like I coach, I lead masterminds, I am not a tech person. Like, this is not my jam. Like, this is just a fun thing that I was like, you know, thinking about I wasn't thinking about this from a commercial standpoint. And then I kind of just had an aha moment. This is probably like mid April where my husband was. He decided to go off on his own to start his fractional business. I'm like, oh Jesus, we all know how long that can take to build business. So I'm like, I, I have to let this is like in front of me and I have people being like, can I pay you for this Zapier bot? I mean, right now, you would look at it and laugh because now it looks primitive, you know, but this is almost two years ago. And so that is the impetus of what is now my story. Pro it started from a failed launch to like this free lead magnet. It wasn't a product. And then I stopped for a couple months and me and my co-founder put our heads together and she's a genius. And so she was vibe coding and we together came up with a beta version of this storytelling tool. It's a storytelling coach, and we wanted it to push people we wanted, not like a ChatGPT, where it just spits out output and tells you you're great. When we wanted people to go deep on themselves. And that's really hard for people to be vulnerable, to actually know what moments in their life matter. You know, you have a lot of people that don't know how to blend their personal self with their professional self. But we now live in a time where you just what's the separation, right? We're all sort of, you know, there's no like, here's my personal self and here's my professional self. Not really like we're one human. So this whole premise was like, how do it wasn't like, how do we get people to tell faster stories? The premise has always been, how do we get people to tap into their own lived experience and have these aha moments about all the amazing things and hard things in their life, and how do they see themselves in a different way? And actually now get excited to put themselves forward, whether it's their business, whether it's their company, whether they're wanting to get on stages like that takes an element of self-belief. And so when we launched this on Black Friday of twenty twenty four, we had no like, we did not know anything. We thought I thought, well, you know, maybe some of my people, my long term followers will like want to sign up. We didn't really know how to price it. We priced. And the first day we launched we had. Well, first of all, just to give you context. So the one year subscription was one thousand dollars. All right. We did like a one year subscription. The very first day that we launched this to my smallish list. I don't have a big list. We had fifteen people buy it. Not even testing it. Like didn't even know what it was. They bought it for a year. So the first day in our first day of. And that just continued to go up. So by day forty five, we were at ten, we were at five figures plus M and it was. I've never experienced anything like that in my business. And I've been a business owner for ten years. That was like seventeen months ago. And it's just taken on and we can go into this, but it's taken on a whole new life. And if you would have told me three years ago that I'd be moving to Lisbon to start an AI tech company, I would have been like, I think you have the wrong Ouija board. Like there's, this is the this is there's just no possible way that this would be true. And like, here I am. And it's I'm in a whole new space right now. Well, kudos to you for going for it, for leaning in to the uncertainty. And sometimes not knowing is actually a good thing. Because if somebody like you said, would have told us what's ahead, we might say, you know what? Never mind, I don't know. I'm good. I'll stay right here. Yeah, yeah, I love I love how you embrace all of it. Sounds like your husband, your kids. You have three kids. And I say that because most people cannot even fathom moving states and uprooting. So just saying, you know what? We're going to lean into this change. Whatever happens, the fact that you had your husband's job, you know, shift during that time and you had to just figure it out, you just have to figure it out. I've had this growth on LinkedIn because I followed you for a few years, and I know that twenty twenty three in tech is like a decade, but twenty twenty three to everybody else is just yesterday. So you've done quite a bit in that amount of time. I love how you understood that the initial, I guess, idea wasn't quite working the way you thought it would, and then you saw the opportunity and you just went for it. So for somebody who is hesitant about change, I speak with people nervous about how AI may actually work against us. So what would you say to somebody who is apprehensive, worried, concerned? All the things, especially women. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is sort of like a two pronged question in my mind. So the first thing that came up for me. So I need to probably unpack this more in therapy, but I have always been particularly morbid. I've always been very aware of mortality. Like I remember when like one of my earliest memories, I'll just do a really quick story here is when I was on the Girl Scout, I was in brownies and we had to go sing Christmas carols at the senior home. I was in kindergarten, so I was five years old and I was in the front row. And I remember we were singing Little Drummer Boy, and I remember locking eyes with this man in the front row. I could still cry thinking about it, like I just started weeping. So I stood there and I couldn't stop crying. And I'm singing carols. And my teacher, the girls, the brownie troop leader, had to, like, get me off. And I was inconsolable. When I reflect on that moment, I was sore like this man, like his eyes. Like he was just like the end of his life. We were so young. It's like I got it at five, you know what I mean? So I always feel like I've always had this drive in me that has come from this place where I know that this is not finite. And so I think when you operate from that space, I mean, my eighteenth birthday, my parents threw a surprise party. Me, I was hysterical. And everyone's like, why are you crying? I'm like, I'm eighteen. Like, I'm old. Like, it's like, I, I am almost at twenty. Like, I might as well be a hundred. I mean, it's just, it's like, not okay. But I do think that there is something about when you realize that you don't know your time and you don't know how much time you are going to have, things become less scary. They become like, well, who cares? Like, who actually cares about trying something or moving to a foreign country when your kids are school aged? It was just a total whim. It becomes less scary when you think that, like, I want to really maximize the gift of time that I have on the planet. And I know that sounds very Pollyanna and we do not. I am not always thinking like that, like, oh, I'm alive and I'm just grateful. No, like I not every single day, but if I actually zoom out, that drives me. So number one, that number two, for people who are afraid to like, do things in their life, like, no, just do it. You just do not know. Um, the second thing I have to say, and this is only since I've been in this space that I have gotten way more fierce. I did not understand, truly, until I done this. The impact when you always hear like females in tech or oh, females need to get into Stem. It almost feels like this kitschy slogan that doesn't really mean anything. Like, what does that mean? Or, you know, you kind of hear all these words of like, oh, females have a hard time in tech and all this stuff. It just never really resonated with me because I was never part of that world. Well, what I now see, and I think we are all seeing in real time, is the platforms and the systems that run our society is off of technology. It is no surprise that we are in this particular scenario that we are in as a society, because we have the same monolithic point of views, making decisions on all of our behalf. So we have the Mark Zuckerberg's, the Sam Altman's, the you insert any, you know, the Elon Musk, all of those people who are making not just cute electrical cars or oh, Facebook to connect with people or Instagram to put like, no, no, no, like that is driving everything. How people treat one another, how people view the world, what issues are important, what gets funded. And so if we only have this same status quo in this next wave of tech, and this is not just the next wave like we are in industrial revolutionary times, truly like, it is very, very rare in history where you know that you are in one of those chapter books when you're a kid in history and you're learning about like the printing press or the industrial revolution or, you know, the frontier, when we staked white flags and land in the West, like we are living through that right now, like we are in it. And so if we allow, if we allow our fear about AI and robots in tech and all of that stuff, if we bury our head in the sand as females of minorities, of people from historically excluded communities, if we just say, this is not a big deal, I'm going to let other people worry about it. The tech people, we are setting ourselves up for a world that we don't want. And I actually don't think most people want because they are not looking out for us. You know, the people that are at the helm right now, the majority of the builders, the majority of the people who are running this show, they are not thinking about humanity. They are not thinking about preservation of thought. They are thinking, we don't want to beat China or we can't let China beat us, whatever that is. We want to extract as much money in dollars as possible. They're not coming at the world from our lived experiences. Of all those people that I had just listed. So it doesn't matter if you're a little scared, you can still be scared And still choose to have agency and be it at minimum, a little proficient and at best building more than that or getting involved with that. Because guess what? Other people will make decisions on your behalf that will affect you anyway, and your children and your children's children. So we need to get involved in a big way. And I am so serious about this because I'm raising money right now and all the rumors are true. It is definitely hard. I just keep motivated when I think about, oh my God, if I don't do this because there's not as many females building, there's not as many people in my lane. So if I'm like, this is too hard, I'm going to tap out who's, who's gonna do it. And I don't mean that as like a hero complex, but I truly mean like, we need to galvanize the troops, you know, thank you so much for that perspective. So important resonates so much. If we are not active participants in the change, then the change is going to happen regardless. And the infrastructure is being built by people who do not have our best interest in mind. So we have to get in there. I heard in your social media. I'm going to try to quote it here, but you said if we are eroding the population's ability to think, reason, trust, or to trust our judgment and our intuition, all of these abilities that make us human, if we are actively eroding that at a rapid pace, are we raising a bunch of psychopaths? And you could argue that like we are designing a culture for that type of mind, like almost psychopathic. What do you mean by that? Please elaborate. Yeah, I know my co-founder thought I should like somebody. My co-founder is like, we are so opposite. We are. She is like this German, German. First of all, right, I attract a lot of Germans in my life. Like my video partner in New York was German. Like, I just feel like, oh, she's like, she needs a German in her life to literally keep the chaos, like in a lane. Yeah. So it's so but she's a German. She lives in Chile now. And, um. her brain is. I always joke her brain needs to be studied in a lab because I think it does. Uh, but when I was having this conversation with her, she was like, okay. I mean, she first of all, I get it. The clinical definition of a psychopath. Like, you don't learn to be a psychopath. You are born that way. It's a neurological disorder. However, my point was, is that right now, the way that people are using AI, by and large, most people are not using AI as like, oh, I'm going to have this thought partner, or I'm going to use it as like my co really smart friend to help me think through this point. Most people are using it to do work faster or because I don't know what I think. Let me ask AI what I think and it'll tell me something that sounds really nice and it sounds really smart. So sure, I guess I think that too. And so my point is, if you are not Teaching people behaviorally how to think about their interactions with AI in a different way, then you really are shortcutting these critical thinking skills. As human beings that make us human, the ability to reason, the ability to actually think about some stuff in our past and to be able to go. Actually, I remember when XYZ happened to me, so I don't agree with that because of this and this and that. But what happens is, is that we're starting to outsource. And actually this is affecting some of the most advanced users, but we're they're outsourcing so much of that now because now everyone's working more, not less. And they've done all these studies at Harvard. Just came out with a big study last year that, yeah, there's certain functions that AI is not good at, but people are relying on AI to do that. Therefore, um, you start to trust yourself less. You start to have less intuition. That gut spidey sense feeling starts to go a little bit. And to be honest with you, we don't know what that looks like because this is still early days. No one knows the ending of this. No one actually knows. What does this society look like when people are eroding critical parts of thought process in judgment? What does that look like when we're teaching our young people? Oh, you can just ChatGPT it. Don't worry about it. Like, look, human beings are adaptable. So I have no doubt that if we're stunting that, there's other things that are going to emerge that we don't even know yet. But even so, what does that look like? If over time, that really is like a dulled, it's like a dulled trait, which I think most people would tend to agree that empathy and judgment and human reasoning, those are the things that make us human. That's what makes us special species versus a robot. So it's like we're teaching our other humans to be more robot now, you know? Yeah. And it's redefining the value of what it means to be a human now and in the long term. And like you said, whatever muscle we don't exercise. And a lot of that is reasoning. Our ability to put new data into historical context. If we outsource that, and in the context of grief, AI companies are trying to help you get rid of grief by creating like an avatar version of your person. So you could have continued bonds, all the things there's ethical and moral, you know, issues with a lot of that consent, you know, your sanity. Like what? Where do we blur the lines a little too much? So these are, you know, existential questions, if you will, that will be defined as time goes by. But if you were starting over today, what would you do differently? So just to give you an example, what I did with my SaaS product, there is not a world that this ever would have been possible, where I would have to have not raised a single dollar. And I have a fully Functioning app platform. Now we have trainings. We have a whole human community. So it's really evolved because we're putting our money where our mouth is. We're human first. AI, if I had this idea, in a normal scenario, what do you do? If you have an idea, you pitch it and then usually you're pitching it to a bunch of dudes, and then you're asking a bunch of dudes to give you money because, you know, to support your idea. But like, if they don't understand like, well, why? Why? Who cares if about storytelling? Who cares about that type of stuff? Because it doesn't matter anyway. If, um, you know, someone just wants to, you know, get the product or who, so, you know, I actually had a conversation with a CIO the other day. He's like, well, we have agents buying from other agents, so they don't care about storytelling. And so I said to him, that is so shortsighted because you think you're going to be the only CIO that has the same open chlor agent to agent buying mechanisms know that's going to become commonplace. So then what happens when everyone is doing the exact same AI workflow? You have to differentiate yourself. And how do you differentiate yourself? It goes back to human basics relatability. Do I connect with this person emotionally? Do I feel good around this person? Does this person make me feel seen? Does it validate my worldview? Goes back to human buckets. And so in another world without AI, I would probably never have gotten this even prototype of my story pro off the ground, because I don't know, it would have been hard and it would have cost me hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was able to do this for nothing. I'm only raising money now to fuel it, and because we have a lot of plans for how we want to grow storytelling and make human AI a part of the discussion in a really big way. So I think if I had to do this differently, though, the biggest thing about all of this is we all have domain expertise and people might not think that, but everyone is naturally interested in different topics or whatever their worldview is. You know, maybe you're really awesome at putting together parent excursions for your children. Maybe you are an expert on the history of your city or something like, so what's cool is in in a different life and this relates to story pro I, I, I'd have to get so much buy in, you don't need buying anymore. So the exciting thing about now is like, if you have an idea and it doesn't always need to be commercial, it can just be something to make your life better or to make your life flow a little bit better, like your calendar or your schedule. Like you can now go and build it very easily by talking to your computer and it appears so I think we need to just be reminding ourselves that some of this stuff can seem very esoteric, and especially if people I don't know how well versed your audience is in AI, you know, so some of this stuff is everyone has different proficiencies, but I think it's always best to not lead with the AI. Like I need to learn AI. That's not what it's about. It's like, what do I want to do? Or what is something in my world or my community that I would like to make better? I'll give you a quick example. I was out to dinner last night with my friends, and I decided that I am not a fashion person. I wish I was, but, but I, but I don't, but I always want to look cool, but like, I never know what's cool. And I'm like, nothing. I have like stuff from ten years ago. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure this is not relevant anymore, but I'm still wearing these pants, you know? Um, I don't have money for a stylist, like all this stuff. So I decided that I want to hire someone in my, in Lisbon to come over to my house, go through my closet, take a photo of every single item in my closet. And I then want to go to Claude code. And I want to make a virtual lookbook based on every single things that I already have, And then ask it to tell me what I need to make me look more. Fill in the blank, edgy or modern or, you know, not. I'm from like two thousand and one, right? Like, so that's not a commercial project. That's something that I have been thinking about in my brain. And I can go do that now. So I think we need to lead with the curiosity of what you actually want in your world, and not even the big world. That's so macro, but just your community or your village or your school district or your book club or whatever it is. And then you start from there and you just get curious. Curiosity is will always lead you to places unexpected, but you have to start with curiosity. Typically, I'm a big fan of curiosity. And for the record, if somebody builds that, I will totally use it because I need to update my wardrobe. So even ideas that may seem personal and small could be scaled. They don't have to be, but they could. Right, exactly. Um, on International Women's Day, I went to a hackathon. I can't even every time I say that word, I have to pause because I am always like, Patrice has left the building. I went to a hackathon with two moms that I met in Lisbon, and it was for International Women's Day. And I've never coded or anything, you know? I mean, now I vibe code, but like, but like, but I have no background in this. And we went and I was blown away by the day. There must have been sixty moms on a Sunday, right? Like leaving their house on a Sunday. And we all sat there and we all built ideas and it was no pressure and it was fun. And then at the end of the day, people presented stuff that they made in a couple of hours. I mean, it was like almost emotional, like watching all these women after women and, you know, people that might not have had, um, opportunities or platforms or voices to make what they want to make. But having to explain like this is what I am passionate about. Like one woman was like an American. And it was like really passionate about teaching Americans Portuguese and wanting Americans to assimilate more into the culture. But she was finding it really hard finding teachers that weren't overly formal. So she decided to make a really fun game. And she did this whole thing. And I was just like, oh my God, I would use that. So it's yeah, it's just really amazing when you kind of break open the, the ceiling of belief. Now we do have tools that make this possible. I love that and that's one way to get in the game. If you will look for these hackathons, look for these opportunities and look into coding all the things. I don't know how much my audience knows about AI, but for context, yeah, I don't want to get too nerdy on this. I don't mean to get nerdy, but I think my point there is, like, I went with two moms that have never done anything like that in their life. Like one. They're both marketing people. They came from agency life. We felt like a fish out of water. But it's amazing. Like, you know, when you just do something like that, then your belief crawls up a little bit, you know? So I think that's the and I found that sometimes we think we need to be so prepared, we need to go back to school and we need to relearn and we have to start from scratch and all the things. And I have found that the people that have built the fastest are usually the people who do not come from that background, because they don't have all of the mental hurdles that are learned. You almost didn't even know any better. So you built it faster and you built it better, and you did it quicker. And it sounds like that's, you know, part of your story as well. And, you know, I want to be mindful of time. So I want to give the audience an, you know, an idea of why storytelling is so important in today's context. I have Claude, I have ChatGPT, I have perplexity, I have all these other things. Why can't I just plug in my stuff and have them spit out something else for free? Like what makes my story pro different, unique and valuable. And what is the value of, um, storytelling in today's context? Yeah. So let me start with the first question. Like why storytelling? And I'll just give a very high level answer. And I think part of the reason is, is because we are in this trust crisis. No one believes anyone anymore. You know, you see a video with your own eyes. And what's the first thing that people say, oh, well, that's AI. I mean, it's, it's really amazing, right? Where we just are so distrustful. And so when people are not trustful of anything, the only way to actually bring people in is to be even more human. And what does that mean? Be more human. That's very sort of like, okay, well, if you think about what being human is. Human beings have passed on culture, humanity, and history for since the beginning of time through storytelling, right? It's like the it's like the ages old keeper of, of humanity is telling stories. If you didn't write it down or you didn't verbally tell something, it's lost. And so most people like, don't know what to do when someone's like, just go be more human or just go be yourself in your content. But people can wrap their brain around, why don't you tell a story? Why don't you tell a story about what it was like when you were a new mom and you didn't know what you were doing, and you had to go back to work when you weren't ready? Why don't you tell us a story about that? People can wrap their brain around that. And when you have people then that are able to do that, storytelling actually is one of the only it is the only, um, marketing pathway that has the ability to neurologically change the brainwaves of an absolute stranger. Like that's, that's insane. And so storytelling is even more important now because of the backdrop of AI. We have too much at us. No one believes anything, anything. You know, so many things can be altered and faked. So we're all craving stuff. I mean, Netflix just had released a job that for chief of Storytelling officer for almost one million dollars, like anthropic has jobs for like half a million dollars. In what world where these tech companies would be advertising roles for head storyteller and offering salaries that are only second place to a developer. I mean, that's crazy. That's all you need to know is when the tech companies are putting value on storytellers. It's the most valuable skill we have right now because it is the only one that is real. It's like our humanity, right? So that's why, number one, if you want to stand out in anything, storytelling is your truly like your quickest way to find your people. You're not, you know, um, and the second part of your question is, so I use, I don't use ChatGPT as much anymore, but we, I definitely use all those things you listed. Perplexity. I use Claude, I use Claude code, all the things. But the fundamental purpose of clod or anthropic or an open AI product is not to make you, Nina, the most human, best, real, authentic version of yourself. Its intention is not to actually give you friction and push back on some of your answers and say, you know what? I think you're staying surface level with me. I think we can go deeper here because then you're going to be very surface level. That's not the intention of these platforms. The intention of these platforms is to give you what you want as quickly and efficiently as possible. But we all know that good things take some time and some work. So storytelling and emotional resonance, that's not always a quick and efficient process that usually takes, like I said in the beginning of our interview, question nine and ten, but we need to I still need to take you through question one through eight. So story Pro is different because our sole focus is not to give you, Nina, the content that you want as quickly as possible. It's to actually help you hone the point of view and perspective that only you can have in this planet because of who you uniquely are. No one else has had the exact same childhood past grief experiences. No one else. And AI can extract frameworks and you can tell AI about your brother. You can tell AI about all these things, and it can put it together in a nice hero's journey arc, but it will never know how you felt. And to get to that level of depth, you have to keep pushing people to often uncomfortable places to release that rock bottom. Oh my God, this is why I do what I do, or this is why I believe what I believe. And that is what my story Pro does. We want you to get to the best version and perspective and we. That's all we care about. That's awesome. And I love that. And again, built by somebody with the perspective of understanding what true storytelling looks like from a lived experience perspective. So this is how our humanity literally gets embedded in the system. And that is not something that's common even with the LMS, with, you know, the tools that we use mostly. So where can people find information? Where can they work with you and maybe provide a use case to bring it home to people on how this could work in their business or in their life? Yeah. I mean, I have so many beautiful stories from people in our community that blow me away. Actually, I know this is a grief podcast, but one of our users just messaged me the other day and she's just like, I can't stop crying because she, you know, had cancer and she's cancer free right now. But it's very hard for her to talk about that. You know, she's not she's not through it emotionally yet, but it's holding her back because she's still sort of living in this time when she was a cancer patient. And so she's like unable to further herself in her career. She feels stuck. And so she's been using my story pro to help her redo her website in the copy. And she said, no, no copywriter has ever been able to nail what she feels in her soul. And she said, this is the first time I see how this is all connected and how this is my path. And so I get stories like that all the time. You know, I have stories from Edna. Edna is one of the top Latin food creators and recipe makers in Panama, and she just won a six figure prize affiliated with YouTube to start another channel. And she used my story pro from start to finish, from the application to scripting her video to answering interview to helping her train. Because again, it's about getting someone to this deep, like you cannot mess with someone who knows why they do what they do. You cannot mess with anyone's self-worth if they know who they are and where they come from, and they're not ashamed about it. Because when you are that steadfast in your belief that is energetically transferable, people feel that. I'm in the middle of teaching a storytelling mastermind to a group of ten women, half our corporate women and half our entrepreneurs. And one of my Co-teachers is an alumni of the same program I taught her and her speaking career, just like shot through the roof. And she just came back to our class last Thursday from New York, and she was telling everyone that she just secured a five hundred thousand dollars grant for her programs, and everyone was asking her questions. And she's been doing this like you'd think five hundred thousand dollars is like asking someone for five hundred dollars. She's done. This is like the second time she's done this like this year. And you hear, it's so hard to get money. And she's like, I am steadfast in what I believe and what I know and what this is that you're with me or you are not with me. So when she is in front of her audience, she's already done this hard work. And that is the hard work. People are skipping that input work, right? They want to go straight to just give me the output, give me the nice keynote, give me the nice one. Sheeter. That sounds really nice. But the problem is, is that everyone is doing that same prompt or everyone's building their projects in the same way because they all watch the same AI influencer creator tell you how to do that. No one is telling you how to actually get to the input before you even use AI. Like what do you believe? So the biggest way to find me is my Instagram. It's Patrice Poltzer, and in my link in bio, I have, you know, a lot of stuff about my story pro, but also my story pro dot ai. Um, you people can go there and we have a free trial. Um, we also have monthly workshops and classes. So we teach people how to build relevant AI as it relates to what people need to know. So we've taught, we're doing a cloud code camp in about a month. We are um, next week we have a fractional CMO who credits my story pro for helping her be so in demand. She is able now to choose her next CMO job because she's like, I am just so laser focused on my value. Um, she's gonna come and talk about marketing trends as a fractional worker. We had, um, a former target VP who was one of the youngest VP's in target in history. Start using my story pro when she was trying to launch her own business after being in corporate for a decade. And that's a very different brain space. She's already surpassed her highest revenue year in target, two years into her new business, because she is getting booked out for speeches, for consulting, and she uses my story pro for everything because we are guided by depth and emotion. And that is not what a lot of these tech bros are guided. That's not their North Star, but that's our North Star, and I absolutely love that. I think it is so important to have that perspective and lead with that. And as I'm listening to these use cases, I'm thinking Grievers are living in liminality. Life as you knew it is no longer and you're usually in transition in one way, shape or form towards a new life. So this almost even sounds like a tool that you could leverage to help you define what's next, not by denying who you are, but by harnessing the fullness of your lived experience in the context of what's changing or what's changed and where you want to go next. It almost sounds like this is a beautiful tool for transition, in addition to all the other use cases that you mentioned. So I love that. I'm going to link it in the show notes. And we're at the end here. I could talk to you about so many things. And there's actually more things I might do a part two or some other collab, but I do want we can do a part two. I want to give you the floor for two things. One, um, to add anything else that you, you know, maybe want to include in this conversation and we didn't touch on. And then the second would be to what would Patrice today say to the version of Patrice that launched my story Pro yeah. Um. Oh God. So yeah, I mean, honestly, I would just love for your community to try it, you know, to, to try the tool. And we're still early on and it's us behind this, you know, it's not like, oh, let me, let me, let me, let me pass you off to my team. It's like, no, no, no, it's us. So we take all the feedback and we're really on the ground with all like, we're like a community. It sounds really cheesy and overused, but we are like, we have a community that people are active on, and most of the people, they're all people that are know that they need to use AI, and they know that it's not going away, but they just want they don't want to do it in this way that feels gross. They don't maybe doesn't resonate as much with a lot of kind of like your LinkedIn, and I'm being massively generalist to like your LinkedIn tech bro energy of like, let me show you my twelve agents on my computer that are doing twelve things at once. And now I'm sitting here and I'm like, oh my God, like it just gives you anxiety because you're so behind all the time. You're always behind. You will never outrun AI. So we're all, every single person in the world is behind. So, but so, so that's number one. I would love for your people to, to trial it because I do think females building in this space is just such a different energy than the status quo building in this space. Um, and the other thing is I would say, oh my God, what would Patrice I mean, I'm so hard on myself. You know, I think like, I think most people that go off and do run a business or have high ambitions to maybe like, rise up in their industry or go on stage. Like there's an underbelly to that, right? You know, a lot of us probably have natural drive or we have like a motivation to achieve, which we all know can be bad if you let that go too much because you're never satisfied, right? Like your worth is based on achievement. And we know that that is not a way to feel fulfilled in whole as a human. So I probably, if I went back and as I'm in a hard season right now with raising money and just the ups and downs of this industry, I would probably tell Patrice to just be, uh, yeah, a little nicer to yourself because I have done a lot in a relatively short period of time for having no background in this space. And I forget about that all the time. I'm always like, oh, well, so and so did this. Or oh, well, it's not I, it's like, I, I, what I tell people not to do, I like do on myself. You know, it's always like the therapist conundrum. So yeah, probably just to be a little bit nicer to yourself and no one has it figured out. That's the other thing. You always hear that. But truly, anyone that says they're an AI expert. Oh, okay. No you're not. Like, you're literally not like even the people running Anthropic's. I was listening to him when he was on stage a lot in Davos at the World Economic Forum, and someone asked him a question and he's like, I don't know. He's like, we're in the we're in the passenger seat. And I'm like, oh my God, if you're in the passenger seat and you are literally running the biggest AI or the second biggest AI company in the world, and you're like, yep, I don't know. Then, you know, we just have to remind ourselves that this is so new. Three years ago, this no consumer knew anything about this. So just to, just to kind of take it in stride a little bit. Thank you so much. We could all be gentler with ourselves, especially as we face so much uncertainty and change. And also this is about living in liminality and the and and moving with Lean In. If you're curious about technology, if you're curious about AI, if you're curious if you're a woman in the space who wants to build something, if you have ideas, just play with it. Look at it as a fun thing to get engaged in and get your hands in there, whether you have experience or not. Patrice is a testament to that. My story pro is a testament to that, so I encourage you to do that. Patrice, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for your shared wisdom. This has been amazing. Thank you for being you. Thank you. Yes. No thank you. That's it for today's episode. Be sure to subscribe to the Grief and Light podcast. I'd also love to connect with you and hear your thoughts and your stories. Feel free to share them with me via my Instagram page @griefandlight. Or you can also visit griefandlight.com for more information and updates. Thank you so much for being here, for being you. And always remember you are not alone. podcast, where we explore this new reality through grief colored lenses openly, authentically. I'm your host, Nina Rodriguez. Let's get started as we face an increasingly uncertain future, how can we create the world that we want to live in? How do we lead with our humanity in a world increasingly ruled by AI? Hello and welcome back to the Grief and Light podcast. My name is Nina Rodriguez and I'm your host. And today's guest is a Gracie Award winning former Today Show producer who spent fifteen years teaching storytelling to brands like Netflix, Apple, Lululemon, and many others. She co-founded My Story Pro, a storytelling thought partner built to protect what makes you unmistakably you. She's now based in Lisbon with her three sons and husband, navigating tech as a woman in a male dominated field and reminding us that our active participation is required in building the future that we want to see. Patrice, welcome to the Grief and Light podcast. What a what an amazing intro. My God, I gotta like, I gotta lift that from you. That was good. It's all you And I'm thrilled about this conversation. It's a little bit different for our listeners. Grief is anything related to loss and life altering change. But today, we're approaching the conversation from the angle of the grief that shows up in our everyday life, especially in the context of the times that we're living in. There's a lot of uncertainty, and I really admire the way that you are embracing change as a woman in a field that you know is not necessarily the friendliest to women now. And you're keeping our humanity at the forefront of what you do. So I would love for people to get to know some of your story about my story. Pro, you became an accidental tech entrepreneur slash developer. What led you there? And, you know, tell us a little bit about that journey. Let me sort of break it down because actually what led me to this exact moment in time professionally, if we're talking about the AI tech, my story pro build, it actually came out of a loss. So when I moved my family from New York to Lisbon in twenty twenty three, I had storytelling in video agency in New York City, and I shut down those studios in Brooklyn because we were embarking on this new chapter in our life. And, you know, I was living in New York, three children, anyone who knows anyone who has children just knows the grind, right? Especially in New York City, you can't even celebrate a client win because you're on to the next and everything is just so expensive. So my plan when I moved to Lisbon was like, take my foot just off the gas for just a little bit, like keep my business. But what do I want out of my business? I was shutting down my studios, which was a big chunk of my income, but my husband was able to keep his job out of New York, and I was at least going to be like, okay, apparel Patrice on a Lisboa Beach might be possible. Maybe a couple days a week, I don't know yet. Well, I was very, very, very wrong. So life never goes as planned. And so when we got here, my husband actually wasn't able to keep his job. So all of a sudden we went from, you know, and we're in a new country, new culture, three kids don't know the language, etc., trying to get people in schools. We did this very fast and we did everything online. And all of a sudden my husband's like, so about that whole job that I've always had, you know, like we've always been a double income family. He didn't have it. I think when you're backed in a corner and you're backed in scenarios where you have not a lot of time to think of the downside because you just got to go, like, I need to keep this, this thing pumping, I need to well, I guess I'm not taking a break off my business right now. I guess I am going like full throttle, but I need to figure what that is because now I'm in Lisbon, I'm not in New York City. I'm not going to do a video shoot, and I need to make all of my revenue now, either online or figure something else. That was my mindset. And so I think it's important because I was in a mode of, let's just try things. So this is twenty twenty three. And so I was already into AI before I came out here. I was very early on, and I am a curious person. I was a journalist for a decade. And so when AI came out, I got into it because I actually had students in my storytelling mastermind turning in like horrific ChatGPT scripts and thinking it was good because it was it was structurally good, but it was soulless. So I was already being like, all right, I need to get involved here. And so I, when I came to Lisbon, I started running naturally. Just come to this workshop here, how I'm thinking about AI. We get that it's fast. We get that it can do content quick, but who cares because the content's not good. And actually, you know, a robot wrote it, so who cares? Like if it's fast and it's in a structurally sound format. If it's actually not moving figuratively, literally anyone. Right. Um, and so fast forward, I figured out and me, my, and my husband, like figuring out like his whole thing. And I thought, you know what? I am going to package all of these workshops I'm doing and I am going to do the classic, put it on a landing page and sell digital products. I already have credibility in this space. I've always been more premium. So I had high level masterminds. I was one on one. I'm not a digital product girly, but I was like, you know what, let's let's try this. And so ahead of this decision, I had this launch and I thought I was going to crush it. I'm like, oh, this is going to be amazing. Because now all my followers who maybe didn't, couldn't join, you know, my higher ticket programs or it wasn't the right timing for their business. Now they can access this knowledge and it's going to be great at a lower price point. The launch did not go like the launch did not go as planned. And so all of a sudden, and in a normal time, it wouldn't have been that big of a deal because I had my agency clients running in the background. So I had fallback, but I had no fallback. So when that launch didn't go well and my husband had still didn't have a job, it, it got really like, oh my God, like I need to actually think outside the box here because this is this, this launch is people don't want these packaged workshops on a landing page. And so it fast forward, I, you know, this is in the spring now of twenty twenty four. And I didn't have a lead magnet. So I'm like, you know, maybe it's just a list problem. I need to grow my list because a lot of people will tell you, well, if you're not selling stuff, you're either selling to the wrong audience or your list isn't big enough. And I knew I had a loyal audience, but I didn't have a big audience. You know, my email list was was small ish. And so I thought, well, I just need to get a lead magnet and then I'll grow my list and then that'll, that'll be the end of it. And so I, I had the wherewithal to know that I wanted to do something different. And so during that time, I started getting into. Zapier. So I don't know if how familiar. Okay. So for those of you listening, Zapier, um, you know, back in the top of twenty twenty four, it was sort of revolutionary and you can connect, uh, it's an AI basically API connective tool. And so I was playing around with it and, um, me and my business operations business girl in my business who's now my co-founder, uh, we were experimenting with this bot. We're like, let's make a bot that's a storytelling bot. And they give me their email. I ask them some questions because I was a producer for a decade, so I know the cadence of questions on how to sort of get someone to give you the real answer, right? Not the surface, right. As a journalist and a producer in the field, I couldn't go back to the Today show with a surface level story, but I was on a deadline, so I had to learn really quickly how to structure the cadence of an interview, you know, and you can't skip. You can't just go to question nine. And the good answers are always on. As you know, as an interview with the podcast, the beginning of a most podcasts are like, all right, the good stuff, I guarantee you with most of your guests lies in the last ten minutes of the interview, but you cannot start in the last ten minutes of your interview. You just can't, right? People need to get rid of their veneer. People need to feel safe with you. People need to feel like, okay, this is a conversation. And so I know that. And so when I was creating this bot, it was all this math methodology and IP into this bot. This was not a product. This was just a cute little carrot to get emails. So then I could lead people down to my programs that I thought I wasn't selling before because they just, I needed new people. And so I released this bot and I've never experienced anything like this in my business. People went mental and I was getting all these emails like, what is this? Like, you know, and I had thousands of new people and I'm like, this is amazing. I'm in like, you know, they're going to buy all my programs. Not one person went down my beautiful funnel, you know, that I made with emails, not no one. They all wanted this free bot, but it wasn't a product. So this whole time I am emailing these people that I do not know, being like I am a storytelling expert. Like I coach, I lead masterminds, I am not a tech person. Like, this is not my jam. Like, this is just a fun thing that I was like, you know, thinking about I wasn't thinking about this from a commercial standpoint. And then I kind of just had an aha moment. This is probably like mid April where my husband was. He decided to go off on his own to start his fractional business. I'm like, oh Jesus, we all know how long that can take to build business. So I'm like, I, I have to let this is like in front of me and I have people being like, can I pay you for this Zapier bot? I mean, right now, you would look at it and laugh because now it looks primitive, you know, but this is almost two years ago. And so that is the impetus of what is now my story. Pro it started from a failed launch to like this free lead magnet. It wasn't a product. And then I stopped for a couple months and me and my co-founder put our heads together and she's a genius. And so she was vibe coding and we together came up with a beta version of this storytelling tool. It's a storytelling coach, and we wanted it to push people we wanted, not like a ChatGPT, where it just spits out output and tells you you're great. When we wanted people to go deep on themselves. And that's really hard for people to be vulnerable, to actually know what moments in their life matter. You know, you have a lot of people that don't know how to blend their personal self with their professional self. But we now live in a time where you just what's the separation, right? We're all sort of, you know, there's no like, here's my personal self and here's my professional self. Not really like we're one human. So this whole premise was like, how do it wasn't like, how do we get people to tell faster stories? The premise has always been, how do we get people to tap into their own lived experience and have these aha moments about all the amazing things and hard things in their life, and how do they see themselves in a different way? And actually now get excited to put themselves forward, whether it's their business, whether it's their company, whether they're wanting to get on stages like that takes an element of self-belief. And so when we launched this on Black Friday of twenty twenty four, we had no like, we did not know anything. We thought I thought, well, you know, maybe some of my people, my long term followers will like want to sign up. We didn't really know how to price it. We priced. And the first day we launched we had. Well, first of all, just to give you context. So the one year subscription was one thousand dollars. All right. We did like a one year subscription. The very first day that we launched this to my smallish list. I don't have a big list. We had fifteen people buy it. Not even testing it. Like didn't even know what it was. They bought it for a year. So the first day in our first day of. And that just continued to go up. So by day forty five, we were at ten, we were at five figures plus M and it was. I've never experienced anything like that in my business. And I've been a business owner for ten years. That was like seventeen months ago. And it's just taken on and we can go into this, but it's taken on a whole new life. And if you would have told me three years ago that I'd be moving to Lisbon to start an AI tech company, I would have been like, I think you have the wrong Ouija board. Like there's, this is the this is there's just no possible way that this would be true. And like, here I am. And it's I'm in a whole new space right now. Well, kudos to you for going for it, for leaning in to the uncertainty. And sometimes not knowing is actually a good thing. Because if somebody like you said, would have told us what's ahead, we might say, you know what? Never mind, I don't know. I'm good. I'll stay right here. Yeah, yeah, I love I love how you embrace all of it. Sounds like your husband, your kids. You have three kids. And I say that because most people cannot even fathom moving states and uprooting. So just saying, you know what? We're going to lean into this change. Whatever happens, the fact that you had your husband's job, you know, shift during that time and you had to just figure it out, you just have to figure it out. I've had this growth on LinkedIn because I followed you for a few years, and I know that twenty twenty three in tech is like a decade, but twenty twenty three to everybody else is just yesterday. So you've done quite a bit in that amount of time. I love how you understood that the initial, I guess, idea wasn't quite working the way you thought it would, and then you saw the opportunity and you just went for it. So for somebody who is hesitant about change, I speak with people nervous about how AI may actually work against us. So what would you say to somebody who is apprehensive, worried, concerned? All the things, especially women. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is sort of like a two pronged question in my mind. So the first thing that came up for me. So I need to probably unpack this more in therapy, but I have always been particularly morbid. I've always been very aware of mortality. Like I remember when like one of my earliest memories, I'll just do a really quick story here is when I was on the Girl Scout, I was in brownies and we had to go sing Christmas carols at the senior home. I was in kindergarten, so I was five years old and I was in the front row. And I remember we were singing Little Drummer Boy, and I remember locking eyes with this man in the front row. I could still cry thinking about it, like I just started weeping. So I stood there and I couldn't stop crying. And I'm singing carols. And my teacher, the girls, the brownie troop leader, had to, like, get me off. And I was inconsolable. When I reflect on that moment, I was sore like this man, like his eyes. Like he was just like the end of his life. We were so young. It's like I got it at five, you know what I mean? So I always feel like I've always had this drive in me that has come from this place where I know that this is not finite. And so I think when you operate from that space, I mean, my eighteenth birthday, my parents threw a surprise party. Me, I was hysterical. And everyone's like, why are you crying? I'm like, I'm eighteen. Like, I'm old. Like, it's like, I, I am almost at twenty. Like, I might as well be a hundred. I mean, it's just, it's like, not okay. But I do think that there is something about when you realize that you don't know your time and you don't know how much time you are going to have, things become less scary. They become like, well, who cares? Like, who actually cares about trying something or moving to a foreign country when your kids are school aged? It was just a total whim. It becomes less scary when you think that, like, I want to really maximize the gift of time that I have on the planet. And I know that sounds very Pollyanna and we do not. I am not always thinking like that, like, oh, I'm alive and I'm just grateful. No, like I not every single day, but if I actually zoom out, that drives me. So number one, that number two, for people who are afraid to like, do things in their life, like, no, just do it. You just do not know. Um, the second thing I have to say, and this is only since I've been in this space that I have gotten way more fierce. I did not understand, truly, until I done this. The impact when you always hear like females in tech or oh, females need to get into Stem. It almost feels like this kitschy slogan that doesn't really mean anything. Like, what does that mean? Or, you know, you kind of hear all these words of like, oh, females have a hard time in tech and all this stuff. It just never really resonated with me because I was never part of that world. Well, what I now see, and I think we are all seeing in real time, is the platforms and the systems that run our society is off of technology. It is no surprise that we are in this particular scenario that we are in as a society, because we have the same monolithic point of views, making decisions on all of our behalf. So we have the Mark Zuckerberg's, the Sam Altman's, the you insert any, you know, the Elon Musk, all of those people who are making not just cute electrical cars or oh, Facebook to connect with people or Instagram to put like, no, no, no, like that is driving everything. How people treat one another, how people view the world, what issues are important, what gets funded. And so if we only have this same status quo in this next wave of tech, and this is not just the next wave like we are in industrial revolutionary times, truly like, it is very, very rare in history where you know that you are in one of those chapter books when you're a kid in history and you're learning about like the printing press or the industrial revolution or, you know, the frontier, when we staked white flags and land in the West, like we are living through that right now, like we are in it. And so if we allow, if we allow our fear about AI and robots in tech and all of that stuff, if we bury our head in the sand as females of minorities, of people from historically excluded communities, if we just say, this is not a big deal, I'm going to let other people worry about it. The tech people, we are setting ourselves up for a world that we don't want. And I actually don't think most people want because they are not looking out for us. You know, the people that are at the helm right now, the majority of the builders, the majority of the people who are running this show, they are not thinking about humanity. They are not thinking about preservation of thought. They are thinking, we don't want to beat China or we can't let China beat us, whatever that is. We want to extract as much money in dollars as possible. They're not coming at the world from our lived experiences. Of all those people that I had just listed. So it doesn't matter if you're a little scared, you can still be scared And still choose to have agency and be it at minimum, a little proficient and at best building more than that or getting involved with that. Because guess what? Other people will make decisions on your behalf that will affect you anyway, and your children and your children's children. So we need to get involved in a big way. And I am so serious about this because I'm raising money right now and all the rumors are true. It is definitely hard. I just keep motivated when I think about, oh my God, if I don't do this because there's not as many females building, there's not as many people in my lane. So if I'm like, this is too hard, I'm going to tap out who's, who's gonna do it. And I don't mean that as like a hero complex, but I truly mean like, we need to galvanize the troops, you know, thank you so much for that perspective. So important resonates so much. If we are not active participants in the change, then the change is going to happen regardless. And the infrastructure is being built by people who do not have our best interest in mind. So we have to get in there. I heard in your social media. I'm going to try to quote it here, but you said if we are eroding the population's ability to think, reason, trust, or to trust our judgment and our intuition, all of these abilities that make us human, if we are actively eroding that at a rapid pace, are we raising a bunch of psychopaths? And you could argue that like we are designing a culture for that type of mind, like almost psychopathic. What do you mean by that? Please elaborate. Yeah, I know my co-founder thought I should like somebody. My co-founder is like, we are so opposite. We are. She is like this German, German. First of all, right, I attract a lot of Germans in my life. Like my video partner in New York was German. Like, I just feel like, oh, she's like, she needs a German in her life to literally keep the chaos, like in a lane. Yeah. So it's so but she's a German. She lives in Chile now. And, um. her brain is. I always joke her brain needs to be studied in a lab because I think it does. Uh, but when I was having this conversation with her, she was like, okay. I mean, she first of all, I get it. The clinical definition of a psychopath. Like, you don't learn to be a psychopath. You are born that way. It's a neurological disorder. However, my point was, is that right now, the way that people are using AI, by and large, most people are not using AI as like, oh, I'm going to have this thought partner, or I'm going to use it as like my co really smart friend to help me think through this point. Most people are using it to do work faster or because I don't know what I think. Let me ask AI what I think and it'll tell me something that sounds really nice and it sounds really smart. So sure, I guess I think that too. And so my point is, if you are not Teaching people behaviorally how to think about their interactions with AI in a different way, then you really are shortcutting these critical thinking skills. As human beings that make us human, the ability to reason, the ability to actually think about some stuff in our past and to be able to go. Actually, I remember when XYZ happened to me, so I don't agree with that because of this and this and that. But what happens is, is that we're starting to outsource. And actually this is affecting some of the most advanced users, but we're they're outsourcing so much of that now because now everyone's working more, not less. And they've done all these studies at Harvard. Just came out with a big study last year that, yeah, there's certain functions that AI is not good at, but people are relying on AI to do that. Therefore, um, you start to trust yourself less. You start to have less intuition. That gut spidey sense feeling starts to go a little bit. And to be honest with you, we don't know what that looks like because this is still early days. No one knows the ending of this. No one actually knows. What does this society look like when people are eroding critical parts of thought process in judgment? What does that look like when we're teaching our young people? Oh, you can just ChatGPT it. Don't worry about it. Like, look, human beings are adaptable. So I have no doubt that if we're stunting that, there's other things that are going to emerge that we don't even know yet. But even so, what does that look like? If over time, that really is like a dulled, it's like a dulled trait, which I think most people would tend to agree that empathy and judgment and human reasoning, those are the things that make us human. That's what makes us special species versus a robot. So it's like we're teaching our other humans to be more robot now, you know? Yeah. And it's redefining the value of what it means to be a human now and in the long term. And like you said, whatever muscle we don't exercise. And a lot of that is reasoning. Our ability to put new data into historical context. If we outsource that, and in the context of grief, AI companies are trying to help you get rid of grief by creating like an avatar version of your person. So you could have continued bonds, all the things there's ethical and moral, you know, issues with a lot of that consent, you know, your sanity. Like what? Where do we blur the lines a little too much? So these are, you know, existential questions, if you will, that will be defined as time goes by. But if you were starting over today, what would you do differently? So just to give you an example, what I did with my SaaS product, there is not a world that this ever would have been possible, where I would have to have not raised a single dollar. And I have a fully Functioning app platform. Now we have trainings. We have a whole human community. So it's really evolved because we're putting our money where our mouth is. We're human first. AI, if I had this idea, in a normal scenario, what do you do? If you have an idea, you pitch it and then usually you're pitching it to a bunch of dudes, and then you're asking a bunch of dudes to give you money because, you know, to support your idea. But like, if they don't understand like, well, why? Why? Who cares if about storytelling? Who cares about that type of stuff? Because it doesn't matter anyway. If, um, you know, someone just wants to, you know, get the product or who, so, you know, I actually had a conversation with a CIO the other day. He's like, well, we have agents buying from other agents, so they don't care about storytelling. And so I said to him, that is so shortsighted because you think you're going to be the only CIO that has the same open chlor agent to agent buying mechanisms know that's going to become commonplace. So then what happens when everyone is doing the exact same AI workflow? You have to differentiate yourself. And how do you differentiate yourself? It goes back to human basics relatability. Do I connect with this person emotionally? Do I feel good around this person? Does this person make me feel seen? Does it validate my worldview? Goes back to human buckets. And so in another world without AI, I would probably never have gotten this even prototype of my story pro off the ground, because I don't know, it would have been hard and it would have cost me hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was able to do this for nothing. I'm only raising money now to fuel it, and because we have a lot of plans for how we want to grow storytelling and make human AI a part of the discussion in a really big way. So I think if I had to do this differently, though, the biggest thing about all of this is we all have domain expertise and people might not think that, but everyone is naturally interested in different topics or whatever their worldview is. You know, maybe you're really awesome at putting together parent excursions for your children. Maybe you are an expert on the history of your city or something like, so what's cool is in in a different life and this relates to story pro I, I, I'd have to get so much buy in, you don't need buying anymore. So the exciting thing about now is like, if you have an idea and it doesn't always need to be commercial, it can just be something to make your life better or to make your life flow a little bit better, like your calendar or your schedule. Like you can now go and build it very easily by talking to your computer and it appears so I think we need to just be reminding ourselves that some of this stuff can seem very esoteric, and especially if people I don't know how well versed your audience is in AI, you know, so some of this stuff is everyone has different proficiencies, but I think it's always best to not lead with the AI. Like I need to learn AI. That's not what it's about. It's like, what do I want to do? Or what is something in my world or my community that I would like to make better? I'll give you a quick example. I was out to dinner last night with my friends, and I decided that I am not a fashion person. I wish I was, but, but I, but I don't, but I always want to look cool, but like, I never know what's cool. And I'm like, nothing. I have like stuff from ten years ago. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure this is not relevant anymore, but I'm still wearing these pants, you know? Um, I don't have money for a stylist, like all this stuff. So I decided that I want to hire someone in my, in Lisbon to come over to my house, go through my closet, take a photo of every single item in my closet. And I then want to go to Claude code. And I want to make a virtual lookbook based on every single things that I already have, And then ask it to tell me what I need to make me look more. Fill in the blank, edgy or modern or, you know, not. I'm from like two thousand and one, right? Like, so that's not a commercial project. That's something that I have been thinking about in my brain. And I can go do that now. So I think we need to lead with the curiosity of what you actually want in your world, and not even the big world. That's so macro, but just your community or your village or your school district or your book club or whatever it is. And then you start from there and you just get curious. Curiosity is will always lead you to places unexpected, but you have to start with curiosity. Typically, I'm a big fan of curiosity. And for the record, if somebody builds that, I will totally use it because I need to update my wardrobe. So even ideas that may seem personal and small could be scaled. They don't have to be, but they could. Right, exactly. Um, on International Women's Day, I went to a hackathon. I can't even every time I say that word, I have to pause because I am always like, Patrice has left the building. I went to a hackathon with two moms that I met in Lisbon, and it was for International Women's Day. And I've never coded or anything, you know? I mean, now I vibe code, but like, but like, but I have no background in this. And we went and I was blown away by the day. There must have been sixty moms on a Sunday, right? Like leaving their house on a Sunday. And we all sat there and we all built ideas and it was no pressure and it was fun. And then at the end of the day, people presented stuff that they made in a couple of hours. I mean, it was like almost emotional, like watching all these women after women and, you know, people that might not have had, um, opportunities or platforms or voices to make what they want to make. But having to explain like this is what I am passionate about. Like one woman was like an American. And it was like really passionate about teaching Americans Portuguese and wanting Americans to assimilate more into the culture. But she was finding it really hard finding teachers that weren't overly formal. So she decided to make a really fun game. And she did this whole thing. And I was just like, oh my God, I would use that. So it's yeah, it's just really amazing when you kind of break open the, the ceiling of belief. Now we do have tools that make this possible. I love that and that's one way to get in the game. If you will look for these hackathons, look for these opportunities and look into coding all the things. I don't know how much my audience knows about AI, but for context, yeah, I don't want to get too nerdy on this. I don't mean to get nerdy, but I think my point there is, like, I went with two moms that have never done anything like that in their life. Like one. They're both marketing people. They came from agency life. We felt like a fish out of water. But it's amazing. Like, you know, when you just do something like that, then your belief crawls up a little bit, you know? So I think that's the and I found that sometimes we think we need to be so prepared, we need to go back to school and we need to relearn and we have to start from scratch and all the things. And I have found that the people that have built the fastest are usually the people who do not come from that background, because they don't have all of the mental hurdles that are learned. You almost didn't even know any better. So you built it faster and you built it better, and you did it quicker. And it sounds like that's, you know, part of your story as well. And, you know, I want to be mindful of time. So I want to give the audience an, you know, an idea of why storytelling is so important in today's context. I have Claude, I have ChatGPT, I have perplexity, I have all these other things. Why can't I just plug in my stuff and have them spit out something else for free? Like what makes my story pro different, unique and valuable. And what is the value of, um, storytelling in today's context? Yeah. So let me start with the first question. Like why storytelling? And I'll just give a very high level answer. And I think part of the reason is, is because we are in this trust crisis. No one believes anyone anymore. You know, you see a video with your own eyes. And what's the first thing that people say, oh, well, that's AI. I mean, it's, it's really amazing, right? Where we just are so distrustful. And so when people are not trustful of anything, the only way to actually bring people in is to be even more human. And what does that mean? Be more human. That's very sort of like, okay, well, if you think about what being human is. Human beings have passed on culture, humanity, and history for since the beginning of time through storytelling, right? It's like the it's like the ages old keeper of, of humanity is telling stories. If you didn't write it down or you didn't verbally tell something, it's lost. And so most people like, don't know what to do when someone's like, just go be more human or just go be yourself in your content. But people can wrap their brain around, why don't you tell a story? Why don't you tell a story about what it was like when you were a new mom and you didn't know what you were doing, and you had to go back to work when you weren't ready? Why don't you tell us a story about that? People can wrap their brain around that. And when you have people then that are able to do that, storytelling actually is one of the only it is the only, um, marketing pathway that has the ability to neurologically change the brainwaves of an absolute stranger. Like that's, that's insane. And so storytelling is even more important now because of the backdrop of AI. We have too much at us. No one believes anything, anything. You know, so many things can be altered and faked. So we're all craving stuff. I mean, Netflix just had released a job that for chief of Storytelling officer for almost one million dollars, like anthropic has jobs for like half a million dollars. In what world where these tech companies would be advertising roles for head storyteller and offering salaries that are only second place to a developer. I mean, that's crazy. That's all you need to know is when the tech companies are putting value on storytellers. It's the most valuable skill we have right now because it is the only one that is real. It's like our humanity, right? So that's why, number one, if you want to stand out in anything, storytelling is your truly like your quickest way to find your people. You're not, you know, um, and the second part of your question is, so I use, I don't use ChatGPT as much anymore, but we, I definitely use all those things you listed. Perplexity. I use Claude, I use Claude code, all the things. But the fundamental purpose of clod or anthropic or an open AI product is not to make you, Nina, the most human, best, real, authentic version of yourself. Its intention is not to actually give you friction and push back on some of your answers and say, you know what? I think you're staying surface level with me. I think we can go deeper here because then you're going to be very surface level. That's not the intention of these platforms. The intention of these platforms is to give you what you want as quickly and efficiently as possible. But we all know that good things take some time and some work. So storytelling and emotional resonance, that's not always a quick and efficient process that usually takes, like I said in the beginning of our interview, question nine and ten, but we need to I still need to take you through question one through eight. So story Pro is different because our sole focus is not to give you, Nina, the content that you want as quickly as possible. It's to actually help you hone the point of view and perspective that only you can have in this planet because of who you uniquely are. No one else has had the exact same childhood past grief experiences. No one else. And AI can extract frameworks and you can tell AI about your brother. You can tell AI about all these things, and it can put it together in a nice hero's journey arc, but it will never know how you felt. And to get to that level of depth, you have to keep pushing people to often uncomfortable places to release that rock bottom. Oh my God, this is why I do what I do, or this is why I believe what I believe. And that is what my story Pro does. We want you to get to the best version and perspective and we. That's all we care about. That's awesome. And I love that. And again, built by somebody with the perspective of understanding what true storytelling looks like from a lived experience perspective. So this is how our humanity literally gets embedded in the system. And that is not something that's common even with the LMS, with, you know, the tools that we use mostly. So where can people find information? Where can they work with you and maybe provide a use case to bring it home to people on how this could work in their business or in their life? Yeah. I mean, I have so many beautiful stories from people in our community that blow me away. Actually, I know this is a grief podcast, but one of our users just messaged me the other day and she's just like, I can't stop crying because she, you know, had cancer and she's cancer free right now. But it's very hard for her to talk about that. You know, she's not she's not through it emotionally yet, but it's holding her back because she's still sort of living in this time when she was a cancer patient. And so she's like unable to further herself in her career. She feels stuck. And so she's been using my story pro to help her redo her website in the copy. And she said, no, no copywriter has ever been able to nail what she feels in her soul. And she said, this is the first time I see how this is all connected and how this is my path. And so I get stories like that all the time. You know, I have stories from Edna. Edna is one of the top Latin food creators and recipe makers in Panama, and she just won a six figure prize affiliated with YouTube to start another channel. And she used my story pro from start to finish, from the application to scripting her video to answering interview to helping her train. Because again, it's about getting someone to this deep, like you cannot mess with someone who knows why they do what they do. You cannot mess with anyone's self-worth if they know who they are and where they come from, and they're not ashamed about it. Because when you are that steadfast in your belief that is energetically transferable, people feel that. I'm in the middle of teaching a storytelling mastermind to a group of ten women, half our corporate women and half our entrepreneurs. And one of my Co-teachers is an alumni of the same program I taught her and her speaking career, just like shot through the roof. And she just came back to our class last Thursday from New York, and she was telling everyone that she just secured a five hundred thousand dollars grant for her programs, and everyone was asking her questions. And she's been doing this like you'd think five hundred thousand dollars is like asking someone for five hundred dollars. She's done. This is like the second time she's done this like this year. And you hear, it's so hard to get money. And she's like, I am steadfast in what I believe and what I know and what this is that you're with me or you are not with me. So when she is in front of her audience, she's already done this hard work. And that is the hard work. People are skipping that input work, right? They want to go straight to just give me the output, give me the nice keynote, give me the nice one. Sheeter. That sounds really nice. But the problem is, is that everyone is doing that same prompt or everyone's building their projects in the same way because they all watch the same AI influencer creator tell you how to do that. No one is telling you how to actually get to the input before you even use AI. Like what do you believe? So the biggest way to find me is my Instagram. It's Patrice Poltzer, and in my link in bio, I have, you know, a lot of stuff about my story pro, but also my story pro dot ai. Um, you people can go there and we have a free trial. Um, we also have monthly workshops and classes. So we teach people how to build relevant AI as it relates to what people need to know. So we've taught, we're doing a cloud code camp in about a month. We are um, next week we have a fractional CMO who credits my story pro for helping her be so in demand. She is able now to choose her next CMO job because she's like, I am just so laser focused on my value. Um, she's gonna come and talk about marketing trends as a fractional worker. We had, um, a former target VP who was one of the youngest VP's in target in history. Start using my story pro when she was trying to launch her own business after being in corporate for a decade. And that's a very different brain space. She's already surpassed her highest revenue year in target, two years into her new business, because she is getting booked out for speeches, for consulting, and she uses my story pro for everything because we are guided by depth and emotion. And that is not what a lot of these tech bros are guided. That's not their North Star, but that's our North Star, and I absolutely love that. I think it is so important to have that perspective and lead with that. And as I'm listening to these use cases, I'm thinking Grievers are living in liminality. Life as you knew it is no longer and you're usually in transition in one way, shape or form towards a new life. So this almost even sounds like a tool that you could leverage to help you define what's next, not by denying who you are, but by harnessing the fullness of your lived experience in the context of what's changing or what's changed and where you want to go next. It almost sounds like this is a beautiful tool for transition, in addition to all the other use cases that you mentioned. So I love that. I'm going to link it in the show notes. And we're at the end here. I could talk to you about so many things. And there's actually more things I might do a part two or some other collab, but I do want we can do a part two. I want to give you the floor for two things. One, um, to add anything else that you, you know, maybe want to include in this conversation and we didn't touch on. And then the second would be to what would Patrice today say to the version of Patrice that launched my story Pro yeah. Um. Oh God. So yeah, I mean, honestly, I would just love for your community to try it, you know, to, to try the tool. And we're still early on and it's us behind this, you know, it's not like, oh, let me, let me, let me, let me pass you off to my team. It's like, no, no, no, it's us. So we take all the feedback and we're really on the ground with all like, we're like a community. It sounds really cheesy and overused, but we are like, we have a community that people are active on, and most of the people, they're all people that are know that they need to use AI, and they know that it's not going away, but they just want they don't want to do it in this way that feels gross. They don't maybe doesn't resonate as much with a lot of kind of like your LinkedIn, and I'm being massively generalist to like your LinkedIn tech bro energy of like, let me show you my twelve agents on my computer that are doing twelve things at once. And now I'm sitting here and I'm like, oh my God, like it just gives you anxiety because you're so behind all the time. You're always behind. You will never outrun AI. So we're all, every single person in the world is behind. So, but so, so that's number one. I would love for your people to, to trial it because I do think females building in this space is just such a different energy than the status quo building in this space. Um, and the other thing is I would say, oh my God, what would Patrice I mean, I'm so hard on myself. You know, I think like, I think most people that go off and do run a business or have high ambitions to maybe like, rise up in their industry or go on stage. Like there's an underbelly to that, right? You know, a lot of us probably have natural drive or we have like a motivation to achieve, which we all know can be bad if you let that go too much because you're never satisfied, right? Like your worth is based on achievement. And we know that that is not a way to feel fulfilled in whole as a human. So I probably, if I went back and as I'm in a hard season right now with raising money and just the ups and downs of this industry, I would probably tell Patrice to just be, uh, yeah, a little nicer to yourself because I have done a lot in a relatively short period of time for having no background in this space. And I forget about that all the time. I'm always like, oh, well, so and so did this. Or oh, well, it's not I, it's like, I, I, what I tell people not to do, I like do on myself. You know, it's always like the therapist conundrum. So yeah, probably just to be a little bit nicer to yourself and no one has it figured out. That's the other thing. You always hear that. But truly, anyone that says they're an AI expert. Oh, okay. No you're not. Like, you're literally not like even the people running Anthropic's. I was listening to him when he was on stage a lot in Davos at the World Economic Forum, and someone asked him a question and he's like, I don't know. He's like, we're in the we're in the passenger seat. And I'm like, oh my God, if you're in the passenger seat and you are literally running the biggest AI or the second biggest AI company in the world, and you're like, yep, I don't know. Then, you know, we just have to remind ourselves that this is so new. Three years ago, this no consumer knew anything about this. So just to, just to kind of take it in stride a little bit. Thank you so much. We could all be gentler with ourselves, especially as we face so much uncertainty and change. And also this is about living in liminality and the and and moving with Lean In. If you're curious about technology, if you're curious about AI, if you're curious if you're a woman in the space who wants to build something, if you have ideas, just play with it. Look at it as a fun thing to get engaged in and get your hands in there, whether you have experience or not. Patrice is a testament to that. My story pro is a testament to that, so I encourage you to do that. Patrice, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for your shared wisdom. This has been amazing. Thank you for being you. Thank you. Yes. No thank you. That's it for today's episode. Be sure to subscribe to the Grief and Light podcast. I'd also love to connect with you and hear your thoughts and your stories. Feel free to share them with me via my Instagram page @griefandlight. Or you can also visit griefandlight.com for more information and updates. Thank you so much for being here, for being you. And always remember you are not alone.