Culture Beats AI | Bob Gower | Full Battery Media

In this episode, I sit down with Bob Gower, founder of Splendid Torch, to talk about AI adoption, company culture, creativity, and why the future of work is not just about better technology. 

Bob brings a really unique perspective because he looks at AI through the lens of human systems, organizational design, philosophy, and adaptability. We get into why so many companies are using AI the wrong way, how fear and bad communication can create “shadow AI” inside teams, and why the businesses that win with AI may be the ones that build trust, experimentation, and better culture first. We also talk about creativity, writing, music, photography, craftsmanship, and how AI can either flatten human expression or help unlock new ways to tell better stories. 

This conversation is really about what happens when technology changes faster than people can emotionally process, and how we can still keep humanity at the center of it.

What do you think matters more in the AI era: better tools, better culture, or better human judgment?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Yeah, agreed. I mean, I think you know, at the end of the day, our our lives are as brief as they are, the meaning and the pleasure and the joy, most of it comes from interaction with other human beings. Right. And so to the extent that AI can help you know, like I I I I have um you know, my wife is somewhat neurodiverse. I have a friend, you know, many friends who are who are who are neurodiverse and and I and so we we have these conversations about what people are able to do and what people aren't able to do. You know, we talk about ableism quite a bit sometimes, right? And I'm thinking like well, if something if if if a tool allows somebody to be creative in a medium that they weren't previously able to be creative in, then that can unlock new way, new ways of storytelling, new ways of connecting two different people. And to and you know, I I think photography is a wonderful example, right? Like that when photography came out, everybody was like, this is the death of art, you know, this is the death of painting. And it wasn't the death of painting, it was the re it was the birth of like dotism and and cubism and you know, like these non-strictly representational forms of art, because that was now more taken care of by by the camera. And I think AI is an analog to that, but in a in a in a in a much more robust and strange and complex way that we that that is really pretty unpredictable. But I'm really excited by it. I'm I'm I I'm excited by the idea of someone that I previously might not have paid attention to because they weren't able to produce something of a certain kind of whatever it was, you know, like that they are now able to express themselves in a new way. Uh and I think that's to me that's that's really exciting. And it's the opposite of how many people think of AI as this like cold, distant, um, mechanical thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

Welcome everybody back to the Full Battery Media Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Trace, and I have an awesome guest with me today. Would you like to tell people who you are and a little bit about what you do?

SPEAKER_00 2:09

Sure. I'm Bob Gower. Uh I've done so many things in my career. I am currently the founder of Splendid Torch, and we are a consulting collective focusing on AI adoption, but we do it from a human and systems perspective rather than from a technology perspective. I can give you a lot more on my history. It's it's it's too varied. I don't know what to focus on, but that but that's that's enough for now, maybe. I love it, man.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

Well, I it's interesting because uh you you've done a lot of different stuff, which is what was really fascinating to me when I was like digging into your history. You you know studied in Asia, you studied Zin and martial arts in Japan, which is for me is pretty rad. I I'm a I also studied martial arts for a long time, and I am currently in Asia because of my love of Eastern philosophy brought me here. I'm actually based in Vietnam right now. I've been here over 20 some odd years, uh, on and off. But like I I studied Japanese-style jujitsu, uh, which is very similar to judo. And um, and then I always wanted to go to Japan. It was like the goal was to go to Japan, but then I was gonna teach English after university, uh, and that was gonna be my way to get in. But my friend said, Oh, you're a dual national. I can get you into a grade school in Vietnam if you want to go there. And I was like, I don't know much about Vietnam, but sounds interesting. And then one thing led to another, and life kind of happened, and I'm still here and married my wife, who's a singer, and we had a kid, and I started making content and making videos. I had a I uh went back to LA for a while and got into film before I came back to Vietnam again in 2013, and I've been here since uh full time. But what happened in that time was I just started learning to love to share stories, whether that be through film or other medium. And that's kind of what brought me here. And I and I I was fascinated by your background because you have just this varied and diverse story. And I now you're working with AI, but I want to know what took you from here to here? What was the catalyst for that?

SPEAKER_00 4:17

That's such a great question. That is such a great question. By the way, um, are you in north or south Vietnam? Where are you in Vietnam? I'm in I'm in Ho Chi Minh City, so I'm southern. You're in Ho Chi Minh. Okay, great. Yeah, yeah. Gotcha. I've never been in the South. I I traveled overland from Bangkok to Hanoi in the 90s, and we we entered Vietnam kind of um in the midsection and went north. And we were on our way to China, and then my my ex-wife and I, uh, who is a New Zealander, and I don't know if you've you've probably encountered New Zealanders on the road. They have a reputation of, you know, they they they go out on the edge. And so we were we were doing some rather intense travel through the region. I I love Southeast Asia. And my son will be going for his first trip. He's 19, and he'll be going there uh this summer with some friends. So anyway. That's awesome. I'm very, very connected and really enjoy the country. So, anyway, how did I get here? Um boy, I don't, you know how how how far back to go and all of that. I guess the the main thing for me is like I've always really been interested and curious about um kind of the systems that run the world, like how the world works. Uh I started off studying moral philosophy mainly because I was curious about, well, how do I be a good person? Like what is it, you know, like what does it take to be a good person in the world? And this was, I'm 60 years old now, so this was many years ago. And uh became really fascinated with um certain Asian traditions, with Buddhism, with uh martial arts, and kind of developing a kind of discipline. And then slowly over my I've also always been really intellectually curious. And in the mid-90s, I discovered chaos theory. I don't know if you're familiar with uh with chaos and complexity, but that really has served, I think, as sort of the foundation of my intellectual curiosity ever since. And then I began working with organizations. Um, I had worked in visual design for a time, and then I was like, actually, I'm more interested in like the people that make the stuff rather than the making of the stuff. Like I was more interested in what are the team, what are team dynamics, what's going on in this organization? And that led me to a kind of obscure field of organization design. And so, and for the past 20 years or so, I've been working in some variants of that. Organization design and team development are kind of the things that I'm I'm most curious about because I think I really think both as an individual and as a collective, like the way we do things matters, the way we approach problems, the way we think, the way we address our own biases, the way we uh collaborate with others. To me, it's just like there's a certain magic there that I'm just always really fascinated. And I got into AI because AI is throwing everything up in the air right now in the organization world, and I kind of it's a it's the next fun wave, and so I'm writing that now. That's awesome. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:51

I'm not gonna lie though, uh anytime someone says chaos theory, I'm just I go straight back to Ian Malcolm with a water drop on the hand. So love my my Jurassic Park references. But I I love you can't help it, but um, you know, I really interested because uh when I was reading up about some of the stuff that you're writing and putting out there, you you say AI adoption is an architecture problem, not just a technology problem. If you had to explain that to someone that's a complete idiot like me, how would you phrase that, you know?

SPEAKER_00 7:28

Yeah. I mean, so again, I I approach the world as an organization designer, and I approach the world as someone who wants to make uh systems that work for everyone. I'm a, you know, I really I like working with teams of diverse people. I like um uh making sure that everybody feels appreciated and everybody feels included. And you know, when we talk about AI, you know, also my MBA, I have an MBA that focuses on sustainability. That was about you know 20 years ago. And so you know, resource use and all this stuff is very interesting to me. And I think when we talk about AI, it's very easy to talk about it as an environmental problem, which are real, like I'm not gonna diminish, you know, you know, downplay the the energy and the water and the various things that go into it. Uh and then also people are very concerned about jobs. They're like, I'm gonna get replaced. But I look, but I'm a little bit of a student of history, and when I look back over the way other technical adoptions have um disrupted the world, things like the shipping container, things like robotics, things like even like something as simple as the UPC code, all of these things um get adopted. Everybody kind of has to play with them and has to use them, but the people who win are the people who really adapt how their organization operates towards the UPC code, you know, towards the, sorry, towards the new innovation. So Toyota won robotics over like American manufacturing by inventing lean manufacturing. Um the UP the UPC code, Walmart, you know, for better or for worse, won the UPC code game because they reinvented how they managed vendors, how they managed their inventory, whereas other groups, you know, other big retailers like Kmart, who no longer exist really, you know, just adopted it as like a little bit of an efficiency play. So what I'm always curious about is as a new wave of technology enters an organization or as a new wave of um even like social change or political change, right? External system change, as those begin to impact individual organizations, I'm always looking for the opportunity to change how we do things. Um, what gets unlocked by that? And AI, frankly, I don't know how much you played with it, but like I've been working with it in various ways for about three years and been, and like many people, we've been through many, many waves of it. It is the most revolutionary technology I've ever worked. And I and I I don't want to sound like a techno-optimist because I'm not necessarily of that camp, but it is, I think it unlocks, I think things can get really interesting and weird. I think there's some really powerful things that we can do with AI that will help us reinvent how organizations work and hopefully do so along better lines.

SPEAKER_01 10:08

I I love um we're using it a ton in my business, and I'm using it a ton for my wife. I'm using it in different areas, and it's like there's different ways to do it. But one of the things that I find is that it's allowing us to iterate faster, but also allowing us to my wife and I use it for music. We are creating this hybrid system where we will have a human songwriter, and then what we do is like I would have, you know, the challenges of my wife is a singer. We would go to a music producer and I would have five samples. I want the song to sound like this. And here's the raw lyrics, and this is what I want you to make it sound like. There's 500 ways to do that, you know? And there's so but then we take an AI music direction, we plug our song in, we plug our melody in, and we then say, Can you do it with this and this inspiration? And we boom, try it out. Not quite what we're looking for. Let's change our prompt. Boom, try it out again. Wow, how about more French horns? Like, boom, do it again. And then suddenly we have this song that was very human and written, and then we use AI to kind of express the way we want it to come. And then we go back to a producer, a music producer, going, This is what we're looking for. Can you help us kind of create some of that human touch to it? You know, we've got all these things, and then that person's like, let me find a human guitarist, and we can use the AI pieces that are really great, and we create this new synthesis versus if I had to do that all manually before, uh, it would have been A, extremely expensive and B, extremely challenging to really get the vision of what we want. And now we're able to do it, you know, and I'm just fascinated by the ability for AI to uh open doors that had never been able to be opened by people, you know? And that's one of the things that I'm fascinated by. You know, one of the things too is like anytime I start getting people, I I'm a bit of a I I love to look for a brighter future and hope that things are not gonna go full terminator. But when my mom tells the story of my great-grandma, uh, who was around the time that the car came around, and they got the first family car in the 1910, like 19, like the teens, and she tells this story about grandma getting in the car and they were going over 20 miles an hour, and grandma dove out of the car at 20 miles an hour because she was afraid they were gonna all die at some high-speed thing, you know. And it's like, if you think back to before cars, what were some of the most common jobs in America? Why are so many people named Smith? You know, you have blacksmiths that were doing horseshoes, you have farriers. That was one of it was like us going around and seeing a car auto mechanic shop all over. There were farriers everywhere. You know, there was this whole ecosystem that was built up. And I tell people, I love this example. You go back to someone from that time and they're like, Oh, all of the farriers are gonna disappear, you know. Hey, I've got this thing to tell you about. What is that? It's called a drive-thru car wash. You don't know about it yet, but it's gonna be a thing, you know? Auto detailing, custom sound systems in a car. What is that? You know, there's a whole world that's waiting to be opened for us, but we just can't even conceptualize it because it's beyond our ability to conceptualize.

SPEAKER_00 13:49

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that that your your experience really resonates with me quite a bit. Yeah. Like I use it, I think people and again, I'm I I'm not a techno-optimist. I'm not saying like AI is going to save us all. I am definitely not in that camp. And I think there the people who would criticize AI or who just say we just have to resist it and fight it. One, I hate to say it, but I I, you know, the system of the world is probably not going to not going to allow it not to come. I mean, we can I think I think we need more regulation. I think we need to be thoughtful about it. And, you know, like you know, 100%. But we're not going, you know, we're the genie is not going back in the bottle. So now that the genie is out of the bottle, what are we going to do with it? And I began using it in writing probably two years ago. Uh and uh and I writing is like a lot of what I how I spend my time and what I enjoy. And what I found is that similar to your experience with with music, is that it allows me to iterate very, very quickly an idea. So and I'll just be out walking. I I do a lot of voice notes to myself now with uh with just messages on the phone. And I will just I'll just Yeah. And so I'll just like start talking, be like, I'm really thinking about like this example from this one thing. Like I was thinking about recently about the story of um actually the end of the Vietnam War, how uh I don't know if you know the Pentagon Papers when they were released. Um this guy, Daniel Ellsberg, is the guy who released them. He had a conversation with my favorite poet, um, Gary Snyder, who was living in Japan at the time, is kind of how I ended up living in Japan, was following in his footsteps. But they had they just ran into each other in a bar in Japan in the night in 1960, and they had this conversation that sort of stayed in Ellsberg's head. And then 10 years later, it sort of led to him, it sort of like reformatted and led to him. So this one conversation can like potentially, you know, contributed to the end of the war, end of a war, right? Like it to me, I'm always like sort of fascinated by these I call I think about in like nonlinear, go back to chaos theory, nonlinear dynamics inside complex systems, right? And so I'm always and I'm very humbled by all of this because I'm like, I don't know. Anyway, I'm sorry. I would take an idea like that, connect it to something at work, and then it would give me an iteration of the of the of the article that I want to write and be like, no, that's not quite right. Give me this other article, you know, give me another iteration, another iteration, and then I'll take it myself and and rewrite the final thing. But one, I work faster, two, I work more effectively. Um and three, I think it often will feed back things to me that I was thinking but in feeling, but I couldn't quite articulate. I didn't, I lacked the skill. I mean, I'm a I've been a writer for 30, 40 years, right? I lacked the skill to put what I was trying to put into words into words, and it did it for me in a way that I immediately recognized and I resonated with. And I'm like, it's making me a better writer, a better thinker. Um it doesn't do that for everybody, obviously. You know, so it depends on the how you use it. But it's deeply revolutionary. And I think things I always say this to people, I think things are gonna get kind of weird. I think AI is really opening up some possibilities and it's gonna make uh that that we many things that we can't see yet. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:57

I use it to challenge me. Uh and one of the things I love is like I'm dealing with certain different business things. And so I'm asking, I absolutely, after living in Asia, um I one of the books, whether you like it or not, I have in a Game of Thrones type thing and watching the social dynamics of the Vietnamese like media and showbiz, it's straight up like Game of Thrones. And I tell my wife, one of the books that I read ages ago that this reminds me of is like uh 48 Laws of Power and like the power the games and the power dynamics, and so I will find different books and then I'll start like asking it. I like I'll do voice memos of like this is something that I'm dealing with. How could this apply to this? And whether it be that book, whether it be Sun Tzu's The Art of War, I I just go through the book of the week and sit there and start breaking apart chapters and using it to quiz me on how some of the things in my current reality and work and life are interacting with these things. And I think again, the tool, it's like a knife. I have a financial podcast where we talk about money and everyone talks about it. Money is a tool. AI is a tool. I want to ask you this because it leads to my next question. A lot of companies are rushing to use AI now. What do you think most businesses are getting wrong about AI adoption?

SPEAKER_00 18:26

Yeah. So I I think businesses are getting a lot wrong about AI adoption. And and maybe it's we can even just start with that word adoption. Like the the first thing that people are getting wrong is they are treating AI as if it's one thing. They're saying we want our people to use AI. And so it's very and it's very hard to measure at scale, like how people, you know, what's going on, especially because a lot of people, a lot of the organizations we work with, will come in and part of our first analysis is well, what's going on currently? And what we find is that everybody has ChatGPT or Claude on their phone and is uploading company data to that that's that's ungoverned, that's unsecured, probably shouldn't be put onto a public platform like that. I mean, uh it it's it can be it's not the security issues are there, but they're not they're not maybe as bad as some people think. But there is a lot of like, we call it shadow AI, right? So there's a lot of shadow AI adoption. And then the next and and so I was working with a company recently, and their governance around it, so directives from their IT department, was both vague and draconian all at the same time. And so basically it gave everybody in the organization two choices. The choice was either to use it how they wanted to use it, and to just pray, you know, beg for forgiveness if they, you know, if someone found out and they did something wrong, or just not share with other people. So they keep their experiments to themselves. And then the or was to not do anything at all because the the the government's directives were really just, you know, don't upload sensitive data. And like, well, what's that what is sensitive data, right? What do you what do you mean by that? And to what platform, and are there any permissions that I need to change when I'm using the platform? And so it just encouraged and so it encourages two things. One, it encourages, and we look a lot at culture, like how culture develops. So one, if you're adopting a tool that has a lot of potential use cases, a lot of it gets better every time, or it gets different at least every time we use it, the the innovation curve is really steep on it, um, so it's changing all of the time itself. Um the you know, the models are changing all the time, the tools are changing all the time, but also just the the instance of it that you are currently using gets more information every time you use it. So it's also changing every time. That we need experimentation. Like the only way to use these things well is to experiment, which means we have to fail, we have to trust each other, we have to be willing to share, you know, like and so when you have these draconian rules, it doesn't encourage people just kind of keep it to themselves. And the tools kind of encourage that anyway, because they do kind of live, you know, like your individual instance can be so different from the organizational. And or the organization will buy like a big platform. They'll buy copilot or something, right? They'll buy a huge platform and they'll be like, everybody should use copilot, but it's not a great model, it's not a great tool, the use cases aren't quite there. And so people just don't quite they're not quite thinking about strategically why am I doing, why would I want to apply AI to something? What's the governance rules that are going to keep us safe as I do it? Does this change our workflows, sort of our operational posture? How do I enable people to use it safely and make sure that they're paying attention to the governance and rules and understand the strategic alignment that I just articulated? And then the final piece, the thing that we always talk about, because we're very, you know, we see culture as this incredibly central thing to organizational development. Like if you if I have a culture where people trust each other and they're creative and they're and it's a culture of experimentation and asking questions and curiosity. It's so much easier to do innovative work in that kind of company. And yet, most companies are applying AI either with these draconian messages that are policies that lock it down, or even or maybe and potentially worse, they're laying off a bunch of people and they're saying, oh, it's because of AI efficiencies. And now everybody is like now becomes terrified of AI, and the culture gets damaged. I mean, layoffs always hurt culture. And then the culture gets damaged. And I'm not saying we don't need to like sometimes trim workforce or something like that, but it's just sort of the narrative and the way we're thinking about it, the way we're talking about it, it just sort of seems to take all the joy, the pleasure, the fun, the experimentation out of it. And that's what these tools really thrive on, in my experience.

SPEAKER_01 22:43

Aaron Powell I completely agree. And I think that the fear is one of the things I heard recently was that someone was commenting about that what they saw as one of the challenges is that the companies that were pushing a lot of these AI solutions, they were preaching it's going to help everyone, it's going to do all this. But yet these companies were like, it's going to help everyone. And then massive layoff, you know? And it's like, you know, it's like, well, hang on, that didn't help everyone. There was a video I watched of Gin Z, and it was at a uh like a university graduation, and then someone's like, and the this like lady came on, she's like, All right, you know, well, we're talking about the the future of AI, and the whole class started booing. And it's like, what? What's going on? And they were like, well, it's gonna take our jobs, you know? And it's interesting too because I think one of the things that's happening is that the way it's been rolled out has not, it's happened at a time that was very tumultuous. And people were like the way the companies rolled it out was done in a way that wasn't necessarily I'm gonna give a different example. Okay, yeah. In my company, uh we had a problem with people coming late to work and getting back to work on time, right? Small company, startup. I'm too nice. I can't be mean. And I'll be like, guys, come on, man, just step up, just get to work, you know? And my wife's like, no, you gotta be stronger, you gotta be, you know, like this. And I was just like, I don't know. And so we had a new HR came in right at the same time that we were rolling out this message about get to work on time and having this new lunchtime, right? It wasn't her fight. She just happened to start at that moment. And there was already this situation that was existing in the wider ecosystem in my business. But this person comes in right at the time when it everything stirred up, and they're seen as this catalyst. But reality was the stuff going on was already going on. And I feel like I wonder if some of what's happening with AI is that we're in this really weird time. And it's coming in when we are already in a degree of turmoil, if that makes sense. I don't know if I'm off base, but it feels like that to a degree.

SPEAKER_00 25:18

No, I mean, I I think you're right. Like I mean, certainly the last 10 years have been have felt, you know, with the pandemic, with what's been going on in the political and economic, you know, like everything feels much less stable. Um we used to talk, you know, 15 years ago, we used to talk a lot about uh we use this acronym VUCA. I don't know if you're familiar with it. It comes from, I think, the Navy SEALs or something, but volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. So like we're that that's the that's the that's the kind of world we're you know that they are trained to operate in, right? So it comes out of like special forces, right? You and everybody was, you know, it was very popular in the business world to say, like, oh, the business world is becoming volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous now. And how do we operate in these times? And then and now I'm actually hearing people say, oh no, no. It's that was stable compared to where we are now, right? You know, like where we are now, we're talking more about chaos than complexity now. And um and so, yeah, I mean this is why I think in in my in in my in my company, we we think a lot about how to describe what we do because we we we operate a kind of a strange little nexus, right? We care an awful lot about technology, but we're not technologists. Um we are operations people, we have some HR folks, we have some organization designers that tends our our milie is more engineering the organization rather than engineering the technology, but the two things interact in such an interesting, you know, and dynamic way. And so we have a very we sometimes have a a challenge for us in our business is to explain what we do, right? Like, you know, explain what our benefit is, right? And so what we we've been settling a lot on the word around adaptivity or adaptability, right? So your ability to continuously adapt to an unstable world, right? That that that I'm to me is perhaps my thesis is that that's the core capability that most organizations are going to need in order to survive. And it's not and it's continuous adaption. It's not it's not like the examples I gave before of like robotics or the UPC code or whatever. Like those were, you know, you had plateaus, you know, like you've got the you got the technology, you adapted to it, then you got a plateau, then you get a, you know, and and sort of that that adoption curve or whatever. I think we're getting this sort of like this innovation curve that's just kind of you know, hockey sticking on us, which means we're just all sort of hanging on for the ride right now. And it also means, to my mind, this is why I think about culture so much, because I the cult the companies that I know that have real longevity, that really you know, manage to stick around and do some good for the world, are the organizations that take care of the people that work there, where the people feel like I am part of something that I'm proud to be a part of. I am proud I am I am part of something that at least expresses some care for me and I can and I care about the mission to some degree, right? That that is such a foundational piece. And unfortunately, we're also living in this time where the economic system, and then you're you know, in finance guy, right? The economic system is driving us to more extraction, more, you know, and extracting from people as much as from the from from natural resources. And maybe this is just wishful thinking on my part, but I really, really hope that the winners in this new game are the ones who who invest in culture, who invest in their people, and find a way to care for and and find a way to create environments where people actually care for each other and care about each other. And uh yeah, but I I I could be, you know, maybe, maybe, I may just be too hopeful, too.

SPEAKER_01 28:51

I don't know. I I actually I disagree. I think that you're hitting the nail on the head. There's a couple things. I I work in media and content, and we see AI cutting into profit margins and revenue. You know, already AI is starting to edit videos and stuff, but one of the things that I find, and I'm I'm not doom and gloom, I actually I am the opposite. I feel like it just can help us tell stories better. Like, how can you tell stories better? Because to me, if I can automate some of the stuff that takes me a lot of time, if there are new tools, you know, if I was doing video editing 20 years ago, I'd be splicing film together. Isn't it nice that I can do it digitally now? Isn't it nice that I have these tools that make it a lot easier to tell stories? You know, and like what I have in this phone is better than the camera that I was shooting on 15 years ago, you know?

SPEAKER_02 29:43

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:44

Um couple things that pop out. I also have a wine podcast. I've got a lot of podcasts, and uh I grew up in the Napa Valley, uh, high school and college, families up in the Bay Area, and like I spend a lot of time there. This fall, I so I interview all these winemakers because I'm fascinated by winemaking. I am fascinated by the craft of this is farming. These vineyards are planted, and then you've got all these years that go by till you can use the grapes, and then the grapes are aged in these bottles, and then you go through this process, and it is super organic, hands in the earth, and the difference between the winemaker, the difference between a hot summer and a cold summer, the difference between that type of soil. Where am I going with this? It's that I'm heading back to Napa this fall to shoot a documentary about harvest. And no matter what, I might go this harvest, I might go next harvest. It's always going to be a different story. Now, I'm using AI extensively to help me brainstorm to think about storylines, to think about plots, to think about my editing workflow, how I can clean things up. I'll take a script after I've shot it, throw it into AI and say, what could I trim to make this tighter? What could I add to this? But here's the cool part. I push back against AI all the time. I push back against it because I know what I would like to watch. And this is something that someone said to me. As long as we are still the ones consuming what we are creating, as long as we are still the consumers, there's still going to be a human element in the content. There's still going to be a human element in this, unless we are completely removed from the system. But as of right now, that still looks like we're the consumers for the foreseeable future, you know?

SPEAKER_00 31:36

Yeah, agreed. I mean, I think you know, at the end of the day, our our lives are as brief as they are, the meaning and the pleasure and the joy, most of it comes from interaction with other human beings, right? Yep. And so to the extent that AI can help, you know, like I I I I have um, you know, my wife is somewhat neurodiverse. I have a friend, you know, many friends who are who are who are neurodiverse. And and I and so we we have these conversations about what people are able to do and what people aren't able to do. You know, we talk about ableism quite a bit sometimes, right? And I'm thinking like, well, if something if if if a tool allows somebody to be creative in a medium that they weren't previously able to be creative in, then that can unlock new way, new ways of storytelling, new ways of connecting two different people. And to and, you know, I I think photography is a wonderful example, right? Like that when photography came out, everybody was like, this is the death of art, you know, this is the death of painting. And it wasn't the death of painting, it was the re it was the birth of like dotism and and cubism and you know, like these non-strictly representational forms of art, because that was now more taken care of by by the camera. And I think AI is an analog to that, but in a in a in a in a much more robust and strange and complex way that we that that is really pretty unpredictable. But I'm really excited by it. I I'm I I'm excited by the idea of someone that I previously might not have paid attention to because they weren't able to produce something of a certain kind, whatever it was, you know, like that they are now able to express themselves in a new way. Uh and I think that's to me, that's that's really exciting. And it's the opposite of how many people think of AI as this like cold, distant, um, mechanical thing.

unknown 33:24

Right.

SPEAKER_01 33:25

I was listening to this video the other day, and it was um Bach. It was plain Bach, which probably one of the greatest heights of human culture, some of the things that Bach wrote. I just think absolutely phenomenal. Any of the great people from that time period were next level, right? I love absolutely everything from Bach, but then I didn't realize that I was listening to Bach in the wrong way. Because any of the piano concertos written by Bach were not written for piano. They were written for this plucking instrument that had an entirely different sound because the piano didn't exist at that time. The piano was a later invention, you know? And there were times throughout history in the 17th to 18th centuries, the the violin family was something that was a new addition. And people thought it was going to destroy music. Now we think of like the string section as a stalwart of the classical music, you know, genre. But you know, in the in the 18th and 19th century, it was the piano because it was invented and people were terrified of it. But then, you know, can you imagine uh Chopin or Liszt without like the piano? Like these these composers that took it and made it something amazing, you know. Throughout history, there have been these things that were seen to be ruining art, seemed to be ruining things. And I think that, you know, I think we'll get to the point where uh whatever our little CP3PO is doing, it sits next to us and it pipes off things. Uh but I I also think that we're headed toward a territory where we just can't foresee what's coming. Uh and I I think that whether that be something that's uh grand or something that's very mundane, but I mean I think that there's going to be a mundane nature of things that we are gonna have to adapt. But there was something that you mentioned earlier about organizations and people, and I think from having a background in martial arts, uh one of the things that I learned as a martial artist is that nothing ever goes as planned. When you go and you are engaging in some type of martial arts bout, it generally goes a different direction. You know, Dr. Ian Malcolm, the Velociraptors escape, man. And you know, you have to figure out how to adapt. And yet it doesn't always have to look terrifying, but it does have to be something that you you innovate and you sit there and you go, hey, this is going a different direction. You know, if AI takes over all of the work that my company currently does, then I'll find a way to adapt to that, to be a coach, to grow with it, to evolve with that trend. What is a new offering that we can have? You know, I'll just sit down to with my team and go, what could we do instead? What could we do to create value in this new world? But man, I don't know. I think that we have to adapt, but I think it's mindset. It's gonna be always mindset throughout human history. It's been our mindset to how do you engage with this new thing, you know?

SPEAKER_00 36:43

Yeah. Yeah, no, I I I agree. And I will not disagree entire at all, really. But I would love to hear it disagree. I do think there are, you know, there are always like local winners and losers. And I think that there are that that, you know, like there, you know, like a lot of us, I feel fairly confident that I can adapt to the world, right? And I and I'm and I'm but I do have I do, you know, I know a lot of I know a lot of writing and I've written a couple of books and I know a lot of writers. And when AI was first coming out, like there's you know, like I'm part of like this, this, this class action lawsuit against uh anthropic where I might get a few thousand bucks because they ingested our books without permission, right, into their into their training data. Fun. All right, whatever. And as I was thinking through it, I was like, the books, books for me are not my livelihood, right? They are something that I write for because I'm interested in them, and they're something that they're kind of a calling card for my work, you know, but they they're in the for me in many ways, it's like the more people who see my stuff or hear my name, the better it is for me whether or not they paid me a dime. But I know other people who are like, no, royalty and and and and sales, you know, you know, like sales of books is like that is their their entire livelihood is built around that. And I and I hear the I hear their concern. And then the the systems guy in me, the philosoph the ph philosopher in me is like, well, ownership of ideas is really a capitalist construct, and like, you know, you know, copyright is only we only really care about it, not not from a not necessarily from creativity when if we're just being creative, we might call it we were inspired by somebody else rather than we stole their work. But in a capitalist construct where we all have to like sell our work in order to make a living, um and I and I and I and it's and it's easy for me to sort of like hand wave my my concerns away, but then I I feel like, oh no, there are there are people who are going to lose their livelihoods and who may not be able to to pivot. They may not have the the time, they may not have the interest, they, you know, there there are people kind of being left behind by the new technology. And I yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:47

So one of the things, too, that I wonder though, um, I wonder if there's a space where like that group of students that had the pushback, my daughter didn't want a fancy camera for her birthday. She wanted an old 19, like a 2000s like digital camera that you know was very raw, that didn't have all of the filters on it. And I asked her why, and she's like, she's 10, and she's like, because it looks real. And I was like, you know, well, what do you mean? Like, you know, and she's like, well, it just looks kind of how more of how I see stuff. It's interesting too, because I think that for writing, you know, there will still be a place for writers. There'll still be a place that it might be different, but I don't know. I just have this hope that we will continue to respect and love the craft. You know, like there was a winemaker. I'm gonna go back to something that I can actually conceptualize a little easier because I don't know. He was talking about how there might be a time where we can break down and you know, have a machine that can go beep boop boop boop and then it spits out uh a $2,000 bottle of wine, what used to be a $2,000 bottle of wine. But like, is it still gonna have the same value? Or are people gonna go, you know what? Actually, I want this. I want the thing that was farmed on this farm and done this way. I don't know. But I think that's the question that people are gonna have to start, that we're all gonna have to figure out. And is there something to be said for the value of, I don't know, and I don't want to say hard work, but like the struggle that goes into creating a piece of art? I mean, what I just released a music video for my wife, and it was a lot of editing. We used a lot of great tools on it, but you know, when I was filming and hand holding that gimbal and my heavy camera and going back and forth, running around the hot stage, running circles around her to get this shot of me spinning, you know, that took energy. There was something to be put into that. So I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 41:03

Have you ever heard of the IKEA effect? Do you know? No, I'd love to hear it. Yeah, it's like it's just this idea, and I'm I think there's some I there's some papers about it. I I can't quote them at all. But like, um but as I understand it, it's that when you like people value their new piece of IKEA furniture more highly than they value maybe a nicer piece of furniture they bought already assembled. Because when they put energy into assembling it, you then feel more ownership of it because it's taken some of your time, because you have, you know, so they call it they call this the IKEA effect, right? That if something requires energy or time from us, we tend to value it more highly. Right. And so, and I can remember this, right? Like I, you know, I'm a I was living in Japan in the early 90s, um, pre-internet, you know, when uh and took a lot of uh film, you know, took lots of pictures on film. I've got boxes of slides um sitting around somewhere. And I remember how, you know, it cost me something every time I took a picture, right? So I paid a lot, I I took a lot more energy framing, you know, like framing that photo, right? And then later I worked as a newspaper design director as digital photography was entering into the into the newspaper world back in the States, and I would send, you know, photographers out to out to sporting events. And I was work, I was working at the San Francisco Examiner, and so we would send them out to the, you know, out to the Giants game or whatever. And so they would and they would just come back with so many photos because now they had digital backs on all of their SLRs, right? And so and I just remember how in some ways things improved because I had a lot as a as an art director, I had a lot more to choose from. But there was also like the photographer, the job of the photographer changed in some significant way. I don't know, I don't quite understand. Maybe they they might describe it differently. They might just say, like, I could I could they could experiment more, I guess, right? You know, they could try more stuff. They would they could be a little more risky and they'd you know keep it on auto, right? And just let it run and then pick the best photo out.

SPEAKER_01 43:08

So I'm a film photographer. I shoot digital, I shoot film, but I I love one of my favorite. I have Pintax K1000, I've got an old Olympus, I've got an old uh Nikon, but one of my favorites is I have the Canon 1 uh N. It was essentially the last of the you know, Canon like top-of-the-line cameras before they went to the 1D, you know, and before they went over to the 5D and like that whole lineup of of digital cameras. And at its time it was like a four thousand dollar camera, and I I love that camera. And I we had this music video for my wife, and I was directing, and I also just I had my camera there because I just love capturing moments while everything's going on, and I also Was checking the framing on things, and I just pull out my my camera because it's you know it helps me, you know, 24 to 70 on there, and I'm just checking frames and things like where I want to be shooting for the next shot. And I also had a digital photographer there, and on that day for this one photographer, like this one music video, he shot 3,000 photos. I had three roles and I I finished up those roles. He sent us all of these beautiful photos, but mine were just as good. And that was the wild part. I had just as many good photos, and my wife was like, How did you pull that off? And I said it was like intention, you know, it's like the art of being present, the art of zen. And it's interesting because you know, the idea of like that that flower arrangement or the simple my teacher would have us do a judo throw thousands of times just to get it right. And what does right mean? I don't know. I can't even explain what right is, but it just felt it. It was like the pop, they're in the air, land beautifully, and you're just like, how did I do that? It was just this this motion, this no mind. And I think that there's something to be said for I watch the lady up our street, and she cooks the best uh duck vermicelli noodle soup. It is got all of these Chinese herbs in it for boosting your chi. It is heavenly, probably one of the most amazing foods I've ever eaten. And I don't know what she does. They start they wake up at 3 a.m. and start prepping it. And I've never seen this in any restaurant I've ever been to. It's in no Vietnamese restaurants, it is just random on the street. She should have like a couple Michelin stars, but no one knows about her. But the people that do, they just show up every day. And to me, I think that is what is going to be preserved. And when people ask me, like, what's special about the videos you do? And I'm like, they've got that. And at least for right now, that thing, that humanity, that heart, is still something there. And I mean, I think that AI will get better at that. But I think that there's still something to be said for I don't know, that slowing down and taking those digital photos or the the the film photos, you know.

SPEAKER_00 46:28

You know, every new wave of technology doesn't re completely replace the old wave, right? Like I was a woodworker years ago, and I'm a huge fan of uh Japanese American woodworker named George Nakashima. I don't know if you know his work at all, but but like he makes these beautiful tables. And you know, IKEA makes great useful tables too, but like his tables have that thing. They they, you know, his whole thing was he finds a piece of wood and then he lets the wood tell him the shape of the table, right? Like he he listens to the table. And his his wood shop is done in New Hope, uh, Pennsylvania, right over the border here. And like he would like that's a that you know, and I think maybe we can also enter, you know, as as new technology, you know how music, you know, there's no identifiable music from the 2010. So, you know, like, or you know, like because it feels like all music began to sort of like exist together, you know, like because there's some, you know, my son, I'll hear him listening to, you know, Chet Baker, and then I'll hear him listening to hip-hop. I'll hear, you know, like, and he doesn't really pay attention to what's new, what's modern, what's now, the way I did, you know, when I was growing up in the in the 70s and 80s, where I was more like, what's the latest thing by this band that I really cared about? And I think he cares about that to a certain degree, but it's more this sort of remixing, you know, you know, kind of thing that's happening, which I'm really fascinated. Are you familiar with um Craig Maud? Do you know who he is at all? He's an American, lives in Japan. You I I you I would highly recommend his work. So he's really interesting. He's a bit of a technologist, but he's actually more of a Luddite in a certain way. And he does these experiments. Um he wrote a wonderful book about he walks around Japan. He does these walking tours of Japan, and he'll he'll do them by himself. He'll also lead them sometimes. But he wrote this beautiful book uh where he was just like walking around looking for the perfect uh pizza toast, which is this thing that they sell in coffee shops in Japan. It's like it's it's like a post-war thing where it's like uh, you know, like you have cheese, you have bread, you have tomato sauce, and everybody has their own variation on it. So it's this book called Kissa by Kissa, which is Kissa Ten, which is the Japanese word for coffee shop. Anyway, so he's walking around kind of the Yokohama area. Um, and as he's doing it, he only he does he doesn't allow himself to listen to anything. He can take only a couple of pictures a day, and he has a phone that allows him to send SMS out but not receive it back in. And so he's just like writing these little journals, and he has a community of people that receive them, and then he comes back and he turns it into a beautiful handbound book. You know, like it's just this sort of like interesting mix of like technology applied really deliberately in order to enhance the situation. And I think that's kind of and I and I think if we can kind of like put AI into that context rather than it's gonna do our dishes and and eliminate labor and all, you know, like to me, that's a that's a red herring. What I'm more interested in is like what does it unlock for us um to allow to be more deliberate about? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:28

That is exactly what I'm talking about. Where can people find out more about you and what you do?

SPEAKER_00 49:34

Um Splendid Torch uh is the is my my business's website. Um we have a good sub stack as well. Uh I think if you just search under Splendid Torch, our our URL is a little bit weird. It's splendid. So it's not, we don't have it, we didn't get a.com, we got a.ch. So just we spell it out that way. So Splendid Torch. Um yeah, I've taken down my personal website for now. So yeah, just go over go over to Splendid Torch and it'll it'll kind of direct you everywhere everywhere else. You'll you'll be able to find me. Yeah.