How To Outsmart AI Experts By Not Being One

Gord Vickman: Welcome to the next episode of Podcast Payoffs. Gord Vickman here with Dan Sullivan. So glad you're with us today. Dan, I cheekily titled this episode Energizing Teamwork When Tech Wears Thin. That sounds like corporate gobbledygook, but you'll see where I go with this. So, you know, we talk a lot about AI, Dan, both you and I and inside the company. We had an amazing presentation. Tim Sullivan, who's on our tech team, did a presentation at a recent company meeting and just blew everybody's mind with the capabilities. And obviously, he's very technically inclined, but he was showing people apps that he built in his spare time. He's like, yeah, you know, I was in the shower and I built an app and everyone's brains are like leaking out of their head. And I thought, you know, there's a little bit of overwhelm going on right now in terms of AI, not only in the workplace, but also in your personal life. So before we jump into that, Dan, first of all, welcome to the show. I don't want to monopolize the intro.
 
Dan Sullivan:Thank you. Yeah, I've really got in the groove with how I use AI and I've gotten really, really good at it because I just picked a single format or interface with Perplexity. I'm sort of a one master dog, you know. First of all, if I want to know anything about other things I could do—I won't do them, but I could do them—I just have 15 minutes with Mike Koenigs and he tells me 15 possibilities. So I always know the smart human I would have to go. Even then, I'd keep Mike between me and the technology.
 
Gord Vickman:That's your line, Dan, that I wanted to ask you about. Your line is, I always keep a smart human between me and technology. Tell me more about that. What is gained and what is perhaps lost, if anything?
 
Dan Sullivan:First of all, the human brain is the most remarkable thing that ever got created in the history of whatever all of this is, you know, from the beginning, because humans are not logical at all. I mean, we use logic, we use logic like we use math, but nobody goes around mathematicing all day. You know, you use it when you want to make sure that there's more coming in than going out.
 
Gord Vickman:Maybe a rain man does the math all day when the match box falls on the ground, but you're right. He's the only one.
 
Dan Sullivan:Yeah. And Mike is terrific. And, you know, and then we have Lior Weinstein in the Program, and Leora is just enormously creative and productive in how he uses AI. Chad Jenkins. So I'm surrounded more and more, and that's outside of our company and inside our company, we have growing capabilities. So all I have to do is be really, really good at what I want. And then I have tools like a Fast Filter, my go-to. You sent me two Fast Filters for the two podcasts that we're doing. I get it instantly. I know what we're going to talk about. So I know this technology is there. I know it's a forever technology. You know, you can't reverse the progress on AI any more than you could with electricity. And we want electricity. And AI to me is a new power source, you know. But I don't have to be sticking my finger in the socket to learn about electricity. I know what a shock is. And I'll let somebody else stick their finger in the socket, including you.
 
Gord Vickman:The line from that Chris Farley movie with David Spade, oh my gosh, it was funny. He said, you can get a look at a great steak by sticking your head up a cow's ass, but sometimes you got to take the butcher's word for it. So, there's a link I'll put in our show notes, if you're curious. I found this site, Dan. It's called Whatever AI. You can just go in the show notes and I'll link there. It'll be the first thing you see. All A.I. tools. And what it is, someone has basically made a search engine for A.I. tools. And you can search by not only the tool itself, but what you want to do.
 
So I was playing with it and I put in, you know, audio music. And then, of course, it populates and there's 500 different AI tools to do this and do that. Pass it over to our audio engineer, Willard Bond, and he's like, wow, that's a comprehensive list. I'll dig in eventually. And I was thinking, yeah, this is fun to have, but when you have 1800 options to accomplish everything, then I'd suggest that you probably have no options because you got information overload.
 
And then I started thinking, you know, if I'm feeling this as someone who's reasonably technically inclined, I'm sure there are people who are less technically inclined who are probably feeling a little bit of the overwhelm themselves and perhaps maybe going into in your Gap Gain model, like they're gapped out because they're thinking, you know, everybody knows more about this than I do. I don't know anything. Why am I not a master of this? So that's why I wanted to, you know, start this podcast and just talk about digital overwhelm and maybe get some strategies from you for people who may be feeling that gap.
 
I'll start with a little story. It's a very reassuring story. So if you are feeling like you've fallen behind, and if you hang out in spaces, both online and maybe in person, where people are really super smart and technically inclined, like we do, Dan, you said, like you mentioned Mike, you mentioned Lior, and so many of our Coach members who are extremely technically inclined, you know, wizards with AI and whatnot. I have a lot of friends who work in technology. I have friends who are in that space. So it's easy to fall behind, or to believe you're falling behind, rather.
 
And then a few weeks ago, I got a phone call. Very dear friend, lifelong friend, lives down in London, Ontario, which is probably the closest major city south as you're going towards Windsor, Detroit area. And he said, I have something I gotta tell you. I said, okay, tell me. He said, did you know that ChatGPT can make recipes? I said, tell me more about that. You know, not trying to be the wet blanket. I said, tell me more about that. You know, tell me more.
 
Dan Sullivan:Sounds like this is important to you.
 
Gord Vickman:Yes. The Chris Voss. It sounds like this is important to you. Tell me more about that. He said, well, you know my buddy Jay, the cop. I said, yes, I know your buddy Jay, the cop. Good guy. He said, well, he had all this stuff in his fridge and he didn't know what to do with it. I think he had chicken. He might've had a pickle. Maybe he had some sauce and all this other stuff. So we put it into ChatGPT and he said, make a recipe with all this. And ChatGPT gave him a casserole recipe and he made the casserole recipe and it was delicious. So now I'm like, oh, okay, he's not being silly. And he goes, yeah, so if you have all this stuff in your fridge and you don't know what to do with it, just put it into ChatGPT and it'll give you a casserole recipe. I said, okay, thanks for the hot tip.
 
So I left the conversation and I thought, you know, if you are even on first base with all of this technology—it’s important to note that the overwhelming majority of the world just discovered, first of all, they don't even know ChatGPT exists or what to do with it. Secondly, many of them have just discovered that ChatGPT can create a recipe for you. So you're not behind, you're not so far behind that you can't catch up, and there's plenty of time. Now, I wouldn't suggest waiting five years to start dipping your toes into the pool here, but just so you know that when you hang out in spaces where people are technologically inclined and they're talking about this a lot, it's easy to get gapped out and think you've fallen behind. But the overwhelming majority of the world on the outside of the biodome here that I'm talking about just discovered that ChatGPT can make a casserole for you.
 
Dan Sullivan:Yeah. Can I even push your thought further?
 
Gord Vickman:Yes.
 
Dan Sullivan:That regardless of what you have on hand, ChatGPT will turn it into a casserole.
 
Gord Vickman:It's true. I got a box of rusty nails. I got a dirty old wig. Got some old phone bill here. What are you going to make? Got some cheese? Okay. So turn on the oven to 350 and then you're going to do that. So yeah, you haven't fallen behind and there's plenty of time to do this. And once again, if you, in a weird way, I will put that link to the AI search feature in our show notes, all AI tools. I can't remember what it ends with, but you can find it there.
 
So Dan, the average American worker, this is Reuters saying that the average American worker, this is knowledge worker—we're not talking about people who are fixing things that need to be fixed, like the light poles or a toilet—average American knowledge worker uses 13 different apps a day. Many of them AI, some of them are legacy apps. Switching between them 30 times, losing an hour of productivity bouncing around. So Dan, more tools. Is this a productivity myth? We just need to add more tools and we'll be more productive? Because clearly, according to this research, it's the opposite.
 
Dan Sullivan:My attitude toward this really triggered the book and the tool that we have of Who Not How, you know. So I dealt with this where what I've discovered is that in terms of internal teamwork and Strategic Coach, I bet almost anything I want to get done, there's somebody in the company who can get their mind around it a lot better than I can. They've done searches, they've done investigations, they've done experiments. And why would I spend any of my time doing anything except being really clear what I'm trying to achieve? And then I communicate this to the person who has these abilities and they know where the other people in the company far more than I do. They're aware of other people's skills, knowledge, their experience of actually pulling off really great projects.
 
So all I have to do is put out, this is the project that I want to achieve. It's really important to me. This is why it's important. And if I can't get a good result here, this is the price I have to pay if I don't achieve this. And when I get the solution to this, it does this, it does this, it does this, it does this. Five will do it. I go away, and three or four days later, they've got the whole project finished for me. And that took me 15 minutes to write out my thoughts on a form, you know. I typed it out. I can send it as a PDF. But I'm not going to sit down with that person and talk to them until I'm very, very clear about what I want. This is what I want, this is what it looks like when I get it, and hey, can you help me?
 
Gord Vickman:And all this came from, you know, going back a little bit, you talked about AI tinkering. So unpack that. What is AI tinkering to Dan Sullivan?
 
Dan Sullivan:Well, I think humans are really good at tinkering. They're far better than AI is at tinkering. You know, and we've talked about this previously on podcasts related to AI, that the day that AI has been thinking overnight and has been really, really thinking about, you know, what does Dan want? Now, I'm going to really surprise Dan in the morning because I've done all this thinking about something I know. Then I get real, real interested in where AI is going, and so far I've seen no proof that AI does anything when I'm not interacting with it. It has done nothing while I was not paying attention to it. So what I'm beginning to realize, if I don't initiate it, it doesn't exist.
 
Gord Vickman:That's true. Because we're not at the point where we have sentient AI thinking. And it's funny, I was on Twitter, which is normally a pretty gross place, but people are posting things and they're saying, oh, you know, Altman tried to shut off GPT and then it tried to download itself onto an external server. Like you can picture it oozing out of the server like slime. And then people are asking, Grok, is this true? And it's like, this is exaggerated. So there's kind of like fear mongering and people are trying to scare everybody right now saying that, you know, we are entering the Terminator 2 zone, but I don't think we're there quite yet where AI has an emotion. And if it says it's going to be turned off, then it tries to find an escape route. Maybe we'll get there one day. You know, they've made many movies about it.
 
Dan Sullivan:Yeah, I think we're into an infinite process of AI not getting there.
 
Gord Vickman:So, Dan, set some guardrails for those who, maybe they heard what you said about tinkering, and they're like, okay, I want to tinker like that. I want to make sure that I have goals in mind, perhaps, or maybe no goals in mind. But if you're going to start tinkering with these programs, how could an entrepreneur make sure that they're not attempting to solve a problem that they don't even have?
 
Dan Sullivan:I'll give you an analogy of a different type of situation, which I think it's a metaphor. I'm setting this up as a metaphor. But in New York City, right where the park starts, Central Park, and this is over by what's called Columbus Circle, there's the Time Warner building, very impressive skyscraper, actually a good-looking skyscraper. And on the ground floor, there's this huge escalator that goes down into the basement. And that entire basement, you can be at the very, very top of the escalator, and you look down, and it's just the most amazing Whole Foods store you ever saw. I talked to some people, you know, how many products does Whole Foods, a really big one, there's about 50,000 products, you know, and this is a real good size Whole Foods.
 
Now, if I set it as a goal that I have to know every product that's in Whole Foods, that would be three lifetimes for me. But actually, you know, I actually just wanted to get a couple bags of walnuts, you know, and I go down there and it's easy to find. So I'm only looking for one thing, you know, the 49,999 products I don't have to know about. But if in the future there's one I need, I know how to get it.
 
And so my sense is, be clear about what you're looking for. At all times, your job as a human is to be very, very clear about what you're looking for. And I'm pretty good about just walking into a store, finding one thing, and walking out having purchased it. So my sense is that the skill that humans need to deal with this universe of complexity is the same as all other universes of complexity. It's like, there's easily 100 million entrepreneurs in the world who are entrepreneurs. We have an entrepreneurial coaching program, but I'm not looking for 100 million. I'm just looking for probably an extra 500 for next year, you know, to get into the Program, or 1,000. We shoot for 1,000 new people in the program.
 
And I don't have to find them. Our sales team has to find them. Our marketing team has to attract them to the point where our sales team can actually talk to them. And then we have a screening process. Is this person right for our program? So, more and more, I'm talking to the salespeople. I said, you're the buyer here, you're not the seller. They're the ones who want to know about Strategic Coach, so they've got some reason to know about this. Find out what the reason is and see if it lines up with the kind of person that we're actually looking for. You're not selling the Program. They're already in the mood to buy something. All you have to do is make sure that adding this extra person to the Strategic Coach Program doesn't screw up the Program.
 
Gord Vickman:Mm-hmm. Casting.
 
Dan Sullivan:Yeah, yeah, we've had people who are, you know, not appropriate. One is that they're not at a high enough level of being an entrepreneur. You gotta, by the standards of the world, you already have to be successful, you have to be talented, you have to be ambitious. And then there's an amount of money we wanna see that you've already made that indicates that you're ready to take a jump.
 
Gord Vickman:Mm-hmm. That makes sense.
 
Dan Sullivan:Yeah, and the same thing goes for team members. You know, we have two kinds of bringing on board. We have new entrepreneurs in the Program and then we have new team members in the team. Okay, but we're in a position where we're the buyers. We just have to put out this is what we're buying for us to buy you your participation with us, either back stage or front stage. You have to be this type of person.
 
Gord Vickman:Now, when we're bringing new team members in, is there an expectation? I know you're not directly involved in the hiring process, but at the top levels, when you're having your closed-door discussions, how woven is AI into that process?
 
Dan Sullivan:I don't mean like give away the company secrets, but ... You don't really know, but I would say that probably as our team becomes more familiar with AI in terms of their own work, this would be the onboarding team. People say, well, if you're HR, I say, well, it's all HR. It's all human relationships. So I said, everything as far as I'm concerned is HR. So let's not use the word HR because it's a meaningless term, you know. But the big thing is that the more and more that you become really familiar and comfortable with what the company is and who's already in the company, then if you're bringing someone new, it's not so much what they can do, because we've already done some testing, layers of testing, that the person is good at this type of activity.
 
So that being the case, will they fit in with the existing team? I mean, on day one, are they valuable? You know? Yeah, that's what we want. And not only are they valuable, but they're comfortable and excited about bringing their role, their specific role, to the company. And it's yes or no. We're in the marketplace, they're in the marketplace. We just want to see if there's a fit.
 
Gord Vickman:Where I was going with that, that I fumbled through, was, you know, thinking about Shopify. Shopify is the most successful Canadian tech company ever. Multi-giga-billionaire Toby Lütke. Am I pronouncing that right? Toby Lütke. So the founder, I guess. Interesting guy. Shopify is a Canadian tech company and there was a decree online that I read recently, and Shopify has announced, perhaps it was internal and it leaked, I don't know how it got out, but it was the talk of the Twitter town for a short while, and Shopify has announced that they are no longer going to be adding any new team members to the company unless the team that wants to hire a new person can prove that AI cannot do that job better.
 
Dan Sullivan:Yeah. That's become a meme almost. I see that popping up. But it's not some strange new demand or requirement to do it. I came from the United States to Canada. My first job was as a copywriter in a big ad agency. And one of the questions they said, do you type?
 
Gord Vickman:Like, can you type without staring? Are you typing with two fingers? Like, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick? Or can you actually use all ten?
 
Dan Sullivan:Yeah, I use all ten fingers. I was very fortunate because if I hadn't been drafted into the Army, I probably wouldn't know that skill. But I got into a position where I had to back up other people, but I had to type. So they sent me to typing school and I'm good. You know, I'm 40, 45 words per minute, you know, decent shape. It doesn't have to be accurate because autocorrect. Well, yeah, in those days, it was a person, you know, who did it. And they could make perfect sense of my rough typing notes. And all I had to do is pump out ad copy or commercial copy. You know, it might be an ad in paper or it might be a commercial radio or television in those days.
 
And this is 1970s. This is before a lot of people were born. But if it was handwriting, just couldn't do that with a top agency. They just had to move stuff really quickly. So, 1971, can you type? 2025, what AI tools are you available with? These are technical skills. I mean, you can't hire someone who really desires to be a plumber unless they know plumbing. You know, they have to have some technical hands-on. So, we're crossing the thing is that hands-on knowledge, in other words, you have experience of this sort of thing, is becoming important. But we're making a big deal out of something that actually has been going on forever, you know.
 
Can we leave you on your own and know that at the end of a half hour, an hour, if we ask you to type up a page, can you do it? And the same thing now, do you have basic AI skills? Can you sort out? Can you organize? Can you combine some thoughts and put it in? That's what AI does. So it's really good. Now, Tom Lambotte, who's another one of our clients, who says, do you even know what AI is about? Do you even have the right attitude of dealing with AI? And he has a course on mindset, AI mindset. Just what's the relationship that you're bringing? You're bringing a lot of knowledge. You're bringing a lot of skill. You have ambition. You're bringing that. But can you interact with this new technology? So that's basically what you want.
 
Gord Vickman:Yeah. And I mean, in the Shopify example, haven't corporations been doing this since the dawn of time before they hire someone instead of saying okay? So people freaked out. They're like, oh, no, the robots are coming. Toby won't hire anybody unless I can do the job. Okay, well, think back to 10 years ago. Take AI out and just put the words someone else. Before we hire this lady, can we just not give this work to someone else who's already here? And then prior to that, it's like, hey, before we hire this person to do this, can we just give this work to someone else? So then take out someone else who already works here and insert AI.
 
But it's interesting because, you know, let's say they do want to bring a new team member in. In their effort to prove that AI can't do the job, it's more than likely that they're going to find that they discover a way to have AI do that job. So maybe, maybe this is some kind of brilliant mind game that Toby Lütke is playing with his team and he's like, okay, well, try and figure out if AI can do this and try and prove or disprove that. Most of the time, they're probably going to find that the job, as of right now, can't be done entirely by AI, but eventually we may get there. Who knows?
 
By the way, I can type too, and there was a high school class, and I still remember, you brought back this very vivid memory for me. Mr. Gingrich was his name, and his claim to fame was he went to high school with Madonna. And with the high school in the 90s, we'd sit at these typewriters and he would just bark, A, A, A. And we'd all go A, A, A. And then S, S, S. And then you'd tap S, S, S. So this is an entire semester of this man. He may have been in the army because he had kind of like the drill sergeant voice, but he would just pound the letters into you.
 
And that's what it takes. The human brain all it takes. But this is muscle memory with enough repetition of saying T, T, T and then hitting it. Now, many decades later, I can type, and I still remember that. That's knowledge. I soaked that in as a teenager, and even now to this day, I can put a blindfold on. I know exactly where the W is. I don't even have to look at it. I don't know if that's a course that's being taught in schools these days.
 
Dan Sullivan:Just before we came on and started the podcast, I have a recording, so I write a book every quarter, a small book, you know, it's about 50 pages of actual print. We're moving through it, so I'm getting near the end, this is for this quarter, and it's called Always More Ambitious, that's the name of the book. They're all the same, they have an introduction, they have eight chapters, and they have a conclusion, and then the little bridge to how this relates to being in Strategic Coach programs. So all the concepts are geared to exploring the kind of thinking that we do, thinking about your thinking in Strategic Coach.
 
So I had about 40 minutes, and I have a recording session where I'm interviewed, and I use my tool called the Fast Filter, and I just went the best result, and I spent about five minutes on the best result. I put in probably 60, 70 words, And then I went to Perplexity, the AI program, and I said, now, what I want you to do is I want you to write a 110-word best result using my copy. And it did. And I said, now, break out the five individual ideas that are hit upon in the introduction and make them success criteria. And it did, knocked them out. And I said, okay. I put in a few more thoughts for clarifying it.
 
And then I said, now here's the thing. What I'd like you to do is to have a variety of sentences, short sentences, medium-sized sentences, and long sentences. And I want one complex sentence in the introduction that has three clauses to it. And then I also want you to add two incomplete but high-impact incomplete sentences. And it sounded just like Dan. I said, okay, now do the same thing for the five success criteria. There are 40 words each.
 
And I did that. I said, okay, now we go to the worst result. So let's take everything I've written, and I want you to write 110 words, negative. This is oppositional, this is pessimistic, this is where what I've written before is very confidence building, it's very clarifying. I want this to be that this is very pessimistic, this is very confusing, this is very complex. 110 words come out. And then I put it right into a Fast Filter. I took it from Perplexity and moved all the things to Perplexity. They all fit. They all made sense. They were all cohesive and everything else. And then I had the real contrast between the best result and worst result. And I looked at it, and it was done. And that was 35 minutes. I had a complete chapter.
 
I'll be interviewed on this. The transcript of the interview goes to the actual writer who writes it, and he'll create four pages, four complete pages of copy. And that's all it took. Now, if you measure back, that represents about 25 years of me being really, really good at outlining a really good chapter in the book. And I used to do this in pencil. I used to do this in pen. But I'm just doing what I've already done, but I've just included this productivity enabler called AI that does it for me. And it knows my voice. I would say it sounds like Dan. 90% sounds like Dan after my first try with it, and I've gotten better at that.
 
Gord Vickman:That's cool. So, Dan, just as we wrap here, let's pretend for a moment an entrepreneur approaches you in a workshop and they say, Dan, I've got a company. I've got a team. Obviously, I'm in the workshop. We're a bit scattered. We're a bit overwhelmed. We have these tools that we know we can work in. We have some resistance. People aren't sure what's going on. How do I get all this organized? Because you seem to have it figured out not only with the way you do tinkering and the way you do sort of goal-oriented AI usage, leaving everything else to the team. If you could sum that up and put a little bow on it, what advice would you give to that entrepreneur who doesn't quite know the next steps in terms of how to integrate AI into their company in a meaningful, thoughtful, and in a way that would not freak people out?
 
Dan Sullivan:Yeah. Well, first of all, what do you want your company to look three years from now? Okay. So you would say three years from now and you've put in exactly how you want the company operating. Okay. And especially what you want to say is, what do I want to be doing as the entrepreneur over the next three years? So at the end of three years, how have I improved as an entrepreneur as best result? Now, five success criteria that are measurable, you put those five in and then you put the opposite, you put the oppositional paragraph in, and you run them off and you talk to your team and say, now, who knows anything about AI here?
 
You know, and this is different from two years ago because it's been a tsunami of new capabilities coming into the market. And somebody says, well, I know how to do this. I know somebody how to do this and everything. I says, good, read it over, talk it over among yourselves and say, how are we going to move forward? And they come back and they say, this is what we should do, do this, and everything like that. And my leadership is simply telling people what I want.
 
I mean, when you came on as podcast manager, I didn't know anything about—I knew how to talk into a mic, you know.
 
Gord Vickman:You still do.
 
Dan Sullivan:I still do. I still do. I don't know if there's been any improvement, but it's good enough. So here's the thing. It's not my job to transform our company into a network of fiends, but I have a feeling that everybody's talking to everybody else out there. They're exploring things. They're tinkering, you know, for their own right. And I'm sure that some of the skills they've developed for their own purpose is going to be useful to us.
 
Gord Vickman:And with that, Dan, one line that we shared in a previous podcast was: At least for now, AI is your car wash, but you still got to put the wax on yourself.
 
Dan Sullivan:Yeah, and I think Grok was introduced today—this is Elon Musk saying. We had a discussion group every quarter. We have about a dozen Coach people, clients, and some team members. So we were last night and one of them had his Tesla X. He was leaving, he says, watch, he says, I'll just summon it. And he went to his iPhone and he put it in and it starts up, lights up, backs up perfectly. And he says, that's what I can do now. And I said, that's terrific. Okay, so I said, if I ever need anyone to drive me somewhere, you're the person.
 
Gord Vickman:Or not. The car.
 
Dan Sullivan:Yeah. So the big thing is to realize that the key to using any technology, but obviously this is a big jump in technological capability, your ability is to interface with other people who know AI and say what you want to achieve and let them figure it out.
 
Gord Vickman:And that's where we end. I got nothing to add. Words of wisdom. Dan, always a pleasure. Thanks so much.
 
Dan Sullivan:Thank you.