Speaker 1 0:00
All right, here we are. Welcome, everyone. This is the Work on Purpose Summit. This will also be a special edition of our podcast. You are in the right place if you are looking for lovable work yourself, if you are wanting to create it for others, or you're navigating a pause or a pivot. I'm Sarah Feeley, the president of Compassionate Leader Circle. We're joined by several esteemed guests today, who you will all get to meet and hear from. We've got Laurel Donnellan, the CEO and founder of Compassionate Leader Circle. We've got Hamza Khan. We've got Abhijit Baduri and Katie Reed, three AI and future of work experts who all have a really different angle and area of specialty on this topic. There they are saying hello to their their smiling faces. I'm going to give you all a more a more robust introduction in a moment. So at CLC, we're a leadership development firm. We help people reach their potential through finding their purpose and soul work, and we also support businesses looking to develop remarkable leaders. We're here today to talk about the intersection of two major topics. One is the future of work, particularly in the age of AI, and importantly, the increasing importance of purpose and self identity in that future. And the data is telling us some pretty interesting and clear things. BetterUp and Harvard Business Review did a survey in 2023. 90% of participants would trade almost a quarter of their lifetime earnings for more meaningful work. 70% of people are seeking purpose at work, but only 15% are finding it. There's a huge gap there, obviously, and there's also skin in the game and a return on investment for businesses. People who find purpose and meaning at their work are 5.6 times more engaged when their purpose is strong and half as likely to burn out. And this is really fascinating. If you look at what futurists and the Bureau of Labor Statistics are projecting about Gen Alpha, so those are people born between 2010 and 2024, they will average between 18 and 25 jobs across their lifetime, including six to nine different career chapters. So those aren't just job moves; those are six to nine actual career pivots, which is more than double the volatility in job changing than prior generations, careers are messier and even more human than ever. It's not will we change jobs. It's it's happening. What will drive us and guide us? So in the next 85 minutes, we'll we'll go as follows. I'm going to wrap up my brief intro here. Laurel, our CEO and founder, is going to explore our newest model called the Purpose Planning Circles. We're going to go deep and broad with our panelists. Then we're going to open it up to a Q and A. So please pop your questions in the Q and A, and you can ask you know questions to our panelists directly. We'll do an interactive session. We're not going to ask you to talk or turn your cameras on, but we're going to ask you to apply some of the concepts we're talking about in your own current life, and then we'll wrap with some some free stuff and swag. I just want to remind you we're really going to be talking about four main topics here. So the future of work: what does AI change and what doesn't it change? There's a lot of fluff out there and fear mongering, and there's some things that will change, and there's a lot of things that will stay the same. We'll talk about human advantage. What durable skills can technology and AI not replace? We'll talk about career ownership. So how do you thrive in a world of pivots, pauses, and possibilities, and then we'll talk about career navigation, and that is getting into the driver's seat of your career, leveraging your own purpose and meaning as you navigate change. Next, I'm going to pass it on to our CEO and founder, Laurel Donnellan. She's been doing this work for about 30 years. She's been talking about compassion, love, and purpose at work when those were all like people wouldn't touch them with a 10 foot pole. She's also my personal dream doula, and if you ever feel like you're adrift, she's the person who can really set you out on your own personal compass. Without further ado, Laurel, I'll let you take the screen.

Judy Brennan 4:38
Thank you, Sarah. You are my dream business partner, and I want to welcome everyone to our purpose party and thank everyone for the opportunity to talk about my favorite topic, purpose. We define purpose as a declaration of contribution based on your values, and we take purpose very seriously. And we take dream jobs and dream work very seriously. So, this is a model that we use to help people discern where they are at. We call this the remarkable work umbrella. So, if you look at unremarkable work, I don't want you to think about that as a summer rain. That is like cold, hard, uncomfortable rain, unremarkable work. Unremarkable work is work that is not sustainable. So it may not be sustainable for your heart or your emotions. It may not be financially stable. We want to get you underneath the umbrella. So remarkable work is work that fills you up and sustains you, and there's two types of remarkable work. Soul work on the right is the absolute best use of your passions and purpose, and I believe that if you're willing to work for it, you can all find and you all deserve soul work. If you're lucky enough to have soul work, I feel like everyone has the obligation to help other people get there or to provide that lovable work for other people. On the left, we have bridge work. Bridge work is work that sustains you while you're pursuing soul work. So, for instance, if being a veterinarian is your soul work, maybe being a vet tech or an assistant or a dog walker and going to school could be your bridge work. So, bridge work is connected to your soul work. I am very curious about the people who are listening in. Some of you are going to be live, and some of you are going to listen in later. But I'd like you, if you have a moment in the chat, if you could just put where you're at on this model. Are you doing unremarkable work, remarkable work, bridge work, soul work? If you could share that in the chat, that would be great, and we'll have a sense of who's here. So for the last few weeks, I've been doing some research. I knew that the trends of work and the amount of work and amount of jobs were trending up, but I didn't realize how drastic the trend was from generation to generation. So I'm a boomer, and if you look at the dark blue graph, that is how many jobs on average a boomer has had. Most of us are at the end of our career, and then we go to Gen X and millennials and Gen Z and Gen Alpha, so we're we're looking at you know the oldest generation having about 13 jobs, and future generations having up to 25 jobs. The light blue represents careers, so careers are clusters of jobs that are related. I've had two careers. My first career was in hospitality, and my second career has been running Compassionate Leader Circle for almost 30 years. So, two careers, which is very you know on trend for Boomers. Gen Alpha, who's just entering the workforce now, will have eight to nine careers and have to spend more time re-educating themselves, and then the red is the average tenure per job. So that is also going in the opposite direction. That's going down. So boomers at almost three years per job, Gen Alpha is looking like it's less than a year per job. So, this is the current state and future of work around career volatility, and the reason why the amount of jobs we have and the amount of careers we have, I think, is on the next slide. So we'll share that AI is definitely affecting this. All tech is affecting this. There's going to be more job displacement and automation. People are working longer. They're living longer, and they want to work. Some have to work. Some want to work. There's definitely a rise in gig and portfolio jobs, and younger people seem to not have patience for remarkable work, so they leave when they're unhappy, and that's creating shorter tenures.

Judy Brennan 9:32
Now, the the opportunity here for all of us is around getting in the driver's seat, as Sarah talked about of your own career and understanding what your purpose is, understanding what your passions are, and then if you're an employer, doing what you can to create more stability for your employees. So as you plan your career, whether that. In any generation, so whether you're new to the workforce or someone looking at retirement, we're looking at helping you look at work through five lenses. The first one being soul work, which I've already explained, and that is the best use of your passions and purpose. In order to figure out soul work. You have to know what your passions and purpose are. If you don't know what your soul work is, your job in that circle is to figure that out. And we have lots of tools and guides and programs that can help you. Some are free, and we will share those later. And in addition, my advice to all my clients and all the folks that are looking at the future of work is to look at these other four lenses in your planning. So, full-time jobs, if that is something that you're interested in or something that you're not interested in, I think it's good to look at your options there. What is available to you as a full-time job that offers benefits? The other circle here is part-time freelance and gig jobs. And maybe if you're if you're struggling with free time, finding free-time work, you might be open your heart mind to that because that's another way to create financial stability. If you are interested in starting a business or being a solopreneur or maybe spending time on investments, we throw those into entrepreneurial pursuits. That's an area that I think is going to have a lot of growth. I think AI, in particular, will level the playing field for people who want to create businesses, and then the fifth and final circle is pauses and pivots, and this is where you're going to find yourself sometimes in creating planned pivot, which might be like a retreat or a break, and sometimes there's going to be unplanned pivots like losing your job. So all of five areas have to be attended as you're planning the future of work. This is generally what the trends are for the next 10 years. Full-time employment is going to shrink. Part-time and gig work and freelance work is going to grow, and entrepreneurial pursuits will also grow. We promised you some AI, and I know our panelists are going to talk about some of these things. But I think a year ago I was thinking that AI was the enemy, and I've spent about a year diving deep into AI and using AI and trying to educate myself on AI, and I right now I'm sitting in the middle of AI is a great opportunity, and AI is also a problem if we don't address it. I think number one, my human centered AI checklist advice is to learn about AI and build fluency, but don't forget to give yourself and others permission to dream and innovate and think about what you really want to do without AI. We want to help you prepare for reinvention with durable skills. The panel is going to talk about this too. There's lots of skills that AI can't replace, and I think everyone should lean into those interpersonal and character skills, we're going to have more pauses in purpose. So I think embracing those and planning for those is going to be important. And then around AI, lead and vote with your values. and And in addition to voting at the ballot box for maybe politicians that care about the future of work and the future of employment, and how AI will affect our environment, you can also vote with who you work for, who you support, what companies you spend dollars on. There's lots of ways to get yourself involved. So there's been some questions while I've been talking. All of this information that I'm sharing, plus more, will be shared in a guide that we've created for you, so you'll be getting that information. Thanks, Sarah.

Speaker 1 14:11
Thank you, Laurel. Now, if I could have our esteemed guests bring their videos back on, so we can see their shining faces. So I'm gonna do some brief intros. They were hard to keep brief because y'all are just so awesome and have done a lot of different things. But Kiana, our director of community engagement, is gonna be popping all of your URLs into the chat. So, folks, if you want to look up any of these people, those will be in the chat first. Hamza Khan, who I met at Work Human, one of the most compelling speakers I've seen live. So awesome, Hamza! Best-selling author, award-winning entrepreneur, globally renowned keynote speaker, whose TEDx talk "Stop Managing, Start Leading" has had millions of views. He's a friend. He's a Horontonian. Do I have that? Right from Toronto, and one of the most inspiring, thoughtful, and hopeful voices out there when it comes to humanity and the future of work, Hamza. I'm allowing you to get on your soapbox for about one to two one minute. Tell us what is on your mind as it pertains to the future of work.

Hamza Khan 15:19
Oh my goodness, Sarah! First of all, thank you, and thank you, Laurel, for generously inviting me to be a part of this. And I'm very excited to be here to be trading ideas with Abijit, Katie, and everyone involved here. And really encourage everybody in the chat to get involved in this. I had an idea of what I wanted to say before we saw Laurel share those stats, and the resounding feeling that I had was, oh my God, this sucks for the next generation. Pardon my language. And I think I'm just gonna go off script over here and just actually step on the soapbox mentally and just say what's in my heart. And so, as Laurel was sharing, and I'll try to keep this under two minutes, I thought of the Mark Twain quote, which is, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes, and I think in every technological revolution there's this fundamental tension between the owners of the means of production. In this case, if we're talking about AI, we're talking about Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropics, so on and so forth, and the people, us, whose lives are disrupted by the proliferation. It's so clear, based on what Laurel shared, that the lives that are going to be impacted the most downstream are our kids and their kids and all of posterity. We've seen this movie before. We saw it with the Luddite movement. We saw it with the Haymarket affair, early internet, social media. When we had an opportunity to turn it into a utility, but instead decided to slap ads on it, and I think, I know I'm not falling for it again. There's this push to call this the age of AI, and I think, frankly, and again, I invite all of us to weigh in on this. But I feel personally, it's irresponsible to center the tool, and by extension, the owners of the tool and their agendas, putting humanity, putting the next generation on its back foot. So, let me wrap this up because I'm clearly agitated by this. My soapbox address pertaining to the future of work would be this. Since the dawn of the agricultural revolution, when the idea of dehumanization began to experience the industrialization that we see today, ever since then, we have been in what I offer to all of us as the rehumanization era, and what we're calling the AI era is but a chapter in that grand saga. So that's me on my soapbox.

Speaker 1 17:33
Did I hear you say I'm going to come back to this? But rehumanization. I think we have been in

Hamza Khan 17:38
the rehumanization era, and I think that AI is a catalyst. I share Laurel's optimism and concern. I think I'm more optimistic than I am concerned, but the concerns are very healthy and very strong. But I'm hopeful that AI, as counterintuitive as it sounds, can actually help us to be more human. And I'm excited to trade ideas on how that could happen.

Speaker 1 17:58
Thank you, Hamza. Thank you. Now I'll turn to my friend Abhijit Baduri. We met one fateful evening at a work human conference in Orlando, and I was like sucked into his brain. And it was we're fast friends. He's one of the world's leading voices on career ownership, lifelong learning, future of work. He's a global speaker, seven-time published author, with his newest book coming out this later this year. He's the former global head of leadership development at Microsoft, no small gig, and he advises organizations and professionals on navigating rapidly changing workplaces. Abhijit, it's only fair I let you get on your soapbox. We're going to keep it to one to two minutes here. What does career ownership mean in today's landscape?

Speaker 2 18:45
So I think when you look at the way careers used to be built, they were built earlier on three platforms. One was interchangeability in the industrial age. You had to fit a job description. You had to fit a credential description that you know you need to have a master's degree or a graduate degree, and all of that you know the employer gave you a particular title, a job, all of that. So it was interchangeable. You had to be like everybody else to fit in. It was credential driven and given by the employer. If you reverse it, the the age of work that we are looking at now is actually going to be the exact opposite. That instead of being interchangeable, the opportunity is going to be how unique are you going to be? And uniqueness comes from you know three particular aspects. One is the kind of judgment you bring to the table, the kind of relationships that you have, and of course the way that you sort of articulate the narrative, the storyline. So these three things combine to make you unique. The second thing is that instead of credentials, people now worry about the portfolio of work that you can share. So you know the degree is merely like a receipt for the work, whatever you study. But it's really your portfolio, and the third is that instead of it being frozen, you know. So work used to be one tidal, one lane. You know, you worked in it for like 3040, years and retired. Now it's going to be you know different kinds of lanes. So you will shift your path, much like a river, not a frozen block of ice, so you will be fluid, and that's you know the big shift. Work is moving from being a defined frozen piece into something which is more fluid. So it's like the river when you get a barrier, you go past it, you climb over it, or you dissolve it. So it's like that.

Speaker 1 20:38
Abhijit, I remember meeting you in Orlando, and and you you you use this metaphor from ice to water, and my brain. I mean, and I think there's, and we'll talk about this in a moment. But this idea of fluidity, with that comes more ambiguity, more change, a lot of things that make us innately uncomfortable as humans, and we'll get to that in a moment. Like, what does that require from us with this greater sense of fluidity in careers? Last but not least, Katie Reed. Katie and Laurel have been friends and colleagues for over 26 years, and we use some of Katie's work in our purpose coach certification. She sits on our faculty. She is a 20-year psychotherapist turned buyer psychologist and AI strategist. So she's an expert at the intersection of AI and our brains. She helps entrepreneurs and enterprises reinvent their work to meet this next chapter. She's been brought in to to businesses to teach her unique AI plus psychology strategies with companies as large as Intel and our proprietary AI models are used by brands to understand their customers at scale. Katie, again, all fairness, welcome. Soapbox, one to two minutes. How is AI affecting this notion of expertise?

Speaker 3 22:00
Yes, I love this question. I'm going to start very briefly by saying a quick Laurel story. When Laurel and I first met, we have a great origin story, which I just sent out to my list the other day. Which is that within about three minutes of meeting me many years ago, Laurel said, "I just have this feeling like I'm supposed to invite you to this sweat lodge that's happening tomorrow, and she did, and we have been friends ever since. And it was meant to be. And our careers have developed along sort of parallel tracks in some ways, which has been interesting. And when I first started working with AI a couple of years ago, most of my work at the time was with psychotherapists like myself. My first thought was, everyone I know is screwed because I was looking at this magical box who could now provide probably about 80% of the expertise that we all have spent so many years and so much time and so much time in school and in our careers developing. Now I could get that free from a prompt instantly, and I'll go more into this in my talk later on. But I really got nervous about that because I thought, wow, one of the main things that we hang our identities on as human beings is our area of expertise, just like Abhijit was just saying. And so when we hang our identity on that, and then we're being asked to shift that. Gosh, 25 times in the case of my kiddo Jen Alpha, that's pretty amazing. So we'll get into that more. I'm excited to talk about it. I'm gonna keep going on this thread here, and please, I'll remind everyone who's listening: pop your questions in the Q and A. No questions, a dumb question. And this is for now, Hamza, Katie, and Abijit, this is going to be a fluid session. So if someone says something that you want to pop on and talk about, let's just keep rolling. We've talked, Katie, about how AI is sort of commoditizing knowledge. How should we begin thinking about ourselves, redefining who we are when expertise isn't

Speaker 1 24:00
like our greatest differentiator, maybe anymore.

Speaker 3 24:05
Exactly, and that becomes the question. So, just this morning, I was taking a shower, getting ready, thinking about the session, and I was thinking back to when I first graduated college, and I was working at a Starbucks. Abhijit, you're in Seattle. It was the big giant Starbucks in the U District, and it was a really big Starbucks, and you would meet new employees all the time. And what's funny was at this Starbucks, when you met a new employee, the first thing we all said to each other is, "So what do you do? Because all of us worked at Starbucks, and we were all different ages, but all of us knew that wasn't our identity, right? We hadn't settled into that as our identity, and so then we all kind of grew through that, and grew up, and got our careers, and spent all this time in our expertise and our identity, especially the longer and longer. If you're a doctor, if you're a lawyer, if you're someone who has spent a long time building up this expertise. That was a scarce and rare thing, your skill, and so it became so much a part of your identity. So, what do you do when the magical box comes along and with a prompt? Now your whole identity is somewhat in question. And I remember when I first had this fear for all of my fellow colleagues, that I was like, "Oh no, we're all screwed. The magical box can answer everyone's questions now. I thought, "No, no, no, we're fine. Survival of the fittest, right? Like the cream will rise to the top, and the best of the best will just do great, and everything will be fine. There was an error in my logic, and it took me time to realize it, and the error in my logic is the Dunning Kruger effect, meaning we don't know what we don't know, and so we look at the answer from the AI, and we are not experts, and so we think it's the ultimate answer. It's coming down from the mountaintop. The AI has told us, and we don't know what we don't know, so this becomes the scary thing for people who base their expertise on and their identity on what they do and on who they are. Is all these things, and there's a thing. And Abhijit, I think this exactly goes back to what you were just talking about. There is a concept in psychology called narrative identity theory. What this says is, I can continue to grow and evolve my understanding of my identity with the circumstances inside of me, outside of me that grow and change in the world. And so now, when I think about, thank you for the thumbs up. When I think about the durable human skills that we need, that our kids need, I think about that exact thing. How can we learn to better and better evolve our identities? Because it's no longer just going to be, I'm an accountant, I'm a this. We are going to have to evolve multiple, multiple times, and I will let others weigh in. Katie

Speaker 1 27:04
Reed just threw a softball out to Abhijit and Hamza. Thank you, Katie. I'll let you either of you duke it out over how you want to respond. I know there's a lot of good fodder here.

Speaker 2 27:16
I'll just build on you know something that she said that you know there are three things. One is, as we said, that the narrative that you craft is an essential part of how we describe ourselves. So if you say, "I work for so and so company, I'm a coder with so and so company. That job is very fluid because it can go away any time. You know, so because it's given by somebody else, they decide to take it away. But if you kind of redefine your own identity in terms of the judgment that you bring to the table, a good example of that is, you know, today the radiologist can use AI to detect, say, cancer, you know, much faster and more accurately than any radiologist, and already they are doing that. So what does it mean? The role of the radiologist is not just to sort of take the data and pass it on, but the skill to tell the person, the the patient, this is what it means for you, and to break it to the family. That human skill is priceless because AI can spit out the answer on a sheet and give it to you, but how do you convey it? That meaning, that story-that's really where the differentiation is. So that's you know absolutely what agree with what Katie said. Hamza, what do you think?

Hamza Khan 28:33
Thank you, Abjiith, and thank you, Katie. Katie, I especially appreciated how you model humility in sharing that you experienced a perspective shift, and you referenced the Donnell Kruger effect. I love going through that entire odyssey, if you will, at the beginning of the AI boom. I would say I felt compelled to also climb to the peak of Mount Stupid, but as I found myself getting to the top, I was like, "Hold on, this is getting a little wild right now. I'm seeing, at least in the speaking industry, every speaker was retooling all of their keynotes to be like plus AI with AI AI infuse this AI infuse that, and they all got there. And there I was just sitting back, and probably I incurred some massive opportunity cost by not rushing into that. But I'm glad that I did because once the sort of lust crested or waned, I should say, then we started to see everything that both yourself, Katie, and Abijit have spoken about right now, and on the other side of this, I'm feeling the same epiphany as well, which is AI is great for taking away the tedium, helping us with the mundane, the trivial tasks that we were never supposed to do. In my soul, I'm a writer, but part of good writing is editing as well. I don't want to do copy editing. I don't have to go in and fix grammar, spelling, and syntax. I have a team to do that, but this team is, you know, at times they're humans, and I have to help them, and I want to empower them. But I also entrust them to simplify and accelerate their work. I'm like, hey, folks, you don't have to be the one going in there and looking for every misuse of the Oxford comma. Go in there. And be a human throughout the loop, not just in the loop, but like just have AI do a first pass at this, and then come back and check it again. Everybody wins because we can all free up our time to do the thing that we love doing, which is substantive editing. In the case of my editors, and for me, it's writing, and it goes back to something that was misattributed to Hemingway, which is write drunk, edit sober. I think with the help of AI, I can just write drunk all day every day. Not that I actually do, but you know.

Speaker 1 30:25
Yeah, no. Now we know your secrets. Samza, let's come back to this rehumanization. It strikes me as I hadn't thought of it that way. Is it is it a paradox? Tell us tell us more about your thinking there.

Hamza Khan 30:42
Yeah, the data is very clear. We've entered and we have been, I would argue, for a long time in a period of dehumanization, and the stats are most visible on the front lines. I think it was actually a Microsoft groundbreaking study done with Edelman in 2021, where they showed that the people most affected by changes in the workplace are women, people of color, Gen Z, frontline workers? They have vastly different realities than all of us gathered here as panelists, and I imagine everyone has some leadership capacity, some leadership capability, some experience, and quote unquote privilege in the workplace. And so that's not equally felt. You know, there is a post-work world. There is a four-day work week. There is a much more utopian way of working. It already exists, but it's not evenly distributed. And so, when we start paying attention to that, you know, frontline person of color, woman, single mother level data, then we start to see words like surviving and suffering being used. I remember very, very being struck by the Microsoft Edelman report, where people were describing their experiences as one that produces suffering, and so we have to zoom out from that and think, this is happening. And so, on the one hand, we're talking about AI, and we're talking about the way in which the future of work can evolve for hopefully collective flourishing, but simultaneous to that, concurrent to that, people are just not doing well. And I'll reference some very specific reports that show this: the Gallup State of the Workplace report. Everybody's familiar with that. We know the stat: up to 85% of the workforce is disengaged, and 70% of the variance in their engagement is because of leaders. Two that are very recent are the World Happiness Report, which shows that in North America, in Canada, in the U.S. especially, youth unhappiness is among the highest in the world, and so youth, the next generation, Generation Alpha, my kids, Generation Beta, are entering possibly one of the bleakest work periods in known history, and so that to me is a huge cause for concern. I had a chance to talk to Dr. Felix Chung, one of the authors, fellow U of T alumni, and I asked him why is this the case? Like, why are we, despite all of these gains in productivity, despite all of the advances that we have in technology, and all of this sort of-I'm just going to call it what it is-hysteria around AI. Why are youth unhappy? And the answer he gave me-I'm getting chills thinking about this. He said today's leaders are not thinking about kids. That was it, and I was like, "Oh my God, is the answer that simple? And yeah, I think so. We're not factoring at the political level policies for the next generation. As business leaders, we're thinking about our shareholders, we're thinking about current stakeholders. But how often are we applying, you know, an indigenous concept like the seventh generation principle, born from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and many indigenous cultures all over the world, and then the second one that I want to reference here is the Global Flourishing Study, which looks at approximately I think six or seven different dimensions that all humans, most humans, want as it pertains to their flourishing. And on that list of six or seven dimensions, work and career is actually non-existent. It's things like connection. It's things like purpose that we talked about earlier when we're sharing the model. It's meaningful relationships. It is stability and safety, so on and so forth. Physical, mental, emotional well-being, and so I'm seeing all of this, and and I just feel like we have to introduce some time and space into the dialog, lest we get carried away with the momentum of this is the AI era. When in fact, I would argue, as I started this conversation or started this answer, that we have been in the period of trying to rehumanize the workforce that, for most people, has become dehumanizing.

Speaker 1 34:15
Thanks, Hamza, and I'll add something here, and then Katie or Abhijit, feel free to chime in or or pivot a bit. We had Kelly Monahan on our podcast. She is a future of work expert and one of the first future of work led future of work at Meta, where she left to to do her own thing. and And she was saying that, and it brings me back to human flourishing and connection. She gave us three quick ways to think about: Am I using AI in the right way? Is AI, you know, how should I be using this? And her number one predictor is: Is AI alleviating some of my workload so that I can spend it with humans? Is it checking things off my list and off my right? My. So I can be interfacing with humans, and it got me thinking about what you said, Hamza, about connection. Does anyone? I mean, anyone have thoughts about this this notion of connectivity as it applies to AI? I

Speaker 3 35:15
find this so fascinating and so important, and I'm really curious, actually, to hear from the two other panelists, especially on this rehumanizing topic, because what I see actually happening in more of the psychological capacity, people say to me all the time, and they say it with embarrassment. They go, "Oh, ChatGPT is like my friend. Claude is my friend. Like they are really connecting. These AIs are built to be so compelling and so empathic. That was my first that oh crap moment that I had where I thought everyone's in trouble. It was because I thought oh my gosh this AI is giving such perfect empathy, such perfect reflection, such perfect sycophancy and encouragement and all these things that humans are often starved for in their everyday life, and so even though on one level they know they're talking to a sort of non-existent entity, it starts to feel existent enough, and people start to envision it as this is my friend. God knows we've seen a huge rise in things like AI companionship, and so to your point, Sarah, it's so interesting because will people leave a machine that is sort of endlessly empathic to them just for doing their work tasks, like Hamza was saying, just for doing the editing, just for doing the stuff that's taking them away from human contact, and will they then make the effort to go make more human contact. I worry about this less for our generation, but a lot for my kids' generation. So I'm curious to hear what the others have to say.

Hamza Khan 36:48
That's such an important distinction too, and I I want to clarify that my perspective over here is one that's ultimately pro AI. If I've come across as anything less than that, I apologize for misspeaking. I'm very excited about the potential for this to be a liberating force for all of humanity to help us be more human, and I think what you shared over here, Katie, offers me a good mirror and everybody else a good mirror to understand the ways in which we might be accepting, neglecting, or worse, provoking dehumanizing behavior doesn't just come from the AI. In fact, I would argue that AI, for me, I've been using it now since it's since it became available via the earliest forms of ChatGPT, feels much more conversational and human than a lot of humans that I interact with. I was just recently at the USPS here in New York, which is our postal service, and I swear to God, man, I love the people who work over there. But there are some people who need to get automated. Some people who need who should not be doing their job because they are actually more dehumanizing than the technology that we think is dehumanizing. These are people who are burnt out, disengaged, and I'm again I'm I wish them the best. But I think that that is a catastrophic failure at the level of leadership that has accepted, neglected, or worse, provoked their disutility and caused disengagement over there. And so AI gives us the opportunity to raise our level of humanization and see that if this technology that is recursive, that is mimicking human empathy and compassion, is able to do it in this way, hopefully for us that could be a way to you know run a diagnostic and ask, am I minding my p's and q's? Am I taking this active listening approach that is being modeled so effectively by this technology. So thank you for offering that distinction and clarification there, Katie.

Speaker 2 38:26
So I want to sort of talk about the fact that when we have this conversation about AI, most of the times, you know, what we are really saying is AI is sort of going to replace our skills. You know, so this whole conversation is so. What skills do I need to build? So people go on and get these random certifications, and they still realize that nothing has changed in the world. They've got five more certifications, and nothing has changed. So I think that is part of the this entire process because I think we we are reframing this entire conversation wrong. We are talking about skills. AI will learn every skill. Just as you and I, we didn't know how to drive. We learned the skill. Now tomorrow, there's going to be a driverless car which can pick up that skill and sort of go for it and do it better than a human. Already, their you know accident rates are lower. But I think the opportunity is not so much in the skills or the talent. I mean, talent is when somebody you are teaching them the basic notes, and they can already understand the music, and they have got this natural talent. So that's this element. But I think the ability for the human being to bring their work to other human beings and build that connection. So you know, the musician who's learned the skills. I mean, and so can AI. AI can compose music; they can do all of that. But to pause and wait for the audience reaction, hold the note a second longer, to not play what you had originally thought. I mean, look at it this way: when we started this conversation, Hamza started by saying, "I'm going." To go off script, no AI will ever do that because you know it's got a script. You tell them the question, they'll give the answer. They'll never turn back and ask you the question. Hey, you sound a little sad today. Why is that? The musician can sense the sadness, link it to an incident that has happened in the city that the audience is carrying into the auditorium. That sensitivity, that's humanness. So I think when we look at AI from the point of view of purely productivity, I think it's a sin because work is not just about how do you shrink it to the bare minimum, which is when employers will talk about I'm tracking all the keystrokes that you are doing. It's crazy. Work is not just about you know the the productivity aspect of it. How do you build the connection, the human connection, and that's what is driving loneliness. Therefore, people are saying, "I'd rather talk to a you know someone, even if it is Claude, because the human being doesn't have time, so and everything. I mean, work from home is hugely efficient, but it kills the connection because you meet somebody, you bump into them. I can set up time to talk to you, but you cannot, you know, build a relationship. And I say, okay, are you free between 930 and 945 tomorrow morning, when I'll build a deeper relationship with you. It never works like that. Human beings build their relationships on inefficiencies. The people with whom you've talked all kinds of stuff, not necessarily the transaction. That's what is missing.

Speaker 1 41:36
Abhijit, I'm. Thank you. I'm gonna bring it back to you. So, how do we folks listening? We at TLC do a lot of work with university level students, right? You get these folks who are like high achieving. I'm gonna just check all the boxes on my syllabus, and then they get out into the world and they go, "Oh, this is ambiguous and changing. And you know, so what do you say to those people, all of us, as they think about how do we thrive in this quote future of work?

Speaker 2 42:11
You know, I think it's also about taking charge of crafting your own identity. You know, as Katie said earlier, you know, is it's you take charge of that identity. Hamza talks about humanizing. What are we really talking about? Everybody is really talking about the same thing. That how do you treat work beyond money? You you know look at the data that Laurel shared. It's not just money that you work for because you know my wife works as a teacher. Could she make more money working as a in some other profession, of course, she could. But the meaning that you create by being a teacher-that is what drives people to give their best. When people find meaning, they don't get burnt out. We just saw the data on that. So, if you look at everything that is, you know, we are pointing towards, is how do you bring your uniqueness to the work that you do, you know. So don't just do what the job description does. That AI can automate, but what do you do to make that work so uniquely personal, so that nobody else can do it except you? That is what makes you irreplaceable. So you know, in that's the new book that I'm doing, where where you're really talking about what makes you irreplaceable, is your own humanness, your own identity, which is built based on, you know, your successes, failures, what you've learned, what you've read, the music that you've seen, the books, the movies, everything put together. That when you bring into the work that you do, you build connections with human beings. That is the big differentiation.

Speaker 1 43:47
Before I turn into the Q and A, Katie Hamza, did you have anything on your mind or want to respond to that?

Speaker 3 43:56
Jump in, because I love that Abhijit, and I was thinking as you were talking, what happens then in the world where, like normally, we build skill? Really, Sarah? I was thinking about purpose, and I was thinking about your work and Laurel's work and the bigger meaning behind this whole panel. And I was thinking, like Abhijit said, AI will learn to do all the skills, sadly, including things like teaching, like passion-focused careers that people really love. God knows, in 20 years it might all be an online world. Who knows? But when we look at that, then-and this is not an answer that I have fully formed in my head-but the question that was forming is: Then what happens to purpose? Because, like we said, for so long, when I think about my grandfather, you know, got a job at a factory and stayed there his entire life in one job at the same factory. And we look at how different the world is today. He knew his purpose. He knew his one job at this factory his whole life, and he raised eight kids that way. But we look at the world today, and then we go, okay, then if learning the new skills, if getting the new certification, can't actually. Feel that sense of purpose for me. I wonder then what happens to that question of purpose for people, and where do they? Will we suddenly have an economy where we have the time to go pursue that? Because, like Hamza was saying, we're going to a shorter work week. Maybe there's a universal basic income. Maybe, maybe these things are going to evolve for us. But I'm curious about that. Where do we end up with purpose when AI can learn every skill?

Speaker 2 45:25
You know, I'm just going to add. I don't mean to normalize this before I pass it to Hamza. I think purpose becomes like that tuning fork. You know, you hit it once that note. You keep hearing it all your life, and it sort of draws you to it. No matter where you are, you'll sort of gravitate towards that sound, and that's what purpose is all about. So you know there could be a lot of content which is online, but the teacher is the one who can make you believe what you don't believe you can do yourself. That is the purpose of what teaching is all about. So that's how I look at it.

Hamza Khan 46:01
This is great, and I love just the natural confluence and synergies that we all share over here. I'll just quickly add a small bow to this already beautiful bouquet here. I'm reminded of the Pablo Casa quote, which is the the the the meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away, and I'm very excited by the possibility that our kids and all posterity, the inner children, and the children that we're going to care for are all going to experience something approximating a post-work world. And I added the distinction inspired by this conversation that it's not a post-meaning world. I would argue that in that world, we can actually lean into the things that we've always been trying to do, but have just been buried under the muck of tedium and systems that are archaic and medieval. And I think that is a world of leisure. That's a world of education. That's a world of adventure. That's a world of passion. I would encourage everybody to you know check us all out, and we'd love to stay connected. But I really enjoyed you know I was reading through your site, Abujee, then Katie. Something from a copywriting perspective really leapt out at me when you said, "Why me? You said, "I didn't turn 19 and become an Instagram marketing coach. No shade. And I love that, as also you know, marketing communications professional. The point is, if you want to hire Katie, understand that you are bringing Katie's background, perspective, and experience. This is Katie has invested in in finding the meaning to her life, and it's a very unique perspective that you're going to get. You're going to get Katie's wisdom because through ChatGPT, through all of the other technologies that you use, you're going to know how to do things right. As Sarah said in the introductory remarks, we're in an era of knowledge being commodified. But what's left on the other side of that for us to do as humans is the work of wisdom. And you know, if knowledge is knowing how to do things right, wisdom is knowing the right thing to do. And you know, it was Katie that went to the sweat lodge with Laurel. It wasn't. It wasn't Claude that did that. And so there's like a there's there's there's a deep relationship and just an intuitive way of knowing over here.

Speaker 1 47:48
Laurel, I'm going to bring you on. Would love to hear any comments you have, and if you want to be the the maestro of the Q and A.

Judy Brennan 47:57
Yeah, I think we have two juicy questions that are more important than what I have to say right now. So the first one is a long one. So pay attention, panel. With gig, freelance, etc. in the workplace, will the future narrative be more of work skills and less of engagement, belongingness metric? What does then really? What's really going to be measured at work, and what happens to the employer plus employee status?

Speaker 2 48:29
I'm going to have a go. I just put it more as a provocation for the others to respond. I think you know this whole notion of work being you know work is always looked at as something which is given. It's a task, and and the definition of work is increasingly sort of getting limited to the task. And when you remove the human element, it is only that task which remains, and that can be automated. So I think that's going to go away. What is going to you know be the differentiator is the humanness. That how do you you know for example you could sort of say here are the five options AI can give you the answer to which is best because of whatever analysis, but the courage to share it back to the employees that is something the CEO will have to bring to the table. So courage is not what AI can ever do. So the notion of work, when it is done like that, will need to be reimagined, and we'll have to find new measures. Right now, the role of the manager, for example, is to be an evaluator. This gets an A plus. This gets a C plus. But it's how do you turn every performer into somebody who can discover that meaning? That's going to be what the work is going to be about.

Judy Brennan 49:44
I agree. It's a big opportunity for employers. I I need to go on to the next question because they're also great. This is all well and good, but what about the ethical and environmental concerns of AI? What about the data we're seeing? How it's changing our cognitive processing abilities for the worse, and I'll just add that I have a nephew who works in a high school, and he doesn't think anyone should touch AI until they're 21 because he's seeing the real effects of overusing AI in school.

Hamza Khan 50:17
Yeah, I'll jump in over here, Laurel, and we're seeing now the the end of a 10 year journey with social media as we know it, and we're seeing Meta being held accountable for causing. I hate to even just like put put my thoughts into words over here because I think thoughts become things. But you know, if you're just following the Meta lawsuits, you're seeing the ways in which they're causing harm, especially to young women. And you know, we saw this coming. A lot of us who were paying attention to the way that this technology was evolving, we were talking about you know the risks of using social media, and you know if you have to get a license to drive a car, a license to use a gun, why are we letting our kids go on social media? This thing that, by all accounts, by all measures, is as addictive and has addictive qualities. And I think you know what your what your son was saying over there and his friends, I think it's a very powerful sentiment. I'm always alarmed whenever the the owners of the means of production, you know, speak about the technology. They just seem so out of touch with the reality of us, the people. And so I get frustrated, and every day I wake up and I feel more and more the pull towards we need to pause, we need to stop this this run to just you know compete in in this fictional narrative that we're competing against other countries over here, and let's just get back to a more co-creative, collaborative approach to building something that helps everybody. I think about this saying that is is very popular in in activist communities. I think it was first put forth by either Martin Luther King or Malcolm X or perhaps both. But the idea is that nobody is free until everybody's free, and I think the flip side is also true here. Nobody is truly flourishing until everybody is flourishing, and I really worry about AI's potential to create disproportionate gains for one group of people, especially us in the global north, and then result in environmental degradation and cognitive decay for everybody else.

Judy Brennan 52:00
Katie, a post-work world sounds great, but how do we affect change at the political and social levels to make this possible? We still need to work to make money to afford to live. If these tools replace workers, what happens to workers in the immediate future?

Speaker 3 52:18
I think this is the exact question. I think you are pointing to the question on the button on everybody's mind right now, and I think the tools are evolving so much faster than any government's capacity to keep up with the political and social impacts of them, and it's very, very frightening in that way. Similar to Abhijit and Hamza's answers that they just gave to the last couple questions, and I don't know the miracle answer to this. I do know as we were talking about sort of AI literacy and what do we do about these things. One thing I see just remarkably lacking is any sort of education right now for the general population, for kids in schools, about what is this thing you're actually talking to? How does it work in the background? How does it think in the background? How does it formulate the answer it's giving to you? That to me, that alone, and teaching kids this is the actual environmental impact, not inflated, not politicized, but hey, this is what it actually does when you just chit chat with it because you think it's funny or whatnot. This is the actual impact, so be aware of that. Or for to be able to say, hey, this is how it's creating an answer, and so these are the ways that those answers a might be flat out wrong, or b are really only ever going to be at the 50% level because it's only ever going to choose the next most likely word in a sequence, so it's kind of always going to be picking the top of the bell curve for the most likely next word, which is always the 50% level. So there's going to be a lot of expertise you are actually missing by only finding your information from AI. What we don't see happening is that kind of education, so that people understand the magical mystery box that they're talking to, and can therefore make more informed decisions about it going forward.

Hamza Khan 54:11
One of the strategies that was shared earlier, team, was I think it was number five, which is lead and vote with your values, and I think that that's really important. You know, we could have a conversation over drinks about just the loss of faith in the traditional political system and why I think personally, my opinion that you know voting in in elections is it's it's it's we're stuck in a paradigm, but the lead really resonates with me. I think that everybody here has the capacity to lead themselves, to lead others, to lead their teams, organizations, to lead the society in which they live, the communities in which they work, live, and play, and by extension, reverberate the the change that I believe is in everybody's heart. And I think you know the way that we started this conversation, we talked about how Laurel has been a pioneer in introducing ideas around compassion, love, and purpose into the workplace. I think there's a real operation. For all of us to do that, you know, I'll just like step on the soapbox and get off in 10 seconds over here. I want to try and experiment, if at all possible, with all due respect to my brother Abhijit over here. I think humanity for one year should just try to like replace all leaders, all male leaders, with women. It's just worth trying. Do it for a year, and if it doesn't work, we can go back to the way things are right now, but I truly believe, in a year's time, we'll be like this is a much better way. This is a much better way.

Speaker 2 55:27
Oh, I couldn't agree more. You know, but also if you see what's happened in India, you know, they've had massive youth protests. What really happened is, you know, they forced the government to actually rethink their approach towards education. They say, "What good is education if it doesn't get us jobs? So you know this whole business of casually saying, "Yeah, I know a few million people will be left without employment. Yeah, but we'll solve a bigger problem of going to you know some other planet. You know, we need to sort of stop thinking that that person's work is just you know is doing some work. It's not. We just need to have that sensitivity about this.

Hamza Khan 56:08
Yeah, that that is that is an example of a jit that I'm I'm like paying attention paying attention to very very clearly because I think that that is the beginning of what we're going to see happen in the United States. It's almost it will happen everywhere. It'll happen everywhere. Yeah, any anywhere where there's like the great man, and like I wrote about it in the chat here. It's the focus of my research. If you really want to take a deep dive, an irreversible path into understanding our world, look up the great man theories of leadership that are informing every theory of leadership up until the present moment. And so, actually, the work that Laurel is doing, all of us are talking about here, is quite revolutionary to talk about compassion, which is you know, it comes from the 14th or 16th century French work with meaning to suffer together. It's so powerful over there. And you think about leadership as we know it right now. There's this idea that typically it's usually men that rise to the top of organizations and exert their will from the top down. They lead over people, not through them. They make decisions about them without them. And we've seen this play out in the global you know, arena certainly in the world of politics. So India is like the is the canary in the coal mine. That youth-led movement over there. You're absolutely right, Abuji. I have a strong sense that the kids are going to be all right. We see it reflected in the data. They don't want this. They want a system that's much more egalitarian, flat, holocratic, much more compassionate. And I have hope that all around the world we're going to see similar movements that restore dignity and faith in humanity.

Speaker 1 57:26
I'm hearing compassion is the answer. Shall we just drop the mic and turn the whole thing off?

Judy Brennan 57:32
First of all, I want to thank our panelists. I've never been in a panel or in the presence of of panelists that listen so deeply to their fellow panelists. So thank you for that, and thank you for modeling love and learning and listening. Very impressed with you all, and happy and honored to be in this conversation. Katie brought up a sweat lodge. There is ancient wisdom that is human that can be found in ashrams in India, and sweat lodges in the United States, and churches, and synagogues, and temples, and you know people hiking. I think there's an ancient process for finding and following your soul work. There's African dream ceremonies and Aborigine walkabouts, and and I think we need to bring that back without AI, without screens. We need to figure out to help young people and all of us really kind of resettle in with the best of who we are, from a very deep and spiritual place, and that will look different for people. But I think that's my purpose: is to help us remember ancient wisdom that is that is consistent and important, and helping everyone find who they are. I do believe this idea of calling is a quiet voice that will guide you to the right thing or a tuning fork, but we have to be quiet to hear it, so let's model that right now. Let's all close our eyes and and we're going to do just a really short meditation. If you're driving, don't do this, but close your eyes and find your breath. Try not to change it, but just find your breath And ask yourself just a simple question: What is at my center? What is at my center? What positive idea is at my center? It's breathing in this. Idea of center, breathing everything else out, and if you can, just allow something to arise or nothing to arise. You can't do it wrong. So, what is at my center? Breathe in the answer into your heart. Come back to the room, and if you're willing, if you could just put into the chat what is at your center. I'm gonna ask my panelists to go away for now. We're gonna show another slide and and wrap. But thank you for being here with us today. There's lots of beautiful things: movement, hope, love. This is who we are. This is what humanity is. Gratitude. So, based on whatever was at your center, I'd like you to think about soul work being, you know, the best possible uses of your passions and purpose. And you may not be entirely clear about that, but based on everything you heard today from Sarah and our beautiful panelists, and me, and from the the wonderful chat that was going on, what is one thing you can do to find or follow or enhance or embrace your soul work, and just think about one thing you can do in the next week. Let's not get too far away from it. And if you could put that in the chat, that would be great. Sarah's going to be sharing a swag bag, but those of you interested in going deeper with your own passions and purpose and planning on purpose, we're we're having a cohort start in October where we're bringing together community. We are using all of our tools and the purpose circles to help you plan on purpose. So we have a amazing program planned for October. We'd love for you to join us, and with that, I pass it back to my colleague Sarah.

Speaker 1 1:02:08
Can I invite Hamza and Avijit and Katie back on the screen, and and actually Laurel, you as well. We've covered a lot here. We've talked about AI and ethics. We've talked about future of of work in a lot of respects. We've talked about purpose and soul work and identity. I'm going to ask you all the same question. After everything we've discussed today, what do you want our listeners to leave with? I'll give you one one to one minute to 90 seconds to answer that, Laurel. Why don't I let you go first?

Judy Brennan 1:02:49
We lost our Katie. What I'm going to say is, you deserve to have work that you love. You may not not love every single aspect of it, but whether you're at the beginning of your career, the end of your career doesn't matter. You deserve it, and if you have it, I'll challenge you to provide it for someone else, or mentor someone else, or encourage someone else to to find it and follow it, and the other thing I want to say is we do have agency. Like I, I feel like the my great grandmother and grandmother were suffragettes, and they fought for the vote in Chicago, and they were women. They didn't have a lot of money, and they helped us get the vote. So, if you're concerned about the perils of AI, get involved and and do something.

Speaker 1 1:03:50
One thing, Laurel, I want to add to what you're saying because I think sometimes purpose can be misunderstood as this really like an an earth shaking, earth shattering impact one has to have, and purpose is really just tapping into your innate drivers, strengths, passions, and values, right? So, there's a great story about a a bus driver who I don't think that the bus driving was his like calling, but what he created on his bus route with the with the 40 kids on his bus was this incredible 10 minute to one hour experience that each of those kids had in finding community, safety, connection, and laughter while they were on his bus. But he brought his unique self right to those that two and fourth bus route every day. So it's not about changing the world necessarily in something vast and broad. It might be, but it's tapping into yourself, whatever your job might be in this moment, to find some bit of. Calling you have anyway. I'll flip it over to you, Abhijit. What do you want our our listeners to leave with?

Speaker 2 1:05:07
I think what I have felt is that if you bring in the hobbies that you have, you know the passions that you have, and it's not about being completely, you know, at the master level of any of that, but if you bring in that into the work that you do, so I bring in my art and my writing into the work that I do, and that actually ensures that. But there could be millions of people who are better at talent management than I am, or who are better at drawing than I am, or who are better at writing than I am. But this combination, you know, certainly makes it unique in terms of how I convey, you know, talent management with the people that I work with, and that's I think which is why it's so energizing for me. So I think that's what I have learned about what gives meaning and how do I craft it.

Speaker 1 1:05:59
Thank you. And by the way, getting to see your artwork applied to your brilliance is incredibly unique and entertaining. So thank you for sharing your artwork with us. Yes, Hanza, what's on your mind?

Hamza Khan 1:06:14
Oh my goodness, there's there's so much. But if I could just distill it, you know, you in sharing Sarah the example of of the bus driver who creates those magical experiences for those kids, it was a powerful reminder of the agency that we all have to change the world. And I'm reminded of a saying by one of my friends and mentors, Drew Dudley, fantastic TEDx talk called "Leading with Lollipops, and he says, "There's no one world. There's just 9 billion experiences of it. It's a pretty metaphysical idea. It means that there is one animating spirit, and we are all all but manifestations of that. And so, you know, you think about this: Abijit, Laurel, Sarah, Katie. We're all essentially the same person. We're just different expressions of that same animating spirit. And sometimes the individual sort of, for lack of a better word, the meat sack that's containing that animating spirit, we sometimes forget that like this spirit is stronger than anything that happens to it. It is a social spirit. It is an indomitable spirit, and we just have to remind ourselves. And I'm certainly reminded of it through this dialog that we can achieve more by working better together. And many hands make life work. Sometimes I feel like I have to be the person to do it all, and I'm sure that sentiment is shared with all of my fellow panelists as well. But I'm, you know, relaxing my shoulders, unclenching my jaw, unballing my fists, knowing that, again, many hands make life work, and we're going to be just fine because I know that when I log off, Abijit is carrying this work forward, Katie is carrying this work forward, Laurel, Sarah, all of our esteemed guests here are carrying it forward, and I think we're going to be okay.

Speaker 1 1:07:43
You and Katie, well, welcome back. I don't know if you caught my last question, but it was it was simply after all we've discussed today. What do you want our listeners to leave with?

Speaker 3 1:07:55
So apologies, my internet bounced me off completely, but I do have to tell you guys all because it was really funny because Laurel said, "Everybody, close your eyes, and we're going to do a meditation. And I sat there for like I was like, "Wow, Laurel's really going for this. She really wants us to drop right in, and I opened my eyes and realized my whole internet is completely down. I was dying laughing. So, hello, we are back. What do I want to leave you with? I'll give you a two-second story. This is part of the rehumanizing that we talked about. This just happened the other day. I have so I'm a therapist, right? So I have folders set up in my AI where I say you need to behave like this famous theorist, this particular therapist, this person whose work I really respect, and I was in one of those folders for days and days, wrestling with like a really hard question I was dealing with, and give me what would this therapist be sitting across and telling me what to do in this situation, and wrestling and wrestling with the AI, and thinking I will be able to come. I'm such a smart person, and look at my little AI that I set up, and I'll be able to come to the answer of this, and I've got my pros and cons and all the things, and then I went to lunch with a friend of mine. I sat down with her and I told her, "Oh, this is this thing I've just been wrestling with. And there was just this moment where I saw her face, and I saw the empathy, and I saw her eyebrows, and she was like, "Oh, that is really hard. Wow, I am so sorry. That's a really hard decision. I don't know what I would do either. And it was like, like you were just saying, Hanj, like my shoulders dropped. It was that moment where the problem, which with the AI I could keep entirely in my head, and then sitting with a friend, it dropped right into my heart, and it dropped right into my body. And I think that is the piece of humanity that we will continue to keep fighting for, because when you get that little moment that reminds you of that, and that reminds you of the actual limits of the technology and of the

Speaker 1 1:09:55
cliffhanger, Katie,

Hamza Khan 1:09:58
back into the meditation realm. Yeah, she's meditating meditation. You know,

Speaker 1 1:10:03
I'll I'll say this. I'm stealing Katie's mic, but I'm taking. I'm I'm thinking back to the. It's not the human human flourishing study, but the happiness report, and it talked about Australia, United States. Someone correct me. The UK. There's another. There's four countries, right? The UK,

Hamza Khan 1:10:21
US, Canada, Australia, yeah,

Speaker 1 1:10:23
Canada, Australia, and what's interesting is that the youth in many other countries that aren't those four, their happiness is increasing, and what it is showing, and and they did this isn't just correlation, but I think some causation data that says that those societies where happiness is increasing, especially with the youth, is because they value human connection, face to face in real life connection. When Katie said, "Oh, I you know I was I was swirling with this AI bot, getting really heady about it, and then I went to a friend, and I got face to face, and my shoulders drop. It's a universal human truth, isn't it? That when we connect face to face, you know, the proverbial shoulders drop, and the neuroscience around this says that when people feel a greater sense of ease, you know, the limbic system, the amygdala can calm down, and we actually become more creative, more intelligent, and so this really positive cycle occurs. This virtuous cycle occurs when we actually connect and we let our nervous systems calm down. If we all want to be better people, we should connect with each other. Let me turn it to and Katie. If you come back, you just hop right in and and start speaking.

Judy Brennan 1:11:44
She may not be able to come back because she's she she doesn't have internet, but she's here in spirit.

Speaker 1 1:11:50
She's here in spirit. I want to wrap us up here by showing us just a bit of a swag bag. Everyone who signed up for this, whether you're you're here live or you you're watching this recording, we're giving away a swag bag that has all sorts of free stuff and discounted stuff. You will get a recording of this. You're going to get some panelist resources. So Katie has an incredible CastleGuard framework free diagnostic tool that will take in sort of a psychologist AI lens on any single website without having to submit your email or a credit card and give you a rundown of what a buyer or a future a future buyer thinks or takes on your website. Avijit is is Letta is sharing us his dreamers and unicorns free newsletter, and I think Abhijit, in that newsletter, you're gonna give folks a little bit of a heads up on your forthcoming book. That is a surefire, incredible offer. And then Hamza has given us two free eBooks you can download for free. Feel free to be inspired. You know what I say is like you laugh a little, you cry a little, you think a little. You've had a great day. You're sure to you're sure to experience that with Abhijit and Hamsa's resources. And then here at CLC, we're giving away a free guide of designing a meaningful career in the age of AI. It's a deeper extension on what Laurel previewed today, and then this fall we are leading off an online plan for purpose cohort, and there'll be a discount code in that swag bag for anyone who wants to join us. I want to say thank you. A deep, deep, heartfelt sense of gratitude I have for Abhijit, Katie, and Hamsa who have given their time to share their brilliance and their insights to be vulnerable and thoughtful and open with us. I also know that for everyone who's attended here, your time is you know likely your most valuable resource, and to spend it here with us, we're really grateful. The future belongs to people who know who they are, who keep learning, who stay curious, and have the courage and vulnerability to say, "Maybe I don't know, and seek to evolve. If you want to take out your phones, I mean, you'll be getting this via email. But if you want to take out your your phones and scan the QR code on the left side is the swag bag QR code with free resources. On the right side of your screen is you can talk to us whether that's via Zoom or email. We just want to know what you're thinking. You know, one of the the biggest things that we try to create here is a sense of community, a sense of shared hope, a sense of connection, and that is not just us talking at you, but talking with you. We'd love to hear what's on your mind, Laurel. Is there anything I've missed before we sign off here today?

Judy Brennan 1:14:53
I think that you were a beautiful host, Sarah, and I loved being with our panelists, and I hope. We can be with our panelist again because it was a very special group of people. Katie says hello as well from her internet dropped home. So thank you all for joining

Unknown Speaker 1:15:13
us.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai