[Music] hi Shannon Waller here and welcome to inside strategic coach with Dan Sullivan Dan prior to us turning recording on today we were talking about some of the impact of AI and some of the forecasts that people are making about human creativity going down and things like that and you made a comment that I found intriguing that I thought would be a good conversation topic and you said people who aren't creative imitate creativity what does that mean what does that look like I'm super curious first of all I want to pay some due respect to imitation here and that is that the two Timeless ways of learning in this world and improving yourself is observing other people's performance that you admire and then imitate that yeah and the second one is repetition you know that we learn things by repeating them over and over again but I would say that we're social creatures so somewhere in the past the human species pulled off something that none of the other species did certainly not to the degree that we do it and that is that we use our brains to access the uniqueness of other people's brains there are some animals we call them smart animals because they seem to not just be the way that they were patterned by their genes but they have the ability to spot other behavior and sort of learn you know dogs being one of them and I think dogs are you know the closest Companion Animal to humans probably more so than any other species and we know that there's marine life especially The Dolphin Family killer whales are purposes I mean they're purposes and they end up as entertainers you know because they learn new things and it's very entertaining for people to be in the presence of animals that learn we like things that learn you know and we have technology now you know the new AI artificial intelligence that's now available for individuals to work with you know where before it was big corporations or big government had artificial intelligence but now it's available to individuals and uh I think the thing about this is that imitation whether we admit to it or not we all imitate other people's performance that we ourselves wish we had that quality we wish we had the level of excellence and really the uniqueness but the interesting thing about it is that if you're a creative person and you come across someone who's more creative to you you do imitate but at a certain point you make it your own and you're no longer imitating you've created your own form of imitation and I think what the imitating person does and for how long they do it tells you whether they're just an imitator or whether they're creative o I love that it makes me think of coaching Dan like I learned to coach from watching you the other coaches as well but at some point I'm not the same as you right I've created my own style and structure and flow and perception all the things it really works for me as have all the other coaches as well well there's a point about that I know that the coaches people who are going big people who are already coach strategic coach associate coaches and yourself and Kathy Davis and you know Christy Chambers and Moren solivan you know they imitate me you know and they watch me but I never watched them true people say why have you never seen any of your coach's coach because when they're the coach in a workshop I don't want them to think about how I did it I want them to be themselves and respond to it because I don't want imitators I don't want imitators no I want creative people one of the people I'd been very influenced by by his performance not another coach it was a basketball player Larry Bird and I just admired how he seemed to have a sense of what every one of his other teammates were doing most players are out there you know what am I doing and he was out there saying what are we doing and how do I make them better I didn't even make the basketball team when I was in high school team I don't have basketball skills but I have an appreciation for someone else's skills that I can translate over and put them into my world so I'm at the point now with the free zone where I've made everybody else in the room into a coach into a creative coach just through the structures I've created I think I'm learning more from them than they're learning from me yeah that's there's a player who's from Serbia and he was the most valuable player in the Championship Finals their team W his name is jokic Nicola jokic and quite frankly I think he's the greatest basketball player I've ever seen in my life and he's like 6'1 and he's 280 lb and he can shoot and he can rebound but he's a phenomenal passer and they say you seem to have an approach to the game and he says either I'm open to score or one of my teammates is open to score if I'm not open I find the teammate who is open to score and there's something I love about that so he's playing the whole game of basketball he's not just playing his part of the basketball he's playing the whole team and I love that you know but I've translated it into my own you know where my unique abilities I've taken the pattern that I see in him and I've translated it yeah I mean they're probably the most talked about political individual of my life time where the people who love him talk about him and the people who hate him is Donald Trump and Donald Trump I think was the owner of worldwide wrestling before he became a politician and he noticed that the Dynamics of worldwide wrestling which is all rigged and rehearsed by the way always had the hero and the villain I always had the hero and he took that model and when he entered politics he just inserted the model on the political scene and he was the hero to all the people that the villains were oppressing and I said what a neat thing he's turned politics I mean politics is usually very boring even the people who hate him can't stop watching him entertainment yeah he obviously was imitating something that he picked up but he turned it into his own creative form and they some people you know not every strategic coach client votes the same way that I do and they says I can't stand the guy I says yeah but you can't stop watching him can you yeah and I said I love him and they said why do you love him I said well he's a thug he says he's a thug why do you like him I said he's our Thug the other side are all thugs we never had our Thug so we've got our Thug you know and not only that but he's an entertaining Thug there you go yeah and I think about creative people they can be polarizing there's musicians that I totally respect their musicianship and their creativity and they're not people I want to listen to oh right but I respect their creative take on whatever it is that they're doing yeah but I take my inspiration from all walks of life and historically I mean I've got lots of Heroes from history Johan Sebastian Bach Shakespeare is you can see the structure to what they do but they've gone Way Beyond the structure of creating Shakespeare was just created some of the most amazing fictional Personalities in the history of the world Hamlet AOW Thal staff he creates all these amazing personalities and the personalities were bigger than the place that they were in Johan Sebastian Bach had this thing of counter puntal he would have two opposite tunes that were in harmony with each other I said yeah it's like the strategy Circle you know you take a vision and you have the obstacles and you take the vision on the obstacles and they create a new capability I said I love that you know so imitation might be where we start but it's not where you want to end up and it's interesting Dan because there are people apparently I don't know any but there are people who are brilliant painters and they can take a masterpiece and they can imitate it like almost exactly and you think oh my gosh why don't they take that instead of trying to duplicate something and rip it off why don't they create their own but they're missing that they're not creative they're not creative so that's one of the examples that yeah they don't make it their own they don't make it their own yeah I mean it's kind of like I think I have it right here but all grapefruit trees start as orange trees oh I didn't know that they are graphs they have a orange tree starting and they take a graph and they graft it on and because the root structure of orange trees is stronger than the root structure for grapefruit trees oh okay that's interesting I may have it Ron here but I'm going after the principle here and what they've done so real creativity is actually a grafting that you start with the unique ability you see someone else's unique ability learn how they're unique and you take some of their principles and you graft it onto your own unique ability and that creates something new yeah and that creates something brand new the combination of their uniqueness and your uniqueness creates something totally new awesome so it's imitation as inspiration yeah but what happens if they're just imitators right well then they're thieves when you have someone who's technically a great painter and and they take someone who's a great artist and they produce the it kind of looks like it I mean I have one in my living room it's a matis painting and the painting was done by someone else as matis would do it right but I don't say I have a Matisse I just say I've got a reproduction of a matis thing but people who imitate but aren't creative are counterfeits because they're stealing right they're a counterfeit Bill trying to pass them off as a actual bill and I can tell with people who have big reputations they're big celebrities but they're imitators they're not creative H interesting you can tell they stay within the framework of what they've imitated it seems like they would be smart enough Dan to come up with some of their own ideas are they just not courageous enough to do it or why is that they're lacking a chip they just don't have the creativity see they want to be admired like the real deal right they want to pass himself off as a real deal but they're not the real deal and they won't take that risk yeah interesting with artificial intelligence and the writing capabilities of chat GPT and all the different versions we see of it is this going to exacerbate made the distinction between creative and imitators it remains to be seen because I think we're so new into it I mean it's probably been six months since chat GPT came out and I think it's all in flux right now I mean people are using it in every which way and there doesn't seem to be any Center to this activity whatsoever for myself I've looked at everything and I said there's one question that keeps me simple in all the complexity and the question is how does this get me to my next 20% productivity gain the only thing I'm interested in is how does artificial intelligence get me to our and my personal 20% and then the company's 20% increase and that's the only thing I'm interested in I mean people come into workshops people are really into AI look what I can do I can take someone else and I can take what you're thinking is and I can take someone else and their voice and I can do that that this does not increase my productivity right so I've handled AI for the rest of my life it's always where's the next 20% increase in productivity I don't care about anything else I love that it's interesting Dan there was an example not that long ago where I'm very clear that Chad GPT to use one version of AI is really good at language it has an excellent vocabul and it's pattern recognition it's really good at that but what it's missing is the ideas and if you don't put in compelling ideas you get a lot of well-written meaningless information yeah it's flat what I look for is energy and it doesn't have any energy right it's kind of cool it's kind of cute you know it's kind of clever but there's no energy it's like the difference between clever and intelligence yeah really creative humans have an energy to them that is as unique to them as their capability they just have this energy you can just feel the energy and it's an active energy it's not a captured energy but I've seen things and they're very clever you know they have all sorts of apps you know or you just put in the prompts and you say I want you to take these 10 paragraphs and write them as William Shakespeare would write them with a certain rhyme sense and everything like that and you know 15 seconds later it comes out but there's no Shakespeare there certainly not there's no Shakespeare there I mean there's no energy I think we'll respond to it without our knowing it or without actually being trained to do it you're going to just say no like there's this thing where you can create totally human looking faces and when heish m Donald our cartoonist for our quarterly books he just creates 15 different human faces and then he cartoons from those faces and the reason he does this he doesn't want to cartoon from any particular human being face I says can you show me the face and he showed me the faces and there was no energy in any of the faces it's like we've been to presentations where they have a animated not real person doing the introductions and I said you know when I talk to men they say this always reminds me of my first wife kind of Naggy just a slight snarky attitude you know and everything else and I said I don't think this is a jump forward I think this is a jump back that's interesting yeah because I know exactly the example you're talking about there's something missing well there are one trick pony you know and if you deviate from the script they're off in the weeds they can't at all yeah I mean humans throughout history have gotten good at detecting counterfeits and this it's counterfeit it's counterfeit yeah yeah it's counterfeit it has no value it could be entertaining but it's entertaining the first time but it's not entertaining the second time real creativity is entertaining continually imitation it's like teaching a dog how to do card tricks they're not very good at it but you're amazed that they can do it at all the first time yeah after that you're like why are you wasting your time yeah oh my goodness I mean first of all a couple things I've gotten out of this conversation is that you know imitation is actually how we learn repetition is how we learn but it's important to kind of Riff Off into our own directions and make it our own but the other point Dan and if you just think about a regular conversation you don't always know where it's going to go and it's that human intelligence ability to respond my daughter called up a bank to resolve an issue and AI was quite clearly talking to her she goes oh it was AI it was so frustrating kept giving me my balance and what I finally wanted was a human it couldn't answer the questions the way she was asking it and it will get smarter finally she Sayes can I talk to a person and then she got p through who was lovely the system was Lex useless other than finally getting her to where she one way of making humans look better is to have the first interaction be with AI 100% so one of the things I'm getting out of this conversation is how innately creative human beings are and I think we're not I mean every person is completely unique yeah but AI is this bright shiny object that looks like it can do all the things and we're completely not appreciating the fact that one single conversation even with an institution like a bank you know it requires that spontaneous not predictable conversational capability to solve a problem and that's something that AI will ever be able to do sure as heck ain't there yet yeah you know probably an old technology that took the World by storm when it was created was mirrors you know actually fairly accurate mirrors flat surface and it just reflected back actually where the person was and what their face was and I think that the craze about mirrors was as much as we're seeing the craze with GPT it's a mirror of a certain sense we're looking into it and it's taking this back but I can tell almost immediately when any written communication or spoken communication to me is AI someone reading something you know and I said this is AI isn't it you didn't actually put any thought into this did you I don't get your personality I don't get who you are from this this is AI what I've noticed is that it's changed my writing because I go out of my way to be so personal with the person I'm writing to there are things that I know about this person that aren't written down everything else and I always refer to these things and I've noticed my whole personal communication has become much more specific and very idiosyncratic you know I've stopped using proper grammar like Peter Zion does he'll have a phrase like you know he wants to make a point and the phras is all the way to the end and he'll say all period the period way period and he totally communicates what it means by not using proper grammar and proper sentence structure and everything else and I think really creative people in a world of AI imitation how AI counterfeiting are going to be wildly more creative just to differentiate themselves from the robots I think so too and I think it will shine a spotlight on human intelligence human creativity all of that original Works original thoughts become actually much more valued and much more appreciated because of the volume I think there's going to be some interesting court cases we're doing a lot of work with the patent Bureau and I think that there's going to be new differentiations fine distinctions being made out of this that they say this is a derivative you know this is not the real thing so I think our senses our human intelligence is going to jump up a notch and being able to differentiate between authentic and derivative and real and counterfeit you know I I just think we're going to get smarter as a result of this but not in the way they're saying we're going to get smarter oo yes our thinking is going to get smarter because of the machine intelligence and that's what I'm seeing already because I only like real you me both I only like real and my ability to spot real from fake is much sharper with each passing decade you know my senses and my filters are like lot sharper at almost 80 than they were at 70 which were more than when they were 60 I don't think I'm unique in this I think everybody as they go along we have a name for it it's called wisdom yep I smell a fake Gord Vickman who's our Podcast manager here he was saying that he screens a lot of people who want to have podcast with me or someone else in coach and he says I can tell there's something off about it and if there's anything off I just say no we can't do that and I think he's just expressing that his senses of being able to tell a real deal from a counterfeit or they're trying to scam us in some way they're trying to attach our name to their show so that their show can have the stature that they see that we have even with all the internet scams someone tried to rent us a house they didn't own which was interesting I call it Spidey senses my Spidey senses are just little inconsistencies little things that didn't didn't make sense and I think we'll be trusting our instincts on that I mean human beings are really good at surviving threats this is how we got this far if we see something it's not real I think we'll get more capable and more finely tuned in that discernment yeah so another thing I'm taking away is this is a new bright shiny object mirror that's reflecting back at us but really lean into that human lean into the creativity create your own stuff don't borrow don't steal you know there's lots of new opportunities for new things to be created regardless so this is fasing conversation as always thank you Dan thank you shair