Gen X To Gen Z: Different AI Superpowers

Meg Smith (00:12)
Hello and welcome to the AI Advantage. I am your host Meg Smith here with Mark. today we're talking about personal leadership and influence. This is, think one of my, you know, favorite skills, areas, topics in relation to AI, mostly because, and we've talked about this a little bit over the last couple of episodes. I find it's the way that I can get out of the like big scary.

The world is ending, AI is bad, the planet's burning, like up here and into the like, okay, actually, so what, what does it mean for me? What should I do with this information?

Mark Smith (00:49)
I like that. One of the quotes that I you know, I percolate on recently came from Neil deGrasse Tyson And he actually wrote it in one of his books recently. And the quote is this, instead of becoming our overlord and enslaving us all, artificial intelligence will be just another helpful feature on the tech infrastructure that...

serve our daily lives and I really feel that this is the future of AI that it's going to become an incredibly powerful tool that can enhance our daily lives rather than becoming our overlord and enslaving us and so when I see that and and its application to me I'm always looking at okay how can how can

AI enhance the inherent skills that I have? You know, we're big fans of ⁓ a technology called StrengthsFinder. And if we look at our own individual strengths, how could we use AI to take us to the next level of personal leadership and therefore how we apply what we learn to our own lives?

Meg Smith (02:06)
love that. And I was thinking about it in the context of sometimes we talk about strengths as individuals, but also there are generational strengths that we have when it comes to AI. And I was chatting with our friend just last night and saying how, you know, ⁓ a lot of Gen Z will have benefit of being digital native and

⁓ can just like identify what reels are made from AI videos, images. They just have this inherent ability because it's, it's sort of, they've never known a world without the internet. But then also I see a lot of attitudes coming from Gen Z that are seeing this headline and seeing the kind of the takes on, on AI that it's ruining the planet, that it's going to be overlords, that we're all going to, you know, it's basically doom and gloom. And I'm seeing some people want to opt out and.

I think that is what drives me around this conversation of personal leadership, because based on what we've seen and what we're hearing, and even that take from Neil deGrasse Tyson, it's not going away, but also we just need to understand it. And the more that we can understand it and how it relates to us and our lives and the lives we want to live, the better position we're going to be to sort of adopt or adapt to this thing that is sort of changing the world around us.

Mark Smith (03:26)
Yeah, and going beyond understanding, right? Because I feel to some degree understanding is knowledge. It is developing the skills off the back of that and going, okay, how can I apply it to my life? And I suppose I just want to give you a practical example of how I do this when I am developing my own personal leadership. A lot of you know, I read a lot of books and I find that when I read a book,

The first read is kind of, it gives you context over time I have felt. And let's just put novels to one side here. I'm not talking about the novels I read. I'm talking about particularly the biographies and or the books on business leadership, on personal leadership, in any number of the other books that I have covered.

You know right now I'm reading a lot of books of course on AI and getting different perspectives and insights. But what I like to do is that I take a book and the first read is the first read. Then I take the book and I generally whenever I buy a book I always buy it in two formats. I always buy the audible version and I always buy the Kindle version. And the reason I buy these two versions

is because what I've learned about my own learning ability is that if I just read a book, I can get to the end of a page and go, what was that about? Because my mind has drifted off, one little point took me away, but I'm still reading, but it's almost like I'm reading subconsciously. And I get to the bottom of the page and realize like, I don't know what exactly that page was about because I've tuned out. And so,

One of the lessons I learned about my own learning style ages ago is that if I listen to the book, if I just get the audible version, I fall asleep when listening. Right? And so, you know, if I'm using my eyes, I drift off into thought land. And if I use my ears, I wake up and go, my gosh, chapters have gone by, right?

But what I found is that if I combine the two, so in other words, I read on screen in the Kindle, but I have the audio in my ear at the same time, I have sometimes got up to 3x the speed, but because I'm reading it on page, I stay hyper-focused because it's coming in through my eyes, but also my ears at the same time. My average now listening rate is 2x speed, and that is how I consume. So through my ears and through my eyes. And the beauty is, that whenever they're talking about diagrams or images, et cetera, in the book, I get to see those.

on screen as well so I'm not having to context switch in that perspective. But that's the first read right? Then what I do is that I take that Kindle book and I turn it into a PDF that I then give to my LLM and I will say whichever AI I'm using I will say here's a book I've just finished reading and I want to

go through this book from the perspective of what can I apply to my life? What is usable by me? What do I, what habit or behaviors do I want to shift by applying what I've learned in this book? And so here's an example of this. I'm to share on screen, a, the seven habits of highly effective people by Stephen Covey. Now I've read this book multiple times over my life and

there are seven things around personal leadership that he defined in this book. And you can take any book that this applies to you, any kind of leader that you see that there is something in their life that you, you know, maybe read in the page that you want to apply and then turn into a habit in your life. And so if I take this, you can see the first three habits around independence of be proactive, begin with the end in mind and put first things first, right? So I take those,

And then I take those into, and let's just say I take the first one, be proactive. And I say, listen, I'm working through the seven habits are highly effective people. This is what I'll say to my AI. And I'm on the habit of be proactive. What I would like you to do is ask me 20 questions around being, how being proactive should apply to me in context of my life, but also referencing the kind of architecture of being proactive that Stephen Covey.

talks about. And so then I can riff a whole thing that now takes this concept, be proactive and hyper-personalizes it to me. And then out of the back of that, I can say, okay, now with that, I would like that to become a habit in my life. What would a habit for me? You know how habits work with me, because you know, I've been working with LLM for some time and other applications.

What is gonna be the best way to turn this into a habit that I wanna make part of my life? So I've made the decision I want this habit, right? I'm not giving that over to the LLM to decide. And then I go through that process of 20 questions, highly applicable to me, and then come up with a pattern of how I can incorporate this into my life. And I can then go through, begin with the end of mine. What would that look like? Now, you you might find Covey's not your author, and it might be that you've got Atomic Habits, for example.

You could take Atomic Habits, one of the most popular books of modern times, feed that into your LLM and say, hey, understand me in context of this book and go, how can these leadership secrets that come out of Atomic Habits and forming habits that really transform my life, how could they apply to me? And so taking any number of these, you can work through the books, authors, et cetera, that you like and start implementing the leadership.

Meg Smith (09:08)
I really...

Mark Smith (09:15)
principles ⁓ and personalise it to you.

Meg Smith (09:19)
I like that because I know from my experience of reading books, like the one that came to mind was the four hour work week, which was Timothy Ferris, big cult sort of business, personal leadership book came out, I think in the 2010s and books like that give you a, I don't know how many steps it was, a 10 step process or these frameworks, right? And I don't know about you.

But for me, when I read books like that, I think this is amazing. And then for whatever reason, sometimes you can, the book is written as if you're gonna apply steps one, two, three, fourth, you know, whatever. And then you get to this sort of dream outcome. But in real life, how it's worked for me anyway, is an idea will stick with me. And then at the right time later on, as I've learned other things and as I've built on my knowledge and experience,

then I'm able to go back to that and get something more applicable or something that is building on my experience to get to the output rather than following this linear process that works super well for a book but doesn't always work super well for your circumstances in life. So what I like about this is you then are able to use your conversation or your chat thread or whatever it might be inside of your account in your AI tool.

so that you can come back to it and it holds the context of, know, last time you were talking about ideas for being proactive, then say a month later, you come back and go, I was super proactive. I had a meeting with someone and then I contacted them, I connected with them on LinkedIn straight away. And then now they've come back to me and asked me a particular question about my area of expertise. How could I?

know, systemically be more proactive and take that. So you're giving feedback based on what's actually happening in your life. And then the, the LLM is drawing on all that general knowledge, the specific grounding of the book. And you can say things like, Hey, what book should I read next? What is a complimentary, you know, point of view that would help me get to the next step on my journey.

Mark Smith (11:21)
that. I think we live in a time that what AI enables us is access to resources in ways that we never could dream of possible in the past and therefore and when I say access to resources access to resources in reference to me like what's unique about me and how do I interpret it and how what is my process around it so rather than being generic and be highly tailored and that's why

I think this whole, why this topic of personal leadership with AI is so important. We can't leave it up to somebody else. If we're not personally leading in our own lives with artificial intelligence, we are just going to be buffeted and swayed by other people's ideas and application to our life. Whether that be a spouse, a business partner, your boss, the government and...

It's really important to go, hang on a second. I am actually going to form my own opinions. I'm going to apply it to my life how I see best fit for me rather than just become one of the many fish in the ocean, right? That gets buffeted by whatever a popular opinion is or other people's ideas of what's best for us. Personal leadership is about going, hang on.

Let me take control of my life where I wanted to go, where, what I want to achieve. And that could be, for example, you could start with health. Where, what level of health do you want? What do you desire? What have you been putting off for years? Could you use AI to tailor a personal health plan that works for you, works with your schedule, works with your timelines, works with your body composition and tailor for you. then.

you might say, the next area of personal leadership I'm gonna apply is personal finance. know, one thing I feel that we've been let down in the education system is not we're taught how to make money, but not how to have money make money for us and how to use money effectively. do, you know, what are the systems and processes to become prosperous by applying what has worked for others, but we might not have access to it.

Now we have access to it, right? We have access, but by, you know, engaging in conversation with AI, potentially we can uncover the model that's right for me or the model that's right for you in your situation.

Meg Smith (13:47)
Yeah, and I think it also comes back to that it's yes and it's the conversation with AI and that judgment free space to to ask ideas or ask the dumb question. But then also through that, you know, finding people that you are comfortable to talk to about that and how you can learn from them. Once you kind of know what you're looking for. We've been having a chat in one of our community groups about the fire movement.

Financially Independent Retire Early is an Australian movement that is similar to other movements. There's also a really great program in the UK, what we've talked about previously. For Mark and I, our personal finance journey really was, I think, several books over several years. And the biggest one for me was The Barefoot Investor, written by an Australian author.

Honestly, again, looking at the process by which that became knowledge that I owned and lived by, it wasn't just reading it once. It was reading it and doing what was in reach and possible and felt like the right thing. And then I think a year later, we each read it again and we took our own notes of, okay, what parts of the process do we think we should apply now? And we kind of swapped our notes and we're like, okay, great. I think this is the right thing. ⁓

Actually, the big change for both of us was that the second read, we were ready to get rid of our credit cards. We were in this sort of school of thought that was like, we pay our credit cards off every month. So it's not like we're paying interest. It's not a thing. But the second read, when we went back again, I think we had come further on our journey towards the step free life. And then we're able to go actually, let's try it. And what was

crazy to both of us was that even though we didn't feel burdened by it, we didn't have credit card debt, we weren't paying interest, but the truth that we now own for ourselves is that we spend real money differently than we spend credit money. And that is something that was in the book and other people had said, but until we lived it for ourselves and we were ready to apply it practically, it was, you know, I think something that was, we dismissed it for the air points, I think. We were like, no, no, no, we want the air points. And then we've got to, you know,

a different perspective on that now because we were able to go back and learn again and talk to more people.

Mark Smith (16:02)
Yeah, and that's another lens to look at this. That's financial literacy, right? And financial literacy is an ongoing journey. One of our goals right now is to get to three million in sorry, in shareholdings. And then we know that at three million, you can live indefinitely off selling monthly incrementally off that. we don't do anything fancy, we're just using ETFs.

following the SMP 500, very plain Jane type share trading, but we have built up a considerable reserve now by doing that process. And then you can look at health literacy in context of your body, not in context of fads and the latest diets and, but in contrast of your body. What about mental health literacy? What do you understand your mental health? Do you understand things that

allow you to run in your optimal state of you know what some consider flow and and but you know then when you need to take downtime when you need to take respite and care for yourself mentally and do you know the people that are toxic in your life and then how to go well how do I handle it and you know how I've handled toxicity in my life is

Meg Smith (17:15)
They said.

Mark Smith (17:18)
remove people. never allow them to become into my physical world and those can be direct family members but that still applies as in because I've decided I'm taking control of my mental health. I'm not this person might influence that negatively so therefore I've eliminated them from my life and literally eliminated them because I want to be responsible for that area of my life.

So think health, literacy, sorry, financial literacy, digital literacy, AI literacy. There's so many of these things that you can focus on and have personal leadership in.

Meg Smith (17:54)
I'm just laughing because it reminded me of that there's a New Zealand TikTok influencer called Nix and she does a great bit where it's like, I want you to eat, just like not at my table. Like I wish well for you. I wish I want you to eat, but just like way the fuck over there.

Mark Smith (18:11)
Yeah, so this is for people that have had a negative influence in her life, right? And often these are family members. These are people that are very super close to us. ⁓

Meg Smith (18:16)
Yeah, I mean, that's, and her story is one of the most incredible stories of resilience ever. And we'll link it in the show notes. It's really moving and powerful. And so you go, Hey, that is about survival. That is about mental health and wellness and, thriving. And, you know, we, I just keep coming back to the conversations that we need to have intergenerationally. I saw a,

post by Chris Huntingford, was talking about how he was, I think it was working on something with a young guy, 19 year old and observing how this guy prompted and how it was so different. was just completely out of the realms of sort of how he had come at prompting in the past. And it made me go, ⁓ my God, like I'm not even aware of how other people are prompting. So I started this conversation with ChatGPT about like,

Hey, what are the trends between Gen Z and millennial? But then I was telling Mark some of the things and he was like, what about Gen X? Like, come on. And so I did, I kind of expanded this conversation. I think it's super interesting because just as you've demonstrated in the example that you gave today, Gen Xs are more likely to look at structure. Their experience of analog to digital life has allowed this development in this experience around

workflow, things in context, the business experience, the so what does like this is the way of meaning making. And so when you come to things like prompting, you're at Gen X generally are more comfortable with a structured prompt, which is great because that's actually one of the best ways to get valuable outputs from AI. So, you know, what's the, what's the role you want it to play? What's the context of the thing you're working on? What's the output that you're working towards? You know, those things work super well.

And then with with Gen X's though, there can be a when you're first getting started, I sort of a trap that you can fall into that is to treat it like a search engine, which we've talked to before, right? And then millennials are super happy to be bringing new tools into their workflow, because they've always had to do that. It's always been part of that I related to that to my professional experience of

You know, you get a little bit of a way to learn a new tool, but there's a trap in that too, because we can then have this experience of I've had to learn, you know, Google AdWords and other Google Analytics and like all these different ⁓ software as a service UIs that you can just take what's on face value a little bit easily. And I felt personally attacked when I read this part. They are comfortable. might not, they might under invest in the what could go wrong.

or the hallucination, the guardrail side of prompting, which GenX is generally going to be better at or more inclined to consider because of their work experience. I love this tip, which I'd never heard before. It was talking about prompt pipelines. So looking at rather than, you know, we're getting quite complex prompts or one-shot prompts that give all of the context and everything in one. And then you've got multi-shot prompts, which are like, do this and then do this.

But this is a slightly different way of thinking about your prompting. So putting them into sort of three pipelines. So first look at what is your prompt to explore the idea, the concept, the research. We've been doing this in research using the researcher agent and copilot at the moment, but you can also use deep research and Gemini and in ChatTPT, but that's like the explore prompt. And then you've got your prompt to start to filter and refine.

And then another prompt or group of prompts to finalize the actual output in the format. So I really liked that prompt pipeline concept. And then for Gen Z that, we've kind of already talked a little bit about the way that they approach it, but I really liked this concept that they are way more inclined to experiment without the formality. They don't really care about the structure. They're happy to go something like.

Mark Smith (22:03)
I like it.

Meg Smith (22:17)
quickly, quick and dirty, and then know that whatever the output is, is not going to be perfect and refine again. But the big, big thing that for us with Gen Z is in our lives to influence on the use of AI is critical thinking. really, and I think that the one of the best ways to do that in a family unit or in a small team at your work or whatever your sphere of influence is, is to create opportunities that feel really safe for them.

Mark Smith (22:30)
Hmm.

Meg Smith (22:43)
to talk it out. So it gives them that practice of not just having these long conversations with AI, but actually being able to talk out those ideas and ask some of those core questions of, what biases might be here? What's the big so what of this? Do we need to get another source here? Is this a reliable source that it's drawing on? What haven't we thought of? Those are some of the things that for me, when thinking about particular people in our lives that we need to create

Mark Smith (23:02)
Yeah.

Meg Smith (23:09)
opportunity for those conversations as well.

Mark Smith (23:11)
One of the final things here is that when you've got the output, you can always ask the AI again, please tell me what assumptions you've made in getting to this point. Right? To see that if it's made any assumptions that are actually not aligned to what you're thinking, it could be worthwhile and then decepting that because it might change or influence the way that answer goes.

Meg Smith (23:33)
we had a really cool conversation this week. were quite a few people in the community talking about vibe coding and this idea of how you can use AI to teach you to code and maybe extend beyond your coding abilities if you don't have any, or you don't have a little bit. And there was a really nice balance back and forth between, you know, the pro code perspective, which pointed out that actually often the code that is generated is not production ready when you're vibe coding. And so the, kind of current state of play was

was to say it can be really great for learning and experimentation and also to be aware of risks of just going ahead and using that code in a live tool or what might that mean. So join the community if you're interested in conversation like that. We also talk about buying camper vans and doing all sorts with AI.

If you're listening to this podcast, you can watch it and see our faces over on YouTube or on Spotify. The really cool thing about Spotify, if you use it is we, can comment on specific episodes, just like you can on YouTube, but it's kind of awesome. We've seen a couple of pieces of feedback come through about particular episodes on Spotify, which we really appreciate your comments and your reviews and your feedback. So thank you very much for that.

Next week we're talking about resilience, wellbeing and lifelong learning. And that's actually going to be the sort of the last episode of our first season of the AI Advantage. We're going to, that's the 12th skill that we've looked at. And so we'll explore that together. And then we might do one more bonus episode of the season. I'm just kind of throwing this at Mark now. I think it'll be kind of cool to do an Ask Us Anything.

⁓ as our last episode of the first season, and then we're to go on hiatus cause it's going to be, it's going to be summer for us here in New Zealand, though there will be plenty of other episodes, episodes dropping on the Microsoft innovation podcast over that time. But thank you so much for being here. And, ⁓ I'm going to say it again, cause I think we need reminders. Like let's all go and touch some grass because all plant a tree or pick up a book.

Mark Smith (25:08)
Mm-hmm.

Meg Smith (25:33)
Do something with your hands that do what Mark was saying about connecting your eyes and your physical thinking at the same time. Have a wonderful week.