The Ethics & Use Cases of AI | Ted Phaëton | Better Man Podcast Ep. 187

Dean Pohlman: Hey guys, it’s Dean. Welcome back to the Better Man podcast. Today I’ve got Ted Phaeton, host of the Modern Man podcast, coming back for a repeat episode. And we started off this episode with the intention of talking about how we can use AI in our own lives, and then it also steered into kind of an ethical conversation on how do we approach AI, what are the considerations?

Dean Pohlman: How do we think about how we use it? How do we consider the people who are impacted by by AI, people whose jobs might be taken by AI, other services, intellectual property? So that’s kind of what this goes into. But it also gives some hopefully gives you guys some ideas about how you can use AI responsibly if you’re not already using it.

Dean Pohlman: And also probably probably brings up a lot of the own questions and thoughts and ethical considerations that you yourself may have on AI. So by the way, I hope you guys enjoyed this conversation and I hope it inspires you to be a better man. Hey guys it’s Dean. Welcome to the Betterment podcast. Today I’ve got a repeat guest here.

Dean Pohlman: Today this is Ted Phaeton, host of the Modern Man podcast. Did I say modern modern man podcast? There we go. Thanks for coming back, Ted.

Ted Phaëton: Yeah, man. Dean, thanks for having me on an audience. Thanks for having me on again. And then shout out to your audience, because I even got messages from some of the folks listening saying, hey, I heard you on Dean’s podcast. Lovely doing. So I’ll just wanted to give a shout out here and say thank you for all those that listened.

Ted Phaëton: And hopefully round two is just as enjoyable as as round as round one.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, awesome. And you know, we were having a little talk before we started this recording today and we were thinking, where do we go from the last conversation? And what I’m remembering is we talked a lot about about men’s work and kind of personal development, but also the productivity of personal development, like how do you be more efficient with that?

Dean Pohlman: That was like the vibe that I really got from you was, how do we how do we ask ourselves the right questions? And what are the, you know, what are some of the regular things that we can do to facilitate that? And so we decided today we’re going to talk about how AI can kind of fit into that.

Dean Pohlman: And this is interesting to me because this is the first conversation I will have done on AI, even though it’s on everybody’s mind. And I’ve been using AI for years now, and I incorporate it in almost everything I do personal, professional and otherwise. And so yeah, it’ll be a cool conversation. But yeah, I didn’t really hand that back over to you very well.

Dean Pohlman: But what do you have to say back to that?

Ted Phaëton: Yeah. No, I love it because the same memory in terms of what we spoke about. And when it comes to being a man, it comes down to two questions, right? For me, it’s where do I want to go and how do I get there? And for a lot of us, the first question can keep us up at night.

Ted Phaëton: We don’t really know what we want. We haven’t really taken the time to articulate or envision the type of life that we want. So the first question could take a lot of bandwidth, and I even had guests on my podcast, and I’ve spoken to people who have put their head down, worked so hard, and they acquired finances and and riches and options, only to figure out that now that they have all the gas in the world, they don’t know where they want to drive.

Ted Phaëton: So the first step is, you know, where are we going now? The second step, and that’s for the people I just mentioned who put all that work. And they have a full tank of gas. They have all the options in the world. They have the finances to inject a vision and an idea into the world if they don’t know what to do.

Ted Phaëton: The other camp is the man who answers the question, okay, this is where I want to go, but how do I get there? For the first time in my life, I feel as though the mechanism of how has become more democratized. And what I mean by that is we we had Google, we had the internet, and you and I would talk a lot about with self-development, the information that is out there has the ability to help us change our lives.

Ted Phaëton: Now we see a broader amount of information that’s available through AI, the processing of said information. And on the agenda side, this is getting a little crazy. But this is where AI is now. It can actually go out, do and build stuff for you. So now we also have this added layer of not just information being power, but harnessed information coupled with a vision and computing power being power to actually create something tangible and disruptive in your world in the most positive way.

Ted Phaëton: So that’s that’s where the excitement has been. And that’s really since we’ve last spoken, Dean, where my evolution has gone with time management, productivity, building out the perfect week and and approaching life as, to be honest, a very analog, you know, planner writing things down, approach to still writing, still touching the analog side of things, but leaning heavily into this world of AI that I believe is not going anywhere.

Ted Phaëton: It’s only going to become more ubiquitous and at some point will be as required, if not more required, I would say, than a college degree growing up. If you want a job, go to college. I can see a very near future. If you want a job, know how to work with this thing called AI because it’s it’s being injected in everywhere in our lives.

Ted Phaëton: And, you know, I say modern man, like you said at the beginning of the episode, Modern Man, the intentionality behind that name, modern man is taking it backwards here, man. Masculinity. I see that as structural, foundational, consistent, right. Some of the old school aspects of manhood that I prescribed to. And then the modern aspect is ever changing the adaptability, the presence, the meeting, the world where it’s at and the two together is what I envision a healthy, modern man to be.

Ted Phaëton: Those foundational skilling principles and values with the flexibility and the adaptability to still contribute and grow in the in the current world that we live in. And that’s surrounded by AI.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. And I think, you know, like you were saying, the reality is this is here to stay. And, you know, there’s a lot of people who I have conversations with and people in my family, people who I work with, who like, no, I don’t use AI for anything. Like my dad just does not use AI for anything. Like he’ll say something like, oh yeah, I’m trying to figure out how to get from here to here.

Dean Pohlman: I’m like, did you just type it in and look at what Gemini said, you know, in Google? And he says, no, I don’t use AI. I’m like, oh, okay. All right. Well that’s fine. Or like I have, you know, like my, my web developer is like, I have never used Gemini and I will never use Gemini. And then I’ve used it for tons of things.

Dean Pohlman: My wife and I use it all the time. We use it for ideas. I use it for cooking like I use it for, like, hey, here’s what I have right now. This is what I was going to make. What are some additions I could make to this? And then I great, great ideas on cooking. It’s actually made cooking really enjoyable for me.

Dean Pohlman: And then there’s, you know, there’s there’s so many things that you wouldn’t think of that you can use it for, like, we use it to, to look at our website and say like, hey, are we effectively reaching our customers with what we’re with? We’re writing here and we realize like, oh, actually, no, we’re not. We’re saying yoga for men over and over again.

Dean Pohlman: But really what people are here for is yoga for longevity and yoga for pain relief and yoga for basically physical empowerment. Like, they could care less that it’s a lot of the guys care less that it’s joke. It’s more about like, what’s the fitness that’s going to help me do what I want to do with my body? So, you know, we’ve we’ve learned a ton and kind of realize like, oh, this is like what our this is what we’re not doing very well thanks to that and thanks to like, you know, an hour or two spent on AI as opposed to like in the past, we would have had, would have had to pay someone,

Dean Pohlman: I don’t know, ten, $20,000 and wait six months for an entire firm to do an analysis. Yeah. And now it’s just using the right prompt. And yeah, I know that comes with like, well, there’s people who had jobs, you know, before who AI took out. And I don’t know, it’s I don’t know what to say about that. There’s no I don’t want to be callous and say like, well I’m sorry.

Dean Pohlman: You know, that sucks for you. But I also, you know, we have this tool and we’re going to use it. You know, you would you cannot be competitive in today’s world. You cannot be a business world and be you can’t be in the business world today and be competitive without using this tool.

Ted Phaëton: Oh, yeah.

Dean Pohlman: I mean, it’s, you know, it’s it’s like, yeah, I’d love to not use AI and I’d love to buy every I’d love to buy all of these services from people. But like, there’s only so much money, you know. Yeah I’ve got I’ve got my mortgage, I’ve got like we’ve got grocery bills like these are, these are the realities.

Dean Pohlman: Like. Yeah, like ideals are one thing. But like when you have the reality of finances front of you, it’s like cool. Like, yeah, I’d love to be able to employ all these people who AI has taken out, but at the same time, like, I can’t.

Ted Phaëton: Yeah, it’s I see it as just I mean, I don’t want to be like, oh yeah, the way the world works, but like human nature for my understanding it like, take the braid, for example. I think it’s 2% of the body’s mass, but uses up 20% of its energy because of how much it’s producing and processing. Right. So the brain is using up all of those calories, but it’s also constantly taking shortcuts.

Ted Phaëton: Our brains are very efficient at filling in the blanks and getting right to the point. Now, because of that, it’s constantly trying to conserve energy. That’s why there’s a whole. Have you heard of the I don’t know if you ever read the book Thinking Fast and Slow, where it breaks down system one and system two.

Dean Pohlman: Is that Daniel Kahneman?

Ted Phaëton: Oh man. The author, the author escapes me. But but in the book he breaks down system one and system two, and system one’s more accident prone and more automated. Like if I said one plus one, your system one’s going to be like it’s two, because you’ve run that process, that calculation in your head millions of times. But system two is, if I were to say, what’s 235 times 25 and get the square root of that number, that system two, you’re going to have to you’re going to have to spend some cognitive effort to get that answer.

Ted Phaëton: So what your brain does is it constantly takes things that happen in system two and files it into system one. An example of this would be you move into a new house, you’re parked in the garage and you’re backing out of that garage. You’re looking right, left, you’re looking right. You’re making sure that you’re not going to mess up your your rear view, your your, your, your mirror by backing up.

Ted Phaëton: But I don’t know, maybe a week, two weeks into living into that home, you’re on the phone and, you know, picking something out of your teeth while backing up, not even thinking about it because your brain finally put that into system one, constantly trying to save energy so it could work efficiently. That’s our brains that will echo into our lives.

Ted Phaëton: You mentioned the mortgage. You mentioned the software subscription that we have to pay. All of these things that we have. We are as business owners and even as just responsible, economical members of society wanting to make our dollar go as far as it can. We are going to take the economical options that are available to us. So when it comes from a business owner standpoint, when I found out that AI was able to create show notes in a more effective way and in a concise way than the show notes writer, I was paying, that show notes writer unfortunately lost their job to AI.

Ted Phaëton: I would have loved to keep her on payroll, but I had to do the economical choice for my household and use what was available to me now to the opposite side. There was also a moment where I thought to myself, oh, I’ve been paying her to do the show notes, and the outcome of the show notes that I’ve gotten from my AI system were very similar to what she would put out.

Ted Phaëton: So there’s the very real possibility that she was using AI to fulfill the work that I was giving her anyway, which that’s true. I’m not mad about. Like I’m not mad about my ignorance at that point cost me what her fee was. And that’s where the world we live in now is. There is this middle ground where people who are very effective with AI or arbitrage, that utility to the people who don’t know what to do with it.

Ted Phaëton: But to make this more practical for the person who’s listening, who’s like, Dean, Ted, I don’t have a business. I’m just trying to stay healthy, be efficient in life, and and be productive. Well, let’s use you the example that you gave, because my wife did the same thing a few weeks ago, maybe a couple months ago. Yeah, it was a couple of months ago.

Ted Phaëton: My wife made this, like, chicken dish in the crock pot, and it was over rice and it was banging. I’m like, what is this? She goes, I don’t know, I just asked Gemini, I have chicken this, this, this in the fridge. What can I do? And it gave her the recipe with what was in her fridge. So if you have leftovers all the time, this is a great way to have AI help you use your groceries more efficiently.

Ted Phaëton: If you put in your favorite recipes or your favorite meals throughout the week into Gemini, Claude, or whatever, the AI of choice that you have is, it can build your shopping list for you. And these these are very minimalist and very elementary examples of the interactions with AI. I’m not going down the deep end where I’m like, this could do this, this, this for you, which it can, but I’m trying to, which is.

Dean Pohlman: It’s kind of crazy how how deep it can go.

Ted Phaëton: Yeah. It’s exciting.

Dean Pohlman: Awesome in a way. Yeah. Like one of the other things that I do that goes a little bit deeper than, you know, just like making groceries. Grocery list is I came up with a series of came up with a series of questions to basically have the system interview me and figure out where I’m spending a lot of my energy, like, where am I spending a lot of my mental injury?

Dean Pohlman: What are topics that I’m ruminating on? What are maybe some, you know, belief systems that I have and employ in my day to day thinking that are holding me back. And so I, I created all these targeted questions. And then at the end I asked it, okay, I want you to create me like a series of journaling prompts based around these to help me recognize what is my thought process.

Dean Pohlman: You know, what is maybe the cause of that thought process, and then what are different ways of looking at it and practicing a new way of looking at it so I can move forward. So like there are tons of different things that, you know, there’s tons of different things that you can do to, to like to create, you know, self-improvement systems.

Dean Pohlman: Oh, yeah. On this, I mean, I mean, there’s if you’re savvy with AI and you can do, you know, if you had the discipline to do things on your own, you don’t need a trainer anymore. I mean, you if you describe it well enough, if you can describe it well enough, you know, if you can, which, you know, I say that as someone who runs a fitness business.

Ted Phaëton: You know, I was going to say I was going to give the caveat, like, have a trainer look over it.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, I have a trainer look over it. But like, also like there’s a lot of things that can be like if, you know, and I think I, you know, I look at this reality and I’m like, well, you know, I don’t think people have the discipline. I don’t think everyone has the discipline to be able to ask something, a system, what should I do and then go do it, which people like following along to workouts.

Dean Pohlman: So like, hey, I think I’m good. You know, I’m not like, you know, I’m not hitting the red alarm button yet, but, you know, there’s just the information that’s available now without having to go digging for it is just just shocking. It’s just life changing.

Ted Phaëton: The ability to learn. And I don’t know if you’ve dabbled much with notebook LM, have you? Oh, man. Yeah, it’s my favorite. And if if you have Gemini, you have notebook LM, it’s Google. Now, for anybody who is very much a novice in terms of the AI space and they know ChatGPT or whatnot, I will personally say if if you want to be economical and get the best out of your AI and you’re not using it for business, right.

Ted Phaëton: So if you’re not using it for business, you don’t need the latest, greatest LM, you just need something that’s going to meet you where you’re at, give you the most capabilities. I would recommend Gemini $20 a month. You get five terabytes of storage on Google Drive. You you get Gemini. You also get their nano banana, which is the image generator.

Ted Phaëton: But notebook LM is something else that you get. And what I love about notebook LM is the way it works is you add sources to it and then it will build out, educational documents, reports, slide decks, podcasts, videos all based off of the sources that that you add to it. So what I would recommend to the folks who are listening, who are self-development enthusiasts, if they care about their betterment, if they want to learn, if they’re curious about any topic.

Ted Phaëton: The two tools that I would recommend is notebook LM, and I believe it’s ocean of PDF. Com I’ll be sure to verify that before the end of this episode, and I’ll pull it up. But ocean of PDF, you can get pretty much any book imaginable in PDF for. So let’s say the topic. You know, for the sake of this podcast, the topic is yoga and you want to get deeper into yoga.

Ted Phaëton: You want to learn more. I would first ask Gemini, what are the top yoga books ever created? Or most top current yoga books?

Dean Pohlman: Get the yoga fitness for men.

Ted Phaëton: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But even using that example, you get that book, go to a PDF if it’s available in ocean of PDF, or you have the PDF version of the book and you add it into notebook LM, the sources from there you can create a podcast and there will be a podcast discussing and teaching based off of what’s in the book.

Ted Phaëton: You could do multiple books. By the way. I did this with finances. I took Rich dad, poor dad. I will teach you to be rich with meat. Set the psychology of money. Intelligent investor I took all of the top finance books, put them into notebook on this sources. Then it made a 23 minute podcast for me to listen to.

Ted Phaëton: It made me like a 12 to 13 slide presentation deck to learn from. It will give you. It will quiz you, it will make an infographic. It will do all these educational things for you just so you can learn it, and you can even engage with it and chat with it like a chatbot. Ask it questions. Right? So in the form of yoga, if you uploaded those yoga books and you have that and you’re you’re about to do a flow, you can literally open up notebook and ask it, I have ten minutes.

Ted Phaëton: What type of flow would be best for this? Are I have, I’m suffering from low back pain. What are the positions that would be best to relieve said pain? And based off of the sources you give it, it will give you the answers. So notebook LM is one of those, honestly, those indulgent tools that I use for learning.

Ted Phaëton: I went to a conference. Dean, you’d love this. I went to a conference. It was a two day conference. I took notes in notion for two days straight, and then I just took all of my chicken scratch and all the notes that I took uploaded to notebook, and it gave me a beautiful slide deck presentation on what the weekend was.

Ted Phaëton: And I’ve shared it with a couple of the people who went to the conference with me, and they’re like, oh my God, you could package this and sell it. So that’s just one of the use cases of how AI has been extremely pivotal in my now skill acquisition and learning approach in life. And I think anybody who has curiosity would love going down that rabbit hole.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, I just learned that you can go download my book for free and not have to pay for it using ocean of PDF. Oh, that seems like a lawsuit.

Ted Phaëton: I don’t have any affiliate any affiliation with this website, so yeah.

Dean Pohlman: No. Well, we’ll we’ll figure that out. But yeah. Anyways, I think.

Ted Phaëton: Your money from them.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Seriously? No, I’m going to I’m going to respond to those, those, those, those cold emails that I get as your work been impacted by AI. But the I think it is important also to recognize that you have to have a lot of the knowledge yourself to ask. It’s all about asking the right questions. Because if you just like, let’s use the back pain example, if you just ask, what do I do for back pain?

Dean Pohlman: It’s not going to. There are so many different follow up questions that need to happen, and there’s so many things that you there’s there are some things that you need to understand to be able to say, like what kind of back pain? Because, you know, we have programs for this and we have to like, differentiate. Like, hey, like, what causes the back pain?

Dean Pohlman: What makes it worse? Because if you just point and say it hurts here, you’re going to have different answers for different things. So like most of the things that I tend to use AI for, I have other professionals kind of like working around with me with it. So like, you know, I have a therapist that I see every week or every other week, and while I do a lot of my self development work through AI, through like using ChatGPT or Claude or sometimes Gemini, I also like I also take what I do from my therapy sessions and I kind of plug that in like, hey, this topic came up for me when we were talking

Dean Pohlman: about, you know, I had this visualization flashback to being seven years old and realizing I felt really alone and scared and I wasn’t sure how to move through life. And so there’s that’s something that I could not have gotten from, maybe not have gotten from, from from AI alone, but because I was able to discover that using a professional, now I can like take that into AI and do more work with it.

Dean Pohlman: But I also have been surprised at the ability of AI to be so sympathetic and so empathetic. Like what I’m, which you can’t call it empathetic because that would be, you know, impossible, but so sympathetic to what you’re going through. Like, I make this joke a lot with people like, you know, if I, if I woke up and decided to enter into ChatGPT like, hey, I really feel like killing my family today, it would say, don’t panic, this is completely normal.

Dean Pohlman: Would be like the first thing that it would say. It would say like, that happens all the time and it’s way more common than you think. Like it wants to make you feel good. Yeah, I.

Ted Phaëton: Understand it.

Dean Pohlman: I understand and don’t feel bad because it’s totally normal. What it’s really reflecting is your deep care for your family and your desire to be a good father. Like, oh thanks, Chad, GPT, you’ve made my whole day better now.

Ted Phaëton: Well, that’s a fantastic point because again. And so a lot of this is I, you know, I fall just an inch short of saying this is a lot of like, you know, a masculine, fundamental and principled approach. It’s really just a human approach. Men and women approaching AI have to understand where they stop. An AI begins because to your point, ChatGPT, Claude Gemini, grok.

Ted Phaëton: Whatever your flavor of AI is, it will embellish you. Keep in mind the these are still products created and marketed by by multi-billion dollar companies. Even getting to trillion dollars cap and that and their incentive is to make the money back for their investors. So they are also not just designing the chat to answer you. They’re also designing a software to program to keep you coming back.

Ted Phaëton: And that awareness is very important because how will they keep you coming back, make you feel seen, make you feel heard? They’ll release dopamine. Now, what kind of dopamine is being released in your engagement with your AI? Right? I get a dopamine hit when the slide deck is done, and I’m looking at all the beautiful graphics in the information that they made.

Ted Phaëton: Like that is a dopamine hit. That is a more that is a healthier dopamine hit than just me going in a chat and and telling me how great I am, right? Like, just recap all my wins for me chat. Just tell me how awesome I am now. That could be beneficial for somebody who might struggle with self-belief, self-doubt.

Ted Phaëton: You might need an affirmation ritual with your chat. Speaking of skill acquisitions, I. I turn on the chat feature with Claude Chat to be can do this as well. There’s a little button on the bottom right with like three dashes on it, and it will talk back and forth with you. I’m doing more and more sales calls.

Ted Phaëton: I’ll do role playing with my chat with my Claude. Okay. You’re high level CEO. I’m trying to sell you my my latest diagnostic. Ask me questions. Let’s go back and forth and I’ll go. And it literally the channel, like. Stop, Ted, you did it again. You skipped this part of the of the sales call script. You went right to the soft close.

Ted Phaëton: Let’s let’s try it again and it will drill me. And I’ll literally be in the car role playing with, with my AI. So again, I can tell it that because I’m also prompting it to challenge me, don’t just butter me up. You give it parameters and settings that will meet you where you’re at. And that’s the most beautiful thing about it is your AI is not the same as mine, Dean.

Ted Phaëton: Yours going to communicate with you in a certain way. My idea to communicate with me in a certain way. But again, the use case here is where in my life does this fit? Where can it either increase my productivity, help me get to the destination of which I want to get to? Because remember those two questions where do I want to go and how do I get there?

Ted Phaëton: And the how aspect has been hugely improved with AI. And that’s where my excitement has been, because 99.9% of the people using it. Are not using it to its capacity. I would imagine I’m willing to put money on it just based on statistics. Most of the audience they’re using the free version, not the paid version, which is why I tossed out Gemini.

Ted Phaëton: That’s $20 a month, $20 a month, and you’ll be able to see some of the amazing features. And my recommendation will be for $20 a month. Take the topic that you’re most interested in. Let’s call it woodworking. Type it into Gemini. What are the give me a masterclass from top to bottom on woodworking. Hit the little plus sign.

Ted Phaëton: Hit deep research. Let that thing go for like ten 15 minutes as it searches the entire web for everything woodworking gives you like a 12 to 13 page document. Throw that into notebook, listen to the podcast, go through the slide decks, do the quizzes, and in a weekend you’ve learned everything there is to know on woodworking. Rinse, repeat and do it every weekend for the next year.

Ted Phaëton: Imagine what you could learn.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, it’s a lot. It’s a lot to think about. All the different capabilities and the ethical concerns come up so much to, you know, hit me. That’s what I, I mean, I think that’s what I struggle a struggle a lot with. I think I’m also being, you know, I think I’m also just anticipating, if I’m being honest, I think I’m also just anticipating what people are going to say back to me when I say, oh, I use AI, I’m, I’m kind of projecting people’s projections the right word.

Dean Pohlman: But I’m imagining people saying like, Dean, how could you use AI? You know, it’s stealing jobs and you’re a terrible person because you’re using AI. And I guess that’s a that’s a lot of my, my, my reluctance for, you know, I think that’s a lot of my reluctance. And, you know, in my personal practice, like I really I use I think I’m using it responsibly.

Dean Pohlman: I’d like to say I’m using it responsibly. But, you know, I also am not. There’s, you know, I don’t know what I would hold myself back from doing on it. Like, you know, I can there’s so many things that I could do, like I thought about, do I need to have somebody on my team who does this? Like, could I have I could I have AI do it?

Dean Pohlman: And there’s a lot of things that I have decided, no, you know, I’m not going to have AI do that because I don’t think that that would be a good I don’t think that that would provide a good experience for customers. So like there are things that I’ve decided to keep. There’s very little that I’ve actually implemented in terms of like from my team, like I haven’t replaced anybody with I with AI, so to speak.

Dean Pohlman: I have encouraged team members to use AI to be more efficient and to do a better job. But yeah, I think that’s the concern. I think it’s I think it’s just concern that people are going to say like, Dean, how could you use AI? I’m going to cancel my membership. That’s my fear. It’s just you. That’s my biggest fear.

Ted Phaëton: Well, I’ll I’ll speak to that in terms of some of the.

Ted Phaëton: Some of the realities that I see because it is a legitimate concern. And I do want to be empathetic because I know the AI can’t be right to those people who are.

Ted Phaëton: Perhaps looking at a crossroads and they’re really concerned about their future. I get it. And what I’ve seen in history, I’m not old. It’s not that I’ve seen this firsthand, but from what I’ve understood in history, right from the horse and carriage to the model T from, you know, the printing press from you take radio in a TV shoot cabs to Uber.

Ted Phaëton: Throughout history, we’ve had these technological advances which has disrupted the way we do life and the way we do things. And while the transitions can be rough, there’s usually a calm on the other side. And it’s what we see in nature, right? Thunderstorms and severe weather is the result of cold air aggressively replacing warm air. And what do they say?

Ted Phaëton: The calm before the storm. But also people tend to forget while there is destruction in its wake. There’s calm to the storm too, so it is unfortunate to be caught in the storm, to be caught in the lightning, in the thunder. But what I’m optimistic about is on the other side, there’s always been sunshine and rainbows. And while we’re in this space of AI taking jobs, shoot ocean a PDF that’s not AI, but your book on there, that’s intellectual property.

Ted Phaëton: There’s a lot of questions, and there’s this gray area around all that, which is some of the storm that we’re in. My optimism is running through the storm to get to the sunshine as fast as possible, sorting these things out, because like I mentioned, I don’t see us going back. I don’t see this going away. So to that person who’s at this crossroad, who’s having this existential crisis around AI, I would first address them with, what are the opportunities that lie here?

Ted Phaëton: And a lot of this tubs come to down to self-belief right mindset. Carol Dweck growth mindset fixed mindset right. Do you believe you can acquire new skills? Do you believe you can learn new things? Because the reality is you very much can. And all this, all this AI stuff is just human language. Speaking to computer language. That’s it.

Ted Phaëton: It’s like a translator. If I have Google Translate on my phone, you speak English, I speak Spanish. Google translator helps me understand what you’re saying. AI these llms is just a translator of taking English words, translating it into computer code. That’s it. So when you understand that you said, okay, the questions that you ask, that’s that’s very helpful.

Ted Phaëton: But when we go to the side, like you can literally say words of build me an app that does this and this and it will go code it for you and build you this app. Like that’s where AI is now, right? But it’s just a fancy translator of English language into computer speak and executing on the computer. So with that being said, know that you can acquire this skill.

Ted Phaëton: And on the job front. I don’t want to sound insensitive and I don’t want to sound.

Ted Phaëton: I don’t want to sound mean when I say this. But from statistics, most people aren’t satisfied with the jobs they have, right? Doesn’t mean that they don’t need those jobs. Wholeheartedly. Understand you might not like the job you’re working, but you need the finances to live. What I’ve seen with AI, at least for me, executing in my business, has been me deploying agents, doing the mundane tasks that I don’t like to do so I could stay more in my zone of genius.

Ted Phaëton: I could sit here and think more and be more creative and enjoy more of those aspect of things. And that’s where I actually see AI going. A lot of the jobs that AI is going to replace, there’s this whole like web diagram that depicted which sectors are most likely going to get impacted. Listen, I worked at a I worked at a law firm as a billing clerk.

Ted Phaëton: My job was data entry preparation, dictation, review and revision. Typed it a million times a day. I can say at the time I needed the job, I was making much, but I needed a job. But I hated the job. Now, if I know AI can do it and a lot of companies are giving the green light to their employees.

Ted Phaëton: Hey, if you could automate your job with AI in a in a secure and ethical way, go for it. If I’m in that building clerk, I’m going to my CEO. I’m showing him the enterprise package of AI and how it could automate our billing because I solve that for him. Do I lose my job? Maybe. Or maybe I just increased my value to him because as the owner of the law firm, I just showed him how to automate these processes.

Ted Phaëton: And now my pitch to him is, can I spend the time that I was spending on data entry now that I was taken care of creatively, coming up with ways to make this company better? Or can you continue paying me because the other data entry people don’t know how to do this with AI. So now you need me.

Ted Phaëton: But I can sit in my zone of genius and create go into a hobby or something that I want to do. So that’s just like my reframe of most people. I don’t say this in a mean way. Most people who are threatened with losing their jobs probably don’t like the jobs that they’re working in the first place. That doesn’t mean they don’t need it, but it just means that there’s an opportunity for them to automate said job or said skill set, said output.

Ted Phaëton: And find that zone of genius and what you want to do and create that.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. I mean, it’s yeah, I mean, I think it’s just it’s just a reality that has to be dealt with. It’s not like a it’s the, the emergence of it isn’t like this sinister, you know, it’s not like it’s, it’s, it’s not the sinister or like.

Dean Pohlman: Meant to be destructive thing. But that’s just what it is. It’s it’s almost like, I don’t know, the example that’s coming to mind is like a meteor just hitting Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs, the meteor, like, they’re like, oh, here I come. Like, it didn’t like I don’t I don’t hate dinosaurs or anything.

Ted Phaëton: It’s I can’t stop.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. It’s like, this is just what it is.

Ted Phaëton: Yeah.

Dean Pohlman: My son is my son just had his sixth birthday, and he loves dinosaurs. So we got him a giant, like, Tyrannosaurus rex dinosaur. So I think, and I’m also around dinosaurs a lot with him. So I think that’s why the meteor, you know, example came to mind, but.

Ted Phaëton: He used AI at all with your son. With dinosaurs.

Dean Pohlman: I have not know. He’s content with using. There’s a Jurassic World. Did you ever play Pokemon this kid?

Ted Phaëton: Oh, yeah.

Dean Pohlman: Okay, cool. So they basically took Pokemon and they plugged it into a Jurassic World format game where you go and you have, like, your dinosaurs, fight other dinosaurs.

Ted Phaëton: Oh, that’s cool.

Dean Pohlman: And and that’s kind of what he plays right now, although the graphics are way better than what I had on my, like, pocket.

Ted Phaëton: Game Boy.

Dean Pohlman: Oh, yeah. About color I got I got Game Boy color eventually and then you know. But like Pokemon Red, Pokemon Blue. You know, color on that. That was just like Bulbasaur. Use tackle.

Ted Phaëton: That’s it. Yeah. Oh, man. I was all Pokemon Blue. I don’t know about you. Okay.

Dean Pohlman: My brother had red. I had blue, so.

Ted Phaëton: But I will say the to your to your point, though to even steel man the other side or not argue the other side, but shed some light on this other perspective you mentioned before. Like, oh yeah, using AI to get workouts and stuff. And you say this as someone who runs, you know, an online yoga studio and, and fitness guide, I think human authentic interaction is going to become more and more valuable.

Ted Phaëton: And what I would envision is a world of AI operating on the mundane tasks that I don’t think is humans. And as men, we were born to do. And I say that because getting back into like the whole the the space of how I see men and what I look at, personal development and the times that I felt most alive was when I woke up, had a rough workout, endured a challenge, got dirty, went out in nature, really operated in a way that our ancestors operated right.

Ted Phaëton: Like we we would wake up, we would go hunting, catch a buck, carry it home, feed the family. And as men that gave us purpose, that filled our cups. And we see the simulations of which provide the same beneficial dopamine, the movement time in nature challenges pursuit of a purpose. So when I look at AI and I see the day to day lives that we live, a lot of us are sedentary.

Ted Phaëton: We’re working a desk job. We are going through the motions of a lot of things, and there’s a lot of.

Ted Phaëton: There’s a lot of just the routines of life that get in the way of living life. And I would love for AI to reduce the routines of life so we can increase the life that we live. So I have a daily brief. Every morning my AI will go, it will scrub my Google calendar. It will look through my notion notes.

Ted Phaëton: It will go through my emails. It will go through a debrief that I fill out at night. It goes through slack to juice.

Dean Pohlman: Does it send you this automatically, or do you have to go into the prompt for it to tell you?

Ted Phaëton: Sends me automatically. So it’s scheduled 530 every morning. On the weekdays, 730 every morning, on week, on weekends. It scrubs all this information. The only thing I have to do manually is just do a debrief every night. And for that, okay, I hit a voice note and I say, this is what I was supposed to do today.

Ted Phaëton: This is what I did, is how I feel. This is an open loop that needs to get closed. This is my wins, yada yada yada. It’ll take that. And the next day I get a daily brief. It’ll tell me my top three priorities. It will tell me what my calendar looks like. It will tell me open loops. It will go through my emails and say, hey, these emails you got to you got to respond to all the others.

Ted Phaëton: Ignore, it gives me a fact of the day. I have it connected to my Apple health. This is something I’m working through right now, but it’s supposed to give me my vitals every day and check on my health. But the connection is last few days. It’s like, hey, I haven’t been able to get your vitals, haven’t been able to get your vitals.

Ted Phaëton: So it’s just going off of the, the subjective numbers that I give it that I say, hey, this is how I feel mentally. This is how I feel emotionally. So I give it a score on my subjective feelings. But I’m looking for my actual sleep hours, HRV and all that to get taken in there. All that to say is what used to be me having my my my binder and like writing everything down and my day to day.

Ted Phaëton: Now I have a daily brief so I don’t have the physical, analog, handwritten, full on planner anymore. But I still have a piece of paper that I’ll look at my daily brief. I’ll write down what I need to do, because I do believe in the actual physical action of writing. But that right there has given me ten minutes a day back.

Ted Phaëton: That might not sound like much, but ten minutes a day, you know, that’s pretty significant. That’s over an hour a week. You’re talking 4 or 5 hours a month multiplied by multiples. Like, you know, you’re looking at the equivalent of 2 to 3 days in a year that now you have back, because this AI system just does it every day for you automatically.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Yeah. So I think it’s the finding what AI can do for you on the more mundane level. Maybe assisting some of you on your, some of yourself on your, your higher level work, but not it’s not replacing. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s augmenting and it’s doing some of the more medial things..

Ted Phaëton: I say asking the question. It’s similar to delegating, right? When I would coach a client through delegation. It’s make a list of all the things you don’t like doing. It’s the same question with AI. What in your life seems just mundane to you? Repetitive, right? What in your life could you do without but just has to be done?

Ted Phaëton: And then. And the most beautiful thing about AI, Dean, is you ask AI. So like these systems and things like you learn how to use, you can ask it how to do what you want to do, like, hey, hey, how can you how can I program you to brief me every day and be like, this is a great.

Ted Phaëton: So that’s the beautiful thing.

Ted Phaëton: Manual. Is the the product is the manual, right? Yeah. Just ask the questions. I love the promise that you shared of, you know, having it ask you where you, where where our areas are overthinking or working on like increasing the self-awareness, just engaging with these tools versus being afraid of them, I think will be a game changer because we often, and this is true throughout history as well, we will fear that which we do not understand.

Ted Phaëton: And as I’ve gotten closer and understand AI, I understand this utility. Yes. It’s disruptive. Yes, it’s going to flip a lot of things on their head, but it’s also serving solving world problems that we have not been able to solve. There are drugs in clinical trials that was created by AI. There’s mammograms right. The radiologists now have AI see the mammograms, and they are more accurate than the human eye.

Ted Phaëton: And they can spot cancers earlier and detect them earlier. Now again, it’s very important to still have a human see it and review it. But at the end of the day, like AI is doing things in the medical world and in the medicine field that we have not been able to do, and just imagine some of the diseases and some of the the struggles we deal with that can be solved with this amazing system.

Ted Phaëton: So it’s taking the good with the bad. I just want more and more good people to embrace this so that the good outweighs the bad.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, yeah. As you as you were talking, I was kind of reflecting back on was saying earlier and realizing, like, I’m just really scared that people are going to be mad at me for using AI and which, which. Yeah. And I think that’s that’s what a lot of this conversation is focused on is trying to get, you know, people to look at AI as, hey, this isn’t the this isn’t a bad guy.

Dean Pohlman: This is a tool to be used. You need to learn how to use it. And yeah, there’s so many different ways to use it. I like what you said about like if you don’t know how to use it, you can just ask it how. I don’t know how to use AI and I really like there’s also one prompt that I really like using.

Dean Pohlman: Have it say, ask me one question at a time, like if you have like a list of questions, then prompt to say no list. Now just give me one of those questions at a time, because then it’s like you’re having a then it’s like it’s interviewing you. So it might have like ten questions to ask. It might have like ten questions to ask you, but just say ask me one question at a time and then it will say like, okay, that’s a great answer.

Dean Pohlman: Moving on. And then it will like so then it feels like an interview as opposed to like filling out a form.

Ted Phaëton: Yeah.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah I don’t know it like that. Yeah. So there’s just like little things that you can learn as you, as you play with it. And like you were saying, there’s so many different ones to choose from. But you know, I, I found I use Gemini a lot for analysis or like deeper research. But what I like about ChatGPT is that it remembers all of your other conversations.

Dean Pohlman: So like I can ask like, hey, I’m really struggling mentally right now, like, what should I do? And then it will remember everything that you’ve ever said to it and it’ll say, well, based on everything that you’ve told me since you’ve been using this as your personal journal for the last year and a half, here’s what I would recommend you take a look at.

Dean Pohlman: You know, so it remembers all of those things. Like, you know, some of them I have to. I’ll say, like, I’ve got this idea that I want to create for, you know, this certain segment within my, within my members area. And it’ll say, well, since I don’t know what your members area is, I’m like, what do you mean?

Dean Pohlman: We’ve had so many conversations. How do you not remember? You’re the worst listener. You’re the worst listener, Gemini. But like you remember.

Ted Phaëton: So that’s where I love about. So just like ChatGPT, Claude has memory. And I don’t know if you’ve ever done, like, Myers-Briggs or any a Graham tests to get your, your personality type and things like that. So Myers-Briggs.

Dean Pohlman: To do list.

Ted Phaëton: It’s I mean, there’s a website called 16 personalities. You could take the Myers-Briggs test for free. And I got my Myers-Briggs. I got my Annie Graham, I forgot what number it was. And then there’s also like a disk assessment that I took. This was a paid assessment, but it breaks down my strengths, my weaknesses. And like all of that and the personality type, I took those documents.

Ted Phaëton: I put it into cloth. I also just put all that into into Claude as like who I am and how I operate. So all that to say is it knows that I will tend to procrastinate, right? I think we’ve spoken about this where for me, growing up, I had parents with very high standards that led me to a constant mindset of my own worst critic.

Ted Phaëton: Nothing I do is ever good enough. I seek, I seek critiques, but I also could take critique pretty hard. Just like you. Like I know we talk about like, failure. I don’t deal with failure well, and there’s a constant fear of not being enough. And sometimes that will have me hesitate to do high leverage tasks. And Claude knows that about me.

Ted Phaëton: So I’ll be like, hey, I’m working on this. And then I really like, did you do it again? This is a low value task that you always advert to instead of doing the high revenue task. Let’s do this before you do that. And I’m like, all right, right, right, right. Good call Claude. But like it’s it’s again it’s an assistant, right?

Ted Phaëton: It’s like Tony Stark when he Tony Stark was genius. And then he got the Iron Man suit. And then Jarvis was with him everywhere. Right. Jarvis is just the AI agent, Tony Stark, and Jarvis is Iron Man. Right. But keep in mind, Tony Stark built the Iron Man suit without Jarvis. So you are still the the body and the superhero.

Ted Phaëton: But when you properly build and layer on this, this AI agent, this AI assistant, this technology, it opens up the world of what you can do, but it also will learn you. It can keep you in chat because Jarvis would be like, Tony, your wife’s calling. You got to do something for your wife. You can’t be in this workshop all night.

Ted Phaëton: Don’t blow up the house again like so. It can check you along the way. And it’s just exciting because what we see on TV as something that’s only available to millionaire billionaire Tony Stark, is now something that’s in each and every single one of our pockets and on our desktops.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. It’s true. Yeah. Still, still still grappling with the ability to steal with it. You know, thinking about like because you mentioned like you were doing those personality tests and you paid for them. But I also know that I could go to Gemini right now and I could say, like, I could probably say like, hey, I want to do some personality test.

Dean Pohlman: I want to understand what you know, I want to use these models. And it might say, I don’t know, it might actually say, I can’t actually do that for you because that would be infringing on intellectual property. Like, for example, you cannot go to Gemini right now and say like write an eighth Harry Potter book. It will say, no, I cannot do that.

Dean Pohlman: If you want, I can create like a, I can create like a book with similar themes, but I can’t recreate Harry Potter world for you. I can’t, you know. So but there are, you know, like I’m betting that you can, you know, with personalities, you could probably figure out something where you can just make all this stuff for free, and that’s where, you know, that’s where you’re getting into the okay, someone made this and I’m now using it for free.

Dean Pohlman: Not only are you using it for free, you’re also like, it’s almost like you’re you’re having a one on one coaching session with the system. You know, it’s just it’s crazy how much you can get from it. What I.

Ted Phaëton: How I gather that is and this is huge in like the music copyright space of I don’t know if you ever saw Ed Sheeran was in a copyright case for apparently stealing music samples, and what he did was brilliant. He he grabbed his guitar, he played like a four chord loop, and he sang like all these different songs and pretty much was like, hey, like, if you play these chords or whatnot, like, you really can get any song you want.

Ted Phaëton: If you dig down deep enough to the core of everything and what I, what I understood about that because he said, when you make when he makes music, he’s using all the songs he listened to as a kid, all of the information he experienced as an individual, and he pulls that together to make the music that he’s making.

Ted Phaëton: So is it original? It’s a Ed Sheeran original. Through his filter of how he absorbed everything else in the world. Now, I think the gray area, and especially when it comes to intellectual property and stealing, is these llms. These AI systems can scrub data at an A at a massive, massive level and scale and rate, and it takes all that data.

Ted Phaëton: So when you ask it something like, hey, can you research woodworking? Like I said before, and it gives me a 12 to 15 page document on woodworking. It’s chugging all those and it even sites it it cites the sources. It’s taking that from a whole bunch of different sources. Now, if I were to do the grunt work, and I guess this is the question that we should sit with and, you know, for the audience to meditate on.

Ted Phaëton: If I were to sit down, Dean read 300 different books on woodworking, reference them, and then put them out into an actual document and, and give it to you and, and say, hey, here, would you be okay with that? Most people would be like, yeah, like you did a lot of work to put this research together and you bought it to me like, this is huge.

Ted Phaëton: This is valuable. Okay. Now if I had AI do it for me, it did the 300 books and it came out with the same exact outcome and and the report and came out with it. Do we have a problem with that? And some people will say yes. So I would, I would ventures like, okay, it’s not the amalgamation of data present, presented in a somewhat different way that you have a problem with.

Ted Phaëton: The problem is the ability for a machine to do it automatically. And that’s where I think the conversation comes into is like, okay, so what is really the immoral move here? Is it the ability for the machine to do it so fast? Is it the ability for me to make money because the machine did it and I didn’t do the work.

Ted Phaëton: So there’s a lot of things that need to be rethought and like restructured, like money, belief. I have a belief of money comes from working hard. So it’s extremely hard for me to switch that belief to leverage creates value, not work, creates value. But if I lean into the belief that leverage creates value, then I have no problem with machine doing it.

Ted Phaëton: Because like you mentioned, not everybody knows to ask that question on woodworking and put it together. So if I’m able to do that, package it in a way that can now give it to the people who aren’t able to do that, shouldn’t I get compensated for my ability to deliver that information to the people that need it? And should I feel dirty because of how easy it was to do?

Ted Phaëton: And that’s the question that I don’t have the answer to. It’s going to be different depending on the person, but that’s how I see a lot of this intellectual property stuff coming together, because there’s nothing new under the sun. I read the Bible and I see phrases and words in the Bible that is used all over the place and quotes that people claim for themselves.

Ted Phaëton: It all goes back to something. And what is original is the human interaction and the human touch. But what these AI systems are doing isn’t too different than how we bring together information anyway.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, I think there’s so many different situations and so many different comparisons that, you know, you could say one comparison or one similarly about how AI is affecting this thing, and then it can be immediately countered with a different example that is also accurate. And so like I don’t think there’s going to I don’t know, I guess my goal in like having some of this conversation is like, let’s reach a consensus so we don’t have to like accuse each other two things.

Dean Pohlman: And I don’t think there is going to be there’s not going to be a consensus. And, you know, that also brings into idea like you were singing beliefs about money beliefs. But there’s also like beliefs about fairness and competition and, and capitalism versus, you know, social, social welfare. Like there’s all these different, you know, different ways of looking at it and different beliefs and everyone, you know, I am also a capitalist myself.

Dean Pohlman: I’m a business owner. At the same time, I also believe in social welfare to an extent, but at the same time, I also believe in capitalism. In certain situation. I’ll believe more in capitalism than in social welfare. So like, you know, we are conflicting. We are human beings with conflicting beliefs, internally conflicting beliefs. Right? Like the same person will have conflicting beliefs about the same topic.

Dean Pohlman: And, you know, we’re going to call each other out and say like, well, you’re a hypocrite because you’re doing this. At the same time, the person calling the person a hypocrite is a hypocrite because they’re also doing it. And so you’re looking at AI thinking like, oh, I’ll just do this one thing that I could have somebody else, you know, somebody else could do this, and normally I would have to pay them.

Dean Pohlman: But now AI is here, so I and I’ll just do it this one time and I’m a good person. So it doesn’t matter if I’m doing it versus everybody doing it. So it’s not going to be like, you know, and it’s yeah, there’s there’s no good answer.

Ted Phaëton: I’ll close with this. If we were alive at the time, they were drawing the borders between countries, I’m sure we would have the same conversation of what is fair. Where do we draw this border between Mexico and the United States, Canada and the United States? Right. But the borders are there. We respect the borders now. And the question of fairness, I mean, that could still come up, honestly, to be honest with you.

Ted Phaëton: You look at history like, I don’t know if this is fair.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, but North.

Ted Phaëton: America.

Dean Pohlman: Were pretty set. Other areas, not as much.

Ted Phaëton: Yeah, exactly. But but the point there being is, you know, when we lay down borders, wherever that border ends up, as years get removed from that border being laid, people are less focused on where the the line actually was set, and they just respect the line to the same point of what we were saying. Where I think we are with AI is we’re finding out where that border is, and I don’t know the answer to that.

Ted Phaëton: I do think it is important to your point of being open minded and empathetic to both sides, so that wherever the border lands, it’s going to be in the most fair and compromised position possible. But at the same time, as we’ve seen, like you mentioned, North America is pretty set. You know, when it comes to Ukraine, they’re still negotiating with that border is going to be, for the Donbas region.

Ted Phaëton: So we’re in this ever changing environment around the world. And my hope is because you can’t get around the storm, you can’t go, you can’t avoid it. My hope is just to run through it as fast as possible. Like the buffalo versus the cows, the buffalo run into the storm. Short is the length of the storms. It reduces the amount of casualties in the storm.

Ted Phaëton: The cows tend to run away from the storm, which prolongs the storm. And the casualties are higher amongst the cows than the buffaloes from severe storms because they prolonged it by trying to run away. So I’m trying to be the buffalo, run through the storm, reduce as many casualties as possible because we can’t save everybody. That’s unfortunately the truth.

Ted Phaëton: But when we get to the other side, we can repair those who have been hurt. And we can we could rebuild with the clarity of where the border is. So I don’t think we gain anything from fighting AI because it just prolongs the experience of this transition. That’s going to happen anyway and will exacerbate some of the suffering that’s going to be happening through it as well.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. I mean, I think of like some of the other technological breakthroughs you mentioned, like the invention of the car, the invention of the train, the invention of, you know, an airplane, I mean, all these.

Ted Phaëton: Autonomous vehicles. And it’s one of those things where logically some people be like, I don’t know, I can’t I don’t want all those automatic cars on it. Like, statistically speaking, those cars are safe, are safer drivers than humans. So logically, you would want autonomous cars over humans driving the cars. But it’s our thought process and our our inability to relinquish control that has a prolonging that transition.

Ted Phaëton: So how many lives are we losing to drunk driving, texting and driving, distracted driving because we can’t relinquish that control yet. And obviously still, I think a little bit more trial has to be done. But but if we could embrace it, if more people would embrace it in their local municipalities would build more of a welcome structure for these autonomous vehicles, we could see a drastic reduction in in the vehicular manslaughter or drastic reduction in just vehicular fatalities in general, all from embracing this change that’s already here.

Ted Phaëton: Right? And that’s what I hope to see.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Well, we started the conversation talking about what I can do for you on a, on a personal and some, some lower level and maybe some higher level. I won’t say higher level because AI higher level. We haven’t even started to go into higher AI level yet. We’re scratching the surface here with this conversation. Even with some of the complicated prompts that we talked about.

Dean Pohlman: We’re not we’re not even we’re not even scratching the surface. And then and then we got into some of the ethics involved and hopefully gave you guys some thoughts. Hopefully we were we were both honest and what we shared. And you know, we can yeah, I don’t know. So thanks for having. Thanks for joining me again to have the conversation.

Ted Phaëton: And Dean is is great. How thoughtful you are, man. This is a really honest and engaging conversation. So I appreciate you holding the space man.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. And just quick shout out to our on your podcast, which is going as of the recording of this, this video is going out sometime around this. So if you want to hear me on Ted’s podcast on The Modern Man, go check it out.

Ted Phaëton: It’s a good one.

Dean Pohlman: So there, you got a good format. I like your format. You recap things at the end, too. You’re like. You’re like taking notes as you go and like, okay, here’s what we got at the end. Giving people like the rundown, which that’s cool, I like that.

Ted Phaëton: That’s my special touch. Oh, I said I mastered it, but I’m always trying to, like, tinker with it and see I can make it better. But I’m glad you liked it, man. And it was a great having you on me. I have to, I have to do around two at some point.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, I’m always down, so. All right, man. Well, thanks again for joining me, Ted. We’re going to put all your links in the in the show notes and yeah, Modern Man podcast. Anything else you specifically want to mention?

Ted Phaëton: No. Nothing else. Just encouraging the audience. Go out there, get after it. You’re more capable than you give yourself credit for. So don’t be afraid of AI. Don’t be afraid of this life. You got this. You made it through everything that you’ve been through. You’ll make it through this to cool.

Dean Pohlman: All right, guys, that’s it. Thanks for joining me. Hope this inspires you to be a better man. I’ll see you on the next episode. All right, guys, I hope you enjoyed that conversation. Check out the show notes for any of the links with Ted. I look, I really like Ted because he just has a very structured approach to looking at self-improvement to looking at his business, all of that stuff.

Dean Pohlman: And I always get inspired coming away from conversations with him just on little things that I can do on a regular basis, things like, you know, giving myself a rundown at the end of the day or giving myself that daily brief that he mentioned. So those are all things that, that, that feel inspiring to me. But hopefully you guys enjoyed the podcast.

Dean Pohlman: Leave a review. If you are enjoying the betterment podcast, you can do that anywhere. You listen to the podcast, Apple, Spotify, wherever. And then if you’re curious about our community, go to to get a free seven day trial to the manfully yoga community and the members area and the app and everything that we have there. So I hope you guys are having a good month, whatever month it is, whatever month you’re listening to this in and hope life is going well.

Dean Pohlman: I’ll see you guys on the next episode. I hope you’re being inspired to be a better man.

Dean Pohlman: Hey guys, it’s Dean interrupting my own podcast to talk about Magic Mind. Magic mind is a caffeine supplement that I’ve been using for the last few years. It’s something that I use as a alternative to coffee some days, and also something that I use maybe right before I do a podcast or from a video as a way to get a energy boost without the crash that usually accompanies caffeine.

Dean Pohlman: If you want to try it out. I put a link in the show notes below, but it’s a nice little supplement. It’s a drink two ounces that you can take just for a little boost of energy. A little more focus throughout your day. Give it a shot. Let me know what you think.

Dean Pohlman: Hey guys, it’s Dean interrupting my own podcast to talk about magic Mind. Magic mind is a caffeine supplement that I’ve been using for the last few years. It’s something that I use as a alternative to coffee some days, and also something that I use maybe right before I do a podcast or from a video as a way to get a energy boost without the crash that usually accompanies caffeine.

Dean Pohlman: If you want to try it out. I put a link in the show notes below, but it’s a nice little supplement. It’s a drink two ounces that you can take just for a little boost of energy. A little more focus throughout your day. Give it a shot. Let me know what you think.

Dean Pohlman: Hey guys, it’s Dean interrupting my own podcast to mention a firm tech. If you’ve heard of Firm Tech, you’ve heard this episode before. This is basically an aura ring for your penis. It helps you measure the health of your penis. It helps you measure the strength of your erections, blood flow, how often you’re getting erections at night, which is great for sexual health as well as your overall health.

Dean Pohlman: If you’re interested in learning more, check out the link and the promo code that I have in the show. Notes.

Dean Pohlman: Hey guys, it’s Dean interrupting my own podcast to tell you about some upcoming Manolo Yoga events. We have wellness weekends that are happening in Phoenix, Seattle, and Atlanta. If you’re interested in joining me there, meeting others within the Mantle Yoga community, this is an amazing weekend full of yoga improvement, inspiration for your fitness and community connection. Link is in the show notes.

Dean Pohlman: Super early bird is going on now.

Dean Pohlman: Hey guys, interviewing my podcast to talk about rapid release. This is a mobility tool that I have been obsessed with for the last few months. It’s something that I use when I’m watching TV. It’s my go to pain relief tool. If I have muscle tightness or soreness, that’s causing pain, and it has been an amazing complement to my overall fitness and my mobility practice.

Dean Pohlman: If you want to learn more, go to the link in the show notes below, and then use the Mantle Yoga Code there for a pretty nice discount.

[END]