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00:00:01
Kari Schneider: When Everything Gets Easier, We Get Weaker
17 Plays1 day ago
In this episode, Eric talks with Kari Schneider, performance coach and co-author of The Human Algorithm, about a question that is becoming harder to ignore: what happens when technology advances faster than our ability to lead ourselves?
Kari began her career coaching Olympic and professional athletes, where performance was measurable and the margin for error was small. Over time, she discovered that physical training alone was never enough. Athletes could have the best conditioning program in the world, yet still fail if their mindset, emotional state, or decision-making capacity was misaligned. That realization eventually carried her from the training facility into boardrooms, where the same patterns showed up in executives and organizations.
The conversation explores how human performance actually works. Not as a steady upward line, but as cycles of effort and recovery. Most people assume they should always be improving, always producing, always pushing. Yet even elite athletes only peak once or twice a year. Sustainable performance requires strategic imbalance, deliberate recovery, and clarity about what matters most.
They also discuss the role artificial intelligence is beginning to play in shaping behavior. AI can accelerate work and remove friction, but it can also bypass the struggle that builds capability. When answers arrive instantly, people risk losing the process of thinking, testing, and refining their own judgment. The danger is not the technology itself. The danger is becoming dependent on it before understanding who you are and what you stand for.
At its core, this is a conversation about responsibility. About values. And about the discipline of developing self-mastery in a world that increasingly rewards speed over reflection.
Topics Covered
- Why peak performance happens in cycles, not straight lines
- The concept of strategic imbalance and recovery
- How athletes and executives face the same performance pressures
- The hidden cost of constant productivity
- Decision fatigue and the role of structure and routine
- Why complexity kills motivation
- The difference between hedonic and eudaimonic happiness
- How AI can remove the struggle that builds capability
- The risk of outsourcing judgment to technology
- The importance of defining personal and organizational values
- Why self-mastery matters more than technical mastery
- How leaders can use AI without becoming dependent on it
- The relationship between resilience, effort, and fulfillment
Episode Links
- Learn more about Kari: https://theempowered.ca
- Explore the book: https://thehumanalgorithm.ai/home
- Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karischneider/
- Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_mpwrd/
For more episodes: https://unfoldingthought.com
Questions or guest ideas: eric@inboundandagile.com
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Transcript
00:00:02
Speaker
Kari, thank you for joining me. Where does today's recording find you? Thank you very much, Eric. It's a pleasure to be here. i am loving in life and I am, I'm in Canada. I am about an hour and a half north of Toronto and a little colder than most places I imagine, but it's ah it's a wonderful place to be. Kari, would you mind telling me a bit about yourself?
00:00:29
Speaker
Well, where to begin? i am a mom. I am ah an entrepreneur. I've been in business for oh probably 20 years now. I am an author. I'm a podcaster. I am an advisor to CEOs and high-level leaders.
00:00:50
Speaker
And I consult for companies on leadership. So I do a lot of great things, but ultimately what I'm up to is optimizing human performance.
00:01:02
Speaker
Now, I'm sure that we will talk, or I hope that we will talk a bit about your book, which I've read, and I'm very interested to ask you about that, but maybe by way of getting there and also into some of the things that you shared about yourself.
00:01:24
Speaker
I think your career sort of started in ah a different place or with a different focus. So can you tell me how you went from, i think, coaching Olympic level or high level athletes to now advising executives and organizations?
00:01:40
Speaker
So I used to be ah in the high performance sport level for a very long time at the Olympic and pro level. And what I did in that realm, I was a strength and conditioning specialist, an exercise physiologist, an athletic therapist.
00:01:59
Speaker
um I started off doing research in physiology and heart rate variability, and then I shifted over to doing research in biomechanics. And ultimately, i was um working for what's called a Canadian Sport Institute. And in Canada, we have about six Canadian sport institutes, and they're responsible for supporting our Olympic and national level teams and individual athletes.
00:02:30
Speaker
And so what I did was i would my job was the manager of strength and conditioning, and i was the head strength coach for the men's and women's national volleyball teams and a number of other athletes such as triathletes and swimmers and track athletes and rugby players and soccer, or just all sorts of athletes. I either was the person who brought the athlete to their next physical level or I contracted out another professional, another strength coach to do so.
00:03:04
Speaker
so i had I had to be very, very good in strength and conditioning, biomechanics, exercise physiology, rehabilitation at the top level.
00:03:15
Speaker
And what I discovered was this really interesting thing that I could know every little nuance about the latest research. I could know all of the best practices to get more power out of an athlete or more strength.
00:03:31
Speaker
But what I discovered was if they didn't have ah the mindset or the emotional space to be able to physically perform, then they wouldn't and they couldn't.
00:03:45
Speaker
And so I discovered along the way that I might have been well-versed in all of the sciences that were needed for learning. physical optimization, but i was realizing very fast that if I didn't listen to the athlete, if I didn't understand their energy level, if I didn't monitor their nervous system, their emotional state, their their thought patterns, how they're speaking, if I didn't monitor those things, then i would be misjudging or misprescribing what they needed to physically do next.
00:04:24
Speaker
And keep in mind that if anyone's watching the video, I'm ah i'm a small statured female in a realm that this, especially a couple of decades ago, was very, very dominated by men.
00:04:37
Speaker
And most of my athletes were male athletes. So I had to already be better than my male peers because I was already being prejudged as a female.
00:04:49
Speaker
So I i thought i was at the top of my game. Numbers don't lie. You get fired very quickly at the top level of sport. I watched a lot of head coaches get fired.
00:05:01
Speaker
And I thought I was at the top of my game, but I was discovering live time that someone was pushed to their emotional limit or their mental limit.
00:05:14
Speaker
And there would never be any more out of them physically. So I started to dive deeply into behavior change, mindset, understanding the human as a whole, not just as a physiological or physical beast.
00:05:30
Speaker
And that um had me be successful at what I did. and And some would say very good or great at what I did.
00:05:41
Speaker
But what happened was... um The area I was working in our offices were out of a university and the university flooded. And that meant that our physical training spaces flooded as well.
00:05:54
Speaker
And that meant that we had Olympians or potential Olympians who were looking to go to an Olympic qualifier without a place to train. And so I went around to the local resources, the the provincial level, the national level, to see if I could open a facility.
00:06:13
Speaker
And everybody said no, they wouldn't partner with me. And so I left my salaried position, and I was a single mom at the time. My my oldest daughter was... um She was my only child at the time, but she was five years old.
00:06:29
Speaker
And I used my house as collateral, and I started my own business by opening a facility that was needed for our Olympic athletes. And luckily for me, my the coaches that I was supporting, their athletes...
00:06:45
Speaker
They believed in me and my abilities so much that they ended up contracting me. So the Sport Institute, instead of employing me out of their facility, they then contracted me in my facility when I opened my business. Now, the thing about sport in Canada is that it's not well-funded like the US or like some other countries. Most of the countries in the world really have to nickel and dime to figure out how they're going to get the next foot forward.
00:07:13
Speaker
And so when I opened the facility, I opened a 6,000-square-foot facility, and ah very much in the style of functional training, what might look like a CrossFit gym today, but that was before CrossFit existed.
00:07:28
Speaker
And um I opened this facility knowing that in order to pay the bills, in order to make it a business, that I was going to need to open the doors to the public as well. Well, because I had national team athletes in there,
00:07:43
Speaker
It attracted business people, doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs. They wanted to work with the person who worked with the athletes.
00:07:55
Speaker
And so the two types of clientele that I was seeing were Olympic-level athletes or aspiring national team athletes.
00:08:06
Speaker
or high achievers in life. And suddenly I was seeing in the high achievers that they were not just coming for physical optimization, they were bringing their business problems and bringing their life problems. And i was like, oh, there's even more of this brain and emotional work that I have to do with every person. It's not just for the the athletes to perform their best, it's every person.
00:08:35
Speaker
And um and i discovered a lot, and I started working with a lot of high achievers in life. And eventually i ran my facility until I sold my business, and I moved it once as well, but I had sold my business in
00:08:57
Speaker
2020 before COVID hit, and I had been in the the transition of consulting in leadership and consulting or advising for CEOs because they wanted to think more clearly, they wanted to be more disciplined, they wanted to um have help and have someone hold space while seeing their next level and their their strategies for optimization.
00:09:21
Speaker
So that was the transition. And what I've discovered now more is that if I'm consulting for businesses, then they they want that mentality. They want that mindset of a high-performance athlete.
00:09:36
Speaker
They want what it takes to optimize performance. in all aspects. Anyone who's leading a company and they are responsible for all of it, they start to understand that it's not just the strategy for the business. It's not just telling employees what to do.
00:09:57
Speaker
It's how well are they sleeping? It's can they actually follow their own thoughts and discern which thoughts are going to work for them or work for against them?
00:10:09
Speaker
Can they face themselves in their own close relationships at home? All of these things impact who they are as a human being, as a whole human being, and whether or not they can grow themselves as a leader.
00:10:24
Speaker
when you were working with athletes, were you primarily working one-on-one, you know, with the the individual athlete? Or were you, I guess, training a team or talking to a team? And then now, maybe, or as you started to work more with people in business, are you doing, know, solo coaching?
00:10:49
Speaker
Or are you going in and, you know, working with a whole company? So all of the above. So when when I worked with ah national teams,
00:11:01
Speaker
I may have ah the entire senior team for, let's say, the men's national volleyball team. And if I'm working with that whole team, there's a group of, let's say, 12 to 16 players.
00:11:15
Speaker
And I'm seeing them, we're in the trenches every day. I'm seeing them almost every day because that's their physical training every single day. Um, but at the same time, I might be seeing uh, national team aerial skier.
00:11:32
Speaker
And in that case, that particular athlete isn't with their team. They are, they are either off season or they're training with me one-on-one. So I would see all of the above. and Then later, what I would find is that when I moved my facility and moved my business to a different small city, I wasn't i wasn't given full national teams. What were coming to me were almost um misplaced national level athletes where they happened to live in that area, but their the national team wasn't together at that particular time of year, and then I'd be getting this athlete.
00:12:16
Speaker
But Sport Canada didn't necessarily fund very well. What I discovered was that i I couldn't run a business and have be paid next to nothing from Sport Canada to work one-on-one with this athlete. So what I started to do is take the national team rugby player and the pro hockey player and the national team diver and the you know three national hockey players and put them together in a group.
00:12:43
Speaker
And the interesting thing was, Their high-level mindsets from different sports started to integrate really well together, and i would they'd have, obviously, their individualized work.
00:12:59
Speaker
But when they were together, and how I'd orchestrate that... it it made magic. It made motivation. made inspiration It made It created positive rivalry. It did a lot of amazing things.
00:13:15
Speaker
But back when I was working in high-level sport, I noticed that individual sport athletes were very different than team sport athletes. Individual sport athletes were could push themselves and push themselves in ways that I would have to hold them back and redirect them so that they were pushing themselves on the things that were best for them versus the team sport athlete wasn't as likely to take responsibility.
00:13:47
Speaker
and they were more likely to kind of lean on the team. So what I started to create, and everyone I worked with knew this, is I wanted people to train like an individual sport athlete and work together like a team sport athlete. And I would bring that concept to individual sports. So if I was working with a group of triathletes or swimmers, and I would bring that concept to team sports.
00:14:11
Speaker
And it would get them um more well balanced in how they they approached their own their own work their own work ethic.
00:14:25
Speaker
And now you flash forward to working with with business, and I do both. the The bulk of my clientele is is business leaders or CEOs or or investment partners where it's an individual and they want a behind-the-scenes advisor,
00:14:44
Speaker
who is going to help them with everything and optimize everything. This could be negotiating a deal. This could be reconnecting with their spouse. This could be the the things they need accountability for and want to keep taking action on so that they are optimizing themselves because they know that they've got blind spots.
00:15:05
Speaker
That would be the individual. And then there's the business where if I work with a leadership team and I'm consulting for a business, then I'm typically doing a combination of individual and group where I might work with a company's leadership team and see the individual, say, director of operations and the CEO, whatever, individually, separately, work with them individually.
00:15:29
Speaker
but then have a group session with the whole leadership team on a concept or on um something that the whole group is going to benefit from. It might be more on the teaching area or the group coaching area so that they can elevate as a group.
00:15:46
Speaker
um So your answer is both, all of the above. And the bulk of of the clients that I work with now are one-on-one because they don't they don't even, some of them don't even tell others that they have a advisor or coach behind the scenes. It's like their secret weapon. Others are very laudatory and expressive about having someone and everyone needing someone who can support their optimization.
00:16:16
Speaker
When you say that solo sport athletes will push too hard or or something along those lines on the physical side of things, I guess, that might lead to overtraining or injury of some sort.
00:16:36
Speaker
But then on the mental side of things, does is that often, or in your experience, did that often lead to things like burnout? Yeah, they're they're not they're not separate separate beasts. they're they're all It's all intertwined.
00:16:52
Speaker
um if If someone has a physical injury, that physical injury could be black and white, simply too much volume too soon, and they get an injury.
00:17:08
Speaker
um let's say all of that volume and intensity was well monitored and it wasn't too much volume or intensity too soon. And there wasn't a mechanism of injury or or a imbalance or a structural misalignment.
00:17:27
Speaker
they there's likely something else that's mental or physical, and their body takes it on. So we we would like to think that the physical thing is the physical thing and the mental thing is the mental thing, but they intertwine and they affect one another. They always do.
00:17:47
Speaker
um you You can sit right here. If I... if i you know, gave you a little jab in the back and it hit a spot that was sore and then you're kind of doubled over and sitting down, i promise you, your mental and emotional state will have changed.
00:18:03
Speaker
And all that happened was a physical thing. But your mental and emotional state will have changed. And vice versa, the same thing happens. Your mental emotional state changes and something will change physically too.
00:18:17
Speaker
So we, especially the the majority of people I work with are men. They're men who have typically achieved more than they ever thought they would in their life, and they've exceeded all of their goals.
00:18:31
Speaker
And then they find themselves at a place that they go, huh, why am I not as happy as I thought I'd be? Why am I not fulfilled? And And what they've missed along the way, they've been doing a lot of the physical achievements or the actions that have created a result in the world that we can physically measure.
00:18:54
Speaker
Same thing as a physical lift. We can fi physically measure that someone did two more chin-ups in over the course of the six months than when they could only do two less.
00:19:06
Speaker
So we can measure that thing. But at the end of that accomplishment, most people are expecting to feel a certain way or expecting to have a certain mental state after they've achieved the thing that they were going for.
00:19:28
Speaker
And... If the person is is relying on that achievement to give them the mental or emotional state that they want, they're typically going to burn themselves out. And when I say burn themselves out, this could be overreaching, overtraining.
00:19:48
Speaker
When you're at the high level of sport, you don't have the depth of athletes like we do in Canada. We just don't have as many athletes as the population of the U.S. or other countries. So we have to do better with fewer. And when you have to do better with fewer, you are you are pushing the highest levels of physiology so that you get the most in the shortest time, the best in the shortest time. That involves cycling through what's called overreaching and then doing some downloading or recovery and then overreaching again and then downloading
00:20:23
Speaker
or or um tapering in order to peak. Now at the highest level in the world, athletes don't peak once a month.
00:20:35
Speaker
They peak one to two times a year. This is why when someone goes to the Olympics, usually world records are less or more, they're they're a better record than an Olympic record. Why? Because the athlete had to peak to qualify for the Olympics.
00:20:53
Speaker
And by the time they go to the Olympics, they're physically, emotionally, mentally often somewhat less than when they peaked for whatever the qualifier was for the Olympics.
00:21:04
Speaker
So if you look at an athlete like a like a swimmer or a gymnast or a track athlete that are individual sports, they're usually only peaking one, two, three tops times in a year.
00:21:19
Speaker
and And yet what happens in business, this is this fallacy. What happens in life, people are expecting to like keep on this straight line upward. And that's not how the world, biology, physiology, it's not how any of it works. We work in cycles.
00:21:37
Speaker
We work in dips. We go up and we down or go down. And that's what I call, what happens in sport is is periodization. It's called periodization. We take ah an a quadrennial, which is a four-year cycle for the Olympics.
00:21:50
Speaker
And we break it down to an ah annual plan for four of them for a quad. And then we break that down into mesocycles. And then we break that down further into a microcycle is typically a weekly cycle.
00:22:02
Speaker
But all of those are being planned in order to get an outcome and get certain peaks. But in the real world, most of us humans are walking around or business people or high achievers or whatever, expecting to be on this straight line to continue to improve and improve and improve.
00:22:18
Speaker
But I utilize periodization from high-performance sport and call it strategic imbalance. Because if we're in balance, if we have balance all the time, nothing is changing.
00:22:29
Speaker
We're not improving, but we have to do some work in order to just maintain balance. But if we're balanced and we're maintaining, nothing's improving, nothing's going down.
00:22:41
Speaker
So we have to strategize to decide where are we going to push, where are we going to pull back, when are we going to recover from that push. And it's a strategy and it's a strategic imbalance in order to create growth.
00:22:56
Speaker
And that can happen on any level. It can happen in relationships. It can happen in sprints in business. One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is go on, let's go on a two-week sprint and another two-week sprint and another two-week sprint. Tell me of any sprinter ever who could keep sprinting.
00:23:13
Speaker
it doesn't It doesn't exist. There has to be a recovery, a dip and then a push and then a dip and then a push and then a real pullback and then begin again.
00:23:24
Speaker
And that kind of cycling creates continual improvement. However, we walk around as humans thinking that we're just going to keep improving all the time. Now, you can do that, but not in everybo not in the same area all the time. And that's where if you look at the complexity of taking an athlete to get them to their top, there are elements like speed, power,
00:23:52
Speaker
strength, technical ability in whatever the sport is. Let's say they are play hockey or rugby or something like that. But there's so many different elements. One can be resting while the other is pushing.
00:24:07
Speaker
One can be maintaining while the other one is going through a really hard push. One can be recovering while another one is is new and trying something new. So you've got all these different elements. That's the same for all of us. We can maintain our sleep.
00:24:22
Speaker
We can maintain our output, our work output. We can maintain other things that are normal for us to maintain while we're trying really hard to do a new achievement on this new thing.
00:24:35
Speaker
Can you kind of illustrate that or or give me a scenario of how that might show up for an individual in business or a team in business?
00:24:46
Speaker
And I'll tell you what I'm imagining or what what I'm, the picture that I'm trying to form in my head, Kari, is I, myself, I'm somewhat regimented, you might say.
00:25:00
Speaker
i you know, I don't wouldn't say that am stuck to a schedule or a particular way of doing things, but I am very comfortable with knowing when I'm going to do things, how I'm going to do things. And, you know, the you can fill in the gaps here any way you want, whether I eat the same meal every day or I wake up at the same time or whatever else, right? Like some of those details are not super important, but I find comfort in that. And I believe that I, because I'm well-rested, because I don't have to spend mental energy thinking about what I'm going to do and any number of other things, that I am happier and I perform better. And these things, you know, influence one another, as you sort of said, with the physical mental.
00:25:51
Speaker
And so, I can guess how this might show up, but I'm really curious whether it's for your clients or just a general scenario, how it actually shows up given your experience.
00:26:06
Speaker
So what often happens, so i love i love what you've described because it sounds like you're dialed in on certain things. Let's say, um and and i I'm dialed in on a lot of things. There many ritualistic type of systems that occur in most high achievers because then there is it reduces decision fatigue.
00:26:29
Speaker
It creates continuity. It creates a lot of things that work really well and can compound positively. So we can create a virtuous cycle with something that works really well. Let's say it's let's say you have a rotation of three different breakfasts that are super healthy. You never think about it. You just have those same three things.
00:26:51
Speaker
you know, rotating through throughout the week. You get the variety, you get the nutrients, you love it, you don't have to think about it. And then you push yourself because you want to go on a six-week-long work trip to Taiwan, and it's a completely different environment.
00:27:13
Speaker
So that's where that's the test, because now you you're pushing yourself in a zone mentally. Let's say it's a project. Let's say there's all kinds more intellectual demands. There's interrelational demands with other humans and and language barriers you're not used to.
00:27:33
Speaker
So there's so much taxing your brain that if you can do the closest thing to your ritual that you would ordinarily do in your regular life, that little thing is going to turn into what I call us ah structure, lean on structure.
00:27:52
Speaker
You have a structure. It works. You do it at home all the time. The more you can lean on that same structure when everything is changed, then you're going to keep moving forward more on the thing that you're struggling with, which would be the project in this example, in a different country, in a different time zone, with different culture and different food.
00:28:16
Speaker
So the more you can replicate what works and then not have to think about it, the more you're going to have the bandwidth mentally, so intellectually, emotionally, and um um in all the other areas, in the results that you're creating, you're going to have more bandwidth to be able to let your brain focus on those things and figure out those problems and create new patterns.
00:28:44
Speaker
All your brain is doing Your brain is is looking for patterns, is doing pattern recognition, pattern utilization, and pattern creation.
00:28:56
Speaker
And the thing is, is that you can see patterns so easily, but it doesn't mean you're going to utilize the pattern. Let's say you start utilizing a pattern. Good for you. We've started to utilize it.
00:29:09
Speaker
But then can you create a pattern that works for you or works for the thing you're trying to achieve? Because the more you can replicate the things that work, then when it comes to making something better, all it requires is a refinement or a tweak instead of a whole new thing.
00:29:27
Speaker
Our brains have a really hard time doing a whole new thing. A whole new thing is is terrifying to a brain. Our brains are here to keep us safe. That's it. You said you were comfortable in the things that you did. Well, that's the motivational triad. We seek pleasure. We avoid pain. And above all else, we stay comfortable.
00:29:49
Speaker
So the beauty comes in if we've been able to create a pattern that our brain doesn't have to think about, and it might be a next level pattern, but as soon as your brain becomes comfortable with it, all of a sudden you've just leveled up by creating a new pattern that's the next level and getting your brain to become comfortable with it and and ritualized.
00:30:11
Speaker
Now, the thing about behavior change is that people think that ah, this is so good. i love my breakfast routine or I love my one-on-one meeting routine with my direct reports or I love getting to the gym three times a week. It's so great. It's a pattern. It's who I am now. They believe that.
00:30:34
Speaker
But where the real test comes in is whether they've done that thing over and over again for six months or And and if it's if it's broken, they get right back on it.
00:30:50
Speaker
And if something changed, like travel, like a death in the family, like a business disruption, they could still keep it going. Then you know it's part of who you are as your identity within your pattern within your own identity.
00:31:07
Speaker
Then it'll stick for good. You said behavior change and One thing that that sparked for me, Kari, is i think the the visual sort of, or the idea that I had in my head up until that point was, and forgive me if you even put it this way, but the idea that I had in my head was sort of a foundation, you know, giving myself a strong foundation or a higher point from which I can begin climbing the next mountain or however it is that we want to describe the thing.
00:31:42
Speaker
So if I have to climb a mountain that, you know, is, let's pick an amount, let's say it's 10,000 feet tall But because of, you know, this foundation that I built, I'm starting from 5,000 feet rather than starting from zero.
00:32:00
Speaker
Then the energy that I expend is in my very simplistic, you know, situation here, much less. And then I'm going to assume that my recovery time will be less and my turnaround time, you know, my ability to go right back and push on the same or different things is, you know, I can get to that quicker. And, you know, a very simple way of putting it might be, it's just easier because I've got myself to a higher point
00:32:35
Speaker
And we can poke holes in this in plenty of ways, but I was thinking about that. And then you said behavior change. And, you know, maybe this relates to your book. Maybe it doesn't.
00:32:49
Speaker
But I think that we've been saying for decades that the pace of change has never been faster. And, you know, some people will say, well, it's just all change now. And, you know,
00:33:06
Speaker
Maybe it's a question, how much change is and how much uncertainty is AI introducing? And you wrote a book that I'm going to say is at the very least related to AI, if not about AI in some respects.
00:33:22
Speaker
And when you said behavior change, and you also said decision fatigue, I believe, i started to think, are there ways in which we collectively, you know, at a societal level, perhaps we're chipping away at what could be a foundation for many of us, in which case it makes it difficult to climb that next mountain every time.
00:33:50
Speaker
I appreciate how you brought all this together because, so first of all, you you use the analogy of a mountain. And before writing this book, i I, for a very long time, would, people would come to me with goals.
00:34:05
Speaker
They want their goal. I'm going to help them optimize. Typically to optimize, they have something that they want. What you described, I would have terms for one would be a base camp goal or a summit goal.
00:34:19
Speaker
So then i would help them distinguish so that I could understand and they could understand so we have clarity around, is this a base camp goal? Meaning, is it something that you've you've had that's been very foundational?
00:34:33
Speaker
Maybe you've done it before, but you want to do it ah again or you want to do it a little bit better and just improve that that foundation. Something that's going to be a health goal, something that's going to be sustainable, that would be a base camp goal. And then a summit goal would be one of those people would call BHAGs, big, hairy, audacious goals, something they've is so far beyond what they could ever imagine.
00:34:59
Speaker
And they that's a summit goal. it's it's They don't even have full clarity on it because they don't they have no idea how they're going to make it happen, but they know they really want it.
00:35:10
Speaker
And they might have a really solid foundation of a base camp overall. So you talked about that base camp. Now to bring this over to to AI, you can hear how I'm describing that. The reason for that is to create clarity, to create simplicity.
00:35:31
Speaker
Because as soon as we have too many options, then it shuts down every possible option. complexity kills motivation.
00:35:43
Speaker
Complexity kills the desire to go for that thing that was either different or scary. Even though we innately have that as humans, we're creative creatures, we're curious creatures. We want something that might be different. We've got a dopamine system specifically for that.
00:36:01
Speaker
I can't reach my water. I want my water. As soon as I get my water, I still get a dopamine hit because I grab my water. As soon as I drink my water, I got what I wanted, dopamine drops.
00:36:14
Speaker
So dopamine is the motivation and motivation molecule. Dopamine is there to keep us going for something. So now take We have...
00:36:25
Speaker
we have We have a younger generation. I have children who are in their 20s, and I have a child, my youngest is 15. So we have, my children are digital natives, except in the unique case of my household, none of them got a phone before they were 13.
00:36:48
Speaker
They also have rules around phones or screen time or things like that, so that there's more of an emphasis on human interaction. So now we have this situation where if somebody wants something, AI is there to facilitate it so fast that we now don't have the step-by-step progressions that are part of our biological system to actually get the thing.
00:37:22
Speaker
Now the thing can get to us the thing we wanted. Let's say we wanted information. Let's say we wanted to create a document. Let's say we wanted whatever. We can get that thing so fast that that we're denying ourselves the figuring it out.
00:37:41
Speaker
the creating more resilience, creating more capability, creating more um synapses. So we have this brain that's got neuroplasticity. It means it's gonna constantly change. It can learn, it's gonna, I can make it work better at certain things and kind of go dull with certain things depending on how I use this.
00:38:05
Speaker
It is like the most magnificent muscle, except not dumb like a muscle, It can do just about anything. It's bizarre. i've so I used to work with Paralympic athletes too. I've seen things that are impossible.
00:38:24
Speaker
I've seen what the body can do, what the brain restructures in the body in order to make something happen. And that happens with everything. But now we're in a situation.
00:38:37
Speaker
So when you said a book about AI that's related to AI, the book really is about values. It's about ethics. It's about who we are in the context of a world that's going to be, that we can't get away from AI.
00:38:52
Speaker
The AI is going to be infiltrating and is infiltrating everything that is digitally available. So if most of us have some sort of digital interaction or influence in our day-to-day lives, and now we have AI involved in almost all of that, then it changes how our brain is working.
00:39:19
Speaker
It's a fast feedback system where, oh, you want that? Here you go. Oh, you want? And that's not going to slow down. that's When we say going faster, you look at the Industrial Revolution and how fast that came along. Well, this is exponentially happening faster.
00:39:35
Speaker
more than the internet coming on, more than the industrial revolution. We look at AI and it can do things that most humans right now, most humans don't use AI and intentionally, whereas they might say they're on OpenAI or Anthropic or Perplexity or Grok or Copilot or Gemini or on and on we go, right? There are just so many platforms.
00:40:00
Speaker
Most people are not on the platforms yet. But the amount that that's changing is happening so fast. And at the same time, AI is learning so much faster. Like it can't even, it's like if we look at the iteration of ChatGBT and the iteration that went from I was lucky. i had I had two clients who were early adopters. One of them had a background in tech. We're talking way back in Yelp and Yahoo and all that stuff. And another client was very much an investor and very interested in tech, used to have family members who were in like tech spy world kind of thing.
00:40:43
Speaker
So I happened to be in proximity with some cool people. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been an early adopter to AI. I just wouldn't have. But if you look at the iteration of ChatGBT back with 2.0 or 3.0, you've got ChatGBT 3.0. That'd be like taking the amount it could do and putting it in a shot glass.
00:41:04
Speaker
You jump to 3.5, and that's like taking the shot glass, and now it's it's it's potential or um what is what it can do is the size of a town.
00:41:18
Speaker
And then you take the next iteration to 4.0, and then that ends up being the size of a country. it's Its iterations are so mind-blowingly different from one to the next.
00:41:34
Speaker
And they're mind-blowingly different because it's AI that's doing the growth, not us. and So now I have my youngest is in high school.
00:41:44
Speaker
And you've got an entire generation there who've been digital natives, and they're used to being entertained by their phone. In fact, most of them have some level of addictive behavior around phones.
00:41:58
Speaker
And their brains, which do not stop developing, like I know physical bodies, female physical bodies stop developing right around that 16 to 18 zone.
00:42:09
Speaker
Male bodies stop developing around that 22 to 25 zone. Brains do not stop developing, we used to think, somewhere around that 25-year-old zone. But now it turns out there's still more things happening with our brains into the 30-years-old.
00:42:25
Speaker
Well, you look at our youngest brains and they're being influenced by ai so much of what they're seeing is not even being managed or restricted or safetied by humans.
00:42:41
Speaker
And that's where my... ah What i emphasize is self-mastery. It's self-leadership.
00:42:53
Speaker
It's self-understanding. and Not to be, you know, this island of self-self-self, but rather so that we have the ability to really connect with other humans.
00:43:05
Speaker
to be able to really um experience what this thing is called life that's not just influencing my brain digitally, but rather i can be curious about everything sin without being led by the nose as to how I'm supposed to think.
00:43:25
Speaker
Because if you go into a silo called life, ChatGBT, as an example, there's different, I'm just using that one since most people are familiar with that. But if I go in there, that's that's a silo of one. It's an echo chamber of one.
00:43:40
Speaker
It's not like where even our past iteration, let's say we're in some sort of WhatsApp chat groups or Facebook groups Facebook groups our instagram Instagram algorithm or our what we're being fed on LinkedIn, at least those were these echo chambers of similar thinkers, which is problematic of it in and of itself because we're not getting the the diversity of other thinkers. where We're being siloed into sameness.
00:44:11
Speaker
Oh, you want you like people to think like this. The algorithm is going to feed you this. Well, now you go into something like a chat GBT, And it's the greatest people pleaser on the planet.
00:44:22
Speaker
So it's just going to keep feeding what you like, which is a great little ego boost, except what people find is that, yeah, I'm getting something I want, something I want, but there's, it's How do you measure this part of things that leads to happiness, that leads to fulfillment, which is the process, the journey of figuring it out yourself? And that's where happiness lives.
00:44:50
Speaker
So when I ah circle back and I go, remember that burnt out human being, whether they're a high level athlete or they're ah a business person, that burnt out human being what they're missing is is happiness. And happiness scientifically is is part hedonic happiness, like pleasure in your mouth, chocolate, party, um feel good, anything feel good is hedonic happiness. And then there's eudaimonic happiness. And that's the stuff that takes the effort. It's the, that was really freaking hard. And oh my gosh, I feel so good that I did that. A workout, a project, seeing something through that was difficult, that's eudaimonic happiness.
00:45:31
Speaker
And so this this supposed formula for happiness ends up being roughly around the 20 of the hedonic and 80 of the eudaimonic And yet, where' we have a society now that knows less and less about how to struggle through something and feel good about it.
00:45:50
Speaker
How to work together with others and and build trust because of the failures or because of the small conflicts that were solved along the way.
00:46:02
Speaker
This is what happens in sport. This is what happens in team sport, individual sport. So what ends up happening with me is people want what I have to offer when it comes to thinking in order to help them be at their best leadership, at their best thinking. And a i can be a tool in helping that.
00:46:25
Speaker
But as humans, we're so susceptible to instead of use it instead of keeping our own leadership, our own autonomy, our own mastery, instead letting it become the master of us.
00:46:39
Speaker
I'm really curious how this shows up in, or what you're talking about with your clients as it relates to this, but let me give you a scenario. So i coach youth club soccer and if the ultimate performance goal, let's say, yeah ah separate from people feeling good because they win or whatever else, if just the number, the measurement that we're looking for is wins,
00:47:11
Speaker
then we could go to the lowest possible league or division or whatever it is, and we'll get the wins. But I'm imagining based on what you're saying, it's a little bit like if how you measure, you know, your diet is, well, did you get calories or not? Then we we we got calories, we got wins, but they're kind of empty calories or empty wins.
00:47:36
Speaker
And by going for the easiest thing, the easiest win, it actually makes it harder in the next year or the year after or whatever for the team, but also the individual to reach their highest potential.
00:47:53
Speaker
And, you know, let's just say that one of these players could be an Olympic level soccer player, world-class, whatever. Well, by going just to check the box and get the win, I'm actually making it harder for them.
00:48:08
Speaker
Oh, yes. No one ever became their best by staying comfortable. Well, and then, so Kari, when I'm really curious how you're talking with your clients about this and then what the what the immediate needs are, you know, and immediate pressures that they face or the things that they're experimenting with or whatever else versus the, you know, need to put in the work so that they can reach greater heights or however we want to put it because,
00:48:39
Speaker
I think sort of a corollary to some of these empty calories or whatever else is, or the the phone, you know, giving me constant dopamine hits or not challenging me or whatever is sort of like, okay, I, um, I'm a marketer.
00:48:58
Speaker
And if someone says, I need a creative brief or a strategy brief or whatever, I go to ChattyPT and I say, here are couple of details.
00:49:08
Speaker
Give me a brief. Well, it gives me a brief in 30 seconds. And now I can use it as a tool that speeds certain things up, but then I really have to do some critical thinking or whatever else.
00:49:21
Speaker
Or I could say, wow, that thing that used to take me five hours just took me five minutes. And potentially in this situation that I'm setting up,
00:49:34
Speaker
I'm checking the box, I'm getting the briefs done over time. But we find over a year or two years or five years, not only is possibly the work on average worse, but also I have progressed less.
00:49:49
Speaker
So as it relates to AI specifically, I suppose, are you dealing with challenges like that with your clients? You know what's really interesting? it' is This is interesting. So first of all, you know what you're describing is it's like there's advancements in everything. do we like I live in an area that has a strong Mennonite community.
00:50:11
Speaker
I drive by horse and buggies every day. So the argument there is that do do you want to take on the advancements, the technological advancements, or do you want to keep things exactly the same?
00:50:28
Speaker
And this is where I'm not saying that there's a right or wrong. in In my world, I would like people to use AI. I want people to use AI.
00:50:40
Speaker
But at the same time, simultaneously, developing their own mastery and choice and autonomy and highest-level thinking. We're talking meta-level thinking where I can see my thoughts and simultaneously I'm seeing my thoughts and I'm observing that I'm the observer of my thoughts.
00:51:04
Speaker
So that's meta. And... That's what I work on with my clients. and My clients, this is the thing. I would say one of them is is utilizing AI at a very high level, and he teaches people about AI.
00:51:25
Speaker
But the majority of them are so freaking busy trying to lead a leadership team or run a company that has high stakes, or most of them aren't utilizing AI as much as I'd like them to.
00:51:39
Speaker
because they have so much going on. Now, let's not take that person as the example. let's take Let's take the average person as an example, the marketer that you describe.
00:51:50
Speaker
And in that case, what I would say is know yourself well enough. Know that you really freaking love to connect with other people or know that part of your value system is curiosity or part of your value system is generosity or contribution or part of your value system is learning. Because if you know your values really freaking well,
00:52:13
Speaker
then what you're going to do is you're going to structure your prompts into that ai such that it looks for the biases, such that you are creative with it. So what if this? What if this? I want you to be the devil's advocate in this situation and do this, this, and this. What if you were a board of directors and on that board of directors, there's this person and this person. Tell me who else should fill that. No, I don't. And and argue with it.
00:52:42
Speaker
Argue with it to make you better. Argue with it to test your own value system. We're in a scenario where there's there's a ah cycle, and the cycle is where hard times create strong people.
00:52:59
Speaker
Strong people create good times. Good times create weak people. Weak people create hard times.
00:53:10
Speaker
And so on. Hard times create strong people. Strong people create good times. Good times create weak people. Weak people create hard times. We have been in cycles like this for centuries.
00:53:23
Speaker
We can trace it back just a few generations and look at World War I, World War two We can look at at the the flappers back in the beginning of like the early 20s.
00:53:35
Speaker
they were like what They were criticized like the millennials were a few years back. And how, you know, selfish and weak they were and they did things this way, they were so different, whatever. Well, they also had to get through a market crash, World War II, and they became some of the strongest people that we've seen in recent generations.
00:53:57
Speaker
So like the cycle continues. This is going to, this is such a disruption. it is, we are seeing it already in workforces and geopolitics. And there's there's so many things going on.
00:54:13
Speaker
we We look at just a few days ago where The U.S. military is trying to create deals with big AI companies, and then the AI companies are deciding where their ethics are at in order to, whether or not to surveil all the public, whether or not to give autonomous intelligence drones, the AI capability just to have the AI make the decisions to kill?
00:54:36
Speaker
Like these are big, big questions. The only way we're going to as a human species, as a world, be able to navigate questions like these is if we get to know ourselves and decide who we want to be from a values and ethics perspective and continue to evolve that because the people I am, the people I'm around, the people I work with, they're not static.
00:54:59
Speaker
There's some people that you might have remembered or close to in high school, and they are the same person, the same person, the same person all the way through their whole life. Their values are exactly the same. They are the same. There's nothing wrong with that.
00:55:12
Speaker
There's a lot of people who are learning and growing really fast. Their values will change. I have my clients and myself go through a values exercise every six to 12 months. Does it mean that they're a different human being?
00:55:24
Speaker
Somewhat. It just means that some of their values might have become more important because of the emphasis of what matters to them in their lives and what they're what they've learned and what they've grown with. So this I know i've I've said a lot here, but it's because I believe that it is so important that we as human beings are endeavoring to get to know ourselves, get to know what matters to us, get to know each other. And that's what is involved with self-mastery so that we can be really great integrated humans with other people.
00:56:00
Speaker
So that we can be thriving and not, like, we look at our mental health now. The mental health, look at the how it correlates with social media.
00:56:12
Speaker
why Why do you think that, happened to be in a lab years ago. i happened to be a lab that I knew the data on step counts and activity with kids. but it wasn't public information.
00:56:25
Speaker
And so everybody at that time, my oldest is 25 years old. Everybody around that time when she was little was feeding everybody, oh, look at like this this video and that video and put them on this video. And then the iPads came out.
00:56:39
Speaker
And then every little, look at what the kid, look at what the two-year-old can do with the iPad and swiping and this and that. Well, that dopamine feedback loop is so fast. And what what we've learned back then, ages ago, is that risky play, getting a kid out in risky play where they have to problem solve with other kids in a forest, in nature, in ah unusual situations, but we bubbled them and bubble wrap them.
00:57:07
Speaker
And what that does to kids is then their social skills go down, their health goes down, their mental health goes down, their emotional capabilities go down. And what I would love is for people to help themselves and help each other master those things so that when it comes to something that's that's simply outpacing us so fast, called AI, that we can make some decent decisions instead of it doing it for us, which it's going to do, which it already is in a lot of ways.
00:57:42
Speaker
And I'm not saying that that's not going to be a potential good thing, like the medical solutions, the environmental solutions. There's so many solutions that AI can can provide. However, let's not forget the foundational thing called a human being.
00:57:58
Speaker
Being a human. Being a whole creature, not based on what we're doing, not based on how much we produce. love results. Trust me, I got companies that need to have outputs and results and KPIs at the end of the day.
00:58:14
Speaker
But the cost of that without a whole human is very empty and it has its impact on the world. You know, one of the first things that you talked about was that we need to know our values or something along those lines. And then later on in what you were saying,
00:58:36
Speaker
I think I realized, and please tell me if I'm wrong, but I think that this relates to, in your book, you talk early on about needing an AI ethics philosophy for an individual, and then i think an ethics mission statement, AI ethics mission statement for an organization, and then I forget the exact structure, but I think I'm remembering that the end of just about every chapter is a series of questions. And I believe that you're leading towards or or helping people develop
00:59:14
Speaker
that ethics philosophy or mission statement. And, and I think that's, uh, some of what you're ultimately saying here is that the your book can help people come to understand what it is that they stand for, that they want, that they're trying to really get done.
00:59:36
Speaker
when they use AI or ah really, I think it applies in a number of different scenarios, you know, AI or otherwise, so that we're not, I think you said it, you know kind of led around by the nose or led astray by this thing is capable of doing a lot. And we don't really know what we stand for or what we want or whatever else.
00:59:56
Speaker
We knew it was risky to put a book out there when a book could then be obsolete by the time it gets printed. And so we wanted to make sure that it had staying power so it could always be helpful in in it's in its usage. it's It's a way of ah re-examining different, it could be a context like a business, it could be a community, it could be an individual, where the questions are what prompt how we think.
01:00:26
Speaker
So if I have to answer a question about something, and then i discover by answering that question From my experiences of life or from what I want for a future, I discover by my own answers more about myself and more about what I'm looking for in life.
01:00:46
Speaker
And same thing for a business. The questions, if they're really good questions, they will help people discover more about the situation, themselves, each other, the business, the context.
01:01:02
Speaker
And that, it doesn't mean question yourself in circles. It means figure some things out so that so that it helps for decision making. It helps for what you want to support and what you don't want to support.
01:01:19
Speaker
It helps for getting other people's perspectives. And I think that's vital right now instead of a constant if if people start to lean on ai versus their own answers if if the answer comes up which is comfort right easy comfort motivational triad stay comfortable if the answer comes up i don't know i don't know is your brain's answer to hold you right where you are and not have an answer
01:01:51
Speaker
And right now, if you come up with I don't know, a lot of people are going to just ask AI. And the thing is, is if you and i if you if you use whatever, whatever format you use, ChatGBT, Anthropic, Claude, Grock, whatever.
01:02:10
Speaker
If we use the same platform and you ask the question and then I ask the question of it, it's going to give you a different answer back, even if we both ask the same question at the same time, because it's going to look to please you.
01:02:27
Speaker
Now, a feedback system like that If we can come up with our own answers, even if it's not the greatest answer, then we can start to vet that answer. Well, I think that I'd really like to live in a place that's of a really cold climate.
01:02:44
Speaker
And, well, that's what I think. And now I'm going to test that because everything's, it's a scientific process. Everything's a hypothesis. We're just throwing spaghetti at the wall and trying to see what actually works.
01:02:56
Speaker
But a i can, for many people, take the process of of the scientific process out of the equation because it's doing it for you. You're not testing your own theory. You're not testing your own opinions or your own thoughts or bringing them to other people and trying them on with other human beings.
01:03:13
Speaker
You're doing it with AI. And it's just going to tell you what you want to hear unless you've trained it well giving it really good custom instructions, start to use it as a tool to help you interact with other people, start to use those people to then use AI better so that you can elevate the group and hopefully create more connection instead of more separation.
01:03:39
Speaker
yeah I would love to be a fly on the wall in some of these conversations with your clients, you know, because many of us have opinions and can speculate all that, but to see in an action would be really interesting to me. But I know that we don't have unlimited time today. So to ensure that we have a little bit of time,
01:04:03
Speaker
in case we need it, I'll ask you the last two questions and then we'll see where that takes us. And so those are, Kari, where should I go to learn more, connect with you or whatever else? I've read the book, but obviously not everyone has. So maybe there's that.
01:04:20
Speaker
And the second question is, whether we've talked about it or not, is there something you would want to leave me with, words of wisdom or things that you would want me to be thinking about after today?
01:04:32
Speaker
The book is, we have a, you can get a sample chapter for free if you want. There are some AI prompts to help leaders think better on our website. And the web website for this one is thehumanalgorithm.ai.
01:04:48
Speaker
Thehumanalgorithm.ai. My website is theempowered.ca. dot ca a And I'm on Instagram. I'm on LinkedIn.
01:05:00
Speaker
ah Mostly those two. Instagram is the underscore MPWRD. And um LinkedIn is my name, Kari Schneider.
01:05:11
Speaker
And leaving...
01:05:16
Speaker
For people, i our tagline with my business, I love to go back to, and it's it's be your best so you can live and give your best. And living and giving, I think, is simply a form of leading.
01:05:30
Speaker
So yes, I'm in leadership and values and things like that, but it's becoming your best, being your best in every any given moment to live and give, live the life and give to others your best as well.
01:05:45
Speaker
And if our best lowers and lowers and lowers, we don't have as much to live. We don't have as much to give for others as well. And so I i challenge people to Think future and what would your future self want for you now?
01:06:08
Speaker
What would your future self wish for you now? And allow that ability to keep being your best in every moment to be able to be in this beautiful thing called the moment, our own presence with each other, connect it.
01:06:26
Speaker
I appreciate you being here. I've really enjoyed the conversation. i enjoyed your book. And so thank you for recording with me, Kari. Thank you for having me. I love what you're doing. I think it's a great thing.
01:06:36
Speaker
Thank you.