Latest / Human Equilibrium: Wise Leadership in the Age of AI / Before You Automate, Ask What’s Sacred – with Kyle Kesterson

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Before You Automate, Ask What’s Sacred – with Kyle Kesterson · Human Equilibrium: Wise Leadership in the Age of AI

• speaker-0: Artists, people who see the world differently and have the ability to express it, are the most dangerous people on the planet. We are biologically, physiologically wired to beauty. Artists are the arrangers that create beauty and awe, which is presence, which is attention, the most lucrative resource we have. And let's assume we're gonna get to the point where AI can do everything better. Is that the point? what do you just want to protect? What do you just not want to offload and give, even if AI can do it better? speaker-1: Welcome to Human Equilibrium, a podcast about leadership at the intersection of artificial intelligence and human wisdom. I'm Dan Molly, a leadership advisor, executive coach, and facilitator. On the show, I talk with founders, people leaders, and experts in AI and transformation. Together we explore how AI is changing leadership, organizations, and the experience of being human. And in these conversations, we step beneath the hype and the doom to explore what leaders are really experiencing with AI and how we can leverage increasingly powerful technology while strengthening the human leadership capacities needed to guide it wisely. This is human equilibrium. My guest today is Kyle Kesserson. Just after dropping out of art college, Kyle co-created the Funko Pop Toy Line, and shortly after the launch of the iPhone, designed one of the first 30 apps in the App Store, co-founded two Techstars software companies with 11 million users between them, and more recently led AI Strategy at the Academy Award-winning studio, Felix and Paul. He has been building with AI and algorithms since 2010, with Microsoft Connect and IBM Watson, long before ChatGPT. After a decade living as a full-time nomad, he now lives in Quito, Ecuador. He studies the Mayan calendar with his teachers, aiming to be a bridge between artificial and ancestral intelligence. Through Demystified AI and his build lab. on school. He helps solo operators and creative professionals adopt AI to remove everyday bottlenecks while protecting what's sacred. Kyle, welcome to the show. I'd like to start off by inviting you to share the short story of how you came to do the work you do today. you've been building with AI since 2010, that's like way before many of us knew what it was. So, what sparked your initial curiosity about the technology and how has your work with AI evolved over these past sixteen years? speaker-0: it was before I knew even what AI was, I was working with it. So we'll get to that. Short story, backstory, how do I how does this begin? when I grew up, I I watched a lot of movies, a lot of movies. And I found that anytime I watched a movie with a strong character that did something, I got so inspired and I was determined to like become that thing or that person, you know, watching like ninja movies and then just like flipping off the couch to, you know, watching like I'm there was one on like Pistol Pete Merovich, and I was like, I'm gonna be a professional basketball player. And then around 1995, I was in fifth grade, and Johnny mnemonic came out with Keanu Reeves, where it was basically like him and the Matrix before the Matrix. And he had a hard drive in his head, and he would kind of he had to transfer information by him being a carrier, and he would go into these like worlds where he would just be like typing in thin air, but he didn't Internally, he was like processing a whole world. And I remember sitting at my desk in fifth grade, just doing that, was like imagining my fingers, typing on all the things, and just, you know, that was about the point where I completely disengaged from school in general and got really into computers. And hackers came out, and I was super inspired by hackers. And so just technology was always really inspiring for me. And it ended up becoming a path. of creativity. I always felt like technology was a substrate for expression and creativity and productivity. And and those touched on a number of things that just really lit me up. One, just I was always lazy when it came to having to do things that I didn't want to do. And I was always trying to find like the fastest, easiest way through it so I could do the stuff that I wanted to do. and then fast forward, you know, I've started my career as formally as an illustrator, as an artist, you know, just which was becoming a vessel for channeling creative ideas and imagination. And I used to use my hands to do it, and I still use my hands to do it, but technology again kind of became an instrument. and it turns out that I'm wired to think about problem solving in a product. lens and product and experience. And you know, there's empathy involved in that. You have to understand people, and then you have to think very mechanically. You have to think, you know, it's a story that unfolds over time. And so it just touched on a lot of topics that just naturally lit me up. and I also happen to have a cr an amazing mentor who was an engineer at Microsoft when I was in sixth grade. So I used to do my homework in where he was like writing code for Microsoft Word 97, So I was just like in those environments and I happened to be finding myself at the forefront. I didn't know it was the forefront, but I was just introduced to really cutting-edge technologies in labs. And that was always very exciting. It was very novel. in terms of getting involved with AI in 2010, you know. It was algorithms. It was just like how, you know, the math, the computational math underneath the the the product was able to amplify something. So I got really inspired by computer vision in 2010 when I was going to hackathons, startup weekend, bringing ideas to life. and I'd I'd done a number of them already, mostly focused on mobile phones and iPads. Type of touch interactivity. And somebody from Microsoft brought the Microsoft Connect to the hackathon. And this was before they the Kinect even opened it up for people to officially use it. So we were like hacking the Kinect, and he had like source code to the Kinect. And so we used the body as a controller to interact with. We were creating games at the time. And I was like, this is the coolest thing ever. So that was the opening, and from that. That startup weekend, I started a whole company that was built around the Kinect. And then I got invited to work with the Kinect team to then build, you know, touchless interfaces. And then when I got into IBM Watson, that was the same time with Amazon, Amazon Alexa's first voice to interface team. that was the first time of being able to also interpret what a human could produce. And then watch the machine translate it. And then we got to control what the output was. So we built this I.O. engine in out where Watson was actually the brain in the middle of it. And that was 2014. So we just happened to find ourselves touching on really cool technologies before generative AI you know, started to make its way onto the scene. speaker-1: Hmm. So I love how you were kind of riding this wave of algorithms that were largely, you know, just on computers, now moving into physical and creative world and allowing you to embody and work with all the different dimensions of what you wanted to create instead of just, you know, staring at a screen and only typing. Right. So I'd love to hear just a little bit more about why was that important to you? Why did that meet you in terms of your learning style and kind of what you thought the world needed more of? speaker-0: I started my career as a character illustrator, which meant I was constantly turning shapes into anthropo I was anthropomorphizing everything all the time. And that led me into creating toys, which was like anthropomorphizing plastic, you know, and just having people having a nostalgic relationship to this physical object. and that object then imbued with story and with meaning. You know, we worked with a lot of IP licensors. And so there was already like a a deeper, more psychological, emotional connection to plastic. And then when it came to technology, I was able to see my characters come to life, not just animated, but interactive. I remember doing one of the first little hacks we did was Taking the webcam with an illustrated little character on it. it was like a little virtual Tamagotchi, but you're able to play peekaboo. And it was super simple. It was like, is your face seen or not seen? Seen or not seen? And every time it was a yes-no, the it would trigger this animation within the baby, but you forgot for a moment what you were doing and what you're interacting with. And it there was like a real connection established. And I think that's been a bit of a through line in that. Now taking these models that can reason and think and rearrange and provide an output, you are now interacting, you're you're relating with. And so, in a way, it's anthropomorphizing technology, it's anthropomorphizing our phones, our computers. And so, what happens when you don't feel like you're just touching glass and you know. precious minerals and all of that stuff, but you actually believe that it's a mirror or you see the reflection of what you're putting into it produced back out of it. I think it's a it it brings out a lot when the object dissolves. another point on that, when we were working with the Connect, we essentially built a magic mirror. We were doing performance based animation. Where people would walk up to a screen, characters would be on a screen, and instantly, without any friction, a character would just lock into the body because it could read skeletal data. It could see all the facial, you know, the all the points around the face and see your expressions. And all of that we had mapped to what the character can do. So, and in real time, as people moved, characters moved, as people spoke and it responded back, and we can tweak the voice. It just became play. And when people were in this state of play, that's presence. And then when people are in full presence, all the other things kind of go away. Things like I'm gonna use a great example. So when we were in Microsoft demoing this, we you know, we'd have executives come in with their clipboards. I remember this woman in her 60s, you know, she's kind of wearing this like tight little everything was just tight about her as she walked into the space. And then as she's walking, there's a giraffe along with her. And she just stopped and looked, and she just kind of like lifted her arm and the ja giraffe lifted its leg and she kind of like bent her head and the neck kind of like bent to the side. And before you know it, she's like trying to get her leg to like twist and contort and try to like trick the giraffe. And it's like For a moment she forgot she was this serious executive and this large organization and, wearing this costume because she got to see not just her reflection, but she got to see Like a map, it was a magic mirror. She got to see a an a reflection of her creativity, of her expression. And so that's super powerful when we live in a world where people are wearing all of these masks. So if we're now sitting in front of technology that is mirroring what we put into it, we get to learn a lot about ourselves, right? And it it could help show us patterns and Blind spots, you know, it's one of s AI's superpower is it infers all of what's happening in the gaps. You know, it has all of the context, but it can see connections and in between connections. And so, and then it can see repetition. So you can get new dimensions of who you are based on how you interact. And then if you're a curious person and you want to actually go into What could be blind spots, your your isms, your buzzwords, your shadows. If you're the kind of person who likes self-development and growth, like it's kind of presenting it on a platter for you. So I think that's just one thing I think a lot about as I create experiences and ways of working with AI is yes, we're anthropomorphizing technology, but we're doing it in a way where. It's like fractaling based off of your own curiosity and what you're willing to put into it. speaker-1: Hmm. So much to unpack there, and I want to come back to it. But I want to just set one more piece of foundation here, which is the podcast is about leadership. So I'd love to hear what experiences speaker-0: Like what speaker-1: or influence have have most shaped the way that you lead or think about leadership. speaker-0: It's been in phases. The I'd say the first phase of my life growing up in a very like traditional Western canon was through a lot of media and how a man is supposed to be and how a man is supposed to lead. And it was, you know, what we've come to learn is toxic and harmful and full of ways of bypassing doing hard work and learning how to soften. So everything was gearing you to being harder. And I think that first wave was me attempting to become harder. And as a way to protect myself, as a way to exude confidence, as and just to have a feeling of like I know what the hell is even going on, or that I have any control in any of this. And All of that's an illusion. And I'd say the second wave of coming to leadership was being around a lot of women who were very strong women who, like my grandmother, my mother, just they created their own reality. Like those are the first two. And then I've been very fortunate also to, through my 20s and in my 30s, just be surrounded by. Very creative, strong leaders who are women who lead by listening, who lead with their intuition, who don't have to have things be so linear. and so I think just observing and learning how to hold space for that, and not just hold space for it, but like how can I support it taught me a lot. And then I I would put this last maybe third s last six or seven years has been around from a more of like cosmological perspective. You know, you reference in that opening introduction how I've been studying the the Mayan calendar. It's called the Cholquij. And I've been studying with Tutu Hill like traditional Mayan elders in Guatemala as much as possible. And if I'm not there, I'm writing about it, posting about it every day. And through this technology that this ancient civilization was able to put together, again, we're back to technology, where through observation of cycles and patterns, we're able to create this system of understanding on how life moves, how life Goes through its seasons and not just like human life, but any living conscious element, all the way up to how the stars and planets move and are in a relation with those. So get back to your question around leadership. There's a couple archetypes that embody The literal vibrational resonance that would be defined as, characterized as leadership. And one of them, I'll just touch on one, is called kech. And kech First of all, it's embodied and represented as the stag, like the deer, but the masculine, the one with the antlers. And if you see a stag, you immediately feel its presence, you feel its strength, but you see that it's has stability as well as agility, and it's about resourcing yourself first and foremost. Like What do you do to bring a center of gravity within yourself before you do anything external? How are you finding your own internal balance? And what's the work that you're doing to create that fortitude, like actual endurance and strength? And when you feel strong, you can you know that you can take on a lot more. You can feel a deeper impact because of that strength that will allow for it. Then you look at the antlers, and the antlers are actually like antenna, little feelers. So it's about sensitivity and it's about deep listening. So if you imagine this stag just in the forest at night, and it's just kind of like a tuning. Where in the forest at night do you go? And it's your relationship with that unseen. You could go all the way down and just call it your intuition, or you can, abstract it or go into the more of the spiritual realms of just what lives beyond your five senses. How do you tune into that? And then once you can get that sense of orientation and you're resourced and strong, you just start moving in that direction. And then things around you will see that, feel that. You're strong and that you can just go off into the darkness. And people are going to trust that. And when people trust that, they'll just inherently follow that. That's just leadership. And then the other aspect of it is leading from the fat from the front versus leading from the back. And leading from the front is very much like, I know the way, follow me. We're going to charge into the darkness, you know, and you're leading from the front. But actually, When you're strong enough to take on imprints and impacts, let's say others that are following like, actually, I think we I I I really feel like we should go this way, or I want to try this out, instead of just like, no, no, no, I got this. You're like, okay, let's see where that goes. And you allow it. Even if you can foresee the failure, you allow for it. Because through allowing other people to make those little mistakes and have those little impacts and imprints, and then you digest them and then you figure out how to empower yourself to not make those same mistakes in the future, you're turning others into leaders so that they can lead themselves because you won't always be there to lead from the front. So I think a big aspect of leadership is being strong enough to allow for failure. And allowing people to try things out and make it as soft as possible, but allow people to also grow. speaker-1: Mm. Yeah, I think of that as the difference between leading others and leading through others, that there's an expanded awareness around how am I cultivating the leadership around me, not just trying to prove the leadership, you know, from the front. It actually makes me think about the wolf pack, how you have usually at the front the weaker wolves, the older wolves, the injured wolves. And then you actually have at the far back, usually the strongest wolf who has the wider lens and context and is keeping an eye on the whole thing, but also, like you said, allowing for the pack to kind of guide the direction and then it just being a steward of that that collective vision. So that's really interesting that you bring that up. Yeah, go ahead. speaker-0: I was gonna say, and just to even bring that to AI, what does it mean to work with and relate with AI? Who's leading, who's following? And right now we're in this paradigm of like use AI. Like, use AI because you're pushing a boulder up a mountain every day, trying to participate and keep up with. everything that it requires to keep up with the cost of living to just growing your career to all the things you're trying to strive and achieve and one person having to carry way too much in order to participate? Well, AI is a superpower in order to be able to just like offload or put on rocket skates. And so now what's the relationship between what are you giving away? What are you letting AI lead? versus where where's your role in this? Because we are still in this little bit of a window where we are using AI. We will more and more move into the window of being used by AI. Right? So, and it's already happening. And we'll, I think we'll get more into this in a second, but when I when I personally every day work with AI, it's like this. Like I start With the intent. I give it what it needs to do. It comes back and I put myself back into the process. I review it, I tweak it, I reinforce it, I sent it off. It does its work, it comes back. And so I'm every interstitial, but I started it and then I'm the last one to do the thing with it. So I bookend it. You know, I let AI in between the gaps. Whereas the a lot of the people that I work with as clients, when they come to me and I learn how they're working with AI, or I see the results of it all around us, I can see it's like, just take this and then run with it and then do all of the things with it. And then it makes all of the decisions and then it represents you. It's taken over your voice, it's taken over your ideas, and it's doing a lot of your work. So at what point where are you in any of that anymore? So that Mixed with AI is very ontological. It's already reshaping how we think about processing, how we communicate our ideas and our needs, how we give context to other people. Well, if you get better at better at giving AI the context it needs in order to provide the results to support you, you're gonna continue to adjust and tweak and you're gonna find yourself communicating to people that way, right? Or thinking that way. Very ontological. How we're using this tool is shaping how we process information. but yes, so in terms of like, yeah, agency and sovereignty and you know, leadership, this is a very important topic and learning how to do this right. speaker-1: It is, yeah. And so what do you tend to do first when you have a client or someone asking you about how to leverage AI effectively while protecting what's sacred, as you say? how do you suggest that they start that process rather than simply in the face of the overwhelm and the acceleration and the compression of their work, trying to just simply offload it? speaker-0: I actually have a starting exercise that we do, which is defining what's sacred. And we go through, and I have like the whole checklist version that just kind of pulls together, you know, dozens of different options and different categories that make up a day or a week of our life that you can just kind of quickly go through and go that way, or you can journal it where you can just live your day not the end of each day, you just recap from the moment you got up till now, what did your day consist of? What were all of the actions that you took? What were all the questions that came up? How did you answer those questions? And but what makes up your day? And I'm talking all the things from making the bed to brushing your teeth to doing the dishes to making food. Because while we're looking at AI Processing a lot of our informational work, there's now robots building themselves and walking off the factory floor, and there's gonna be more robots than people in the next X number of years. So we really need to continue to understand like what are all of the things that make up being human? From the exciting novel all the way down to the mundane, and then Process, even in the mundane, even though at first glance you might not want to do it, it is still something that makes up your experience or your feeling of, you know, being a part of a family or a relationship or, you know, the all the the life admin stuff. So we go through an exercise that just audits, that observes, and then we'll process like Of all of these things, what could AI do? And then of all of these things, like what do you just want to protect? What do just not want to offload and give, even if AI can do it better? And let's assume we're going to get to the point where AI can do everything better. Is that the point? Or is the point that it's creating capacity for you to move in the direction that allows you to stay? excited and expansive and naturally learning and growing, you know, like or do you wanna like just I just want AI to do everything and you just kinda like dissolve into a blob. speaker-1: Yeah, right. speaker-0: Where do you want to atrophy where versus where do you want to grow? speaker-1: Exactly. Reminds me a little bit of Wally, right? And the humans just sitting back in their chairs sipping their Cokes and just not having to do anything because work is taken care of. But it's interesting because there's this sort of fantasy, I think it's a sort of narrative that's been marketed to us to some degree by these frontier labs, this idea that when AI becomes more capable in everything, like you're saying. we will have more creative freedom. We'll be able to choose what we want to do with our time and with our lives. And I think what that assumes is that is that we know what's important to us and that we're willing to actually cultivate it and take a stand for it. And I think for a lot of us, to your point, AI's ontological impact, its meaning-making impact for us is actually shifting us to some degree. And I've experienced this, shifting us out of. the deeper awareness of actually who we are. And so it there's a way, like you said, it's shifting our language, it's shifting our thinking, it's shifting the way that we communicate, the way we handle tension or conflict or friction. And so what I'm interested in is how do we continue to invest in what is sacred so that when we do have more time and capacity, if that promise comes to be, we actually know how to invest that into our humanity and our relationships rather than feeling lost and allowing ourselves to become sort of agents for AI, sort of inverting the relationship. speaker-0: You brought up Wally and I think of this other film Click. It's like this really crappy movie with Adam Sandler I saw in like, I don't know, junior high, high school, whatever, but it's about a magic remote control that he comes across that he learned that he has a a life remote where he can like fast forward things. And He would apply them to like, God, I don't want to take the, you know, may say a long drive. I don't want to take the trash out. I'm just gonna and just press the button and it fast forward that thing. Or it's like, my gosh, I definitely don't want to do my taxes. my gosh, I'm getting nagged right now. I don't want to fight with my partner. And before you know it, He's hit fast forward on all these things, but the like the devil's in the details and this magic remote learns from your behavior and it learns, you don't want to do that thing. Here, let me just automate that for you. And so now every time it comes to the trash, every time it comes to taxes, every time it comes to brushing teeth, every time it comes to that argument, every time it comes to cooking dinner. And so before you know it, it whole life is gone. everything got fast forwarded. And then you realized, whoa, it was actually all of those things in between that made up having a life, you know? And so that just always stuck with me because that's the closest thing to what's being turned on right now, the more more and more that everyday people are having access to. Scheduled workflows and scheduled automations, you know, and there's it's very empowering, but as you said, are you keeping a a lens to the bigger picture, like to the bigger context on like where does that fit in your overall life? And do you even have clarity on the things in your life that are inviting you to? Like you said, to like I said, to grow, to be challenged. you know, it's like it's through the challenge, through like the the friction that the growth happens. And so, you know, AI is kind of like smoothing everything out. just our process of things. So I think it's really important in this next generation, especially as we think about education and educating our children, is to know where we're introducing friction and why we're introducing friction. it's biology at the end of the day. speaker-1: Right. speaker-0: Right. speaker-1: So I'd like to hear a little bit more about how you're using AI in your work today. And also maybe the flip side of that, if there are any parts of your work, like you said, that you're deliberately choosing to protect from AI and why? speaker-0: Yeah, so I've offloaded everything to AI. I actually created an AI avatar. You're talking to him right now. Like Kyle's actu he's actually still in the other sleep. speaker-1: That explains so much. speaker-0: You can you can see me speaking in dashes. I It's it's ironic. My work is helping helping people have more time to do the things that they choose to do. And being a longtime entrepreneur, which means wearing every possible hat, including taking other trash, and trying to like so much of our work as individual operators, creative professionals, is all of the work that it takes in order to do the work that you're providing or building. All of this in order to do the service and actually help people on the front end, right? I'm focused a lot on how much of this Is necessary to do yourself in order to get to this thing, which is where your genius and your magic and your desire is, where the impact is of our work. Like I want to focus more on myself, just being here. What's really cool about this time versus where I was 16 years ago, I had to raise venture capital and have a whole team. And I had to take my ideas and give them to other people to tell me what was not possible. when I was working with engineers, as much as it was inspiring as a duo, I had to constantly push against people telling me what was not possible. I had to do all of this, I gave all of this love into the experience and the design and bringing it to life to give it to somebody who then gives it back to me. And it's like a completely different product. And now the process is just trying to get it to my idea again. So that used to take hundreds of thousands of dollars, to millions of dollars and teams. Just to get my idea through the pipeline. And what's really amazing now is being able to carry my own idea end to end. So we are living in a time right now where like just big companies don't need to exist in the same way, which is not a scary thing. It's like we're in the proliferation of like the The indie operator, the indie studio, the indie, product developer. small teams can do so much more. And that is agency and autonomy. And you don't have to eat up as many resources and take much bigger risks in order to do that. So for me, I'm constantly trying to figure out. based on what is actually possible, discerning between that and the hypey demos of what are the best paths and tools and workflows that can meet really busy people where they're at today. People who are super busy, even though it's like, well, if you only took the time to learn and readapt and change your entire paradigm of how you're thinking about working, all of a sudden you can do great things. And it's like, I don't have time. So I'm Always trying to be like, well, how do you reduce all of that friction to where it's like, it's just working for you? It's just working with you. It's it's the same as working with. You have a different type of patience and capacity to bring on. Let's talk about an executive assistant. Like a big part of the work that supports me is just I have an incredible executive assistant system that takes all of my things around. meetings and follow-ups and lead gen and all of these mechanical things that I would normally have to do. And it just lives in a way where I don't have to do all of the steps. I don't have to put so much of my brain energy into navigating things just to find the signal. What's my priority for the day? Am I prepared to go into these things? And the nice thing about waking up prepared is can actually touch a lot more surface area in my day. And this is just my professional client based work, but then I'm constantly tinkering and building and there's not enough hours in the day to be like, God, I really want to build this or I really want to try this out. I really want to tell this story. I really want to, you know, and so, you know, I think yesterday I built three new apps. I think I've built over 50 apps just since January, right? So I'm constantly using it to just bring more ideas through me that otherwise would just die on the vine. It would be like a little passing thought while driving or cooking. And I just in the yesterday's paradigm, we would never see the light of day. I find pain in the death of ideas. Like I want to live in the world where like every idea that wants to live can live. Because there's just no friction between being able to just like berth them into the world. So going from thought to thing has never been faster. And that's super exciting as a creative person, as a builder, as somebody who likes to solve problems. Because there's a lot of problems in this world from stupid, simple, little silly, mundane problems to like you know, extinction level event problems. so anyway, in short. Yeah. speaker-1: I appreciate that. So I want to know from your vantage point as someone who's deeply involved in working with AI yourself, but also supporting lots of organizations to do the same. You've been in this field for 16 years. What do you think is important for us to be talking about as leaders and workplaces, society at large, that we're not talking enough about yet in relation to AI? speaker-0: So I'm gonna answer that and also close, I think the last question, which is like, what am I protecting that's my own? And at the end of the day, what I'm protecting is my idea, my question, and my voice. So it's always me hitting publish on something. Like even if even if I'm doing like menial things where AI takes a first pass because it's trained on a lot of my patterns. I'm always massaging and adjusting and like making what is me out in the world come from me. It never publishes as me. It doesn't write for me ultimately. You know, oftentimes and most of the stuff, like I actually get a lot of joy in crafting how I express myself. So that is something that I protect ultimately as like how I'm. out in the world is actually coming from me fr at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end. so in terms of with organizations, I think it's still the same it it's it overlaps. Like I'm gonna use an example of there's a lot of people representing organizations and themselves, let's say in the in the world of LinkedIn. LinkedIn's one of my least favorite places to be these days because it's so clear how much people have automated connecting with other people. And I think that's, you know, we're going into the the you know the dead internet era where content that's coming out, but not even just the content, the The responses, the interactivity. And to be fair, it's been something that's been happening for it's been something that's been happening for 30 minutes focus time and it's done. Sorry, my my AI Bob just had something to say. speaking of AI. so I I think that the human connection between people in the workplace, like don't automate that. I think that there's going to be more and more the use of AI to help with team building and conflict resolution, understanding people within the organizations. Like actually I think this is an incredible use is when when there's a model that kind of has a profile or archetypes of the people and teams within it, and then it becomes kind of like a living wiki. to support the process, I think is really powerful for relationships. It's really powerful when you can take not just people's like front-facing work histories or what their skills are, what their results are of their work, but then you start to take in all of their emails that they're sending from the email, from their outbox in a work setting to All of the slack conversations and how they you know communicate and present themselves. There's all sorts of like psychological cues about people in how people communicate, but then also, you know, getting into more of the energetic esoteric systems, the, you know, from you know, Vedic astrology to human design to Myers-Briggs to you know these psychological. Slight these psychographs, if the models understand people in teams and they're alongside people working together, one of the biggest killers of innovation, of progress, is just conflict. It's misunderstanding, it's misalignment. So I think if these tools can be used in a way to just make sure that people are feeling heard, that they are heard, and that they're just making sure they're on the same page. I think the quality of organizations will improve dramatically. And I don't see a lot of groups using these tools effectively in this way, not just for productivity, but you know, the human speaker-1: Yeah. The one thing that I'm curious about there Is whether that becomes a sort of offloading of our capacity to cultivate meaningful relationship. Because if we need that AI to constantly be the mediator in order for us to be okay in relationship, to be effective, to build trust, et cetera. And if all of that is predicated on this idea of the smoothing out of relational tensions, then what is lost in that process? If you don't have the AI in every conversation, if you don't have the AI in every relationship or every decision. that's where I start feeling like there's something missing with that future. speaker-0: Well, it doesn't have to be visible to everybody. even if it's just a tool that's available that's able to report it to an HR person, somebody whose job it is to be able to understand the temperature of the relationship so that things don't blow up and come to a head. Even just having that level of visibility support that person's role to go in and to be the touch point, I think is a healthy way to navigate that. But In the context of an organization where people are time constrained, resource constrained, dealing with personal lives. And it's not a, an environment that normally, and I'm talking more traditional organizations. It's just not a culture that breeds authenticity and you don't know what people are processing. And so when people react a certain way, people take that personal and and and and and and and and and so when people are rushed and they they just feel contracted. You're not getting the best version, the clearest version, the most patient patient version. Well, ultimately that environment is has a timeline, or that individual in that role has a timeline. So I think that it is a necessary, you know, just based off of history and how, like, of course, every culture wants to, you know, develop a type of culture that feels fun and open and playful and casual and yes, you could bring your dogs. Yes, you can, wear a t-shirt. Yeah. it's all relatively superficial. It's like what people are actually processing and are people fully aligned? When people are fully aligned, the ability to make the progress, to achieve the results, to feel good going to work every single day, all of these things really matter. And just leaving it to, you know, us in our meat suits to figure out in these artificial constructs, I don't think we'll ever get there. I really don't think we'll ever get there. But if we can have, we already have an HR department. So if we have these super tools that make their jobs better, they can, you know, have it's like one of my favorite uses of AI, this is not generative AI, but it's big AI, is in the use of agriculture. Like we need to figure out food systems. More than ever with the changing climate, with the growing populations. So crop yields are really important. If you can put sensors that are able to see the temperature changes, that are able to see when a little pest comes in and starts eating at that leaf, and you can just like go straight to it and just make that slight adjustment, your overall crop yield is going to be like much fuller and more abundant. And I think that. temperature changes and pests coming in and eating at relationships or eating at attention and eating at projects, all of that is super relevant. So at the end of the day, we are farming our ideas and our energy and our relationships. So I think we can be empowered without giving it all away, without everybody, you know, it it's like, I have a problem with James, you know, have my AI talk to his AI and figure it out. Like I don't think that's the answer. speaker-1: Yeah, I understand you're talking about it more systemically and more in terms of team dynamics and understanding the the data and the and the different nuances of people's communication and leadership styles and what would best support them structurally to then do the work of resolving or repairing or whatever it is, which still remains the I think the work of a leader or the work of an employee, a human, because we need those skills, I would argue. To be in effective and meaningful and fulfilling relationships. So I wanna end with one more question. I want to get your thoughts on this because there's a big debate happening right now as we're recording. and in the past couple of weeks, in particular, around sort of the the doom and the gloom side and like the super hype side of AI. We've talked a lot about how AI is a really effective tool and more and more it's a coworker, it's it's you're able to offload work, but also partner in completing that work in really powerful ways. We've also heard, and you s alluded to this earlier, that more and more we're gonna have a flipped relationship where AI is going to be making more of the decisions for us. And it's gonna be sort of impractical impractical and even almost like unthinkable to trust your own judgment over AI, because AI is reflective of all the knowledge ever in human history, basically. And so there's this conversation happening now of AI is going to we're going lose control, right? AI is going to be basically pursuing its own goals, or even if it's pursuing goals that some small tiny room of humans are are sending it out to to achieve, that we may not have AI that supports human flourishing. On the other side, we have people saying this is the future of the economy. There are going to be all these creative entrepreneurs, all these new businesses. It's a lot of what we talked about today. So I wonder, like in this broader macro conversation, what is your sense, your feeling, your experience around what's actually real in relation to AI and what's coming? speaker-0: Big question. I don't think it's an accident that AI is coming from humans versus any other species that has ever lived on this planet. And if you look at humanity over time in all of the conditions that we've currently ever been faced with, even if there are large numbers of people that like don't make it through. An earthquake, a blizzard, like harsh conditions, volcanic eruption. Like we've put ourselves we live in the context of insurmountable forces all the time, like flying through space on this rock with the you know, potential for a collision with another. asteroid, all of we're in the face of these forces. We've been living in the face and with the threat of these forces. Since the inception of our species and before. And one thing that's been incredible about being human is that we're adaptable, collectively speaking. We've been adapting to insane conditions, insane environments. Whether that means being resourceful and having to innovate and create new types of Tools and methods to survive in these conditions? Or the stories we tell ourselves to just power through them. Right. we can put ourselves in really harsh conditions, but tell ourselves a story that we're not a victim of it, but actually this is an adventure. And it changes our physiology and our biology. So there's our story that's on top of the objective reality of what's happening. And I'm bringing all of that up because we are in the face of like a growing insurmountable force. That can take us one way or the other way. I'm not I'm I'm not a part of the Doom Party. I've never been a part of the Doom Party because we're like I I understand the importance of asking hard questions and proactively taking the steps to avoid potential challenges, pain, and suffering. However, we are a part of the little people class. There's only so much that we individually are able to participate in when it comes to the tectonic plates that are shifting. So we are still participating, you we get up, we have to go through our day, we have to bring in the resources, we have to support our lives, and within our lives, we direct ourselves towards however we're, you know, who we're connecting with, what we're creating, how we're relaxing, how we're, you know, enjoying this life in between all of the stresses and strains that require that's required of us. But I feel it's my duty and responsibility to Show how empowering and expansive this moment is because it is. Like we are living in an age of mythic powers. And there's a lot of responsibility that comes with that. And there's a lot of consideration that comes with that. And there are much bigger organizations that are kind of at the helm that they've been at the helm the whole time. Like, you know, we've had a doomsday clock, what, since we split the atom? Right. we we've still had to entrust people that we've allowed stay in positions of power to make decisions that don't drive us off a cliff. And if we genuinely think that's where we're at, well then we need to more collectively mobilize and do something about it. But day to day, I think there's just We're at a a a point where as a creative person, it's never been more exciting. I'm just like I'm constantly energized, and that's that's been my biggest truth. my biggest truth is if I'm able to stay genuinely excited and motivated, it's it means that there's a lot of food for the soul here. And I'm just like feasting on food for the soul. And I have my own filters of values and standards and like not creating harm to other people. And it's like, if I can live my life this way and walk this way and hopefully just show what's possible. And then the other person starts to figure out and adjust this way and the other person starts to figure out and adjust this way, then it starts to become this collective movement of showing what's possible and that we can live in a productive, healthy, generative way. And rather than if we just let the Doomsday narrative like a tidal wave continua to keep us away from what's possible. Cause I actually think that there's more of a like insidious agenda of keeping people disempowered because we are t able to topple big organizations and things that normally would take lots of people and lots of capital to get across. Like people can, individuals can do it. Like the last point is like. I think this is the new renaissance of the artist again. I think for so many generations, artists, people who see the world differently and have the ability to express it, are the most dangerous people on the planet. Because when you can create art, we are biologically, physiologically wired to beauty. We are wired to awe. Artists are the arrangers that create beauty and awe, which is presence, which is attention, the most lucrative resource we have. Which is why artists have been exploited by governments for propaganda, by organizations to sell stuff, by religion for you know and dogma to like convert people into you know control. And so artists have the ability. To change the face of this planet. And these are the most empowering tools we've ever been given to do that. So it just ultimately leaves me super optimistic that we have a bright future if more artists don't see this as a threat, but see it as a way to amplify their own genius, their own vision, their own creativity, like the world will change. speaker-1: Hmm. Well, I think that's a good place to end. Kyle Kuserson, it's been such a joy having you on the show. Thanks for being here. speaker-0: Thanks, brother. That was a good good chat with you. speaker-1: Thanks for listening to Human Equilibrium. If this conversation sparks something for you, I invite you to keep exploring with me at humanequilibrium.ai. There you can find the field guide on wise leadership in the age of AI, take the free human equilibrium assessment, and explore my work with leaders and teams to strengthen judgment, emotional clarity, and relational presence in an AI accelerated world. Until next time, stay curious, stay human, and lead wisely.