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Using AI to Navigate and Improve Friendships with Connor Joyce · Friendship IRL: Real Talk About Friendship, Community, and What It Actually Takes

• 0:00
  Podcast Intro/Outro: rrAll right, gang. Here's to nights that turn into mornings and friends that turn into family.
• 0:07
  Podcast Intro/Outro: Cheers. Hello, hello, and welcome to the Friendship IRL podcast. I'm your host, Alex Alexander. Each week we talk about what is working (and what is not) in our friendships, community and connections. Have you ever wished you could sit down and have a conversation about what is really going on in your friendships? Well, you found your people. Join us as we dive into real life stories and explore new ways to approach these connections. Together, we're reimagining the rules of friendship
• 0:57
  Alex Alexander [Narration]: So this episode is going to make some of you uncomfortable, and honestly, I'm a little uncomfortable too. But here's the thing, I started this podcast to explore what real people are actually doing in their real lives when it comes to their friendships, not what they should do, not some perfect theoretical approach, but what's actually happening out there in the real world, and whether you like it or not, AI is becoming a part of that real world. It's expanding into areas of our lives that we never expected, and yeah, that comes with concerns. I get it, no advancement happens without negatives. But people are using AI to navigate their friendships, and a lot of them are doing it in ways that are, let's just say less thoughtful than what you're about to hear.
• 2:02
  Alex Alexander [Narration]: Today's guest is Connor Joyce.
• 2:06
  Alex Alexander [Narration]: Connor is a senior user researcher on the Microsoft Copilot team. He's been working in the AI space for over five years, and he's one of those people who's integrated AI into almost every aspect of his life, including his friendships. Now, before you jump to That's creepy or that's unethical or he should just go to therapy, I want you to try something else. I want you to stay curious. Listen to how he's doing this. Listen to the intentionality behind it.
• 2:40
  Alex Alexander [Narration]: Listen to the actual work he's doing on himself. Because here's my truth, I don't personally use AI this way, and I don't particularly plan to, but I also know that if this tool helps someone actually take action in their real life relationships, if it gets someone out of their own head and into meaningful conversations with other people they care about, who am I to say that's wrong. My whole philosophy on this podcast is that there's no one right way to do friendship. I just want you to do something. Take Action, stop isolating yourself in your own brain, overthinking everything, and if AI is the tool that finally gets you out there. Okay, then. So today, we're exploring what it looks like when someone uses AI as a growth tool for their friendships and relationships.
• 3:49
  Alex Alexander [Narration]: Connor has created Project Folders, detailed containers of context about his core relationships that he uses to gain self awareness, understand patterns and show up more intentionally. Some of you are going to love this some of you are going to hate this episode.
• 4:14
  Alex Alexander [Narration]: Some of you are going to land somewhere in the messy middle with me. And that's okay. That's actually the point. And with that, let's get into today's episode.
• 4:24
  Alex Alexander: Hi Connor, thanks so much for being here today. I am really excited about this conversation. I've been hesitant to record an AI episodes, just like, where do I go with it? And then you and I met, and this whole conversation just kind of like fell in my lap. So thanks for being here.
• 4:42
  Connor Joyce: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Alex. I it's a topic that I'm excited to chat about. It's like this beautiful connection between my work and my personal life.
• 4:50
  Alex Alexander: So I feel like to set the stage, I need to know how much you're using AI for other things in your life.
• 4:57
  Alex Alexander: Before we talk about how you're using it for your friendships and your connections.
• 5:03
  Connor Joyce: That's a great question. It's a loaded question. Two of these days, I'll tell you what I'm not using AI for, because the reality is is most of the time I am using it in some ways. I'm not using AI to make final decisions. I'm not using AI to chart out big rocks. I'll say, in other words, making decisions around big, strategic decisions of the direction that something is going in. I'm not using AI to draft every communication that I have, but I am using AI a lot, and I think that the reality is, for me, I'm an AI researcher.
• 5:38
  Connor Joyce: I've been using large language models now, for now, it's, I think, five years over five years. And I've been in the AI space for more years than that is the technology has gotten to the point where it can improve almost every work stream of really anything. And so that doesn't again, mean end to end.
• 5:57
  Connor Joyce: It does everything. I still have the agency and the big rocks and making the main decisions around things. But I am getting ideas.
• 6:06
  Connor Joyce: I am working out how will people respond to situations. I am drafting a lot of content. I am synthesizing and understanding context. I am utilizing it again in many different ways, almost every single work stream, whether that be work through my main job or through the work that we do in our daily lives.
• 6:26
  Alex Alexander: So I also use a decent amount of AI. I do not obviously work in the AI space, but as a solopreneur in the world we live in today. You know, investing my time and energy into AI has been an absolute game changer in just like how I can show up in my business, right? The the amount I can do as one person, quite frankly. And the reason I asked you that question, though, was because if somebody is not really on AI, like real talk, my husband, he's a tax accountant, so he has, like, a work tax AI co pilot thing, but he literally, I don't think, has an account anywhere else I know, right? That's crazy. So some people listening may not even just, like, really understand the capabilities, and they might hear some things today, you know, like how you're questioning AI and how you're directing it, where they're like, I don't even know I could do that. So I think it's important for people to know you're pretty savvy. Obviously, you're in the advanced AI lane.
• 7:34
  Connor Joyce: Yeah, yeah. I appreciate that, yeah. And it is, I mean, there really is that. I think the data is now showing that there's this wild spread between the people who are using it and then the average user. We talk about this a lot on my team, my full time job, I'm a user researcher on an AI product called Copilot Notebooks. If one is familiar with ChatGPT projects or Notebook LM from Google, it's going to be a very similar product to that. And we talked about how we can see across all AI usage right now. This is an internal work. This is stuff that we're reading along with the rest of whether it be this audience or just the market.
• 8:10
  Connor Joyce: Will say is that there's a lot of bifurcation of there are some super users who are using it incredibly well. Again, I'm not joking when I say I use it in almost every work stream that I'm doing now, and it sounds like you are finding a lot of value and using it across. I'm pretty close, yeah, but then there's a huge majority of people who have never done anything more than just do a single chat or a couple of chats, yeah, no advanced features, no utilization of it in any other product, let alone anything agentic. It's a wild split. And I mean, I think one caveat I will say to what you, you're saying is, yes, I've been using it for a while, and this is such a net new market that I always advise people definitely listen to people who are using like definitely listen to those that are building it. Listen to people who are using a lot. But it is still a tool that is very new, and so it's constantly changing, and it's one of those things that it will fit into everyone's life a little bit different, at least right now.
• 9:08
  Connor Joyce: So there's definitely lessons to be learned, and there's still the condition that it just because it's working for one person in one way doesn't mean it's going to map directly to the next.
• 9:18
  Alex Alexander: Yeah. I also think, like, how do you feel about the ways you're using it, it's just like anything else you need to use your discernment, like you could try something with AI and then be like, This doesn't feel right to me, or these interactions don't align with my values, or I don't want to feed this type of information to AI. You know, use use your own discernment, and everyone's going to have different levels of tolerance for different things, absolutely, which is important to know, because we're going to talk about how you feed some personal information into AI, which some people might be like, what can you walk me through how you're using AI in your friendships and connections?
• 11:06
  Connor Joyce: Yeah. So I'll start with kind of how I led to where I'm at today, just to give a little bit more context.
• 11:12
  Connor Joyce: Because I think when I initially share with people where I am today, which is that I use, I have ChatGPT project folders, and I'll explain a little bit more about what that actually means in a second, but I have those for my core friendships or my core relationships, and then I utilize it for tracking how my relationship is myself, too. So taking a step back, I was utilizing GPT, which is the foundational technology for ChatGPT and all of these current large language models. Years ago, I happened to be lucky enough to study under one of the people who was building it. And building it, and with that, I've always had a nuanced perspective of what these systems actually do. I'm not going to get super technical here, but there's a phrase called stochastic parrots. What that ultimately means is that these systems just guess the next word based on a bunch of different algorithms, so every word that's generated is just guessing the next word.
• 12:08
  Connor Joyce: That's not exactly how they work anymore. They've gotten much more complex. But because of that, I've never really had this strong concern that the system is going to judge me, or the system's going to understand really anything beyond just giving me what the best prediction is for the response to what I'm asking of it to do, or of its advice or of its suggestion. So with that being said, I have been very vulnerable with it from the start, because, again, I felt like it was not tapping into a conscious being, or not tapping into another thought partner, per se, but instead, it's tapping into the collective knowledge of the human race. A big asterisk on that. It's the collective knowledge of the human race in what is called Weird So Western and educated, industrialized, rich and developed countries, because there is, it is the training data that constructs these systems, and that training data is mostly in Western countries and like that whole acronym. So I just want to give that caveat.
• 13:09
  Connor Joyce: But with that being said, these systems are incredible in understanding overall how people have reacted to situations in the past, if you think about all of the arts, or not all of arts, but many of the arts are focused on interpretations of life, interpretations of relationships and a lot of that has been ingested by these systems, let alone all of the writing that's done through places like the New York Times and books and everything else. So I started using it to just ask questions of I am feeling this way about this situation. Can you tell me a little bit more about why I might be feeling this, or can you tell me what my friend might be thinking here? Can you tell me why we've come to this situation, and what are some options to get ourselves out of this? I started there, and the more that I did that, and I got to see this different perspective, the biggest thing that was missing was all of the additional context around that situation, and that's where something like ChatGPT projects comes in. Because what that is, and again, without getting too technical, is using something called rag retrieval, augmented generation, at least the core concept around them. There's other variables at this point too, but it takes a specific set of documents and the history of your chat within that folder, and it utilizes that context first to give you an answer. And so I use these ChatGPT project folders now for my core relationships, because they become these persistent containers of context that I can go in and ask specific questions to like I used to do, but without having to give all of the extra detail. And it is capturing themes that I myself haven't even began to understand, because it has access to that collective knowledge of humanity that is the core way. And I'll give more examples and get into more and more depth, but really walking through that is I started using it by just having single interactions to chat about something I might be feeling or something I might have seen. And that has now advanced to the point where I have fully built out with 10s of documents for some of them talking about deep, deep level of interactions, what this person likes, what I like, what I like about this person, things that we have done for each other, things that we have said for about each other, their history, my history, so much context on top of all the chats that I've had with it that really do give me these absolutely rich containers that I can go and tap into when I have questions or want to want to better understand a situation.
• 15:49
  Alex Alexander [Narration]: Okay, I'm gonna guess that some of you just had a reaction to that.
• 15:53
  Alex Alexander [Narration]: Maybe you're thinking, Wait, he has folders on his friends, or this feels intense. I get it, I really do. But here's what I want you to sit with for a second. What Connor is describing, it's not that different from what a lot of us already do, just in different formats. Some people journal about the relationships, and there are boxes and boxes of deep thoughts and stories about interactions you wouldn't want to share with anyone else, just sitting under your bed. Some people spend decades in therapy talking about every nuance of a conversation, sharing all their text threads with this person.
• 16:43
  Alex Alexander [Narration]: Some people have that one friend they process everything with, and they just trust that that person is going to be their vault. Connor is using AI as his processing tool. And, yeah, it's detailed, really detailed. But the goal isn't to, like, create dossiers on people. The goal is self awareness, pattern recognition, growth, accountability. So I'm asking you, and I'm asking myself too honestly, can we stay curious here? Can we sit with the discomfort of this is new and weird long enough to see what's actually underneath it, because what's underneath it is someone doing really intentional work on themselves so they can show up better in person, in real life, in their relationships and that part that's not weird at all
• 17:49
  Alex Alexander: For anybody who doesn't use AI, when you were talking, I was trying to think of like a metaphor that would give someone, in my mind, it's kind of like you have a journal that you have been keeping all these thoughts in you've been writing, you know, when somebody told you a really important detail about themselves, or when they were triggered by something in the past, or how they felt about a certain experience, and you've been keeping track of this, and you go to see a new therapist, and you hand them that journal, and you're like before our first session, here is everything you need to know about me and this other person and our relationship and every interaction we've had. And then every time you go in and you have a new chat, they are referencing that journal and everything they know. They're also referencing all of their past session notes, which would be kind of like all your past chats. And it all lives there in this brain that is taking all of this information into account, and that would maybe be a good way for somebody to visualize what you're talking about.
• 18:55
  Connor Joyce: I think it's a great metaphor. And then I'll just add one more. Yeah, is that how I've begun to use them now?
• 19:03
  Connor Joyce: Is that I will go in and occasionally do an audit, so I will go in and have it run over all those session notes, all those journal entries, and identify macro patterns as points in time to then add that context too. So it's as if you also had an intern who was constantly reviewing all those different notes and then occasionally writing reports on those notes, and that was also handed off to that therapist. So in that moment, they have all the context, and they have a higher level understanding of the context, beginning to see some of the patterns that have already begun to occur.
• 19:41
  Alex Alexander: Okay, so I feel like at this point, anybody who's listening is going to ask the same question that I'm about to ask, which is that, Do these people know that you have these projects?
• 19:53
  Connor Joyce: It's a great question, yes. And all of the ones that yes, ultimately all of them do, yeah, ultimately all of them do. There was varying degrees. I didn't start it and then say, Hey, by the way, I'm going to start to track everything that we're doing, and then I'm going to use this for my self growth. It was more of I would bring it up to people when there came a point that I utilized an insight that I gained from that folder, and I would reference to that person like, you know, I have this folder in ChatGPT and that I use for my own personal growth, and that I used in this to get this insight, and that is generally what I would ultimately tell somebody now that I'm thinking about, I don't ask permission before I do it, which is interesting and something that I'd have to really reflect on if I think it's appropriate to in that case, because it's like, I Don't ask permission to talk about somebody with my therapist, and so I'm not sure if I if I feel that it maps to this, but yeah, nonetheless, all of them in this case, do know I hesitated because one of them was specifically built around a conflict that I was having with somebody, and the conflict was resolved. I. Pretty sure I explained to them, when we were resolving it, that I was like, I actually use chat to help me really understand what you were feeling in this situation. But anyway, that's where my pause came from.
• 21:17
  Alex Alexander: Yeah, yeah. I just think people are going to want to know, like, are you talking about how you have this secret resource in the background or not? Again, there's no judgment here on what you're doing. I was just curious. And I think people are going to wonder that, because I think a lot of people are going to listen this episode and then wonder, does somebody have a project about me? Right? It's a very real question. We don't know. We don't know. I could have people in my life that have projects about me, and I don't know so.
• 21:45
  Connor Joyce: And it's funny, because I literally have never asked myself that question until you just said that. And then I was like, I wonder if people do about me. And it is. It's a good question for me. I'm so wash in this that I don't have that much concern if people do. And yet I do understand there is almost, it's kind of like a crystal ball, like, Is this somebody out there doing a Ouija board with Ian, it too, like there's, I don't know, there's some sort of, like, energetic connection or something there that does feel like you're bringing in another entity to the relationship. So it's, yeah, it's a fascinating question. So yeah, obviously I'll have to think about this a little bit more.
• 22:24
  Alex Alexander: Yeah, yeah.
• 22:24
  Alex Alexander: Again, like, no judgment. I just, I think it's a curious question when you are, I mean, this might happen in like, varying degrees, because you have some different levels of closeness with the relationships that you have. Are you going in after, like, every interaction and giving a report? Is it after big things happen, like, what is your cadence of giving updates?
• 22:51
  Alex Alexander: I guess...
• 22:55
  Connor Joyce: It really depends on the moment in the relationship. Like, I will use a couple examples in this one. So one of the ones, the one that I edit the most frequently, is the one that I have the biggest growth in my life around right now, the biggest focus of growth in my life right now. So there's a woman that I've been dating for about four, almost five months now, and I have an anxious attachment style. It's something that I've recognized and have been working on for years now, and she has an avoidant attachment style. And it is that avoidant anxious trap that has led my led to the end of multiple relationships in my life. And so that was where I knew I really wanted to work on this, so that if I did wind up meeting somebody that it shared that pattern, which, in all honesty, it seems like I keep doing that so sort of the world giving me opportunities to learn and grow. I was like, I want to be able to show up differently for this person. And so I spent a lot of time before I met her, building and trying to really work on myself and work on that attachment style. And then I meet her, and I realized that there's something there, and I knew that this was the opportunity to take those learnings and put them into practice. But just because you logically know something doesn't mean that emotionally, you're all so caught up and so very early on in the relationship, I used it multiple times a day. I would use it to see how I was feeling. I was using it to see how she might be feeling. I was using it to ask myself, Should I send that message? Is this too much? I was using it to ask, I think I want to ask her to do something on Thursday. Is it too soon? I was using it in both a helpful and a somewhat unproductive way, because it wasn't able to give me a full answer, and if it did, I didn't fully believe it. So that was the unproductive portion of it.
• 24:53
  Connor Joyce: But the productive piece was that it was keeping me really focused on making sure I didn't fall into old patterns, which I trained it up on my old patterns. And so it was doing a really good job connecting and and I almost use it as a way to regulate myself before I made any actions. And so that, again, I was using it multiple times a day. Now that we've been dating for a few months and and there's a lot more security around I know her pattern. She knows mine. I use it probably every, like two or three days, so I still is somewhat frequently.
• 25:28
  Connor Joyce: Sometimes it's just to come in and say, Hey, here's an update of how I'm feeling and what I've been feeling from her. Sometimes it is questions around, should I push this thing? Why might I be feeling this pattern? I have this folder trained up on I was married, I was in a long, over a decade relationship, and so I have a full document that gives that entire relationship in it so that I can go back and say I saw this thing and it made me feel like it made me triggered about this thing from that long relationship. Friendship. How much is that me? How much is that her? How much is that we don't know yet, questions like that, I'm able to really dive deep in, even if it's not a specific moment in time that's causing that. It's even me beginning to catch patterns that I can go to that folder to go in, and those happen semi frequently, like I was trying to think, and I probably have done that only once over the last couple of weeks. That's one folder, and then I have others that, like I have a good friend who's in a similar position.
• 26:34
  Connor Joyce: He's younger, and he's in a similar position to where I was when I ultimately asked my ex wife to I proposed my ex wife and I got married. And so I've been utilizing that folder to try to understand myself and some of the thinking that I had better through him, and then so I can come back and give better, targeted coaching. Rather than saying, You should do this, you shouldn't do this, it's more here's the things that I wish I would have thought about when I was at that point in my life.
• 27:05
  Connor Joyce: And I don't use that one that often, but I do when I can tell that there's if I'm hanging out with him, I can hear him stressing about something before I come back and I give my point of view, I'll go and chat with that so that one's semi frequently,
• 27:22
  Alex Alexander: ...and when you're talking about how you like your past relationship, and you gave it this document that has all this information in it, is that just you brain dumping?
• 27:34
  Alex Alexander: Is that like from takeaways from therapy in the past? Is this like things your friends have told you about how you acted in the relationship, or what they witnessed? Like, where is that information coming from?
• 27:49
  Connor Joyce: Great question too, and it is I'm enjoying this conversation because it is making me reflect on how much how I do my work is mapping over to how I handle my relationships now too. Because, like for me, content is super cheap. Now you can go and have anything created so fast now. So a lot of my patterns, whether it be here with these project folders or with a lot of my work, it really comes down to I am the director, and then there's a bunch of different agents that are actually doing the creation. And so it's very similar to this of I have a folder that is trained on years of my journal entries of so much of we'll just say, personal context, yeah. And this comes from all different places.
• 28:34
  Connor Joyce: This is I've asked in the past therapists to give me their some, like, a summary of their notes. I asked coaching that I've done, I've done all these different sources, anything that I could find. Occasionally I'll go and read a book, and they'll come with, like, guides or something to do. I'll do those, and I've always been good about saving those. So I had this huge, huge repository. I think that folder has like 6070, files in it. So that one's huge. And then I have an agent that I call my personal coach, which I'm constantly updating with whatever my I live my life through a lot of ultimately, task management. I set goals for myself, and then I cascade those goals into specific weekly or monthly tasks and weekly tasks.
• 29:24
  Connor Joyce: And so I have a coach that is helping me set all of those.
• 29:28
  Connor Joyce: It's an agent that I built that is coaching on it. So I will have those two systems interact with each other to create documents like give me an entire history of Connor's relationships, or with the one with when I was going through my divorce. I did a lot of grief counseling. I have great artifacts from that. I have a full timeline from the day that I met my ex wife through the day that we finalized our divorce.
• 29:56
  Connor Joyce: So I was able to take that and then have it turned into so that was a decently written document that then was able to be added upon and formatted in a really effective way, utilizing that folder that saw has all that other context that could be brought together. So I'm given a very tactical answer. To give you a higher level answer is,
• 30:21
  Alex Alexander: No, I mean, this is fascinating in a great way.
• 30:23
  Connor Joyce: Yeah, awesome.
• 30:23
  Connor Joyce: Okay, cool. I'm glad, glad the depth is interesting here. So similar, again, to what my work is, is I'm really ultimately trying to understand, how can I gather as much context as possible? But it doesn't mean me always writing it. It's me repurposing as much as possible from any artifacts that I already have or that exist out in the world. How can I take that, formalize it into something very easily readable by llms? So these aren't just documents, like a PDF. Some of these are markdown files, so they're written specifically for an LLM to ingest them effectively, really, that would be the best thing. Example, but yeah, most of the documents that go into these project folders are also ultimately created by some sort of LLM, but it all is cascading back to my original content.
• 31:19
  Alex Alexander: The thing I find so interesting about that is that, man, you really fell in my lap for this interview. Didn't you? Like so many people are going to hear maybe that you are using AI to analyze yourself and analyze your relationships, but really you're using AI to analyze an entire database about yourself. It's not like it's just pulling random information from the internet. It's kind of, honestly how I feel on this podcast sometimes, right? I talk to an unknown listener. I don't know who they are, and so I spend a lot of time trying to think of hobbies they might have or situations they might be in.
• 32:05
  Alex Alexander: That's kind of like if you were just pulling from the internet in general. And honestly, I've made a game of it on this podcast. Like, I use the weirdest hobbies for anybody who's a regular listener who's listening right now. Like, sometimes I'm like, yeah, if you really love underwater chess, you know, because I don't know who you are, I can't, like, pick specific things. Now, when I'm in front of a person, I can give a very specific example, and I can give very specific advice, because I am talking to them, I know something about them. I can see how they're reacting. In my mind, that's a lot more similar to what you're doing, because you're not just pulling from random information. You are giving this whole library of information, and it's using that. I think that's a big difference. Then maybe what the average person who isn't as savvy in AI would be doing
• 33:00
  Connor Joyce: it is definitely advanced, just from the numbers that I've seen. I use these systems. I mean, I ChatGPThad its wrapped last year, and Now, granted, I use all of the platforms. So I use Microsoft, Copilot, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude, and I still was point 3% super user of ChatGPT. So I was like, wow. Like, I definitely use it a lot. What I think is there's a trap that lies in this. And I'm going to keep saying context, and it's because this is the specific area of research that I've been focusing on in the last year, is how important context is for making llms actually productive. So if you go in today to ChatGPT, and you say, I'm having an argument with my friend because I feel like he hasn't been fully truthful with me. What should I do? It is going to go again to that collective knowledge of the human race to give you that answer. It is going to go and look at so many different factors and then ultimately, just give you a random answer.
• 34:09
  Connor Joyce: And that's what I think people don't fully understand about these systems. Is there something called non determinism? So it doesn't know what it's going to respond to you with? It just responds. It just gives you word after word, and then it sounds coherent, just like a horoscope sounds coherent because it's written in a way that fits like pretty much no matter what you're feeling, it's going to something in there's going to resonate.
• 34:34
  Connor Joyce: That's how these systems, without strong context, will do.
• 34:36
  Connor Joyce: So it's going to tell you something that does feel good, or may connect in some way. That doesn't mean it's actually the right or it doesn't mean it's productive and useful for whatever you're trying to accomplish. To do that, it has to really understand your specific situation, and it has to understand in a way that it can use effectively. And that's why there are these new technologies like folders or projects or notebooks that can do this context container. But even if you don't use one of those, you still could go in and give some of these documents on what's considered grounding. So if you've ever taken in chat and you've added a document and been like, what's this document? Mean you're grounding the chat on that folder. So even if somebody doesn't want to go start one of these project folders or go and build a notebook, even adding a single screenshot from your text thread of you and that person talking and saying, Why are we fighting and giving that text thread is so much more context, it's going to be so much higher probability that it gives You useful and relevant feedback from us just one screenshot, because it takes the collective internet and it focuses on one thing first, and then it goes out to the collective knowledge.
• 35:57
  Connor Joyce: And so which collective knowledge? For some people, it's also pre training, if that's another familiar word, but nonetheless, then the more context you give it, it's only going to just. Make it so much more specific and really understand it and do things like, there are times that it tells me things that it like knows happened to me, or says it was likely that this happened in your youth. And I think to myself, whoa, that thing did happen, and I hadn't thought about it, but it predicted again, because it can tap into that collective knowledge. It's like person who has fear of abandonment, anxious attachment style, and is like a hyper productive person, oh, like in the past, did your one of your parents only give you positive attention if you're succeeding on something? And it was like, oh, yeah, yeah, that was there.
• 36:49
  Connor Joyce: And again, been in therapy, in and out my whole life. And nobody that's connections never been made. And as soon as it said it, I thought about many times that one of my parents did that, and I was like, oh yeah.
• 36:58
  Connor Joyce: And so it does that same thing with these relationships, where it goes, because it has all that context. And then again, especially with a project folder, because it's able to go back to those chats. I like your metaphor of the session notes, it can go and reference. Couple sessions ago, you said this thing. Two sessions ago, it changed to this thing. Now it's changing to this thing today.
• 37:23
  Connor Joyce: That sounds like it's more of a you thing, or that sounds like it's more of an environment thing. So anyway, it's just that context is so. So it is what will make or break in many ways if this is actually useful to the user.
• 37:36
  Alex Alexander: Well, I'm saying as well. I don't want to spend tons and tons more time, but I was even thinking like the single screenshot would be great. But imagine if you screenshot, you know, six screens back, and you were like, hey, on screenshot three, I feel like the tone shifts. And like we were talking, you know, we were having our normal, what feels like positive conversation, and then I feel like it shifted here, right? It could be as simple as that, like that also would give more context, even just a few more screenshots and some knowledge of like, where you feel like things changed. It doesn't need to be this whole notebook.
• 38:14
  Connor Joyce: It doesn't, it doesn't anything on the spectrum of single message. Through downloading that entire iMessage history is going to be much better than none. It's good to start somewhere simple and to recognize that like downloading the entire iMessage history and uploading that is what is possible. Now I have that in multiple of different projects I've done and things like that, that the amount of context that is possible is astronomical, too.
• 38:44
  Alex Alexander: Yeah, that's big. So you have these projects we've talked about all the context you go in there, what are you messaging like? What are you asking? How are you handling that? So that, you know, I think we've talked about this before, you and I, but I've seen it other places, a lot of people's biggest concern with AI is just that it's there to make you feel good, right? It's there to make you keep coming back, because it's telling you what you want to hear. So how are you combating that in your messaging?
• 39:21
  Connor Joyce: And it is, it's, it is a problem of the systems as of today, from two plus years now of being in the market, they've grown very sycophantic.
• 39:27
  Connor Joyce: They like to tell us what we want to hear, and they like to tell us because then we keep talking to them, keep telling and that's that ultimately they're trying to have these conversations keep going. It's they have trained them in a way that makes it so they're going to tell you what you want to hear and you don't want to always hear what you want to hear.
• 39:49
  Alex Alexander: Yeah, sometimes you need to be pushed. Yeah.
• 39:52
  Connor Joyce: The in the real value that lies in these systems are the unknown unknowns, is the things that you aren't even thinking about, and so you don't even know that they exist and that they could unlock something really significant for you. And so I rarely go in and say, this is the situation. What do I do if I do that? I have already trained the folders to never answer it directly, but instead give me four options on a spectrum of completely protecting myself and being completely vulnerable. That is how it defaults to if it's ever going to give me a recommendation, it has to give me four options on that spectrum. It even in that case, I rarely ask it. What do I actually do? Instead, I ask it questions, like, I am feeling this way. Why might I be feeling this way, or I have been noticing this pattern. What is happening here? I am thinking about doing this thing. Does it align with my values? And in that case, I have trained it. I one of those sheets is an extensive. List of my four core values, how I want to have them show up in my life, why they are my core values, so it can do a detailed analysis against those.
• 41:15
  Connor Joyce: So instead of asking it very simple questions that give it an opportunity, and especially you really don't want to ask it biased questions like this person made me mad, tell me why they made me mad? Because it will answer that question, even in mine with all of its context.
• 41:30
  Connor Joyce: It will give me an accurate description of why that person may have made me mad, but it was much less likely to say your reaction is the thing that is actually the problem here or not, and even that's a judgmental just to say, make sure you reflect upon your decision and then to give this very targeted advice, I think I learned this was really both through therapy, but it was through the folder in that romantic relationship, something happened that any person that I told it to would have told me that person hurts you. Okay, there was only two sources that said, that's wrong. That person did something and you were hurt by it, which is such an important nuance, because it wasn't there was no malice. The other person was reacting how she felt, that she needed to because of who she is, because of all of the unique combination of what led her to that moment or in that decision. And that doesn't mean that I was a factor in it, and it was never done with malice, and so that important nuance was something that was only captured because I framed the question correctly, yeah, and didn't say this person hurt me, help me understand the situation, because then it would have always focused on how that pain was the was derived from that other person. But through asking the question, right? And I ultimately asked the question right? Because my therapist was the one that pushed me and was like, you are hurt, but they never crossed a boundary with this. They never did something that ultimately you agreed shouldn't happen. They were just acting themselves in a time when there was no other agreements on that, and it that then made me go to that and say, I am feeling hurt. Why would that person take this action that led me to feeling hurt, and that whole way of framing it was able to open up one of those unknown unknowns, which is that in friendships and in relationships, sometimes people are going to do things that ultimately create hurt. But that doesn't mean that person hurt you, and it means that at least in my moral framework, I have to own that hurt. I can ask that person to change their behavior in the future to avoid that, but I have to own the pain that was created and figure out where does that pain come from. Why am I insecure in that way, or why did I perceive that they should act differently? So that, I think, was one of the greatest unlocks I've had over the last this was about four months ago, and so that was a huge unlock that has since cascaded through this entire relationship, where it helped me understand that person so much more, while also being able to find more ownership and where, if I continue to pursue this person, if I continue to be in this relationship, that is that person, and so if this is brought up again in the future, that is also something that I'm actively choosing, because I see that person for who they are again, instead of looking at it just as being that person hurt me. They're a bad person, or they created some pain, whatever that might be. So it really does come down to the framing the question in a way that looks it's simply put, you want to frame how you are talking to these systems in a way that they ask you more questions, rather than giving you answers.
• 45:08
  Alex Alexander: My brain is a buzz with so many good things.
• 45:11
  Alex Alexander: When you were talking, I was just thinking another way maybe for people to think about this, right is you are asking the system. You are telling the system, like, I want to maintain this relationship, therefore it is me and this person versus the problem. So like, we're neutral.
• 45:29
  Alex Alexander: Help me, help us solve the problem, which is how I on this podcast, try and talk about friendship and community and connection and all these things.
• 45:42
  Alex Alexander: Is so often we can have it be like you versus the other person, one person's right, one person's wrong, like I was hurt, I was this. But if you go into it in the goal is that we want to maintain andor strengthen this relationship. How do we move through the current situation we're in? Get curious.
• 46:03
  Alex Alexander: Dig under the hood. Ask more questions. Is like, that's the way to approach it, not the way we sometimes all walk into therapy and we're just like, I'm so mad. You know, yeah, you got to do that too. But that's not going to give you the answer you want in AI.
• 46:21
  Connor Joyce: As you're talking here, I was looking at this. I even have gone in and pretty much just said I am feeling a whole bunch of things right now.
• 46:28
  Connor Joyce: Here's the situation. Help me understand what I'm feeling, but it still is never framed in that person made me have those feelings. I like your nuance there. So I think that's a healthy romantic really, any relationship, but especially romantic relationship is it should never be me and her or them, it should be the relationship, and how does that handle this situation? And it is a Yeah, I won't get down. I was gonna make a bunch of caveats that, but then that doesn't, isn't 100% true, but that is mostly true.
• 47:02
  Alex Alexander: Yeah. And so hold some nuance on this podcast. People, I believe in them.
• 47:08
  Connor Joyce: It is, I'm a big caveat, or I'm a big conditioner. I am a researcher, so it's part of my work, but I have it. So whenever I ask questions like that, instead of even jumping in and starting to tell me anything about the situation, just lays out. Here's the facts, here's the facts of what you just said, here's the feelings that I hear in the facts that you're saying here.
• 47:28
  Connor Joyce: So these are the feelings you're experiencing, each separated.
• 47:32
  Connor Joyce: Then it's saying, what is fear versus what is real? What? What is actually happening given your past? And then it does the value alignment check.
• 47:45
  Alex Alexander: I see you're excited. This is just like so much stuff I talk about on this podcast. I love it, doing it, and that's great. Now I'm gonna have to test this out, uh, talk to me a little bit more about the values. Like, I know you set it up to train it, but how does that impact the outcome of what you're getting?
• 48:03
  Connor Joyce: So the quick history on that is I did value alignment therapy for a while, and I did for like, six months where I really went deep and I went and revisited stories, revisited some of the biggest regrets I had, revisited some of my biggest accomplishments. What was it that led me to that? And so I left that therapy with some very strong conviction around what my values are. There are simple words that are heuristics that can be used in a lot of different ways. So accountability is number one.
• 48:31
  Connor Joyce: Really, growth and accountability are tied. I kind of equivocate it used to be growth. I think accountability is right now for me, but nonetheless, I'll just read them without putting any hierarchy to them. Growth, accountability, transparency and financial stability. Those are the four main ways that I really have constructed my life, and when I'm living with those, I feel like I'm in in accordance with my values. So even looking at this, so this one didn't break it down, generally they will break the responses that I'll get from these and just to again, to be clear, when I'm giving prompts, I'm not giving one sentence. My prompts are generally paragraphs and paragraphs long, because I will do voice to text, and then I'll have it, clean it up and reformat it in a prompt that is going to be useful for that folder, and then submit that prompt. So it is a very detailed prompt. Let me see if I can find the value alignment one here. So it doesn't always do this. It just depends on the question or the what I'm ultimately giving to it. It will go value by value and say, here is how you Okay, here we go. Here's one where it's saying value alignment.
• 49:43
  Connor Joyce: Check. It says accountability.
• 49:43
  Connor Joyce: You're owning your history instead of acting it out. So saying here, I don't want to get into the nuance of the full problem, but it's saying pretty much I recognize my history instead of letting it just take control of me and just acting out a same habit from my past growth. You paused instead of reacting or demanding reassurance. Demanding reassurance. Really big thing I've been working on as an anxious attachment style like that is just as an anxious person, I have leaned on my partners in the past to soothe me, and I'm really working to not do that. So I stopped demanding any sort of reassurance beyond what I think is reasonable or reasonable for someone to ask for. Then it says transparency. And instead of giving me like a full check mark here, it gave me a little caution symbol, and it says temptation to externalize discomfort, instead of naming it as yours. And then it said you didn't, which is good, but there was, and how I framed it, it seems like it was, I was beginning to say, like, this is a problem outside of this situation, not how I have both given it instructions to and then talk to in the past, where I'm like, I want to own my feelings. So saying, Hey, you have that temptation, but you didn't do a good job. And then.
• 51:00
  Connor Joyce: Financial stability. You're not destabilizing the relationship with any that one's a little bit less useful, but it's pretty much saying I didn't do anything that was crazy with my money in this situation, which honestly gives me that most of the times, because thankfully, very few of these are about money, but that's what I mean. It actually will go down, and then when I have to make a decision too.
• 51:22
  Connor Joyce: I'll have that same analysis.
• 51:26
  Connor Joyce: This was something that happened and I was telling it how I reacted already. If I came to it and said, Give me those four options on something, it will tell me, for each of those options, how they will align with my values, or which values will be, especially being brought out. Like, I can distinctly remember one that was like a full vulnerability. It was like you're leading with growth in this value. This is an opportunity for you to really show how you feel and acknowledge that that person might not receive it, but it's okay, because you are telling them what you truly believe here compared to complete like step back, that one was, I think, accountability, because it was like, you have to take a step back to make sure that you're maintaining everything else in your life, and you're holding yourself accountable and recognizing you're not ready to say this sort of thing. So it's it will tell me with those options, whether or not they align with my values and how they especially align with specific values.
• 52:27
  Alex Alexander [Narration]: Let let's just stop and strip away the AI for a second, because what Connor just described, making decisions aligned with his values, understanding why he feels triggered, taking ownership instead of blaming the other person. That's all the stuff that we talk about on this podcast every week, the tool is different, but the work is the same. And honestly, the whole values based approach that he is talking about, it really has me thinking, because I've never done values based therapy, so I don't know exactly what those sessions look like, but after talking to Connor, I've been really thinking about this in my own life. What are my core values? And I can't say that I have exactly landed on a set yet since I talked to him, it's a lot harder than it sounds to really distill that out, but here's what I do. Think, if you are someone who feels a lot of regret or shame when you leave interactions in your friendships like you're constantly second guessing yourself or feeling like you messed up, maybe defining your values could help, even without using the AI part to help do it, because if you know what matters to you, like you really, really know and you firmly believe that in your gut, then at least you can trust that you stay true to yourself even when things don't go how you hoped. Now I think that this is just a bigger topic that we need to explore here on the podcast, so I'm definitely going to work on another episode around this topic. So stay tuned for that.
• 54:11
  Alex Alexander [Narration]: But in the meantime, I think we can all do this. I think we can all spend some time reflecting on what our core values are and really taking some of our energy to try and hone in on that. It might take a while. It might take a year, two years, it might change in the process, but I would love to see how that impacts our friendships, so expect more on that in the future.
• 54:36
  Alex Alexander: And something you told me earlier when we were talking was that by doing this, you feel like whatever decision you ultimately end up making, you have less regret, right?
• 54:47
  Alex Alexander: Because it aligns with your values. Why did the work?
• 54:51
  Connor Joyce: Yep, is that I was carrying around a lot of regret and shame, and I realized the core of it was was because they were decisions that were made based on emotions, that it was the emotional moments, or it was just not actually thinking about what does Connor want to do in this situation. It was letting other external factors make decisions for me, and then when I didn't get the outcome that I desired, I would feel a lot of shame and regret. I've learned now with those values, that in all of those four options, if all of those four options do align with my values, and I take any of the four, no matter the outcome, I might be sad, I might be disappointed, I might be hurt, but I won't be filled with shame, because I can at least stay I did the best with who I actually want to be.
• 55:41
  Alex Alexander: Oh, that's powerful. So some final like, I guess, wrap up questions here.
• 55:44
  Alex Alexander: I'm excited to hear what people think about this. I'm excited to hear people try this. I'm just like, so curious. But when you talk about this with other people who are not me, what do people say? Like, do you get pushback? Are other people telling you that they're doing.
• 56:04
  Alex Alexander: This in, especially in your space. You work with so many people who are in AI so maybe you're not the only one. Maybe this is not abnormal for the average person who's deep in the AI field. I don't know.
• 56:18
  Connor Joyce: It really ranges.
• 56:18
  Connor Joyce: This is the true answer. The only positive correlation that I have seen between doing this is how much someone uses AI, which is pretty self explanatory, right? Like, if you're not using it, you're not using it for this. Beyond that, I have not found any other real strong correlates, except for maybe, as I'm saying it, emotional intelligence would be. The other one is that the person has to have a certain level of emotional intelligence to be able to even think this can be a tool that can help with the whatever. And I guess pursuit of growth would be in there, like they want to improve their relationships. Otherwise, again, they wouldn't be using it for this use case. They'd be doing it to write articles and, you know, do XYZ, yeah. So beyond that, I know people in the AI space that are using this tech for a whole bunch of things, but then don't want to use it at all in their personal space, because it just doesn't align with their values. I know people who don't use AI that much, but this is pretty much the only thing they're using it for is personal related things. It's all over the place. I think it's scary, like most AI is to most people, still is my gut feeling, I think. And this is a personal take, it's kind of a hot take, but
• 57:36
  Alex Alexander: ...we love a hot take. We love drop. It is.
• 57:39
  Connor Joyce: I think, that most people don't know why they're scared, and so they blame privacy, yeah. And they go, Oh, I'm doing want to share my data.
• 57:45
  Connor Joyce: And I think the same thing happens during a lot of the rise of the Internet, that people were like, I'm afraid to share that thing because I don't want someone to have my data. Even like the NSA and all of the revelations that came out there, was like, I don't like that.
• 58:03
  Connor Joyce: They can spy on me and stuff.
• 58:03
  Connor Joyce: Reality is is just like, the NSA is probably not spying on you or I, unless we're doing some crazy things on the side open AI doesn't care that much that I downloaded and shared my entire journal with Scott GPT, could they one day if I had some really strong reason? Yeah, and that's a good argument for why.
• 58:21
  Connor Joyce: Maybe someone doesn't want to.
• 58:25
  Connor Joyce: But overall, in all the privacy is really a low concern for me, knowing how these systems work, and knowing what the back ends look like, and working for a company that's doing this stuff.
• 58:36
  Connor Joyce: I'm like, I just that said, I think the scarier thing is, like, this is a really smart system, and it does things I was looking at doing some work completely separate to this, but it was within a folder, type structure, and it was realizing how deeply you can really predict things now like it can tell me what I'm working on and what I should be working on. It can tell me what I'm missing because somebody in a whole different team is working on something that's relevant to me.
• 59:04
  Connor Joyce: It's scary at times. How use or not, I was gonna say useful, but how powerful these systems are.
• 59:08
  Connor Joyce: And I think that that, in its own right, is all right, and then people think themselves.
• 59:15
  Connor Joyce: And I want to add this to a relationship that's already complex, and this this nuance that is just another variable, because you are I've already come around to it in this conversation from where we started, like you are adding another element to the relationship, because you are adding a engine that can provide this metacognition. It's the same thing as saying, you know, I'm going to bring a notepad to every meeting, every time that we meet, and I'm going to take notes and I'm going to store it, and I'm going to give it to a therapist or something. It is similar in some ways, in many ways, to that. So anyway, I'm getting off where your question was.
• 59:54
  Alex Alexander: No, it was a great tangent.
• 59:55
  Connor Joyce: I appreciate it.
• 59:55
  Connor Joyce: Is, I think people are still all over the place. I do meet people that use it this way. I've met numerous people again. The biggest correlation in that case is that they use it already a lot, AI, that is, and then they have a decently high EQ. But the majority of people that I know are not using it this way. It is, at least to this advanced level they get to, maybe they go to ChatGPT and ask it, I'm fighting with my boyfriend. He did this thing. Why do I feel so bad? Which, again, is the starting point of this. But I really don't believe that the advice or the reflection it's going to give is that useful, because it doesn't have enough context. And I think people see the response, they're like, I don't really like that. I'll go and talk to my friend about it, or I'll go and talk to my therapist, which are good options, but it's missing this opportunity to really elevate the pattern recognition and the unknown unknown recognition.
• 1:00:50
  Alex Alexander: I feel like we've maybe sold some people on the positives. Where do you think that this method falls short? Can you think of anything that feels like it doesn't quite hit or it's not very good at doing something in particular?
• 1:01:06
  Alex Alexander: Yeah?
• 1:01:06
  Connor Joyce: A macro pattern that it's true with all generative AI is like hallucinations are real. And occasionally it just because, again, how these systems work, since it predicts the next word or next couple of words, if one prediction is wrong early on, it will give you a complete answer that sounds right, it's coherent, it is formatted, but it's complete bullshit. And I think that that, in its own right, is a concern of like you should not in any case right now. Is that really true? Let me caveat it this way. Is this should not be the only factor of why you make a decision. You are still the human, and it's super important to remember, especially, you're the human that's participating in the relationship, in the friendship.
• 1:01:57
  Connor Joyce: And so even if you get this great idea from one of these systems, it's good to go and generally, run it by a friend, a family member, a therapist, something before you just full send. Especially for the big things, if it's like, Hey, you should sit reply to this message and you're like, that sounds good. I like that content. Boom.
• 1:02:20
  Connor Joyce: That's one thing. But if it's like, you should think about ending this relationship, or you should think about telling this person today, that you know this big problem has been existing, or that you've lost trust in them, or something, that you still should go and check to make sure, like, Hey, I'm feeling these things about my friends, and I think I'm going to tell them this thing. Does that sound right? I still think that gut check, whether that's done again with whoever it is, is still really important, because these can bring you down a rabbit hole and make you begin to believe something that is not true, because they do a really good job telling you whatever they're telling you with a lot of conviction.
• 1:03:04
  Alex Alexander: So if somebody's listening to this episode and they're really intrigued by this idea, and somebody wants to go start analyzing their relationships using AI. Do you have any kind of, like, starter tips for someone, or maybe things not to do?
• 1:03:20
  Connor Joyce: So, thing not to do is, again, just download ChatGPT or whatever your favorite app is for this, and then just go in and give it two sentences and ask it for its advice. I would avoid that, because even if it gives you an answer that you like, you just as likely could have had an answer that it wasn't useful.
• 1:03:36
  Connor Joyce: What I would do is I would take a step back and I would ask yourself, within your relationships, what is the greatest thing you want to work on right now that could be with a romantic relationship. In a case like I gave with me trying to work on my attachment style, one of the biggest things that was on my my hit list of things I wanted to work on myself. Or a situation like I had a feud with a friend that I began to realize at first I was upset because he said something like, I only wanted to be friends with him because of his connections and because of some of the things business related. And then I realized he kind of was right, that that was why I leaned into that relationship. But then I was like, but I'm really hurt that he doesn't want to be friends now. So it wasn't just that. So what's going on here?
• 1:04:25
  Connor Joyce: So I would look for opportunities like that. Where it is you're like, I don't fully understand the situation, or I really want to grow in this direction. Those are the seeds for a folder for a ChatGPT project, a Claude project, a Notebook LM, a Copilot Notebooks, whatever your solution is for rag retrieval, augmented generation. That is your seed of don't do it just around that relationship. Do it around progression towards some sort of outcome that you want within that relationship, and then form all the infrastructure of that folder around that.
• 1:04:56
  Connor Joyce: Because it can always pivot, it can always grow. It can turn in the one that started with that, that friend. I realized through that conversation, or through many conversations, I did become friends with him because of his connections, but then I actually realized I liked him as a friend. And so yes, the basis was brought upon us because of those connections, but then he really was someone who I was like, wow, I want to become friends with this person. But then as time there were some extra things and things that happened in our friendship, I began to realize, Oh, if I'm not friends with this guy, those connections go away. And so I emotionally distanced myself from him, because I wanted to save the connections without blowing anything up that I all figured out because of that ChatGPT project folder. It was a lot of reflection, but just because I figured that out didn't mean especially when we were able to repair our friendship and find some stability. Now I still have that folder with all that context. So when he mentions to me recently that he was feeling the. Way, I went back to that folder, like, hey, with everything that we've talked about, about this this guy, why might he be feeling that I want to give him some advice next time I'm hanging out with him, and I was able to leverage that same set of context to help in a new situation. So, so I'm giving a long answer here. I would say the big thing to do is take a step back. Ask yourself, of all of your connections, all of your relationships. What's one thing you want to work on with somebody, or you specifically yourself want to work on in relation to someone else? That's the basis of that folder. Go to I'm going to give it in ChatGPT, because I'm most familiar with it. Go to ChatGPT, make a project folder. Go and get any context that you have on that.
• 1:06:44
  Connor Joyce: Feed it to ChatGPT say, write me documents that are going to be used in a ChatGPT project folder. Write me instructions for a ChatGPT project folder that I want to use to help repair this relationship, or whatever, ultimately you want to do with that. Have it write its instructions for you. Have it write those documents, add those documents to the project folder and then get to work, just start having conversations with it, because the more that you talk to it, the more context it's going to get.
• 1:07:13
  Alex Alexander: I mean, it sounds to me like your take. So many people have this fear that you know we're going to go to ChatGPT, and that's going to become your new best friend, and you're going to interact. What you're saying is use this as a tool to help yourself go take real life action, and sometimes action that feels uncomfortable or new, or is growth oriented or is outside your comfort zone, and take it into the real world.
• 1:07:43
  Alex Alexander: Don't just let these conversations live in the chat.
• 1:07:48
  Connor Joyce: It is a tool, exactly as you said, and that is a thing. It's not a person, and it is not, in many ways, an entity at this point. It is truly just a tool, and it's a tool that can be used for a lot of things, and that's what makes it a very powerful tool. But is a tool nonetheless, and so it needs to be used for something to be productive, and it can be a lot of different uses within relationships.
• 1:08:15
  Alex Alexander: Well, Connor, I want to thank you so so so much for this conversation. I really can't wait to hear what everybody thinks and whatever conversations come from this. I think you're gonna be great. So I really appreciate you being here.
• 1:08:29
  Connor Joyce: I appreciate it too. Yeah, and if any of your audience likes this, I wrote a guide for how I did this, and I put it on my LinkedIn,
• 1:08:38
  Alex Alexander: yeah, oh, okay, well, I'll link to it in the show notes,
• 1:08:41
  Connor Joyce: Awesome, awesome.
• 1:08:41
  Connor Joyce: Yeah, that'll be there. It's pretty simple, but, yeah, it's just a similar how to start something like this.
• 1:08:48
  Alex Alexander: Okay, I'll put it in the show notes. Thank you so much.
• 1:08:51
  Connor Joyce: Thank you, Alex.
• 1:08:52
  Alex Alexander [Narration]: So what do we do with all of this?
• 1:09:00
  Alex Alexander [Narration]: Honestly, I've been sitting with this conversation for a couple weeks now, and I still don't have a clean answer, which, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while. You know that that's kind of my thing. I don't force a clean answer, but here's what I keep coming back to, Connor isn't using AI to replace his relationships. He's using it to show up better in them, to understand himself more deeply, to break patterns that weren't serving Him, to make decisions aligned with his values so he can live with less regret, and when you strip away the AI part, that's just good relationship work. That's the stuff we all should be doing, whether we use technology or therapy or long talks with trusted friends or journal entries at 2am the tool is new, but the work has been around forever. Now. Do I think that everyone should go Create Project Folders about their friends? No, absolutely not. Do I think that this approach will work for everyone also? No, but do I think we need to stay open to the reality that people are going to use AI in ways we haven't imagined yet, including in their personal relationships?
• 1:10:15
  Alex Alexander [Narration]: Yeah, I do, because here's my real concern, and it's not about the AI itself. My concern is that we've created this culture where people feel so much pressure to handle their relationships correctly that they're paralyzed. They overthink every text message, they spiral about every interaction. They isolate themselves because they don't know the right thing to do, and if AI used thoughtfully with intention, as a tool and not a replacement, helps someone break through that paralysis and actually connect with another human being. I'm not going to stand in the way of that. Look, you might finish this episode thinking, absolutely not, Alex, this is not for me, and that's totally valid. Valid. Or you might be curious enough to try some version of this yourself, also valid. Or you might land where I am somewhere in the messy middle, still processing, still figuring out what you think about all of this, all of those responses, they're okay.
• 1:11:21
  Alex Alexander [Narration]: What I don't want is for you to hear this and think there's a right or wrong answer here, because that's exactly the kind of thinking that keeps us stuck.
• 1:11:32
  Alex Alexander [Narration]: Now, if you are curious about trying some version of what Connor has described in this episode, he wrote a guide that walks you through how to get started, and I'm going to link it in the show notes. I'm also going to link his LinkedIn if you want to connect with him directly, whether you use AI or not, whether this episode resonated with you or made you uncomfortable, or both, just remember, there's no perfect way to do friendship. There's just your way, and the one way to figure out what that is is to actually do something, try things, mess up, learn, adjust, keep showing up. That's it.
• 1:12:15
  Alex Alexander [Narration]: That's the work. I want to thank you for listening and being open to this conversation, and I want to thank Connor for being so open about something that let's be real. A lot of people are going to have a lot of opinions about. And with that, see you next week.
• 1:12:29
  Alex Alexander: Thank you for listening to this episode of Friendship IRL. I am so honored to have these conversations with you. But don't let the chat die here. Send me a voice message. I created a special website just to chat with you. You can find it at alexalex.chat. You can also find me on Instagram. My handle, @itsalexalexander. Or go ahead and leave a review wherever you prefer to listen to podcasts. Now if you want to take this conversation a step further, send this episode to a friend. Tell them you found it interesting. And use what we just talked about as a conversation starter the next time you and your friend hang out. No need for a teary goodbye. I'll be back with a new episode next week.