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I must say at the outset that my time with Glenn Gow on this episode was incredibly enjoyable and I hope you find it the same. I love to learn as I have said to you many times and today I learned a lot.
Glenn hails from Florida. He obtained colleges degrees in business and then spent much time in marketing and even some in sales. He worked with many large companies and especially with their CEOs.
A few years ago he decided to help C suite level people by becoming a CEO coach where he could impart the many of years of experience he gained in the technology world.
Glenn is absolutely a visionary in many ways. He and I talk a great deal about AI. I love Glenn’s observations as he explains that AI is a tool, not a threat. Listen in and hear his reasoning.
About the Guest:
Glenn Gow is a CEO Coach, a Keynote Speaker on AI, and a Board Member
The implications of AI for every single business are shocking. We’re all rethinking how we work, and how we can transform our offerings with the power of AI. It’s incredibly exciting, and a little terrifying on how to keep up.
Glenn Gow is a CEO Coach, a Keynote Speaker on AI, and a Board Member. Glenn understands exactly what we, as leaders, need to harness this technology. Glenn will be helping us understand the implications for business, and how to harness this technology. You will walk away with an arsenal of information.
Glenn is a sought-after speaker on AI and has spoken at The Wall Street Journal AI Conference, the National Association of Corporate Directors, MIT/Stanford Venture Lab, Harvard Business School, The Private Directors Association, Silicon Valley Directors Exchange, Financial Executives Networking Group, The Entrepreneur’s Organization, and the Northern California Venture Capital Association.
He writes an AI column for Forbes and has been published in Directors & Boards, Directorship (NACD), CIO Magazine, Inc. Magazine, and InfoWorld. As a CEO for 25 years, he advised numerous leading tech companies including Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and many more.
Speaker Reel: https://bit.ly/SpeakerGlenn
Ways to connect with Glenn:
LinksWebsite: https://www.glenngow.com Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/glenngow
About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.
Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children’s Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association’s 2012 Hero Dog Awards.
https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/
accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/
https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/
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Transcription Notes
Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us. Michael Hingson ** 01:21 Well, hi there and welcome to another episode of unstoppable mindset. I am your host, Mike Hingson. And our guest today is Glenn Gow. And Glenn is a very knowledgeable soul regarding artificial intelligence. He is a board member he speaks on AI he is a coach. And I don't know what else and when he first joined this afternoon, I pulled an old joke that maybe a lot of you wouldn't know. We used to on television, watch commercials for Memorex tape, which was really good stuff. And when he came on, I said, the question we got to ask is, are we live? Or are we Memorex? Because that's a, a thing that Memorex did. And their point was, you couldn't tell the difference. I never bought that, though, because I could tell the difference. But the Max was pretty good, wasn't Glenn Gow ** 02:11 it? It was, it was pretty good. Michael Hingson ** 02:14 I actually still have some blank Memorex cassettes. So Oh, there you go. You're a collector. So Glenn, welcome to unstoppable mindset. We're really glad you're here. Really happy Glenn Gow ** 02:25 to be here, Michael. And thank you for the introduction. And I'm looking forward to the conversation. Michael Hingson ** 02:30 And also Glenn is a board member will have to find out about that along the way as well. And that's board is in being on a board not being board. But you know what? So tell us a little about the the early Glenn growing up and all that sort of stuff? Glenn Gow ** 02:45 Well, I grew up in a wonderful family that supported learning, Michael. And so everything we did was about becoming a little bit better than the way we were, whether it was being happier in life or being more productive or making better friends. And we were always thinking about how can we just be a little bit better. And the wonderful thing about that, is that turns you into a learning machine on any topic. So whether I'm coaching my CEOs, or I'm studying AI, I'm very, very interested in learning and becoming better. And so it's something that I learned at a very early age and it's become part of who I am. Michael Hingson ** 03:31 Did you grow up in California? I grew up in Florida and Florida. Okay. Laura Glenn Gow ** 03:39 eventually went to business school at Harvard. And then came out to California. Ah, Michael Hingson ** 03:46 yeah, as we were talking about earlier, can't beat the weather. No, no. I think the absolute best weather is San Diego but you know, California in general has great weather. Glenn Gow ** 04:01 I feel very spoiled, spoiled where I am in Northern California right now. So I have no complaints. We Michael Hingson ** 04:06 lived in Novato for several for 12 years and in an area called Bell marine keys which was a community that was developed in the early 1970s They wanted to make it look like Venice, Italy. So every house is on a lagoon or a channel in between lagoons and either they have docks or their dock ready and it was so nice to be there. That sounds really nice. Yeah, we're far enough away from like highway 101 that you could hear it if you really worked at it at night and it were quiet no wind, but mostly it was just a nice wonderful community and we loved it a lot. Fantastic. So you you grew up in Florida and all that and really devoted your your life to learning so you got a business degree and then where did you go from from Harvard and getting I assume about Bachelor's in business? Glenn Gow ** 05:02 A master's in business? Okay, yeah. And then the most important part of my history was I worked for a startup immediately after business school, which quickly failed, happens. And then well, that's an important very important learning process. And then lucky enough to work at Oracle when it was a relatively small company. And I worked, I was the first person in the marketing function within sales. In other words, I was doing both sales and marketing. And that was an incredible experience, as the company grew from fairly small to a billion dollars in revenue, which is tiny by, by today's standards, yeah. And then I stepped out to start my own company, where we focused on helping technology companies on marketing strategy. And so we had the opportunity to work with Apple, to work with Facebook, and Google, and Microsoft, and Oracle, and IBM and every large technology company. I did that for 25 years as a CEO. Now, importantly, Michael, during that time, I had a coach for 17 years. This was my co coach. And I knew a lot about business. And my co coach, interestingly enough, didn't really know all that much about business. But she did know something that I didn't know, which was the mind of the CEO, and the mental game, and how to become an even better CEO. So I take all of that experience, having run a company, and having been coach for so long. And I use that every day now. So I was lucky enough to be recruited into venture capital, after I ran the marketing consultancy. And that's when I started coaching CEOs, the CEOs of our portfolio companies, and having been through a startup that had failed before I could truly empathize with the life of CEOs. And then I took all of that coaching and business knowledge. And I found that CEOs really got value out of our conversations. So much so that I fell in love with that. And I've been doing that full time now for three years. Because a lot Michael Hingson ** 07:28 of them, although they were CEOs, got into it, for whatever reason, but weren't necessarily as knowledgeable as they needed to be about being a CEO. Glenn Gow ** 07:39 Exactly right. And as long as Michael, as long as they have that mindset, this is how I described it, the mindset is that every great athlete has a coach, and some of them have many coaches. And you ask yourself, Why does someone who's at the top of their game, have a coach, it's because it coach helps them become even better. And if you have that mentality, as a CEO, you are going to improve every day, if you put your mind into that process of improvement, and that's what I'm here to do with my CEOs? Michael Hingson ** 08:14 And do you still have a coach, Glenn Gow ** 08:18 I do not currently have a coach, I am looking for a coach. I have advisors. But here's something that's interesting, that you made me think about Michael, is that I coached 20 CEOs. That's about as many as I want to coach. And I learned something from them every time I coach them. Mm hmm. And so I want to share those best practices with my other CEOs. So I feel like even though I don't have a coach working directly with me, not right now. I'm learning every day through my interactions with my CEOs. And I'm able to share that information with all of them on what best practices I just heard about. Michael Hingson ** 09:03 Yeah. And I would think that the best CEOs are people who, at least in part, adopt a learning mindset, because if you think you know it all, you'll sometime and maybe sometime soon, discover it isn't really that way. Glenn Gow ** 09:20 Let me give you a statistic that I discovered when I was in venture capital. roughly 60% of CEOs get fired within a five year period in the venture backed world, and you ask yourself, why did they get fired? The simple answer is they're not growing the company fast enough. But then you say, why is the CEO not growing the company fast enough? It's because they are not growing themselves fast enough. In other words, when they became the CEO and the venture capitalists put money into them, they were probably the perfect person for that company at that time at that size. But as the company negros takes on new employees, new customers, new investors, it requires that the CEO have new skill sets, and improve skill sets in order to succeed with this company that's transforming. I call it scaling the CEO. Right? And that's what I do. I help the CEO become even better. Michael Hingson ** 10:24 And that's an important thing to occur if you're dealing with people who are supposed to be the leaders of companies and the people who are either the visionaries for the company, or somehow promote and create whatever is necessary to create the visioning for the company. Glenn Gow ** 10:46 That's right. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Michael Hingson ** 10:49 Yeah. And, you know, I, I have said several times on this podcast that if I'm not learning at least as much as anybody else, listening to this podcast on any given episode, that I'm not doing my job, well, and I have been so value in my mindset of being able to learn from everyone who's been on board, it's in who's come on as guests. It's great. It's a lot of fun. And I get to learn a lot. And I can't complain about that a bit. Well, it's Glenn Gow ** 11:18 a win win win. Michael Hingson ** 11:19 It is, as far as I'm concerned, and I enjoy doing it. It's, it's so much fun. Well, so you've you've been doing the coaching process for at least a few years, have you become certified as a coach? Or do you just do it or what? Glenn Gow ** 11:35 I am not certified, nor am I ever going to get certified. I look at my 17 years of training from my personal coach. As as as the as the experience of learning through that I don't, I don't, gosh, I just feel lucky to have had that experience. And don't feel like there's any value. For me personally, writing certification isn't good. But for me personally, it just doesn't make any sense. Well, Michael Hingson ** 12:03 and I agree, I've, I've thought about that. Some people have suggested that I should explore doing more in the coaching world. And one of the ways I think that I could add value in the coaching world today is that is we have an aging population and a younger population dealing with an aging population. We don't have any really substantive all around coaches dealing with blindness and low vision, who can guide people so it is it is something that I've been looking at and seriously thinking about happening. I think it would be a fun thing. And I think it would be a valuable thing if we can give good suggestions to people and help them deal with something that we shouldn't have to deal with. But we but we do in the shouldn't have to is that society rose up and learns that blindness is a big, severe, serious problem. And the reality is, it's not blindness, it's people's attitudes about blindness, because people who happen to be blind or low vision, can do the same things other people just we may not do it the same way. And we also tend to make our world because there are a whole lot more sighted people than blind people, we make our world side oriented. But that still doesn't mean that blindness is the problem. Glenn Gow ** 13:26 That's right. That's right. And that made me think, Michael for a moment about AI and and the current some of the current interfaces with AI. And I think there's an incredible opportunity for people to interact with AI purely on a voice basis. Yeah. Michael Hingson ** 13:46 Well, and that's true, although we type as well. But the the issue is really the, the having the input that AI gets from wherever it gets and guide it to provide good output and good ways to help. Exactly. Yeah, which is what AI is all about. What got you started in really thinking about and becoming more of a mentor and proponent of AI? Glenn Gow ** 14:18 Well, first of all, I described myself this way, I'm a I'm an expert in AI at a niche, which is the sea level. So I'm an expert in talking about AI to to CEOs and the board. So I'm not going to talk about the technology. I'm gonna talk about the implications of the technology, right? Started, Michael was one of the great things about working in venture capital is that you can predict the future. You can predict the future because it's walking in the door every day in the guise of entrepreneurs who are telling you all the trends that are coming together and how they're going to take advantage of those trends. And when you see that 20th person walking In the door and talk to you about AI before it's being used anywhere, you can say I see something coming in our direction. And that's when I dove in. And that's when I said, I need to deeply understand the implications of what's happening here. And so I got very, very excited about it. Because, look, we all live through technology innovations. But AI is different from every other technology innovation. And the reason it's different is that it learns. And sometimes it learns all by itself. What does that mean? What does that mean is it means that it creates a flywheel effect. If it starts learning about your customers and your market and your products. And you feed it more data, it gets smarter all by itself. And that flywheel gets spinning and you progress, you gain market share, you gain revenue, you gain more insights. And if your competitors aren't doing that, they're using some other kind of technology. You're gonna leave them in the dust, they will not be able to catch up to you because of that flywheel because it's learning and getting better. Constantly. Michael Hingson ** 16:16 Yeah, my first exposure to AI goes back to well, it's more learning, but it is still ai 1975 1976 with Dr. Ray Kurzweil, oh, well, and Ray's first development, his first invention was the Kurzweil Reading Machine for the blind. Well, first was Omni font, optical character recognition. And he chose as his first application to make a machine that would be able to scan any, and recognize any type or print or combination, I'm typing print fonts, but one of the things that Ray put into that machine was a learning feature. So the more that the machines scan, when I was reading a book, or anyone was reading a book, or anything that that was in print, the better the recognition was. And it did that all by itself. Amazing. And it was absolutely easy to see that happen over a few pages in a book. So I've been using and accepting the whole concept of machine learning, ever since that day, but of course, in the past several years, we've now seen AI go to incredibly whole new levels. And it's interesting, the the people who who are negative about it, and so on, I'm sitting here thinking, Alright, what, 30 years ago, or maybe 35, now we had the internet, or 30 years ago, we had the internet come along. And along with the internet, of course, there are the people who misuse it, and we have the dark web. And I think somebody should check out more of the dark web and see if it's accessible. And if not, we should sue some of those people. That'd be fun. But we have the dark web, and we don't get anywhere near although some people recognize the the problems with it. We don't get anywhere near the route from any of that, that we're getting from artificial intelligence today, which tells me people are starting to you know, they, they see the significance of it, but you know, we're dealing with a, with a world where people really aren't visiting it properly or visiting it enough? Glenn Gow ** 18:34 Well, it's hard to predict what we're gonna see. And AI is just a tool, Michael, it didn't was that with any tool. It's going to be used for good and it could be used for bad. And so they're, they're bad people. And if they get hold of a tool, they're going to use that tool. And so we do need to be aware of that we do need to be concerned about that we need to ensure we have protections against that. Yep. Just like any tool. Yep. But the key thing is it's happening way faster than the experts ever predicted. And so what does that mean? That means that we as humans, need to move fast to keep up. Michael Hingson ** 19:17 And we're dealing with, with a lot of change, and many people aren't used to changing or change happening that quickly. But it's the way it is. Glenn Gow ** 19:26 Well, not only that, Michael, but most people don't like change. Michael Hingson ** 19:30 No. Glenn Gow ** 19:33 And if you don't like change, and change is happening and being part of the change requires you or enables you to be successful, then you're going to be left behind. So my favorite saying is AI is not going to take your job. A person who is using AI is going to take your job. Michael Hingson ** 19:53 Yeah. And that's and that's something that makes perfect sense. And that's the way it will be but AI is ain't gonna do it. I don't see no matter how much AI learns, and can learn, there are things that people can do or have within them that are makeup that will allow them to continue to function and AI is not going to take over the world. It is not a Colossus The Forbin Project. Right? Right. And that was a good movie and a good book. But Glenn Gow ** 20:27 the key is for us to ask ourselves, how do we get the most out of this tool. And so I want to share with you a story one of my CEOs shared with me Remember, I talked about sharing best practices from what I learned. So I'm a big proponent of AI, in that it holds tremendous value for companies of all kinds in all industries of all sizes. And so I'm encouraging my CEOs to do more in this area, so that they get a competitive advantage. One of my CEOs stood up at an all hands meeting in the company and said, I'm going to create an AI mandate, starting today. And for the next month, every single employee needs to use AI every day for a month. Now, I don't care what you do with AI, I don't care if what you do doesn't work. What I want is all of us to learn about AI. And so after a month, what I want each of you to do is report to your manager, what did you learn, because we're going to learn about the things that it doesn't do very well. We're going to learn about the things it does extraordinarily well. And then we're going to figure out how to leverage this tool so that we all can be more productive. I thought that was a brilliant way to introduce, because it's okay to fail is what the CEO was saying, and figure out your own experiments. And what came out of that was a whole slew of opportunities that no one imagined that AI could do. So the accounting department figured out, hey, I can write macros in my spreadsheet. Well, that's not what we knew when we when we began this experiment. And yet now we know we can do that. Michael Hingson ** 22:21 And we can use it and speed up the process. Glenn Gow ** 22:25 Exactly, exactly. And so many learnings, like that. And now this company is a highly innovative way of thinking about everything, and is going to do extremely well compared to their competitors, because they're embracing this amazing tool. Michael Hingson ** 22:40 I've used chat GPT to help write some articles. Although I, I generate like five or six versions, and then I put them together, and then I add my own stuff to it. Because AI doesn't guess the saralee get everything well. But, of course, that's the case. But still, it has sped the process up so much. But it goes back to me giving it the right parameters to work with. Glenn Gow ** 23:11 Exactly. And Michael give you a little tip. So when you think about interacting with a large language model, you want to you want to think about being in a dialogue with it. Not that you give it a prompt and hope for a good result. Right? You You work hard on the prompt, and it comes back with a result and it's okay to say that wasn't very good. Yeah, I think you missed a few major points. And you completely missed that I wanted this to have a perspective on the following. Yeah. It'll say, Gee, Michael, I'm sorry about that. I'm gonna go do another version of it. And so then we're just talking about writing a blog post here, let's say so let's, let's say it comes back with a one. That's it's pretty good now. All right, we'll say hey, that's pretty good. Now, what you can do is you can give it a prompt that lays out Michael Hanson's writing style. Michael likes to write in the following kind of prose, and he likes to use adjectives and active verbs, and he likes to use bullets, and he likes to use speak at a college level, and you can give it your style, so it'll take the output it created for you, and then it'll sound a lot more like Michael. Mm hmm. And then that's a good time to sit back and edit it, because you've already done a lot of the work through the prompting. Michael Hingson ** 24:39 And it's all happened a lot faster than I would ever do it on my own. Absolutely. Glenn Gow ** 24:44 Oh, I'll give you one more tip. So I created my style prompt. Right when I want to tell a large language model I want you to write like Glenn Gao. You know how I created this style prompt? Oh, I asked chit chat GPT Ready to do it for me? Here's all my writing. Now go evaluate my writing and tell me how you would describe my style. Michael Hingson ** 25:12 How do you get bought on whether that's a good question for here, but I'll ask anyway, how do you show it your writing? There, there are aspects of, of the, of Chet GPT. And so on that I have to figure out how to do yet because it's not as accessible as it really could be. So I don't know how, Glenn Gow ** 25:32 yeah, and so I won't, I won't spend a lot of time on it, because it's fairly complex. But you have to choose your best writing, you have to put it into a document and you probably are going to give it to a large language model that isn't Chachi btw that can read large documents, got it and then get the output from there. Okay, it's not easy to get there. But once you get there, now you have your style guideline. Michael Hingson ** 25:55 And you can save that. Yeah, yeah. I presume you can save that and then tell it to use it again. When you next you Right, Glenn Gow ** 26:02 exactly. Right. Yeah. So anyway, a little tips there. But that's just one small drop in this bucket of this amazing tool that is available to us. Michael Hingson ** 26:11 Yeah. And it and it's only gonna get better. And it is so cool that it's there and does the things that it does. What is we're starting to hear more about this whole thing, this whole concept of generative AI, what does that? Glenn Gow ** 26:25 Well, that's what we've been talking about generative AI, and that's where it generates. It fits within the world of large language models, and, and other models. And so let me back up a second and define it this way. So for almost seven years, we had what I'll call traditional AI. That still exists. And that's still actually even more important than generative AI, it's gonna have a bigger impact on the economy than generative AI. But generative AI is very, very new, we'll call it roughly two years old. And it creates content of various types. And I think the most impactful well, okay, the traditionally AI is much more about predicting outcomes, whereas generative actually creates outcomes for you. I think the greatest impact in the generative AI side is not going to be in language, it's not going to be in pictures, it's going to be in code, somewhere development code. And the reason I think the greatest impact is going to happen here is, Michael, if you get really good at writing articles, or blog posts, using a large language model, you might get, I don't know a few 1000 people to read what you've written. But if your team or if your team writes code, and it goes into a product, you might have millions of people. Now using something that was created using generative AI is going to be an enormous impact on the software development world, it's already starting. Michael Hingson ** 28:05 And that makes sense. Well, and look, I think a lot of people don't know it. But the whole concept of AI was very actively used in developing as I understand that the mRNA vaccines for COVID. I believe that's true. I've heard I can't remember where I heard that. But I heard it from what I regard as a reliable source, as I recall. Glenn Gow ** 28:28 No, it's very true, because that's more in the traditional AI realm. Yeah, where you feed the AI a lot of data and AI can see patterns in data that humans simply can't see. There's too much data, our brains aren't wired to see patterns in data. And AI can see patterns. And it could suggest particular experiments you might run based on the patterns it sees. Yeah, and that's one of the great things it's for. So in drug discovery, Michael, there's, there's a product. It's created by a division of Google called Deep Mind. And this product is called Alpha fold two. And what it does is something that I don't fully understand, because I'm not a scientist or a biologist. It does something called protein folding. So what is protein folding going to do for us? It's going to help cure diseases is what it's going to do. And this is a scientific problem that has existed for forever. Until within the last year or so. Google solved the problem using AI of protein folding. And what it does is it just opens up the ability for people, for scientists to develop new drugs and new protocols and new ways of looking at our DNA to cure diseases. And so we haven't we don't hear much about this yet, because we don't interact with something called Alpha. Fold two, we can't it's too complex. It's not an area we understand. But when it starts curing diseases, we're going to start paying attention to what's happening in the pharma world, in the healthcare world in the scientific world. Michael Hingson ** 30:14 And, you know, the reality is, no matter what the downsides, in terms of bad actors who do things with AI, there are so many more people who will do good things with it. And it is still very well, and it probably always will be, but it's it is very much an evolutionary process. And we're new to the whole process. That's right. Glenn Gow ** 30:38 That's right. And we have to think of it too. There are a lot of races happening here. Michael, I talked one about one race being the flywheel effect race, where I'm, I'm in on a business and I'm competing with other individual companies to be successful. So I need to take advantage of what AI can offer to me so that I can get into that flywheel improvement, continual improvement cycle and beat my competitors. That's one race we have. We have another race against at the at the at the national level, we have a race against China. China, has committed to becoming a world leader in AI. I don't know that we've actually stated that in the United States. And yet we are today the world leader in AI. And the question is, who is going to come out ahead? Yeah. So there's a race. And we have to, we have to be aware of that race and understand that race, there's a third race, which is against hackers. So one of the interesting things about the large language model world here is that we have tools like chat GPT, the most popular one and the most advanced one, which is called closed source software. But Mehta, the company formerly known as Facebook, Facebook, has released open source software models, when you release open source software, that means anybody in the world so North Korea can use it, around can use it, a hacker in their basement in New Jersey can use it to do things that we wish they weren't doing. And so given that this is the world we live in, if you're running a company, you need to ensure that the vendors you hire in the world of cybersecurity are on the cutting edge of AI and using the latest AI technologies to help prevent what the bad guys are trying to do with the latest AI technologies. Michael Hingson ** 32:47 It's very much like anything in the in the hacking world, we need to make sure that we have bright people and people who are not only bright enough, but are forward looking enough to anticipate and figure out what the hackers might do to be able to make sure that we put safeguards into the system as best as we can, as best as we can. And when somebody isn't totally successful at that, because somebody on the other side comes out with something more clever. We learn from it, which is also part of the process. Exactly right. And then we use AI to figure out how to fix it. Glenn Gow ** 33:30 We are definitely going to do more and more than agree with that. Michael Hingson ** 33:34 Yeah. You know, it's it's always interesting and pertinent to ask questions like, what do we do about AI producing inaccurate information? But you know, I think that really ultimately comes from it depends on the information we give it, doesn't it? Well, let Glenn Gow ** 33:56 me answer your question. slightly differently. Okay. So there is this thing, as you know, called hallucination where AI might give us the wrong answer. This happens, by the way, only in generative AI does not happen in traditional AI. Because we're not asking traditional AI to, to make anything up. In generative AI, we are actually asking it to make something up. We're asking it to write something or build something that hadn't existed before. And so it has a hallucination problem. So there are two ways around this. Well, I'll say three ways around this. There are certain things where we don't really care if AI makes something up. Let's say Spotify, is using AI to predict the next song that I want to hear. I don't care if Spotify makes a mistake, right? I just happen to hear a song that maybe isn't my favorite as a result. There's no risk factor here. But the minute I step into the world of making Have something that has some risk to it, we need a human in the loop. A human must be involved in making the ultimate decision about what we're going to publish or what code we're going to write or what we're going to what strategy we're going to take on. So you have a human in the loop, sometimes you have you human deeply in the loop. Because there's, there's there's a lot of potential danger associated with this. Like, should we fire a missile or something? Or we have a little bit of a human in the loop? Like, should I publish this blog post said, Shut up Tejas wrote the answers usually no, don't do that. But, but, and there's one other factor. So if you're using a large language model, and you're asking it to do some research, you ask it, or you tell it, you say, and I want you to point me to the source of the information. Now, this is important, because it'll make up sources. Sometimes Michael, it'll say, Oh, here's the source, ha, ha, ha, it's not really a source, it doesn't really say, this is the source of information, they just made it up or the LLM made it up. So instead, by taking a combination of having the human in the loop, and having the source, then the human can go to the source and validate. Yeah, that the large language module model actually did the research and came back with an answer for you that is valid. And now you can make a decision based on that. And Michael Hingson ** 36:30 the other thing that, again, comes to mind is that hopefully, interacting with the LLM, and dealing with correcting sources and so on, it learns along the way, and over time, maybe you won't make as many mistakes. Glenn Gow ** 36:47 I think that's true. It is happening now with the models because there is human feedback involved. So it's, it's getting better and better. But it may be the case that we never get to perfection here. Yeah. But you know what? Humans aren't perfect either. And so well, we just needed to get to be a little bit better than humans. Michael Hingson ** 37:11 Yeah, no, we've got a, we've got to continue to grow. Glenn Gow ** 37:17 Precisely, yeah. How Michael Hingson ** 37:19 do we deal with the biases and all the negative things that people say about AI and things that are clearly not true? And very frankly, to me, some of it comes from the political side of things, because people promote fear way too much. But how do we deal with that? Well, Glenn Gow ** 37:42 so I heard the word bias in your question, and I have I have an answer, maybe about that. But tell me what can you give me an example of what you're you're asking about so I can be more precise? Michael Hingson ** 37:51 Oh, I'm just thinking of we, we hear so many people saying how bad AI is and we should really not only have better governor's on him, we shouldn't allow it. Kids use it to cheat. It's bad. We shouldn't have it. Well, and it comes from? Yeah, some kids do. There's a challenge there. But anyway, go ahead. Glenn Gow ** 38:16 Well, let's just use that example, Mike. Okay. So it has to do with being creative about how do you manage change. So I'm going to use an example of a Wharton professor, his name is Ethan Moloch. He's a wonderful person to follow if you want to look him up. He's a leader in thinking about AI and how it applies both in the academic world and the business world. So he, like I said, he teaches a business course at Wharton. And so one day he gets up in front of the class. And he says, Okay, we're all going to write a paper. I don't know what the paper was about. Not important. No, I'm going to ask all of you to write a paper. And I'm going to insist that all of you use chat GPT. And the class is like standing up and clapping and like, oh my god, this is amazing. Because what used to take me four hours is gonna take me 30 minutes now. But he wasn't done. Yeah. And I'm going to ask you to defend every line in the paper. Yep. And so they are suddenly realized that they needed to understand what this tool was telling them and they needed to believe it and validate it. So they are actually learning more than they would learn without ChaCha btw because it's providing all this information that they need to go it's almost like they're it's pointing to here are the important things you need to go learn. It's not about writing the paper. It's about the learning. Yeah. And I thought that was incredibly brilliant to embrace AI so that his students become better at what he said. asking them to do it, which is to think about business problems in a certain way. Yeah, Michael Hingson ** 40:04 well, and I, the first time I was talking with someone about chat GPT, and they were talking about how kids cheat, and so on. And cheese, well, with some people true. And some people, it's probably too strong a term, but how kids are using it and not doing it on their own. I immediately said, This is an incredible teaching opportunity. What the teachers need to start to do is to not fear, the artificial intelligence, but rather uses as an opportunity to say to the students, okay, and the way we're going to grade your papers is that you're going to have to defend it. And you're going to have to tell me, what is in the paper? And why you say what you say? Yeah. And I think that makes perfect sense. It's in and I don't know whether that's more work for teachers, it can be time consuming. But it's an opportunity to really change a lot of our teaching models, which is great. Glenn Gow ** 41:06 Exactly. Right. Exactly. Right. And if teachers are smart, they should use AI to help them build their curriculum, and build what it is they're going to teach and how they're going to teach it. Because AI is a fantastic tool for that. And Michael Hingson ** 41:23 if school administrators were smart, they would encourage it. That's right. Which is another story entirely. By but you know, it's a process. But I but I really think that it offers so much of an incredible opportunity to vastly improve teaching that, how can you argue with that? But Glenn Gow ** 41:46 well, let's, let's take what you just said, Michael Fullan. And apply that statement vastly improved teaching to the work world? Yeah. So if I'm running a company, I have people who know some things and people who don't know some things in my company. And I want everyone to know as much as they possibly can, so they can make better decisions. AI is one of the mechanisms to help me get there very quickly. So when one of my favorite phrases, is the head of HR is talking to the CEO, and the head of HR says, gosh, you know, I don't know if we should train all these people. What if we train them and they leave the company? And the CEO says, What if we don't train them, and they stay at the company? So this is a tool for training for teaching for learning for every employee. And every CEO is going to benefit if he if that CEO can get the employees learning by using this incredible tool. Yeah. Michael Hingson ** 43:02 Isn't that cool? Yeah, very cool. And it makes perfect sense. Well, you know, so again, in general, I asked the question before about bias. But is the bias really against AI? Or is it against change? Glenn Gow ** 43:22 It's a bit of a complicated question. So yeah. So think of it this way. If you build a large language model, and there are only a small number of companies in the world who can build large language models, because it's very, very, very expensive to do. So. What you do if you're open AI, let's say or your anthropic is another company. X is another company, pi is another company, or if you're going to build a large language model, you do something, which is you put guard rails on that. Because you don't want bias inside of those guardrails. And yeah, when you lay down the guardrails, the human who's laying down the guardrails has some bias, Michael, why because they're human. So you might have one large language model that leans a little bit to the left and another one that leans a little bit to the right, and that's based on the people who designed it. And so you could argue that every large language model has some bias built into it purely because humans built in. Hmm. And then you get to choose though, which largely language model do you want to work with whether it's chat CBT, or Claude from anthropic or many others. Michael Hingson ** 44:44 But a lot of the bias at least that I'm that I'm thinking of, and a lot of people probably think of when they hear this discussion is people are just prejudiced against the whole concept of AI. And I think that yeah, Glenn Gow ** 44:56 I don't I don't hear that very much. Okay. hear people hungry, I hear people who are hungry to learn more. That's great. So maybe you're hearing by us that I don't hear well, I, you know, Michael Hingson ** 45:10 probably from different sources. And I've watched enough TV to to observe things, and I've heard negative things. But I'm not hearing nearly as much fear about AI, as I did a year ago. Glenn Gow ** 45:25 Oh, interesting. Michael Hingson ** 45:28 And maybe it's just people aren't talking about it. But you know, go ahead. Well, maybe people are Glenn Gow ** 45:34 beginning to understand it better. That's usually why you might see reduction in fears people begin to understand that. This is why humans are not good at change. Typically, they fear the future, they fear, they're not going to fit into the future. They fear that I can understand that future. But once you start to step into the future, you realize, oh, no, it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. Maybe it's even good. Yeah. And so that's probably why you're seeing that reduction in fear. Michael Hingson ** 46:03 We as a society, and as a race, tend to fear a lot more than we ought to. Because we've we decided that we're afraid of one thing or another. And most of the things that we're afraid of never really happen anyway. Glenn Gow ** 46:20 Exactly. So that's a skill all unto itself. Yes. Why am I focused on something that hasn't happened? isn't likely to happen. And I probably be okay. If it did happen, I'm probably going to be fine. And yet we do tend, we can tend to go there. It's your training of the mind, Michael, this comes back to I'm glad you brought it up. This comes back to one of the concepts I have, in my my coaching of CEOs is, how do you look at the world? Do you look at the world from a fear perspective? Or do you look at the world from an opportunity perspective, we can look at the exact same thing. And come up with a different outcome or a different way of thinking about I'll give you a funny example. A funny example. A shoe company sends a shoe salesman to a country in the desert, to go sell shoes. And the shoe salesman shows up. And he immediately emails back to headquarters and says I'm never going to be successful here. No one wear shoes here. And so he has a failure mindset. So they bring it back. They send another salesman to the exact same location, immediately sends an email back to headquarters and says, Send me ship fulls of shoes. No one wear shoes here. Yeah. And about how are we choosing to perceive what's in front of us? Yeah. Michael Hingson ** 48:06 I, for a while ever since escaping from the World Trade Center, I've been talking about escaping and what I what I did, how I prepared for it. But never thought about the fact that with all the things that I learned about emergency preparedness, talking to fire people learning how to travel around the complex, not by reading science, of course, but by truly learning it. It created a mindset that said, You know what to do in an emergency, although at the time, I didn't think about it, but much later, I realized it. And I went oh, that is that's a good point. And then during the pandemic, I realized that while I've talked about not being afraid, I've not ever taught anyone how they can learn to control fear. And it's not to not be afraid, but rather to use fear as a powerful tool to help you. And so we've now written a book, it's called Live like a guide dogs stories from a blind man and his dogs about overcoming adversity, being brave, and walking in faith. And it's all about using information that I've observed and learned from a guy dogs and my wife service dog about different aspects of fear and learning to control fear and making it an add a positive attribute to have not an adversary. Well, Glenn Gow ** 49:32 Michael, that sounds amazing is your How long is your book been out? Michael Hingson ** 49:35 It isn't. This one is going to come out later in the year. I'll send you an email there. Oh, already been a couple of announcements about it. And it's available for pre order. So I will I will make sure that we put that also in the show notes again, but it's not out yet. But it's coming it'll be fun. I'd love to get your thoughts on it. And maybe when we start looking for people to review it I'll have to see if you'll look at it and Give us a review. Glenn Gow ** 50:00 Fantastic. I'd love to be part of that. Michael Hingson ** 50:02 So when we talk about AI, and just all the things that are going on, of course, some people talk about job loss or afraid of job loss, what do you think about that? Glenn Gow ** 50:13 So I'm going to answer your question in a second. And I just want to suggest maybe this will be our last topic. Is that okay? Michael Hingson ** 50:22 Only if it's an AI solution? Yeah, well, yeah. Well, so in resist, Glenn Gow ** 50:30 look, job loss is a real thing. But I want to really frame how we think about this issue. So I want us to think about our jobs as being made up of tasks. Some people have lots and lots and lots of tasks. And some people have a smaller number of tasks that make up their job. AI is going to replace tasks. So if I have 100 tasks that I do every day, and AI can replace 30 of them, I'm going to be pretty happy about that. Because I'm going to be a lot more productive, and I can focus on the ones that I'm best at, and I'm gonna let ai do the things, it's best that but if my job is made up of a tiny number of tasks, let's say, I'm a long haul truck driver. And my task is to get the truck into the into the right lane and go for the next 1000 miles. My job's in danger, because the bulk of my work is associated with a small number of tasks that AI can take on. And so we want to ask ourselves, what what is our day look like? And how many things can be taken over by AI? And how can we embrace them. So there will, there will be three things that happen, there will be new jobs created by AI, the bulk of people will be impacted in a positive way, where they will use AI to be more effective, more efficient in their day, and they'll be able to get more done in a shorter period of time. And then there are some jobs that are going to go away, they're going to disappear. Because of this nature of they're made up of a small number of tasks. Yeah. And so you're running a company, you want to ask yourself, what do we do with that information? Do I think about the employees that I might not need in the future? Do I help them get training right now on this so that they recognize that their job may go away, Michael Hingson ** 52:26 or you find other things for them to do or find other things Glenn Gow ** 52:29 for them to do exactly. But in all cases, the market will cert will determine whether or not these jobs stick around or not, yeah, they'll be individual decision makers. Because if you're a competitor suddenly eliminates a bunch of jobs. Let's I'll use an example. Let's say you run a warehouse, and you have 100 people in your warehouse. And your competitor says, I only need 10 People in my warehouse, and I need 90 robots in my warehouse. And that's going to be cheaper and more efficient. Well, I can't be that employee that are an employer that says I'm going to keep all my employees paid, I'm gonna have to understand the nature of how jobs are going to change. And I need to act quickly. This is why we want to embrace AI as quickly as possible to make those decisions. Well, Michael Hingson ** 53:21 so So two things, one, going back to the truck driver, okay, so AI can take over the actual driving of the truck, at some point, to the point where we don't have to fear that. That doesn't mean we can't find other things for that truck driver to do while he is in the truck. And the truck is being driven by AI. So that Glenn Gow ** 53:45 is true. That is absolutely true. And so let us use this as our last example, a perfect example would be that that truck drivers overseeing six trucks, right? All at once happens to be sitting in one. But one of those six trucks gets stuck somewhere because you have a flat tire. And it needs a human intervention. But the human in the truck can tell it. Hey, that truck over there was five miles away, pull over and wait for a tow truck to come and get you. Yeah, yeah. Well, Michael Hingson ** 54:18 very, very quickly. One last thing. I worked with a company called access to be I don't know if you're familiar with accessibility and what it does to help make the internet more accessible. No, please. So accessibility is a product that began several years ago when three guys in Israel developed sought wealth. They first had an internet company that made websites and then in 2017, Israel came along and said God and make all websites accessible. They had so many that they had to figure out a way to do that. And they used AI and they created a widget that sits in the cloud. And the widget can analyze any website of any subscriber. And when it analyzes, it creates what's called an overlay and creates all The code that it feels that it can put in to the site to make it accessible, and it doesn't reprogram the website. But when I go to a site that subscribes to access a B, I hear a message that says, Put your browser in a screen reader mode and I push the button, the widget up in the cloud transmits all the Accessibility Code down to my browser, which has already got the rest of the website, my browser doesn't care where the information comes from, right, as long as it's there. Now, it's not perfect, it doesn't do graphics, it doesn't do necessarily the most sophisticated tables and all bar charts. It doesn't describe all pictures. But it does a lot to make websites a lot more usable. And they have other profiles for other kinds of disabilities. But there's a cadre of people who just are so totally against it, hey, I could never do this overlays will never work. And I'm and they're vehement. And, you know, I continuously think of when I in 1985, started a company because I couldn't get a job to sell products, I started a company selling some of the early PC based CAD systems. And I had an I had architects who came in and they said, Well, we like your product, it's great. But if we use it, since we charge for our time, we can't make nearly the money that we otherwise would have. And I said, you're looking at it the wrong way. You don't deal with it in terms of how much your time is charged. Now, you look at it in terms of your expertise, and you're charging for your expertise. You don't change your prices, you get more customers. And you can do so much more with each customer by using a PC based CAD system and bring the architect or bring the client in and do walkthroughs and fly throughs and other stuff. But it's the same thing. And now CAD is commonplace. The reality is the overlay does so much and accessory is so creative at what it does. And they've also brought in additional services to do the things that the widget can't do. But it's amazing to see some people who were so vehemently against AI and overlays. When in reality, every website designer should include it. Because at least it'll do some of the heavy lifting and in what may not do everything, but it will do a lot and save them time and they don't have to change what they charge. Glenn Gow ** 57:20 That's great. Sounds like you're a good salesman. Michael Hingson ** 57:23 Well, we'll we'll keep going with it. It's it's a lot of fun. Well, I really want to thank you for being here. If people want to reach out to you. How do they do Glenn Gow ** 57:30 that? It's very simple, Michael, Michael Hingson ** 57:32 there you go. They can just go to AI and say find. Yeah, go ahead. 57:37 Well, my website is My name is Glenn Gow .com. So Glen with two Ns, G L, E, N, N G. O W.com. That's Michael Hingson ** 57:47 easy. Well, I hope people will reach out. And this has been a lot of fun. And I want to 57:53 one thing I forgot to mention, absolutely. Okay. On my website, I have a tool that's free to use. It's available 24/7 You don't even need to fill out a form to use it. It's called AI CEO coach. So if you're a CEO, you can go to my website, Glen Gow.com and use this tool as often as you want absolutely for free. And ask it questions that a CEO would ask and see if you like the answers, and please give me some feedback on it. People love it so far. Cool. Michael Hingson ** 58:32 Okay. And it's called again, AI 58:35 CEO, Coach coach. Michael Hingson ** 58:37 Cool. Well, people go reach out and check it out and reach out to Glenn. I want to thank you again for being here. And I want to thank you all for listening. Love to hear your thoughts. Email me at Michaelhi m i c h a el h i at accessiBe A c c e s s i b e.com. Or go to our podcast page www dot Michael hingson.com/podcast. And that's m i c h a e l h i n g s o n.com/podcast. Love to hear your thoughts and please give us a five star rating wherever you are listening to our podcast or watching our podcast today. We value your insights and Glenn for you and you listening. If you know of anyone else who want to be a guest on unstoppable mindset. Please introduce us always looking for more people to come on and be a part of unstoppable mindset. So again, Glenn, I want to thank you for being here and really appreciate your time today. My Glenn Gow ** 59:29 pleasure, Michael, it was a pleasure. I really enjoyed that. **Michael Hingson ** 59:36 You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite your friends to join us in the future. If you know of any one or any organization needing a speaker for an event, please email me at speaker at Michael hingson.com. I appreciate it very much. To learn more about the concept of blinded by fear, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com forward slash blinded by fear and while you're there, feel free to pick up a copy of my free eBook entitled blinded by fear. The unstoppable mindset podcast is provided by access cast an initiative of accessiBe and is sponsored by accessiBe. Please visit www.accessibe.com . AccessiBe is spelled a c c e s s i b e. There you can learn all about how you can make your website inclusive for all persons with disabilities and how you can help make the internet fully inclusive by 2025. Thanks again for Listening. 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