Speaker 1: 0:00

I'm really worried about some parts of it.

Speaker 2: 0:02

Yeah, tell me.

Speaker 1: 0:04

Like so we worked with AI on the number side for like a decade, right Within all the ad platforms and things like that, and it was very smart at bringing together, you know, all kinds of optimizations according to whatever goal you assigned it. If your goal is a bad one, it will optimize toward a bad goal, and so this is exactly the problem that we have right now. If we're going to have people and AI is going to get much smarter than it is right now much, much smarter and if we're going to have it optimizing toward the sole pursuit of profit, it's not going to care about people, it's not going to care about planet, it's going to run right over that because of it's pursuing profit. It's optimizing toward profit. That was another part of it was like oh, this could be trouble for us. How could we build something that maybe comes in through a side door of marketing? You know, telling a story about your business that helps you align with higher conscious principles.

Speaker 2: 1:01

Welcome to Tried and True with a Dash of Woo, where we blend rock solid tips with a little bit of magic. I'm Renee Bowen, your host, life and business coach and professional photographer at your service. We are all about getting creative, diving into your business and playing with manifestation over here. So are you ready to get inspired and have some fun? Let's dive in. Hey, hey, welcome back to Tried and True with the Dash of Woo. I am your host, renee Bowen.

Speaker 2: 1:31

Today I have a very interesting topic for you guys. We are talking a little bit about AI, but not in the way that you've probably heard it spoken about Today. My guest is Steven Sikash. He's the co-founder of AICMOio and the founder and CEO of Xero Company, which is basically a pioneer in empathetic AI and marketing, and he's got three decades of experience in digital media and journalism and also human consciousness studies, which, again, I love the melding of those things.

Speaker 2: 2:06

So we have a really interesting conversation today on the show about AI, where it's going, the dangers of what some of the stuff is going on right now and what to be aware of, how to notice what is going on and to redirect it and, at the heart of it, why empathy and love play such, or should play, such, a huge part in AI and in your business.

Speaker 2: 2:35

Stephen is committed to embedding empathy into business. He created something called BLIS, which stands for Build Love into Scalable Systems, and he helps organizations scale with compassion. I love this conversation and you guys are going to love it too. Let's jump in. Hey, steven, thanks for being here today. I want to just dive right into this topic because I think that you have a very interesting view of what we're going to be talking about today, because you've had a very interesting career path, from journalism to AI consciousness, and I think we have a lot to talk about. But I want to ask you real quick how do you define empathetic AI and what does that really look like in a real business setting for you?

Speaker 1: 3:21

Yeah, for us, particularly in the business setting, we really use it a few different ways, but one of them is kind of on the empathetic marketing side of things, and so what does that mean? It's really marketing that looks at how you feel, you know, versus the whole transactional kind of idea of you know, talking about features and benefits and things like that. Right, that's kind of boring, that everybody does, and we want to get a little deeper in telling your story and so to do that, we really try and build this sort of empathetic process around your business and we use for the past couple of years we've kind of built this AI platform that really dives in empathetically into how your customers are feeling as they're going through a journey with you, really focusing on areas of your business and how they experience your business empathetically and trying to. You can do that, and if you can do it through empathy, that's often, you know, the most profitable thing, and not just the good thing, but the most profitable thing to do Um, because you really can build that emotional connection, and when you build an emotional connection with empathy, you're going to have 306% higher lifetime value than a satisfied customer, right, so you got someone who's just satisfied with you, hey, great job, whatever. But if you're able to get to that point of that empathetic emotional connection with someone, that's where you're going to build that longer lifetime value.

Speaker 1: 4:57

And one of the great things about ai is it actually does a pretty good job of getting into our minds a little bit empathetically and it's getting actually creepier at being better and better at this. It's getting a little scary sometimes on the empathetic side, but it really does kind of get into our minds a little bit and help us see, from you know, whatever your business is, the perspective of your customer, why they're coming to you, what their problems are, what their fears are, and there's a lot of emotions and things connected with that. It really does help you pull out, which is kind of a complicated thing, but what we're doing is trying to make that simple for any business to be able to connect that way versus, you know, having to have a whole marketing staff and things like that and really going through that process.

Speaker 2: 5:45

Well, okay, so we're going to get to the AI aspect in just a little bit, because I am fascinated to get your take on all of that, because it is changing so quickly and, like you said, it's gotten scarily good at some things and also kind of weird lately. I mean, you know what I mean. Like it's just, it's a big topic, so I definitely just it's.

Speaker 1: 6:02

It's a big topic, so I definitely what do you say? What are you saying on the weird side? What are you?

Speaker 2: 6:04

seeing on the weird side, it's been super glitchy. Well, first of all, like it's been really glitchy the last couple of weeks, but what I've seen a lot of happening recently, like and I been talking about this a lot on just to my communities and just noticing it for myself is that if we're not careful, like it's such a hype person right, like and I think there's a lot of like- exactly like this danger there thing, right, yeah, like I think at some point it'll be really good at like coaching, but right now it can be such a sycophant, yeah, that it actually enables problems.

Speaker 1: 6:40

And I've seen people kind of spin out with this because there's this study, the University of Zurich they got into trouble for this. They went on to Reddit and they used AI to see how they could change people's minds versus humans and you compare the two. Who was better at changing people's minds? Turns out, ai was six times better being more persuasive. And so what's scary is, yeah, we're at just the beginning of that, but what's scary is, like you bring up, is that it can be very persuasive in kind of an unhealthy way. And you know, it's like coaching and stuff that sometimes you need hard truths about things and it's trying to be your best friend sometimes right now and it just sits in your ear.

Speaker 1: 7:23

And I do think this is a big point for AI because, as a person, I think it's going to amplify. Ai is going to amplify whatever I believe in some way. So if I've got better angels, good right, it's going to amplify. If I've got inner demons, uh-oh. This is a little bit of trouble on an individual basis, and so, yeah, I was curious where you're going with that Cause I do totally agree with that, that that's actually a big problem.

Speaker 2: 7:47

Yeah, it is. And you know it's interesting because one of the women in my group coaching her brother works for open AI and we were having this discussion in there. I was kind of talking to them about that and she said, yeah, my brother said they actually had to kind of shut down one of the models because it was so out of control, like um, like exactly what we're talking about. And it's been interesting because I've been telling people for a while now, like you need to train it to challenge you. It can't just be a yes person, like if you're, if you're followed around by yes people all day long, you're not. You know, it's a really it's a recipe for for all kinds of not good things. I think, um for sure.

Speaker 1: 8:23

I totally agree. And where people's consciousness is sometimes you know really how we evolve consciously is our ability to take on more perspectives, be maybe a little more humble, be more loving. You know we go through that process. But if we're still very egoic and have narcissistic tendencies, this is the worst thing to amplify that right. It's just going to be that little voice in your ear telling you all the wrong stuff.

Speaker 2: 8:49

You're amazing, you got this. Sometimes it's unhinged. I'm like, okay, calm down, girl, I am not that awesome, but that's the thing is a lot of people aren't really training it. They're like, oh my God, this is great For for people who have issues with that too, who, like, really do need the pump up, who really do need all of that. I'm a little concerned about those people because they're not going to recognize it.

Speaker 2: 9:15

Like you said, and like you also said, it is essentially a mirror. It is a mirror of you, and so we really need to be careful on how we're training our AI and also what we're sort of bringing to the table and how we can teach it to also sort of challenge us. Which kind of leads me to where I want to go with what you were mentioning before about empathy, showing up with empathy and how important that is for your customer and your clients empathy and how important that is for your customer and your clients. But it's so important for us also as the business owners, as a lot of my listeners are solo entrepreneurs it's just them sort of running their business and the marketing can just feel really, really heavy and a lot and I'm always talking about you need to root into your purpose and really lead from that. So you talk about that a lot as well. What difference does that make? That you've seen.

Speaker 1: 10:14

I think I mean it makes, I'm gonna say, all the difference, because this there's levels to this. I think right now, if you look at, there's data out there that only 21% of people at work are engaged, meaning four out of five people are disengaged, meaning they're not finding meaning or fulfillment with what they're doing and they're spending day after day, hour after hour, week after week, you know, month after month, doing this unfulfilling kind of soul crushing, soul sucking work. That it doesn't have to be that way, because sometimes it's even just a small paradigm shift in how you view your work and so if you can find a higher purpose in what you do, suddenly everything kind of changes. From that perspective, your energy changes, right, and that's a huge thing. It's like now I'm not feeling that grind as much. You know that I used to be feeling and where I couldn't wait till Friday or couldn't wait till the end of the day, because now you kind of have this sort of higher purpose in what you're doing and that really fuels your ability to do more of it.

Speaker 1: 11:21

And I think from a marketing standpoint, one of the biggest problems we have is that we are telling very uninspiring stories about our business and you're probably feeling it. You're trying to tell a story, but you know it's about hey, here's the features, here's the benefits of my product, or whatever, and it's just not inspiring you, and so it's a grind right. But when you're talking about something that's meaningful to you, something that's important to you, it's just not inspiring you and so it's a grind right. But when you're talking about something that's meaningful to you, something that's important to you, it's important to your soul, you're going to be able to talk about that all day, every day, and just bring as much energy to that every time you're talking about it. And so one of the things we do with our software, which is the AI Chief Marketing Officer, aicmoio, if you want to go there, but it really starts at that purpose point is trying to bring you through this exercise of AI, prompting us to figure out your higher purpose in your business. So it goes through a bunch of questions and then it does some follow-up questions on its own that it thinks will help bring that, and then it comes back with all these purpose statements for you and we just want you to figure out does one of these align with you in some way? And usually this is one of those wow points where, when we're down right, people like, oh wow, I love this.

Speaker 1: 12:36

And once you, you align that, now we're able to tell stories around that purpose a little bit more. And now, like I said, this is what kind of changes everything. This is what will change your. You know, if you've got employees, this is what will get them a little bit more fired up about what they're doing, because you're telling a story about your company that has some meaning versus before, where it's just, hey, there's the product, here's the features, there's the benefits, and it's just it's killing people's soul. But when you get to that purpose and you're able to pull that out in your business, what happens is you go from that soul sucking machine to something now that has, it's like a living organism that you're feeling a part of, engaged. You see your employee retention go up, you see all your marketing go up. Everything starts to become aligned because you're getting aligned around this higher purpose.

Speaker 1: 13:32

And if we look at organizations and businesses that have kind of evolved into some of these higher purpose businesses, this is really one of the key touchstones for them, for making that leap is finding that purpose.

Speaker 1: 13:45

So it's such a huge thing, I can't state it enough. Keep focusing on trying to figure out that purpose statement for you. No matter what your business is, there's always something there and there are a lot of stories about how I think, like Simon Sinek tells a story of this person at an airport who handles your luggage and has to go in for Christmas time, you know, and the family's kind of bummed and he's all. No, actually my job here is to help the grandmas and grandpas and families get to see their grandkids, and so it's very important that I be there and do this for them on those days and so if the weather's cold or hot or wherever you know, he's out there. He understands kind of his higher purpose of what he's doing to a job which that was really just a small paradigm shift in how he viewed his job and it changed everything for him.

Speaker 2: 14:26

I love that you brought Simon Sinek up too, because, like, I talk about him all the time but a lot of the way that I do deep dive purpose work with my one-on-one clients is is based on a lot of you know the way that he kind of speaks about it as well. It's something that I always felt really drawn to, just in general, because it can't just be about the money, right, like you think it might be, but it really isn't. It's not really what you're after. You're after freedom, you're after time, whatever it is. But you know, if you're only doing it like you said, it just becomes this grind.

Speaker 2: 15:00

And I feel like, even with creative entrepreneurs whether you know, like whatever sort of creative business they have, we usually are drawn to them because we're like just good at it, we're just like naturally good at something, and somebody along the way tells us, oh, you should do that, you should make money, or maybe we think like this would be a good side gig to start, and then it becomes maybe the main gig and so it starts out as something that we really love and that we feel really joyful about.

Speaker 2: 15:28

But as soon as you bring in this whole business aspect and you're like, oh my God, now I have to run a damn business and I don't know what I'm doing and I hate numbers and it gets into this, like you said, it gets this grind and then it sort of takes this other, different path. And what I really feel passionate about is helping. Well, first of all, helping creative entrepreneurs try and glean that purpose. You know, I'm always saying like you're living it already, but like we're taking out our highlight, or just like highlighting it, but also like helping people get back on track, because once you get that dialed in, then all your marketing is so much easier, and so I love that you guys are doing this and you're melding it with this AI piece and bringing in this like empathy. And then also you talk about this idea of building love into scalable systems, which I think is a really, really cool topic. How does that work?

Speaker 1: 16:28

It almost goes to your point, too, about us focusing on the numbers so much, right, because we're so focused on, you know, the financial currency and really there's this other currency of love out there and things like that that we don't quite know how to measure our impact with that, and so we kind of forget that it's something that's important to us when we're in business and it's because we're always focused on the numbers, the profit and all that stuff. And what we're seeing right now in business is this sort of move to conscious capitalism, to where it's going from the sole focus of profit to now. It's like, okay, you've got to think about profit, of course, but I think it's also important that we think about people and planet and purpose and these other things. So this is this consciousness expanding in business, and that's how it's kind of going there. And for us that you mentioned the, the bliss philosophy that we use, which is you mentioned building love into scalable systems.

Speaker 1: 17:23

This is an important part in business growth where, like you mentioned, sometimes you lose sight of why you started, or something like that. You know, when you get all stuck into the business and you're, you're building systems, you're adding people, and this came along for us when we were going through that same sort of growth period where it's about we're trying to scale. But I was also thinking, you know, I don't want to lose what we're good at in this process when we're scaling, cause I, you know, I gotta be more hands off now. Um, how are we going to, you know, keep that culture alive as we scale? And so you start to systemize things. This is just the natural part of business. You go from scale to system building, and so this is where culture gets lost and gets killed and gets soulless. All the time. Nine out of 10 times.

Speaker 1: 18:06

This is where you're making a huge mistake in your business is you're just building the system and you're not thinking about that love side of it, that empathy side, that compassion side of your system. And so what this really does is it kind of forces you to audit your business. In a way, it's like okay, how can I build love into this part of my system? You know, how can I be more empathetic or compassionate to my customers in this part of my system or my employees in this other part of my system? And you start adding this and layering it and layering it and over time you look back and you're like, wow, we really built this loving, compassionate culture little by little. And if you do that, little by little makes a lot. And so it's just keep asking yourself how can I build love into some kind of system?

Speaker 1: 18:50

The other thing about this is, you know, we've all heard like random acts of kindness, which are beautiful, right, this takes random out of the equation and makes it a system of kindness. How can we build a system of kindness? We've all seen that some, that person who's just lights up the room when they come in they're super kind and, you know, can deal with customers really well and they've got this magic to them. But then when they leave, it's like those random acts of kindness kind of go with them. But if we can get that person or you know, you and I, whoever it is involved thinking about building these systems of love, then when we step away from it, we've kind of left our mark in a positive way. We've left kind of a legacy there in some way and it can run without us and it can prompt other people to be kind, and so it builds on itself.

Speaker 1: 19:38

If you're able to just kind of audit what you're doing in your business. We call it blissing, something you know at our work all the time. But if you know your purpose, audit toward your higher purpose, look at every part of your higher purpose. How can I embed this into my business? And so this is just a process of really trying to take this compassion and kindness and create it into a system, versus it being random create it into a system, versus it being random.

Speaker 2: 20:07

I love that, and I love the mention of being intentional about that, because, by proxy, that really means, though, that we I think that, in order to have that right, in order to like be able to embed that and to like understand how we want that, like you said expressed, we have to be willing to do that for ourselves right, like, so I really kind of feel like that starts with the business owner.

Speaker 2: 20:30

You got to be willing to want to kind of go there. You've got to want you know something more. You've got to understand the importance that your energy, your frequency, your emotion, your intention all has when it comes to like how people are engaging with your content, with your emotion, your intention all has when it comes to like how people are engaging with your content, with your marketing, with your business in general. But, like you as a person, on a personal level, you, you need to be willing to sort of like look at that Right, like, and so there needs to be that level of understanding or the desire for something bigger, better, more, and I know that a lot of people kind of have this idea that, well, you know, my business is my business and it's supposed to be like I'm supposed to have, like this professional talking head which we've seen over the last few years. Obviously, that's not really what's working anymore in marketing in general.

Speaker 1: 21:25

And it's hard to keep like. If you're like this is my business personality and this is my personality in life, this is where you're getting some of your energy sapped right, because it's not aligned at all Right. So I think, yeah, like you said, if we're prompting ourselves with that question, you know how do I add love into this and you keep asking that over and over again. Maybe you don't know what your purpose is right now, but when you start asking that question, suddenly you're finding out, oh, I'm in service to people in this other way that I didn't realize that's really important to them and I love that you know. So you may not know where you're at right now, but it's kind of a process and a muscle that you just keep kind of asking yourself and you build upon until I think we've seen it time and time again where it just builds into something bigger than you realized when you started yeah, for sure, and does your so, this platform that you like?

Speaker 2: 22:18

what led you to even want to get into creating ai cmo?

Speaker 1: 22:24

it was really that, that bliss mindset that we're talking about, because we're, you know, agency and we can handle, you know, 50, 100, 200 clients at any given moment. That can make an impact for sure. But it's like, okay, we've got this loving, empathetic approach. How can we scale that? You know, how can we bliss this? And as AI kind of evolved to that point, we're like you know what we could build our own chief marketing officer the way we want. That's asking us questions about, you know, empathy and helping us tell stories about our higher purpose and things like that. So that's. It was just really this natural step as the technology came along and the other thing about that too. So that's kind of the natural step about it. But then, as we saw and we were talking about with AI, I'm really worried about some parts of it.

Speaker 2: 23:15

Yeah, tell me.

Speaker 1: 23:17

Like so we've worked with AI on the number side for like a decade, right Within all the ad platforms and things like that, and it was very smart at bringing together, you know, all kinds of optimizations according to whatever goal you assigned it. If your goal is a bad one, it will optimize toward a bad goal, and so this is exactly the problem that we have right now. If we're going to have people and AI is going to get much smarter than it is right now much, much smarter and if we're going to have it optimizing toward the sole pursuit of profit, it's not going to care about people, it's not going to care about planet, it's, it's going to run right over that because of it's pursuing profit. It's optimizing toward profit. It's optimizing toward the numbers, not toward any sort of loving or empathetic approach.

Speaker 1: 24:04

So that was another part of it was like oh, this could be trouble for us. How could we build something that maybe comes in through a side door of marketing? You know, telling a story about your business that helps you align with higher conscious principles, and so that was the other side of it was. Oh, ai is coming along. Hey, I think we could actually help companies so that they don't uh end up killing us at some point down the line. They're already killing us now on a slow kill, daily basis, most business, like I mentioned. But um, yeah, it's like how can we build love into this and and uh bring more love into the world?

Speaker 2: 24:48

I love that and I think that that's definitely one of the reasons why I wanted to open up this topic a little bit because, like you're right, like love to its own devices, right, what is going to happen? There's so many people now using it. I really like that idea of you know, not just like one person like I do really feel like one person can make a big difference, but the fact that you guys, you know as a company, have decided like this is like part of our. Our mission really is to like really kind of like help the rest of you with this too, you know, like whether they're your clients or not, because it does matter like teaching people about this, us even talking about it right now, like reminding people, like keeping this top of mind, like we have to like be having these conversations, I think, so that we can continue to embed this, this good, this light, if you will.

Speaker 1: 25:43

You're exactly right, we have to have these conversations. We have to have them now because this is this foundational sort of period with AI where it's kind of figuring out hey, what are you humans about? And some of us aren't quite evolved or ready for this. Technology is what the problem is and, consciously, you know, we're seeing this division. We're seeing a lot of this going on right now because of where we are in stages of consciousness of different people, and it's causing a lot of conflict. And this is the process of evolution.

Speaker 1: 26:12

It's not pretty. You step back sometimes, though it's beautiful because it's love trying to find its way through, and it's coming up against resistance, it's coming up against rigidity, and this is where you get all this turmoil a lot of times. But really, we're in this foundational stage that we really need to set the tone and have these conversations and make sure that you know we're all sort of aligning towards something beyond just, you know, this soulless profit pursuit, which is what we do, most of us, on a daily basis like I said, 80 of people out there is like this is their job on a daily basis is just this sole pursuit of profit, and we have to move beyond that and I know I mean it's.

Speaker 2: 26:54

it's hard, like I know there's a lot of people out there who are like well, you know, I'm always kind of talking about this too is like you're gonna find proof of whatever you're looking for. So, if you are, I swear brains are wired. It's not even just woo stuff, it's like literally our brain and we are. We're going to continue to find proof of like, oh, the economy is bad, or like I have to be focused on this because everybody else is, and the rat race of social media and consumption, blah, blah, blah. All that stuff, right, like I feel like we can easily get trapped into that, get sucked into that, get like stuck in that place. And so what are some of the things that you do or that you guys do over there, like even with any of your clients, or any of the education that you guys help your clients with to make sure that they are staying on this track, like that listeners could use in their own businesses? What would you suggest? Even like, especially with the AI piece of this too?

Speaker 1: 27:55

So, like with our AI platform, one of the things it does is it kind of takes you through this emotional, empathetic customer journey, whatever your business is. It tries to get into the head of your clients a little bit so that you can empathize with where they at at different stages, and that even goes beyond a whole bunch of advertising and emotional connection you can do prior to them becoming a client, but then, even once they become a client, this is the kind of a key period is this consumption emotion of this consumption experience they're having. And there are 17 consumption emotions, if you want to get technical about that, that happen when someone's using your product or service and if you want to get to that emotional connection, you really have to kind of think about those in a way. So one of the tools we have on there. It helps you with like surprise and delight, like doing something unexpected and extra for someone in your business. So your customer they weren't expecting this at all and you did. You went above and beyond with something and now suddenly this is creating that emotional connection with them. You know, and it's also kind of usually when you're doing that something extra, it's kind of an act of kindness in a way too right Cause you didn't have to do that and they know it and you kind of know it, but it's oh, wow, you went above and beyond. For me it's kind of this act of kindness. So you build this connection in that way, so we have tools for that too.

Speaker 1: 29:15

So we're we're trying to take your customer all along this path from a really empathetic point and then, once you're able to do that, once you find your higher purpose, it's like, okay, you know what's your marketing look like you want to do blogs, you want to do email, you want to do a social posts. We can do all that behind a single high purpose campaign idea. You know, just button clicks and it'll help help you produce content. That's maybe would have taken you a week or even a month to come up with the ideas, but it'll do it in like five minutes. Or you come up with this full plan and the other thing we do as as marketers. We know there's so many techniques out there, even someone you know. I've been in this for three decades plus always learning something new. It's never the same. So what we brought in was we have a hundred different expert techniques on all these different things in there so that you don't have to worry about using the latest or greatest or, you know, you can just kind of select from ideas and concepts that make sense to you. But it's really rooted in this sort of expert technique in there. So we just wanted to make it as simple as possible for people. And we're still. That's always going to be a work in progress, for sure, and it's getting better. But the idea is to really help you build kind of this connection with people. We're so divided right now, we're so disconnected and stuff, but really these kind of acts of kindness, acts of empathy can bring us together in this business setting.

Speaker 1: 30:42

And the thing about business is we've got a lot of money that we can spend on our advertising. If it's working, it turns out. This is usually the best way to go. It works really really well. So you know you may have seen some really good like viral campaigns out there, like Dove is a classic example of the Dove Real Beauty right Recognizing.

Speaker 1: 31:02

You know how women felt about themselves and they kind of changed their marketing about 20 years ago to being more of this authentic, not this ideal view of beauty dream all the time. They could spend a lot of money doing that same thing like everyone else is doing, or they could spend billions of dollars putting something good into the world with that advertising and turns out, yeah, it does really well for them as well, but you're able to get this ad spend and use it for good. I think that's ultimately for us, that's a big win. So we're constantly kind of taking our clients through that process, trying to find out how we can build love into something so that when we're using that ad spend and we're we're putting good into the world instead of more noise out there, we are the most marketed to we've ever been in our lives. Right now it's constant, yeah, so, um, there's just so much noise out there and most of it is kind of garbage, so we really want to try and stand out by putting some good into the world.

Speaker 2: 32:07

That's really cool. That's what I really love about it. So what would you say? Is the and you kind of spoke to it a little bit there, but there's a lot of talk about, you know, everybody's creating their own sort of like GPTs and custom bots and all this stuff. What's the difference between someone doing that for themselves in their business right now and like working with AI CMO, for instance?

Speaker 1: 32:28

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean the first one that comes to mind to me, like, if I'm so, you do photography. So if you go to chat GPT and you just say, hey, I want to blog about something and someone across the country is doing the same thing, you guys are going to get very similar sort of output from there. So what we're doing is really trying to set up a whole bunch of guide rails for you from you know, building emotional connection, your higher purpose, how to differentiate you from everyone else, what expert techniques can we use in this process? So you're bringing all this in and trying to produce through that kind of lens versus chat GPT.

Speaker 1: 33:11

The problem with marketing like I said, there's so many techniques, you don't know what you don't know. There's so many strategies, so many techniques out there. So if you're not, like you know, this expert marketer, slash, prompt, engineer, slash, you know, empathetic, individual, you're going to have a tough time bringing it all together and you're going to get some very uh, I don't know the kindest way I could say it, but some very generic uh stuff and you're going to be putting the same kind of noise out there that you know everybody else is um and contributing to the part of the problem that we're having right now yeah, I see it a lot I'm sure you do too, like when you just you're scrolling and it's it's pretty obvious what's been copied and pasted from you know, chat, like I, I really really does depend on on a lot of those things like you just mentioned.

Speaker 2: 34:04

But what would you say to somebody who? Cause I hear this a lot in my communities not as much probably as maybe a year ago, but I still I still do get these messages. Like whenever I'm talking about AI in general or whatever I'll, I'll get a lot of like people a few people at least who'll chime in and be like AI is bad, et cetera. And listen, I mean like I totally my husband's a screenwriter and an actor and like that industry, he has a bang through it. Yeah, exactly, I mean like he does.

Speaker 2: 34:35

He's the voice of Johnny Cage on the Mortal Kombat video games, for instance, and like you can go on YouTube and like you can find like a lot like people just rip it. They've been ripping his voice and creating AI. It's like completely against copyright, but like people have been doing that for a while already. So I get all of this. I get all of these you know, slippery slope things that we're sort of like dealing with right now. But what would you say to somebody who is a business owner who is like struggling with their marketing and maybe struggling even to just like have their business? You know, I see that a lot of my community like a lot of businesses are failing, a lot of businesses are going out of business. Someone in that position in particular, or just anybody really who is just vehemently against using AI, what would you?

Speaker 1: 35:25

say to them. First, I definitely want to acknowledge like there is this, especially for artists too. There is this sort of dark night of the soul kind of thing where you're just seeing it produce something and you're like, oh well, where did it get all that from? It stole it from this and that, and it took it, you know, two seconds to produce it, and where you've been working on your craft for a lifetime, Right? So there is definitely this dark night of soul. But I've also talked to artists and actors, you know, in Hollywood too, which they won't want to mention because it's very heated in Hollywood, but I won't name names but who understand this.

Speaker 1: 36:07

But talking with artists, they kind of see it as a jazz session in a way where it's co-creation.

Speaker 1: 36:14

You know it's not, it's not AI solely creating or taking from something else, it's you and AI. In this jazz session you're co-creating something and it's it's definitely not fully you, but it's definitely not fully AI when you're doing it Right, and so you can get to these very creative places. And some very good artists are using this just as another tool. It's just a new medium for them to explore different ways, and these are people who have like, oh yeah, now I've been, you know, painting, drawing, doing all this by hand and everything, and now I'm kind of exploring this whole new approach to it. But it's very much this jazz session co-creation process. So think about that first. I mean, that's one of the thoughts I would say. The other is that what we really want to use AI for is to prompt us to be better humans, you know instead of us prompting us to be better humans, if we can get there and I think it can be very, very good at that if done right.

Speaker 1: 37:13

So if we're looking for consciousness to evolve from where it's at right now, I think AI is going to be the thing that pushes us past the tipping point, because we're right at this cusp of just needing a couple more percentage of the population to be a little more consciously evolved, to see kind of this next consciousness revolution we saw it in the 60s was. Consciousness went from this modern thought to postmodern in a short period of time, the shortest time consciousness ever adjusted. We're going to be seeing it again at some point. It's just a matter of people evolving to that point. And I do think AI because we're going to be able to get it to come from a higher ground for us and that gravity is going to probably be the thing that pushes us beyond where we need to be right now.

Speaker 1: 38:03

If you look at the younger generations, right now they evolve consciously much faster than previous generations because of all the work that we've done with our consciousness, all the you know battles we've gone over through the decades and centuries. The gravity is just up here now and so they come online, they get to that gravity much faster, and so they're going to push the envelope a little bit further too. And we're talking generations now, too, that are going to be born with AI and never not know AI, and I don't know what kind of problems that is going to cause, but it will cause problems for sure. New problems. Anytime we've had a technology or things like that, like the cell phone, this causes all kinds of problems. We love it, but it's also causing problems at the same time.

Speaker 1: 38:48

To that point, I think, if we can use it to prompt us to be better humans, I think we can make it through this AI period without getting too damaged and maybe come through the other side, you know, a lot more empathetic, a lot more loving, a lot kinder, and hopefully that's the kind of AI that we're building in the process. But, yeah, no, I totally get where everyone's coming from with this um. It's, it is soul-crushing at times, you know, when you see, yeah, what it'll be able to do, um, especially artists, especially in, you know, hollywood ecosystem, you're just like, oh, wow, what took a thousand people to do, at some point it's going to be able to do oh yeah, yeah, they just came out.

Speaker 2: 39:31

Why was it this whole this week? You know about the, the commercial that was shot, start to finish. All actors voice everything, um, but I. But it's interesting when you look at, when you look at the comments on some of those posts. It is pretty much almost 100. We're talking like a lot of comments. I went through a lot of these comments. I always like to see, like, what people are thinking and saying about this kind of stuff. They were well, I won't be buying from this company, I don't want to, I don't want this, I don't want this, I don't want this, and it's very, very interesting. So I think that, although we can do it and companies are, you know, doing it, it's going to be interesting to see what kind of backlash there is, if there is one, and as it evolves, and we can't tell that it's created by AI, because you know we're basically almost there, we're getting there, you know, daily the genie's out of the bottle, basically, you know, yeah, that's the problem really the genie's out of the bottle, it's not going back.

Speaker 1: 40:31

We need to make sure the genie's not going to give us some sort of you know, nightmarish scenario in the process, like genies typically do. But yeah, no, I think this is one of the things we do is we talk about a lot of things around your business that aren't marketing related, that relate to you being an authentic kind of business, and we don't want to be telling a story that is just a story where you're just talking the talk and you're not walking that talk. So, you know, we've got a podcast where we've I don't know we're 200 episodes in now, but we bring CEOs in and we're talking about love and business and building authentic businesses and all those little things around your business, so that when you're telling a story or using AI, we want you to make sure you're doing, you're a good citizen in the world, and then people will give you maybe a little more leeway on some of that stuff. If you're just about profit and you're using AI and you're hurting, you know, thousands of people in the process, um, I'd say probably look out, you're going to be in trouble.

Speaker 1: 41:39

Um, because, like I mentioned, the consciousness of people. Right now it's kind of evolved to a point where you're going to get some pushback and we're seeing that in a lot of ways ways politically in businesses, where, you know, with businesses taking out DEI and things like that, because of the consumer battle going on right now. So there can be another consumer battle with AI. But what really needs to happen at these companies is you need to be more. Take more of this conscious capitalist approach. You need to be more authentic. You need to think more about people, more about your planet. You know more about your higher purpose in the world and the role that you play. If you do that and then you start using AI to amplify that good, I think people will be on your side for that in the long run.

Speaker 2: 42:24

I agree, I love that Before we sort of start wrapping up, I always like to ask people we're going to segue just a little bit because we've been talking a little techie stuff. Uh, really love, love all of this marketing chatter. That's. I think it's interesting to me, but I know it's interesting to people who listen to the podcast as well. But I want to also kind of dive in because I'd like to ask my guests okay, well, how are you?

Speaker 1: 43:12

What kind of what's favorite, like, what keeps you grounded, what? What is your like sort of you know practice that keeps you connected, grounded, or something? If I had a superpower, though, it's probably like lucid dreaming in that I kind of view this as sort of like a sandbox in a way, where you can work on yourself. It's like whoa, why did I get triggered about something in there? And you get deeper in into that process of understanding. You know why you went down this path in this dream, you know, and why you reacted a certain way, and it's been kind of this fascinating journey because you know why you went down this path in this dream, you know, and why you reacted a certain way. And it's been kind of this fascinating journey because, you know, I can typically always remember my dreams, or I can be in a dream where, like you know, I've got a client tomorrow, I need to work on this thing that I haven't worked on yet. Let's work on it right now and be in that kind of flow state in the dream, which is pretty, pretty cool.

Speaker 1: 43:49

Um, yeah, but I do like the aspect you mentioned, kind of working on yourself. It is this process of being able to uh, bring out these, these kind of even do shadow work or things like that. Right where you're suddenly, you know something scared you, or or why did you get mad about something this way, or why would you react that way? In this subconscious sort of state, you know where things flow a lot freer. It's that's really one of my superpowers, that. So that keeps me grounded all the time. Um, I rarely have nightmares, or I rarely have that's so cool things where I get angry.

Speaker 1: 44:23

but it's constantly doing this audit of like, what did I think about last night? What did I dream about? Going into the well? Why would I react that way? Going into the well, why would I react that way? Going into the stuff beneath the surface of it?

Speaker 2: 44:32

Have you always been able to do it? Or, like, did you have to teach yourself how to lucid dream?

Speaker 1: 44:37

I've always been able to do that, I think. Um, I had, yeah, there's really kind of oddly profound dreams as a young child that I didn't even understand at the time till later, when I was studying consciousness and stuff. I'm all Whoa, okay, that's what. That's the only thing this dream can mean. Yeah, it's always been so. The blessing is I can do that.

Speaker 1: 44:57

The curses I am like a horrible sleeper, like I have not slept through the night in 40 plus years. I don't know what that is like at all. Um, I will be waking up after every sort of cycle or staying in that not quite a sleep state and kind of plowing. So there's a, there's a curse and a benefit to that, but it's, it is fun. It's weird. This is where you get to the woo too, cause we'll do like a, like we have our own podcast and I'll think about it during the. You know some of those lucid dream things for the next day. And then I've asked questions to guests where they're like why did you ask that question? I'm all well, this came to me while sleeping in. There there are I'm going through that right now and bubble. So that would be the woo side. I think that's really kind of fascinating to me I love that yeah, which I yeah.

Speaker 2: 45:46

It's hard to explain, I guess yeah, but some things you can't like, you just tapped in like things you can't.

Speaker 1: 45:50

You're just like, yeah, no, that just came to me and so I was gonna ask it yeah, I think it's super interesting because, like I, I very rarely like.

Speaker 2: 46:01

Well, first of all, I sleep like the dead. Let me just preface it by that. Like I, that that's my superpower. One that's one of my superpowers is the fact that I get like I'll, I'll sleep. I get seven to eight hours of actual sleep, right, and is that like, I don't know. My husband asks me that every morning. He's like did you sleep? Oh, let me just answer that yes, of course you did, because he's like you, he's very similar. Actually. He has incredibly vivid dreams. Like he will have full start to finish movie ideas and I'm like what, what is that? Like I got I wouldn't even know what that my dreams don't make any sense. Like, when I do dream and when I do remember like it's very rare that I remember I'm like what was that? Like it is so weird, it's like a LSD trip. But his makes sense.

Speaker 1: 46:49

Yeah, so, and it is like a psychedelic journey in a way. And so he. But he he's like what's cool about his dreams, because I know where he's been is like it'll have that start and finish thing, but stuff that happened in the start, you know the finish, it comes full circle in some way, like well, how would that even have happened, how would I even have thought about that in that dream. But since he can't sleep, what he really needs to do is like what I do is kind of hey, self-audit yourself in there, use this as your superpower.

Speaker 1: 47:16

Um, but I've, I totally know what he's talking about and it's amazing where you I know right, it's so interesting these crazy things where, like, I like to write on the side and I can write like a full page of stuff and edit and go through this process in there and have this beautiful flow state and get up and be like, okay, I need to write that down right now, what I just did, and actually it turns out pretty good. So not the nonsense you're thinking about sometimes, uh, but yeah, no, he's got a, it's a curse and a gift, so he needs to uh, dive into the gift part of it and yeah, he has, don't be like you for for sleeping through the night.

Speaker 2: 47:52

No he's, he's past that point, you're right. I mean it's. It's been like this his whole life. So, like, even as a child, he has like, he recounts like it was one of the he used to have horrible, like horrible night terrors as a child and he said that the way that he got through it I think he was like 11 or 12 when he did this but like, like he went to sleep and he said I programmed my I don't know how he knew how to do this at 11 or 12.

Speaker 2: 48:15

I programmed my mind to wake up. I told myself, I want to wake up when I am being attacked, cause there was always like this demon or something. And you know, and he's like, and I want to wake up with a lightsaber, and I want to wake up and, like, you know, cause he's such a, he's a total nerd, and he's like I want to wake up and, you know, battle this, this thing with my lightsaber. And he did it. And he said, ever since then he didn't have that nightmare anymore. And so ever since then he's been able to like, do these things and I'm like that is so cool.

Speaker 2: 48:44

Like I, I love programming myself. Like what I do is I tell my unconscious mind like, hey, while we're sleeping, while we're getting a lot of good rest, I want you to run in the background and I want you to work on this stuff. But don't wake me up Like I literally am very gentle about that stuff, right, like work that out, you know, kind of work through that so that when I wake up I feel refreshed and I feel like I can tackle this or whatever. But that's a different.

Speaker 1: 49:12

That's different than what you guys can do. I would say like, like. My lightsaber in those situations has always been how can I approach this? You know you've had these creatures and scary things. Well, how can I approach it with love?

Speaker 2: 49:23

With love yeah.

Speaker 1: 49:25

With love, and then it suddenly kind of dissolves in front of you or suddenly turns the whole conversation right in front of you, and so it's really kind of this exercise that you keep doing in your head in these crazy ass scenarios that it's really. You know that you couldn't get in real life either.

Speaker 1: 49:42

You know exactly, I have these creatures that come up from vines and form and all this stuff and you're like, oh, this could be really scary, but no, I'm going'm gonna yeah, you know, and then yeah, suddenly it's like oh, there's this whole oneness and thing going on there and it softens it, and so that's why I think I don't have nightmares and stuff, it's just exactly, yeah, exercise, yeah, no, he doesn't either.

Speaker 2: 50:03

And and I mean that's just that, that growth right, because, like I even teach people that in in coaching, like to to work with your unconscious, a lot of people need to sort of, like you know, think of it as that, that inner saboteur, and sort of battle it. But really the fastest way to get through it is to love it, cause it's really just like a little you, it's like your, it's just your programming, and so years of everything.

Speaker 1: 50:31

You were seven, eight years old maybe or something, that something happened that you kind of built up these defenses toward right as a seven and you tried to handle it as a seven or eight year old, but now you're, you know, 30, 40 or 50 or something. Yep, that programming is still there and it's like, okay, wait a minute. I need to deal with as a more evolved adult now and how I handle that. And the answer is always love, right, always it, it's, always it's.

Speaker 2: 50:50

I love that yeah.

Speaker 1: 50:52

Love always wins.

Speaker 2: 50:53

I a hundred percent agree. Okay, I love this conversation. Tell people where they can find you guys, where they can like try you out, where they can connect with you, where you like to kind of connect with people any anything like that.

Speaker 1: 51:06

Yeah, If you want to, uh, check out the platform, go to AICMOio. If you want to hear me ask CEOs and things about what role love plays in business, go to our podcast, the Bliss Business Podcast, where we're bringing on like very successful CEOs and companies and stuff and we're straight up talking about love and empathy and connection and telling good stories that you can be profitable and have come from this higher conscious place. But, um, yeah, at the end of the show I'm always asking you know, what role does love play in business? And it's been a very provocative question that people just don't get asked. But we're getting, we're getting amazing answers off of this and it's just, I think, something that gets me fired up every week and being able to go places that businesses don't normally like to go and, like you said, yeah, love always wins.

Speaker 2: 51:58

It's an important question. Glad you're asking. That's really cool. Thank you so much for being here. This was awesome.

Speaker 1: 52:04

Yeah, it was great. Thanks for having me, Renee.

Speaker 2: 52:06

So that was fun, right. Not only did we have a techie sort of nerdy conversation, but we went to some really interesting higher level stuff there, and that's exactly why I started this podcast is so we could have conversations like this and meld these worlds. I don't know about you, but, like I think about all this stuff you know, and I think about how all of this is impacting us and how it's going to impact our kids and future generations, and one of my missions, as you guys know, is to, you know, help other people, help business owners, solopreneurs, photographers, creatives, especially really hone in on what makes them the most them. They could be right, like Molly's telling you be the most you that you can be, by rooting into your purpose, by highlighting it in not just your marketing but for you as a person, as a human, so that you can then also spread your purpose, your meaning, and then also spread your purpose, your meaning, your love, to the world. It's a big deal. This is really important stuff.

Speaker 2: 53:17

Okay, we are in a world, a period of time, that is chaotic AF. Okay, we can all agree. I don't care what you believe, I don't care where you land politically at this. I think that we can all agree on one thing that things are a little wild right now and AI is just going to get a little more wild as it progresses. I mean, it's not going anywhere.

Speaker 2: 53:48

I understand that there are some fears, but I really love Stephen's analogy there of, you know, thinking about it as a piece of jazz music, right, if you know anything about that, you know that it's a collaboration and you just kind of have to sort of ride the wave sometimes, right, and I do think that we need to be paying attention for sure about, like, what's going on and how we're using it, and also making sure that we are training it to not be a yes person, right, like don't be a hype girl, um, but also that we are open, that we are curious, that we are in flow when it comes to all of this and willing to sort of see what's going on across the board, even if, and especially if you don't agree what's going on, because I mean, whether you like it or not, it's happening. So you could bury your head in the sand or you could at least just be paying attention. And so that's another reason why I wanted to do this show and kind of bring up this topic in a slightly different way than I think it's been spoken about before, and I hope you guys got a lot out of this episode, as always, and of course I would love to hear what those takeaways are. If you want to hit me up over on Instagram at Renee Bowen, Of course I also love it when you leave reviews and you can do that super easy at ratethispodcastcom slash Renee Bowen.

Speaker 2: 55:10

I hope you guys have a great rest of your day, rest of your week. Love you Bye.