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Successful Life Podcast
The Successful Life Podcast, hosted by Corey Berrier, is a globally recognized show that ranks in the top 2% of podcasts worldwide. It offers expert insights tailored for contractors, focusing on business strategies, sales skills development, and the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in the industry.
Successful Life Podcast
Unpacking AI’s Influence on Sales: Jonathan Whistman's Expert Perspective
What happens when you blend leadership, sales, and artificial intelligence? You get a riveting conversation with Jonathan Whistman, the author of 'The Book of Sales Boss'. His book offers a fresh perspective on transitioning into a sales leadership role, tackling 'head trash,' and the exciting journey of publishing a book. We also converse about the fascinating world of AI and its impact on business operations, specifically in hiring and customer service.
Imagine an AI technology that can analyze calls, predict customer responses, and even schedule appointments. We explore these possibilities and more, with Jonathan providing riveting examples of how AI can revolutionize business operations. We also consider the potential of AI to self-sustain robots, upgrade plugins, and even rewrite new plugins. Moreover, we broach the topic of balancing work, family, and judgment, underlining the importance of understanding and appreciating the unique traits of high-performing leaders.
Our conversation takes an intriguing turn as we delve into the implications of deep fake videos and the need for laws and regulations to keep pace with advancing technology. Jonathan emphasizes the crucial need for social debates around the use and misuse of technology. Don't let this opportunity pass you by - gain insights from an expert on sales leadership, AI in business, and the role of technology in shaping our future. Join us for this captivating conversation with Jonathan Whistman.
https://www.perceptionpredict.ai/blog/author/jonathan-whistman-1
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanwhistman/
https://www.thesalesboss.com/
https://celebritypresspublishing.com/members/jonathan-whistman/
https://www.crunchbase.com/person/jonathan-whistman
https://www.audible.com/pd/9-Simple-Steps-to-Sell-More-ht-Audiobook/B0D4SJYD4Q?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=library_overflow
https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Steps-Sell-More-Stereotypes-ebook/dp/B0BRNSFYG6/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1OSB7HX6FQMHS&keywords=corey+berrier&qid=1674232549&sprefix=%2Caps%2C93&sr=8-1
https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreysalescoach/
Welcome to the successful life podcast. I'm your host, Corey Barrier, and I'm here with my man, Jonathan Wispin. Sorry about that.
Speaker 2:It's your problem, it's mouthful, jonathan Wispin.
Speaker 1:Nice to be here. The sales boss, I'm so excited to have you. I've been through your book not once, but almost twice, man. I really agree with a lot of the stuff that you talk about in the book.
Speaker 2:My favorite question, though. I know you're the host, but I got to interrupt. Yeah, somebody says they read my book, and especially if you've read it twice, what's the one thing you've disagreed with?
Speaker 1:That is a great question. You put me on the spot here. I'm a sales guy. I'm a seasoned sales guy. I don't know that anything didn't make sense. I don't know that it all resonated with me. I've had Sandler training I've been through. I've read every sales book you could think of. I don't know that I disagreed with anything. Or if I did, I'm not nothing sticking out in my head.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, great. The reason I like to ask that question is usually it's that one thing somebody disagrees with. That's where their own belief in head trash exists, and it's usually the area where you can make the most progress.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. Yeah, nothing resonated, nothing sticks out. Yeah, great. Yeah, I thought it was great. Yeah, jonathan, the book came out not that long ago.
Speaker 2:It's actually been out five years now. It's been out there changing companies for being battle tested the last five years.
Speaker 1:So what made you write the book? What was the reason that you wanted to write the book? Now, I'm just going to. I'm an author, I have a book. Well, I'll let you answer the question opposed to me, jumping in.
Speaker 2:I had been doing consulting and I got into consulting by mistake, I think, like most people do. I'd had some business success. And people ask me hey, what do you think of my business, what would you do? And I was, over the one, humbled by that question, but second, afraid of the question because these were people that I already thought of as really successful. So my stock answer was, of course, I don't know. It sounds like you're really doing all right already, but if you let me bang around, I'll bring a few ideas to the table and they'll just be ideas. It's just based on my experience and thought and based on doing that and then getting success with people and really doubling revenue in a lot of companies.
Speaker 2:Then I that sort of became the thing I started doing and I realized as I worked through many of those companies that one of the prime areas they lacked in was what I call a sales boss, and I use sales boss to refer to a sales leader that is operating at the top 1% of their industry. So that might be the owner, it might be a position in the company, but if you have a sales boss, somebody that gets all of those pieces, it fixes every other part of the business, but it's hard to get right unless you design. So I wanted to write the book from that standpoint and I had worked with a lot of salespeople that I was doing some sales coaching with and then went into sales leadership positions and then went on to be CEOs of companies and I thought it would be helpful for when those salespeople are switching roles, or they're a sales leader and they switch companies, how do you get started in a company that needs help without totally destroying the culture that's there but leaving your impact? And the minute you start a job as a sales leader in an organization, the clock starts ticking. You maybe have 90 days where you're walking on water, and then outside of that time it's okay, you're one of the crew, and then, if you haven't really had an impact, at month eight it's already like you've lost your polish.
Speaker 2:But you also can't move so fast that you destroy the. They still have a business to do and so you can't change everything. So that was why I started writing the book and just putting my ideas down. And then, by accident, I was at a conference learning and I was sitting at a table with one of the agents from Wiley and I also happened to have one of my clients there and so we started talking and the agent from Wiley was there and we were having drinks and everybody makes promises over a beer. So they were like, oh yeah, we should get a book thing going, and so I followed up with the agent afterwards.
Speaker 2:And well, sales leadership books, sales management books, are really tough, like we'll try to do something but it could be years before we get something done. Can you send me your manuscript? I didn't have a manuscript at that point. I had, I think, five or six chapters at early stage. So I sent him that and he came back two weeks later. I'm going to pitch this to you and I guess you have these the agents and they go into an executive meeting and pitch which books they're going to do in the next quarter. Then he came out of that and said let's do it.
Speaker 1:So that's really cool.
Speaker 2:That was sort of the path that made me go. Okay, I guess I got to get this thing done.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you mentioned culture. Let's talk about that for a second. You mentioned a couple of things I want to dive into. So a lot of home services industry plumbers, hvac, the industry that I serve in and what I find lots of times it is one of the most frustrating things. Probably one of the most frustrating things is your best technician. They move the best technician into the sales manager role or the service manager role. It's all the sales. At the end of the day, that person doesn't always do the best in that role. It's like taking your top guy that's crushing it for you and taking him completely out of his element and having managing people. How do you help a company, how do you help a company that's made that decision and that guy is their right hand man. They believe everything he says, for whatever reason. How do you handle that?
Speaker 2:Well, there's a lot of things to unpack there, but you're exactly right, that can tell you have had experience. That's almost always the case, right? Because especially in a smaller business, that person that's producing consistently for you is a savior. Right, you feel like you owe a lot of your company to them, but it's almost a fatal mistake if you promote them into a leadership role and they're not the right person for it, because, human nature being what it is, most people can't step backwards, so they can't go. I'm not a great sales leader. Let me go back to being your best technician. It's really rare.
Speaker 2:So usually what happens is one of two things. One is you both tolerate each other being a subpar leader, just out of respect for your history and the time you've had together in your loyalty, or you put pressure on them. They're not going to necessarily improve and they're going to resent it and they're going to leave, and then they're going to be the best technician for your competitor. And so I think and I write about this in my book when you're looking at a leadership role, especially if you're promoting from within, I have six things that I look at, and they have to check the box at the very top of that list. So the very first one is that if they've been in sales, they're usually not the top performer. And the reason is, if you're a top performer and I put that in context so if you're on a team where there's a lot of top performers, if you're the top performer in a group of top performers, that usually means you have sort of natural ability. And there are people like that that just naturally take to sales. They're gifted at it. You could drop them in anywhere with almost any company and they're going to make rainbows and sunshine and make it rain.
Speaker 2:The problem with that person when you put them in a leadership role is they want to lead the same way they want it to be led. And what did they want you to do as a leader with them? Stay out of my way. Let me work my magic and I'm probably not going to fill out all the paperwork either Because they're good at it.
Speaker 2:The problem when you put them in a leadership role is that's how they lead their team, and 90% of people that they're going to get on their sales team can't operate that way. So if you have somebody who has been a good performer, certainly at the top of the sales team, but not the very top. Usually that's a person that has some skill right, natural and made talent. But they also realize they had a lot to learn and so they listened to podcasts, they took coaching when they went to class, they practiced and they had to learn and put structure. And because they had to do that and they saw value in it, you put them in a leadership role. And how do they lead the same way they want it to be led?
Speaker 2:They wanted somebody that challenged them, and so that's the first thing. But if you're an owner of a company, what does it take to be great? If I'm going to put somebody in this role, do you want to go through the other couple of them? Sure. So the next one is and this won't surprise you they have to have a very high level of emotional intelligence, which means they have the ability to regulate their own emotional state up or down and to identify and label it accurately. And secondly, they have to be able to accurately label the emotional state of somebody else and move them up or down. If they don't have a high EQ emotional intelligence, then they're not going to do well in the world. The third thing is that it's somebody that doesn't need the credit that you never find them feeding their own ego. The fourth thing is they have a balanced analytical mind, meaning that they are somebody that loves data, knows their numbers, understands the guts of what makes the sales organization and the install organization run. They've got a grasp of the financial metrics of it. The reason I say a balanced analytical mind is they're not a complete data head. They're not the guy sitting in the CFO's office. They know their numbers enough and it's important to them to use data, but they also have the human element and say well, the data says this, but we're also dealing with humans. They have that ability to blend.
Speaker 2:There's two more, and you think I would remember these from my book. The sixth one is they inspire loyalty and they can hold the attention of a room. You have to put them in a position, and it doesn't mean they have to be super outgoing, but when you have them in a company meeting and they stand up and they speak, they have to be able to command the attention of the room. People have to feel loyal to them. Then I think the last one, number six, which I think is one of the most important, but it's relying upon all the others, and this is one you have to get exactly right is they're comfortable sitting in judgment. I'm saying that way for a very specific reason they're comfortable sitting in judgment. It doesn't mean they want to sit in judgment, that they like to sit in judgment, that they need to sit in judgment. They're just comfortable with it because, at the end of the day, if you're a leader, you have to have a standard and you have to be able to compare somebody's performance to that standard and you have to sit in judgment. You may not always be right, but at your point of view and it's your obligation to be comfortable enough doing it that you don't avoid having that conversation.
Speaker 2:If I'm running an organization, I'm literally going down that checklist. If I'm saying, hey, corey's my best technician, I can see some leadership ability, should I put them in the role? I'm literally going to go down and say if I was in a courtroom and I was on trial and I had to give evidence that Corey had these things, these six things, what evidence would I produce? Number four they have a balanced analytical mind. What evidence do I have of that? You should be able to find evidence. If you can't, I would suggest they're not the right person for the role or your company is broken and you need to figure out your own metrics. Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1:I know that's going on and on. That's great. Though You're a perfect person to ask this, you have done a further deep dive into human analytics, how humans work, at a level that most people have not through AI and through really at this stage of the game, my opinion is with AI you really can have a better result than with humans, because there's not much margin for error. Before I get too off the beaten path, I do want to ask you about this Slack. You mentioned turning your Slack off earlier. I used Slack as well. What are your thoughts on if an organization of 800 people let's say they all use Slack to communicate internally? What are your thoughts on being able and I know that this can, you can do this. I don't know. I'm sure you could do this, but I know this can be done as you could, through either a sentiment analysis or some other analysis, you could predict quiet quitters based on their conversations within the company messaging app. Did that question make sense? In other words, completely make sense?
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, completely make sense. In fact, there are entire product lines built around this and there's always two sides of the equation. Yes, what can we do and what should we do? Fair, let's assume that you should do this, and that's open to debate whether somebody should or shouldn't do it, but there's entire industries around this. As an example, one of my clients was a large legal discovery firm. When court battles coming on for one of the sets of attorneys, they're gathering all of the documents, all of the emails, and they're feeding this all into an algorithm that helps them find patterns in the data.
Speaker 2:One of the models that that organization uses is to be able to develop a map of influence within the organization. By mapping all of the emails, the Slack communications, what meetings people are at with who, what time do they check out of the building, they're able to develop a pretty accurate map to say these three people are involved in this activity together. When an idea starts within an organization, it usually starts here and then it spreads like wildfire this direction. Of that, I'm reminded that I had a mentor one time and I overheard something somebody had said about me and they said it's not really your right to know other people's opinion of you. So true, neither do you want to necessarily know that sort of sticks with me when I think about technology like that. There is a certain amount of healthy stuff that happens in an organization and you're not going to ring it out through technology. Some people are going to vent, some people are going to be, so I tend not to think of AI being used for that.
Speaker 2:However, in our platform for perception, we're building models for pre-hire, predicting actual job performance. We can predict the dollar revenue a sales person is going to produce. We get within 15 to 20% of that. We can predict likely tenure and a lot of data supporting those models. I do think it's appropriate use on the front end because one I'm not using what they would consider private communications. Even though it's a company channel, they're really in their mind thinking of it as a private channel.
Speaker 2:What our data is doing on the front end is simply saying people that fit this psychographic profile in your organization tend to operate at this level and they tend to stay this long, and I think that's really helpful in terms of building a great, high-performing organization, but also making sure I come from the belief set that when we bring somebody into our organization. It's not really okay that they churn out quickly because we've hurt that individual, we've hurt their family, we've hurt their ability to provide. On some level you've impacted their psyche, they've lost on a job that they were excited about. So I think we have to get it right and we're actually doing somebody a favor to say you're not going to thrive in this role.
Speaker 1:Well, look. It also gives you the ability to market to your ideal customer, so to speak.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's exactly right when you know who it is you're going after. What I find fascinating is the patterns that emerge from data, and AI is a cool thing to attach to everything nowadays, and perception has been doing this for a long time. I think it's important to realize that AI, to a large degree, is just advanced mathematics and computing power catching up to the ability to do those in very complex ways. As an example, most people don't realize that there is not a computer on the planet today that can map one molecule of your cup of coffee and that seems really basic, like we drink coffee every day. But the largest supercomputer cannot model a caffeine molecule Interesting, which seems so basic.
Speaker 2:It's not that we don't know how to map it, we just don't have the computer power to do it. You would literally have to put the world's biggest supercomputer on that problem for over 300 years to be able to map that. So what is happening behind the scenes is we're getting greater and greater computing power and we're also getting better and better methods of computing. So we're shortening workload on computers. So you're getting things like quantum computing coming on the scene. You may remember last year actually it was the year before with Google's quantum computer. They solved a problem in three minutes that would have taken the world's largest supercomputer 100 years to solve.
Speaker 1:I didn't know that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and most people don't, because it's just out in academia, right? Why is that important? Well, when we advance AI and we'll call it that AI, but it's math and computing power combined in pattern recognition. When we can do that all of a sudden you think about when people are building airplanes aircraft Used to be. They build a plane, very expensive to do, they put it in a giant wind tunnel and they blow wind out and see if it fell apart. That's the best they had. Nobody does that nowadays. It's all modeled in a computer. Because we have computers that are capable of doing the algorithm that predicts how is the wind flow going to go over the wings, what's the stress going to be like?
Speaker 2:Eventually, computers are going to get to the place where we can, inside the computer, map every molecule known to man. That completely changes things. If there's a disease state today, what do you do Now? Finally, we've mapped the genome, we've got DNA sequencing, but they're really going in and saying the solutions to this disease exist somewhere between here and here. But we only have so much time and money. Let's slice out here and let's go to a wet lab and create that in a Petri dish and grow it and let's put it in a drug trial. That didn't work, okay, but this one worked the best. Now we know it's in this zip code and let's slice and dice and go. That's a very long process. Imagine being able to just map all the possible solutions and say this is the right solution and the very first time we formulate it we get it right. That's the way it is with aircraft. Now they design in a computer, the very first addition they put out usually flies Drugs are going to get that way.
Speaker 1:That was exactly my literally I was getting ready to ask you, so it seems like it could solve a lot of problems. That could put a lot of pharmaceutical companies out of business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, or drastically reduce the cost of them. That's really where we're at as a society. I think chat, gpt, is normalizing that language for the everyday human. But this conversation has been going on for multiple decades about this point in time of when computing power and our knowledge matches up. Yeah, and it will in many ways break the common ways we think about our agreements as a society what we do for work, how we go about that work, how we age, how we think about aging. So if you follow genomic research at any level the when the human genome was finally mapped 100 percent Now we have genomic medicine, which is completely different than the way we think about medicine today.
Speaker 2:Genomic medicine doesn't mean we make our eyesight better or an ailing condition better. It means we literally fix it. So, going through the FDA now are already approved therapies. One of them that was recently approved is for a very specialized subset of blindness, but in 100 percent of the cases it fixes it. It doesn't make it less, it just fixes it. It's at the genomic level. We're going to get that way where you have an issue with a knee, you have an issue with a heart, where you at the genome level we're actually able to fix it. We're able to 3D print bio identical tissue.
Speaker 2:That's what is coming to our planet and you can freak out about it, because you shouldn't write an article using chat GBT. We have bigger problems than that. We have bigger opportunities than that. I know that wasn't the topic of this podcast, but I think when I get to talk to somebody like yourself that's open to a discussion of AI, we really should be thinking way bigger on what's going to get. In the way of that is fear and uncertainty and the way we want our life to be. Today, I'm getting to see it just in the hiring, and that's probably as important as it is to a business to get their hiring. I think it's vastly important to do that, because the quality of business is the people Right. But if you can't use the latest technology to hire people, how are you going to cope when the other areas of your because that's just table stakes? I really think there's going to be a point in time within the next couple of years where nobody would even consider hiring somebody without predictive technology.
Speaker 2:You have you go back to the world of medicine if you have an AI that can draw upon every example of cancer that's ever existed. In the treatment and the outcome. One can take some self from you and say, oh, you have the same cancer that three other people in history have had and here's the thing that fixes it. You're going to love AI, but for the doctor I think it's actually going to be malpractice not to use the AI. I can see that. Do you want some doctor operating on you that went to med school how many years ago and maybe goes to a couple of conferences? If they're really leading edge? We're just as humans. We're not capable of A taking in all that information, but B even identifying the pattern. So I don't think AI replaces humans. I think AI enables humans to do their job on level that wasn't possible, and I find that super exciting.
Speaker 1:Me too. I find it super exciting. Well, I'll tell you what got me into this, in really looking into AI, was just to me, it's one of the most fascinating things in the world. I met with this guy and I'm not going to say his name and I'm not going to say his company, but basically call, like you and I are having here, after the call is over. It analyzes the call, tells you the emotion on the call, very similar to what we were talking about in Fireflies or one of the note takers. It would go along the line and give emojis as to how the call went. Well, I thought that was the most fascinating thing I've ever seen.
Speaker 1:So I started doing some work with this guy. Well, he brought up Stephanie in the back, so it doesn't really matter to each his own, but I wasn't really getting answers from him. So I just went and figured it out myself and I think that in terms of salespeople, in terms of Zoom calls, in terms of being able to, so I got to the MVP stage of a call center AI and my goal with that was the first layer was just to be able to tell you how the call went at the end of the call through emojis For you. That makes sense and that's not groundbreaking. The next level to that is to be able to take.
Speaker 2:I like to feel so far as to say that's already old technology and for most of the listeners, they might go wow, really, you can do that oh yeah, I just listened to a podcast today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, listened to a podcast. They were like oh yeah, we're working on that. I'm like I've had this MVP built six months ago. I'm not a software guy, I'm a sales guy. So I didn't realize what I was involved with software until I got to that point and then fell flat. But what I had planned to do is to take customer data and you could train the model on the customers calling in the CSRs, the customer service rep and predict what the next customer is going to say and really have that CSR. Just, they wouldn't even really have to think that hard because the information would pop up. It would just pop up on the screen and it wouldn't shock me in the least if that's already available.
Speaker 2:It is already available and it's already outdated. So I was on a call the other day for 10 minutes talking to a human with a pretty complex problem, and it wasn't until I was 10 minutes in that I realized I wasn't talking to a human and I'm pretty forward. It was really good. So I investigated the technology and figured out what's the underlying technology. I built a plugin for our hiring software, which I haven't released this plugin yet, but it can do a pretty call Corey say hey, corey, how's the day going? I understand you're having an upcoming interview.
Speaker 2:You would be really hard pressed to tell you're not talking to a human and it will respond to your questions. If you ask what's the pay rate, do you work in mornings, afternoon, it can answer all of that. It feels human. And the interesting part of that is you think about CSR agents and that sort of thing. That job is going to go away for sure and I would say it's probably less than five years Before that. And the reason is I was able to deploy this model and my pricing model is less than $4 for every minute that it's speaking. You're the human as a business owner and you're going to get it right every single time. I tested this model and you got to do thousands of iterations around that. Yes, I'm going through the model and so they're interviewing me. I think I was doing it for a cleaning job, so I'm just playing along, right, doing answering the questions.
Speaker 2:You got to try to throw the edge cases at it and you did ask me the question we have multiple shifts available. Would you like a morning shift or an afternoon shift? And I said well, I'd prefer an afternoon shift because I like to get my kids off to school in the morning. So I get all the way to the end of the call it offers me. It says I think we should have you in for an interview. I have a spot available at nine or 11 on this day. It schedules all of. It says I'm going to text you the thing. So it's, it texts you the appointment link automatically. But what got me was when it signed off, because it's not programmed in this way. It has boundaries of what it can do and can't do. When it gets to the end of the call, it says hey, jonathan, look forward to having you into the office meeting our hiring manager. Give your kids a high five on the way off to school this morning. Just boom, mind voice, let's voice right.
Speaker 1:We're talking about voice, just voice, right?
Speaker 2:It's just voice yeah, and it's completely automated. There are so many scenarios where this is going to be useful. You think about if you're a contractor and you're offering let's say you're offering financing, all right, so you go in and you do a project and maybe you put in a new garage or whatever you're doing I don't know what your audience business is and then, after the whole job's done, the AI call sounds completely human. It says, hey, corey, our tech was out there. I understand we put in a new garage door for you. We did XYZ and it's listening right, can tell the sentiment. And then it says you finance the door with us Congratulations, by the way using our money, with the rates we were able to give you. That was the smart choice. You spent $11,000 of that. It turns out that we qualified you for 25. Would you like me to close out that credit request? Or would you be open to considering cabinets and new garage door flooring? And, based on that conversation, let me text you over a couple of pictures. When our garage door tech was out there, they took a picture of the garage and we've overlaid that with some things that we feel like you could do for the difference between 11 and 25. That possibility is possible today with the existing infrastructure plugged in correctly today already available. People can feel free to reach out to me if they want tips on how to where to look for that sort of thing, but that's already happening.
Speaker 2:If you're a contractor and you're thinking about I'm going to do business the way I've always done it and I got to keep going back to hiring right, because that's how I make my living and build my company Hiring is one place where people matter. But even on the other side of it, where you're not using people, you should be using technology to improve that. You can even imagine a roofer today getting up on a roofer and saying, yeah, god damn it, I'm not giving up my hammer and my nail, I'm really fast at that Even if they were the best at it, like the guy's going to show up with a pneumatic hammer and just blow past his production level. So you might be the best in your business today doing it the way you do it, but you are going to get left behind by people that use technology and understand technology and, more importantly, craft technology. Ai for hiring isn't perfect today, but it's 90% better than what you're doing today and there will be a day when it's perfect. So, like you think about that voice call, I'm getting 10 minutes in before I realize it's off.
Speaker 2:Three months ago that wasn't possible. Like every single customer service thing you got, that was automated. It's like a robot, right. You find like, give me a human, give me a human. I got off that call and I thought at first I was annoyed, I was like they tricked me. And then it wasn't like. Two seconds later I was like wait a minute. That was the best customer service call I've ever had. It was intelligent, it was smart, it helped me figure it out. I could understand the language they were speaking. I was like sign me up every day.
Speaker 1:I'll take that experience over any other and most people would right, and that's going to take the place of texting and thumbs that most people are used to now. So I had I was in a beta with one of those companies and when I was talking to him, exactly what you were thinking my goal in having these conversations with the people that I, the people that I was talking to was that. Okay, so there's. So imagine that you mentioned roofing. Ironically, we built a roofing AI which we can get into that. But imagine when a storm hits and imagine being able to deploy that voice to every single person in that neighborhood, in that area that got hit. You will smash the rest of the market.
Speaker 2:Well, and especially if you can do it in a way that sounds human. Yeah, so there are questions and you can do 100% of the homes in that area at the same moment. Yeah, five minutes after the storm hits, you've called 100% of the homes 100%. Yeah, you can't build a sales team that lets you do that.
Speaker 1:No, sir, sure can it's just fascinating.
Speaker 2:I was at dinner last night with somebody whose father's aging and he's a veteran, so he uses the VA and he said I never realized him how helping my dad. There's eight apps for the VA and he's like nobody sits down and tells you which app you need to do which sort of thing and it's just a mess. And I just was like imagine how AI is going to change that. If you could just call in and you're talking to a well-trained AI that didn't care if they spend an hour with you, working you through everything, helping you understand it, texting you the examples. That's where I think access to care is so much improved. And yes, when I talk about this, almost always I'll get an angry crowd of people saying you're taking people's jobs. Yep, for sure, and it's going to happen. And we're also going to save a lot of lives because we can finally understand disease states and we can at scale.
Speaker 2:When people first started doing online video dating myself when you start doing online video, the biggest segment for that and improving it was online porn Good porn, and now that was its foothold and now we use it for everything advertising, for spread of knowledge, spread of ideas. It doesn't matter what technology you start with. Yeah, there's the edge cases of doing replacing a customer success person and whatever. What you really should be interested in is the usage of that technology that does amazing things. You look at wars that happen on the planet. Some of the biggest advancements in technology, medicine, et cetera have come from times war not advocating for war, using that as an example to say this is how technology goes and progresses. So utilize the technology, get familiar with the technology and I would say, second we really in almost every period of history when technology has advanced, it's created new and better, higher level jobs. I do think we're getting close to a point where that is no longer true, where the technology actually replaces a job that doesn't create another job.
Speaker 2:As an example already, if you're a coder in Silicon Valley doing coding, about 80% of the code that's being written is being utilized through something like CodePilot, where it's already pre-written for you. You're just describing what you want and the code is written Right. You have to test it, you have to massage it, but that's V1. There's going to be a time when we deploy technology. The reason it created better jobs is you needed programming engineers to fix the bugs and update the code and update the plugins. Well, we're getting really close to where the AI can write its own code, upgrade its own code, upgrade its own plugin, rewrite new plugins, identify limitations, describe to itself what it wants and write it itself. So now you have computerized systems that really can self-sustain.
Speaker 2:You also then have robotics. You look at some of the robotics that are happening. You're going to have robots who can now repair themselves because they can update their code, and the raw materials that go into building that robot are planted, harvested, extracted from the earth by a robot that is self-healing, self-developing, and really, at some point you're not creating a net new job. And the only reason I say that is and I find that fascinating is that as a society we're not ready for it. Right at the time period where we're going to unlock human lifespan, we're also going to be in a position where there isn't enough jobs in the traditional sense of what working has meant, and I don't think we're ready for that as a society to say we place value on a human life because it's a human life, not because of what they do for a living.
Speaker 1:That's a tough concept in it.
Speaker 2:It is right because it's so in readiness, like you meet somebody like, hey, what do you do for a living? And right how we interact. And that's our identity and the problem. You should get people in these political arguments where they're like, well, I don't want universal basic income, I don't want people to have a job and I don't think we should get healthy.
Speaker 2:And there's this argument and, yes, there's some truth to all of it. We're pretty much going to be at a point as a society where we either answer those questions in a Smart, intelligent way or we have chaos for a period of time While we figure it out, and there will be some big losers in that. That's the concern with when you think about and I'm not opposed to massive wealth and Elon Musk's of the world, sure, but when that sort of wealth gets concentrated and ownership of the Software and you like chat, gtp T's owned by a corporation, right and so that that benefit to society is going to continue to isolate to a narrow subset the biggest satellite system in the world, used by most of the militaries on the planet, are owned by a private individual.
Speaker 1:That makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's what we're thought used to always be a nation.
Speaker 1:That's what we thought anyway.
Speaker 2:Well, it has always been that way, okay.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 2:Wow okay.
Speaker 2:And now the satellite network is owned by Elon Musk. Not saying it's a good or bad thing, but it has fundamentally changed the power dynamics on the planet. If Elon decides, I'm shutting off the satellite access to Ukraine, guess what that changes the outcome of a war it used to be. Nations made those decisions in place and that is more and more Falling to individuals who don't necessarily have oversight, right and in control and might have a bad day. Not that I government stone, I just think I'm not coming down on either side of that issue. Sure, if we can't have a realistic conversation about the impact those sorts of changes are having on society, I think we're at a disadvantage.
Speaker 1:It's a little scary to think about how many people Wouldn't even be able to understand what you're saying, to understand the impact this could have on in our lifetime. For sure We'll have it in our lifetime.
Speaker 2:The real challenge is that People are working so hard to feed their families and to make a living and to deal with their own problems. It's very difficult to lift your head up and go okay, what else is going on? And probably for things that they feel like they don't have much control. From the same way, like I think about political things, I'm like I Don't know, but I'm probably not gonna fix that. Yeah, but unless we do. And then that's why I think some of the think tanks that happen around where you get really smart people together, that there's.
Speaker 2:You talk about auto, auto, self-driving cars, ai, right, there's all these think tanks that have been happening for years about how does the insurance company change now, when a car gets in an accident, who's actually responsible? Is it the software writer? Is it the hardware of the car? Is it the owner of the car? Is it the passengers that are in the car? It's gonna completely remake the insurance industry. And guess what? I went to an industry conference on that seven years ago, but people are just now really starting to think. But there are there, there are portions of our society that are structured around helping us think through these problems, or there's no problem.
Speaker 1:Problems, but they're just things that need to be thought through sure, and there's really not depending on where you fall in that spectrum, it is gonna be a small amount of people, one that that win at this, I think because you're winning like if winning is being at the top, controlling the technology, having the wealth by 100%.
Speaker 2:Agree to you, but I think humans has a whole stand to win when we do it right agreed Provided it gets in the right hands, yeah even if that, the, the very high end of that value, ends up with a stratified layer of humans.
Speaker 2:I don't. It's interesting the way we think about success. I was having a conversation with somebody this morning and we were talking about a Documentary I'd watched on the life of Bill Gates. Okay, it's an amazing thing, and even after he got out of the Microsoft he's gone on to do the bill Bill Gates foundation that they're doing Solving disease at eradication in countries and medicine. Yeah, it's had a huge impact on the planet.
Speaker 2:But when you, when they do a Retrospective on their life, they say, oh well, he was a disengaged father, he didn't spend time with his kids. They're a negative thing around him as a father, which is an interesting thing. He could have been a great father and Not done. All of the other things he's done would have had a way worse impact on society, right in terms of disease states and all that. And he's granted his kids the ability to have access to anything they want. But the price for that was Didn't sit down, have dinner with my kids, I didn't go to their games, and as a society we would, if we were just judging our neighbor or you or I would say well, that's terrible, you never sit down with your kids, you're, you're workaholic, but the net benefit of it To society was great, so it just reinforced.
Speaker 2:We should never be judging other people because we don't know what they're, what impact they're gonna have on society, and it is a choice for every human to make. Where do they want to engage and what impact do they want to have? For somebody it might be look, I want to be here with my kids every day. That's my thing. I don't care if I accomplish anything else. And Somebody else might say I want to create enough wealth that my kids can not have to worry about themselves financially. They can chase the dreams they want to have. That's a balance people are trying to find right. And who are we to judge?
Speaker 1:We're not. We're not Because Neil on us, because another good example. Where would we be without that guy? Where would we be without the decisions that he's made to not be with his family or his 25 kids? Or? I'm really grateful that he's not a great father. You know what I mean, and I don't look at him as a bad father. I just look at him as some people have the ability to see past where it's actually just a different definition of what a great father is.
Speaker 2:Absolutely it is. And when I work and I work with a lot of really high performing executives that have built amazing companies and I love it when they find that balance with family and everything else and family is really high on my list of priorities, so but the dysfunction that a high performing leader has is almost in equal measure to the genius they have and they excel in this one area or a handful of areas of their life and it's almost like the other side suffered. It's almost like somebody that's autistic and it's really gifted at music and math, but they can't sit down and have a conversation or tell you how they're feeling.
Speaker 1:There's no balance.
Speaker 2:Like, yeah, there's a balance to that and I think it's finding the beauty in all of those kinds of people. Can we find as much beauty in their dysfunction as we find in their genius?
Speaker 1:That's a group. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I totally agree with you and really I was listening to the four agreements the other day, fascinating book, love that book. And then we're talking about assumptions. If I'm making an assumption about you, really that's just me projecting what I'm thinking about me onto you and I'm like that is so true.
Speaker 2:In my book I use a phrase that is, I believe you believe that which can sound really sarcastic Not at all, but what I mean by that is if we can get up close and personal to the people in our company and authentically believe hey, if I grew up the way Corey grew up, experience what he did, I probably would see this thing exactly how he does and I would feel the same way and respond with this the same way.
Speaker 2:If I can do that, all of a sudden there's zero judgment for me, saying Corey is coming up short, and it's only in that moment that I'm actually able to discover how I might be able to, to propose to Corey that there's another option. Like, I can't help Corey change, but I can maybe widen the perspective and that's how we have to be with people in our organizations is, except that what they're giving you today is 100% of what they're capable of or they have a valid reason they believe for not doing so Doesn't mean that it is universally valid, but to them it is 100% valid. And if I can believe, hey, if I was Corey doing that job for me today and I grew up experiencing what he did and reading the books he did and I would probably feel about me the same way Corey's feeling about me right now. I'm not gonna take offense to it. I don't have to feel like I need to force my will.
Speaker 1:That's a really deep definition of empathy.
Speaker 2:That's it, and that's just where I go to. Like emotional IQ is being able to accurately identify the emotion in yourself, but also in another person, and regulate that up or down. And the very deepest layer of that comes from the old cliche walk a mile in somebody else's shoes, universally true. I would just take it even deeper than that to you have beliefs, I have beliefs, everyone has beliefs that we don't even identify as a belief. We identify it as truth. It doesn't even occur to us that it is a belief that we hold Because we were surrounded by that viewpoint or that understanding of the world.
Speaker 2:And you get people that are really religious Christian, Muslim, otherwise and they're so set on it and they've never actually really studied anything else, but they're so convinced it's because they were surrounded by it. They grew up in a Christian country, surrounded by a Christian family, going to a certain church. And I can say that because I grew up in a cult environment and I was right there and people would say, Jonathan, your brainwash. And I would scoff at them I've got the cleanest brain around, Like it's the rest of you people that are right. And now I'm 20, gosh, no, I used to say 20, 25 years past that and I can't even imagine that I used to believe that way. Like I find it's so far opposite the way I think about things and experience things now, but in that moment it was true. It wasn't a belief, it was truth to me. Yeah, Everybody has that.
Speaker 2:What are we identifying in ourselves as truth? That's actually belief, and if we can crack that open, that's a pretty vulnerable place to be.
Speaker 1:Well, look, it will take something really simple. Look at the political climate. You can talk to 10 people, and five of them may be on one side and five on the other, and they 100% believe in the reasons why they're right to be on. We saw it back in 2020.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we loop that back to AI and imagine the conversational AI that I described earlier, calling for financing and other job interviews. Imagine being able to have two million simultaneous phone calls going out to people with false information, auto generating videos that look real. I was really diving deep into this subject of deep fake videos and we grew up in a period of time and I'll just lump you into that. I hope I'm not too far off. You look really young and healthy, so, but I know you worked at it. It used to be like you would see a picture of people and you were, oh, that's Photoshopped, and they could digitally look at it and have proof that it was Photoshopped. We're getting really close to the point where we can create a deep fake video of anyone saying and doing anything. It sounds like them, looks like it them and worse, there's no digital evidence that can be uncovered that it's not real. And that's the. And if you Google deep fake videos, sure really dive deep on that subject. We're either there now or we're within months of it.
Speaker 2:Last time I looked, and so there's these whole committees meeting to say how can we put markers inside of digitally created content that people don't know about, so that we have something to rely upon to say this did or did not happen In FTs.
Speaker 2:Imagine putting out at scale I don't even care if you, even if intellectually you look at that video, it looks real and you go I know X person didn't do this.
Speaker 2:The fact that you've seen it is really hard to erase from your psyche, even if you tell yourself it's not true and you bombarded with that you could influence entire ways of thinking. That's what advertisement does. Now, yeah, most people aren't aware that back when laser printers got started with printing really high fidelity prints and then people used it to print money and have fake one, the way they solved that is, there was actually laws passed for the manufacturers of those printers to put patterns so fine in the print that nobody could see it unless they had the key to look at it. And then they could say this fake money, counterfeit money, was printed on this sort of printer that was sold in this region of the country, and now they could narrow the search and we're repeating that now. When we think about deep fake videos, it's really like how do we find a way to find the person that's going to misuse the technology?
Speaker 1:And there's always going to be bad players.
Speaker 2:Once Pandora's box is open and the capability exists to do it, somebody's going to do it, and that's where good social debate around what's the right or wrong use of technology. I found it hilarious that so many people in our country were shocked that our government was listening in on everybody and connecting vast amount of data. Duh, what else do you think they would be doing Right? Whether it's right or wrong, that's a very valid debate. However, that sort of thing is and will continue to happen.
Speaker 1:Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 2:We covered a lot of ground. Yeah, we did. Related to that. We really did.
Speaker 1:We really did. We went all over the place, but I'm used to that. This was such a great conversation If nobody else got anything out of it. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Speaker 2:Likewise, and I enjoyed chatting with you, so we got our needs met at the end of the day.
Speaker 1:That's right. So, jonathan, where could people find you? Can you give some of that information out?
Speaker 2:And then, yeah, my name is John with the J-O-N. So, like John at the sales boss will give me, john at whohirecom will get me. An online message to Corey will get me. You can Google me, you'll find me.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, I appreciate it, my friend, and I really enjoyed the conversation. Likewise Good to chat you too.
