Discover Fresh Perspectives

Staying Relevant in the AI Age: Wisdom from Terry Brock

• David Gouthro • Season 3 • Episode 20

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Welcome to Discover Fresh Perspectives! In today’s episode, host David Gouthro sits down with renowned technology expert and speaker, Terry Brock, to explore the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence. From demystifying what AI truly is and discussing its transformative potential, to tackling common myths and concerns, this conversation dives deep into how AI is changing every aspect of our lives and work.

You'll hear real-world examples—from saving lives in medicine to revolutionizing research—and learn why embracing change and continuous learning is crucial in this AI-driven era. Whether you’re a skeptic, enthusiast, or just curious about where technology is heading, Terry brings clarity, humour, and actionable advice for engaging with AI in practical, responsible ways. Don't miss out on this wide-ranging exploration about the opportunities and challenges of our tech-powered future!

A Bit About Terry!

Terry Brock has always been fascinated by technology and its power to transform lives. Throughout his career, he has explored how innovations, like artificial intelligence, can help us accomplish tasks faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Terry recognizes that AI brings tremendous benefits—from automating activities to unlocking new possibilities—and believes it can change our world for the better if we approach it thoughtfully.

Yet, he also acknowledges the need to address potential challenges that come with any new technology. By championing responsible and positive use, Terry aims to guide others toward making the most of AI’s promise in an ever-changing world.

Please check out Terry's Website or his LinkedIn to learn more!

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NOTE: If you wish to join in the podcast fun, please click here to book your own episode with me: https://calendly.com/gouthro/podcast-pals!

SPEAKER_02

Are you stuck in the same old routine at work? Do you find yourself hitting a creative wall, unable to see beyond your current perspective? It's time to break free and unlock the power of fresh perspectives. I'm David Guthrow back with Discover Fresh Perspectives. And today we're getting some fresh perspectives from my friend and colleague Terry Brock. Welcome, Terry.

SPEAKER_00

Great to be with you, David. Let's make some magic today.

SPEAKER_02

So I I don't think there's an option to not have that happen when I'm chatting with you. And I remember, Terry, the first time we met, you had done quite a few presentations for our conferences at the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers, and you've got all kinds of events going on in NSA, and you're uh a recipient of the um uh the CPAE. Is that the correct?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, the Council of Peers Award of Excellence.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, through the National Speakers Association, which is uh, from my perspective, a big deal. And you've always been a fabulous contributor. And mostly it's been in my initial experience was around technology. And boy, has technology ever changed since when we first met a number of years ago. Yes. So, you know, now it's about AI. And uh I'm always interested in your perspectives on on AI and uh, you know, what people need to know about, what some of the myths are, uh, you know, just why it's important, and there's so many aspects to it. So maybe we could just start with, okay, first of all, Terry, what is AI? What's the range of it? Because there's I don't know what the experience of our listeners is around that. So it'd be helpful to kind of have a base of what some of those things are. And I'll continually ask about just a sec, what's that acronym mean? What's an LLM and things like that? So AI, Terry Brock, go.

SPEAKER_00

It is a wonderful tool in many cases. It's called artificial intelligence. And it gives us the ability to have machines do a lot of options, a lot of uh uh recordings, a lot of different activities for us. AI helps us to get things done that we couldn't do before or do it better and definitely faster in many cases. Does it have good? Oh, yeah, a whole lot of good. But also, like any technology, it's got some potential problems that could be there, and we need to address all of that. But it is definitely changing our world the way we know it. And I think if we do it the right way, it's going to change it very much for positive.

SPEAKER_02

So let's dive into that. So when you say the right way, what would be the right way to uh to approach it? And for many people, AI really just came into our lexicon not that many years ago and was widely understood, and it's just been accelerating like crazy. But what's the right way for someone to approach AI if if there is such a thing?

SPEAKER_00

I think there is, and it's uh with an open mind, like with any new technology or something new, to realize, okay, this is a tool, and that's what it is. It's a tool that can help us do our work a little bit better and help us do a lot better in many ways. For instance, we can do research. We can find out what's going on, and we can give it a command. And I did just this morning some things I needed to know. And it can go out and get hundreds, literally hundreds of research points, data points, finding out what's going on and get me research at the quality of a PhD dissertation in a few minutes. We've been using this, uh, we being Gina Carr, my partner, and my fiance and I working together. We have a client we worked with just a little while ago, a few months ago, and they're in the gaming industry. They're over in China. And gaming is something I haven't done a lot with, but we use some tools to go out and do some research. And it did a lot of wonderful things we saw. I mean, literally hundreds of data points. We compiled that, put it together, had AI give us some definitions of what's going on, give us some compilations of it, and then we reported back to our client in China what was happening and some of the trends that are happening and where it's going. Well, this is a very large uh manufacturer over in China. And they came back and they said, you know, we checked you out. What you said didn't sound right, just quite right, but we checked it out and you were right. You were telling us this is where it's going. We went out and checked in the marketplace. It really is going that way. And you gave us some other information, Terry, that we didn't know. And I thought, yeah, this is what AI can do, done the right way. And the right way is you use your brain, you look at it, you use discernment, is this what to do? And as a journalist by training, I know that we have this thing called a rule of three, where we look at if one person says, here's the story, this is what's happening, we go, okay, that's that's nice, that's good. I would be deficient in my uh duties, I'd be a derelict in my duties. If I came back and said, I just talked to this person, this is exactly what's happening, this is the truth. Well, it might or might not be, with all due respect to whoever it was I was speaking to. What you want to do is talk to another person who is not working with that other person, a second person, and then a third person. Now, if I have three different people and they come back saying the same thing, that doesn't mean they're necessarily right. They could be, but all three of them could be wrong. But I've got a little bit more of an advantage going that way to understand, okay, there could be some truth in here. And the beauty of it with AI, it wouldn't stop at three. It can go to literally hundreds, millions of data points, and we start seeing the trends and start realizing, okay, this is what's happening. This is where we're going. So we can make better decisions. Matter of fact, David, I'll give you an example. Just a couple of weeks ago, it really made me feel good. We were at uh, I think you know Gina, my partner's uh past president of the Harvard Club of Central Florida. So uh she was there, a lot of the people get there. We were there for a regular meeting, and uh person came in a little bit later, and we got a chance to go over and talk with him, come to find out. He is a medical doctor, a radiologist, and he graduated from Harvard Medical School. And I said, Well, it's interesting what we're doing. We got into a nice conversation. I said, Yeah, we do a lot with AI. And he said, AI, we're using that now a lot too. I said, Really? What are you doing with it? He goes, Well, Terry, let me show you this. You pull out his smartphone, he said, just today, we were working with an example of a patient, and we thought he was doing all right. We had six different neurosurgeons and heart doctors that were there that were looking at it, saying, everything is looking good. But then the AI came back and told us, wait a minute, there's something long wrong with the uh the goobie flopper or whatever. I mean, it was a technical medical term, gooby flopper, as good as I get. I didn't see a lot of medicine. But you see, that's what it was. And I said, Really? What was that? He said, Well, we looked at it, and then we showed that to the other surgeons, and they said, Yes, when you magnolate, we didn't catch that before. Now we're seeing it. They immediately did surgery on this person, saved his life. And I think, whoa, there's an example of what AI can do. It's finding those elements that are important that we might not have seen before. For you and me, I'm not a heart surgeon, I don't think you are either, but we need to do research on what are the various views on this important topic that our client is interested in. Maybe we didn't know there was a point of view from someone in Ontario that said this, or someone over in Newfoundland that said this and that. We didn't know about that, but now we do, and AI was the one that let us know about.

SPEAKER_02

So I, you know, I find this interesting because, and we'll take the medical example, because I have some friends that are going through some major medical issues right now. Excuse me. And there's a reluctance sometimes to get a second opinion or even a third opinion, because it's so lucky to talk to one person at all. But the fact that AI can gather information from many, many people, and quite often, as you say, you get you get diverse opinions. So I'm walking in the park, there's a couple of people that walk their dogs at the same time that we do, and they're doctors. And occasionally I'll take advantage of that relationship to ask a question and you get different answers, right? So then what I have to do is figure out which one actually feels feels right to me. But that the time saving of being able to do that can have, you know, life altering in a positive way results. So maybe I could just just talk about some of the things that I've heard people wondering or worrying about with with AI. And and I know that the technology changes dramatically. And I think I've heard you say a number of times that the AI that you have today, whatever's not working, guarantee it's going to be working. This is the worst it's ever going to be. It's only going to get better.

SPEAKER_01

Yes.

SPEAKER_02

But some of the things that we've that I've heard people talk about are how sometimes AI makes stuff up. So could you maybe just comment about that, about you know, any information around that and how and how that may be changing? Because I know a lot of people talk about that. They just take it and put it out there. It's like, oh, that's actually not true.

SPEAKER_00

David, you're absolutely right. AI does that because it's been trained to give us a positive answer, to try to make sure we can it complies with us and say, yes, and we call that hallucination. That's literally the term that we use, hallucinations. And we say it's there. But what we're seeing now is that is decreasing dramatically because they're using more deep thinking. That's literally the term that we're using. Deep thinking, so it goes even deeper to rather than say, we're going to check this one book and see what this one book says about this important topic. Well, maybe it'd be better to look at five or ten or a thousand books or whatever the number would be to find the right answer. It could be that there are many that believe that option A is the way to solve this, but there's an option B, C, and maybe even a D or more. And so it can go in there and do that research much faster than the most well-meaning intern that's trying to do that at a local library or a college student who's working on her PhD and she's really, really smart and going out and doing that research, but the AI can do more. So what we do is it's not that we're going to not use her. We're going to use the AI to give her information so that then she can make a better decision so that that wise doctor can look at it and go, oh, here's what the correlation is saying. It's saying this over here. And let's take it to more than one LLM. LLM? Yeah, LLM being, thank you for asking, a large language model. What that means, like Chat GPT, that many people have heard of, that is an LLM. So is a term tool called Perplexity. And so is a tool called GROC, G-R-O-K. And there's several others that are out there. But what you want to do is use more than one. When I'm writing, for instance, I have a blog that goes out or an email I send out every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. And a best damn email that's sent out, at least from me on those Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturdays. I can say that in a bunch. But I want to do research and I want to find out what's going on. So often when it's something really important, I'll check with Chat GPT. I'll check with probably Gemini from Google. I'll also probably check with Grok, G-R-O-I like that, because I'm getting a slightly different point of view from each of them. And then I'll take that, put them together. And then what we want to do is not just what I've heard some well-meaning people say, but would not be correct. They say all you got to do now is copy it and paste it. And then slap your hands together, you're all done. And I think, no, no, no, no, no, please. What you do is you copy, paste, and then customize. Put your own feeling, your own ideas in. For instance, David, AI can give you great answers and ideas, but it doesn't know about that wonderful seminar you went to in Saskatchewan last March. You went there, the professor, I mean, she was great. She raised if these three points that are good, you can share that and give your own opinion on it. You say, I think she was right on this one and this one. I agree with her on point number three, but I would modify that a little bit on this. Whatever. You're putting it in there. You're what I'd like to call you icing it. So you're putting it in. You're David icing it. You're putting in there using a Mary, a friend named Mary might Mary ice it. I'm Terry, so I Terry ice it. Sounds like a fun thing to do. Terry ice the thing. You know, but go in there and I want you to make it you, you icing it. And that's where by using that approach, the journalist to me says, okay, we're doing a lot more research here, which is a healthy thing. Can we know that it's 100% certain? There are very few things that we can do. At least that's the way it works here on planet Earth. Now, up on Omicron CETI 3, that well, wait now, I'm not supposed to talk about it. Never mind. Let's just say that we're doing it, we're doing what we can here on Earth.

SPEAKER_02

So, so Terry, and I'm gonna bump pop all over the place here because it's just things that that I'm I'm curious about. And um so, you know, I've heard people say, like I uh so being good at prompting, asking questions of these these uh LLMs is is really important. But I've heard some people say, you know, after they have gather all this information, then they'll say, and make it sound like me. So which is doing the customized that you're suggesting, but actually have an AI do that. And the sophistication is getting such that it can actually make it make it sound like you. And just the you know, the whole question of of um you know artificial intelligence versus actual intelligence, how do you tell the difference? And I see some people writing articles and saying at the bottom, this has not been produced with the use of AI. Well, anyone can add that to it.

SPEAKER_00

Like how would you ever do nudge nudge? I did it myself. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_02

Like, you know, how uh and and and and should I actually care if something has been uh I'll use the word terrified. I'm sure that's you know, that's not the word you use, but just to have the Terry part in it. Been terrified versus been artificially terrified. Should I care about that? And if so, why?

SPEAKER_00

I think it depends on the situation. There's that old it depends again. I mean, if I'm a medical doctor and I'm recommending to you, should you get uh this operation or not? Well, that's important to know. And it's not a bad thing to get a second opinion or a third opinion. You can get that. If it's something like if I say, you know, what's the capital of uh uh uh Russia? And I tell you, well, it's uh St. Petersburg. Well, is that important to know? Well, I'm wrong on that because it's really Moscow. But uh how important is that to know? Now, if you've got a lot writing on it, I think you'd want to uh get that information. But I think the idea of checking multiple sources is a good rule of thumb. And by doing that and uh maintaining a slight healthy sense of uh uh skepticism. The same. Right. Maybe, maybe not. Let me check it out, is good. And I think to your point, should we be concerned if someone says this was written by me, not by an AI? Really? Was an AI used at all? And I look at it this way. I think, wait a minute, go back in time, way back in time, David, when you and I were little kids and we would go to the library. Remember those places of the library, we go there and we'd get books and all that. And I remember um when I when I was in high school and I'd have to do research for a paper, I'd go to these wonderful angels called librarians. I love them. And they would get me a bunch of books and they might stack four, five, maybe ten books there. And if I pull some information and I say, this book said this, this book said that, always citing the authority, like I should, putting that in there. Am I writing the book myself or am I getting it from other books? Well, I'm using the other books as resources. Yeah. I'm saying this is what they said. My opinion is this, or I think we ought to do that. I think you, that's the way we need to look at AI. It can get us more information. It can, excuse me, it can write something for us. But what we can do is go back and say, I like the way they said that, but I'm gonna reword that and you eyes it. I'm gonna, in my case, Terry eyes this a little bit more, putting my feeling in there. Again, like my hypothetical of that seminar you went to last March in Saskatchewan, that was so good. AI doesn't know about that, but that can be it good for you. And that's that experience you had when you were on the train in Toronto and such and such happened. You could say, this happened to me, and it reminds me of this and this and this. That is uniquely you. And AI can't steal that from us.

SPEAKER_02

So, and I realize a lot of them coming up with the concerns I've heard from other people, some of them I probably have myself. So let's take the notion of the thought leader. That we, you know, who are the thought leaders these days? And, you know, I think sometimes we pay attention to as much to who said it as to what was said. And we ascribe certain credibility to that individual. Now, what if it's not actually from that individual, that it's from like something they've compiled? I don't know if that should make a difference, but you know, how much stock do we put in and who says something as opposed to to what is said? I guess we could always use AI to check it out and get a second opinion on it.

SPEAKER_00

But uh would be a good idea. Yeah, find out did this person really say that? And it might be we don't know. And some things we just can't find that out. But when we can, that's good. But I think more than who said it might be what was said. I see often sometimes you and I talked about before we were recording about social media. And social media has its good side, but it also has a lot of let's use the word yuck, okay? The yuck that's out there. But I think that sometimes I've remembered I've put something out, maybe a quote from a person that I thought was good. I thought the quote was really good. And I put it up, and people will come in derisively say, that's no good because this person was bad, and she did this, and she did that, and she's a terrible person. I thought, wait a minute, what about the quote itself? That's what matters. Here's a statement. I mean, this statement was made. Do we like that statement? Now, if someone said that that was terrible, well, that's a whole different story. But I would take it to, well, even this terrible person, if that person is a terrible person or was a terrible person, could say something that's really good. And I think that's the the way we need to look at it. We need to be discerning, not just jump in and say, I'm not going to do anything that this person said because he did this and this and this years ago. Well, that doesn't relate to what we're talking about right here. For instance, would you want someone who might be a real scum to work with, but they're the best heart surgeon in town? That really knows how to do it.

SPEAKER_02

I think an example that many people could relate to is a musician. You know, you used to like their music, then you found out what a scumbag they were, and all of a sudden that do you stop liking their music because of who the person is? And what do people think about you? Because I still like music from person X who, you know, beat their dog or, you know.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, did something terrible. And yeah, I don't believe in what that person did. They did a bad act. Let's assume they did something that really we would acknowledge as bad. But their music could still be good.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that's a tough one. Okay, here's some more, some more myths, some things I've heard. Just recently, uh, Terry, one is there, and this is uh an article I just read the other day about there's a lot of you know fear-mongering about AI and people saying, well, you know, AI won't take your job, but someone who uses AI will, and things like that. This particular article was saying that uh you really need to look at any job that primarily is based on being in front of a computer screen is in jeopardy. Right. So you're not likely to have, you know, if you're a plumber, people are still gonna have plumbing issues. If they're gonna have before all these things are taken over by robots, which is still a little bit ways out, anything physical, it's gonna be harder to have a ripe replacement, might augment it, not how you get better at it, but you're still gonna need the person there. But anything in in front of a screen, you need to really be thinking about, you know, what the role of AI is and what your role is that in that is gonna be, and and what do you do? And any comments on that would be really appreciated.

SPEAKER_00

I think it's a very important point because yes, it is taking away those kind of jobs, just like automation and electricity and other technologies have done that throughout the centuries. We've seen that. Uh, for instance, I talk a lot in my programs, um where I remember when I was a little kid, we'd go downtown and we had a building that was really tall. It was like five stories. Woo-hoo, that was a big one in small town where I grew up in Michigan. And it was, we'd go there. But they had a person on there dressed in a very nice uniform that would press a button for us and tell us we would say, we're going to uh children's toys. Oh, that's on floor three. They would press number three and take us there. Tell us about anything that might be going on. Oh, and there's a sale this weekend on tricycles. You might look at that while you're here, et cetera, et cetera. And that person uh would help us. Well, those people lost their jobs to electricity, you know, the animation or those kind of things. The automation, all of that is making a big impact. So, yes, we can. And those that stand in front of a screen, yeah, your jobs are vulnerable because AI can write. It can do a really good job at it as well, and it can do a lot of other things. But what we have to do as human beings, just like my mythical friend, who is not mythical, there's a lot of them that did operate in elevators, they needed to learn new skills. They needed to adapt and adjust. My mother was a telephone operator back uh in the 1950s, 60s. They took those wires and they would plug them in, et cetera, et cetera. We don't need them anymore. We have cell phones that we take and you just punch in a number and you're your own telephone operator. Well, should we say, oh, we've lost jobs, we've got to do something for these people? Well, we feel for them. We want something to be done right to help them, but I think all of us have to take it upon ourselves to constantly keep learning. You can't say, I went to school and I studied uh health insurance, or I studied health, or I studied uh economics or history, as if it were an inoculation. I did it once, I don't have to do it again. Well, we need to keep learning on what What's new and what's relevant in our world today?

SPEAKER_02

So, and and you know, I don't want to dive too much into theory here, but I will for just a moment, because you can look at an adoption curve of technology. And I think part of the quest is you know, when do you see when do you take a look at where you are in that adoption curve and start to look for things differently? And I'll give you another example. Um, projectionists in movie theaters. This used to be a really big deal. Like there's all this huge equipment, you had to thread all this kind of stuff, and now you know, push a button and go. But a lot of the the projectionists, you know, fought against this protection, protect our jobs and things like that.

SPEAKER_01

Yes.

SPEAKER_02

And and you know, if you wait until there's absolutely no opportunity left, it's almost too late. It's when do you start seeing when the opportunity is to start to adopt a different technology? And and now adoption curve as technology changes so quickly, the length of time for those adoption curves is much, much faster. So, you know, when when should people, when and who and when should people start looking at how I prepare for a world that may not value or need what I'm doing now? Like when do you start looking at those things and what's an approach to that?

SPEAKER_00

The who is everyone, and the when is constantly. We have to keep looking at because it is changing very fast. And you never know when the job you had that you thought was secure is taken away. We've seen lots of that. Like you were saying, there are the people that put did the projectors. We remember that. Now that's all automated. And we've seen that with many jobs. But also, I'd look at one of the jobs years ago. The way to really do farming, which is important for eating, anyone that's eating, we would plow the fields, you would have a physical plow in the ground, there would be some beasts of burden, some donkeys or some oxen or whoever you could wrap some stuff around and get them to start moving in the right direction. Well, these people lost their jobs doing that. However, are we better off now because we have machines doing it? I think so. We're getting more yield per acre, and the really, really smart people in the agriculture industry look at it way smarter than me. And they say we use this and this technology, et cetera. They're getting more done. Matter of fact, we're even at the point now, we might not even people meet people driving the tractors. We can have that done controlled by satellite. It's being done right now. And we see, are we going to do something for those poor farmers? Well, the farmers are gonna have to change just like you and I are gonna have to. And literally everyone on the planet is gonna have to re-examine and change. We might say, Oh, I don't like that. I've studied this in school. I got a degree in that. Well, that's real good, Sparky, but right now you got to switch and change. Welcome to Planet Earth. It works that way here. So we have to adapt and adjust.

SPEAKER_02

So another question I have then is how do you how do you learn? And I'll tell you why I'm uh concerned about this. I was watching a clip on uh, I think it was a presentation to Congress in the US on something about learning and education. And the person who's doing this presentation was talking about how for the for the first time this generation, uh, in terms of the measures of of comprehension and things like that is actually dropped for the first time. Because then they started this back in, I think, to the 1800s, measuring certain things like uh how you understand complexity, how you respond to to ambiguity and things like that. And every every generation was getting better because you had better education, spent more time in schools and things like that. And then something changed. And uh all of a sudden, a lot of the learning was done online or in front of a screen. And part of his point was that we evolved as human beings to learn from other people. We, you know, we are social beasts in terms of how we learned. And now these scores were dropping. And one of the examples was used to be that you'd be given, let's say, a 750-word uh paragraph or story, then be asked a series of questions that required you to interpret what you'd heard. It wasn't based on on the facts, factual recollection, but but how do you make meaning of some of those things and put it together? And and uh that was one of the ways they determined a certain level of comprehension and and and uh cognitive ability. So now they're getting to the point that the tests are looking so bad that they're actually changing the tests to make things look better. And he is the example now where they give you uh one statement of fact and then they ask a question, a factual question about that statement, then another statement and then a question. So actually, you know, being dumbed down, right, because of the ways that that we've been learning. So, you know, if you want to learn, if you want to get better, if you want to adapt uh to some of these new technologies, what are some ways to actually go about doing that? How to get how to get started, where actually we know how we learn, but there's this variety of ways to do it, many of which aren't as effective as human beings to pick it up. I realize that's a very big question. There's a PhD in here for you, Terry.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, there would be. Well, I think you're asking the right question. These are very important because we've got to look at what do we do in dumbing it down? I don't think that's the answer. Would we want to go to a restaurant where they dumbed it down and made the menu not quite as healthy? There's only a few things in there that would kill you. And we didn't lose more than half of our customers, you know. No, no, no, no, no. Not a way to do it. Or would you want to go to the surgeon who got through and got a medical degree, but it was at that school where they kept cutting it back and making it easier? No, I certainly don't want to get on the airplane with the pilot like that. And we could go on with many other examples, and the answer is a resounding no. And so I think the key we need to start with is realize this is reality. We have to continually learn. We've got to stretch our brains and we've got to grow more. By the way, this uh side benefit good news is neuroscientists and people who are way smarter than me in how our brain works say the more we stretch it and make it work and learn, reading, learning a new language, learning square dancing, literally, learning a musical instrument, learning a new language. All of this helps us to strengthen our brain. The more we do that, the longer we're going to live. So it's good for us personally, but also this way we're making our brain stronger. And AI comes in there and helps us. There's an example, for instance, on uh ChatGPT, there's a mode called study and learn. So that it teaches you a given subject. You get the very best tutors in the world that are with us now or that are no longer with us. And you can have structured lessons that go back in a Socratic method, not just saying, what's the answer to this, but what would you think of this if you had to do it this way? Oh, now you're having to think. And psychologists tell us the more we make the brain think and have to work harder to learn something, the more we learn it. So the good news is we can learn more. The bad news is circling back to what you were talking about with schools and universities, and they're seeing their laureate, they've got a model that is broken. That model with one person standing in front on a chalkboard or whiteboard or whatever, writing things down and having them remember what needs to be done for the test that's coming up next Friday. That's an old model that we're seeing is not working. What we've got to do now is change the way we learn so that we're asking inquisitive questions, things that are tough, and that when we don't know it, it remembers that and it goes back and asks us again. Study and learn mode is something that's on ChatGPT. Other LLMs, the large language models, have equivalent tools to do something like that. And for everyone that's listening to this, I encourage you to look into that, see what's there, so that you can start training your brain and be ready now for the job you have that could change and probably will.

SPEAKER_02

So I'm gonna pause for a moment and diverge for just a sec. So the first pause is that all this information that Terry's talking about, I'm gonna make sure that's in your program notes. So if you're listening to this and driving, don't write it down. I'll make sure all this is in there, as well as some great ways to get more of Terry, because he has some, he has some amazing resources. He and his his uh partner Gina do some absolutely amazing work. So that's that's one thing. My second diversion is we're both part of uh an associate. Actually, the politics have changed. We were once both part of something called the Global Speakers Federation.

SPEAKER_00

And in our hearts, we still are.

SPEAKER_02

But you know, a lot of the model amongst professional speakers is still very much the conferences. One person speaks and everyone else listens, which is totally contrary to what Terry's saying we need to do if we really want to learn. We have to let people engage with it. Okay, so I'll set that aside. Now, my next question is that I think there's a lot of myths out there, Terry, that prevent people from even willing to engage in learning more about artificial intelligence. So do you have a sense of what some of those myths might be that that people are using as excuses for not choosing to learn more?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, they have all kinds of excuses. Sometimes people will say, oh, it's gonna ruin our world and we got to stop doing it now. To which I think, well, come on, let's look at it like any technology. But for instance, airplanes. You and I know that airplanes are the safest form of transportation. They really are. Now, are they perfect and are people still dying? Well, unfortunately, yes, that has happened. It does. But that doesn't mean we give it up. It doesn't mean we say, no, we're never gonna fly on any airplanes ever again. No, no. We say, let's study what happened. We feel for the families of those that were lost and those that were in accidents, yes. And we want to address that. Same thing with learning. We've got to realize that what we did before and the way we did it has changed forever now. This is at Gutenberg Press and more level of change quality. We're seeing that our world has changed. And now you can say, okay, I'm not gonna do it, but then you'll get run over. And I think we've got to look at that and be aware there are gonna be some uh challenges to any new technology that comes out.

SPEAKER_02

So, what are some some of the bars, how do you address some of the barriers like, I'm not smart enough to learn this, I'm too old to learn this? Like, how do you address those that that I think are largely self-impoled myths and barriers? But you know, how if people are holding on to that, and some of them are listeners maybe saying, Yeah, yeah, this is for other people, it's not for me. I'm X years old. What do you say to them?

SPEAKER_00

I would say if you're X years old, whatever that X is, even if it's considered a large number, new science shows us, hey, your brain can rejuvenate itself done the right way. There are really smart medical doctors, psychologists, neurosurgeons, people, neuroscientists that you can go to and talk to about this. Ask them about what's going on. If they're saying, oh no, your brain decreases all the time, well, then there's a person you don't want to see. Go see others. But those that are looking at it realize our brains can keep going long into the hundreds. And I'm talking about being healthy and strong, not thinking, oh, I don't want to get so old that I'm decrepit. No, strong body, strong mind, achieving positive goals well into our hundreds. We can do it now. Now that means there's certain things you need to do, certain kinds of exercise, foods to eat, and certain things you shouldn't do. Okay, that kind of food, you don't want to eat it. Maybe this drinking here or that, you need to talk to a professional about it, find out what's going on, see what's happening. And I think we can do that, but we've got to realize this is the way our world is. It has changed, and we can sit and try to deny it, but that won't work. That's not going to solve it. Instead, embrace the new and the opportunities for bringing. Here's a wild and crazy concept, peace to our planet somewhere. Maybe we can do that. There's enough of us crazy out there. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one, as my friend John said long, long ago, much better than I could. But I think we could look at it and say, let's make this world a better place. Let's start with ourselves. Start with what we can control, like a stoic way of living, David, that you and I embrace the idea of I can't control everything, but I can control how much I can exercise today. Oh, okay, I'm gonna do that. I can control that. I can control what food I'm gonna eat. I can control when I'm gonna go to bed for the most part and when I'm gonna get up. So I make sure I get that quality of sleep that the doctors tell us we need to do. Find out what it is and stay in tune with it. Don't stick your head in the ground and go, oh, well, I'm not gonna pay attention to it. Throughout history, people that have denied things like that don't do well. They no longer are on planet Earth. And we see that what we've got to do is continue to, as the United States Marines say, improvise, adapt, and overcome. And that's what we need to do.

SPEAKER_02

So this is fabulous. It's so fabulous that I only have two more questions I'd like to explore in this particular podcast. And and the and I'll tell you what they both are. But the first one is what are some what are some cautionary notes uh about the use of AI? You know, uh they talk about blind faith may not necessarily be the best thing in approaching this. So any cautionary notes. And then the second thing is so if you just decided as a result of listening to those podcasts, you want to get started on learning more, what are one or two ways that that you could suggest people to go to to start learning and acquiring more knowledge around AI? So, first of all, any cautionary notes, any, you know, keep your radar open for these things and don't just swallow everything. And then, okay, how do I get started?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I would agree with you on that. Don't just believe everything. That's a good rule of thumb in life. Just because someone says it doesn't necessarily mean it's true. And look at AI. They can have what's called hallucinations. That's the term we use for it. And that means they're trying, but the AI has been programmed to give you a positive answer, to try to be there to help you. That's its programming, it's training, as we call it. And so what you want to do is say, okay, that's good. Are you sure about that? I've had many times when I ask AI something, Chat GPT or perplexity or grok, and I ask a question, and it comes back with something that I go, wait a minute, that can't be true because of this. And it'll come back and say, oh, yeah, I was wrong on that. Here's what it is. So you want to keep asking those questions and realize we've got to learn. We've got to make sure that our brain keeps going in the right direction. And I would say, think of a topic you would like to learn, particularly something that might be valuable in the marketplace. So many of us are choosing a life of being an entrepreneur. We can create our own lifestyle, the things we want. We do have to push ourselves a little bit there. Matter of fact, a lot of it. We have to push ourselves and find the tools that are out there through Perplexity, through ChatGPT. And this is where you can start learning one, how to learn, two, what to learn by looking at the research. Where is there in demand right now? Where are employers looking for jobs and they can't find the people that know how to do that? Hey, maybe that's what I ought to start studying, huh? And they're paying a lot of money for that. Yeah, okay. I might need to study something different than what I'm doing now. But I want you to think about something that might be not quite the same as what you're doing, but it might be tangential to it. Just a step to the side. And it's similar. You can learn it. You're gonna have to put some work in, you're gonna have to do some study. But using the AI, it can tell you the questions to ask. It can start asking you the right questions, and it can remember what you did, what you got right, and what you got wrong two weeks ago, three weeks ago, and come back and check with you again on that. This is what it does brilliantly. So that now you're really learning a valuable skill in the marketplace. People say, Oh, you can do that? Hey, could you come work with us? We'll pay you a high dollar number. Oh, okay, I think that's good. And you get in there and you can do it. So instead of it being doom and gloom, you might lose your job. It's kind of those elevator operators that we talked about that would push buttons to get people to the right floor. And now suddenly they don't have a job. Well, they've got done, they've got other jobs now. They have discovered new ways they can take their brain and do something. Frankly, it might be a lot more fun than standing in an elevator punching buttons all day long. And so now we have a great opportunity if we know what to do and seize it. One of the best things to do, don't try to do it by yourself. You can do a lot and should do a lot of reading and study by yourself, but also be in a community. Find a community that helps you learn, a learning community of people that are saying, yes, we can help you, we can help you with this, we can do it. There are many, many wonderful communities out there. Check into them, find out what is right for you for the topic you want to learn. And hey, use the Chat GPT and other tools to find out where they are, where they exist and what's available to help you learn the skills that are going to be right for you.

SPEAKER_02

Terry, I'm so glad you added that last piece about the importance of community, because it'd be so easy to do to do virtually everything that that uh an LLM recommends it to do on screen. And but we're still such social beings. So I'm so glad you brought it back to let's learn together, let's have that community. I think that's absolutely fabulous.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I think that's important. We all are there, we do work. One of the things we talk about is you know, in our program, uh Stark Raving Entrepreneurs, we use the Japanese saying that is very popular in Silicon Valley. None of us is as smart as all of us. Yeah. And so by being in that community where there's a lot of really smart people or people that are helping you, each person's got to decide what group is right for them. And sometimes you try a group for a while and it was good, but not anymore. Now I need something else. Okay, that's fine. Just like we went through elementary school, then we went through high school and we changed friends, we changed things. And when high school graduated, we went somewhere else and did something. That's life. It keeps changing and growing. We're with this group for a while, then we move over here. But have that as your idea. You're going to train and study yourself the best you can with AI, but then you're also going to get the help with others, hanging around people who are smarter than you in key areas. That's how you make a difference.

SPEAKER_02

Terry, this has been great. I'm so grateful for you, first of all, being willing to be a guest, and then also being such a good guest, because I haven't had any bad guests, but you're like you were a fabulous guest.

SPEAKER_00

And uh, thank you. And you're a fabulous host. I would really appreciate it. By the way, folks, you got to get to know this guy. If you don't know him, I've known the game for decades. And this man is very smart. He's well respected in his community. He's a good guy. Find out his stuff, get to know what he's doing. And he's not giving me any money or anything to say on that. What I'm seriously, person to person, human being to human being, get to know this wonderful guy. And I think you will find a lot of good for you.

SPEAKER_02

Well, so in sales, they talk about not skating past the close. So this is a great place to end. So thank you so much, Terry and uh Terry Brock, put lots of information in the uh in the program notes. And come on back next week. All I can guarantee it will be a different person with a different perspective on something, and that there's a danger that you will really enjoy it. Subscribe now because on Fresh Perspective, every episode is an opportunity to explore new horizons and redefine what's achievable.