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What's your AI success story? What made you realize you had to change? And what does a hopeful future with AI look like to you? AI Hope with Geoff Livingston asks three simple questions of people doing the hard work of adapting and thriving in the AI era.
AI Hope Episode 1: Reaching Higher with Purpose featuring Aaron Strout
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[00:00:00]
Geoff: Hey everybody. My name is Jeff Livingston, and this is AI Hope. My book, Now Is Gone, is about never-ending change. This podcast is about what comes after, the stories, the people, and the reason for hope
Geoff: I, I love it. There's nothing like a good coffee chat. Speaking of, Mr. Aaron Strout, author of Wired for Purpose. Congratulations on this book. Thank you. It's fantastic. Um, I've been reading it over the past few days in advance of this conversation, and as I said to you privately, I've already found it to be impactful for me.
Geoff: It's all about why humanity is the biggest differentiator in a digital world, and I think that's a perfect way to discuss AI hope, right? And you do talk about AI specifically in there, but you also talk about challenges that people face. First, before we get into some of that, I wanted to ask you, you know, what's your big AI success that you've had personally that is worthy of sharing?
Aaron: So you know, the [00:01:00] funny thing is I always like to think about these questions, so I appreciate that you sent them over in advance. And this is one where it's a really simple question that has a really lot of different paths you could take behind it. And so I would say that there's a twofold answer to it, if you'll indulge me on that.
Aaron: The first is I started playing with generative AI tools probably three-ish years ago. Um- Yeah ... we have a mutual friend, Adam Hirsch, who was working for Real Chemistry at the time, and so he signed us on to use a tool called Writer. So ChatGPT was big at the time, but Writer was a little more geared toward marketing services agencies.
Aaron: And one of the first things that I used it for was we were doing a event or programming an event for a client, and it was much more clinical, and I always worked in the healthcare world. I had always worked more on the commercialization side, which is like the marketing and the sales and the how do you get it out into the public.
Aaron: And so I wasn't as familiar with some of the players and the topics that we needed to do. So [00:02:00] I used the tool to say, "Help me think through what should the panel be titled, what should the, who are the players that we want." So the first go around I, I did it, and it came out with, like, some great recommendations, and I'm looking through LinkedIn to see if I knew the people or had a second-degree connection.
Aaron: And second iteration, third iteration, all of a sudden it started doing what we know AI does sometimes; it started to hallucinate. So it started to make up people- Oh ... and/or make up people that weren't at particular companies. And all of a sudden I had that, "Oh, crap," like I thought this thing was gonna, like, be a magic or silver bullet, and turns out it's not as much of a silver bullet as you would think.
Aaron: So it was a good lesson to learn early days. I use AI literally for everything. I do a podcast. I'm a fractional CMO. I have a, obviously the book and the promotion. So I use it as a thought partner, right, to either create the outline or help me with, like, titles that are GEO friendly, things like that But the one that I'd say has probably helped me the most is I wanted to...
Aaron: [00:03:00] I have a podcast called The Reaching Higher Podcast, and it's influential people that are doing societal good. So we've had people like the actor Adrian Grenier on, Al Roker, Senator Mallory McMorrow, who's running for US Senate.
Geoff: Okay,
Aaron: player. And so, so, and I don't say this to name-drop, but the, the good and the bad is, is that when you have people like that, it's, you have to be discerning.
Aaron: And so I have a lot of great people- Yeah ... that pitch me or people that send people my way. Right. And so long story long I wanted to have some sort of a vehicle where I could feature people that I liked, that are smart, that are doing good things, that maybe don't have 100,000 or a million or, you know, 10 million people that know who they are.
Aaron: And so I started doing a new series on LinkedIn called Interesting People I Think You Should Know. Perfect. And so why this is good is I don't have tons of time with all my other jobs, so I'm able to go to the person's LinkedIn bio once I pick someone. I say, "Write me five questions and a fun one based on this."
Aaron: They answer, and then I'm able to take AI and sort of use that to help write the intro and [00:04:00] do some of the filling in. And it's, I literally can do what used to take me probably four to six hours in 30 minutes, and it just makes it so much easier to do. So that's a much longer answer than you were looking for, but two, two examples of the good and bad of what AI can do and how it helps me in, in my day-to-day life.
Geoff: Well, it's, it's funny, uh, in our pre-pod again, so sorry folks, you're getting some back talk. But like, we were talking about my photography and also I have this kind of cottage budding running coaching business where people just come to me inbound and ask me to coach them. And then of course, I have my AI consultancy.
Geoff: How can somebody do these things, right? How can you do so many things? And the only way I can do that is with my AI team. Literally, it, it allows me to scale in a way that simply would not have been possible. So I totally identify with what you're talking about. What interests me about what you're saying is, um- Uh, you were such a successful executive, and you were dealing with some real interesting situations, and you talk a [00:05:00] lot about them in the book. one of them you have, uh, one of the chapters you talk about is rational optimization in a reactive world. And you actually started that chapter talking about how reactive social media is now and how negative is, it is, and how toxic it is, and how we have to maintain this sense of optimism, particularly as we deal with challenges.
Geoff: And I was curious, with this current technology boom or this, whatever this wave may be going down as, have you had, like, kind of like that moment where you've had to stop and say, "Look, I, I can't react to this." I... Like that now is gone moment where things are changing, I have to adapt, uh, I'm going to, I've done this before, and we've seen that with that experience in the book.
Geoff: Can you share that with us?
Aaron: Yeah. And again, this is one where lots of different permutations, and I did go back and sort of look through my notes on the OG now is gone and how brilliant it was back in 2007 to look [00:06:00] at social media and how companies were able to... The companies that were able to do- to adopt it weren't trying to control it, right?
Aaron: They were using it to be participatory, if I'm phrasing this right, with their communities. And the more you embrace your community and brought them in and let you, let them sort of co-think things with you, the stronger your ties were, the better your customer experience was, all those good things. So I guess in my thinking, The whole idea of rational optimism is I've always been a glass half full guy, but I think there's a world where people can associate that with being Pollyanna.
Aaron: And I think the thing that kept coming up as I was writing that chapter was I've tried to always be that calm under pressure guy.
Geoff: Right.
Aaron: And I will get to the point that you're asking in just a second. So one of the analogies I made in the book was, we called it flight attendant energy. For the crisis, right?
Aaron: And so for any of us who've ever flown on a plane, right? Yeah. You know that when it gets turbulent, and anyone that's flown, you do have those moments. Plane's dropping, things are sha- trays are shaking. The [00:07:00] first thing you do is you look at the flight attendants, and it's like, are they calm or are they freaking out?
Aaron: And if they're freaking out, you're like, "Oh my God, I'm gonna die. Let me try to like-" "... send a text to my wife or my kids or my parents." If they're calm, which they are most of the time, you're like, "Okay, they're not freaking out, so I'm not freaking out." And it turns out there is a physiological phenomena behind that which we wrote about in, in the book, and that is that you can literally download your calm into people.
Aaron: That, that sort of rational optimism, which is, again, I know that maybe this is an unideal situation. I know bad things might be happening. Let's find a way forward. Let's lock arms and let's do it. And by the way, I'd like to teach the team so that I don't have to sort of be that person that does that every single time for you.
Aaron: So I wake up almost every single day and I'm thinking to myself, "Am I underestimating the impact that AI, generative AI is having on society?" We read all these doom and gloom. It's taking all our jobs. It's going to take over. It's gonna be Terminator [00:08:00] or whatever, you know, insert sci-fi futuristic movie.
Aaron: And I keep coming back to like the Marc Andreessen, you know, who, um, founder of Andreessen Horowitz for old, old guys like you and me.
Geoff: Netscape.
Aaron: Netscape, created the first web browser, the first commercial web browser. And, uh, Aaron Levie, who's the CEO of Box, the, you know, one of the largest storage, uh, companies in the world, uh, v- online storage companies.
Aaron: And their whole premise, and I think you share in this, is- Generative AI is giving people who are good at their jobs or smart people a much greater runway, and it's a great equalizer. And so I keep sort of coming back to the, yes, we have to keep the bad in check, and there's plenty of room for bad. Yes, we do have to keep an eye on it, and it's part of why I tell people, anyone that will listen, and I do counsel a lot of folks on their job searches, that you will fall behind if you don't start to pick it up and play with it today.
Aaron: It does not have to be the thing like Jeff and I probably use this way more than other people do. Just go to Gemini, which is part of your Chrome. Like if [00:09:00] you ever use your Chrome browser- Yeah ... Firefox, whatever. It's embedded right in the top hand, right-hand corner. It's free. Yeah. Like, you can't do all of the fancy vibe coding, things like that, but you can create images.
Aaron: You can create blog posts. You can ask it questions. You get it, by the way, when you ask any search engine, like, "Tell me this," and it says, "Do you want the AI version?" Sometimes it defaults to that. So I think if people are willing to experiment, that's one of the things I also implore people to do in the book, which I've done across my last 30 years professionally, is script these little experiments and make them two-week experiments and make sure, like, if they fail or they don't look like they're promising, drop them and move on and say, "This is what I learned from it," and do that.
Aaron: So again, long-winded answer to what your question was, but that's sort of how I'm thinking about it and how I'm thinking about generative AI. But I do have that daily battle of like, I think this is a really good thing, but let me just reaffirm that it is. And so I try to always be processing and sort of looking at the trail forward and being very [00:10:00] purposeful in terms of how I think about it.
Geoff: Yeah. AI is definitely disposable, right? It changes so quickly. You can't get hung up on this one project. Yeah, I like that.
Aaron: Or one platform, by the way, which is the reason why I try to play with multiple platforms, and I encourage people. Claude is my primary, right? Right now. This is Anthropic. Right.
Geoff: Yeah. I use Copilot still a fair amount. I use Gemini a fair amount. I've dabbled with ChatGPT. I mentioned Writer before, but I don't think it's at Perplexity. Depending on what you're trying to do, it is good to know what the edges of these tools are. And, you know, as we just said, you never know when that tool is going to swap out, so don't fall in love with the tool or, you know, the particular project.
Aaron: Be in that constant learning mindset, which I think is important. I love it. I love it. Just to wrap up our conversation because, you know, this is meant to be that digestible short pod, and you had that fantastic chapter, Designing a Future That Heals, where you talked about AI and medicine and in particular [00:11:00] solving disease, but you were also talking a lot about the role of marketing in that chapter, the role of, uh- Just generally ethics and process and how generative AI works with people, the need for human-guided AI versus humanity replaced by AI.
Geoff: Lot of, a lot of thinking in that chapter. I'm curious, what's your vision for the AI future?
Aaron: Well, again, that's a big, big picture question. I would say it-- to narrow it to healthcare, I think it's got so many different possibilities. One of which is just giving doctors and nurses back time where if they've got Ambien AI, and basically they can chart doing that with the idea that they have to go back and check the references, make sure that any recommendations are the same recommendations they would give.
Aaron: Which is that human-guided, right? Technology-led, but human-guided. I think the beauty is, is that it's able to do things through things like synthetic trials, where you don't have to have 1,000 or 10,000 people. You can now start to [00:12:00] take, different sort of data, this RWD, real world data, from a variety of sources.
Aaron: You can sort of sync it up you can make it homogenous, and then you can start to apply learnings from that. Or even recreating... There's a, a guy that I had on the podcast, Dr. Joseph Wu, and he's actually taking regular h- you know, blood cells, turning them into stem cells, and then evolving, n- I mention it in the book- Yeah, he did a book with me
Geoff: turning them into liver, brain, and heart cells so you can start to do individual drug tests or therapy tests on these cells. And so I think we almost have no idea where this is gonna take us eventually, but I think that there is a world where its ability to assemble data in, like, seconds versus minutes or days, its ability to find patterns that we as human beings can't find, and its ability to sort of help us get rid of the rote things that we have to do that may have taken us hours.
Aaron: Because, you know, now all we have to do is just do that sort of f- final check on it. [00:13:00] That's the places where it's going to have a tremendous impact among, you know, thousands of other use cases.
Geoff: I love it. I love it. All right. Aaron, you're on tour. Is that right?
Aaron: I'm doing a, a mini book tour to the East Coast, uh, in mid-June.
Aaron: Uh, and then we'll do some other locations. But DC, your home, uh, area. Uh, New York and Boston on the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th. All
Geoff: right. Of June. We'll try to get this out before that, get people to the event.
Aaron: If you do, great. If not, then people can feel jealous that they didn't get a chance to, uh- ... hang with us in person.
Geoff: That's right, 'cause I'll be at the DC one for sure,
Aaron: that's right. So come and see Jeff in person.
Geoff: Yeah.
Aaron: He'll sign
Geoff: some books too. Bring tomatoes. Bring the tomatoes. Only for me, not for Aaron. Um-
Aaron: No, no, no. Both of us.
Geoff: So very good. And where can people find you? We'll put all the links in the show notes, but d- is there a particular
Aaron: place?
Aaron: The simplest version, so the simple, simple version is if you Google me, Aaron Strout, A-A-R-O-N S-T-R-O-U-T, you'll find me in a lot of places. LinkedIn is a good place. I put a lot [00:14:00] of my content there. The book has a specific site, which is getwiredforpurpose.com. That will link you to the places you can buy it, and then if you're interested in the podcast, it's, you know- Jeff is, uh, is, uh, a leader in this space, but, uh, reachinghigherpod.com is the place you can go and see and listen to the podcast.
Geoff: We'll put all those links in the show notes. Aaron, thank you so much for joining us, and folks, I hope you feel inspired by our conversation today. I do.
Aaron: Thanks for having me, Jeff. This is a true honor.
Geoff: Cheers, my friend.