AI Readiness Project with My Luu & Amber Trivedi: Building the “Life GPS”

 Forget trying to keep up with ai. It's moving too fast. It's time to think differently about it. Welcome to the AI Readiness Project posted by Kyle Shaman and Anne Murphy. They're here to help you build the mindset to thrive in an AI driven world, and prepare for what's next.

Yo Ann Murphy are, are you ready to thrive in an AI driven world? I am. Absolutely. I mean. What choice do we have? That's a, that's a good point. I mean, listen, quite frankly, a lot of people are just kind of crossing their arms and, and they're like, I'm gonna be angry about this. I'm like, well kidding. Good luck.

That is a choice it seems. It seems like a stressful way to go.

I mean, it's crazy enough that we have to figure out what this stuff's gonna be anyway. I can't imagine just sitting on the sidelines and watching it happen. I mean, at what po Yeah, at at what point are you like, you know what, now's the moment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because there's not gonna be, there's not gonna be a moment where you're like, it's smooth sailing now.

Everybody's figured it all out, so I'm gonna happen. No. You know, but there, there does seem to be like a, a, a really palpable sense that. People think that, that they can stop it, right? Like if I, if I complain loudly enough, if, if, you know, if we get all, all the artists together and say, Hey, you've stolen our work, that, that it's gonna stop and it's not right.

And it's right. Like it's, there's a lot of energy being put into areas. Listen, I, the way these models were trained, there is a lot of problematic stuff in it. And it's not going away. Right. So it's like it's not going away. Even those two things, you know, you could work on how to make things better moving forward, but it, but I don't think, I, I don't think this genie's going back in the bottle, so absolutely fascinating times.

I, um, go ahead. You were, I was just gonna, no, I was gonna just say how ready are. How here you for AI this week? Speaking of, are you sitting there with your arms crossed, all angry and bitter? Are you, are you hopeful and optimistic? Where are you on the spectrum this week? Okay, so I think a lot of times. In life in general, it's easy to think that there's nothing you can do to make a, a difference, right?

Mm-hmm. Like recycling or politics like, uh, shucks, nothing I do can make a difference. But then you look back at some examples of when relatively small groups of vociferous people, um, with lots of energy behind them and, and a, a reason. For pushing back against the way things are or the way things always have been, where they have made a difference and I cracked one of those open with AI.

Over the past week, as you know, I've been paying attention to this whole thing with Delta Airlines coming out and saying, our pricing model, our AI driven, pri driven pricing model is, is called this. Pay. We're gonna charge you the most we think you will pay. That's the new model.

We have an algorithm. It's been trained. The algorithm is trained. We know who you're to find out how exactly much is the highest threshold of what you'll pay to do the thing, and that's the amount that we're gonna charge you. And, and they said that out loud. Oh yeah. It's everywhere. It's everywhere. I, I missed this little gem of.

Capitalism. Well, what's crazy is I feel like I had already gotten accustomed to surge pricing and Right. Which is, which is mind boggling unto itself. Yeah. Like, like grocery store surge pricing is just, that's bananas. But it's going to happen. And now here we are. Other level of we're gonna take every single scrap of information we have about you, which is probably signaling very like seemingly incongruous things.

For example, I travel for work. When I was an employee for 30 years, very different than when I travel with me, like me and my kids, right? Yeah, yeah, of course. So if you're taking the tickets that I've purchased and trying to deduce what's the highest amount you'll pay, are they looking to see if I, if I, what, credit card number I used, or I don't know, maybe.

Anyway, what I, when I started to feel pretty dismayed about it. I remembered that in the last couple of years, there've been a few examples of when people pushed back against major corporations and actually got them to change the whole, um, let the meat cereal thing where everybody boycotted General Mills.

Yep. Yep. The Budweiser thing, they lost 27 billion or million. Billion. It doesn't matter if it's a, a lot or a lot of money, when they, uh, they, they had, um, Dylan Mulvaney as a, uh, as a spokesperson. Their base, you know, like, you know, not trans rights folk. Protested made a big deal about it, and then the Trans Rights people said, that's cool.

We just won't, we won't consume Budweiser products anymore. Right, right, right. Yeah. So maybe consumers say, that's cool. We're just not gonna fly in Delta anymore. Yeah. Yeah. And then Southwest doesn't do it. And United doesn't do it. So we do have more power sometimes than we estimate, but it does feel pretty scary to have corporations going around saying, we're gonna charge you the max.

Yeah. That's kind of crazy. I there, there's another thing about ai. AI though, that, I mean, there's a couple of things. One is. Sort of big AI systems have been around for decades and decades and decades, and you know, the fact that they're saying, ah, we're gonna use ai and it might just be a marketing positioning thing, maybe people will think this is cool.

I don't know. What you and I experience certainly within our communities on a regular basis though, is not only can big corporations use this AI stuff to amplify whatever they want to do, good or bad individuals can too, and. As AI gets more and more capable each individual, like right now, I would argue that if you're decent with ai, you are probably the equivalent of somewhere between, I don't know, 10 and 50 employees.

If, if you're really applying AI to what you do, you've got a decent amount of, you know, capacity. And as we get into. Agents and, and things like that, you know, that number's gonna go up. So every individual is gonna have sort of the production power of like a, let's just call it a hundred person company.

Yes. And so individuals, you know, are, are gonna have a lot more agency moving forward. And I think it's, I think it's kind of fascinating, you know, in the workplace as well. Like, what's that mean? Like, you've got kids, your kids are just about to go to college, is that right? I have one in college and one who's starting his first year in a couple in a, in six weeks.

And, and like, I mean, where's your head with, like, what do, what do they, do you want them to go to college? Like, do you, what do, what do you want them to study? I know they've got their own ideas, but, but like, where's your head with value of college right now? It's all over the place because I was socialized by my parents who were first gen to of course go to college.

And so I was already, I like blinders on. That's my path period. End of discussion. And I do think that it was the right call, um, particularly because I just kept going and got my master's degree, which did open a lot of doors for me. Mm-hmm. Um. But with, and then I've worked in higher ed for 30 years, so I've seen the, how the sausage is made.

Right, right, right. And some of it is sublime. Some of it is just like, this is, I understand why we have higher, higher ed no matter what. And then there are other areas where I'm like, when is this bubble going to burst? You know? Yeah. And I actually, I actually think the. Charge the amount that's the max might burst the higher ed bubble because we've already been charging families.

So more, I mean the, the trillion, trillions and trillions of dollars that are now amassed in student loan debt. Yeah. Like now maybe the pricing would be what people can pay mm-hmm. Versus the, this weird, this weird calculation of what we think people can pay. So. As they go, as they, you know, enter into this chapter of their lives.

I, I have to over index the social component of being in college. Yeah. Right. Like, Luca arrived at San Diego States, started a Spanish language club. She's on the, you know, she, she's. A fourth author on the climate strategy for SDSU report, like those kind of things are so incredibly impactful. Um. Whether their academic education is going to, you know, change anything one way or the other?

I don't know. Well, they're, I don't know. They're gonna, they're gonna have instant access to all knowledge, right? Yeah. Ai, like, like, yeah. The, the requirement of higher ed to educate on, you know, the specific disciplines I think goes down. I agree. I think, I think. The, the social, if, if what higher ed can can provide is social engagement and critical thinking and adaptability and some of the attributes that in, in a world that's gonna be transforming probably significantly for the next 20 years.

Yep. I think the only thing that is gonna be a constant is that things are changing and you're gonna have to adapt to them. Right. And so I think being in community supports that and being able to be adaptable supports that. And if, if. If that's the direction that higher Ed goes, then I think it's got a really good shot.

Um, if it remains in its current state, I, I don't get it. I just don't get it. No. Well, and also like the kids who are in college right now, not to be like Debbie Downer, but when they graduate, it's gonna be a very grim job market. Where's the entry level? Where's the, like on entry level talking about they're gonna be automated.

It's gonna be grim the way that they are going to. You know, thrive beyond college is a hundred percent gonna be relationships. Yeah. That's all it's gonna be. Yeah. Um. I, I, I, on some days I have some empathy and some days I feel I feel pretty grumpy about the higher ed industrial complex, not responding fast enough to the changes in how pedagogy and evaluation should be taking place.

AI era ai. I, I, I know I told you about this, but I may have been, I may not have shared the video with you. My daughter's first day of class at San Diego State, and I'm not gonna say the faculty member's name, we were on. I, I was in something with you and, or maybe I was watching a video or something like that, and I texted her and I was like, Hey, how are your faculty talking about AI these first few days of school?

Right? She turns on her phone and videotapes her, her faculty member who's saying, if you don't have enough self-respect to not use a robot. For your homework. I don't have enough respect to grade your stuff. Wow. If you are gonna give your life over to an algorithm, then. You are not gonna be successful in your life.

And, and I didn't mind that she had a point of view on it, but I did mind that she was shaming the kids. Yep. And also the fact that she thought it was gonna work. She thought that would work. I mean, are you kidding me? Exactly. Well, yeah. We've got AI detectors now. It's, it's like you've got, you've got one of the most profound.

Uh, knowledge, you know, technologies in the history of humanity and, and the one place that should be exploring knowledge technology is higher ed. And they're like, no, no, that's okay. We've got detectors for that. Nobody's cheating on my watch. Yeah, just it's absolutely stunning. Um, well, yeah, yeah. So, so, so let me just jump in.

I want, I wanna get to our guests 'cause we have, this is our first show. We've got two guests. I'm super excited. Two guests. So, but, but here's the thing. This is. Quasi related that I think would be something good to pay attention to, um, moving forward. And that is this, um, when you go into do something in ai, how we've historically used computers is it can do, you can kind of do one thing at a time.

Like, I'm gonna go work on a spreadsheet, or I'm gonna go work on a song, or I'm gonna go work on writing this email. You tend to do one thing at a time. A really good creative exercise. That's a, that's, that's an exercise for sort of, um, expanding your critical thinking is once a week or once a day, go in with whatever the intention is.

I'm gonna write an email here and then. Go tangentially and just do something completely different. Let me take this same intention and instead of an email, let me write a song for that person. Or let me make a children's book of that idea. Or you know, let me go in and I'm gonna make this image, but now I'm gonna go write a poem about it.

Right? Start to exercise your ability to go cross disciplines, because I think people that can think laterally. Even though they might have been assigned a vertical task. Yep. They now start to think more like creative directors where they, you've got access to lots of different tools. Yep. And just experiment with pushing, you know, playing with something outside of what you know, the single thing that you intended to do.

Brilliant. 'cause it won't take you that much longer. And if you make something and it's totally useless, you're like, well that was fine. Whatever. I, you know. Great. But what you might end up doing is you generate something that goes, oh, there's actually maybe a better way to do this thing that I set out to do.

Or I, I could maybe do two of these things and it would be, you know, more effective. So, so that's just my thought about, about something. Love that to explore and pay, pay attention with. Well, okay, so what's, what I love about that is if, if by any chance people are. Sitting around going like, God, I would really love to try like VO three, but I just don't have any ideas.

Yeah, just take the boring email that you were already writing and put that Exactly. See if it becomes something interesting. Yeah, exactly. Have, have a lizard come out and deliver this same message. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Um, why not? I think, I think that what. Our guests are doing with their technology kind of rhymes with that exercise in a way where we're finding ways to discover about ourselves.

The multidisciplinary interests that we have, we're taking, we're taking those blinders off that mm-hmm. We all know now with when we were asked, when we were five, what do you wanna be when you grow up? What do you wanna be? What's your one thing? You're only gonna do the one thing, and the only one thing that you wanna, you're allowed to do when you grow up is that thing.

I just posted a, a video on TikTok about this, like growing up Gen X, you weren't even really allowed to like have any. Really serious hobbies. And if you did, you shouldn't tell anybody at work 'cause they would think that you were like disloyal to your employer by having any interest other than that workplace.

But we know it doesn't work. We know that we're lonely and we're tired and we're, you know, health, health issues and sitting is the new smoking and all this kind of stuff. And so they're taking those. Blinders off for people at an early point in their lives so that they can look at the breadth of opportunities that are out there.

And I think this is so cool. Yep. Yeah, exactly. Beautiful. Um, why don't you tell the good people about, she leads ai, then I'll talk about the salon and then we will bring up our guests of honor. So our mission at She Leads AI is to unite accomplished women to advance AI for global prosperity and. It sounds lofty, but we are doing it.

So one of the projects that we're involved with is our, um, AI educators in training are providing essentially AI 1 0 1 to women in low income countries who are currently on scholarships in their region. Um. University scholarships and the organization, you go realized the best way to future proof that investment that they'd made in these young women was to teach them ai.

Mm-hmm. So we collaborate with them on providing the. Um, training, but also now we're working with them to develop the curriculum for more advanced courses for these young women. There are 6,500 students and we're 500 in right now. Yeah. And we're gonna work our way through it. So those are the kind of things that we get to do.

That one is an example of just, this is what we want to do. This is from our hearts. It's not for money, it's. Because we believe that this is, this is the path forward. But we also have, uh, an, a consulting agency, our external facing academy. We have a membership community, we have a conference, um, we have a book club.

You know, it's, so, it's a really good opportunity just to be around other women who, who wanna make shit happen. Um, and also wanna do it in a very different way than we have early, you know, at the early days of our careers. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. I just, I am only chuckling because of, you know what started as a simple community, you've now got like these seven, seven wings, you know, down this wing, you know, but hey, that's, that's what you gotta do, right?

You know, you, well, here's my, here's my initial. That was, this is what we are, and now we're doing it. Beautiful. I love it. I love it. Well, in a similar vein, uh, the AI salon, uh, is a, is a community of people that are, you know, trying to mindfully. Um, learn about ai, teach each other about ai, explore it, um, figure out the impact on humans and the impact humans can have on ai.

'cause I think it actually goes both way. I think we can actually bend the trajectory of this technology mm-hmm. Towards the good, um, if, if, uh, if we have communities like ours that are putting humans at the center. Uh, of the relationship with, with ai, not, not leading with the tools, but leading with the people.

Um, I think that's incredibly important. I think it's also the key to making AI. Much more magical for you personally is put yourself at the center of the prompt. Right? As you feed your prompt, you feed it. Mm-hmm. Your ideas and your point of view and your opinions and your questions, and all of a sudden AI seems to come to life because it's amplifying your ideas.

Right? And so the people that are. Doing the most remarkable stuff with this are not treating AI like, oh, it's gonna do the work for me. They're like, this is the work I want to do and I want AI to amplify that for me. And that's, that's what the salon's all about. We've got a subscription, uh, area of the salon called the AI Salon Mastermind, which is for people that really wanna kind of step up their game and really get to wanna know one another better and support one another.

So super exciting and yeah, I love the salon. The people there are amazing. Me too. Me too. And one final, one final, uh, promo brought to you by the AI Readiness Project is brought to you by the AI Readiness Training Program, which is now live. So if you want to get your head around all things ai, whether it's business or creative, or safety and security, or ethical use of ai, um, we've put together a training program here that is.

Independent of the technology. So this is kind of evergreen training about just getting into an AI readiness mindset, which is about things like curiosity and adaptability and having taste and curation and, you know, creative thinking and critical thinking. Uh, it's all in there. It's really good content.

So if you haven't, uh, gone and checked that out, please do that now. And with that, I would love for us to bring up our special guests. So why don't we, hello? Hello. Welcome. Hello. How are you both? Wonderful. Doing well. Glad to here. I'm so excited to have you here. We're excited. We haven't talked. We have talked so much about.

AI and self identity and. Self-actualization and careers and wellbeing and, but we've never had guests or guests or guests who have brought all those things together in a company. So I am just so. Delighted that you're here and that we can learn about lifes spark labs and what, where you're going with it, and learn a little bit about you personally too.

Um, we have three questions that we ask all of our guests, but, but way before that, we would love for you to introduce yourselves, tell us what you're up to, and let the nice people, um, know where they can find you and where you hang out. Sure. Amber, you wanna Amazing? Yes. Yes. So we're super excited. Life Spark Labs is building the life GPS for people, which is really allowing everyone to make life altering decisions that align with their values, especially when they're in a time of crisis or overwhelm.

And our first product is for Gen Z. And we are helping them find their purpose, navigate their career path, and build the human skills that employers are looking for. Because we have heard so much, both from Gen Z, really struggling to, you know, figure out what is the next path as well as, you know, on the employer side, how are we integrating this clash of cultures and how do we actually get everyone to work well together?

Wow, great. Amazing. Amazing. Yes. Yes. Um, and Amber and I had the privilege to work together at a prior organization and she and I were just like, work sisters. We just hit it off. And so we both are passionate about different dimensions. Amber's focus on mental health and wellbeing and mine and career and, and young adult development and learning.

Um, so it was like a beautiful merge of our minds. So, um, I'm currently focused on what I call, like hiding the vegetables of the learning behind our video game. So we really wanna make the, you know, program fun and engaging, but also more importantly, how do we lead to behavior change? How do we lead to outcomes that are important to these young people?

How do I get clarity and confidence in the role that I wanna play in society? And that first job is so pivotal to a young person, so, oh my goodness. Yeah, really excited to. Unlock kind of being on the recruiting side, the HR side, the learning side, you know, for the past 15 years and really democratize that information to young people so they can make better decisions.

Mm-hmm. I, I, I have to ask one more question. Sorry, Kyle. Um, Amber, you alluded to a roadmap that I. If I'm reading between the lines, would include other demographics in the future. And I was wondering, can you share, like are there any in particular that you are excited about or where you think you all will fill some white space?

Yes. Yes. So, um, our. Core thesis right now is that, you know, career decisions and wellbeing need to be integrated because that is how, uh, all, all, um, mental health struggles really originate when you were faced with a situation that. Doesn't align with your values. Mm-hmm. So right now we thought if we start with the younger generation and help them find out where do they belong in society and feel good about that, that's our first use case.

But we can see this happening later on whenever they're at a transition point in a career. We can also see it happening in healthcare. Uh, how are you making decisions about family planning, fertility issues, or how about major financial life milestones? How do you go in making a decision, feeling good and not.

Feeling regret about that. Yeah. Wonderful. Yeah. Wow. Um, can you talk to me, either of you? My, my or Amber? Um, feel free to, to field this one. Um. We, we talked a little bit about, or Ann talked about, you know, her daughter's professor saying, you know, AI's evil and you should never use it. And I, I've seen kind of two reactions from young people right now.

One is AI's awesome and yeah, of course it's awesome and I'm just gonna use it. And then others are like, well, we were told that was bad, so I avoid it. So I'm just curious what, what you're seeing with young people. Like is there a balance to that? Is. Has ha has the educational, uh, institution sort of damaged a generation and made them afraid to even try it?

Like what, what are you seeing on that front? Yeah, I would say that it's important to clarify the, how, how AI is being used is the most critical way I would, uh, clarify that. Let's face it, the cat's out the bag. You can't stuff AI back in. So whether or not it's condoned or, or or facilitated at these institutions, it will be used.

And so it's a matter of how, and so there's different studies that show, there's kind of the extremes. If you think about if I use AI to answer this, um, you know, essay question without any sort of pre-work and generate me an, uh, an a multi-page paper, you know. Make it sound like I wrote it as a human and submit it.

That's kind of like one polar end. Mm-hmm. The other polar end is the young person seeing the assignment by the professor doing some ideation, some thinking with AI as their thought partner or even like brainstorming and outline on their own, and leveraging some of that critical thinking to have. A frame or a structured point of view or, or even that initial, um, dialogue on what is my point of view?

Help me weigh the pros and cons. Um, it's the way that young people are using ai. That's actually for me, really exciting because it's less the lemme copy, paste and cheat and it's more of, I wanna know how to be a better learner. I wanna know how to. Have this conversation with my professor, I wanna know what are the pros and cons point of view.

And so that's actually how young people are using ai. So it's actually a sign that, not that people are trying to cheat, it's rather that maybe the way that we're teaching is no longer suitable for effective learning design back. Dan, your point around pedagogies that are leveraging AI as part of the process rather than.

Saying that it's never going to exist or it shouldn't belong in the learning experience. Yeah. Right, right, right. Yeah. And it's all been tied to which, which you've seen with technology, new technology in, in many other places. I, I come from a background in genomics, so we saw a little bit about this. It's the fear of, wow, everything is changing from how we're used to doing things.

And it's that resistance to not wanna adopt it instead of being ready, as you say, with the readiness to embrace how it can actually improve things for us. Mm-hmm. And we as a society and a sys as a system. Need to get to the other side because this generation's getting left behind. If we're shoving them into old models while the technology changes, we need to give them the new paradigm that's gonna allow them to thrive.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm thinking about how so often, um, in my career I've seen where when somebody isn't a good fit for the organization, one of the things we do is as a parting gift, we give them a career coach. They do the, like, what color is your parachute? And intuitively I knew, wait a second, like this is backwards.

This conversation about what do you, you know, what color is your parachute? This person would've been a good fit for their job. 'cause they probably wouldn't have been in this current job. Yeah, yeah. And so. You know, being able to work through some of those things in an environment well, like a game, which I wanna hear about how it's gamified and what that, what that's like making it like a game rather than, I mean, I bought my stepdaughter, what color is your parachute?

When she was in the middle of making some big life choices, that thing never got cracked open. I, I know she never opened it. Yeah. You know, mom. Yeah, exactly. Thanks, stepmom. Awesome. Always a good book. Always a goodie book. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you think about like the complexity of that first career decision you are having to weigh, okay, well now I have to figure out who I am now.

Kind of, but I've been a part of this family for so long and I've kind of internalized. What I think I should be doing. And so having this first kind of independent thought is a very scary thing at a young person. And it can be overwhelming because the options feel endless. And so there's a lot of, um, decision making around, okay, well, let me do what I'm supposed to do, or let me do what I, I call the should, I should be a dot, dot, dot, dot.

Mm-hmm. Because of my. My societal upbringing, 'cause of my family, because of my culture, my background, all these shoulding reasons. Yes. But what if there was a play-based way to try out all the different careers in a game world? And you do it based on exploration and do it based on your natural curiosity.

And so the way that our game works is that you have an experience that, um. Share that helps you prompt like kind of a little bit more about you. What are you interested in, what are you curious about? When was the last time that you forgot about time, when was the last time that you were excited about something?

All these kind of like conversational questions that help serve us a little bit about who you are and get some recommendations about some games and, um, scenarios that you can play in game world that can help you uncover. Did I like that experience, or no, I did not like that experience. And not having to have the process of do I find someone in real life and find 'em on LinkedIn and I go talk to them and I have this reach out to them.

And so that whole process of discovering what career options are. Times it's limited based on your immediate circle of your family, your friends, but to have access, I think, Kyle, you talked about earlier, unlimited access to knowledge and career options at your and game world is really what the experience is like in our game.

Yeah, it's amazing. Is it fun? Is it a fun game? Yes, yes. Isn't it? It's definitely fun. This is what the, um, young people told us they wanted to find their purpose, and they struggled with motivation, procrastination. They needed to have something that. Felt like a lifestyle fun tool. So just to give you a sneak peek, um, it is set in this futuristic distant planet series A where our players' job is an echo retrieval specialist, and they need to upload these fragments of human consciousness into these humanoid robots.

But a mind and turmoil cannot be uploaded. So they need to first go in and make repairs. And as they are diving into those echoes into those people's minds, they are able to see it through their lens and simulate different experiences. And then we're also helping them translate, well, what does this mean for you and to the real world?

And this is what we heard loud and clear from people that. This self-discovery is hard work and it's intimidating, so they needed a place to warm up and start to feel comfortable with it, and then when they were ready practicing in this game world, they could start to translate it into real life, but they needed that on-ramp to be able to tackle it.

That's awesome. We just on, on a previous podcast, one of the things we talked about exploring for the week was when chat GPT or whatever, you know, gives you an output rather than just responding to it like, oh, you know, it's good or bad, or whatever. Like really take the time to understand if you don't like what it gave you.

Why don't you like it? Like really start to discover your personal point of view, your personal worldview, right? Your, your, your, your guiding compass, and it sounds like your game, that it, it allows them to discover that without being, if you just ask someone what's your worldview? What's your, your guiding,

yeah, exactly. Right? Yeah, exactly. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Who created the game? Who, who does? Who's the, whose vision is the game itself? I would say it's a group. We are, we're super fortunate to have this amazing, uh, talented team, including a writer that came from PBS and Amazon, and a game developer who was the first mobile God award developer.

So, uh, we all are bringing our different expertise, but uh, we have three people who are hardcore gamers and just are bringing, you know, their vision of what does fund mean into this important self-discovery process. Mm-hmm. Yeah, gamer, correct. Uh, that's the correct URL that I put on screen there. Yes.

Mm-hmm. Yes, yes. Yeah. Amber and I are at, uh, two of three, uh, fellow full-time co-founders. And so we have to give a huge shout out to Kaitlyn, who is our third co-founder. She's our technical co-founder, Uhhuh, and has really helped amplify, you know, all these ideas, all these concepts into rapid prototyping, building out, um, what the actual experience looks like on screen.

So Caitlyn Hebe is our technical co-founder as well. Awesome. And she's a Gen Z person herself, so she is deeply familiar with what this generation is facing and is really inspired to just build this, the platform that she wishes she had a couple years ago. Wow. That's so good. Really good. Um, how's founder life going for you?

Ooh. What a loaded question, Ann. Uh, I feel like I've a, a quote from the Marines. It's the hardest job I've ever loved, right? Yep. True. It's hard. So true. Yeah. It's funny if, if you've worked in, in any sort of corporate setting previously, you get to that moment where you're like, well, someone's gotta fix this, and you're like.

son. Um, she was born in May,: 2023

Okay. Just as incredible and amazing and who, and that I love as dearly baby and ab Absolutely. Your baby, right? Yeah, it's, it's three, two babies. And so I am fiercely loving both and both require so much love, attention, and care. And so some days I feel like, oh my gosh, I'm a terrible mom because I'm working until midnight and I didn't get to save bedtime, you know, with her, with my human daughter.

But then other days I'm also just like. Uh, super proud of. Mm-hmm. My company and being able to say that I am a founder because I would, I remember there was a day that I didn't think that I could be or I should be, or that I was allowed to be. Mm-hmm. And there were these stories I had told myself for so long, and being able to, if you envision like a Phoenix reborn, rise from the asses ashes and just feel that these things that were no longer serving me can now be gone.

And I, I feel that reflected both in. My fierce love for Madison and my fierce love for this company because both are mirrors of me. Yeah. And so I, I feel like they're, they're calibrating like who I am all the time. Um, so I feel very grateful being a founder and, and this privilege to be able to birth something into the world that I genuinely believe is gonna make it a better place and leave a legacy behind that is only gonna be better for Madison.

Wow. That's really quite beautiful. Yes. Yes. I'm a mom of three Gen Z kids. And so everything that we're doing is really how can we transform their future? And even though founder life is really hard, I think it's one of the best ways to model to them. You know, that that's the best ways my kids are gonna learn is mm-hmm.

By observation and being that role model to, uh, work hard for things that you desperately care about. Yes, yes. But also. Create space in your life for all the things you care about. You know, don't, don't put all your effort on one thing at the exclusion of others. Yes. And, um, try to model that balance for them.

Yeah. Yeah. My kids are, uh, in awe of the hard work that I do now. For the mission driven purpose that I do now, they, what they knew before was when I was employ employee, was that I was doing really good work and that I worked really hard, but they didn't see like a spark in me after, you know? Mm-hmm. I mean, when you're, I was nearing the end, you know, for like a while mm-hmm.

Where I was ready to go out on my own and, and they're like, you're just so happy. Wow. You know, and it's, it is amazing. It's the hardest job that I've ever loved. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Wouldn't have it any other way. Yeah. All right. Anne, do you wanna ask the first question? Oh, yes. We have to ask questions. I forgot.

Okay. We got questions. So, so we've got three questions that we ask all of our guests. So you can each, you can each take a, a, a stab at the questions. How's that sound? Yes. So what was the tipping point when you knew you needed to go all in on ai and what happened next?

I go first? Yeah. Yeah. So, um, you know, Maya and I were very passionate about solving this problem and there are several different ways we could have gone about it, which didn't necessarily require ai, uh, but I think it was just being exposed at different conferences. And I was just at the Gen AI Summit.

Uh, a couple weeks ago and realizing how fast things are moving, that if we did not go all in on AI to be truly AI native today mm-hmm. We would be obsolete within wow months. Right. And so if we truly wanted to make an impact and change the world, we had to go all in and leverage all that AI has to offer.

Yeah. Awesome. How about you Mai? I would say really quickly, from my point of view is from an early career, kind of like I think you talked about earlier, like early career professionals and how skills are being transformed as like the way to measure someone's capabilities and qualities for employment.

When I was seeing how fast from recruiting perspective AI was being leveraged as like key factors in decision making and how. Like young people don't stand a chance unless they leverage it themselves too, and think about that in their process. I was like, we gotta even the playing field. And so for me it was seeing how fast companies were adopting it and how not fast kind of early career professionals were leveraging it in their experience.

So yeah. Yep. Wow. Um, beautiful. Okay, so, um, question number two and my, we'll start with you since you're up on screen. In your area of expertise, what, what is a trend in AI that you're following and why? Yeah, I would say there's two. One is from a learning perspective. Being able to, I follow Dr. Philippa, uh, but she's wonderful from a learning perspective and being able to have learning created within days hours Yeah.

Versus weeks and months is so incredibly exciting, um, from an, from an, um, trend perspective. And the other is how emotionally intelligent AI is becoming. Mm-hmm. So as a coach, as a human resources leader, being able to. Not differentiate if I'm talking to an AI versus a human, is incredibly exciting and also incredibly scary in some ways.

Um, but that's what we need to be thinking about when it comes to what relationships look like, feel like. Yes. And how do we handle all of those experiences? Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. How about you, Emily? That's, you said it's the first time anyone has ever mentioned the emotionally intelligent, like the, the, the progress that we're making in that regard.

So quickly. Yeah. So quickly. Mm-hmm. And like even more empathetic than humans are, which is a, like, given the conditions because we as humans, we often center ourselves in the conversation and often we react is ex, you know, exert our biases. But AI doesn't do that. AI doesn't judge. SCO Fantic and you're always right.

Yes, you're always okay. You're always wonderful. Um, you know, it can be also from an empathy perspective, but if it's not actually me, human experience. Yeah, right. Yeah. I, early on, one of the, one of the women in the AI salon, I think her mother had passed, and I just checked in with her. I said, Hey, how are you doing?

And she goes, I've been, I've been using chat GPTA lot to, to deal with things. I'm like, oh, what's that experience like? She goes, it's a hell of a lot more compassionate to my family. Is, you know, she was like, like, it was like really helping because yeah, it, it didn't have all the crap, you know, it didn't have all those biases and family, you know.

You multiply it by 10, right? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Um, so Amber, how about you? I would say what's, what's your first paying attention to? Um, so mine dovetails a bit on mys in terms of emotionally intelligent ai, but really focusing on. AI and how this is really gonna explode the way we consume information.

Um, so at Lifes Spark Labs, we're looking at all the different agents that can really enhance what is our players' experience to, you know, creating the story for them to customizing their learning. Um, but I am so. I'm excited to see when can we get to the point of, okay, our user will be able to say, I want to experience this content in this way.

So maybe it's, the original content isn't in a game, but it's, it could be text, but then it will deliver it to us in a game or as a video. Um, and then how all of the agents are communicating with each other between the different businesses and what that's gonna mean from compliance and interoperability.

Um, so it's exciting times. Absolutely crazy. Yeah. So the agent component, would you envision ever having, um, like embodied AI as part of your company, or will it always be. Yeah. Will it always? Yeah. Will, will, will robots play a role in, in the work that you do down the road, do you think? Not, um, well, we, we haven't thought about like physical robots.

Mm-hmm. But certainly there are characters within our game already that are acting as the guide that, uh, particularly with that translation from what they learn in the game to real life. Yeah. And being that coach for them. So yes, we're doing that now. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Oh, the third one is me. Um, it's almost like I've never been on the, you know what now and I were talking, we were like, do we think three podcasts in one day?

Is, is a lot. My brain is like on fumes. So bear with me. Um, you know, we're the AI readiness project and we have the AI readiness program. What does AI readiness mean to you? Amber? To me it is all about adaptability and um, you know, just people just getting in and playing and not being afraid of not knowing how to do it.

And you know, I mentioned earlier, I, I come from a world of genomics and it was similar where. You know, when I was in graduate school, they weren't teaching us content. 'cause the content and the science was moving so fast. They were teaching us how to learn. Mm-hmm. And I think that's exactly what we should be doing with AI today, is understanding how we should be.

Learning and absorbing new information in ways that we never could before. Yeah. Yeah. Learning how to learn. Wow. What, like what a boost in learning how to learn. I didn't know I could learn new things. Turns out I can not only learn new things like AI will help me learn new things about ai. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I guess for me, I kind of take it from a, so my background is in organizational psychology, so I take it from kind of a literal like change readiness perspective. Mm-hmm. And being able to. Kind of understand how we can bring others along on the journey. So change is actually kind of like a big bell curve.

If you think about it as a society, as a group, as an organization, you have like kind of your girly adopters that are willing to tolerate discomfort first, that are willing to try it first. But the majority of us are kind of like the, we're gonna wait and see. And so I would challenge all of us to think about like readiness as.

Kind of figuring out like where are you on that spectrum and you know, noticing that and when you realize where you are, how do you help others along that are following suit or like that are in behind you in the change curve because. We, I think you, you started out earlier, um, before we told us about like, when you're level four, you go back and help level three.

Um, because like we need to be able to leverage, leverage this together mm-hmm. Um, together as a society. Um, because I do think in a lot of ways we kind of miss the mark with the internet. We miss the mark with social media and so let's do it right and do this, you know, for all of us in a way that actually helps make society better.

And doesn't leave folks behind. And so I think of readiness as a personal readiness of like, where am I in adopting something that's new in my life and where can I do, uh, my part to help bring others along on this journey, even if it's just one other person. Yes. Yeah, I think that's huge, huge, huge in the, in the ai, uh, in the AI salon, you know, we call that generously lead.

Um, or, or we say learn out loud, which is, you know, mm-hmm. As you figure this stuff out, you know, tell people about it, you know. Tell 'em on LinkedIn and tell 'em at the dinner party and be that annoying person that's like, you know, Kyle, we don't wanna hear about AI anymore. That's, you wanna hear something cool.

And then I talk about ai, um, be that, be that person because it, you know, it helps you with your learning, but it also, you know, it will bring, bring someone else along and, and maybe help them be more ready. Mm-hmm. So, uh, maybe a little lightning round from, with two of you, what would you advise somebody who hasn't gotten off the sidelines yet?

I would say just jump in and practice. Get into a daily habit of talking to your AI companions and just get used to what they tell you. So you know, you start feeling more comfortable. Yeah, I like that too. Find a friend, find a friend, find a buddy. Like just partner with somebody. Like either you go through that.

Kind of, um, new experience together, or you go with someone that's already done it and you follow, have them. As you're kind of confidant, as you go through this experience, find a buddy. It's way better to do it with someone else than by yourself. Absolutely. So, so, and even like, you know, I have this whole community and I'm learning so much alongside, but I've got a couple of people who, when I discover something, like I'm immediately texting them, I'm immediately sending them a screenshot and going, my mind is blown right now.

What are you. Where's your head at with this? Because I think it's too much in some cases. Mm-hmm. To do this all alone. I don't wanna be figuring out some of these existential things in a vacuum all by myself. Yeah. I wanna be able to be in conversation and, and like give one another compassion and empathy while we learn and while we adjust to things that we never thought we could have ever, ever imagined.

Good, bad, and otherwise, it's asking a lot of us right now. Um, it helps to have a buddy. Totally. Absolutely. The world's problems are way too complex to be solved by a single person or single institution. Yes, yes. Mm-hmm. Indeed. Better to be solved by three women founders who do the, who have the impact of at least 30.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. Agents, yeah. Congratulations on, on your business and, and, you know, make making a new baby, uh, together. It, it is, uh. It's a remarkable thing, you know, getting a business off the ground is no small feat and, uh, what, what you're up to sounds absolutely incredible. So good luck with where do people find you?

How do they, how do they invest in, in life? Spark Labs, how do they become a customer? Talk to us a little bit about that so people can find you. Yes, so visit us@lifessparklabs.com and we are in testing our prototype. We'll have our product ready by the end of the year so they can join our wait list by just clicking the join the wait list button.

And then if they're interested in play testing and being the first to play our game, we'll also be sending invitations for to people on our wait list. Terrific. Wonderful. Well, I'm gonna go over there and sign up right away. Fantastic. Well, thank you both so much for being here. Really a pleasure. Thanks.

Our first double guest, that's so exciting. It's great to have you both. We're trailblazers. Trailblazers. Trailblazers. That's what you are. Thank you both. Yes, thank you so much. Appreciate. Bye. Let's chat. Okay.