Latest / Books4Guys / Digital Kaizen | Christopher Hensley on AI, Voice Capture, and Continuous Growth

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Digital Kaizen | Christopher Hensley on AI, Voice Capture, and Continuous Growth · Books4Guys

• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: San Antonio for a year, and I went back and forth between Houston and San Antonio and Austin.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Works for you probably know the company, Holt Caterpillar.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: And uh my family's ex-military, so that uh my grandfather was 82nd Airborne, and so they uh they would go from base to base, and San Antonio is a big military town, so that's kind of how we how we made it into Texas and eventually ended up in Houston.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: No, I remember all the base and people I saw around.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, great city, Houston as well.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: But no, Christopher, man, I'm super excited to talk with you and and have you on the podcast because your book just came out not that long ago, and it touches on a subject that I think most people are interested in.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they don't like it.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of lessons to learn around what you're specifically talking about and what you wrote about.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: And uh your book, Digital Kaizen, and I've got it pulled up here: Digital Kaizen Voice First Thinking and AI Systems for Continuous Improvement.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: And if I'm not mistaken, Kaizen is a Japanese business philosophy term.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Is that right?
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, yep.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: So this is taking uh three really strong growth and productivity ideas and uh interlacing it with uh voice and then uh also sprinkling AI on top of it.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: And and so it's kind of a it's got a little ingredient book of things, but it's really a way to think about AI that that people I don't think have have wrapped their their head around it.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Kai Zen, though, is that small, continuous, positive growth, incremental, slow, positive, continuous growth.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, talk a little, jump right in if you don't mind, because I I want you to kind of explain in your own words just the motivation because you're you're uh you're in the finance space, and this is a little bit of a different book as as far as AI, it applies to everyone and every profession.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: But what did you experience specifically that led you to wanting to write this?
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so this book specifically came out of a couple of different things.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: So when people have heard about me in the past, it might be from my podcast for Money Matters uh podcast, which I've been doing for over a decade, but this isn't particularly about finance.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: It came out of me diving into AI early on in my own practice.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: I had uh both myself and my assistant data analytics certified and prompt engineering certified through Vanderbilt.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I had very positive results.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think a lot of advisors, whether you're financial advisor, attorney, sales professional, there was some hesitation about, you know, going feet first into it, right?
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: We heard the story about the attorneys who wrote a brief and it turned out it was just BS, right?
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: And it was, it was, you know, hallucinated by AI.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: This, you know, fast forward, and we're getting uh past quite quite a bit of that stuff.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: But I had such a positive result with AI in my solo, I would say solo practitioner, solo entrepreneur practice.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: Me and my assistant at the time, who now my assistant's no longer here, so it's just me and my AI tools, that that I found myself embarrassingly, where I'm gonna share with readers this because this might be you, but you're not gonna tell anybody this, right?
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: I found myself talking to Chat GT, chat chat GPT in my car, right?
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: In my truck, if I'm being honest here.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, so a little bit of background here.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm somebody who, prior to the whole AI thing, I am heavily steeped in audio voice recording.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: This was a habit that I developed as a kid.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I early on in my practice, I used, I'm gonna use a couple props here, I used transcribing to transcription devices, right?
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: So I even go further back in time here, with the idea that, you know, doctors take notes, attorneys take notes, financial advisors should take notes, and they're gonna capture some of the best thoughts and and things that, you know, when we're trying to take notes, we're just not great at.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: The things that we missed, kind of like when you go back and you watch a movie for the second time and you say, Oh, I missed that part.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: Now I can see something much richer and deep there.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: That that was the idea then.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: But the book starts where I asked the question, well, if I've had such a positive result in my business, why not introduce this into my personal life?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's that's where the book began.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: And it and and a lot of it was conversations that literally started with me and chat.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: Am I talking to my phone?
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: Am I talking to Chat GPT?
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, that's that's where we're at.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure I'm not the only person out there.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: I might be the only one that'll raise my hand and admit to it.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um But the the other real problem that this book uh I don't say solves, but puts us in front of is the idea of losing your meaning and your voice to AI.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: So AI should be a co-pilot, it should be a tool, but it should not be something that takes away our authenticity, our humanness, our meaning.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what we dive really deep into the with the book.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's interesting because I've been having several conversations recently, kind of around this, and and maybe directly, maybe in a roundabout way, but just more in regard to the importance of critical thinking and talking things out and not letting AI automate and just make me a dull person with no expression or opinion and just letting it basically be me.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's kind of that's kind of freaky.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it seems like a lot of people they're moving so fast with it and trying to keep up and trying to implement it, and they see someone else using it in a more efficient way, so then they do it, and it's just you just keep adding, adding, adding.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's getting really easy to lose your long-term personal development, growth in a way you're almost taking a step backwards by using more and more AI.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: You are a huge user of it, and you're you're kind of teaching us how to implement it without totally losing yourself in the process.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: What are some of the ways you recommend going about using AI?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: And and obviously, again, you use it.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: So you're you're a believer in it, but what do you do specifically, or what do you recommend to other people how to use it where they again don't rely and do everything on it, but like keep their voice in control?
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: So for sure.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I have all I'm Gen X, right?
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: So so Generation X, we have two ways that this could go, right?
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: This is either gonna be Terminator 2 Dystopia.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: I saw the movie, right?
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: This is I grew up with this.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's either going that route or it's Star Wars and R2, the trusty co-pilot that's with us for the for the ride, right?
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I'm rooting very hard for R2, but I am a realist.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so we could, you know, we are at a point where it could go either way.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the things that you just mentioned there uh that should is a strong focal point of the book is keeping your meaning, not delegating meaning, keeping your voice.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, the whole idea behind digital kaizen is a system, a critical system way to think about AI so that we are bringing our meaning and voice along.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: And we don't even actually know what we're bringing along yet.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: Part of the system is that through Kaizen, this grows and the very first step is to capture.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: This could be as simple as just using your phone and hitting record and using audio, voice to capture ideas and thoughts.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: So think about voice journaling, but on steroids, right?
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: Because AI is a strong pattern recognition tool.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so the quickest and easiest way to interact with this technology is through voice.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: It is much quicker than typing.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: If we're trying to be creative, that's something that we're trying to preserve, right?
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: This is creative thought and not just have a whole bunch of AI slop out there, right?
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: Where we become this bad content, right?
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: Like this where you can tell everybody's using AI, right?
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: So the way to prevent that is to keep your voice to the very forefront of that.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: Not just your physical voice, but your meaning, bringing your meaning along.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: So when we capture things with our voice, it's faster.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: When we type, we have a tiny little editor in our head that's sitting there before we put print to word to word or type to screen, right?
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: We say, ah, you know, we're kind of correcting as we go, we've got grammarly going.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: So it's some of our best thoughts.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: Think of it like improvisation or writing a rough draft.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: Those come out through voice.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: One of the pillars, there's three different pillars in the book, but the first one is the extended mind, and it talks about some of our best thinking doesn't just happen in our brain, it happens outside of our body.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so this is the idea of like right now, we are in a dialogue and we're not sure where this conversation's going.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: But whatever it started out with, it's not going to be what we thought, right?
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: But that's how ideas grow.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how some of our most creative thoughts grow.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so the idea of just letting yourself talk and capture those thoughts, you get some of your realest deep, most valuable thoughts and ideas out there.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, some of them might be garbage, but we have to, we have to capture them to be able to go back and mine them.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: Our future self will find something in those thoughts that we didn't even know we needed, right?
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: Two, three years down the road, we're gonna find emotionally rich data of conversations that we had.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: And it's, you know, this a lot of it sounds like a productivity book, and there are lots of aspects to it like that, but it's not a uh a book full of prompts.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, the things that are most meaningful to me that I found were conversations with my son or my wife that I had forgot that I even we had a conversation in the kitchen this morning, and you know, I'm wearing my my voice capture device, right?
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so it picked it up.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: And then when I go back and I look at my summaries at the end of the night, um, some of the most meaningful conversations are there.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: And you you you can you can miss those things.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: That's the the the very first part of it is just to capture and then go back, examine, and it's a loop, just like Kaizen.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: We just keep going back and back and growing in iteration.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: It I love just the emphasis on voice because I'm horrible at this.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: I what's funny though is like if I ever I've talked to a lot of authors who have spoken their books out.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, you know, that's a new thing.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: You speak it, either someone writes it for you, or there's apps and tools now that can like a voice capture, get it all organized, and you you know put it together and edit at the end.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I've always thought, you know, hey, if I ever write a book, it's gonna be that route.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: But when it comes to most things, I am still I'm typing, I'm heads down, I'm typing, I'm texting.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know why that is, because everything you've said is true.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's so much easier to talk.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it and I don't know, maybe I just haven't done it enough.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: I still feel weird when I talk to text, or and it's probably just something if I just started doing it, I'd pick up on and realize the importance of it.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: But I I love the reminder from you speaking about voice because I don't I haven't talked to anyone in really the AI space or anyone else who's written about it that's taking that angle and talking about how important that is.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's a pretty specific area of AI.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh, you know, AI's been around for 20 years.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: What we're seeing now, where it's blown up in the last, you know, five, two, two years or so, is a different version of it, but it there's been AI in some form.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: But when we get specifically into voice, right, you know, we were kind of prepared for this a little bit with I'm afraid to say it, Alexa.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: Let's hopefully it didn't turn on here, or you know, or even the G word, right?
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: And my phone's gonna pick up here in a moment.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, so you know, we were kind of prepared for some of that.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it is it's a different way to come at it.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: But the the idea of that first pillar when we talk about the extended mind and we talk about some of our best thoughts happen in the shower or while we're walking.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: So voice in motion, right?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I still get a little bit of uh, you know, say embarrassed red tinge here when I'm talking to myself while I'm doing my walk in the evening and so, oh, somebody seeing me.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: It seems a little crazy, right?
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: But it works.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's it's in fact, it you're you're allowing yourself the freedom to be able to kind of free flow and and and let it all out.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of thinking behind cognitive downloading or offloading.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so just if you buy into the voice journaling part of it, the idea that you're downloading some of your best thoughts, this is huge.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: This takes frees up bandwidth cognitively for us.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: But then if you add AI back in to it as a pattern recognition, it is very strong at pattern recognition.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: So it will notice things that we are not able to notice ourselves.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's where you you kind of bring it back into the loop at the end there.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: No, Christopher, I'm sitting here thinking, like I'm I'm I feel like such an idiot because I'm I'm sitting here thinking about a new practice that I just implemented into my podcast.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't even know why it's taken me so long, but I just now realized I can download the transcript into ChatGPT and have it give me all of these notes and summary.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because you and what reminded me was you talking about talking with your family and then having like an end-of-day summary rundown, catch up on what was spoken.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: And someone was like, dude, why don't you just run the transcript and have it summarize it?
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, duh.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and I've been doing it for two days.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's why I forgot this is a game changer.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: So let me let me I'll speak on that for a moment.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: So for somebody who's been podcasting for over a decade, like pre-Jo Rogan, pre-Tim Ferris, right?
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: When it iTunes, like I'm dating myself, right?
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: Early Lipson.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh early Lipson days, right?
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: So when podcasts first came out, the idea of sitting there and editing uh clips from it, you know, manually, right?
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's how I produced a show, and it took a very, very long time.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: Now we've got text-based editors, right?
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah, the idea of downloading the transcript, throwing that into an LLM, and and that is how I do the majority of the content part pieces of it.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: So when the show's done, I'll throw the transcript in there.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I I built a GPT.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, if you go onto ChatGPT and you look up podcast, what is it called?
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'll send you a link to it.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: I when G when ChatGPT first came out, I built a ChatGPT uh GPTS that does podcast production.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I fed it the 200-page document from Google that talks about SEO rankings, kind of the rules for that.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I put those two things together.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's good for the like post-production stuff, but yeah, man, the transcription and that's all stuff that here's what's really cool.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: You don't really have to do a heavy lift for that.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's just a byproduct of what we're doing right now, talking, right?
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: No, and I'm I'm again, I'm so the last two days have been just such an eye-opening experience for me doing that.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like the amount of things I forgot that I said or that the person that I was interviewing said.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's you're you're right.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazing how so much can get lost if you don't just from conversation, you forget.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: You just there's other things going on in your brain, and you just don't, you just it's hard to remember everything.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: But the notes that were coming up in the summary, I was like, oh, this is great.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like, this was such a good point.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: I I need to talk about this when I post the episode because I think more people will appreciate that instead of me just giving a general of you know who I talk to, like give some specific points of what was discussed because and then the the listener can decide if it's something that they'll find value in before they even push play, which I I I do when I look up podcasts.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so yeah, everything you're talking about, I'm like, I'm kind of implementing it.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm starting to think about it, and I and I see the importance of it.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: And and it's just it's just being educated on this, I think.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: Everything's going so fast, and we kind of talked about that in the the first part of the conversation is everyone's trying to keep up, but if you take a pause and look at some of these things a little more, and that's what that's what you say.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: Don't always be looking for shortcuts, but what are some things you can get 1% better at and implement and use this to your long-term strategy?
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: How just better as a person, as a business, can you get to?
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that's man, I just Chris, I love this conversation, man.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm learning a lot.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and so it's it's slow down to go fast, right?
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's not having that fear of missing out.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we're all experiencing this, right?
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: If you tried to silently protest by not getting on the AI train two years ago, and and my my spouse was like, and my son's like, you're putting the artist out to work.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, I agree, I'm not disagreeing with all of that, but the train's already left the station, man.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's not rolling back.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so sure enough, within a year, two years out, it's pull up your outlook, pull up, it's on your phone, it's embedded.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: If you're trying to avoid it, well, good luck with that.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's everywhere, right?
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: So, so I encourage people to dive feet first into it.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: On the other hand, there are serious issues there with it with AI.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so we need agency, right?
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, instead of, we need to have a seat at the table.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of like bioethics, right?
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: Science rolls forward, and then we go back and we say, okay, are there there's only 200 people on the planet that are hired by these companies to discuss AI ethics?
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that doesn't seem good, right?
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, even though it's backwards looking, these are problems.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: We have to have that conversation first to get there.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I strongly encourage anybody who's looking to keep going with down this trail with AI, the people who really get it are people who understand plain language.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, when when prompt engineering, if you take a course on prompt engineering, you would think it would be the engineers or the computer science people that would get it.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: But intuitively, it's it's literature majors and philosophy majors because it's it's made in such a way that it understands plain language.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so that I would say come at it that way and the things that make you passionate, dive into it that way.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: Almost like a Montessori approach, right?
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: If you like it, go for it.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I think that's that's a a good way to approach it.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: We do definitely, I have a whole chapter on there, I have a couple chapters on guardrails and things that we need to be aware of so that we don't lose ourselves and we don't lose our authenticity.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: I even dived into some of the negative stuff with people with psychosis who who've you know ended up having conversations thinking that they were talking to God through Chat GPT and stuff.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's not good, right?
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like, like we we we can see that.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: So uh, but I think we we're heading in the right direction.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: It we just need enough people to kind of uh raise their hands and and be looking for for advocacy there and and uh agency.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's very fascinating.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: Christopher, as far as, and I'm thinking just your profession, financial advisor, and I'm I'm thinking of a lot of different professions now that can be affected by this, but what are some things that you see, or what are some things that you're doing different to stay ahead of the curve as a financial advisor versus people who maybe aren't using AI to their advantage?
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: Or what are some potential, maybe some concerns you have that with AI in the financial advising space?
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: And do you see, do you see where people, I don't know, maybe they don't use financial advisors as much?
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: Or how do you maintain your purpose and I guess relevancy in your profession versus people who are struggling with that?
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, okay, there was a couple of different questions there.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I'll take, I'll take them one by one.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: So the first one was uh, am I doing something different than other people with AI in my profession?
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say, yeah, because I don't think a lot of people have dove in as far into it as quick.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: I was reading an article yesterday.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this is relevant, not just for financial advisors, but anybody who is in an industry where data is important.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: This could be healthcare professionals, sales professionals, right?
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: Anything where you have a contact management system, a CRM system.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: What I talk about in the book, a lot of this comes off of the AI adopting the AI note takers really, really fast, right?
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: I started with a company called Avoma.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um I am immediately, or not immediately, but pretty quickly switched to Fireflies, who I'm a pretty big advocate of.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: They are not specifically for the financial services industry, but they are they're kind of not gonna say owning this space.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: I see them doing a lot of stuff that the ones that um that are designated for financial services, that there's a thing called an advisors premium where a company will come in, like an SAAS will come in and then they'll brand, you know, it's this is for financial advisors.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we have deep pockets and then they'll charge.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: I call that the advisors premium, right?
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm also you're talking to one of the most frugal people you'll ever meet.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: I should probably have disclosed that right at the beginning.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: But so I'm always very in the weeds with the technology stack because my practice is kind of all like open uh architecture, best of class, whatever I can do, but for cheap, right?
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: So uh Fireflies is not specifically for financial advisors, but I really like their technology.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of companies out there that are doing the note taking thing that are in that space.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: The article I read last night was about CRMs and the idea that maybe the CRM is get is dying, or it's at least been demoted because the note taker apps are so darn good that what's going on in My industry is when we're in conversations with our clients and it's immediately not only taking this emotional information, some of the most powerful things, you know, talking about people's uh parents passing or somebody going into long-term care or their kids graduating, the things that we should have picked up on and we didn't, this allows us to go back and put that thumbtack there and say, you know, you missed this.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: So next time you talk to that client, go back and get that.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: But then it's getting the hard data stuff that's in the CRM stuff, right?
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what we've, whether we're sales profession professionals using Salesforce or whatever the CRM is, that's what we've always done.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: These note takers are so darn good that it's doing multi-things there.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: And it's for us, it's feeding it back into some of the old paperwork that we used to do automatically.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a real time saver.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so we're able to, this I'll pivot into the second part of it.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: Will we be replaced?
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: So what it's doing is it's freeing up bandwidth so we can do the actual things that you think financial advisors do, which is advising their clients, right?
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: Talking to their clients, building those relationships.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't worry about getting replaced.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: We we had this same fear many years back with the robo advisors.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm uniquely somebody who does actively manage active management.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I do actually, I'm the cook in the kitchen.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: I actually do portfolio construction.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: I do the whole nine yards of it.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: I don't outsource my investments.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: But I think I love the idea of people getting educated on it.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: That was some of them, some of my best clients, they understand what I'm doing.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so getting educated and going down that road is always a plus.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: We do have to put a huge asterisk on there for because I'm not advocating letting LLMs do your financial planning or your investment, but there are things that they can do that are in that realm, right?
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: That that um that that you can ask.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I know people are leveraging that stuff.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: Recently, I think a lot of the financial services industries have this interface where they can get, they can now attach to Chat GPT.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think that rolled out in the past month.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: This would be to scrape your own account, right?
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: So this isn't necessarily advising, but this is like, okay, what did I do this month and going back and doing that, right?
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: Great use of that because it's um it's pattern recognition.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's data that would be really hard for humans to go in and dig.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: It will do it faster and better.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: And we still have the privacy thing.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's not a um uh we'll solve it, but it's not going away anytime soon, right?
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: And but that's I would make the argument that that's been around forever, right?
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: We've we've had I, you know, things of fraud and and all kinds of stuff that are if they're not on your radar radar, they need to be on your radar anyway.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: But that's just baked into the pudding.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: No, the one word, Chris, that I just keep coming back to on this is, and you said it, relationships.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: And as long as as long as humans are still here and and running the show, the relationship piece is the most important that can keep things in check, I feel like, with the advancement of AI and technology.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: It just seems like that's the one thing it may not be able to replicate or do a great job at.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now, maybe some people get confused and talk to it, you know, and that is the relationship.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: But as far as, you know, the way we're talking about it and business and opportunity, the relationship and sales is still the most important aspect of that.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: Chris, is there any we you you kind of talked about kind of a funny scenario earlier about like, hey, this could go one of two directions.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: Is there a part of you at all that sometimes thinks of AI and it going in a direction that is pretty scary?
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: To where, man, there is a lot of job loss and lost purpose, and that just keeps advancing and advancing and advancing, and we're kind of we just end up behind the eight ball and we we didn't get out ahead of it in time, and so there's now a lot of you know catastrophic issues.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like, do you worry about that too, even as a proponent of using AR?
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm an I'm an optimist, but I'm a pragmatist first and a realist first, right?
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: So so so yeah, absolutely.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: That these risks are real, uh, especially if you have it in the hands of a small handful of companies, right?
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then it becomes what's driving it.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: Is it dollar signs or is it people?
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: Most of the times it's dollar signs, and that's not good when it comes to us.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: So so being able to have that conversation of agency and AI ethics.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: I encourage people, there's a movie out right now called the AI Movie, and it does a really good job of looking at both sides of it.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: If anything, you'll walk out of there saying, you know, it's kind of like we can't escape it, it's here, right?
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: But I it it encourages you to get a voice and to to uh be solutions oriented.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's it's I'm I'm like you.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm optimistic.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: But two years ago, I would have said that some of the things happening today wouldn't be possible, and they are happening.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's like, man, I just, you know, what's the next three to five years going to look like?
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: Gonna be crazy.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: This stuff is accelerating super duper fast.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's part of the book is is framing it so that we don't have this FOMO and that we're not being overloaded.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's a way to think of it that puts uh the human being in the in the driver's seat.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love that.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: Chris, just two more questions for you.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: First question as people read your book, if they take only one thing away from it, one nugget of information that sticks with them, what do you hope that one nugget is?
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's so many different things there, but the the thing that I encourage people to do is just hit record, just capture, capture thoughts.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: You never know what future you is going to go back and need or look at, or what's some of the most important things.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: That leads to a second thing called legacy.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: In my industry, we think of estate planning and assets, but legacy is really about our thoughts, our values.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: What do we want to leave to the next generation?
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: And this is a tool that helps you build a legacy in that sense.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a different way to come at it.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: When you say capture, I'm thinking about my wife.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when she wants to take a selfie, just take the selfie, take the pictures, make sure all that's recorded because it'll be nice to look back at it down the road for one reason or another.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so yeah, encourage you to capture, record, take pictures, enjoy those moments.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: Chris, last question for you.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I ask every guest this, just from a books for guys standpoint, but I'm always curious to know what is a book or two that has meant a lot to you personally or professionally, and what's a book that you like to recommend to others?
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know what?
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: The one that I that I actually talk about in the book, there's a couple of them there.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there's the extended mind by Annie Murphy Paul.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, there's the second brain by Tiago Forte.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: I would I would leave it at those two.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: The the last one, Kaizen, that was the the that Japanese management principle, but it's there's been so many books in that.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: I wouldn't like peg that to one author.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: But those two books, the the Extended Mind and the Second Brain are very strong books, I would recommend.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, great, great recommendations.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: And Chris, man, this this conversation has been fantastic.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think what you're speaking about and writing about and the message that you're sharing with people is very, very important.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so I hope I know people will take a lot away from this, and I hope it leads to a lot of people uh reading your book as well.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm excited to see the impact that your book has.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I look forward to hearing people uh shoot me texts, you know, see what they say after they listen or watch the episode.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: But Chris, man, keep doing what you're doing and and excited to follow your work and see the impact that you continue to have.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: Chris, thank you so much for having me on the show today.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: I really enjoyed it.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Chris.