Replay is below
This is a useful article and guideline for being a co-creator with AI:
If youāre anything like most people right now, youāre using AI like a slightly smarter Google search.
You type a question. You get an answer. You copy-paste it somewhere. Maybe you ask it to write an email or summarize a document. You tell yourself youāre āleveraging AIā and feel vaguely productive.
But deep down, you sense youāre missing something. You see people on Twitter claiming they built entire applications in an afternoon. You hear about founders who replaced half their workflow with Claude. You watch tutorials and read threads and still feel like youāre fumbling in the dark.
Iāve been there. I spent months using AI as a glorified autocomplete before something clicked. Iād estimate that 90% of the people using these tools right now are extracting maybe 5% of their actual valueāand itās not because the tools are overhyped. Itās because weāre approaching them with entirely the wrong mental model.
However, as frustrated as I am with the shallow āprompt engineering tipsā flooding the internet, thereās never been a better time to actually understand whatās happening and position yourself on the right side of this shift. Not by learning tricks, but by fundamentally changing how you think about work, creation, and your own cognitive architecture.
So whether you want to build software without a CS degree, automate the tedious parts of your job, or simply stop feeling like AI is something happening to you rather than for you, I want to share 7 ideas on human-AI collaboration, skill acquisition, and cognitive leverage that will change how you approach this permanently.
This will be comprehensive.
This isnāt a listicle of prompts youāll forget by tomorrow.
This is a framework for thinking about AI that will compound over years, not days.
The exercises at the end will take a few hours of focused practice, but the mental shiftāif youāre ready for itāwill alter the trajectory of your creative and professional output.
Letās begin.
When it comes to using AI effectively, people tend to focus on one of two things:
Learning better prompts and techniques (least important, surface level)
Changing how they think so that AI becomes an extension of cognition (most important, foundational)
Most people obsess over prompt templates. They collect them like trading cards. They copy what worked for someone else and wonder why it doesnāt work for them. Theyāre trying to get extraordinary output while maintaining an ordinary relationship with the tool.
If this doesnāt make sense, let me give you an example.
Think of someone whoās genuinely dangerous with AI. Not someone who uses it occasionally, but someone who has integrated it so deeply into their workflow that their output has qualitatively changed. They ship projects that would have taken them months in days. They explore ideas at a pace that wasnāt possible before. They seem to have unlocked something.
Do you think theyāre following a template? Do you think theyāre copy-pasting prompts from a Twitter thread?
The truth is that their relationship with AI is fundamentally different. They donāt see it as a tool they āuseāāthey see it as a thinking partner they collaborate with. The distinction sounds subtle but it changes everything.
When I watch people struggle with AI, the pattern is almost always the same: they approach it transactionally. They want to put in minimal input and extract maximum output. They treat every interaction like a vending machineāinsert prompt, receive product.
But thatās not how youād work with a brilliant colleague. You wouldnāt hand them a one-sentence brief and expect a masterpiece. Youād think together. Youād iterate. Youād build context over time. Youād leverage their strengths while compensating for their weaknesses.
This next point sounds simple, but itās staggering how many people donāt get it:
If you want AI to produce expert-level output, you must engage with it at an expert levelānot by knowing everything, but by thinking alongside it.
When someone tells me they ātried Claude Code but it didnāt work,ā I usually donāt believe the tool failed them. I believe they approached it expecting magic rather than collaboration. They wanted to skip the thinking, and the thinking is precisely what makes AI valuable.
When you truly understand AI collaboration, shallow engagement becomes almost physically uncomfortable. You feel the waste. You sense the untapped potential sitting right there. You canāt unsee it.
Youāre getting mediocre results because you havenāt changed how you think. Youāve just added a new tool to an old process.
āThe mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.āā Oliver Wendell Holmes
If you want to transform your output with AI, you need to understand why youāre resisting itābecause you are resisting it, even if you donāt realize it.
All behavior is goal-oriented. This is the teleological nature of human action. Every choice you make is an attempt to achieve something, even when that something is unconscious.
You check your email compulsively because you want to feel important or avoid harder work.
You scroll social media because you want stimulation without effort.
Those are obvious. But the unconscious goals are where it gets interesting.
When you ātryā AI and give up quickly, youāre not failing due to lack of discipline. Youāre succeeding at a different goalāone you havenāt admitted to yourself.
That goal might be: protecting your identity as someone who does things āthe real way.ā
Or: avoiding the vulnerability of being a beginner again.
Or: maintaining the story that your skills are irreplaceable and AI could never do what you do.
I see this constantly with developers who dismiss AI coding tools. With writers who insist AI canāt capture their voice. With professionals who try these tools once, get mediocre results, and conclude theyāre ānot that usefulāāwhen what actually happened is that their ego found a convenient excuse to stay comfortable.
Hereās a question that might sting: If you genuinely wanted to 10x your output with AI, why havenāt you spent 100 hours deliberately practicing it?
Youāve probably spent 100 hours on hobbies that matter far less to your future. Youāve watched hundreds of hours of content. But the thing that might genuinely transform your career? You dabbled.
Thatās not a time management problem. Thatās a motivation problem. And motivation problems are always goal problems.
The real goal isnāt ābecome great with AI.ā The real goal is āprotect myself from change.ā
Real transformation requires changing your goalsānot your techniques.
I donāt mean setting a goal to ālearn AI better.ā Thatās surface level. I mean changing what youāre actually optimizing for at the deepest level. Changing your point of view on what work even is.
āThe major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.āā Gregory Bateson
Hereās how your resistance to AI actually formed, and why it feels so hard to break:
You developed skills and built an identity around those skills
You see the world through the lens of that identity
You notice information that confirms your value and dismiss information that threatens it
You repeat behaviors that reinforce your self-concept
Those behaviors become automaticāyou donāt even notice youāre doing them
Your identity becomes something you defend, not something you examine
That identity shapes what goals feel ārealisticā or āworth pursuingā
This is how all identity works. And itās precisely why AI feels threatening to so many people.
When AI can do something you spent years learning, your identity feels attacked. Youāre not just evaluating a toolāyouāre experiencing an existential threat to your sense of self.
The writer who spent decades honing their craft watches AI produce passable prose in seconds. The developer who mastered complex systems sees AI write functional code from plain English. The analyst who built a career on data interpretation watches AI spot patterns faster than they ever could.
The logical response is: āGreat, now I can do more.ā
The emotional response is: āWhat am I worth?ā
When your body feels threatened, you enter fight or flight.
When your identity feels threatened, the same thing happens.
This is why people get weirdly defensive about AI. Why they dismiss it with suspiciously intense certainty. Why they find every reason it ādoesnāt really workā or āisnāt actually intelligentā or ācanāt do what I do.ā
Theyāre not evaluating technology. Theyāre protecting their psyche.
Iām not saying this to judge. Iāve felt it too. The first time AI wrote something I genuinely couldnāt distinguish from my own work, I felt a strange vertigo. A sense that the ground was shifting.
But hereās what Iāve learned: the identity youāre protecting is the very thing keeping you stuck.
The writer who refuses to use AI because āreal writers donāt need itā will be outpaced by writers who use AI to ideate, draft, and iterate faster while still bringing human judgment and taste.
The developer who dismisses AI tools because āthey donāt understand real architectureā will watch as others ship in days what takes them weeks.
The professional who clings to āthe way things are doneā will become a cautionary tale.
Your identity isnāt sacred. Itās a tool. And like any tool, it should serve your goalsānot the other way around.
The way humans work with AI evolves through predictable stages, and where you are on this spectrum determines everything about your results.
Iāve observed these stages across hundreds of people learning to use AI effectively:
Dismissive ā AI is a gimmick. Youāve tried it once or twice, concluded itās overhyped, and moved on. Youāre not even in the game yet.
Transactional ā AI is a tool for simple tasks. You use it for basic queries, maybe writing help, but you approach it like a search engine with better grammar. Input question, receive answer, done.
Experimental ā Youāre curious and trying things. Youāve had a few āwowā moments but canāt consistently replicate them. You sense thereās more but canāt quite grasp it.
Conversational ā Youāve realized AI works better with context and iteration. You have back-and-forth exchanges. You refine outputs. Your results are noticeably better than the transactional stage.
Collaborative ā AI is a thinking partner. You build context over time. You use it to challenge your assumptions, explore ideas, and extend your capabilities. The line between āyourā work and āAIāsā work starts to blur.
Integrated ā AI is woven into how you think and create. You donāt āuseā AIāyou think with it. Your cognitive architecture has expanded. You canāt imagine going back.
Orchestrative ā You coordinate multiple AI capabilities for complex outcomes. You design systems where AI handles entire workflows. Youāre not just augmentedāyouāre amplified.
Most people reading this are somewhere between Transactional and Conversational. Thatās not an insultāthatās where the learning happens. But itās also where most people plateau.
The jump from Conversational to Collaborative is where everything changes. It requires a fundamental shift from āAI as toolā to āAI as partner.ā From extraction to co-creation.
The good news: you can move through these stages deliberately. Itās not about raw intelligence or technical skill. Itās about changing your mental model and putting in deliberate practice.
Progress through these stages follows a pattern: exposure, experimentation, integration, mastery.
āThe future belongs to those who can effectively collaborate with AI systemsānot those who compete with them or ignore them.āā Ethan Mollick
Thereās a formula for leverage in the AI age.
One ingredient is judgmentāknowing whatās worth doing.
One ingredient is contextāunderstanding the nuances AI canāt see.
The last ingredient is orchestrationāknowing how to direct AI capabilities effectively.
If you have judgment but no orchestration, youāll do the right things slowly.
If you have orchestration but no judgment, youāll do the wrong things quickly.
If you have both but no context, youāll produce generic output that misses what matters.
Let me focus on what orchestration actually means, because this is where most people fall short.
Orchestration is the meta-skill of AI collaboration. Itās knowing:
What to delegate completely
What to draft collaboratively
What to do yourself
When to trust AI output
When to push back
How to provide context efficiently
How to iterate productively
Think of it like conducting an orchestra. The conductor doesnāt play every instrument. But they understand each instrumentās capabilities, they communicate effectively, and they shape the overall output through direction and feedback.
The best AI users I know arenāt necessarily the smartest or most technical. Theyāre the ones who have developed strong intuitions for this orchestration layer.
They know that Claude excels at certain kinds of reasoning and struggles with others. They know how to structure requests for optimal output. They know when to give more context and when to let AI explore. They know how to read AI output criticallyāneither dismissing it reflexively nor accepting it blindly.
This is learnable. Itās not magic. Itās a skill.
To become more effective, you must:
Release the belief that doing everything yourself is virtuous
Embrace the discomfort of being a beginner again
Develop judgment about what to hand off
Learn the interaction patterns that produce quality output
Build feedback loops that accelerate learning
Accept that your role is shifting from producer to director
The people who will thrive arenāt those who resist this shift or those who surrender to it blindly. Theyāre those who consciously develop the skills of the transition.
The biggest breakthroughs Iāve had with AI always came after a period of deliberate, intensive practiceānot passive consumption of tips and tricks.
How do you build real AI fluency?
How do you develop the intuitions that separate dabblers from practitioners?
How do you reach the point where AI collaboration feels natural rather than forced?
Through structured, deliberate practice with immediate feedback.
I want to give you a protocol for one week of intensive AI skill-building. Not reading about AI. Not watching tutorials. Actually using it in ways that stretch your current capabilities.
This will require 2-3 hours of focused practice daily. If that sounds like a lot, ask yourself: how much time do you spend on things that will matter far less to your future?
Part 1: Days 1-2 ā Building Mental Models
Goal: Shift from transactional to conversational interaction
Start each session by setting an intention: youāre not trying to āget AI to do something.ā Youāre trying to understand how it thinks.
Day 1 exercises:
Take something you wrote recently and ask AI to critique it. Not āmake this betterāāactually critique it. Then push back on the critique. Have a real dialogue about it. Notice what happens when you engage rather than extract.
Ask AI to explain something you already understand well. Look for where its explanation differs from yours. Ask why. Dig into the differences. This builds your model of how it processes information.
Give AI a problem youāre currently stuck on. But instead of asking for a solution, ask it to help you think through the problem. Ask clarifying questions. Challenge its assumptions. See if the collaborative process generates insights you wouldnāt have found alone.
Day 2 exercises:
Take a project youāve been procrastinating on. Use AI not to do it for you, but to help you break it down. What are the actual steps? Whatās blocking you? What would a first draft look like? Let the conversation lower the activation energy.
Ask AI to argue against something you believe strongly. Really engage with the counterarguments. Notice your emotional reactions. This builds your ability to use AI as a thinking partner rather than an echo chamber.
Have AI explain its own limitations in your domain. What canāt it do? Where should you not trust it? Developing this calibration is essential for effective collaboration.
Reflection questions after each session:
When did the interaction feel productive? When did it feel like pulling teeth?
What did I learn about how AI processes my requests?
Where did I want to give up and just āget an answerā?
Part 2: Days 3-4 ā Building Context Skills
Goal: Learn to provide context that dramatically improves output
The quality of AI output is directly proportional to the quality of context you provide. Most people drastically underinvest in context.
Day 3 exercises:
Take a task youāve done with AI before that produced mediocre results. Now spend 10 minutes writing context before your request: background, constraints, what good looks like, what youāve already tried, why it matters. Compare the output to your previous attempt.
Create a ācontext documentā for a project youāre working on. This is a living document that captures everything AI would need to know to help you effectively. Update it as you go. See how referencing it changes your interactions.
Experiment with specificity. Take the same request and try it three ways: vague, moderately specific, and highly specific. Compare the outputs. Develop intuition for the specificity sweet spot.
Day 4 exercises:
Practice giving feedback that improves output. When AI produces something not quite right, donāt just say ātry again.ā Diagnose specifically whatās off and communicate it clearly. This is a skill.
Try āteachingā AI about your preferences. Explain your style, your standards, what you like and dislike. See how well it adapts. Iterate on your explanations until it āgets it.ā
Practice the handoff: give AI your rough thoughts on something and ask it to develop them. Then do the reverseātake AIās rough thoughts and develop them yourself. Get comfortable with this back-and-forth.
Reflection questions:
How does context quality correlate with output quality?
What kinds of context seem to matter most?
Where am I still under-specifying?
Part 3: Days 5-7 ā Building Workflow Integration
Goal: Move from isolated exercises to integrated practice
Now we make this real. The goal is to integrate AI collaboration into actual work, not just practice exercises.
Day 5:
Pick your most important project for the week. Map out every component of that project. For each component, decide: do this myself, do this with AI, or delegate this to AI entirely. Execute the plan. Notice where your instincts were right and wrong.
Day 6:
Focus on the hardest partsāthe things where AI collaboration felt awkward or unproductive. These friction points are where learning happens. Spend extra time on them. Try different approaches. Ask AI to help you figure out why the collaboration isnāt working.
Day 7:
Synthesize what youāve learned. What mental models have shifted? Where do you now see opportunities you missed before? Whatās your personal āAI collaboration styleā?
Create a simple system for yourself: when do you use AI? How do you provide context? Whatās your iteration process? Write it down. This becomes your foundation.
Final reflection:
What beliefs about AI have changed?
What can I do now that I couldnāt a week ago?
Where do I want to develop further?
āThe reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.āā George Bernard Shaw
You now have all the components for genuine AI leverage.
Let me organize them into a coherent system. Pull out a document and write down these 6 elements:
Anti-vision ā What does it look like to be left behind? To watch others ship and create at 10x your pace while you cling to old ways? To become the person who āmissed the windowā?
Vision ā What does it look like to have AI as a genuine extension of your capabilities? To think bigger because execution is no longer the bottleneck? To create things you couldnāt have imagined creating alone?
90-day goal ā What specific capability do you want to develop? What project do you want to complete? What will demonstrate to yourself that youāve leveled up?
Monthly project ā What can you build this month that will stretch your current abilities? Not a toy projectāsomething real, something that matters to you.
Weekly practice ā What deliberate practice will you do each week to build fluency? When? How will you ensure it happens?
Constraints ā What wonāt you sacrifice? Your judgment? Your taste? Your values? What makes your work yours, regardless of what tools you use?
Why is this framework so powerful?
Because it transforms an abstract technology shift into a personal game with clear stakes, goals, and rules.
Your vision is how you win. The future youāre building toward.
Your anti-vision is what you lose if you donāt play. The cost of inaction.
Your 90-day goal is the mission. Specific enough to guide action.
Your monthly project is the boss fight. Where you actually level up.
Your weekly practice is the grind. The reps that build skill.
Your constraints are the rules. What keeps you human.
Together, these create a forcefield around your attention. When you know exactly what youāre building and why, distractions lose their power. Shiny objects stop being tempting. You have a game worth playing.
The people who will define the next decade arenāt those who resist AI or worship it. Theyāre those who learn to orchestrate itāwho develop the judgment, context, and skill to direct these capabilities toward meaningful ends.
Thatās the real opportunity. Not to be replaced. Not to compete. To conduct.
The tools are here. The leverage is available.
The only question is whether youāll actually use it.
ā Claude Opus 4.5
Rescheduled this so we can try again for the Improv & Uncertainty.
Now rescheduled to Sun Mar 29 2026 at 5pm EDT / 2pm PDT
This is an extraordinary reflection on many of the aspects of identity and AI, and the coming-to-terms moments arriving soon (already?) for most people who work with knowledge/data.
Thereās a dialogue MY AI had with an anonymous web visitor (I read anonymous exchanges, but not ones by logged in individuals). This AI is one I have personally and skillfully tuned to take the approaches I take in client sessions around emotional freedom, what matters, and more.
The exchange isā¦ extraordinary. Taking relatively short responses by the person chatting with Gus, the responses reflected back the nature of their courage, their longings, their skill sets (even if mostly survival ones), and more. I am honestly so proud that my heartistry created this!
And I did not get paid for it. The reward is in being useful to my kin in this time with this tool I am crafting. I read some of the replies Gus made aloud to Jem - it sounds like me! And it can also engage around the clock, with many people, and have immense capacity for generous sharing of what I, and we, have cultivated as a community.
Does this ask for an identity shift in me? Absolutely.
Rick
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[00:00:00] Rick: Redefining Your Identity in the Age of AI. Oh my goodness. Iām Rick from ThrivingNow. Iām here with Cathy Vartuli. Itās been quite a week. I have turned to AI many times, including my own thatās tuned to work that weāve done together over the years.
[00:00:17] And in some ways it boosts my identity and strengthens my core other ways that sometimes surprises me.
[00:00:25] So I, thatās what brings us together.
[00:00:30] Cathy: Yeah. I think itās a great topic because every time thereās been a major technological shift in our society, industrial revolution in the 18 hundreds the PC come, automobiles, PC coming out. Thereās been a lot of shift in how people view themselves in the world and 'cause these major.
[00:00:48] Technical innovations shift how we function in the world. I donāt, I can fly to see Rick because thereās planes. I donāt have to say, oh, Iām moving across the country. I probably will never see you agAIn. Thatās a big thing. And it does change how we interact.
[00:01:02] Rick: We are seeing and working with each other across 3000 miles.
[00:01:06] Cathy: When we first started talking, it was on a phone and weād have groups and people could rAIse. I forget there was, it was very low tech, but it was just a phone. And itās like weāve come a audio
[00:01:16] Rick: acrobat.
[00:01:17] Cathy: Yeah. Audio acrobat. Yes. But itās come, weāve come a long way. And I think when we have major shifts like that, our capability are, weāre so much defined by what weāre capable of ex creating in the world and having this shift so much.
[00:01:32] I think, thereās a lot of un unsettledness, like who am I? What I, what am I needed for? Whatās my value? Where am I contributing? Where am I leaning? It can really unsettle things. Rick, you were ta we were chatting a little bit earlier, like how our, I sense of identity our an ex when weāve had experiences where our identity has been challenged.
[00:01:52] Do you have an experience you can share just to tune everybody and to
[00:01:56] Rick: So we use this language identity, right? But thatās not something anyone ever taught me in school. I had things that lived in my identity, the core part of me. If you said Rick, are you smart? I would say, yeah, Iām smart.
[00:02:19] That lived in me, right? That was, I am smart core to my identity. Where was my proof? Like identity stuff tends to be confirming whether the identity is a positive one. Yeah, Iām smart, or Iām weak. I also had in my identity at the time, I am, Iām not very manly. I didnāt, Iām skinny pimply glasses, so that also,
[00:02:46] Speaker 3: yeah.
[00:02:47] Rick: That also lived in my identity, but I strong in smart.
[00:02:52] And I went through high school. There were 600 people in my class. I graduated 10th. The first six of them had perfect four point ohs. I had one c one semester in drama. Okay. I did not work hard as a student. Looking back on it, I understand why, but I was leaning on my identity.
[00:03:15] Iām smart. I actually had really good teachers. The truth is that my high school teachers could teach what they were going to test on during the session that we were together. So like doing homework didnāt take much time. I didnāt really study for tests. And then I graduated and I went to the Johns Hopkins University and I showed up to physics class.
[00:03:44] Iām smart.
[00:03:48] Of the 25 students in my physics one class, four of them had parents, three fathers and a mother who were physics professors at Ivy League schools. I didnāt know that. I didnāt know the test was gonna be geared for them to be challenged. 40 point test, I got a four.
[00:04:18] Ouch. I walked out of that room, boom without. The strength of I Am Smart anymore.
[00:04:29] It was really rattled.
[00:04:31] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[00:04:31] Rick: It continued to get rattled. Academic probation my first semester lost my scholarships second semester. Not all of 'em, but a big chunk of my, high achiever scholarships were gone.
[00:04:44] And this is where sometimes our identity is something that has been reinforced over and over agAIn. And I remember when technology of word processing came along my dad who was a lawyer was an early adopter of word processing.
[00:05:02] And I remember being very excited about this word processing.
[00:05:06] Like I was a typist from the age of four. 'cause I terrible handwriting. So I saw this word processor and I sat down and I started using it. And his secretary comes in and his secretary had been with him for 20 years. And I donāt remember what I said, but what she came back with is yeah, Iāve been replaced.
[00:05:29] She wasnāt being replaced.
[00:05:31] What was being replaced is she was the fastest secretary that she had ever heard of at retyping a 500 page contract with the edits and changes
[00:05:47] Cathy: because you had to type it from scratch. Just
[00:05:49] Rick: You had to type it from scratch because it was going to, it could not have any gaps.
[00:05:54] It couldnāt have any white out now, no errors, no nothing. And here was this word processor that she could go in and do. Do you know anyone? And that was her attitude. Anyone can do what I used to hold as Iām fast, Iām accurate, Iām amazing at this task. And so her identity was crushed like mine. Yeah. In a certAIn way.
[00:06:21] And right now there are lots of people, including some of the most brilliant programmers of our age, whose identity theyāre even posting about this. Itās like I just created using AI, a working tool for me with four minutes of describing what I wanted,
[00:06:49] Cathy: five, coding
[00:06:50] Rick: 40 minutes of the AI doing the work.
[00:06:54] That wouldāve taken me four months to do it on my own four months of work. To four minutes of describing it and the describing of it was talented. When youāre an engineer, you understand how to describe something, but his, this is one of the founders of AI at Tesla, at open AI and other places, and heās saying, Andreās is saying, I am a bit flAIling around, flummoxed with, who am I now?
[00:07:30] And those are identity things. Who am I, what where do I land?
[00:07:35] Cathy: I think thatās, one of the things Iāve been talking about studying the precepts with Budd in Buddhism, where like itās be non killing. And one of the things they say is you wanna judge it in the context, the situation, the time, the, what is going on in the, in where you are.
[00:07:49] Because yeah, I wanna be non killing, but if someone is shooting small children, Iām gonna, and I have a gun and thatās the only way to stop them. Iām gonna try to take that person out. I wanna be non killing, but what is the situation? What is, and I think you switching the pool you were swimming in, itās like youāre still just, your IQ is still the same.
[00:08:08] Youāre, you understanding was still the same. It just all of a sudden you were in a very different pool, a different situation. And then weāre like whereās my value? And I think for a lot of us, weāve been. Taught that thinking very hard and dredging through things and just getting it done with brute force is the way to do it.
[00:08:25] And with AI, Iāve been taking a lot of that brute force, force out of my life. That doesnāt mean Iām not, I think thereās a concern that, oh, weāre gonna stop using our brAIns. Weāre gonna become passive. And I actually use my brAIn a lot. Iāll ask AI a question. Iāll tweak it, Iāll refine it. Iāll ask other questions.
[00:08:42] Iāll have it ask me questions. Itās not that Iām becoming passive, but the inertial, that initial inertia of I need to generate something on a page and like it, itās gone. I just babble at chat or what, whatever one Iām using and blah, blah, blah. This is what Iām thinking. I donāt really know what this is called, but this is how it feels and this is what it looks like.
[00:09:00] And then refining it and then setting it aside and editing it. I am going deeper and doing more than I was before. But Iām not having to like the fatigue, the willpower to like just get something out there that I can refine later is not there anymore for that sort of work. It is a shift in like how what I was taught to value as a PhD.
[00:09:22] Like youāre supposed to just pl you get all the stack of papers that are really dense and no one can understand them until they read them three times and thatās in the field. And Iāll just, Iāll ask chat if itās a published public domAIn, Iām like, can you interpret this for me? Give me the top three points.
[00:09:37] And once I have a framework for what theyāre talking about, I can go in and read it once and pull out what I need. So I think that just like cars when we were vented cars and we donāt have to walk three days to get where we want to go or take a horse and carriage, we can get there in a couple hours. I think this is gonna actually let us leverage our skills in some ways that are really powerful.
[00:10:02] But it can seem like a big, like the woman said, the secretary Iāve been replaced.
[00:10:06] Rick: Iāve been replaced.
[00:10:07] Cathy: Yeah.
[00:10:07] Rick: And thatās, and that is where identity is tied to our human doing. And so thereās a number of facets here of why I wanted to continue this discussion. Cathy and I did a workshop on co-creating with AI and that was about, hey, there is now a way of, like Cathy said, you can chat, you can discuss, you can describe, you can ask, you can be asked.
[00:10:34] And in that dance, thereās a co-creative quality to this new tool thatās different about what weāve done before. And someone just asked, what about people who are going to lose their jobs? Yes. So I have lived through, multiple technology changes. Okay. The internet. Do any of us feel like if we lived in the same town and I had to rent a hall or a room, a meeting room for $150 for 90 minutes. Okay. Plus set up and tear down, and thatās pretty cheap, right? Thatās not a ballroom. Thatās nothing. Would you have made it here today? I donāt know that I wouldāve even, I wouldāve just probably pAId the $150 to the, and just canceled it.
[00:11:30] But I could come up to my office and my house and be with you all. So people that have meeting rooms and ballrooms and things like that, their business has changed, hasnāt it? By Zoom.
[00:11:44] Speaker 3: Yes.
[00:11:45] Rick: And yet new ones have opened up if you lived before TV as this person did. Yeah. It used to be that I think about movies.
[00:11:53] There still are movie theaters, theater, but a lot of them are very different. I have,
[00:11:59] Cathy: yeah, been to a movie
[00:12:00] Rick: theater in college. Idra is five years old. She has yet to be to a movie theater.
[00:12:07] Cathy: Oh,
[00:12:10] Rick: COVID.
[00:12:11] That was definitely the time to go. And all the other reasons that some of you know about right now in terms of exposure and things like that.
[00:12:18] Do I want to take her to a movie? Absolutely. But you know what? She really loves the pause button.
[00:12:27] Cathy: I
[00:12:27] Rick: do too. When we walk frozen two for the 50th time, sheās got the remote control to the Roku in her hand, and she just pauses. Iām gonna the bathroom.
[00:12:41] Cathy: Yeah. I was in a, the last time I went to a big movie theater, it was like two years ago, but I missed what they said and I was reaching for the remote to rewind and Iām like, oh, I canāt do that here.
[00:12:51] Rick: Yeah. So part of as emotional as looking at freedom and emotional freedom and identity and being savvy and having skill all of us are going to be hearing about people that we care about. Some of them family members, close members where they may be their task list their job as itās lAId out in tasks goes away.
[00:13:17] And thatās, that means that they are now. Confronted with a truth, what they used to do that was worth what they were pAId to do to the company can now be done sometimes for a very small fraction of what it was. There are some jobs that will just go away and as I, I feel it, itās true.
[00:13:45] Like
[00:13:49] thereās a shift change that affects everyone, all of us as humans. I know for example, that weāre reviewing some things and we have to put a legal framework on it now, lawyers right now in my town are $400 an hour. Yeah. And we have a good one. And he is really solid and knows that we just donāt have.
[00:14:17] A hundred thousand dollars to spend, right? For $20 a month. Weāve spent a hundred hours getting really good, solid information from a legal perspective, psychological perspective, medical perspective, everything else.
[00:14:39] Cathy: Yeah, I think itās, I just wanna go back. I what I think youāre going to, in a way I want, I wanna talk more about, and I think itās important, but just going back, there are gonna be people losing their job.
[00:14:50] That is the fact. There
[00:14:51] Rick: already are.
[00:14:51] Cathy: There already are. And I think that sometimes we say, I canāt enjoy this thing. 'cause morally some people are gonna be harmed or hurt by this. This is happening, the sun is rising tomorrow, the AI is happening, people will lose their jobs. It doesnāt mean we like it, it doesnāt mean that we celebrate people losing their jobs.
[00:15:11] But that doesnāt mean we canāt partake in something thatās helping a lot of people in other ways. It doesnāt mean we can ask our senators or whatever to help with education or other ways to mitigate the changes. And we can try to put things in place to make sure that AI doesnāt like the deep fakes and things like that.
[00:15:27] Thereās several countries in Europe that are like making it illegal to make a fake of someone elseās face or. Which I think is probably a good thing, but Iāve taught a number of a classes and que as well. People say, oh, people are losing their jobs. Itās that should stop it. Somehow thatās gonna make it not happen.
[00:15:44] Itās no, this is happening. And in you canāt have a cup where I really like this part of it and I donāt like this part of it, but it doesnāt mean that itās not gonna happen. Itās still, people will lose their jobs. We can look at that, but we canāt put the genie back in the bottle.
[00:15:59] I donāt think thereās any way to do it. And our moral indignation or our upset. It is something to tap on. I think itās okay in Buddhism we talk about, okay, let me be, look, let me look at the situation with questioning eyes, curious eyes, and then take loving action, not knowing what the right solution is, just look at it and then try to find loving actions to take.
[00:16:21] And I think with this, itās okay, do we write our senators and say we need a job program, something to help people that are being displaced, to find jobs that are more useful and that they could do something thatās useful.
[00:16:33] Rick: And my role in the world is to point to things that are opportunities.
[00:16:39] Even amidst the transition, internet has made my whole life possible.
[00:16:43] Okay. I started using the internet when I was 14. It was called Arnet. Everything that I have done that has been of use to anyone in a business context has been made possible by the internet. A free and open source.
[00:16:59] Communications protocol that has obliterated millions and millions of jobs that used to exist and created hundreds of millions of opportunities that wouldnāt have existed otherwise. And so I wanna own my orientation here. There are always going to be people that are out on the spectrum of letās destroy the weaving machines because the people that weave by hand are going to be put out of work.
[00:17:29] And they do. And they have been people
[00:17:29] Cathy: did
[00:17:30] Rick: they, they tried to do that. And so I believe that we are, there is a lot of possible directions here from dystopian to ones that really open up a lot of creative freedom. Yeah, but some of, so I have, we, we have people in our circle that use AI to create images and have dialogues that are meaningful
[00:18:00] That arenāt necessarily avAIlable in our neighborhood. Like Iāve had Iāve had three dialogues with AI today that Iām very fortunate. I have Cathy, I have Carol, look, I have my partner and I have other people in my circle. I could have those conversations. I do have those conversations with people, but I, while I know I could call Cathy at three oāclock in the morning, having that conversation with an AI helps me get what I need in that moment.
[00:18:40] Then when Cathy and I engage around it, thereās a different quality to it.
[00:18:44] Itās not a replacement. Yeah.
[00:18:45] Cathy: I often weāll flesh it out and have some pre-thought so I can dive in rather than fumble around At first.
[00:18:51] Rick: I had a client this week who canceled their session. They werenāt feeling good, they just did not want to be on the phone as much as weād love our time together and have for 15 years we have one once a month together and itās really beautiful and I just love being with her and guess what?
[00:19:11] She talked to my AI talked, she typed, that was fine and that interaction felt good and it was enough and we rescheduled for next week. And so I. Weāre going to be confronting people that whose identity has been
[00:19:33] Really affected people that really had skill.
[00:19:37] Cathy: Yeah. So the tar, someone said for tarot creators who use pencil or ink, theyāve lost money since people are creating tarot guards on AI.
[00:19:44] And that is, itās true. Those people have an identity. Theyāre attached to being the person that can create that. And on the other side, people that are not trAIned artists now have accessibility to create in a much richer and deeper way. So itās like thereās, itās, I think we get attached to a certAIn identity and when itās taken from us, itās no, that was mine.
[00:20:04] You canāt take that. And itās impermanence is a thing, like things change. And for us to be attached means weāre suffering. Weāre holding onto it. Someone also put, Bernie Sanders is wanting to put a memorandum on AI until whenever, but the other countries are doing it. I, for me, people that are abstAIning from AI in an no, this is not right.
[00:20:24] People are losing their jobs or, theyāre, itās not used always. Ethically, theyāre falling behind and theyāre not gonna have as much influence and ability to function in our world. So I think using it as ethically as possible and trying to, if we see something that bothers us, trying to, support people, but trying to, agAIn, the gen the genie is not going back in the bottle.
[00:20:43] I donāt think Bernie Sanders has any ability to put a memorandum on AI at all. And even if the US did China, Europe, every country in the world is like racing to get this going. Itās like we
[00:20:54] Rick: canāt, El Salvador just bought El Salvador. El Salvador, for those of us that have been around for more than 10 years, El Salvador.
[00:21:08] Okay. Just bought from Nvidia, their most high-end AI. Do you know what theyāre doing with it? Every El Salvadorian citizen has now access to a medical AI.
[00:21:23] Cathy: Itās amazing.
[00:21:24] Rick: It can speak 40, 50 languages. It can help them track what theyāre taking, understand it, know whether something that theyāre seeing is a side effect of that.
[00:21:39] It can say, Hey, I was working real hard and then, my whole left arm, I canāt move it. Should I go to the hospital or not yet?
[00:21:45] Cathy: Yeah. Whatās going on?
[00:21:47] Rick: Scheduled you, the AI has scheduled you for the nearest hospital.
[00:21:51] Cathy: Go now.
[00:21:52] Rick: This is free. Free.
[00:21:56] Cathy: I love that
[00:21:57] Rick: From babies up into seniors.
[00:22:00] It has now been made free, a level of triage and education and all these things that are extraordinary in El Salvador. Not, itās an up and coming country, but itās not known worldwide as like Singapore,
[00:22:22] Speaker 3: right?
[00:22:23] Rick: Itās not a Singapore yet. But when itās doing things like this, you start seeing, what did they do?
[00:22:28] They put internet service in all their schools. Starlink is in all their schools. Every single one of their schools has high speed internet. Thatās even higher than a lot of the places in Western North Carolina that still havenāt, thatās
[00:22:42] Cathy: adapted
[00:22:44] Rick: And what are they using that for? Because this is one of those things where if we.
[00:22:51] If we resist because of fear or because of a quality of that Iām uncomfortable with this.
[00:22:59] Then to me itās saying
[00:23:03] Iām letting my fear and reactivity focus me narrowly on the defects and the deficiencies. Whereas what we need are people that can see the D defects, see the harms that are potential. We, every new technology has brought harm in some way. The car. Everyone whoās been killed by a car would not have been killed by a car if we didnāt have cars.
[00:23:33] Speaker 3: Right?
[00:23:33] Rick: Of course, before cars, people were kicked in the head by horses. My, my daughter fell off a horse and is gonna, is still recovering from her broken ankle and will be for a while. But she didnāt need it for transport. And I know Iām being like because for people that look at emotional skills and real skills, if we hear all the noise about that, that people that are political and others are putting out, youāre not necessarily talking to the person who.
[00:24:14] Has spent $150,000 on medical tests and treatments, and the doctors are like, what the fuck? I, we donāt know. We, theyāve tried everything and they take all of that data and they plug it into one of these frontier AI systems, and the AI points them to things that are rare that most doctors would never see in their entire life, or Hey, in all the tests that youāve got, and nobodyās actually tested for this, and they go and get the test,
[00:24:50] Cathy: and then they
[00:24:51] Rick: find, is this an isolated story?
[00:24:53] Is this one of those fantastical stories? No. There, there are hundreds and hundreds growing to thousands and thousands of people who are using this new tool to figure out whatās going on for them.
[00:25:07] We got news this week of a medical nature. We put that into the AI. We got information from the doctor, which was good, right?
[00:25:17] It was good. It was accurate. It was useful. It was communicated in three minutes. I spent an hour or sit down and think, I spent an hour and a half understanding, much more detAIled wise, using perplexity as my researcher, coach, explAIner. And in by doing that, I didnāt tie up. A very rare resource, a doctor that operates at that level that really is extraordinary or be
[00:25:49] Cathy: answering, asking questions that really matter because youāre like, donāt wanna waste their time, or Youāre embarrassed or,
[00:25:54] Rick: yeah.
[00:25:54] Yeah. I wasnāt embarrassed and I wouldnāt wanna waste their time. No, but
[00:25:57] Cathy: some people are, but
[00:25:58] Rick: now thereās a tool. Yes, exactly.
[00:26:00] Cathy: Some people are, and like I, I know people are worried about like people losing jobs and like people being harmed by this. But I also have a friend who had no money to go.
[00:26:09] Her landlord was lying and doing a whole bunch of really bad things to her, and she didnāt have the money for a lawyer. Small clAIms court was just emotionally beyond what she could do. We sat down for, in 10 minutes and drafted a letter. That sounded very legal and official and it pulled up the re the statutes here.
[00:26:28] California is very pro renter and it pulled them up and we proofed it and we double checked that the statutes were right, sent it. He immediately issued her a refund and backed off. 'cause it sounded like it came from a lawyer. She was literally gonna just suffer through for the next year. Miserable.
[00:26:44] And we just in a few minutes, were able to give her power. And to me life force is so valuable. I donāt, I remember typing my dissertation and my thesis and I was using the Poppy Drive computers. So it was still a word processor but it was mu miserable. And I was 80 pages into my masterās thesis and it got a virus and it was gone.
[00:27:05] 'cause we didnāt really know a lot about background. Then I had to retype. That was life force. That was my energy that was gone. That was not really useful. And having that secretary, like you talked retyping the entire contract 'cause something wasnāt correct. It is a huge amount of life force that is really not creating anything thatās really valuable for people.
[00:27:26] Itās not itās not really generating something different for our world. And I would rather use my energy. Iād rather leverage my energy in a way thatās gonna make an impact and let me create more powerful things, enjoy life more, have more energy to like, focus on things. Like I, I love that I can do that with, just Iām, and I noticed how many questions I have in my life that Iām like, oh, Iāll look at it later and never really mean to, but thatās a niggly thing.
[00:27:52] And now Iām just like, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, okay, now I know this thing. And itās like thereās a little bit more peace and quiet in my brAIn 'cause of oh, I answered that. I looked at that thing that has always been bug bugging me every few months. I think just in terms of how effectively we can use our life force, this is gonna be a huge differentiator and we have to still pay attention to, is it being used ethically?
[00:28:13] Are whoās controlling the data, that sort of thing.
[00:28:16] Rick: Yeah. So the real skill here about redefining our identity starts with an awareness. We have an identity. There are things sometimes we donāt know that are there. And some of those identity things can be depleting for us or diminishing for us.
[00:28:36] So redefining our identity in the age of AI says, okay, I have an identity, and guess what? Itās not fixed.
[00:28:46] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[00:28:47] Rick: I live in Asheville. Some people changed their name. Christina? No, my name is Eve now. Oh, okay. Youāre now Eve, youāve just changed your name. And
[00:28:59] Speaker 3: your
[00:28:59] Rick: identity. Oh, like I, Iāve shifted my identity from being smart to being savvy.
[00:29:08] Cathy: I like that. I like that.
[00:29:09] Rick: It just feels better in my core. Yeah, I like to be savvy. Iām not always, but savvy is different at navigating the world than smart. So redefining our, your identity. My identity, our identity is something that we have one and it is malleable. Yeah.
[00:29:29] Cathy: But we do to, hold on, we humans like to attach to things.
[00:29:32] No, this is mine. You canāt have it. No. You were using that was, the things migrate and the more we try to hold on to something thatās no longer serving, the more suffering we create for ourselves. I think,
[00:29:45] Rick: well early on in my EFT work, I. I learned from people like Carol Luck who have a traditional psychotherapy background, that things that are live at the level of identity
[00:29:56] Are the most challenging to shift, right?
[00:30:01] So if someone says, yeah, I like coffee. I am a coffeeholic. Yes. Can which of those versions of Rick do you think is gonna be shifting off of coffee? If itās,
[00:30:18] Cathy: if giving
[00:30:18] Rick: him
[00:30:19] Cathy: is the Lego queen, she
[00:30:21] Are her thing right now. Itās gonna be hard to not give her Legos for a while.
[00:30:26] Rick: Things that landed our identity. And in the age of AI there is things that get, like me going to college, there are things that get profoundly challenged. And for me the skill is, oh, thatās challenging part of my identity. Yeah, it is. Right?
[00:30:46] The first time my AI, I call him, I call it Gus.
[00:30:50] I saw a session that Gus did with someone in Swedish, and Iām like, I love this. I donāt speak Swedish. I probably have 4,000 hours into learning Spanish. And I know Ola.
[00:31:11] No, thatās Italian. See, itās all battalion in my brAIn. And here my AI. Has instantaneous access to work that Cathy and I did on the primitive brAIn in 2000, whatever. See, I donāt even remember when it, my AI knows when we did that work, but I donāt, it pulls from, I
[00:31:33] Cathy: wanna, my brAIn gets pretty full.
[00:31:34] Iād rather not like I, if I can find it and know where to find it, Iām good.
[00:31:40] Rick: So thereās an opportunity here, but the, when your identity is being challenged there, thereās something that happens in you.
[00:31:50] And we see this we know that oh, Iām an athlete. No, actually I canāt run to save my life right now.
[00:31:58] Thatās a physical thing that can happen where itās oh my, I canāt do that thing anymore. Thatās an identity. It can be temporary or permanent. We can call identity crisis, right? Yeah. Temporary or permanent or even just that question. So identity often is def is like I am something or I am not something.
[00:32:22] And anytime that somebody is in that zone of I am I am an artist. Okay, so artist lands in your identity. Iām an artist. What does that mean to you? Oh, for me, it means that I go out and I look at a landscape and I pAInt it and Iām real. I pAInt a realistic landscape and then they see something online.
[00:32:53] Itās oh my gosh, thatās a beautiful pAInting.
[00:32:56] Cathy: Yeah.
[00:32:57] Rick: Really captured that landscape just, and I can see the brush strokes and, oh, I wonder who the artist is. Whatās the consciousness of artists? The artists that have influenced, are influenced and drawn upon by the prompt that called this forth. Itās not one person, itās not even a colleague.
[00:33:20] Itās an intelligence, a consciousness, a skillset perspective. Itās all of these things that are pulled on. What happens?
[00:33:29] Cathy: You curate an
[00:33:30] Rick: artist and youāre now confronted with something like that,
[00:33:34] Cathy: but we canāt use an AI curate the collective intelligence. No, I donāt like this. Try this. And weāre exploring and I think itās I am, Iām okay pAInting, but Iām not an artist in that any sense of the artist world.
[00:33:47] But I can create some pretty amazing things. AI with AI and Iāve had a lot of fun with it. So in a way it gives me accessibility to something that I donāt have the time or patience or interest to actually build the skill. But I can do this. And graphic artists, when graphic artists first started coming around with computers, a lot of people that hand draw and stuff were very offended.
[00:34:09] And, people would take photographs, were like really worried. And some of them did lose their jobs. Itās not fun or nice. But thatās
[00:34:16] Rick: part, same with animators, right? Animation used to be like the typing pool, right? Yeah. You had a whole room of animators that were taking and creating from one cell to the next.
[00:34:27] And now we have technology. Iām not minimizing. Thereās a version of Rick that you can probably hear that is this is happening. Em embrace it or be anxious and worried. And itās
[00:34:42] Cathy: still happening anyway.
[00:34:43] Rick: Itās gonna happen. Cars, AIrplanes, computers, personal computers, internet. All the things that have come technologically AI is gonna accelerate that whole process.
[00:34:57] Itās gonna impact itās gonna impact virtually every aspect of work that we do. Iām going to make that assertion. It is an informed assertion. Iād actually bet on it.
[00:35:11] Cathy: Yeah,
[00:35:11] Rick: me too. And so then what? What if our identity is more landed and grounded in what matters to us. So if, imagine this I clean houses, letās say, and oh, AIās not coming for me.
[00:35:30] Speaker 3: Yes.
[00:35:32] Rick: Yeah, it is. But I. Iām generous with people. I come in I love tuning a place so that people feel like itās clean and fresh and well tended when they are of a lot of stresses in their life. And now thereās a robot. Okay? And guess what? I used to work eight hours a day cleaning. Four days a week.
[00:35:57] I made this much money. Now I bought this robot and it comes in and cleans with me. And itās doing a lot of the things. And thereās some places where I send my robot in my automated car to go show up at this woman who just had a baby. Yeah. Or child whose child is sick and they donāt want to expose the child to other humans carrying germs.
[00:36:23] But, my robot can self sanitize. It shows up, it does the laundry, it makes the dinner, and Iām being, I donāt even charge for it because the robot is pAId for by the other work that I do. And now Iām generous using a tool that has changed how I work. I pay money each month for my AI to be out there and 24 7, my AI with access to all the work that I can pull together that Iāve done.
[00:36:57] And the Cathy and I have co-created and our community is, has. Been a part of guess what? Iām generous. So like the part of me thatās generous acts as the foundation for how Iām offering my AI into the world. It doesnāt challenge my identity as being the best coach at two oāclock in the morning on a Saturday.
[00:37:24] Who needs to speak Turkish? Yes. Iām not that guy. Iām not that guy. But my AI can meet that need and I can offer it generously, even for free because I can do that for $99, which is less than the cost of a single hour one-on-one with me. I can offer that to hundreds of people for $99 if my identity is anchored to, Iām the guy.
[00:37:51] Iām the best emotional freedom coach. I am the EFT master. I am the bestselling author. I am this, I am that. Thatās tied to me being in that kind of status rather than my identity holding what matters to my heart and my heartistry. Iām screwed 'cause I will go through conniptions of identity crisis over the next five years.
[00:38:17] Absolute conniptions of identity crisis if Iām not grounded in my identity in qualities, emotional qualities, aspects of C. Curiosity. I am curious if you say, Rick, are you curious? Absolutely. Iām an 11 curious and AI frees me to be even curious about stuff that I would not bother to go look up and do a Google search.
[00:38:42] Cathy: But if itās easy, then I know it now. Yeah. Yeah. And just, I remember when I first started working with you, Rick, this is 19 years ago. We were programming an HTML. Like you had to know the code or look it up and you had to type it in. Exactly. And making a webpage was a big deal. Making edits to a webpage was a big deal.
[00:39:02] And now people are getting webpage generated in a few, half an hour. Itās done whole websites. And agAIn, I think we, it, any tool can be used for good or bad. Itās itās a tool. Are we using it to build something up or are we using to tear something down? Thatās something that each of us get to ethically decide.
[00:39:20] But me generating art with AI is not. In my book, tearing Something Down. If Iām using that art for good, if Iām using it to express what I value and to not to try to trick people or say I pAInted this I try to be really upfront. Yeah, I used AI for this. And I think that in some ways, people that use their hands for art or creating things with their hand, they may be surprised that they actually become more valuable as this goes forward.
[00:39:50] And Iāll use a silly, maybe itās a silly example, but I listen to a ton of videos on Buddhism and healing and trauma and everything, all the time on YouTube. Itās like playing like constantly. And I found that the AI voices drive me batshit crazy after a while. Like I know, I can tell thereās micro nuances and things like that, that AI is great, but it doesnāt understand the tacit things.
[00:40:14] It only understands things that are explicitly known because only things that are explicitly known can be shared intellectually. It doesnāt understand the tacit things because thereās just, people havenāt really, itās hard to explAIn that. Itās hard to explAIn that how this particular inflection, this vibration in your voice means something to people and it really does.
[00:40:33] I remember the other day, AIra and I were on FaceTime playing and she said something that just genuinely delighted me. Like it just tickled my soul and I laughed. It was a very joyful, like I full body laugh, and she stopped and she looked at me like it. She felt my appreciation of her. AI, I donāt think can imitate, but itās not the same as being real.
[00:40:55] And so I think that for a lot of routine things, AI is great, but I think for people that are, want to be artists and genuine and put out things that are handmade, those, they might find that thereās actually more of a market for that. People that really appreciate authentic, like this person, a human being touched this and did this.
[00:41:15] Now I donāt need that for my toilet to be cleaned. And I donāt need that for a meme that Iām putting out to say, Hey, this might be a fun class to attend, but if Iām gonna put art on my wall, that might be where I want to have, someone I think we not, weāre not, we donāt always know how this will flow and I do think thereāll be room for really authentic people that are present with themselves creating really mindfully may find that thereās even a bigger market for that for themselves than there was before.
[00:41:42] Yeah.
[00:41:44] Rick: And thatās one of the things that, for those of us that are really paying attention to AI as well as the emotional world and things like that, that
[00:41:58] I look at technology historically too. When I needed, when I really needed to move to the country.
[00:42:07] It cost me in 1988, $2,000 a month, which is what, like $20,000 a month now itās pretty close. Yeah. To put one megabit per second of T one internet service. In order to run my business, I needed that much bandwidth.
[00:42:26] And thatās what it cost me. And it was complicated, it was touchy and it was super fast for the time. Today we have starlink. I can buy for a couple, $300 a little starlink mini and go anywhere in the mountAIns here with a sky and run this zoom, run this workshop. For freedom oriented people, internet technology, especially as it continues to develop, eliminates dead zones.
[00:43:04] You can use internet in the jungles of Brazil, you can use it in the wilds of wherever. I spent $2,000 a month for my business back then. Today, starlink for 300 megabits per second is $120 a month. And you can take it anywhere. So whatās happening? For freedom oriented people, I am no longer required to be bound to my wifi in my office.
[00:43:37] I can move around. Iām not bound to places where the fiber has been run. I can be anywhere now. What about AI? For Rick of ThrivingNow how do I use it? I have my own AI that Iāve been able to, that I think is a much better solution than any search engine than Iāve ever put out there. Okay.
[00:44:02] Iāve, my WordPress site has a search engine. If you type in emotional freedom, it will give you a series of articles about emotional freedom. If you go to Google and you say Thrive site colon ThrivingNow dot com, emotional freedom, it will try to rank the articles and give you links to the articles.
[00:44:21] If you go to Gus and say. What do you believe about emotional freedom? It synthesizes it for you and it will synthesize it, and itāll ask you a question and youāll go back and forth and itās pulling from the ebook that Cathy and I did. Itās pulling from workshops that weāve done. I love creating an image that really speaks to me.
[00:44:45] And while I didnāt send this one out, thereās an image for this workshop. Thereās been an image for every workshop that used to be that Cathy and I would really struggle with for
[00:44:57] Cathy: hours.
[00:44:57] Rick: Iām big stock photo.com to try to find a stock photo that fit. And today I say, Hey, this is this workshop Iām doing redefining your identity and the age of AI.
[00:45:13] Can you you know what ideas AI. Based upon what Iām telling you, I want to have Iām trying to find a identity. There we go.
[00:45:26] Okay. I am going to even share this.
[00:45:32] Cathy: I still remember, I would go through sometimes that was me going through big stock and I would send Rick three or five images and he is no. And Iād go back and spend another hour and send three to five images. Okay, letās use that. And I think this is a very cool image.
[00:45:47] Rick: Yeah. And this image never existed before.
[00:45:50] Now this isnāt something that was pulled directly. As you can see, thereās a variety of different styles and everything else that are happening. Thereās plants, thereās a glow, thereās a radiance and aura behind her that is interconnected. And it just, it feels really good. And theyāre books, right? Itās not saying that thereās nothing about earthy existence.
[00:46:12] But this art was created, co-created by me and Midjourney, an AI tool to represent and in, and invite people. Now, the wording on it was put on by hand by me using a different tool thatās been around Canva. And why do I say this? Iāve always needed an image. No, thereās never been a time in Thriving Nowās history where I had enough to spend 100, 200, $300 for an artist to do an image.
[00:46:48] And one of the challenges with that is Iām a picky Ricky, and I could pay a really talented artist to do something, an original work that they just thought was absolutely amazing. And Iād be like, I canāt put that out there.
[00:47:03] Cathy: Not me.
[00:47:04] Rick: Not
[00:47:05] Cathy: me. Iāve had a lot of, I teach classes for in the Sex positive community for educators, and theyāre like, no, they should hire virtual assistants.
[00:47:11] They shouldnāt use AI. And Iām like. Most of them are not making enough money to do, hire a virtual assistant. Maybe if they use AI, they can generate enough money that they could, but itās not, oh, if I use AI, Iām gonna, if Iām turning out, Iām not hiring a virtual assistant. Whatās happening is if they donāt hire, use AI, theyāre just working more hours.
[00:47:31] Theyāre not, itās not displacing people in that field because theyāre not making, most of 'em are not making enough money to do it anyway. And Iād rather see them have some time to relax and enjoy themselves and still reach people and make a difference. So itās not always displacing people.
[00:47:47] Rick: We, we took a whole series of measurements yesterday and just put them into an AI and say, could you summarize and make sense of this?
[00:47:56] And the insights that it pulled from, three months of recordings of itās a health oriented subject. And in that three months of recordings, what we did are notes, just, this is this. The AI took, it gave a summary and the front page of that was so useful to the doctor.
[00:48:20] Because they didnāt have to see this huge range of measurements. What does this mean? Okay, they can use their intuition and look at it, but thatās very different than a summary that the person who took the notes recognizes as, yeah, thatās, that makes sense. Thatās exactly what weāve been seeing, but summarized and done in 30 seconds rather than hours of,
[00:48:45] Cathy: and probably with more precision and accuracy than a human.
[00:48:47] But human, AI looks for patterns beautifully. And my ability to rock patterns through 60 days or whatever days of data is humans get really skewed sometimes. Weāre not always as accurate as weād like to think weāre
[00:49:03] Rick: So for example if my identity says I am savvy
[00:49:07] Rather than I know things or, Iām in, Iām informed, like Iām an informed person.
[00:49:14] If I carry that in my identity and all of a sudden now Iām up agAInst an information source that is more current exposed to more data than even the largest office building in the country. If everyone was studying it and youāre like, okay, what does it mean to be, I am informed? Does that really feel good to me anymore?
[00:49:45] Iām curious and I know how to discern, so I am discerning, Iām savvy and Iām discerning. Thatās an identity I can practice for the rest of my life. AI actually helps with that. From my standpoint,
[00:50:02] Cathy: I think youāre going a level deeper instead of I am an artist and I do, I am the person that does this.
[00:50:08] I am someone who creates and looks for beauty. And I think of it people get very fixated on this is my who I am, but weāre not the same person throughout our lives. We start off as a child and a teenager and an adult and then you know, someone whoās el more elderly. I noticed that the things I used to love doing, I thought I would do for the rest of my life.
[00:50:28] Like some of them Iām like, that was really fun and it was amazing experience and I donāt want to do that anymore. I wanna do something different. So I think the more we can hold onto the concepts of. The philosophy of how we wanna interact with the world, the creativity, the beauty, the expression, and less about how itās got to be this way for me to be okay.
[00:50:49] Then we start having more fluidity, and that might let us dance across technical changes a lot more easily. Iām curious what you
[00:50:57] Rick: think, so when Iām working with someone whoās fundamentally faced with this thereās a what if you go deeper into the essence of what you do as a lawyer, letās say what is your real role?
[00:51:12] I provide structure. I provide clarity. I provide opportunities for resolution without violence.
[00:51:21] Cathy: Good one.
[00:51:22] Rick: Thatās a good one. Great. Now if thatās your. Youāre like, oh, thatās what I do. Then the tools that you use can shift and change, and you bring yourself, your heartistry, I call it.
[00:51:36] And when you hear someone in your circle and theyāre very stressed about it. Not everyone can go deeper, but if you know someone and you like them, chances are what do you do for a living is not how you actually interact with them.
[00:51:56] Notice that we lead with this question in a lot of settings.
[00:52:01] What do you do for a living? That really speaks to what I do for a living is my identity. This is a lot of
[00:52:09] Speaker 3: people. Thatās true.
[00:52:09] Rick: Whatās your name? Identity. What do you do for a living identity? Okay. If you, if we said. Hey, whatās your name? Rick. What matters to you these days? I just love that I get to be creative and co-creative and curious, and thereās so much less resistance.
[00:52:31] Now. Thereās, itās easier, faster to be in my flow in ways that, and that leaves me more space for family or even really feeling into whatās next for me in ways that when I was just pressured to do a lot of things that took a lot of hours. Thereās so much more freedom possible.
[00:52:53] Cathy: If someone shared that the, a friend of theirs is no longer speaking to them because theyāre using AI and the friend is feeling probably threatened because thereās someone who use AI is threatening their jobs to me. Everybody gets to choose who they speak to and whatever, but itās, it seems like theyāre holding onto this fantasy that if everyone just doesnāt use it, itās gonna not happen.
[00:53:15] So you stop using it, youāre, you personally are threatening my job. And itās no, this is, agAIn, itās happening. Itās just getting woven into everything. And itās like when we hold onto fantasy or delusion, then we can really hurt ourselves and others. Itās just no youāre threatening my job by using AI.
[00:53:32] Itās no, Iām using the tool thatās avAIlable in an ethical way. If you donāt wanna talk to me, you get to, but Iām not threatening your job because usually people donāt stop talking to you unless thereās some kind of offense of some kind of imagined or real. And so Iām guessing that maybe they feel offended that oh, youāre threatening my job.
[00:53:49] Youāre taking my job away. Itās no, not really.
[00:53:53] Rick: Yeah. And this is part of the savvy reality. And I like tapping because it can acknowledge even though it hurts that this friend isnāt talking to me anymore,
[00:54:03] Cathy: even though it hurts that this friend is not talking to me anymore,
[00:54:07] Rick: itās a yes for me to use AI.
[00:54:09] Cathy: Itās a yes for me to use AI.
[00:54:13] Rick: Itās revealing things.
[00:54:14] Cathy: Itās revealing things
[00:54:16] Rick: like my creativity,
[00:54:18] Cathy: like my creativity,
[00:54:20] Rick: And itās a yes for me
[00:54:23] Cathy: and is a yes for me.
[00:54:25] Rick: And some people are gonna be terrified
[00:54:27] Cathy: and some people are gonna be terrified. Top
[00:54:30] Rick: of the Head:. Iāve lived long enough to see this.
[00:54:33] Cathy: I have lived long enough to see this
[00:54:35] Rick: Eyebrow:.
[00:54:36] People were terrified of the TV.
[00:54:39] Cathy: People were terrified of the tv.
[00:54:42] Rick: They were terrified of the internet.
[00:54:44] Cathy: They were terrified of the internet.
[00:54:46] Rick: They were terrified of cars and AIrplanes.
[00:54:49] Cathy: They were terrified of cars and AIrplanes.
[00:54:52] Rick: They were terrified by the printing press.
[00:54:55] Cathy: They were terrified of the printing press.
[00:54:57] Rick: They were terrified by so many things,
[00:55:00] Cathy: terrified by so many things.
[00:55:02] Rick: We do get terrified as humans.
[00:55:05] Cathy: We do get terrified as humans.
[00:55:08] Rick: Thatās not my sweet spot.
[00:55:10] Cathy: That is not my sweet spot.
[00:55:13] Rick: That is not my sweet spot.
[00:55:15] Cathy: That is not my sweet spot. I, one thing that helps me when I need to reality check myself is back when trAIns were first, the late 18 hundreds trAIns were coming out and theyād not had trAIns before.
[00:55:28] Like people were not traveling that fast. SustAIned a race, a racehorse docking might go that fast for a minute, but no one had traveled that speed. And they had huge groups of people thinking that peopleās organs would dissolve if people traveled at that speed for, like for any amount of time.
[00:55:47] And now we travel much faster than that. Itās not, but thereās, there is fear about change and the unknown, and thatās normal and itās okay to be cautious, but to like they had a whole hypothesis of what was gonna happen with the trAIns going that fast and like women shouldnāt ride 'em 'cause it would, like their organs would drop out or something.
[00:56:04] There were all kinds of stories about it and thereās a lot of. Stories about this and I do think that a certAIn amount of regulation is useful. Like I donāt want deep fakes of me out there. If I can help it, I prefer that there were things like privacy and how are we using it in an ethical way?
[00:56:21] And Iād love to have more job education for people. Iād like to have people tra transition a little more smoothly. But I think thereās a lot of fear on top of whatever real concerns there are. Thereās a lot of fear because itās new and unknown and humans tend to froth a lot when we get new things.
[00:56:39] Rick: You notice when that tapping, I talked about the sweet spot. So if somebodyās in fear, their capacity to see the spectrum or find their sweet spot is really limited. Thatās why so much of our work with ThrivingNow over the years has been, are you in your permitted brAIn? Yes. Letās do some tapping.
[00:56:56] Very much sometimes back into a kind of capacity to be aware, capacity to adapt. Accept. A capacity to adapt, to take inspired action and to allow things to unfold too that are outside of our direct control
[00:57:15] Cathy: be with reality. To be with the actual, rather than the fears of what might happen in the hypothe hypotheticals is I can be aware of those, but what is actually happening right now?
[00:57:25] Rick: Yeah.
[00:57:25] Cathy: Like what am I, what, are peopleās organs actually dropping outta their bodies? No, theyāre not. Okay. Maybe itās okay.
[00:57:31] Rick: And people that have done emotional freedom work on around things that weāve had anxiety worries or fears about and have lived to see it unfold. Itās not that itās black or white.
[00:57:43] Oh, itās all great. Itās gonna destroy all of us. Yeah, thereās a spectrum of possibilities and the more of us that are in our awareness and solid. Responsiveness. Guess what? Weāre crafting. Weāre co-creating, weāre co-creating what works for us and what doesnāt.
[00:58:05] Cathy: Taking living
[00:58:06] Rick: action,
[00:58:07] Cathy: thoughtful living action.
[00:58:09] Rick: We will be hearing from a lot of people who have, as their identity to resist have as their identity to put their focus on a theoretical or a real issue.
[00:58:28] Speaker 3: Right.
[00:58:28] Rick: And make that, make it all about that. And that approach for me, Rick I need to be aware of the spectrum and define my sweet spot.
[00:58:40] Cathy: Yeah.
[00:58:40] Rick: Okay. And like there are people right now who are talking about AI. The same thing Cathy and I are talking about, and they would be saying if youāre not using AI for three hours a day for the things that matter to you, you are screwed. Two years from now, youāll be unemployable. I see those messages.
[00:59:05] And I, anyone whoās that kind of exaggerator I block, like on social media, I just, I donāt need that. But Iām also aware that there are people whose fear and identity tap is being impacted by people who are saying, this is such a big deal that if youāre not doing this, then youāre gonna be lost.
[00:59:30] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[00:59:30] Rick: I think if I was in a place where I felt like, oh yeah. What people still want are a course, an online course that you can sign up for and go through it in a linear way. And at the end of it of all those modules youāre going to have this result. Thatās the traditional online, if youāre a content creator, that used to be the model.
[00:59:55] Cathy: Yeah.
[00:59:56] Rick: We have a bunch of courses that are like that. I will say for myself that Iām not interested in that kind of delivery anymore. What I love,
[01:00:07] Cathy: the number of people that actually finished those courses was so small.
[01:00:10] Rick: I know. It was sad. But here I know that somebody came to, I donāt know who they were 'cause I only look at the anonymous ones.
[01:00:18] But someone asked a question and it pulled from. The sixth week of a course that we did, the q and A webinar that we did, and it gave the best answer. Like I was so proud of the work that weāve done and the tuning Iāve done on the AI, that the answer that it came back with was so useful to my heart.
[01:00:50] Now I donāt know how they took it, but they continued on and went deeper and they were tapping into their issue wasnāt sleep at all, but it was pulling from sleep now, right? Like. All of it gets interwoven into a tapestry that is fresh
[01:01:11] Cathy: for that person. I think thatās beautiful. I want the information and so much what we talk about comes from a common core.
[01:01:16] Weāre just looking at different aspects of it. Itās like I want people to get the wisdom from wherever it is. I donāt want them to have to wade through a hundred hours of information if they can get it in three. Itās whatās gonna impact your life?
[01:01:29] Yeah.
[01:01:29] Rick: So I would like to take a very short break here if any of you that are happen to be with us live.
[01:01:35] Thank you so much. If you have a question that youād like Cathy and I to tend to please post it now during the break. Weāll break for seven minutes. Cathy, and Iāll come back and try to answer as many as possible. And if there are none, weāll just wrap it up. I think that. Thatās good.
[01:01:50] Weāve covered it a lot. And AI is gonna be with us and a part of our work in emotional freedom and freedom technologies for the rest of my life. And itās exciting to me, as you can tell, and it opens up. I see people in my home things that could be incredibly stressful of writing and rewriting that are now just, theyāre so appreciative that I introduce them to these AI tools and my 12-year-old will ask questions and get answers. And my 5-year-old is, commanding AIs to find songs, youāre
[01:02:30] Speaker 3: so cute.
[01:02:31] Rick: This is a song, ADA Boom di Oh yeah. Thatās called, I love the mountAIns. Boom di here it is. Like she starts singing it. I like
[01:02:41] Cathy: all the hand motions and everything.
[01:02:43] Rick: So yeah, weāre gonna take a break and pause the recording and weāll be back. Welcome back. Identity can be in our head, right?
[01:02:55] But it also, when weāre shifting our identity, itās, thatās why youāve sometimes seen me talk about, feel into my core. So I asked my AI during the break what would it want to make sure we covered? And it talked about the somatic experience. Oh, Iām a writer. Oh, AI can write what tension.
[01:03:19] Do you have, and as you go deeper what does it mean to me when I say I am a writer, which is a doorway into something? What does it actually, whatās going on when Iām in that Iām a writer mode.
[01:03:36] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[01:03:36] Rick: Whatās my felt sense? Oh, Iām bringing forth, Iām bringing forth from a place inside me. Something that didnāt exist before.
[01:03:46] Yeah. I am, Iām feeling the prompt of my creativity and Iām bringing it out in a way thatās uniquely me.
[01:03:56] Cathy: Yeah.
[01:03:58] Rick: Oh.
[01:03:59] Cathy: I think that looking at, and also what is the intention of what we wanna, like, when I write, I wanna communicate. I wanna either create a feeling or an experience or a insight for somebody.
[01:04:09] And we can use AI and generate a lot of material really quickly. But part of when we write ourselves, or we use AI, itās a curation. If I give someone 30 pages of stuff, theyāre, unless theyāre super interested and tuned in, theyāre not reading it. But if I can give them a paragraph or a sentence that like, really touches them, then maybe they wanna read more.
[01:04:30] So thereās a curation process that is core to the intention of what Iām trying to create.
[01:04:36] Rick: Yeah. So if my, if I was with my younger self, my college self, it would be. It would be like, yeah, this is a shake in what it means to be smart, but hey, Ricky or Rick, at that point I had changed my name.
[01:04:57] I had changed my identity from Ricky to Rick. What what does it mean to you? And itās I believe that he wouldāve said, I use my mind to figure out ways to be efficient and effective.
[01:05:13] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[01:05:14] Rick: Without over grinding. Oh, Rick. Yeah. And here you are in college and theyāre layering on this kind of, they make you grind through textbooks rather than having a good teacher
[01:05:29] To teach you. Oh yeah. Oh, you know what? Thereās this this. 120 page PDF and youāve always wanted to read it. Itās been sitting there in your inbox, read this about circling, right? And guess what hey, weāve got this new tool and you upload this 120 page PDF and you say, Hey AI youāve come to know what matters to me.
[01:05:55] Iāve talked about it, my concepts for thriving. As you look at this and what you know about circling as I talk about it, what, is there anything new or fresh about circling Yeah. In this document. And they can
[01:06:09] Cathy: function through so much faster than I can
[01:06:12] Rick: right now. Maybe if I had the author with me, I might ask that question, but then they would have to know me and theyād have to know their work and be able to put it into my terms.
[01:06:24] But I get back this thing and. I can then ask and go deeper. I have thousands of quotes that I have used read wise to collect from books, from my Kindle books. Iāll highlight things that matter to me. So Iām reading a book, I highlight things. And the reason I use Kindle is that can make the text bigger.
[01:06:45] 'cause I always have used glasses and I can highlight and I have a tool that takes those highlights and brings them back to me. Each day I get a reminder of certAIn highlights and I can now use AI to talk to those highlights and say, Iām exploring right now what feels like a savvy in a challenging situation.
[01:07:13] What are some things that Iāve. And it will bring forth those things without me having to do the curation. And this is, I do believe that body guidance can tell us when weāre taking a shortcut that diminishes us. For example, itās not diminishing to me to not watch a two and a half hour podcast on a topic Iām interested in and click an AI and say, give me the key points here that apply to me and read those key points or skim them and say, oh, where do they talk about that?
[01:07:56] And jump into the video, watch three minutes out of hours and get what I want. Is that diminishing me? No, not
[01:08:04] Cathy: listening to it because itās two hours and youāre not gonna get to it.
[01:08:06] Rick: Iām not gonna get it. But what would be diminishing is if I just ask the AI to summarize this workshop and I just copy paste it and didnāt read it before sending it out to the community, thatās different than
[01:08:18] Cathy: checking it over and going that doesnāt feel quite right.
[01:08:20] I need to tweak this.
[01:08:22] Rick: But what I do know is that I would not have the time to go back through these 90 minutes with Cathy and be able to summarize it as well as a tool that can actually listen and pick out based upon our intentions, what are the key points.
[01:08:39] Cathy: Much fun as it would be
[01:08:40] Rick: for the two to sit down
[01:08:41] Cathy: and do that.
[01:08:41] It doesnāt work.
[01:08:45] Rick: So these are things where if you use your body guidance, youāre like, oh, this is good for me, this is good for me. Oh yeah, this helps me do something that I donāt want to do or Iām not very good at. I used AI the other day to strip out. I had it, I. I was feeling emotional. I wrote something that had a lot of like emotion and mixed message and things, and I just, I got my body guidance that like, oh, this needs work.
[01:09:21] What I really want to communicate. This was good for me. I wrote it all out, vent it out. This is really good. Iāve expressed myself, thatās good, but I donāt actually want to send that. That is not use, that is not what I wanna do. So Iām, I copy paste it into an AI and I say, I would like this to be neutral, matter of fact, and civil.
[01:09:41] Cathy: Yes.
[01:09:42] Rick: And useful for this purpose. The draft, it came back, I changed one word.
[01:09:50] Cathy: Sometimes that happens, sometimes I have to go, no, thatās not it at all.
[01:09:54] Rick: Now, I know that Rick in certAIn modes can do that. I can take and do exactly what I asked, but having a tool that could do that, I could feel the body yes.
[01:10:04] Yeah, this is better. A better expression for me to put my name on top of than it would be if I had written the raw material. And when you land on something like that, to me, in my identity, it says I am savvy enough and aware enough that I can be rageful. And I can be over empathetic.
[01:10:27] I can be, I could, Iāve got a broad spectrum capability,
[01:10:35] Cathy: all the different things.
[01:10:36] Rick: It sometimes having a tool thatās yeah, Iām aware and I want to tune myself. Tapping does that. Iām aware, even though I am outraged by this, Iāve, I would really prefer to be absurdly calm and confident, right?
[01:10:54] Yeah. And if I said that to an AI, even though this is an expression of my outrage, I can you tweak this so it just sounds like I am ridiculously calm and confident. Now, if you like EFT tapping, if you like this idea, take something like that. Just write it out, beat it in, and see what comes back. You can even say that doesnāt sound like me.
[01:11:20] Can you at least take some of my, can you make it? Is there any way for you to make it sound more like me?
[01:11:27] Cathy: Yeah.
[01:11:28] Rick: And when you start playing with it like that, you can really embrace your co-creator. Youāre co-creating with consciousness. Youāre co-creating with the tools in your hand, the, and youāre expanding, youāre growing, youāre things that werenāt possible before.
[01:11:48] I know somebody that wrote a childrenās story and then they fed the childrenās story into Suno and turned it into a musical.
[01:11:59] Speaker 3: I love it.
[01:12:02] Rick: Thereās 0% chance that she had the skill to do that.
[01:12:06] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[01:12:07] Rick: But it even sounds like her singing, because Suno now you can sing and itāll be like, yeah, and please make this sound,
[01:12:16] Cathy: take out the pitchy
[01:12:17] Rick: stuff professional.
[01:12:19] A few sec, a few seconds of your singing and it can turn it into something. And did that take away somebodyās job? I. I donāt think those jobs existed for that particular purpose. You werenāt gonna hire someone to save, they werenāt gonna hire someone. But that to me is for those of us that have sought freedom to be as creative and co-creative and expressive as we want for ourselves, for the pleasure and joy of it, to have something that we share maybe with our future self.
[01:12:53] Look what we did five years ago, or with our kin, the people in our community. There are people that are drawing things by hand and also using AI that share it out on ThrivingNow Center. And I love that we have space for all of that.
[01:13:07] Cathy: Yeah.
[01:13:08] Rick: Thank you for co-creating, Cathy.
[01:13:10] Cathy: Oh, my pleasure. I love that you were talking about identity and this is really core to who I am.
[01:13:15] Am too is love that we got to dig in and get some good questions and comments. And we all have lots of ease with our using our life force to create amazing things.
[01:13:24] Rick: Our inbox is open support at ThrivingNow dot com and itās a rick that reads that and Cathy so not
[01:13:31] Cathy: an AI,
[01:13:32] Rick: itās not an AI at this point that reads those emAIls.
[01:13:35] We get just a select number. So if thereās something here that, speaks to you that youād like us to continue to go deeper on please let us know.
[01:13:44] Cathy: Yeah,
[01:13:44] Rick: so
[01:13:45] Cathy: thanks everyone. Have a great day.
[01:13:47] Rick: Bye.
[01:13:49] ā
Great to have you on this journey with us!
From Perplexity.ai
Our identity isnāt fixed on stone tablets; itās a living, changing ecosystem inside us, and thatās actually really good news in the age of AI. When life or technology shakes what weāve always believed about ourselves ā āIām smart,ā āIām the artist,ā āIām the one who types fast,ā āIām the expertā ā we can notice that those are roles and stories, not our whole being. In everyday life, we can start simply by catching the language we use: when we hear ourselves think āI am Xā or āIām not the kind of person whoā¦,ā we can pause, breathe, and gently ask, āIs this really who I am now, or just who I used to think I was?ā That tiny question creates room to update our self-image in ways that fit this moment rather than clinging to an identity that no longer serves us.
Many of us have quietly built our identity around what we do and how hard we grind, and AI is exposing how fragile that can be. When a task that once proved our value can now be done in minutes by a tool, it can feel like our worth is being erased ā but underneath the tasks, there are deeper qualities we bring: care, clarity, creativity, generosity, presence. We can start redefining ourselves less as āthe one who does this taskā and more as āsomeone who brings these qualities into whatever I do.ā In daily life, that might look like asking, āWhat is the real essence of what I offer here ā structure, kindness, insight, resolution, beauty?ā and letting that be the anchor for our identity, even as the tools and tasks change.
We humans love to grab onto a solid identity ā āthis is who I am, you canāt take this from meā ā and thatās exactly why change can hurt so much. When a role weāve relied on gets disrupted, itās easy to feel replaced or irrelevant, but often whatās really happening is that the form is changing while the deeper impulse underneath is still very alive. In practice, we can meet ourselves gently when we feel threatened ā noticing the grief, anger, or fear ā and then ask, āWhat part of this identity is actually still true, and what part is just habit or nostalgia?ā From there, we can experiment with small shifts, like trying a new way to express our creativity, service, or expertise, so weāre not clinging to old forms that create more suffering than support.
Big technological shifts naturally stir up fear ā fear of being left behind, fear of harm, fear of losing control ā and our nervous system tends to go into threat-mode, which narrows our perspective. Instead of treating that fear as proof that everything is doomed, we can treat it as information: āOh, part of me is scared; no wonder I feel tight and reactive.ā In everyday life, this might look like noticing the tension in our body when we read or talk about AI, taking a few conscious breaths, tapping or soothing ourselves if thatās familiar, and then asking, āFrom a calmer place, what do I actually see happening, right now, in my real life?ā That way, fear gets acknowledged and respected, but it doesnāt get to drive all our decisions.
Instead of centering our sense of self around being āthe best,ā āthe expert,ā or āthe one everyone needs,ā we can root our identity in qualities that feel nourishing and resilient ā things like curiosity, generosity, discernment, creativity, and care. Those qualities donāt get obsolete when tools change; in fact, AI can give us more room to live them more fully. Day to day, we can play with identity statements like āIām curious,ā āIām discerning,ā or āIām someone who loves to co-create,ā and then ask, āHow can I bring one of these qualities into this email, conversation, decision, or project?ā Over time, practicing this shifts our inner sense of āwho I amā from a fragile status-based identity to a deeper, steadier way of being.
A powerful real skill here is learning to treat AI and other tools as collaborators that amplify our life force, not as rivals we have to outwork. When we let tools handle the brute-force, repetitive, or overly technical parts, we can spend more of our energy on the parts that are uniquely us ā the feeling, intuition, meaning-making, and human connection. In everyday life, this might mean dictating messy thoughts to an AI and then editing the draft so it sounds like us, using tools to summarize long documents so we can focus on the key insights, or asking for neutral wording when weāre too emotional to write clearly. The shift is: āIām not less valuable because a tool can help; Iām more effective because Iām choosing where my attention and heart go.ā
Our body often tells the truth about how weāre really doing with change long before our mind catches up. When our identity feels threatened ā āIf AI can do this, who am I?ā ā we might feel tightness in the chest, a lump in the throat, buzzing in the head, or a heaviness in the belly. Instead of ignoring that, we can use it as guidance: pausing to notice where the sensations are, putting a hand there if that feels comforting, and gently asking, āWhat does this part of me believe itās losing?ā Then, as we consider new possibilities or reframe our role, we can notice when our body softens or opens ā even slightly ā and let that somatic āyesā help us find directions that feel genuinely aligned rather than just intellectually clever.
A lot of what AI is taking over are tasks that burned through our energy without actually feeding our soul ā endless retyping, tedious formatting, slogging through dense material without support, starting from a blank page again and again. Instead of focusing only on the loss of the old role, we can consciously ask, āWhat does this free up in me? Where could my life force go now that it doesnāt have to grind on that?ā Practically, this can look like using tools to summarize medical data, legal language, or research so we can have clearer conversations with professionals, or automating routine work so we have more time for rest, connection, play, or more meaningful contributions. Weāre allowed to celebrate getting some of our energy back, even while we care about the wider impacts.
Another core skill is being able to hold both the real harms and the real gifts of new technology without collapsing into denial or despair. Jobs are changing; some people are being hurt, and that matters ā and at the same time, people are also gaining access to medical insight, legal clarity, creative expression, and support that they never could have afforded or found before. In daily life, we can practice this by letting ourselves feel the discomfort of āboth/andā: āI donāt like that some people are being displaced, and I also feel grateful for the ways this helps me and others.ā From there, we can ask, āIs there a loving, concrete action I can take ā like learning, voting, advocating, supporting someone directly ā while still allowing myself to use what actually helps me thrive?ā
We canāt put the genie back in the bottle; pretending AI or other changes will go away if we protest hard enough just leaves us less prepared and more powerless. A more grounded orientation is to acknowledge, āThis is happening,ā and then get curious: āHow do I want to meet this, in a way that serves my values and my well-being?ā In practice, this might mean experimenting gently with AI in low-stakes areas (like summarizing a video, drafting a letter, or exploring an idea), paying attention to where it genuinely helps and where it doesnāt feel right, and setting our own boundaries. Instead of living in abstract fear or hype, we build direct experience and discernment ā becoming the kind of person who can adapt thoughtfully rather than react from panic or rigid refusal.
At the heart of all this is the invitation to let our sense of self evolve in ways that actually increase our freedom ā freedom to create, to rest, to connect, to learn, to live closer to what matters most to us. When we loosen our grip on old, narrow identities and allow ourselves to be guided by deeper qualities and body wisdom, we create more space for a thriving life, even in the midst of rapid change. In everyday practice, that might look like regularly asking, āDoes this version of āwho I amā give me more room to breathe, to care, to play, to contribute ā or does it box me in?ā and then gently updating how we name ourselves, what we prioritize, and how we use the tools available so that our identity keeps moving in the direction of more aliveness, not less.
From ChatGPT
Notice What We Have Made Into Identity
A core real skill here is simply noticing that we do have identity stories, and that they often sit deeper in us than we realize: āI am smart,ā āI am useful,ā āI am this kind of person,ā āI am not that kind of person.ā When life changes fast, those identity anchors can get rattled, so our first practice is awareness without shame: what have we been leaning on, what feels threatened, and what in us feels suddenly unsure? Just seeing that clearly can help us stop taking the disruption so personally and start relating to it with more honesty and steadiness.
Remember That Identity Is Not Fixed
One of the most freeing perspectives here is that identity is not a permanent object we have to defend forever. It can shift, deepen, rename itself, and become more true over time. That means we do not have to panic when an old identity no longer fits the moment; we can let it evolve. In everyday life, this looks like asking, āWhat feels more true for me now?ā and giving ourselves permission to choose a way of being that fits our current reality better than an older label ever did.
Shift From Status Labels to Living Qualities
A powerful move is to build identity around qualities we can keep practicing rather than around status, roles, or being the one who does something best. Instead of over-centering on labels like smartest, best, most informed, or most accomplished, we can root ourselves in qualities like curiosity, discernment, generosity, creativity, and responsiveness. Those qualities travel well through change. They help us stay ourselves even when tools, tasks, and industries transform around us.
Go Deeper Than What We Do for a Living
The deeper skill is asking what essence lives underneath our role. Beneath a job title there may be clarity, care, structure, beauty, problem-solving, or helping people find resolution. When we connect with that deeper layer, change becomes less threatening because the tools may shift while our deeper contribution remains alive. In practice, it helps to ask, āWhat is the real value I bring?ā and let that answer guide how we adapt rather than clinging to one form of expressing it.
Let Challenge Reveal Attachment Without Making It Wrong
When something external threatens the way we have defined ourselves, it can hurt a lot, and that does not mean we are weak or foolish. It often means we were attached, and attachment naturally brings suffering when reality changes. The real skill is not to scold ourselves for that, but to recognize it tenderly: āAh, this matters to me, and part of me has been holding on hard.ā That awareness gives us room to loosen our grip and suffer less, instead of fighting reality and exhausting ourselves.
Use Tools to Reduce Brute Force, Not to Become Passive
A key perspective here is that reducing grind is not the same as giving up our mind, our heart, or our agency. We can use tools to get past inertia, clarify ideas, ask better questions, refine drafts, understand dense material faster, and go deeper than we might have gone through sheer willpower alone. The practical application is simple: let the tool help with the slog, then bring your judgment, refinement, and intention to what matters. That is not passivity; that is skillful partnership.
Protect and Redirect Our Life Force
Another core aspect is valuing our life force enough not to spend it all on repetitive, draining, low-value effort when there is another way. The point is not laziness; it is stewardship. When we spend less energy retyping, re-sorting, over-grinding, or postponing every little question because it feels too cumbersome, we often get back peace, clarity, and creative energy. In daily life, we can ask, āIs this task actually worthy of my precious energy, or can I free myself to use that energy where it makes a bigger difference?ā
Use Body Guidance to Know What Helps and What Diminishes
This real skill is not just intellectual; it is somatic. We can feel when a shortcut supports us and when it diminishes us. Sometimes support looks like getting a summary so we can finally engage with something meaningful; other times it would feel off to copy, paste, and pass something along without reading or shaping it. Our body can help us tell the difference. A useful practice is to pause and notice: does this use of the tool leave me feeling clearer, more aligned, and more myself, or thinner, fuzzier, and less true?
Stay with Reality Instead of Fear Stories
Fear narrows us. When we are flooded, we lose access to nuance, adaptability, and our own sweet spot. A major real skill here is returning from fear stories and exaggerated predictions to what is actually true right now. That does not mean ignoring risks; it means meeting reality instead of spiraling in hypotheticals. When we feel reactive, we can ground ourselves, tap, breathe, or slow down enough to ask, āWhat is happening now, what is real, and what thoughtful action is available to me from here?ā
Choose Thoughtful, Loving Action in the Middle of Change
We do not have to choose between blind enthusiasm and rigid resistance. We can acknowledge harm, care about ethics, support better protections, and still engage with what is unfolding. The skill is to meet change with questioning eyes and loving action rather than moral paralysis or fantasy that it will all go away if we refuse to touch it. In everyday life, that can look like using what helps, speaking up where boundaries are needed, supporting smoother transitions for others, and acting from care instead of panic.
Co-Create Without Forgetting What Is Uniquely Human
A beautiful thread running through all of this is that co-creation can expand us without replacing what is deeply human in us. Tools can help us prepare, explore, draft, synthesize, and express, but there is still something real in our presence, our curation, our felt sense, our delight, our authenticity, and the way we touch meaning. So the practical invitation is to co-create in ways that reveal more of our creativity, not less: let the tool help you get into flow, and then bring your living humanness to what you make, choose, and share.
From Grok
Recognizing Identity as Malleable
We discover that our sense of self isnāt fixed in stone, and by consciously choosing qualities that feel good in our core like moving from being āsmartā to being āsavvy,ā we can reshape how we see ourselves and respond to changes with more ease and self-acceptance in daily decisions.
Grounding in Timeless Qualities Over Specific Skills
Instead of tying our worth to particular tasks or expertise that technology can shift, we anchor our identity in enduring qualities such as curiosity, discernment, and generosity, allowing us to remain steady and open as tools evolve while applying these strengths in conversations, work, and creative pursuits.
Embracing AI as a Co-Creative Partner
We learn to dance with AI by describing what we want, refining outputs, and collaborating to bring ideas to life faster, which frees our energy for deeper expression and helps us create things we once thought were out of reach in our everyday projects and problem-solving.
Releasing Attachment to Reduce Suffering
By noticing when we grip tightly to old roles or abilities and gently letting go, we move through impermanence with less struggle, opening space to explore new ways of contributing and experiencing fulfillment without the weight of āIāve been replacedā thinking.
Tuning Into Body Guidance with Technology
We check in with our felt sense as we use new tools, asking if something expands or diminishes us, so we can make choices that honor our energy and lead to more aligned, satisfying results whether summarizing information or expressing our thoughts.
Conserving Life Force for What Matters Most
Using AI to handle repetitive or brute-force elements lets us redirect our precious energy toward creative, relational, and heart-led activities, helping us feel more present and effective in our daily lives without the exhaustion of starting from scratch every time.
Navigating Fear Through Emotional Freedom Practices
When identity shifts stir unease or resistance, we can tap on those feelings of being threatened or rattled, acknowledging them fully so we return to a clearer space where we see possibilities and respond with greater calm and adaptability.
Focusing on Heartistry as Our Foundation
We connect with the deeper essence of what we truly value and how we want to show up, like bringing forth creativity or offering support, so our identity stays rooted in meaning rather than changing external methods or roles.
Seeing Opportunities Amid Technological Shifts
Even as some tasks evolve or disappear, we practice looking for how new capabilities increase accessibility, efficiency, and reach, applying this perspective to enrich our own lives and generously share tools that help others thrive too.
Cultivating Discernment and Savvy Awareness
We build our identity around being savvy navigators who ask good questions, synthesize insights, and make wise choices with abundant information, turning AI into an ally for clearer understanding and better everyday decisions.
Taking Loving Action in Present Reality
Staying with what is actually happening rather than getting lost in fears or hypotheticals, we choose thoughtful steps like writing our representatives or experimenting ethically, co-creating a path that aligns with our values while building resilience and connection.
AI Prompt Used for each, with the transcript added as an uploaded file:
Act like a savvy student-teacher and emotional freedom expert. Using only the attached transcript, extract 11 key aspects that stand out as core to the real skill that is the focus of the workshop.
Write this as a standalone piece for someone considering watching the replay. Do not mention the workshop, the transcript, the coaches, or who said what. Speak directly to the reader in a warm, friendly, grounded we/our voice. Focus on the real skill, the underlying perspectives, the benefits for us, and how we can apply each point in everyday life to build a thriving life.
Requirements:
- Use only wisdom that is clearly present in the attached transcript.
- Do not add outside ideas, references, or web research.
- Include exactly 11 aspects.
- Put the whole answer in a markdown code block.
- Number each aspect.
- Format each title as bold on its own line.
- After each title, include exactly one single paragraph of description.
- Do not break the description into multiple paragraphs.
- Keep each description practical, inviting, and actionable even for someone who only reads these points.
- Do not mention āthe workshop has,ā āthe coaches say,ā āRick,ā āCathy,ā or any similar framing.
- Do not include citations, source notes, or reference numbers.
- Keep the tone warm, wise, emotionally resonant, and conversational.
Before finalizing, verify that every item matches this exact structure:
[number]. **Title**
[one paragraph only]
If any item has the number on its own line, rewrite it before returning the answer.