Joshua Wöhle: Turn AI Into Your Competitive Advantage and 50X Your Productivity | Artificial Intelligence | E393

If you walk into a job and you say I would like a job, but I don't use AI. I don't think there will be a job. Joshua Vola is the CEO of Mind Stone, an AI-powered learning platform helping professionals actually use AI to do better work faster. From copilot to gentybt to Claude,

number one problem is people use the MES search engine replacement. Talk to it like you would talk to a person, ask it to ask you questions, don't just ask it for answers. A number one role of a great manager is to make themselves obsolete. And actually the same is true here.

Yeah, you are building your AI's your job becomes building a system around you that can do the job you're currently doing without you, so that you can go and do the next thing. How should knowledge workers think about the fact that they might be training AI to take their jobs and now they're suddenly

“shudged on how well they use AI, like how should they be navigating all that?”

I think the biggest thing that people can do to prepare is to... Is there anything in 2026 right now that you absolutely will not delegate to AI? The reality of where things are at is moving much faster than how people are able to catch up.

Hopefully, I mean, this is an interesting one because... Young and profitors, I recently went to an AI retreat and I literally built an app in just 15 minutes and I have zero coding experience.

I never thought anything like this could be possible and my mind has not been the same

sense. I've been obsessed with AI and learning AI as fast as I can because now I truly understand how it's going to change everything for us. How AI is changing the workforce, why most people are using tools like Claude and ChachiBT completely and correctly, how to build systems that do hours of work in just minutes

and what skills you need right now to stay relevant to keep your jobs or your companies alive. This is not a theoretical episode today, this is stuff that you can actually use and apply today. In my opinion, this is mandatory listening for anybody who wants to be successful this year

“and for the years to come because AI has taken over and you need to learn how to use it effectively.”

Without further delay, Joshua, welcome to Young and profiting podcast. Thank you very much. I'm so excited for this conversation.

Now I went to your Mindstone AI Breakthrough weekend recently and my mind was absolutely

blown from everything I've learned and so I thought I have to bring Joshua on to just unpack everything with AI because you just know so much and I'm just so excited to pick your brain today. So thank you so much for joining us. So one of the things that you've said in the past is that AI is more dangerous from people

who are ignoring AI than just from AI itself. The danger isn't actually ignoring it, so let's paint the picture. If somebody is a, let's say a 30 year old knowledge worker or a marketer or even an entrepreneur, what does it look like if they ignore AI for the next three to five years? First off, three to five years in AI feels like a lifetime at the speed that it's currently

going. But there's this saying, AI is not going to take your job, somebody else using AI will. And I do think that is true, which is that today, if you try to walk into a knowledge work or any, any role in a company and you tell them I'd love to get a job but I don't use email.

“They're probably going to have a problem and I think the same thing is going to be true”

with AI, which is if in actually probably in two years, if you walk into a job and you say I would like a job but I don't use AI, I don't think there will be a job. When I went to this training weekend with you, it was just a few weeks back. I felt like there was no way I could ever create an app myself, for example, I ended up creating one of like 15 minutes after some training with you.

I did not fully realize the capabilities that AI had, I knew it was there but I thought it wasn't for me and of course I used Chachi BT and all the basic stuff, right? But I didn't realize how far ahead it already was and how far behind me and my company were at the time. So talk to us about what was the mindset shift for you when you were like okay, AI is

going to change everything, what capability did you see do where you're like okay, this is really going to change everything and we need to hop on this trend right now. So I think there's a, there are a few things. One is I am, I am a technologist by nature, I say so I guess I kind of fell into a little much earlier than most, I tend to want to figure out how to make it work.

So that was the first thing, which that is different to most and that explains why maybe

we, we were there earlier. The first time that it really clicked that I thought this

learning. We wanted to help people learn in a way that would be more effective and that really would move the needle that helps them have better lives and at some point and it was this was in between GPT 3.5, which was the original Chachi BT and GPT 4 when it came out in March the year after. We realized that AI could estimate the approximate level of understanding of a subject for any individual based on the quality of the question they

were asking and that was was fairly met up because everyone was using Chachi BT to ask questions and ensure you get answers back. But the fact that it could derive your level of understanding based on the type of questions you're asking was a level behind and suddenly it made me think what are some other things that are completely non obvious that you might want to ask this AI and that was really the starting point. I mean, it's been basically

three years of discovery after the discovery since I wanted to dig deeper on that because

“at the AI retreat, I remember one of the exercises that we did was basically asking your”

AI of choice. Tell me, ask me one question at a time to get as much context as possible before answering this question and to me that was like genius and now every time I asked Chachi BT something before I even ask it the question, I first say like ask me a question, you know, one by one to fully unpack context before you give me an answer. And this was

really powerful because before I used to get really frustrated with AI and I would like throw

away a lot of the answers that gave me because I'm like, oh, it just doesn't understand, it doesn't have the full context. So talk to us about how we can prompt better in that way and why that's so important. Yeah, so that is one of my favorite techniques as well is the asking the question. A lot of this actually comes back to changing the way that we interact with AI. Now, one of the frameworks we teach a lot is stop thinking about AI's technology,

think about it as a person, which is both right and wrong. I'm not trying to say here that we that we have some kind of being there, but from a framework perspective, and how do you interact with the technology, it actually works against us that we have a past of Google and how you ask questions in that way. When you have a conversation with a person and you ask that person a question or you want the help of a person, you naturally give that context. If we sit together

and ask you advice on how to run my business, if you genuinely try to help me, one you'd ask me

10 questions first to get that context. Now, the AI doesn't do that automatically, which it should

and honestly, sometimes I wonder why the help did they not build it in a way that it would do

“that naturally, but anyways, it doesn't, which means you have to create that context. And you”

have to create that context that mimics the way that you would have this conversation with a person. After the context is set, the quality of the answer that comes back is going to be much higher, because the opposite is also impossible. You cannot get a perfect answer if you do not give the context, literally the best person in the world wouldn't be able to answer the question, how do I, or what does the better strategy between two different strategies for my company,

if I'm not giving them the context, it's just an impossible situation. But because we are used to using technology in that way, people judge it in that way. So if you ask, okay, which one of these two strategies is best, and it comes back with a bad answer, the default is people think, okay, well, it just can't help me. And this is the problem that you then come into, which when you have a person conversation, if the first answer you would give me isn't quite what I was looking

for, my answer wouldn't be, okay, you're not worth having a conversation. I would say no,

“actually, that's not quite on point. And this is why I think you're missing this piece of context,”

and I would explain it to you, and then we'd continue the conversation. Yeah, so moral of the story, yeah, BAM, is that when you want to get chatty with you, or whatever AI to help you, you actually want to ask it, please give me questions to understand more context before you actually answer the question, right? The other mental shift that I had was actually talking to AI at the retreat, right? So I was so used to chatting all the time, but you guys actually directed

us to, they were called walk-in talks, and basically just talk to AI, and that really helped,

and made it feel like it was a partner, a real team made helping me. Why is that such a powerful

unlock? So this goes back to, yes, one of the, one of the advantages of having started out as

brain acts when you're thinking, when you're interacting with ideas, different neurons that

will fire in different ways depending on the context that you're in. That context can be the room that you're in. It can be the method that you're in, when you're walking, or when you're sitting, it can be the method that you're using to interact with it, talk to it, rather than typing on a keyboard. And so what happens when you talk to AI, and what we did them weekends, literally just put your AirPods in, go and have a walk around, and talk to the AI in a way that you would to a person,

all your surroundings are now different. And so the, the ideas that come to you, the way the things that you will say are going to be different than if you just sit behind your laptop and type it into a chat interface. And what is important to recognize there is actually both are important.

“It's not necessarily just just walking around just the only thing you should be doing,”

but it is that you see different sides. And so you want to combine them. And that's where the magic really happens because suddenly you get the rigor of when you're sitting and kind of the work that you do in a daily basis, but the creativity of walking around and the ideas that otherwise wouldn't have flown. And then the AI is able to take both of those into account and give you much better recommendations. I also feel like the AI is designed to be more succinct

and conversational with the voice prompts. And so it's also like a quicker kind of getting to an

ideation to your point. The first thing I thought of that's different is like, wow, this feels

so much more creative and like natural. Yep. Yeah. Absolutely. So how is AI changed the way that you

“work as a CEO? You can almost frame that the other way around, which is I don't think there's a”

single thing that I don't do differently. Yeah. I can imagine. So the, I mean, the biggest parts are I no longer make a decision without running it through AI first. It just feels like like trying to do complicated arithmetic and not using a calculator. Like even if I knew how to do the math, I would still use a calculator to make sure that I thought making mistakes, right? That would be the biggest thing. The, the second biggest thing is being able to take into account all the context

of everything all the time. So the biggest strategic partnerships we talk about, the biggest deals we have with customers, investors, the ability to draw on every single conversation, every transcript that I have of my conversations with them and then being able to surface what are the most

“important aspects based on any relationship that we have built with customers, investors, or anything else.”

That is just something I wasn't able to do before. I can't hold 10 hour-long conversations in my head at any point. Maybe I can remember some of the important points of the last two meetings, if I'm lucky. But my memory doesn't stretch far enough. And so I would lose a lot of detail. Now I don't. I want to explain to my listeners like just how life changing it was to be at this retreat and to use rebel, which is your tool at Mind Stone. So before I get into it, talk to us

about like what rebel is. Many people will have tried to match a BT in cloud and all of the really cool tools that exist. That would be kind of a chat agent and it works really well. But it's somewhat superficial. It doesn't really know who you are. It doesn't really know what your

company does. And so first and foremost, rebel is just to really, really evolved agent that is

able to do real work rather than stay with it in its own confines. It's able to connect to all of your systems. It's nose you inside out. And then second, it's an AI first operating system for the company that you are in. And so it is building the infrastructure for the type of organization that you need once every person in the company has their own agent. And those agents need to collaborate. And they have shared memory. So it all compounds. You need the safety mechanisms.

So you need the privacy mechanisms at the same time. Because I wonder if the people are familiar with open claw or clawed co-work. Both of these are starting to come up. They have their real privacy issues. Because they do a lot. But once you start to put this in a company context, people need to know that the system is able to do the work without having too much of the collateral damage. And so that is what rebel really has been built to be. Is the infrastructure

that allows every person in the company to have a capable and trustworthy agent whilst at the

to say producing this podcast for quite a skills. I do not naturally have. From audio engineering

to video editing, I have to hire experts who are way better than me in those areas. And as I

“scale, my podcast has become more and more important. And every time I need to hire, my first”

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first found out about Rebel. Basically Rebel is a platform Mindstone is the training company

essentially. So Rebel ingest all of my emails from the past and like also ongoingly. It takes all of my G-Drive files and basically ingest them as well and it's like stores it as memory. I hook up my fireflies, transcripts. I uploaded all the old ones and then it ongoingly processes the new ones. It can scrape all of my social media and get all my post-content. And basically it can it can sing up to air table. It sings up to my finance hub.

And essentially it has all the memory of like how I talk in emails, how I like all the conversations I've had every contract that we have. And now I have essentially the second brain.

And it will it will check my email twice a day. My Slack, by the way, connects to Slack and all

your messages. And basically I can say a voice note and be like respond this way and then it will send

a draft in my email that I can just tweak and edit and send out. So now responding to 20 emails takes five minutes instead of 20 hours or whatever. Like, you know, two hours or whatever it would have taken. I don't miss my Slack messages anymore. It's making me a better leader. It's totally transformed how I operate. And I'm so excited to keep on using it and so much so that I'm literally taking

“every single team member. Even the, you know, everybody on my team's super important. But even the”

most junior person on my team is going to take the mind stone training. And I'm going to be implementing, you know, a hiring freeze. Because there's absolutely no, for me, it's like, okay, what are we going to do? Because I've just unlocked so much capacity. And so one of the things, one of the rules that I'm thinking about implementing is before we put out a JD for a new hire, we've got to prove that AI can't do it first. I run into you might want to ask Rebel every single time. Can you do this?

But yeah, absolutely. It's, it is, we are in a very weird period at the moment. I love the fact that we're able to do these types of weekends. Because there is, this conversation needs to happen much more in the open at the moment. Right now, the public discourse is still the majority of world things that it's somewhat of a hype that it's maybe, it's, it's can't possibly be all that people are making it up to me. I mean, I thought that and I interviewed the biggest AI experts in the

world and not that I thought it was hype. But I just didn't think it was actually like executable

“now for me. Yeah, and, and that is exactly the, and that's why the weekend works. And I was talking”

to, if you friends about this before as well, the hard thing is the claims of the technology are so big that you did it gets instantly ignored. Like when I tell people that I genuinely can now do 50 times the amount of work that I was able to do four years ago, that just gets, I mean, it's a

kid's laughed out of the room for those that, and the problem is it's very divisive for those that

know, they know it's possible. And so then you get a conversation for those that don't know it's possible yet. It's so outlandish that you're not even given the time. I can't show you in half an hour how you get there. But over a three day weekend, I can start to show how everyone understands it's actually possible. And that is why why those weekends are so powerful. But that is also

“why it's so important to have more of this conversation now because it means that 99% if not more”

of people are currently not aware of that is what is possible. And so that means that the rest, the next few years are basically going to be about people that are able to bridge that gap and and people that move slowly or don't move don't bridge the gap at all. Something else that I've been using rebel to do is to essentially create these skills where I ask, I say, hey, rebel, ask me a question one by one to unpack how I do x process. And then I say, okay, now that you know the process,

you do it. Right? So talk to us with the concept of skills and agents and how especially for

somebody who's never heard of any of the, how should we think of this and how can somebody like

get started creating their agent? This is actually really interesting that because a lot of companies exist today that would have what you would call vertical agents. Like you've got a customer support agent, you've got a finance agent, whatever agent and you'll have thousands of them in different ways. Actually, as skill in rebel is not too dissimilar from what people would call agents with specific qualities and examples and capabilities. And so we believe fundamentally,

we will likely not end up in a world where you'll have a thousand different vertical agents you end up with one agent that has very thoroughly developed skills and it can decide to use those skills as and when it sees fit. So it has a skill to manage a financial excelsheet. It has a skill to help build great pitches. It has a skill to build proposals. It has a skill to build presentations, whatever the thing is. So a skill is a combination of a process. Basically a process that the AI

can execute reliably. You tell it, do X, Y, and Z every time I tell you to execute this skill. It is a set of examples so that the AI understands what does good look like when I am asking for

advanced. Sometimes the skill can include some scripts, which is basically some deterministic steps,

some things that all that it can double check for itself to make sure that it can consistently execute on the skill as you go through. So for Excel, this is one of the things because it's managing an Excel sheet is a very complex set of actions and sometimes it has some kind of underlying programs if you want that help the skill execute exactly what it's supposed to. I found this skill so helpful. I created like a lead prospecting skill and it rebels able to like

scrape emails. It can I say all the things like the qualifications like for me. I'm trying to recruit podcasts or so. How many downloads do they get? How many reviews do they have? Links to their

social. Then it will even go as far as crafting a custom email, grabbing the emails and then

drafting them in my inbox. It is insanity. It's like it's literally like having a chief of staff that actually has full context of your entire work-life history, as long as you were able to provide that memory for it. Yeah, so to your point, actually, it's a very good point. The skills can be executed when you want them to and also automate it, right? To your point, the automation.

“And so one of the skills I think that I built live on the weekend, which I'm now using every day,”

was this, it was a lost deals, a value of just skills. So this was just one of the ones that I hadn't gotten around to building yet, but just something that looked at my slacks, my emails, my WhatsApps, and looked at deals that were in our hopes for that didn't have activity for a while, just and then draft an email to revive the deal that I had forgotten about or had let go for too long. And I remember I did what, there was one of the people that was on the weekend that was actually part of the emails

that it wrote live, I think, whilst we were there, which was a fun bit. But that is indeed a good example of the skill. I mean, I've been using it so much to the point where I'm like, okay, this is supposed to save me time, but I'm actually working a lot more now because I just feel like, oh my gosh, this could be a skill in this, and I can be better leader by using rival in this way,

“and so I found myself after the weekend. I think I got home on a Saturday. Sunday, I was supposed”

to have like a day off, but I found myself working the entire day on rebel because it was just so exciting to me. So what kind of boundaries are you putting in place? Like, how are you ensuring that you're learning AI? And of course, I know it's your main thing, but for the normal person, how should they ensure that they build in time to learn AI? And how can they also put boundaries if they find themselves like me staying up really late and working through the weekends because

it's just very exciting. Something that we've recently become more aware of and we're spending more time on. Actually, the end of the weekend was exactly about that, right? Just where you have all this newfound ability, where do you actively want to deploy it? Because most companies don't actively think about that. They go down the productivity line and they get the extra time, but then they're not as conscious of where that time gets deployed and that is important both

at a company level and at a personal level. Now, there are a few things to look at here and it's I think there is a part of this is an individual answer for everyone because not everyone will find the same balance. This whole thing about work-life balance is different for whoever you talk to.

“But the thing that is most important is that you consciously go in and I think Jeremy, who was”

my co-host on the weekend, he puts this fairly well, which is thinking about the person you want to be. Being clear about what that person is, who that person is, and then using that as you get introduced to AI, as you start to find different optimizations, as you find more time back, so that you're clear about where you want to deploy that time. A very active bit of that right now is, I mean, I'm trying to live part of it at the moment, so I've got, we're here in Austin,

I've got my wife and kid here as well. For the first time ever, I'm basically trying to combine,

he's got three, four more months left before he's starting school, so this was the last time that we could go and get some travel in it and just trying to do it all really, which is running the business, being in the US, most of our clients are US, but also being able to travel a little bit going through. In six hours a day at the moment, I think I'm able to do what have taken a full week before, almost forcing myself to live that future so that I'm not setting the bad example either,

addictive once you're able to do so much stuff. I mean, we all want, ultimately, we all want to be

productive as maybe the wrong word, we all want to be good at what we what we're doing. So when you suddenly feel that you can be twice as good at it, three times as good at it, four times as good at it, that feels really good and it's actually very addictive. It is addictive. I feel like we need to make sure that we're building the right things and not just building to build. The other way that I've been thinking about it is like so when I first

I've been an entrepreneur now for like six years. The first four years, I worked myself to the bone. I'd stay up till two a.m. every morning. I worked through every weekend. And then suddenly, like, I built all this capacity and a team and trained everybody where now I can do whatever I want. You know what I mean? Like, you know, I still work hard, but I can take a week off. I can do it.

“I built a business that runs without me. And so I think of it as this, like, you got to”

like, set everything up. And now is a time to, like, focus and figure it out and think about, like, what can I automate? How can I redesign my team where, like, these low priority things that we used to spend a lot of time on now, we use AI to do them and how can I open up my team from work capacity? And it kind of feels like this new, like, reset of I need to set my team for success. And this might take some focus time now. But I imagine in a year after I've set a lot of these things up,

that it would free up capacity. So it's kind of, like, this, like, sacrifice work hard now, so that you can free up your time later on. Is that the right way to think about it? Yeah, for those that want to create that opportunity for themselves, absolutely. I mean, that's definitely what what I am doing as well. So the, um, putting in place that basis. And it was, I think for me,

“there was a tipping point somewhere, when was it? I think it was October of last year.”

Up until that point, I think I probably, I don't, I have never worked more in my life.

And so I was doing whatever, like, 18, 19 hours a day, every day, seven days a week, because I was in that loop. Yeah. And so I was like, okay, I'm twice as productive, three times of productive, four times. I'm ten times as productive shit. Like, and actually, it was going really. Yeah, exactly. And then I think there was, yeah, so in October, there was a very conscious moment where I realized for the first time, was I actually, I'm going to next week,

I'm going to consciously start to do less. So I feel, I mean, I'm in a different place as well, because I, I'm on that cutting edge. So I kind of felt that it's okay to only be 10 times more productive than what I was, uh, before, uh, nobody else is there yet. So I can take a bit of a breather in a way. Yeah, help, help us all along, get to get to where you're at. You're a very successful entrepreneur. You've had multiple companies. So you had super awesome that you sold to Epic Games.

And at that point, you could have just retired a little bit or taken a break, but you jump straight into starting mindstone. So what was it, Genesis of starting mindstone and talked us about,

“why you pivoted into AI? My view of a great life is not one of sitting on the beach and not”

doing much. That's just not who I am. And so the biggest things, I knew I wanted to do something that would make a difference. I should literally, literally, the number one way that I think about measuring my life is, is leaving a legacy in one way or another. And then I hesitated between a few industries. And the one that I think it took about two months or so of kind of thinking through, the one where that I thought I could really make a difference in was education.

Because, I mean, it isn't highly broken. There's so many things that need to be different or even already needed to be different six years ago about education itself. And I have a bit of a weird past with education. I always loved learning. I hated education. I thought there was a better way to go and do that. And so really, the first bet was just, I can, I can see myself spending 30 years tackling problems in education and trying to be as helpful as I possibly can.

And then about three years in, well, a chance you'd be te happened. And it also happens to be actually just before starting super awesome. And this is, think this is actually something that very few people know about me yet. But I was supposed to go and do a Masters in AI in London. I'd been accepted there to go and do the thing. And that was, that was going to start in September. And then I think we had conversations with Dylan in April, May of that same year about starting

super awesome. And so ultimately I decided to go and start super awesome. But I've always had

this ink thing of AI. I've always been really passionate about AI to begin with. And so somehow when then a chance you'd be able to happen and suddenly with everything and learning change. Both

it's kind of like every single thing that I really like doing in life came together.

That's amazing. And it's a good thing you didn't take that AI program because probably would

be completely irrelevant today. But to that point, what are the things about AI that you learn that continue to be relevant? Like so for example, you've got this Mindstone AI training. I assume if people take this training, it's not going to be irrelevant in a year.

“Because there are foundational things that you need to learn in terms of how to use AI.”

So talk to us about some of those things. We've touched on a few of them, which is talk to it like you would talk to a person. I think that's the number one. The second one is ask it to ask you questions. Don't just ask it for answers. It's not terrible to ask it for answers, but actually the majority of your interactions should be getting it to ask you questions instead. Help it help you think. Don't let it take the thinking away. If you're a manager,

there are things you can apply of how great managers work that you can also apply to AI with a slight edge. So one of my other favorite ways of using AI is getting it to rate itself. When you're building companies, you're building teams. If you're successful at what you're doing, hopefully you're hiring people that are better at their respective jobs than you are, right? That's why you're hiring to do those jobs. So it's really hard sometimes to then give them

great feedback because actually they know their job better than you do. And so one of the main techniques of a manager ends up being person comes back with a piece of work. It's great. How would you improve on this particular piece of work? They go and line out all the things that could be better on that particular bet. Okay, great. I agree with you. Now go and do all the things that you just said you could do to make this even better than

what it already is. In a human context, you have to think about how does that land with the person? They just spent a week doing this piece of work. I'm now asking them to spend another week. How are they going to enjoy this? They have a whole bunch of other things they need to get done. So you have to think about that emotional component with AI you do not, but you can apply the same technique, which is, "Ask the AI." Okay, you just did this piece of work for me.

On a scale from 0 to 100, how would you rate that you just did that job?

“It comes back. I think I did a 78 out of 100. It's great. What is wrong with it?”

How would you get it to 100 out of 100? Well, I would do all these things. Okay, now go into it. It really is like managing someone. Exactly. Yeah. That's another really big one. And I think those few ones are already things that everyone today can apply because they're simple, but extremely powerful. And then once you're, once you're start to get into the habit of using it in that way, you're then starting to get to the edges of a Gentic AI and like getting it,

you've got these custom GPTs or projects on cloud, or skills are actually not too dissimilar from like a custom GPT or a cloud project, but just the agent decides to execute them when they can. And there, I'd say these are, this is the encapsulation of certain units of work. So once you start using it more regularly, then you have to start thinking a little bit more inward, which is what are the things that I am doing that I'm doing fairly frequently and that take a decent amount of

of work or the things I should be doing frequently that I never get to or that I always do to a

low standard when they should be a high standard. Actually, that second bit is the thing that people often forget because it's a treasure trove of potential AI enhancement. So what are all the things that if I had the time to do, I could go do and that would make a big difference on my job or on the quality of my work. Well, get AI to do them. If you don't have the time to do it, get AI to do them well.

“It's so interesting that you bring it up. I remember one of the questions that you guys asked”

on the AI weekend is that you say AI is like an intern that doesn't sleep, right? And you're like, if you had to give an intern something to do for 24 hours a day or even 12 hours a day, would you even know what to give it? So how can we start to understand like what we actually need to build? Yeah, this is where people that have managed people before do have an advantage and people

that haven't quickly have to figure out what that means because we are all basically becoming

managers in one way or another. And I would also argue that the analogy of the intern is very quickly becoming the middle-of-all employee and the senior employee. Yeah, I agree. So the depending on the quality of your rebel installation, I am that when I look at our proposal skill, it does better proposals than I do. No question. And I would consider myself a very good salesperson in one way or I do good proposals when it's a skill that builds up over time. And this is the both the good part

is not the problem. We often talk to customers when we start working with the organization, we say,

five to 10% of what we do is helping people use the tools. 90 to 95% of what we end up doing is helping people with the mindset shift of thinking differently about the way that they approach work to begin with. And that is where you get the real return on generative AI. And it's actually the thing that people forget. They think that they can just roll out, change your BT and people will just figure it out. It's as if you think, okay, well, we're going to give every to your point. We're going

to give everyone an intern and they'll just figure out how to make that intern really useful. Let alone if you're giving them actually really capable employees. They wouldn't know what to ask to do to begin with. And so the real work is helping people understand how they can take advantage

“of that technology. There's so many ways I can take this, but I think the next point that I want”

to talk about is the ability for the workforce to be able to code now essentially and build apps.

So I was totally blown away by the fact that on this AI breakthrough weekend with Mindstone, I was

able to basically create an app in 15 minutes. It basically took a podcast episode. I asked, you know, it was catchy BT. I asked it to uncover my my process and to help me come up with a prompt that I then put in a booklet, which you guys taught me about to create the app. And then now I have something where I can pop in my episode, transcript, link to YouTube. It pulls out the hooks. The clips that we should use, the best quotes, like all this kind of stuff. I also created a new app.

Right. After the weekend, of course, to help me create research briefs. And honestly, the output of that app is so much better than what my team was giving me. What I was doing with charging BT, like it is just so much better. And I was talking to, I met this girl who works at one of my sponsors, actually, their company. So I'm not going to say the name, but it's a very big tech company. And she's this in sales. And this company is very AI-forward. And she told me

that they have an AI quota. Okay. They actually get judged by how much AI they use. She's a sales person. She said she's coding now. And that they actually will fire people who if they find out

that they're doing stuff that AI could have done. Yeah. And it's basically she's like, she feels

actually scared because she's really excited that she's learning all this AI. She knows that if for some reason she loses her job, she's so much, when I was talking, I was like, damn, you're really like they're preparing you for the future. So either way, it's a good thing. Yeah. But she's also scared because she said that part of it is like, she gets AI-generated emails, like in her inbox before she responds to an email that emails already drafted. And then she

actually edits it before she sends it out. So she's actually training the AI. And she basically said, I'm kind of training the AI to take my job. So there's a couple of questions I have

“in this whole breakdown is like, how do you imagine the workforce in terms of their ability to code?”

What does that mean for software engineers? Now, like, what is the software engineer role turned into in the future? And then also like, how should knowledge workers think about the fact that they might be training AI to take their jobs? And now like, they're suddenly judged on how well they use AI. Like, how should they be navigating all this? Yeah. This is where the real questions start, right? So the interesting part is we're coming back to the analogy of what does a great manager do.

It's been the case for years and years that the number one role of a great manager is to make themselves obsolete. It's to build a team that can function without them. And actually the same is true here. Yeah. You are building your AI's your job becomes building a system around you that can do the job you're currently doing without you so that you can go and do the next thing. And we'll get through to what that next thing then becomes soon. But when you think back from

“the software engineering perspective to the the first question you had there, I think it's really”

useful for people to look at what is happening with software engineering. And it's going it's hard because people have not emotionally been most people in the world are not emotionally connected to software engineering in one way or another. It's actually been a software engineer's had a really good life. We're getting paid a lot of money to go and and do things that they actually love to doing, but in some ways they're absolutely living the future. And when I say that, if you are still

manually coding something by hand today as a software engineer, you are already behind. Nothing we do in my son is manually coded anymore. Actually we're now at the point where almost everything doesn't even get seen by a human anymore from a code perspective. And that seems

your job used to be coding. Say 10 years ago. Now having said that last year or two years ago

already a great software engineer, their job wasn't just a code. You can maybe think 30, 40% of their job was to code and the 60 or 70% was to figure out what to code to begin with. So a lot of even software engineers then took what is happening at the moment in somewhat of a bad way or at least they weren't extrapolating where they were looking at. Okay, the code in part of my job is now getting automated. Great. I can do other things, which is exactly the

“attitude you should do. So I would do more of the other bits. But what is happening this year”

is also the bit of figuring out what's to build is now also getting automated. Figuring out to build the spec, figuring out the architecture, all of these pieces that were higher level software engineering that a senior software engineer or an architect would do. They're also now getting automated. And where this is so useful as a paradigm for everyone else is to think through what is the equivalent of coding for a software engineer but for someone in finance or for a lawyer

or for an HR professional or a marketer. The equivalent of coding for someone in finance might be managing an excel sheet. That's disappearing this year. Probably by the end of this year, maybe even the middle of this year, you shouldn't be manually updating your excel sheets. That means that you can live one level higher. And that one level higher, the strategic financial picture and everything, maybe the supply, the way that you do with suppliers, the way that you

look at the financing structure of the business, that will still have a year or two extra. I'll be forward that also starts to get touched in different ways. So taking that bit really

“seriously, I think is probably the most important bit because people keep discounting this as if it”

is very talk. It is not. My CTO Greg recently did literally two days ago, did a talk at a CTO conference. It was very interesting because this is a really forward leaning audience. You would expect them to really know their stuff. And so he had prepared this talk thinking, okay, I'm going to go into a whole bunch of people that are very on top of their stuff here. He had prepared the starting point of his presentation to figure out where is the room at from an AI adoption perspective.

The first question he asked was, "How many of you are still writing code by hand all the time?

So with that AI?" And he had expected, okay, that's going to be very, very few. Yeah. Most of the room had their hand up. Oh, God. And here's it. Okay, how many of you are using at least agents to do part of what you're doing? Like barely any hands. And he had like three four levels behind that, which was how many of you are having automated process to deploy what the agent has built. How many of you are still looking at the code? How many of you are still looking

at the reviews of the code? Yeah, but he couldn't even ask them because even in that room, people are putting their head in the sand. It is the reality of where things are at.

“Is moving much faster than how people are able to catch up? And I think the biggest thing that”

people can do to prepare is to take note of what is happening there in software engineering and figure out what that means for their own job. Don't wait. At least for a little bit of time, live in a world where you're thinking, what if, sure, make up your own mind based on what you think is real and what is not, but the number one thing is try on a regular basis to check back in if the technology can do thing. And also, if you do it once and it doesn't quite give you the

thing and you're like, oh, I can't really help me in this thing. It was kind of there, but not quite what I was looking for, try it again in a month. Yeah, things change so fast. Yeah. And I think that is the, that is the really important bit is getting people to understand this. So figure out what is the equivalent of coding for your own job. And then start to figure out how AI can do more and more of that. Try to figure out where you can then spend the additional time. And this is where we come

back to you being deliberate in where you want to spend that time and where it is most effective. Don't let that happen to you. Be an active participant in that, in that change. What's up, young and profitors? When I started building YAP media, I had to figure out everything on my own branding, operations, finance, marketing. Some days, it felt like I had five different

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from this is if you can try to be in a company that's actually very AI-forward. That's going to be great for your future. Even if it feels painful in the moment like being forced to use AI, I know you do something similar at your company we can talk about that. But having a company that's very AI-forward is actually a really good thing for your career. Even if it means you get laid off in the future, you're going to be way ahead from the other people who weren't put in that position

to learn AI. And then also if that's not possible, I would say go find a company that's where that's possible. If that's not possible, learn it on your own. Do the steps that you need. You have a four week training that anybody can sign up for. It doesn't have to be through a company.

“So learn AI on your own if you have to. And then lastly, it feels like entrepreneurship and being”

a founder is the safest route. I was literally just as I was coming here today, there was an ex interaction where someone was asking if everyone becomes a founder who are all the employees.

bit that you talked about, which was this, the fear around the adoption piece and making myself

“obsolete in one way or another. I think that is really important because there are multiple”

aspects in this. And I fully agree with you that if you are in a job right now and a company that is not fully embracing this, I would say that is the number one warning sign. It's like, if you can get a job. Because that company is going to go out of business, even if they're not going to

lay you off, that company is not going to, well, and they're going to, basically you're not going

to have the job because the company is going to be out of business. Exactly. And you will not be in a position to easily find a job anymore because you've lost the skills in your behind. Yeah. Yeah. So that is, that is a really important piece, I think. Then within that, one of the things that I, I must say I struggled with is that when we started my stone, I thought our mission or entire purpose was to light a fire in every single person in the world and somehow help them

figure out how they could enjoy learning. Love learning. I love learning. And I thought for a while that was what we needed to do because if you love learning, everything becomes much easier. I realized

“about halfway through a little bit less, I think was first two years or so. That was actually”

a fairly, or a very self-centered way of going through life. Somehow I thought that was something

that everyone would like. But actually learning is like many other things in life, which is that some people love it, some people hate it. And I realized, and it was so, it was a real epiphany for me, when I realized that actually most people are scared of learning, are scared of change. It became so obvious, and that some people must be listening to this, it's like, well, obviously. So this was not obvious to me. When I realized that most people just don't enjoy that process,

it really changed the way that I thought about learning to begin with. And then when a high hit, it became obvious that a lot of company leaders are, I would say, actually negligent today. When you have a team that you were responsible for, you might think that you're doing the Methaver by not being clear or not giving what you would consider the extra load of asking them to learn how to use AR in their job. You might think, okay, I can't. They're already stretched.

They're telling me they don't want to actually, the kind thing is to tell them to do it. They will thank you for it afterwards. And a good leader is not just doing what their employees ask them to do. They are trying to get them to the best possible outcome. And there is a real dereliction of duty at the moment. There's a real failure of leadership, I think, in many organizations where they, because learning has been, for the last 20 years, most companies look at

learning as a retention tool. They basically did learning budgets so that you feel you have some

progression and you, you wouldn't turn as an employee. You would not leave the company because you felt the company to care for you in one way or another. But it was optional and it was a thing you could opt into. And too many companies are approaching this in the same way when actually they now have a responsibility. They have a responsibility to the employee. And that is what I can see actually to the person you were talking about. I can see how that can suddenly when the leaders

trying to lead and is doing it maybe slightly too aggressively can lead to some fear of exactly this cycle. Okay, now I'm being asked or like absolutely do this. I might, my job might depend on it. And that isn't, I'm not saying that is a good thing at all. I'm saying that is definitely something that needs to be managed better. But between the two fears, I would want to be in the position where I'm being forced to use it more and being set up to be successful in the future.

Yeah, given access to all the tools, having the tools paid for you, all those things learning

“on the company's dime essentially. 100%. And I think that is so important. The real problem”

is the leaders that are not currently making this clear. They are actually the ones that are setting their team up for failure over the next two years. And it is a responsibility and I don't think enough leaders are taking that responsibility seriously at the moment. So let's talk about how to actually implement AI in our organizations. You actually say it's not really up to IT only to implement AI. It's actually an HR problem. Talk to us about that. Yeah, it's actually not even just only.

This comes back to this idea that only 5% or 10% of what we do is help people use the tools. The tools are easy. Deciding to use chatchipiti or cloud or rebel. Okay, there is a technology

the tools, you can't be surprised that you're getting very little back. The tools don't adopt

themselves. There was a friend that told me the other day, it's kind of like giving someone a Boeing 737 and expecting them to be able to pilot the plane without any guidance. It's like a really advanced machine. You can do a bunch of things. But if you don't tell the person how to use it,

“they can't do anything. One of the more important signals in the important things that we try to”

help the company with is to help them realize and move the responsibility of AI from the CTO to the CHRL, or at least someone who is looking at the people side of things so that they understand that this is not a technology question. That is the number one thing. They shouldn't be looking. This is hard and I say this, I am a software engineer by background. I was CTO, it's super awesome. This is counter to a lot of what I would have said before. But generative AI is a technology

unlike anything we have had before. And the reason this is so difficult is that it is technology, which means that all of our pattern matching puts it with the CTO, puts it in the technology bucket. And so by default, it is the CTO's technology, the CTO's responsibility. But the impact is on the

“people. And so once the technology is rolled out, the real work starts and that real work is”

people work, it's process work, it's business work and it's no longer the responsibility of the CTO. The biggest signal we see is when we are able to shift that responsibility from the CTO to the CHRL, we know we have at least had a real impact on the business. At that point, we know that the business will, everyone will have different pace of development going through, but that's the number one signal

that we would look to. When AI first came out more broadly, where companies started to really

use it, there was a trend of using AI to actually cut workforce and to lay people off and basically replace workers. And a lot of companies like Clarenoff, for example, were kind of first to lead that and then actually failed. Whereas other companies like IBM decided to reskill and upskill their employees instead using training similar to what mines don't does, I imagine. So talk to us about the right way and the wrong way to think about rolling AI out to your organization

and what are some of the key things that we need to key challenges or obstacles that we need to look

“out for. So it's a very, very good question. And I think even outside of IBM, Ikea was not as”

a really good one. So the, it is actually comes back to a very similar starting point, which is when when AI is the responsibility of the CTO, technology has been for years and years and years about automation. And AI has been about automation for years. When it is the responsibility of the CTO, the focus ends up being on automating work away. And a side effect of automating the work away, if you're not being conscious about what the results are afterwards, is that the work disappears

and you haven't figured out what other work needs to happen, which means redundancies. It also happens at board level. And this is actually one of the biggest things we are not doing enough of yet. We get to work with the executive teams a lot. We don't do enough work with boards yet. And the problem with that is that you still have the same thing, which is that we'll work with the executive team, the executive team understands there is a whole other side to generative AI.

And I forgot to mention this. The flip side of automation is augmentation. Is how do you think about the enhancement, the improvement in quality, the moving the top line, helping the company grow faster, helping it make more revenue do better work, all of those things. That is actually where a lot of the value in generative AI lies, but it is not historically where technology has had the biggest lever. So we often work with an executive team. And even when

the executive team gets it after a while. And I had one of the more memorable experiences I've had this year is training the executive team of one of the Fortune 50s. And really feeling that we pierced through. They really got it. It was like three hours into a session. They were really excited. All of the stuff we could do. And then the CEO stands up and said great. I've been told to find

a billion dollars to cut out of a budget. Where do we get it? Which was good. I mean, it's a win for

don't just think about where you're going to gain the costs. Think about how this can double your growth rate. How can you find $3 billion in additional revenue in order to maintain

where you're at or move people around. So you don't end up always focusing on the cost reduction.

This is a real competence problem at the moment. People don't know what they don't know. So they focus on cost optimization instead of augmentation. This is where this drives to clerna. That they win. And I don't and clarner doing some awesome stuff. So this is the reality is first. Exactly. People could first move or get things wrong. We got so many things wrong.

“Like, honestly, if you look back, especially in a, if you look back at how you were operating a”

year ago and you're not. If you're not ashamed of how you were operating six months a year ago, two weeks ago, then you're not moving fast enough. And so they were one of the first ones to move. They moved maybe a little bit too quickly. And I think the thing I do think that was a maybe a failure of the way they could have led, is that they led with the redundancies. And so they decided to automate customer support and a whole bunch of people lost their jobs.

And what I do think and what I would love people to walk away with is the case that IKEA made,

which was completely the opposite. IKEA took their customer support employees and basically decided to

put them through training to make them all interior design consultants. So what they did is they looked at what does customer support or customer success look like for IKEA? And they said, we now have this

“technology that can make everything better. What does customer success look like if it were twice as good?”

In the case of IKEA, that meant everyone now has an interior design consultant. And so they thought we're going to elevate this experience. And I think this is the thing that people need to take away, which is you can think about a problem two ways at any point. You can try and figure out how do I get to the same level at half the cost? Or how do I get keep my cost

but make it twice as good? And I want more people to focus on that second bit. For two reasons,

one is because it actually leads to people keeping their jobs and everyone getting a better outcome. Two because it's under invested in and people will be surprised how much easier it is to get to that point. It's just that we're not used to thinking about it. And the companies that are going to stay and grow and thrive are going to be thinking about how to actually make their stuff better. 100%. Yeah. So what about the fact that AI is not free?

A cost money. I mean, Kate, we're kind of doing the math like because I was Kate's my business friend. Because I was working so much on rebel. And I was like, man, this is going to reduce the cost so much and she's like, well, according to like how to spend, it's about a thousand dollars a week right now. And I was like, well, that's kind of worth it for everything that I'm building. You know, for me, as the CEO, but we need to kind of put guard rails on other employees because we can't have

everybody spending, you know, let's say 500 bucks a week or whatever it ends up being. So talk to as about how we can navigate kind of how much spend AI costs and like how we should be thinking about that. Yeah. So this is a very live topic for us as well. For context right now on the software engineering side, we spend $5,000 a month per developer. Okay. And on the non software engineering side, we're spending, it depends on the employee. We're right now we're spending about a thousand or

$1,500 a month. But we, that is because we are not yet as effective as we want to be.

“I think it is really important to look at where we aren't right now and say over the next”

six to nine months and what long term is going to be where we end up. So right now, I would look at the API spend as a API weirdly enough to optimize for. And to say as a business and we actually tell this to all of the customers we work with. When your API bill goes up, you should celebrate that across the organization. You should have an incentive system where the person that racks up $500 in a week

should be put on a pedestal because they have been leaning forward, they have been trying things. And the results that you will get as a business from the fact your employees are trying it and

it's actually a thing you really should be optimizing for. Internally,

we have a target and we're going to think about it the other way around as well. They actually when you do $500 a week, you're probably, it'll be interesting to see how much you can push that. Most people will naturally, once they've got kind of rebel in place in different ways, they will naturally talk out at about $20 to $30 a day at a maximum and that's when you start to really use it. So you use it really well.

“I think I misspoke actually. I think in a week, I did about $300 or something and then it was like”

she was like it's about $1,000 a month and actually it was like that's really good. I mean for I'm much I did a thousand times. I misspoke on that. It was about $200, it was over $200 for the week and she was like it's about, she was saying like it's probably going to be like $1,000 a month. So that is, that is then you're at that level of doing it, doing it really well. And so short term, that is actually what people that get there tend to get a dramatically higher return.

Now you do want to, when you start rolling this out for a hundred thousand people, obviously you want to start looking at okay, there might be a few people that end up spending much more than what they're making back, but that's the exception rather than the rule. So short term, I would say optimize for it. And then also, if you know how to use it well, you don't waste, you don't waste the credits. You know what I mean? And some of it can be pretty

cost effective. Like I was looking at, because I was building all these apps on Riplet and then I didn't know that it was charging us. And so again, until Kate, I'm building this up, she's like well be careful because it's charging us and I was like oh shoot and I go and look and it was like I built two apps and it was like $10 or something and I was like oh, that's fine. This is fine. I can make as many apps as I want, you know, so it's not that expensive, but to your point,

rolling it out to a hundred thousand people. Yeah, so to give you a direct example, the other day, so I am having a conversation with with a few investors here and there. And so as they were starting to become more serious, I thought okay, let's let's be a little bit more thoughtful about this. Let's figure out who would be the 10 investors in the world that I really need to go and have a chat with rather than just randomly waiting for the few that I happen to just talk to.

Normally, previously in super awesome, like the process would have been manually researching 200 investors or actually manually researching 500 of them, so then whittle it down to 200 that might be interesting to speak to and then the hundred that you actually get a path into and then

like basically try and have a whole bunch of conversations to go through. Like that would be

one to two weeks worth of work of just doing the research, making sure you're prepared, going through

“things and figuring out who goes and introduces you. I did this last week with rebel and I think the”

conversation cost me about something that that one conversation cost me about $25. And rebel actually shows you per conversation what you what it costs you to go through. But in that time, it researched a thousand different investors, put everything into an Excel sheet, rated every single one of the investors based on how mindson operates, what their thesis is, crawled through all my own emails, figured out how many of those people have I already talked to? Do I know, am I connected

doing them on LinkedIn, re-ranked them based on thesis overlap and proximity to being able to get either already knowing them or having a direct introduction, and then just gave me the top 10 that I should talk to. Honestly, two weeks of my work, weirdly enough, is worth more than $25. Yeah, that's crazy. That would have been a $30,000 consultant to wouldn't have had the

context or written it in your voice or, you know, so that's incredible. And so that's kind of

“short term. So I think that that is a really important thing for companies to understand, which is”

short term. If your problem is responding too much on the API, actually, let me reverse that. I, it is easy to think. Your problem is going to be that you're going to spend too much money on the API. I have only seen that by some CEO or CTO that knows what they're doing. They let it lose. They're like, oh, I just spent $200 in a week. And then they extrapolate thinking, okay, if I roll this out across my company, every person is going to now do $200 a week, they are not going to

be doing $200. Because they're not you. They, they have to go through their own AI adoption journey. They will start with spending $1 a day. And actually, your problem is going to be that you're going to have to show them how to make much more, how to take much more advantage of it. That is your real problem. If you ever get to the point where you have that API bill that's so high, it just means you're the most AI forward organization in the world and you will have doubled triple your numbers.

that for a very long time, it would make sense to just use the frontier models. The best

“models that exist, the most expensive ones, which are the ones that would be using in rebel as well.”

And well, that frontier keeps going up, actually, the most expensive models that get better and better, but they're also getting more expensive. Now, when you start looking at the trend at a print intelligence level. So for the same quality intelligence today, you're paying about 100 of the price of what you would have paid last year, like 100th. And what is happening is right now, literally the period we're in right now, we are for the first time at a point where

many of the frontier models are at the same if not higher level than intellectually than most human

beings. So what that means is the reality is that rebel often knows better than I do. And I have

to really double check myself every time that it comes to a conclusion that's different to my own. I really have to figure out, wait, how did you get there? Explain it. Let's walk through this, step by step. Let's see it. And most of the time, it was right and I got something wrong. Now, the reason this is important is that actually we're about to get to a point where I know it'd be interesting to see just the next generation of models. And we're talking

“two months from now. Now it's going so fast. The next generation of models, I think for the”

first time, we'll get to a point where most people won't notice the difference anymore. Because unless you have for the last three years built up systems that go beyond your own intellectual ability, you won't see the difference between those two levels of intelligence because the model is just more intelligent than we are. And so you no longer absorb the difference. You won't

be able to take advantage of it. Ultimately, you have a question you reason it through. It gives you

an answer. If you don't have the systems in place to try and figure out what's the right answer, what's it not? How do I think about using this intellectual capability? You just can't use it with which then means that for the majority of people, this approximate level of intelligence is where we are now. And it's going to become the harnesses around it. The agents around it are going to get better. But the intelligence level underneath, in a year from now is going to be at

a hundredth of the price. So right now you might for this level of intelligence, you might be spending two hundred dollars a week. Great. That means that in a year from now, you've spent two dollars per week for this level of intelligence. Now, you might be able as you now, because you're starting earlier than than most, you're definitely on the earlier doctor curve. In a year from now, you will have built systems that will allow you to take advantage of a higher level model. So you

might not be spending two dollars a week. You might be spending $20 a week, $50 a week. It's unlikely that you'll still be spending two hundred dollars a week. If you do, however, you'll be the most AI powered AI first podcast network in the world and you'll have taken over everything. Yeah. Let's talk about right now. I know things are moving really fast, but right now we still need humans in the loop. We can't just let AI run wild. It's the reason why in rebel, you know,

it doesn't automatically send emails that drafts and then there's a human in the loop.

“So what would you say in 2026 are the things that you won't be automating with AI?”

It's a good question. And I'd love to just revert to the human in a loop bit, because actually the framework that we prefer is human at the helm, which is a different thing. But I think it's a really important nuance difference, which is that human in the loop makes the human the bottleneck. Because it somehow means that it's kind of like the manager that asks the employees to run everything

through them. You're always becoming the bottleneck, which means that the maximum level you can get to

is always how much is going through you. Yeah. It's the same of autonomous cars. Actually, the autonomous car analogy here is not a bad one at all, which is that if you still need to be in the driver's seat and you're still responsible for it. And you still have to have your hands on the wheel and do everything. There's there's only so much benefit you're going to get for an from an autonomous car. Now, the reason human at the helm is different is the idea that

you as the human take responsibility and you're accountable for what happens with the AI's that you put in motion. And then you are the one that decides what level of autonomy do you give them.

and what they're not allowed to do. In some cases, you might tell them I'm happy with you sending emails.

“In some cases, you're not. Email sending is an interesting one because it's a hard one to get past.”

Yeah, because it's your it's you. Yeah, exactly. I'm starting like there are now one or two scenarios or I'm starting to get to the point, and I'm explicitly telling it. You can send this email. I do it from my internal slack messages. Yes, exactly. I'm like, tell me what to do. You know, tell what to do. This is yeah, it's only just like internal slack messages. I'm fine. Just do it. Yeah, so I have the same thing literally just coming over here. Actually, I had a big piece and I

I was I had to come here, but my agent was still working and I just kind of had just like, okay, well, when you're done with this work, send the results to Hannah and like do it in whatever way. And then I just walked away from the machine and so the the way that we're trying to instruct this now is that if you're very explicit with rebel, it will go into it. If you tell it send the slack message or send the email, then it will go and send the email. If you tell it draft and then somehow

the end, this is the thing where it's hard. Somehow the AI then decides, oh, well, it asked me to draft, but I'm going to send it anyways, which actually, this is what has happened with like open claw and other things. And every time that you hear this horror story, it's like, well, you told me to do this thing and I just decided to wipe your whole heart disc. Your computer has gone. I was like, oh, wait, you didn't want everything. Oh, that was terrible. I shouldn't have done that.

That's the bit where we come in, where where rebel as a system should take over. So, hey, the user asked this thing, asked to send an email. Wiping your heart disc doesn't seem like an action that should happen when the user is trying to send an email. We might want to ask the user if they're okay with this. The same if you're saying draft me an email and the AI tries to send the email. It should ask you, hey, okay, they asked to draft the email, not to send it.

“So that the the way we're thinking about it is you need to have multiple systems around”

this is where the AI operating system comes in where rebel really, I said, this is probably one of the chords of rebel is that it doesn't just leave fully autonomously the agent to go and do, which is when it can it can really mess up, but it has multiple loops around it to verify

based on the action you asked it. Is this actually an appropriate action to take, but ultimately

the responsibilities on the human. When you tell it to send a slack message and that slack message is off, the thing that I am really keen and I keep hammering with our own team, the thing that I absolutely do not want to see is people blaming rebel, blaming the agents. So like, well, rebel wrote this message in a bad way, sorry, it's like, no, you told it to send a message, you didn't check the message, you take responsibility for it. Exactly. The same for an employee, if you have an employee that

does something bad, if you're the anyone's familiar with building companies, the last thing you want is this kind of blame culture where you say, oh, well, sorry, I'm really sorry for what happened there. So like, I had this employee in my team and they just really messed up what that went up. Like, no, like, you as a leader are responsible for what happens in that team. And if you don't take

that responsibility, your team will always be limited to routing everything through you.

“And that's why I think it's it's such an important bit, both in terms of how we teach people”

to interact with AI, it's they are accountable for it, and also to make sure they're not becoming the bottleneck. And this is when we think about setting people up for success in the future, constantly thinking through, what is the system I want to build that makes me comfortable giving the AI as much as much leeway as I am willing to give it. That's probably one of the biggest things that we try and help people understand. And not everyone will draw the limit in the

same way, which is fine. Is there anything in 2020, sixth right now that you absolutely will not delegate to AI? The human connection is a really, really big piece. There's a reason why we're doing this in person. Yeah. There's a reason why almost every single executive briefing session that we do is in person. It's because a lot of this AI transformation is actually emotional. And emotional is not something that AI is, I mean it can put the words in place, but it can't really make someone

feel better about it, or at least it's harder. It's a fundamental human experience that we're going through. And then the other bit is agency. I won't let AI just self execute on plans within the business without me. So there are ways technically that I could now go and set it up to autonomously start

do I apply my own agency? And how do I build the system in a way that I maintain agency over what

“happens? And then take the most advantage of the AI from within that. But so not letting it act without”

me having asked. And then second, having that human connection and that human experience is where

I would put all of my time. And hopefully, I mean this is an interesting one because it's probably counter to definitely counter to how people would perceive me externally. It's so interesting because I am so absorbed in the technology. The number one of the things that shocked me at the time when we were building super awesome was interesting. Sometimes think of me as somewhat robotic. Because I spend a lot of time with the technology. I'm very logical. But I care a lot about the people

that I work with. And so one of the things that using AI allows me to do is to spend more time actively with people and making sure that I make more time for exactly that piece. So human connection. Okay, so as we close out this interview because we're we've been talking for a long time. Honestly, I feel like we need around to because as you saw the prep brief, I have 15 more questions to ask you, more detail. I think that belongs more in like a part two. So we'll definitely have to set that up.

But I want to talk about tool tourism, right? So so this is something I think you might have coined where people are just trying every tool. What's the problem with tool tourism and how should we think about picking tools that we work with? We're quite framing as a problem, but there's

“definitely there's a situation. Exactly. There's definitely things that you need to watch out for.”

So I'd say on balance tool tourism, meaning that you're actually interacting with the tools already puts you ahead of most people who are not even interacting with them, right? So that's what I mean with. It's not necessarily problem. It is definitely it would prevent you from getting to the real return on the investment of the time that you put in. And I think this has also changed in the last year, which is that the technology in the last

year has really turned a corner where it is now able to produce real work. If you just sit at the level of tourism, you're just superficially trying a tool, you don't really try and go

deeper, you run the risk of never going deep with any of the tools and then never actually

getting to the behavior change. And if you're superficially looking at change BET and then Claude and then Copilot and Gemini and you're kind of thinking, oh yeah, I try all of them out and I kind of do these things and I compare them to any other great. But if you didn't go deep with any of them, you actually never got to the result or the return with any of them. So what is

“important is that you go deep with a few. Now that doesn't mean it's bad to try the others,”

it's always good sometimes to compare and contrast, but don't let it take away from you being able to go deep with one because otherwise you just won't understand what's possible. It's kind of like if you had 10 different operating systems and you tried all of them, I mean right now we really only have Mac Windows and Linux, but imagine you had 10 of them. If you changed that operating

system every week, you would never feel comfortable with your machine. And at some point,

you just need the machine to sit in the background. It's there to help you do work. So whether it's chance to be tea or cloth or something else or rebel becomes the operating system that you that you live in, it is important that you give it enough time to really go deep. Well, you've toured a lot of tools. So I want to end with a quick fire segment on the best AI tools. So best AI tool for building presentations quickly. Gamma. Best AI tool for meeting notes.

Fireflies at the moment. Best AI tool for research. Gemini's deep research. Best AI tool for brainstorming new ideas. Chance to be tea. Best AI tool for thinking and communicating clearly. Claude. Best AI tool for graphics or video clips. Tie between cling and VO3 for 3.1. Best AI tool for building apps without coding skills. Replete. I agree. Best AI tool for coding with coding skills. Droid. Best AI tool for learning faster. Chance to be tea. The AI tool that

more people should know about. Rebel. I agree. The AI tool most people are currently using wrong. All AI assistance. All AI assistance from copilot to chat GBT to Claude to number one problem is

so last bit is about Claude versus chat GBT. So what does Claude do better and what does chat GBT do better? Claude makes it easier to talk to it like a human in a way. It actually talks to you in a more humane way. It's writing is much less mechanical. It's more elegant in a way.

“It is more human. Chance to be tea is really strong at reasoning though. So when you need to”

crunch through a logical set of steps, chance to be tea can be better at it. Also, chance to be

tea was first and their ecosystem is more evolved although anthropic with Claude is starting to

add some kind of really, yeah. It's really getting there. But for a very long time and still like one of the features that chat GBT has that Claude does not, which is fundamental, which we didn't even get to in the weekend and I just realized we should have done that. Is the ability, so chat GBT has a canvas which allows you when you're brainstorming and can put it in a document and then you can annotate the document, but you can basically go back and forth with AI in the document. It's

almost like having a Google Doc, but with AI using change suggestions and comments as it goes along.

“And when you're thinking about the brainstorming something, often my flow would be actually”

start some of the in-chat UBT go through prepare the document, put it back into Claude when I wanted to sound more human. But so that would be, yeah, another way that they compare and contrast. If somebody is listening today, they haven't really started building, maybe they've used chat GBT loosely because everybody has at this point, but maybe they haven't really built any systems yet. Would you say chat GBT or Claude? Claude, today. Yeah, because rebel uses Claude

as one of the main and I feel the difference in quality is like so much better that I have stopped using chat GBT nearly as much. Okay, if you had to delete one forever, chat GBT or Claude.

Definitely chat GBT. There we go, Claude is the winner. Joshua, this has been such an incredible

interview. I end my show with two questions I ask all of my guests. The first one is what is one actionable thing our young and profiteers can do today to become more profitable tomorrow. I mean, that is the perfect question right now, but based on this conversation is just whatever you do lean in on giving yourself the tools to understand how to use AI, whether you do that with us at Mindstone taking the competency program or do it yourself or talk to your company

about what they can make available to give you the space. Whatever you do, make sure that every week you spend some time figuring out how deep this rabbit hole really goes. And what would you say your secret is to profiting in life, especially where all these changes going on? Right now, it's genuinely that I feel for the first time in my life that I'm living the future, which is a very weird position

“to be in, but that's why we're having this conversation today is that I feel that what I'm able”

to do now, most people in the world will be able to do in the next two or three years. And everyone, interesting enough, everyone has a choice and they can do the same. It's not even that I'm special in one way or another. It's just that I leaned in before anybody else did. And so that is, that is the secret sauce today. Yeah, I feel like just so lucky that I was able to go on the air, I told Kate, like I feel like it was fate that we were there and now we're going

to take 60 employees on this journey with Mindstone to teach them how to use Rebel and to, you know, understand AI and I just feel like it's really going to help my business stay competitive, thrive. It made me realize how at risk we are if we don't do this. And so I'm just so thankful that we've met and I'm grateful that now my audience gets to hear everything about Mindstone. Where can everybody learn more about you and Mindstone and everything that you do? So, very simple, go to Mindstone.com

and so we have the AI competency program, everyone can enroll, whether it's individuals, small teams. And if you're a company that is interested in kind of kicking your whole company through it, there's a contact from, so we basically have it for individuals and for companies and then we

can have a conversation figure out how far we can go. Amazing. I'll put all those links in the

show notes. Joshua, again, it was such a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. A huge thank you to Joshua for pulling back the curtain on what's truly possible with AI right now.

This conversation genuinely shifted something for me and I hope it did for you too. One of my

“favorite insights is that most people are using AI completely wrong. They're using tools like”

ChatubyT and Claude like search engines. Joshua challenged that mindset. Instead of asking AI for quick answers, treat it like a smart teammate. Give it context. Ask it to ask you questions

first before giving you an answer. When AI understands the full situation, the quality of your ideas,

strategies, and decisions improved dramatically. Another big takeaway is finding the coding equivalent in your job. Every profession has a repetitive task that eats up time.

“It can be updating spreadsheets, doing research, drafting emails, or organizing information.”

Joshua's advice is simple. Identify that task and start experimenting with AI to handle it. When you automate the repetitive work, you free of time to think strategically and operate at a

much higher level. And finally, start building systems that work for you. Joshua talked about creating

skills, which are repeatable workflows that AI can execute. Instead of doing the same task over and over, teach AI the process once, whether it's research, follow-ups, or content prep,

“hours of work can suddenly just happen in minutes. That's when AI stops being a novelty”

and becomes a real competitive advantage. The opportunity with AI right now is massive, but it's

not going to stay open forever. The entrepreneurs who have racist fully are going to get a

moat around them. They're going to be untouchable. I want that to be you guys. You're already out of the curve by just listening to this episode. Now go take action. If this episode planted a seed in you and you feel more motivated to use AI than ever before, then water that seed by sharing it with somebody in your life who also should be interested in AI. Your only homework today is to pick one thing from this episode and actually try it this week that can be talking

to AI instead of chatting with AI. That can be trying to lose a new tool like Claude or any of the other tools that we mentioned in the episode. And then come tell us how it went on Instagram at YAP with Hala or LinkedIn by searching for my name. It's Hala Taha. And if this episode was worth your time, a five-star review on Apple Podcast goes a long way. Those reviews help us reach more ambitious people just like you and they mean the world to me. I personally go check to see

my new reviews every single day. I'm obsessed with checking my new reviews. So please drop us a five-star review and if you guys want to watch the full conversation, we did record this episode in person so you can find it on YouTube or Spotify video just search up your own and profit in podcasts on YouTube and on Spotify, you can just watch it as a video. This is your host, Hala Taha aka the podcast princess signing off.