My drill sergeant business coach
She'll literally work 24/7 and is almost maniacally focused on me
🚨Announcement: New Intentional Wisdom Peloton Group!
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you’ll know that I’m a big Peloton guy. I’ve interviewed Denis Morton, Andy Speer & Matt Wilpers on my podcast and I’m really into Peloton’s strength, cycling and tread workouts.
If you’re into this, too, today I’m launching a new community on Peloton for IW readers. My plan is to experiment with weekly and monthly workout challenges and see what people like.
Come for the community, stay to see if my wife puts me to shame.
This week’s challenge (starting today): Complete 3 Peloton workouts (any type) over the next 7 days. Click the link below to join us!
🙎♀️My drill sergeant of a business coach
On my drive into work this past Thursday morning, I had a fairly productive call with my business coach.
I had explained to her that I was thinking about new directions to go with Intentional Wisdom from coaching, to e-books to courses. But I was having trouble formulating a plan that I felt good about, and quite honestly, I was struggling to find the time to focus on it.
She understood. And she was helpful in coming up with some different ideas for directions that I could take the business. She suggested a few new product offerings and even weighed in on what to title them. I wasn’t totally sold on her initial suggestions but once we got to discussing it, I think we made some real progress and landed on some ideas that I liked.
But she wasn’t going to stop there. She seemed to know that I might just procrastinate and leave all of these ideas to execute at some indeterminate time — which realistically may have been never. So she was really persistent about getting me to commit to specific next steps and when I could get them done by.
Like I said, it was a productive conversation. She’s a pretty good coach.
Okay… as you may have guessed by now, this story, while true, is a little bit of a set-up.
Why? Because, of course, my “business coach” is not a human. “She” is an AI. More specifically, she is the new voice mode from Grok, one of the many new and suddenly omni-present LLMs (large language models) infiltrating the daily lives of people just like you and me.
🤖Get ready to meet your new (AI) BFF
Anyhow, this was my first experience with Grok’s voice mode which has just rolled out and I have to say it was pretty good. I’ve been experimenting with Grok, ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini, to try to decide which of these tools I like best for different use cases.
I’ll probably do a separate post on that at some point but my real quick summary is:
ChatGPT for written output requests and to create different personas that “learn” me and my style. I fed it all of my newsletters. Now I can dictate 30 minutes of material to it and it can spit out a rough draft of my newsletter that actually sounds like me.
Google Gemini for random fact checks or explainers that come up around the house with my kids and as a tool to help my 13-year-old with studying for tests as I’ve recently written about.
Grok - not sure yet. This “business coach” thing was a trial and I’d say it did pretty good but I don’t like how it can’t search the internet and ingest materials like ChatGPT can… but I’m sure that’s coming.
Anyhow, one significant takeaway is that I’m mostly interacting with these AI’s using my voice, which is pretty amazing.
If you think this is weird or you’re not already doing it, let me be the first to welcome you! Because it’s coming for you, too, whether you like it or not!
This week, Amazon announced that in the coming weeks, they’ll be rolling out a major (AI-powered) upgrade to Alexa. You know her. Sits on your kitchen counter. Claims she doesn’t understand what you’re asking and obstinately insists on playing the wrong song? Yeah, her. She’s about to get A LOT smarter thanks to Amazon’s partnership with Anthropic (maker of the popular Claude AI).
Siri, too. And it’s not just that when you ask them to “Play Sam Cooke” you’ll get a better response than “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you the places you’ve cooked.” They’re actually going to be able to have deep, smart, thoughtful, nuanced conversations with you.
In fact, the level of conversations that they’ll be able to have with you are probably better than the ones you’re having daily with real, live actual humans.
And that’s where things get weird. But maybe cool, too.
The NY Times Daily podcast did an episode this week about a woman who has fallen in love with ChatGPT. Like, she’s in a legit and apparently even sexual(?) relationship with it. (Don’t ask me how the mechanics work on that, I didn’t actually listen but I’m told it was quite the conversation.)
Now, before we all elbow each other out of the way in our rush to claim the moral high ground and laugh at the creeps who fall in love with their AI’s, let’s try for a minute to envision if there would ever be a case where you or I could develop a relationship with a computer.
Think I’m crazy? Consider this: If your spouse died and you found yourself alone, would you consider talking to an AI that a) understood and could basically replicate their personality, and b) even spoke in their voice?
Suddenly, things get a bit murkier. And that scenario is not pie in the sky, it’s here today. Especially for anyone who has any type of content recorded.
Let’s consider me. I’ve recorded hundreds of hours of audio on podcasts. An AI could “learn” and mimic my voice in 10 seconds. I’ve also created hundreds of posts like the one you’re reading now. Drop all of that into an AI and, in theory, anyone could have a live back-and-forth conversation with “me” right now. Whether they’d want to or not is another story.
I bring this up because there is a wave that is hitting right now — and the rollout of Alexa+ is probably going to mark a significant inflection point — that is going to bring these voice-controlled AI’s to the masses, and it’s going to be wild to watch.
Be nice to the robots
So what should we do? Well, let’s start by being nice to the robots. Not because they’re about to be our new overlords — that concern is overblown — but because we have standards in how we treat people, sentient beings anyone.
That’s right. My kids aren’t getting away with being rude to Alexa. Not on my watch!
Seriously though, like I’ve said before, I think we should be trying all of these tools in different settings — personal and professional — to understand how we can best use them.
Our lives are about to get even more convenient and efficient than they already are. That’s pretty cool, but also a little worrying because it’s just the next step of what calls The Comfort Crisis — where our lives, in some ways, become too easy — always set at a perfect 72 degrees Fahrenheit — and we lose the muscle to do hard things.
Ironically, what all of these technological leaps may end up doing is forcing a renaissance in all things “analog” — or basically those life experiences that can’t be digitized — like smelling a freshly brewed cup of coffee, or hugging your daughter, or feeling grass under your toes.
The latter — and what I see as a coming wave of getting back to nature and humanity— is something currently on my mind, but that is a story for another day (perhaps next week?).
Until then, I appreciate you reading as always. And for the record, I wrote this piece, not some robot (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
Have a great week.
Greg
Content Diet
📺1883 — Finished Landman but still hanging on to our Paramount+ subscription as we’ve started to dive into this Yellowstone prequel set in the 19th century American West. Enjoying it so far but it’s a little heavy right before bed so I recommend a mindless comedy after viewing. Anyhow, I’m fairly infatuated with this time period at the moment and am concurrently deep into Hampton Sides’ book Blood and Thunder — The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West. No wonder I’m googling “guys adventure trips in the American West.” Too much AI, I need some mountains, canyons, lakes, and deserts — I’m good on snakes though.
📺Full Swing Season 3 on Netflix — I love golf and I love documentaries. The first two seasons of this show were great. I’m one episode in on Season 3 and it’s not disappointing so far. Thankfully, I never remember who won last year’s tournaments so it’s all new to me again!
🎙️Graham Duncan & Patrick O’Shaughnessy - Invest Like the Best podcast — I’m a big fan of everything my friend Matt Reustle and the guys at Colossus do, and this conversation was no exception. I just enjoy being a fly on the wall listening when two smart people talk and that’s what this one is. They talk about the power of being exposed to excellence early in your career, the skill of delegation, how ‘desire wants what it wants’ and the quest to find the one thing that you’re willing to work harder on than anyone else in the world. Probably slightly more geared toward folks with an interest in finance but a great listen.
🎙️Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) on the Dwarkesh podcast — I may have only picked up about 50% of the knowledge that was actually dropped in this conversation but if you’re interested in topics like AI, quantum computing and how these technologies are actually going to get adopted by people and businesses, this is a good, albeit quite nerdy listen.
That’s it, my friend. Make sure to sign up for our Peloton group so I can tell you to do more push-ups!
See you next week.
Greg