Click or Clash: Rethinking Connection, Loneliness and Love with Dr Ali Walker

In this episode of the Wisdom We Share podcast, we sit down with Dr Ali Walker to explore what it really means to connect, belong and lead in a world that is more “plugged in” yet lonelier than ever.

Ali’s research sits at the crossroads of self-awareness, science and soulful leadership. Together we unpack her groundbreaking framework on connection types, how our wiring shapes every relationship in our lives, and what it takes to create a relationship “pool” that feels clear, nourishing and safe to swim in.

This conversation is not about quick fixes. It is an invitation to look honestly at how you connect, where you feel misaligned, and how you can take sacred responsibility for the “container of energy” between you and the people you love, work with and lead.

In this conversation we explore:

- Why relationships are the strongest predictor of wellbeing, even above diet, sleep and exercise
- Ali’s research on connection styles and why frequency and intensity matter more than “I like / don’t like this person”
- The difference between aloneness, solitude and loneliness, and why you can feel lonely in a crowded room
- How low, mid and high frequency connectors seek connection in very different ways
- Why many low frequency people find nourishment in “non-human” sources of connection such as nature, art, animals and spiritual practice
- How intensity shows up in relationships, from shared activity to deep, eye to eye conversations
- Why friendships often feel easier than romantic partnerships, and how complements differ from mirrors
- The idea of each relationship as a sacred container of energy that both people pour into

Find Ali online:

Website: https://awalker.co/
Assessment and programs: https://www.alitylife.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/draliwalker/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/draliwalker/

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Transcript

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if you think of it as a container of energy a lot of people are storing judgment shame conditioning uh expectations into that little container of energy and both of you are holding that container of energy all the time and so if we're storing that level of emotion or energy in the container between us over time people aren't gonna wanna hold that container because it doesn't become a source of anything good for either of you it just becomes a source of all of those emotions so I actually think the first step is a acknowledging that there's this container between us that we're both investing in it's like a pool of water when I'm working with cultures and leaders I talk to people about everyone in the culture is pouring water into that culture and we want that water to be clear and something that everyone can swim in and it's the same thing in a relationship so if you think about this container of energy that we're pouring into um what is the energy that you're pouring into your relationship and then how does it actually feel to be in that um I think that that in itself just that that sacred responsibility of oh I'm actually contributing to this I think a lot of people see relationships as happening to us um almost as though we're victims of the other person um and their energy but when we start to empower ourselves and realise that we're contributing as well we're both contributing um something happens something shifts welcome to the Wisdom We Share podcast where ancient truths and modern intelligence weave together to inspire ground and shape us for a wiser awakened life I'm Angela Amrit and I'm Robin Wald and together we bring you fascinating conversations from the worlds of spirituality science and human behavior so you can connect to your own inner wisdom joy and clarity elevating the way you actually live your life today we're speaking with someone whose work sits at the nexus of self awareness connecting science and leadership Doctor Ali Walker with a background in law a PhD in human behaviour and batons of media experiences Ali has dedicated her life to asking how do we truly connect lead and belong her latest book click or clash explores the motivations that drive how we relate to others and how understanding our wiring can shift everything from teams families and relationships right through to our own soul's call this conversation is not about quick fixes or leadership checklists it's about tuning in to what really lights us up what holds us back and how the quality of our inner world shapes our connections and contributions Ali thank you so much for being here today thank you for having me and thank you for that beautiful bio I actually I'd love it actually I'd like to use it again because you actually just put so shed so much light on what I do for me yeah it's it's really intriguing what you do you bring in quite a number of um experiences and wisdom from different aspects of life I wanna start off in your book click or clash you show how underlying motivational drivers determine whether we're feeling aligned or in conflict and a big part of the work I do is about getting into alignment releasing what I call resistance um when you first discovered this in your research what did you realize about your own wiring and how did that perhaps change your life hmm wow it changed my life in every way in fact it's still changing my life so just to give a bit of context to the the book click or clash and the framework that is at its basis I wanted to I I started off actually after my PhD I started off thinking about well being and I thought I would be a well being researcher and as I went a little bit further along I realized that yes I was a well being researcher but at the heart of well being and the most important indicator of well being is relationships and so I and so much so that it it's almost has doubled the impact of say diet exercise sleep is still obviously all these things are very important you can't take them away but if you look at the outcomes for people who are thriving in their lives particularly as we age the one clear differentiator is is our relationships the quality of our social relationships and that's the Harvard Study of Adult Development that's been running since 1938 that has articulated that most clearly and so I realized okay yes I am a well being researcher but I need to focus here on relationships and I wanted to understand what makes us feel lonely because if you think about the absence of connection and the absence of belonging that experience is loneliness and I ended up developing a framework that helps us understand how we experience loneliness and how we experience true connection and that framework is at the heart of the book and the the elements of alignment that you're speaking about there's two elements one is frequency of connection so how much you need and the other one is intensity of connection and no one talks about this people say yes you need social connection in order to have well being but no one talks about what that actually means to have meaningful and authentic social connection because for you that might be something it might look very different to what I need in terms of my connection and and that's what I wanted to understand so everyone I and 25,000 people have now taken the assessment to understand uh what true connection looks like for them what loneliness looks like for them so I now have some fantastic research to to base a lot of this um work on and uh I'll give you an example one of the most compelling aspects of the research is uh when I ask people how do you most like to connect I say on your own so there's five options on your own one on one in a small group of two to 5 or sorry in a small group of three to five in a large group of 6 to 15 or at a party or network or conference event and 60% of people say in a small group of three to five 60% of people now that's pretty compelling so then I go into workplaces and say if you wanna have psychologically safe groups and teams to work with try to break up your teams into groups of three to five so that's an example of of how meaningful connection can occur and how misalignment can happen so easily but I'm going off on lots of different tracks here um so I'll come back to see if you if there's anything you wanna hone into or um hit hone in on so thank you so much for all of that context and wow yes I have so many follow up questions um I'm curious if you have the data to share on those other four how how many people out of 100% if 60% want to connect in small group three to five people how many on their own how many one to one large group yeah yeah like yeah I don't have the exact numbers off the top of my head but I can tell you the next pop most popular was one on one hmm then small group and then large group of six to 15 um then on your own and the final one was party or networking event which is so funny this comes back to what meaningful connection looks like we think I need social connection I'll have a party ha ha I'll I'll um I'll do something to um get everyone together and and that was actually the the most the the least popular um way of experiencing connection but just very quickly so then then we have all the full context just to go back to the frequency and intensity I say to when I'm talking to groups of people I say to people we the stories that we tell and the language that we use is is around I like that person I don't like that person I love being around this person I can't stand this person that's this that's the language we use and I say to people it's actually unscientific to to use that those terms we need to start saying we are a match in frequency or we are not a match in frequency we are a match in intensity or we are not a match in intensity because that's what determines how we connect with other people so frequency is just how much connection you like with other with other people if you're a low frequency connector so that's correlated with being an introvert you are going to be you're going to want to be on your own for more than half the time if you're an ambivert so I call it mid frequency connector you want to be on your own around half the time with others around half the time and then if you're a high frequency connector an extrovert you want to be around other people for more than half the time so so many issues in our relationship can just come down to frequency matches how often do you meet couples who say ah they just wanna go out all the time or equally someone might say they never talk to me they never talk to and we take these things so personally you know you might get I interview people all the time I interview couples and you might get one couple saying I get to the weekend and all I wanna do is just stay at home with my partner just relax and and be at home and be together and the partner is a high frequency person so they need access and exposure to lots of different people lots of different groups and it's not personal to that one person it's just that they're wired for more connection so I feel that well my observation is we go around taking so many things personally when in fact it just comes down to how we are wired for meaningful connection so frequency is just how much and intensity is what type so you can be low intensity mid intensity or high intensity and that determines the types of of connection you wanna engage in and when with those types Ali um I have a couple of questions so I might ask one first and one is with the low frequency cause I'm definitely a low frequency like I'm an introvert put me in a box I'm happy um but for me my connection comes from my spiritual practice so for me it's not around people it's around a higher perspective a God divine whatever you wanna call it did you do you have that in your like do you and I'd love to hear about that if you do in in the year yes so so what I say is we all need the same amount of connection let's call it connection just across the board some people get most of their connection from other people if you're a low frequency connector all that means is that your sources of connection are non human to use it yeah non human that's great I love that so you'll be looking for connection in um so not you but just a low frequency connector they'll be looking for connection in say their animals their art music uh when I've interviewed people they say things like I'll go to the art gallery on the weekend on my own I'll watch a movie uh I take my dogs for a walk and I listen to audio books all of these things are sources of connection they're just non human sources of connection so when I say someone's low frequency it just means they're a low frequency human connector and they just need less face to face or humans is the best way of putting it the lowest frequency I've ever gotten and the highest I should say so um the lowest is 20% so everyone needs people at least some of the time um and the highest frequency I've ever gotten is 80% so everyone needs to be on their own at least a small portion of the time but the 20% frequency he I actually had the opportunity to meet him and he uh he's a farmer and he said my nearest neighbour is 60 km away and that's how I like it so he got his connection from his animals on the farm from just being at peace in nature just from you can get your connection from place just and and First Nations people have been doing that for 40,000 years there are so many different sources of connection spiritual connection it's not just other people but this is it's so important to figure out what your source of connection is in order to avoid loneliness because and Johnny if you if you take you if I just pick you up and say alright I'm gonna put you into this other this extroverts life and you on paper are having all of this different connection with people you would feel lonely at the end of that even though you were surrounded by people you'd feel lonely because you weren't filled with the source of connection that you need hmm that would that actually goes beautifully into a question I was gonna ask maybe you could just elaborate on it more I was gonna ask you to distinguish loneliness from aloneness because I like Angie I'm somebody who really enjoys being alone it's my preference and I spend a lot of time with people but then I need to recharge alone in nature with a book with music um in silence in spiritual practice but I never feel lonely when I'm doing that no so I crave aloneness but that's not loneliness so I'm wondering just for our listeners like how would you distinguish those two things yeah so so what you're describing is solitude so alone time in peace and nurturing of self is solitude and it's actually the first step to nourishing relationships with others so we need to in fact I was listening to a podcast with Brene Brown on the weekend and the line she uses is before you can belong anywhere you need to belong to yourself and so that experience of solitude is so important loneliness is when you are alone but you have negative feelings that arise so it's the the negative experience that comes from being on your own and I see or that that's when that's the loneliness that arrives that derives from aloneness but the way I describe loneliness or define it is much broader it's just the negative feelings that arise when what we want from connection is not what we're getting from connection so you can feel lonely in a room full of people in fact some of the most profound experiences of loneliness in the literature have been in intimate couple intimate partner relationships where people are sitting on the couch next to someone but couldn't feel further away from them emotionally and the expectation is I'm with my life partner I'm with my romantic partner and I don't feel connected and that can be extremely lonely so loneliness is just a negative feeling that comes from the experience of not having the connection that you would like to be having um that can be when you're on your own that can be when you are with one other person or a group of people or at a party in fact some of my most profound experiences of loneliness have probably been in in groups of people where I I mean I'm just thinking of one that comes to mind when I was in high school very new to this school and sitting in a group of girls who I didn't really know that well and someone came up and said do you mind if I sit down with you and most of us just shuffled around sure of course to make space for her and one of the girls in the group said you can sit with us but you can't talk and that experience of I didn't even have the language for it at the time but I can't I didn't even feel like I could talk before you arrived and now I feel completely alienated from this situation so that kind of loneliness to me is very profound but it's really important for for everyone to realize that loneliness can happen anywhere um whether you're on your own or with others yeah I I'm working with um a couple at the moment and they what they're lacking is that emotional intimacy that you just as you said and they are two very different types and a lot of what you're talking about to me reminds me of um all of the philosophy of ayurvedic medicine and science which is what is your body type and what are your elements what are your main elements and and how do you connect in relationship and and what are your styles of connecting what are your needs and wants in relationship and and that aspect of knowing knowing your type your frequency it you know is one beautiful aspect of what the wisdom of Ayurveda brings so it's really fantastic that you're bringing this to people because it's something that they can easily grasp it's something that they can easily identify then having identified that what do they do with that because you just mentioned you know what I would call probably people pleasing and I know it's like a pack mentality but from there once we've identified okay this is my way of getting my connection what do we do then do you have any suggestions what would you say to people hmm so I think we're pretty clear on frequency which is the how much element people would have known about that before the introvert extrovert continuum intensity is new in the literature and I think that's really at the heart of what we need to to grasp about ourselves and our needs so intensity is how do you bond with others what makes you feel what kind of experience makes you feel most connected to others or to yourself so intensity is this continuum of I call it emotional tone and it's if if you think of frequency as a an amount or a percentage of time intensity is more like a temperature so on on the one side the lowest intensity you've got someone who prefers to just be in positive shared experience so when I ask low intensity people what do you like to do on the weekend or what do you like to do with your friends they'll say things like go surfing go fishing uh go for a bike ride go kayaking no eye contact you're just engaged in activity together no focus on talking then you move up to the mid intensity types and they they want entertainment they wanna have fun so they might be saying things like oh we go and see a sports game together we might play cards together we uh go out to dinner or go to the pub in a group so there's shared experience it's usually in a group setting and it's a bit of talking but also a bit of activity and then high intensity people what do you do on the weekend we go to breakfast we go to coffee we go to brunch we go to lunch we go to dinner we go to drinks any opportunity to sit eyeball each other and talk about anything that's going on for us this could be one on one it could be in a group of other high intensity people so generally when you're seeking out connection you're looking for people who bond in the same way as you and I would put a lot of money on the fact that anyone listening the people that you whose company you seek out either as co workers or friends are going to be an intensity match to you now what's interesting is that when you get into romantic relationships you're not looking for a match you're not looking for exactly the same as you because you're looking for what I call it's a match in a way but you're looking for a um missing puzzle piece that will fit with you but not duplicate so a friend is a bit like a mirror you made a friend who's an intensity match hopefully a frequency match and um and you you you click straight away cause you wanna be around each other all the time a romantic partner's a bit trickier and it's because you're looking for your whether you breed with that person or not it gets quite primal whether we intend to breed with our romantic partner or not you're looking for someone who's going to create you 2.0 so you want someone who might smooth out your edges if you're extreme in one way you might be looking for someone to you're looking for a balance when you're finding a romantic partner does that happen consciously or unconsciously Ellie no totally unconsciously yeah I thought so and so this is why a lot of people will find friendships a little bit more straightforward than romantic relationships cause friendships you're just looking for a mate you're looking for for your reflection basically in another person um romantic partnerships are a bit bit more complex because you're looking for someone to be your complement now the the if you're looking for a predictive whether a relationship is going to last or not um I can actually if it's too extreme so if your frequency is high frequency and you've got a low frequency partner it's probably not going to last because it's just you're too far apart um if you've got someone who is the highest intensity and someone who's the lowest intensity it's not gonna last cause there is just no way of meeting in the middle um you've got some people who are whose connection type is right in the middle and so they're compatible with anyone on on the the grid um but if you are an extreme it's going to be more difficult to connect with someone on the opposite so to your question you were saying so what do people do with this information armed with this information I suggest that people open their calendar for the week and schedule in meaningful connection before you do anything else so there should be four elements of meaningful connection that are a part of your hopefully every day if not every day every week um the those four connections are No. 1 belonging to self and place so um loving where you spend most of your time and having a daily practice that helps you feel connected to yourself it's that feeling of the exhale so whatever enables you to exhale and breathe deeply some people only do that once a day that they actually huh what whatever gives you that feeling and uh for me I live near a coastal track in Sydney and I love to do that once a day when you so Robin you were speaking before about all the beautiful things you do to experience solitude I that's actually my struggle so I'm one of five children I am a naturally high frequency connector and high intensity connector so I love people love connecting through talking and that's that's what I do that's connection for me um when I got into the research and I realized oh my gosh to optimize my relationships I actually need to be able to have nourishing time alone I that's the one thing I will avoid if I can it's a knee jerk reaction it's it's a problem and I've had to overcome it I don't know why I avoid it cause when I go into it I feel exactly the same way that you do as you describe reading going for a walk on my own going in the ocean on my own it's delicious but for some reason I just avoid it like some people will avoid parties or big gatherings of social groups so um it's it's the key for me now so interesting I'm also one of 5 actually um but this actually goes to another question I have which is I'm fascinated by different systems of that create self awareness for people that elevate our consciousness about who we are and kind of what are sense of self and how we express that what are you know challenges I'm an astrologer so astrology is my main primary tool for understanding what we need and obviously in astrology there's all kinds of information in a person's chart and how that chart evolves over time and by transit in any moment that really speaks to what we need in relationships and then comparing a chart with another person there's all kinds of relationship astrology synastry composites where you're looking for what like what you said about well you wanna mirror and balance each other but if you're too different than the it's too much of a conflict and it's not gonna be comfortable and it you would just won't be able to relax with each other or vibe with each other but in addition to astrology there are other systems right like you know the introvert extrovert and Myers Briggs but there's also human design there's also love languages there's also you know relationship attachment styles I'm curious what distinguishes your kind of profile and um the quiz that you offer for people yeah yeah um how does that compare to or distinguish itself from other types of assessments yeah so um I love that question cause I'm also fascinated by all these different systems and ways of understanding relationships I think uh no one's talked about intensity in the way that um I have described it um or evaluated it in terms of the types of activities we need so if you think about the Myers Briggs and they're talking about intuition or sensing or judging it's very much what I found about a lot of these systems it's understanding you it's the really the self awareness of um when you feel connected this is more I wanted to understand what do we bring into groups and relationships so when do we what are our needs with other people and the diagnostic assessment actually gives you two results the first result is where are you connecting now so based on your and the assessment is a series of paired questions how many conversations do you have per day how many would you prefer to be having so it's a series of questions like that what are you talking about with people what would you prefer to be talking about with people you get two results of where you're currently connecting and where you prefer to be connecting based on those two results the the gap between them can tell you how lonely or how stressed you are because if your current connection is not aligned with how you prefer to be connecting then you're going to experience resistance and this comes back to the alignment we started talking about the resistance is in what what emotional labor is your environment asking you to do that is out of alignment with who you naturally are so I'll give you an example I have three sons so I live in a house with my husband and three boys I live with four males I'm high intensity so that means I love talking and I love having deep conversations so I need to organize chats with people like you in order to get my intensity needs met it's not about saying oh I live with um these people and I should give some more context there cause there are obviously high intensity men um and by the way in the last 10 years that has shifted it used to be there used to be quite a gender split that you had women were high intensity men tended to be low intensity now um there is it's a this interesting mirror of what's happening socially that it's it's morphing you know there's no there's no necessary gender split here um my husband happens to be mid intensity and um my sons are also mid intensity so what that means is that I can occasionally experience loneliness because we go from watching the Rugby to going to the ocean they're becoming surf lifesavers then they're playing sport again now we're playing touch football now they're playing cricket we just do all these mid intensity things I love sport too but at the end of the week sometimes I can feel hold on where did I get where was I being filled up and so I need to find my other sources of connection I think um to to the question before about what what do we do with this information you can't obviously perfectly design your environment or the people around you to meet all your connection needs it's about understanding okay well here's my intensity here's where I currently am so there's a misalignment there what are some activities I can bring into my week that are going to fill me up and give me the sources of connection that I need and I think that's what this assessment gives us that it's not a here you are here's your type off you go see you later it's OK well here is where you currently are so I would hope that people are doing this multiple times throughout their adult life to see where they're connecting and in fact I've worked with people going through grief worked with people on workers compensation who've had injuries at work and their connection type acutely changed for for 12 to 24 months after their injury while they were recalibrating and and working out who they were after this catastrophic event so it's really interesting to use it as a barometer I guess it's it's a barometer of alignment um how how authentically am I connecting at the moment and and how uh empowered do I feel I think um it's a it's a wonderful tool for people to start to if they if they're not on a journey of self awareness self development or have been on one a little while and they're looking for more tools I think it's a really amazing tool that people can use to start to understand themselves more and also how they're showing up in the world um you did talk about other systems not not referring to how we get our correlation and connection from outside um but I think they do I think other systems do do that astrology definitely does I Veda definitely does um so there are there are many means to bring in that you know how do I connect with myself how do I connect with others um but I wonder I'm I'm interested in your opinion around how does your work correlate with what we might call soul driven connection or purpose LED relationships where yes we're in a relationship yes there's different frequencies and different alignments but where where do the metrics drop away and where does things like me working out working through my soul's destiny working through my doing my inner work what's your take on that can you say more about the matrix dropping away yeah so once so once we've identified okay this I'm a high frequency or I'm a low frequency and once we've identified that and yet we're in a relationship say we're married to someone we're in a relationship um and I realize this about me I realize this about my partner and all my kids um yes I can make these changes but but following that what is the deeper work that I can do for myself with myself in myself and what is the deeper work between me and my partner my relationships beyond knowing that type that's what I'm saying is when those metrics once though those metrics have been um understood which you know your your process is gonna really help people do that in such an amazing way I'm just keen to hear if you have any um wisdom from from that once you know that beyond the this is where I'm going to source my connection from what yup what if is there any deep work is there any purpose LED relationship you know in other words we have a we have a bond between us we've entered into these soul contracts we're here you know do you have any do you have any wisdom to share around that is that something that you would wanna talk about yeah so I think I think it just from from hearing you reflect on that that question I I think it comes down to deep acceptance so also before we even get to deep acceptance it actually comes from a a shedding of the conditioning of images of relationships that people have and so I'll give you an example if you um my husband and I have been together for nearly 20 years he's someone who's mid intensity I'm someone who's high intensity once you realize that we're not going to be one of those couples who go and sit at dinner for hours to talk but what we discovered is he does love to talk we just do it on we go on hikes together so we go on walks we'll go for walks for an hour and a half and talk to each other but for sometimes sometimes it's the uh the intensity of just staring someone and looking someone in the eyes the eye contact that throws people off so we discovered that we go on day dates not necessarily dates in the conventional sense now my parents who've been married for 40 years they love going out for dinner with each other I grew up with them going out to dinner together so for a long time I had this judgement of relationships of no no this is what you should do if you are married you should go out to dinner together this sounds really superficial what you're doing on a Saturday night it's actually quite deep for me because it actually required me to shed the judgements and um ideas around relationships that I had and the practicing the sacred acceptance of our relationship as it currently is and then once you have gone through the acceptance phase of this is us we are not any other relationship we're not a relationship on television um or in a movie or my parents or his parents so then once you practice the sacred acceptance the relationship almost softens and relaxes in response and then reveals itself in terms of the way that it wants to connect so I guess this the sacred work or the soul work for me is realizing that each relationship is an entity that that's it's a a vehicle of energy so it stores its own energy and it's if you think of it as a container of energy a lot of people are storing judgment shame conditioning uh expectations into that little container of energy and both of you are holding that container of energy all the time and so if we're storing that level of emotion or energy in the container between us over time people aren't gonna wanna hold that container because it doesn't become a source of anything good for either of you it just becomes a source of all of those emotions so I actually think the first step is a acknowledging that there's this container between us that we're both investing in it's like a pool of water when I'm working with cultures and leaders I talk to people about everyone in the culture is pouring water into that culture and we want that water to be clear and something that everyone can swim in and it's the same thing in a relationship so if you think about this container of energy that we're pouring into um what is the energy that you're pouring into your relationship and then how does it actually feel to be in that um I think that that in itself just that that sacred responsibility of oh I'm actually contributing to this I think a lot of people see relationships as happening to us um almost as though we're victims of the other person um and their energy but when we start to empower ourselves and realise that we're contributing as well we're both contributing um something happens something shifts I know that we really are about to wrap up but I do want to open a can of worms for just a moment we don't have to fully fully flush it out I'm really curious if you have any thoughts about people turning to AI chatbots for relationship as part of this epidemic of loneliness because I've read studies I'm I'm very concerned with teen populations I teach teenagers and young adults and there are studies that suggest now that anywhere from 30 to 60% of teenagers are engaging in relationship intimate friendship partnership relationship with non human chatbots and I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that and whether you think a tool like yours could help people sort of have more self awareness to help them have human to human relationships or do you not see any issue with the you know AI type relationships so for me whenever you're looking to AI or social media or anything at anything on a screen to fill some need that you have um that it's a human need that you have whenever you're looking for that to be a proxy for you the human connection you're deeply seeking it's a problem so if if you have beautiful relationships in your life and then AI is just something funny or something additional or something bonus great but I'm my my I guess is that it's not in most of these cases it's not just an added it's not just a a bonus or an extra or a um a proxy it's adding it's acting more as a stand in for the relationships people are deeply craving so yes it would be my hope that young people could articulate these are my needs in frequency when I and in fact I was working with the school and the parents a couple of weeks ago um and I said the the the best thing we can all do for our children is to help them find a source of belonging on their own that's not on a screen so what is it that you do when you're on your own that that makes you feel nurtured and it has nothing to do with the device if you have the answer to that I think you are uh really far ahead in terms of understanding what belonging is going to feel like because you know the sacred container I was talking about when it comes to AI there's nothing being contributed back that's healthy so it's it's false it's counterfeit it's a it's it's it's fake connection um in the same way that you could sit down for dinner and eat a a bowl of lollies and pretend that you've had a meal you've eaten but it's not it's not good for you it's not it hasn't nourished you in any way it that's how I see AI yeah I think I'd agree there's there's a lack of nourishment I think I think it has a place in terms of um there are ways in which you can work with it to supplement our lives but not to replace them so I think there's a lot to be a lot to be said thank you Robin for opening that can of worms I think it's a rich conversation um and I thank you for sharing your um your take on it Ali I think you know more research also needs to be done um showing that lack of I I too I I work with energy and you know there is a relationship body between people and in groups and that relationship body has its own what's called energy body which you call the pool and it's a real thing it's it's subtle it's not gross in terms of it's not manifest but it's there and you can feel it you know it is it's something that people can feel with their gut with their instincts and that kind of thing is not possible with technology because it doesn't have the the type of organic auric soul presence that humans do and so there is I think as well I agree with you Alisa the real danger of losing our humanity and I don't want to be a scare monger but I think we just have to be measured about you know how we're approaching AI what do you think Robin no agreed and I think that there's also the inherent um uh bias with AI because they're responding to what you need so it's almost like if I'm a low frequency low intensity person and I'm sharing that with AI AI can match me really easily right but what you said about relationships and especially intimate relationships that kind of teach us to grow and expand and get out of our comfort zone if we're only inter you know interacting with something that's gonna just be psychophantic and agree with us all the time and be exactly what we need it doesn't actually help us to evolve or learn new skills or grow in interaction so yeah more to be said on that in the future but um as we wrap up Ali this was such a fascinating conversation I'm very excited to read your book and to take your quiz where can people find more information how can people find your assessment yep so my uh website is a walker. co and the assessment is on my company website which is ality life uh a l I t y life dot com and uh but if you go to my website a walker.co it will send you to the assessment as well and we will link that in the show notes is there any last kind of summary wisdom like a last point that you would love to leave our listeners with yeah I just really uh want to send everyone that that you know the the sacred container we were talking about I just wanna send everyone um my beautiful hopeful energy for our relationships I I can see even now that there's so my son's 13 and we're about to have a social media ban introduced in Australia in the next couple of weeks for anyone under the age of 16 I think we're starting to realize that human connection is primary should be Paramount and we should protect it at all costs so um regulation is starting to catch up and I just really send my um my hope all around the world for um from us for for us being protective of those sacred relationships Ali thank you so much for this really rich conversation you've given us tools you've given us perspectives to understand our connection styles our motivations but also deeper into invitations to lead really from self awareness to honor that inner wiring that we have and also to build cultures and relationships that reflect our greater potential so listeners if this something in this talk stirred you whether a memory of a relationship you'd like to heal a workplace culture you'd like to transform please visit Ali's work her books her assessments um and allow that to hold you in that next step on stage of your growth Ali thank you again for your time your insights and your generosity thank you thanks for having me thank you so much for joining us okay bye bye thank you so much for tuning in to the wisdom We share podcast we hope today's episode sparks some new insight imagination and practical tools you can integrate into your daily life continue this journey with us by subscribing sharing and dropping us a review until next time stay wise