Gord Vickman: Welcome to the next episode of “Podcast Payoffs”. My name is Gord Vickman. Forgot my name there for a moment. Here with my podcast partner, Dan Sullivan.
 
Evan Ryan joins the show today for the second of two episodes. If you haven’t heard the last one, go back and have a listen to that one, either before or after you’ve listened to this one.
 
Evan is the founder of Teammate AI. He’s the author of AI as Your Teammate. And if you stick with us today and you’re an entrepreneur who’s interested in automating the boring to free up your creative potential, then this show is for you. It’s not about replacing humans. It’s about amplifying their potential.
 
Did I get that right, Evan Ryan?
 
Evan Ryan: You absolutely did.
 
Gord Vickman: Dan, the latest quarterly book is called Owning Technology Like a Great Dog. And I think this fits in wonderfully to the subject of AI. You can get a copy of that book, either the physical copy or the download on strategiccoach.com. Just click ‘Store’ and it’s there, Owning Technology Like a Great Dog.
Dan, how do you own technology like a great dog, and why is that important?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, it’s really interesting, because dogs are actually a technology, and I think because there was no species called ‘dog,’ it was a collaboration between, at some point in the future, an enterprising wolf and an enterprising human being.
 
And from DNA, we know it happened twice. It happened once in Europe, and it happened once in Southeast Asia. Because the dogs are genetically different, but both of them, it’s wolf. The beginning DNA is wolf. Seems to me like a remarkable crossover, and they estimate it’s been developing for 30,000 years.
 
Everybody’s got their favorite dog stories, but there’s just the most unusual relationship between humans and another species. And there’s inventories which indicate 150 different things that dogs can do in teamwork with human beings. Quite extraordinary stories.
 
But I... I got this, and you were nearby when I got this idea, Evan, because we were at A360 last March in California. You know, it’s sort of a hype tsunami that comes from the stage, you know, it’s this constant hyping, you know, and it keeps being talked about, you know, “Well, technology is going to take over.” And I always felt that it was a bit of a religion, the way that technology gets talked about in technology circles, is that, “Boy, the faster we get past humanity and just get into the realm of machines and you know, the smartest of us can actually fuse with machines. Boy, that’s going to be a great break for, you know, humanity. So the biggest break for humanity is when we get rid of humanity.” And I found a little bit of a contradiction in the thinking there.
 
So, at a certain point, about halfway through the conference, I said, “This is really silly. I said, there’s a real silliness going on here.” I said, “Why don’t we just use the model of dogs and what we’ve done with dogs to sort of ground ourselves so that we can think about what our relationship should be with technology?” Okay?
 
And right off the bat, a concept stepped out, and that was you have to establish who the owner is. You know, with dogs, right off the bat, the number one job that you have with a dog is get the dog real, real clear who the owner is, okay? And who’s who in the relationship. I’ve known people who have badly behaving dogs, and it’s not a situation I would wish on anybody because it’s just a very toxic thing that happens with the dogs, and oftentimes the dog is dispensed with and which doesn’t seem to me to be a preferred way of going about it.
 
And then I was reading, you know, President Biden’s German Shepherd has now been banned from the White House because it bit eleven people, and they were Secret Service agents. He was biting Secret Service agents.
 
And there was an article which really struck home with me, and the article was that “We can explain Joe Biden’s dog’s behavior, that he has a really bad owner. He has a really bad owner who doesn’t protect the dog.” And that dogs especially don’t like people who don’t smile. And it’s the job of a Secret Service agent not to smile, so it’s a setup for disaster.
 
So anyway, I did this, and I did the whole book of eight different ways you have to be an owner if you’re going to have a great dog, and eight ways of being an owner that will apply equally well to technology. So that’s what the book is about, Evan.
 
Evan Ryan: One of the best concepts, I think, in Strategic Coach was “thinking about your thinking”. And then secondly, it was “wanting what you want” and knowing what you want. And I don’t think that a lot of people have ever even thought about the idea that they could own the technology instead of the technology owning them. For the last 20 or 30 years, they’ve always been employees to the technology.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Sometimes employees, usually slaves.
 
I had a client, he was a Free Zone client, and he said, you know, “I’ve been feeling I’m looking at my cell phone too much.” And so he said, “I did a little test of seven days,” I said seven days. And the average was he looked at his cell phone 87 times a day for seven days. He told me that.
 
And I said, “So who owns who? Sounds to me like you’re owned by your cell phone. The cell phone likes it.”
 
No, the tragedy is the cell phone doesn’t like it. The cell phone doesn’t do anything. It just works. It just works, yeah.
 
But you seem on top of your situation. I mean, you do generally just meeting you in workshops, but just the way you describe your business, you really sound like you’re on top of your game. And I would attribute to that, that you’re the actually the owner of your game.
 
Evan Ryan: Well, I’m going to make this joke and you can cut it if you want. At the risk of the inappropriate joke, the cell phone loves being turned on. That’s his favorite activity. (laughs)
 
You can cut that if you want to, but I thought it and I realized I had to say it.
 
Gord Vickman: No, no, no, no.
 
Evan Ryan: But, yeah, I like living in the real world. I like doing things and exploring and interacting with people and doing all sorts of creative stuff—the same sorts of stuff that I like to do when I had summer vacation when I was a kid and when I was in high school and when I would have free time and in college or in my early professional life. What would I do if I had all the time in the world? I still like doing that stuff. And a lot of that time, that stuff doesn’t involve technology or that doesn’t involve my being an active participant in the technology.
 
And I think that any technology that is giving me another job to do is something that is going to make me an ax murderer.
 
Gord Vickman: So, Evan, what advice would you give for entrepreneurs then who see the technology around them much more like Biden’s very bitey German Shepherd and not something that is being particularly helpful? Do they need to scale back? Do they need a Who? Do they need to start eliminating things?
 
So put yourself in that position where you’re not using it efficiently. How do you crawl out from that swamp?
 
Evan Ryan: I think the first thing is knowing what you want. Like having a really crystal clear vision of what exactly is it that you want. Because it’s very easy for a lot of people to say, “Oh, I want to use technology better,” “I want to use it less,” or “I want to use it more,” or whatever it might be.
 
But having a really crystal clear vision of your future is the single most important aspect to making the technology work. You can properly wrap your mind around it, figure out how the tech fits into it. But if you’re not somebody who can figure out how the tech fits into it, bring on somebody, work with somebody who can figure out how the technology makes your bigger future a reality, either at the pace that you want it to happen faster or slower, but with good reason.
 
Gord Vickman: Makes perfect sense.
 
Dan Sullivan: Evan, one of the frameworks of Strategic Coach is the four freedoms: freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom of relationship, and freedom of purpose. And it seems to me that this is the basis for being an entrepreneur, that at an early age—and I find more and more that it happened before 10 years old—that the person who takes an alternative route to their future, as opposed to studying like mad, getting educated like mad so you can get a good job, entrepreneurs at a certain age go into the marketplace itself and start working out doing useful things that they can get paid for.
 
My father was an entrepreneur, and I’m the only one in the family out of seven children who went entrepreneurially, because the biggest thing is that it really struck me that my dad could do what he wanted with his time, and he could make money the way that he wanted to make money, strictly from the standpoint of his direct value to other people.
 
But if you use the Four Freedoms and sort of measure how you’ve progressed with artificial intelligence, commenting specifically on what it did to your time, what it did to your money, what it did to your relationships, and what it does to your central purpose, I think that would be an extraordinarily useful model for capturing just your response to this and sending out to all the Strategic Coach clients.
 
Evan Ryan: I think when you listen to the tech industry, the tech industry and a lot of the tech companies are trying to use artificial intelligence to increase their freedom of money. They want to use AI to make money, and to replace their relationships. “We’re going to have the AI do the relationship-building instead.”
 
So you’ve got your chatbot, and you’ve got the AI that can make sales calls for you, and you’ve got your customer service AIs, and you’ve got your email AIs, and you’ve got all sorts of different AIs that are essentially outsourcing your relationship-building, where, the way that I use it is it strictly saves me time.
 
The entirety of the purpose of AI is to increase my freedom of time. And then from there, I can be more creative or create more value in the marketplace with my team, and we can create more money, and we can have better relationships. And the AI that saves us more time can also save our customers more time. And so then our customers have more time and money to be able to create new relationships and expand their purpose.
 
So a little bit about my lifestyle. I am a digital nomad. So my lovely girlfriend and I travel all around the world. And we live out of AirBnBs. And right now we’re in Verona, Italy. But earlier this year, we were in Argentina. We’ve also spent time in Thailand and in Japan and in Singapore and in Great Britain. And we’re able to do this because we have technology helping save us time and we have great teamwork saving us time. And the technology enhances our great teamwork so that we can be able to live this kind of a lifestyle.
 
And the rest of it, in terms of expanding our freedom of money, that is coming from great teamwork and great creativity. And then because of that, we can expand our freedom of relationships, and we can help our customers expand their freedom of relationships.
 
So I think the way that people most often think about AI is, “I’m going to use AI to make more money.” Or “I’m going to use AI so that I don’t have to do customer service. I don’t have to do sales. I don’t have to do whatever it might be.” And I think that if you just think about using AI to save you time, the rest cascades.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. You know, one of the things I’ve observed with my relationship with technology in terms of being involved with Abundance360, that so many of them don’t have time. What I’m noticing, they’re really pressed for time. You know, when they’re talking to you, they’re also looking at their watch.
 
But the other thing is that there seems to be a scarcity of money, in the sense that they don’t bet on a new product, they bet on a new bet. In other words, there’s a bet, and they want to be early into the bet so they can make the money from the bet, regardless of whether the product turns out or not.
 
And the third thing I noticed is that their relationships, oftentimes, they’re not enjoying their third marriage more than the first two, but they’re disappointed with their relationships that they’re not more technology-like. You know, the relationships introduce them to all sorts of new unpredictable things, which they wish they could have predictability. And the purpose is to get to the singularity as fast as possible when the machines are in charge of everything.
 
It seems to me that by focusing, as you said in your comments, Evan, by focusing just on the money part of it, they automatically do it at the price of time, relationship, and purpose.
 
Evan Ryan: Yeah, in speaking specifically to the relationships for a second, I remember when Facebook was growing really fast. Mark Zuckerberg was interviewed, and the question that he was asked by the interviewer was something to the effect of, “Now that you don’t write any code, what’s it like to lead the fastest growing company in the world?” And he said, “Actually, it’s really hard because computers do exactly what you tell them to do, whether you told them right or wrong, and humans don’t.”
 
And I think a lot of folks are chasing that predictability. I think there’s also a bit of a casino in the chasing the money aspect of the freedom. And that’s really where the rush is. Whereas if some of those folks were using AI to free up their time, I’m not sure if they would like what they experienced in that newfound free time.
 
Gord Vickman: So what should entrepreneurs be doing a lot less of then? As you gave an example of your lifestyle, Evan, and Dan gave some examples as well of how to maintain and make sure that you’re always in control of this, what could entrepreneurs be doing less of if they see themselves spinning that drain?
 
Evan Ryan: I think the first thing is to leave the status behind. Like the status of being busy all the time and of having a full calendar and “Maybe I’ll be able to fit you in.” I’d say leave the status game of having a full calendar behind, and leave the status game of “Maybe I’ll be able to fit you in behind.” And then secondly, allow your team to do the same. Like AI is simply a tool to be able to do that.
 
But team members that have open calendars are team members that are creative. They’re team members that are thinking about a bigger future. And I think that’s really where it starts. And I have a really hard time when my calendar is full or when I’m doing too many things, I’ve bitten off a little bit more than I can chew. I have a really hard time, very crystal clear, getting a vision of that future, or the future that I want to have. What my future looks like when I’m really busy is just more of the same.
 
And so I think the first thing is just allow yourself to get rid of the busy calendar. Allow yourself to create space for the free time. And then secondly, allow your team to do that. And they will probably take the reins and guide you from there.
 
Dan Sullivan: It’s a new world. You know, I do a lot of historical studying. I’m a bit of a history buff. And I was trying to imagine what life was like in the century after Gutenberg came out with mass printing. A number of things that really fell out of it was really interesting was that there was conceptual difficulty. People had a conceptual difficulty, because all books had been one-offs before Gutenberg. And then, all of a sudden, all the books were just alike. And there’s a story that Gutenberg, among his early customers, had, like, bishops. And these are individuals who, over their lifetime, had written a lot of sermons. And this one bishop, apparently—this may be an apocryphal story, you know, but it, it makes the point—he had Gutenberg set a number of his sermons into a typeset into a book. And then he asked to have a hundred copies printed off, and he was paid for it and everything else. But Gutenberg gave him a deal because he felt that if the bishop bought into this, then the bishop had influence, and he would get a lot of referrals.
 
So he sent the box, you know, the container of 100 books over. And then he expected, you know, within a short period of time, he would get feedback from the bishop, or at least someone from the bishop’s office would say, “He really, really likes it.” And it went by a week, and then it was a month. It got to about three months, and he hadn’t heard word back yet. Nothing bad, but he hadn’t heard anything at all. And finally, he made discrete inquiries, you know, about what had happened. And one of the bishop’s assistants came to Gutenberg, and he said, “He’s only proofread 90 of them so far, so could you wait another couple of weeks?”
 
So the whole point, there wasn’t a conceptual understanding of what this was. In other words, he didn’t understand. I think the AI thing is presenting with most people with the same sort of conceptual chasm, that they have to take a leap over a chasm with what you’re doing. They don’t understand—and this is a dimension higher than printing, because in a certain sense, it’s sort of one-dimensional—but this is multi-dimensional. It’s as many dimensions as you want. And to normalize that, I think, requires an extraordinary enlargement of your brain power.
 
Evan Ryan: But I think to add on to that, first, I didn’t know that story. That’s hysterical.
 
To add on to that, I think to people who don’t understand how software works, software is magic. And then to people who don’t understand how software works, AI is like magic times a thousand, or it seems like it’s magic times a million. It’s really not. But I think that level of complexity or that level of grandioseness overwhelms people’s brains. And instead of saying, “Okay, how do we figure this out? How do we deal with it?” It almost just creates a shutdown where you end up proofreading the first 90 copies, but not the last 10.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, one of the things, because we have, personally, I’ve got a couple of projects that I’m working on. So Joe Stolte is a Coach member who’s created a thing called daily.com, and it’s an AI newsletter. Okay? Every two weeks, a newsletter is sent out. I don’t know who’s sending what here, but the newsletter, first of all, they asked me for my thought leaders, so I had a lot of people that I recommended, and I made about half of them Coach members, you know, who do really interesting thinking, they have good blogs. It came back, and I’m told that in the newsletter business, that if you get a 30% open rate, you’re really at the top of the game. And our first newsletter came back with statistics, and we started with 180 contact lists that we would send it out to, and we had a 56% open rate. That was on the first issue, was 56%. Second was 63, third one was 69, fourth one was 75. And then probably the last five issues, we’ve had a 93 open rate, an 85 open rate. And that grades all the articles, so it usually has about seven or eight articles.
 
And what really strikes me, I told Joe this, and I did a Triple Play for him on what I thought he was doing, a Triple Play being a key Coach tool. And he came back and he says, “You just opened my future.” He said, “Oh, what you revealed to me about what I’m doing.” And I said, “I think what you’re creating is everybody’s marketing director and strategist in a newsletter. Because the information it’s sending back is telling you exactly the kind of information that gets opened most readily, what the click-through rate is, they grade each of the articles, and at the same time they send you suggestions for the next article, the new layout for the article comes back.”
 
And we would never do such a newsletter because the time consumption on our staff would be so great. But basically, the director inside our company who handles this said, “This is a new issue. What do you think?” And most of my contribution has been graphic style issues. I said, “You know, it’s kind of wonky the way this looks,” and everything else. So I say, “This has got to be changed. I really don’t like the way this is laid out. They didn’t put the person’s name in the article, you know, at the lead of it.” And I says, “You know, humans like names, especially if it’s your name.” You like to see your name, you know.
 
So I made all sorts of style suggestions. And Joe said that whenever they get an email that’s got Dan’s style suggestions, they said, “We stop everything and say, this is really good stuff, let’s include this in all of our newsletters,” and everything like that.
 
But the other thing is that our newsletter is the most quoted of another 120 news, I think it’s 120 newsletters, that our newsletter is most referenced. So it’s told me a lot.
 
I’m just telling you this, of what do you think about this? Because I’m learning an immense amount about how the newsletter changes its mind every two weeks. And it starts zeroing in on certain things. And that’s been terrific. That’s been terrific. And we’ve gone from 180 to 1,800 in 10 episodes.
 
Evan Ryan: And your open rates went from 50% or 53% to 96?
 
Dan Sullivan: The eighties and nineties to the eighties and nineties. Yeah.
 
Evan Ryan: That’s quite remarkable. I’ve never heard of anything like that. I’m not a marketing genius, but I’ve never heard of any metrics like that before.
 
Dan Sullivan: It’s called Spark, by the way, the newsletter is called Spark.
 
Evan Ryan: Oh, I’m probably one of your open rates, or I’m probably one of the 1800 openers.
 
Dan Sullivan: Because your articles have been featured.
 
Gord Vickman: Me, too. So two of your 1800 are in the same Zoom room.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Evan Ryan: I think that for many, many centuries of human history, the value that’s been created by humans has been done by doing. And then really in the last 50, 60 years, the knowledge work came along. And so then you had the value being created from knowledge work instead of from the manual labor, but really still you’re doing, you’re the person that’s clicking the keys or that’s clicking the mouse or printing the document, whatever it might be.
 
And what I think is kind of like the really key differentiator here is what your role was, which was to say, “I like this, I don’t like this, I want it to be more like this,” and like really having clarity around what you want. And then those little bits of creativity, instead of needing to have a human going in and reading all the metrics, and guessing “What do we think is working? What do we think it’s not working? And then we’re going to run another experiment.” And then at some point, you know, the humans having a bad day, and so they don’t read the metrics properly. But that sets you back a month.
 
And so I think that it’s a redefinition of what most people think to be creativity is, and what most people think to be the real size and scope of their Unique Ability is, and how kind of potent their Unique Ability can be.
 
I also think that there’s an incoming mindset shift that a lot of entrepreneurs, I think especially Strategic Coach entrepreneurs have, but a lot of other folks don’t, which is the difference between the way that a lion and a deer eat. The lion is like sprint/rest, and the deer is constantly grazing. So versus like creating massive amounts of value in very short decisions versus constantly like punching the clock and doing eight hours or 10 hours a day.
 
So I think that the big thing there is how big of an impact artificial intelligence can have in the intelligence and in the decision making.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Just to add to your analogy there, lions will eat deers, but deers won’t eat lions. (laughs)
 
Evan Ryan: And one other thing I’ll add there is the difference between what you did and what the AI is doing. When the AI is deciding, “We’re going to do more of these topics, less of these topics,” versus “Humans really like names.” That’s a difference that I think is really important. So it’s called “artificial intelligence” for a reason. It’s because we’re consuming data about open rates and where people are clicking and all sorts of stuff like that, and then we’re making a decision from the future, versus artificial wisdom, which isn’t a name. The wisdom is saying “Humans like names,” but the intelligence is saying “People like clicking on this.”
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I created a little acronym about how we get input and it’s called D-I-K-W: Data is one way we get input, which has instant perishability. If you look at the big board, the stock market, those prices, Howard Getson was saying that the average length of time of a price on the big board in the New York Stock Exchange, it’s about 13 seconds, about 13 seconds, because the buying and selling is going on all the time.
 
And then there’s Information, and information is packaged data, is that you put a lot of data together to the point where there’s a message to it, a more major message. And it’s probably the information shelf life might be a couple of days, might be a week. And then D-I, data, information, and then knowledge is K. And K has got possibly, used to have quite a long shelf life, but now the knowledge may be a month, might be a quarter. And in every profession, knowledge that used to last for their career when they got a degree or whether they got their professional accreditation, its half-life has already been reached from the time that they get their credential till they go out to the first month of actually doing business. The shelf life has decreased.
 
Then there’s a huge jump and gap, and you just pointed to it, Evan: Wisdom. And wisdom is knowledge that is timeless. It’s timeless knowledge. Okay?
 
Would you say that if humans are going to be successful in the teamwork with AI, your safest bet is to be wise?
 
Evan Ryan: I think that’s the safest bet in many aspects of life. There’s a reason we still quote Aristotle.
 
Dan Sullivan: I think it’s generally true, but I get a feeling we’re being pushed towards a cliff.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And we’re going to find out whether we can fly or not.
 
Evan Ryan: Yeah. I have a sneaking suspicion that a certain number of new ideas, a certain degree of creativity comes from wisdom and not from knowledge or from information. It’s the innate ability to know what to do or to try a new experiment.
 
So yeah, I would say the cliff is rapidly approaching if you’re somebody who makes their living solely based off of information.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, it really strikes me how eagles teach their little chicks how to fly. Do you know that?
 
Evan Ryan: They just push them off?
 
Dan Sullivan: They just throw them out of the nest. The ones that don’t hit the ground, they can fly. (laughs)
 
There’s a hardheadedness about that, but I mean, humans go through the same thing. I was just noticing reactions to sudden unexpected world events like the COVID. And how some people, I just thrived on COVID. I mean, I remember doing 10x calls, Free Zone calls, the Zoom calls that we do, the two hour sessions. And people would say, “I don’t say this outside, but I hope this doesn’t end too soon. I’m having such a good time.”
 
And then there’s other people who just hit a wall. We had a 40% drop-off in our client base during COVID. I think about probably 30 of the 40 came back, but a lot of them said, you know, “I just packed it in. I just couldn’t deal with this.” And it’s not just one factor, but it was a multitude of factors.
 
I say that history is simply the record of everything we didn’t expect. We don’t write about things we expected.
 
Evan Ryan: No, no, we don’t write that the population ate lunch today.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and I think we’re in for tumultuous times. And, you know, I think that the AI, which is, you know, coming up on a year since ChatGPT, 30th of November. But I think this has introduced a new factor of unpredictability into human affairs. Not that people have a sense that AI is doing this, but there’s unpredictability that’s happening because other humans have access to AI.
 
Evan Ryan: Yeah. And the old world before AI was relatively predictable at the pace at which it was going to change or kind of affect your life. And I think now that the cost of acquiring information or the cost of knowledge has gone down quite sizably. The pace at which different things can affect your life got shortened. Or the timeline at which different things can affect your life got shortened quite a bit.
 
So now I think the big question for a lot of people is “What’s timeless?” or like “What’s not going to change?” or “What are the things that we can count on for the future, no matter kind of how things are changing around me?”
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
So I have a question for you, and this is probably a good wrap-up conversation here, Evan. In my thesis of owning technology like a great dog, so if you look at where you are right now and you say, “What do I own about this technological realm and what don’t I own it?” And what I mean by ‘own’ is you have a sense of ownership that, you know, “I’m kind of in charge.” So the subhead for the book is “Always remember you’re in charge.” Where are the challenges to you being in charge?
 
Evan Ryan: Anytime the technology is placing an artificial restriction on my life or on my business. And that restriction can be as simple as it’s difficult for me to use it, or as, in my opinion, important, as I can’t get my data out of this piece of technology. The company that I’m using owns my data, I don’t own my data.
 
And one of the things that I’m really excited about is it seems like AI in general is the first thing that is going to happen with AI is actually that software developers feel some pain from AI. I think that the cost of building software and building AIs or building automations or whatever it might be, building tools to help your business or help your business or your life run better is going to fall dramatically. I think that it will be one of the single greatest disruptive forces of the next 10 years.
 
As a sidebar, I don’t really understand why the first thing that software developers tried to do was automate their own job away. But they had the whole world of jobs and they decided to use AIs to write code. Feels a little bit like killing the golden goose.
 
But I think that AI’s ability to create great tools for itself allow you to create great tools that are specifically tailored to you, will be one of the single biggest kind of game-changers for a lot of folks heading into the next five or 10 years.
 
But in my life, if there’s something that’s restricting my freedom, either ease of my life, my freedom of time. So it’s kind of causing me pain in the way that I spend my time. Or if there’s something really complex, like “I can’t get my data out,” or “I can’t get insights out that I need to get,” or, or We can’t deliver the value that we need to deliver.” That to me, is quickly becoming a demarcation line that I can’t cross.
 
But what’s exciting about it is that the cost of building software, I think is falling quite fast. And so lots of people are going to be using lots of solutions that are specifically tailored to their needs. And then ultimately, I think specifically tailored to exactly what their clients need.
 
Dan Sullivan: Great answer. Great answer. Yeah.
 
When I first went to a conference where Ray Kurzweil was talking about his singularity, he was saying, you know, “We’re within a decade at that time, two decades where technology is going to be more intelligent than humans.” And I went up to him at a break and I said to him, “When you talk about intelligence, are you talking about consciousness?” And he said, “Well, nobody knows what consciousness is.” And I said, “Hmm, seems to me that it’s a part of human intelligence.” And afterwards, I came back and I wrote a little note. I probably read this little note at least once a month and it says, “Humanity is always infinitely bigger than anything that humanity creates.”
 
Gord Vickman: And some insightful philosophy, and that would probably be a great spot to wrap up. Evan, where can people learn more about you, find out more about you and your work?
 
Evan Ryan: Yeah, you can find us at TeammateAI.com, and you can buy my book, AI is Your Teammate, on Amazon.
 
Gord Vickman: Evan, it’s been a pleasure today.
 
Thank you so much for joining us here on “Podcast Payoffs”, all the way from Italy.
 
And if you like this episode, share it with someone who you think could gain some value from it. Share it with someone you love. Share it with someone you don’t love. Maybe they’ll come around and you’ll be friends after all.
 
Always a pleasure. Dan and Evan, thanks so much.
 
Evan Ryan: Thanks for having me.
 
Dan Sullivan: Thank you, Gord.