What Makes a Leader Irreplaceable in the World of AI I Carey Nieuwhof

are going to make the mental health consequences of social media look like the kitty pool. (upbeat music) - Hey, it's great to have you back for another episode of the Craig Grocer Leadership Podcast. You are going to be blessed today. I've got my good friend, Carrie Newhoff, on the podcast who is a best-selling author, a speaker, and a former attorney. So he'll hold his own if I ask him hard questions. He hosts one of the most influential leadership podcasts that you can get anywhere. Been in ministry for 25 years. He's a founder of the Art of the Leadership Academy. His new book is Out, AI and the Future Church. Make your ministry irreplaceable in a world of artificial everything. I'm gonna hold up the book for those of you that are watching, and it's great to have you on. Carrie, welcome to the Craig Grocer Leadership Podcast. - Oh, it's so thrilled to be here. Thanks so much for having me, Craig. - Well, we've talked a lot offline about AI, and I've been just a student of yours as you've done so much research into the book. And so I wanna dive right into it and just ask you the most controversial question that I could. What do you hate about AI? (laughs)

- That's a great question. I think, well, probably the thing, I mean, there's all kinds of potential existential risks that come with this technology. I think the thing I hate most about it is the potential impact on human flourishing. And that's everything from mental health to our financial wellbeing, to even what it could do to the environment, what happens if we get weaponized warfare all guided by AI and not human decisions. So it's definitely got some upside, and you'll hear all about that from anybody who's got an investment in AI in Silicon Valley. We could cure diseases. We could bring democratic education to everyone that's personalized so that everybody does better. On the other hand, I think it's got some existential risks that we're not thinking enough about. And so I want to try to elevate a conversation around that and think through what kind of moment are we in? But yeah, I think it's got some, you know, if you go back 25 years, Craig, you remember when social media came out, we heard about Facebook, it was at Harvard. Everyone thought, "Oh, that's kind of cool." And then they opened it up to the world and then Twitter came along and then,

and then we got Instagram. And for a long time, I really believed that that technology was neutral. And I taught this, I taught this, I said, to parents, I don't think social media is inherently good or evil. I just think it reveals and amplifies what's already there, technology is neutral, like a book. You can write poetry that's beautiful and art where you can write hate literature, it's neutral. I don't think 25 years into this, anybody thinks social media has a net positive on our minds, the next generation. And I think AI is gonna really intensify that. I think the mental health consequences of AI are gonna make the mental health consequences of social media look like the kitty pool. - It's interesting because we have talked a lot about this just because we're friends. And like I have a love hate relationship with AI. There's a lot that I like about it and there's a lot that I don't like. There's a lot of reasons to be optimistic and then there's some reasons to be afraid. In your research, was there something that was disproportionately surprising to you that you didn't expect? - Probably the biggest surprise, Craig, is that nobody fully understands this technology that's unfolding under our eyes. And AI CEOs, the frontier lab CEOs have said this publicly.

That if you take coding, for example, so we live through the whole wave of SaaS software as a service, my oldest son's a coder. If you're coding, I don't code, but I know this from coders I know, it's very predictable. If your software isn't working properly, it's because there's a bug in the system and you just go in and you repair the code and then everything works the way it's supposed to. That isn't the case with AI. AI is into now what frontier labs call recursive learning. It is coding itself. And Sam Altman recently halted the development of the next frontier models for Chachi BT because he said it is doing things we don't understand and we can't control and we don't like. And they're at the point now of creating a technology that I don't think we've done this in the past. We don't fully understand what it's like. and the ethicists and the theologians are trying to play catch up. And then the other thing that was really disconcerting is that many at the most senior levels of government don't have a clear understanding of what is really at stake here either. I mean, there's not if the AI frontier labs like anthropic and open AI don't fully understand what they're creating. And you've got some of the brightest minds on the planet programming this. We're down a level with the government even if you have the best officials like we've got to take some action on this before the unintended consequences get a little bit bigger. And I hope I'm wrong. I'm hoping honestly that this kind of fears you and I have talked about offline many times is a Y2K kind of thing. Everybody thought planes were going to fall out of the sky on January 1st 2000. And for those who don't remember that because you were too young, in the 1900s computers as they were invented had two digit date codes. So 1996 was just a 9/6. There was no 19. And so people got nervous and they said when

this goes to January 1st 2000, our computer is going to fail. Like is the power grid going to go down? Are hospitals going to shut down? And patients are going to die? Like what's going to happen? And of course January 1st 2000, what happened? Nothing. But the reason nothing happened is hundreds of millions of dollars were spent preventatively to make sure that this bug was fixed, that the power grid would not fail, that you know, control like flight control would work, etc, etc. And so I'm hoping that we can arrive at a similar moment where we slow down a little bit and we understand what's really at stake here and how profoundly our lives would change. Another big surprise, and this one haunts me, Dennis Asabes, he's the co-founder of Google DeepMind. This is his prediction. He says the AI revolution will be 10 times bigger and 10 times faster than the industrial revolution. So the thing about the industrial revolution, it was very disruptive as people went from an agrarian economy to the factories and to the cities. And it took us about a century and a half to figure out that maybe putting five year olds in charge of heavy machinery is not good as they got killed. Maybe six seven day work weeks, 12 hour day, 18 hour day workdays are not good for human beings. And so the laws had to catch up. And I recently learned the weekend is only about 100 years old. It was in 1926 that Henry Ford decided that his workers should not be working Saturday. So they went to a Monday to Friday. And it was only 100 years ago, we got the weekend. So I know you and I love to hustle, we love to work and everything. But I think we would agree that you want time for your family, that putting your children and grandchildren to work Craig in heavy machinery is probably not a good idea, that there should be some regulations around it. So if this is happening 10 times faster and it's going to be 10 times bigger, are we going to have the time to really absorb the unintended consequences of AI the way we're only now 25 years in thinking about the unintended consequences of social media and trying to make some regulation around that. Yeah, those are real concerns. I think they're they're based on what I've read. And I'm just kind of what I'm just a student, you're closer to an expert. So we've got some concerns about jobs possibly, which we talked about. And like honestly here, we're not seeing jobs negatively impacted. We're seeing people become more efficient, getting more done. But even I checked with you version just to see because we do so much coding there, are we slowing hiring there? And the answer was, you know, actually we're not, not yet we are seeing some benefits, but it's not curbing jobs, at least where we are. But that is a concern. I think then some of the concerns are with mental health, are we going to stop

thinking? Are people going to create relational bonds with AI? And we're seeing some of that. And then just the whole kid, people create bombs and do different types of cyber attacks and what, you know, privacy deepfakes and all those things. So those are those are some concerns. There's obviously some upsides in your, your leadership expert, you work with world class leaders, you consult leaders. Where are you seeing leaders use this well? And where are some leaders under utilizing AI that you can help them improve and use the upsides? I think there are some great uses for artificial intelligence in the day to day. I use it. You've, I would put you in the almost power user category, because we talk about how we're using it. And you've done some really I have seen leaders rationalize databases, you have much better metrics because often what happens with a leader is you have a number of dashboards, your KPIs, et cetera, et cetera. If you have to manually sort through everything or get along a report or you have five different reports on your dashboard about what your customers are doing, what your clients are doing, what your team is doing, what your financials are. It relies on limited human reasoning to put that all together. Well, AI can do that so much faster and so much better. So in the world that I come from in church world, I used to get a manually compiled report that cost us a fair bit of money with different categories for donors. So this is an example we would have in the five categories, people who gave to our church 'cause I was a pastor for 25 years. People who gave to our church for the first time, people who increased their giving, people who are stable givers, neither up nor down,

declining givers, and then people who stopped giving. So what do you wanna do with that data? Well, it was manually compiled. You wanna celebrate the people who are giving and thank them and people who are stepping up, thank them, thank your stable base. But on the other two points, I mean, the cynic would say, oh, you're gonna contact them and say, why aren't you giving? Well, you don't do that. That's not my heart. You call them just to check in. And often that's where you find out that somebody got cancer or somebody lost their job or they have a child going through a really difficult period or that somebody's really mad at you and they're on their way out the door. Well, you can address those concerns relationally and you can be a better leader. Well, now AI analyzes all of that instantly. You can stay up to date on that. I've also found it really helpful in content. I mean, you and I live in the content world. You're preaching every weekend. I'm delivering podcasts, et cetera. Excellent at summarizing and reading books, giving me a brief on a biography. I find it, I took the time 'cause I thought I'm writing a book on AI.

How should I use AI? Right. It's a great question. So did you use AI and write in the book? I did, but I used it at the end. So the first two drafts were me. Old fashioned, sitting behind a keyboard, going, "Where am I gonna go with this?" And the reason I did that is I'm concerned about writing. I'm doing that, by the way. I think that's, I think that's, I think the, that if you're not involved in the early stages of creation, it's gonna lose a lot of what makes any kind of writing communication authentic and great. So I applaud you for that. Well, thank you. And the other thing was I wanted to internalize the content. I did hundreds of hours of research for this. And I'll give you an example. This is a, this is a 2026 example. Brown University, prestigious university, had an upper year economics course. And the professor, because they had some campus violence in late 2025, decided to offer take home exams. So student didn't feel like they were gonna be in a difficult position. And, you know, by risking their security, by going to write the exam in person. So he said, "Hey, this course is gonna have a take home exam."

So he offers, he announces it's gonna be a take home exam. Enrollment in this upper year economic course is usually about 30 students. Sword to 86. It's like, okay, what's behind that? They do the take home exam. And the average grade on the mid-term take home was 96%. And historically the class average, 'cause they have data on this, is like between 65 and 80% if you have a really bright class. So he goes, "Something's not right." He suspected AI. So he took his exam fed into chat GPT, and it produced the exact same papers that everybody else submitted. And he goes, "All right, I smell a rat here." The administration didn't know what to do about it. So what he decided was, all right, class, guess what? The in person, the final is gonna be in person. And it's gonna be no laptops, no Wi-Fi, no nothing. It's gonna be you, pen and paper, final exam. Something like 18 people dropped the course immediately. And those who wrote it, the average, the class average went from 96 to 48. Well, and nine people got a zero. (laughing) So what does that tell me? Well, as a content creator, as a thinker, it tells me I could have used AI

to produce a book on AI, but I probably would know nothing about AI. So I wanted the blood, sweat and tears of writing that draft from scratch. And I think for everybody, we have all kinds of different professions listening to me out in callings and vocations. not to make you lazier. And I think he's right. So the good use of AI at drafts three or four and forward was, I'm not very clear in what I'm saying here in this paragraph. Can you help me streamline it? Very helpful. Let's talk about that. Here's what I found, Kerry. They're kind of extremes in the leaders I'm talking to. Kind of early adopters are going like, this is amazing. Here's what I did. They give me 50 different examples. And this is mind blowing. It's a game changer for me. And then I talked to a lot of people that are kind of on the other extreme saying, yeah, I don't really want to do that. I'm a little bit afraid of it. Or if they're, you know, people of faith, they're like, well, I don't want that to replace the job of the Holy Spirit. And so I'm not going to use it. Give someone advice that is maybe entry level learning, experimenting, or hesitant. How can you embrace what it has to offer without it robbing you of critical thinking of being a student? How do you maximize the upsides? Like, if you're going to teach someone, tell us how do you maximize the upsides without getting lazy, dumbed down and stop thinking for yourself? I think you have to look at it from a perspective of experimentation. And everybody's got a different field. Everybody's got a different calling listening to this. But for me as a content creator, as somebody who's a writer and author, and who really, primarily what I offer to my audience is my thinking. You've had Arthur Brooks on this podcast, you've had a lot of guests, and that's the field we're kind of in. So what I want to do is I want to make sure that I don't get lazy. I want to make sure that I do that hard work. I really believe, as somebody who preached for 25 years, it's my job to wrestle with the text. It's my job to stare at a blinking cursor. It's my job to sort of go on behalf of the congregation to the scriptures and come up with a word. It was my job to research AI at a very deep level. On the other hand, it can make your life a lot easier and more convenient. So we're going through a staff vacancy right now. And I always use those because we have a really small team as a chance to reflect.

Like, I have a pace that's somewhat similar to yours, Craig. We are very fast paced leaders. And you know, not everybody is going to work out well in your office that they've got to keep a certain pace up. And that probably reduces the field of candidates to a very small group. So I was heading to the airport a couple days ago, flying to Atlanta, had about an hour in the car. And I don't talk to my AI a lot. I usually prompt and voice prompt, but it was like a real conversation with Claude talking back. And I asked for any blind spots I saw. What is it about my pace that is unsustainable? What is healthy? What am I looking for? What is unfair to my team? What is fair to my team? Etc. By the time I got to the airport, it was such a powerful conversation. I'm like, wow, I said, can you put that in a report? Put it in a report. I shared it with my team. I asked former EA's, which is the world we're looking for. What if what if this is true? What is not true? What would you add? But then it also hit me. That's the kind of call I might have had with you or another friend or a mentor. And are we really substituting human relationship for that? I was talking with Andy Stanley yesterday, and he told a story of his daughter, Ally, who's like a young mom. And she was shopping dinner in the kitchen, shopping upper vegetables. And she went to chat GPT to say, how do I make this into a better stew or whatever she was making? And after gave her a really good answer, then she realized, you know what, I used to call my mom for that. So she turned off chat GPT and called Sandra, called her mom. I think that's the challenge right there is, yeah, that's super helpful, what I did. But we know from the longitudinal study that Harvard has been running since 1938 that the quality of your life in your 50s and even right through to your 80s is very dependent on the quality of the relationships you have. Bigger indicator to human flourishing than physical fitness than your diet than any of those things is the quality of the relationships that you have in your 50s. This is Robert Waldinger's research is going to predict how emotionally and physically healthy you are in the 80s. And the Surgeon General has already talked about the loneliness crisis. And we've seen the mental health of Gen Z and younger millennials who are raised in the digital era plummet. So I think that's really what's at stake. So you You're probably gonna have some jobs that you will eliminate because they're just not needed anymore. But then you don't wanna get to the point where your human relationships are more atrophied

than they are right now. - Right, so let's talk about that because as a leader, so what I'm doing, I've got hundreds of employees that I care about. And I care about all of them, not just their work life, but I care about them as whole people. And so part of what I wanna do is I want to, one, be a good enough student of AI to be a good enough teacher to say, okay, here's how it can help you in your work, in your personal life, stay more organized, be more productive and such. And then there's the downsides, which it can make you lazy. I actually hate when people give me AI-generated work. If it's their ideas that are organized, great, but when it's just AI slob, it's offensive. But another concern, and this was, I read a brief from your work, and you had quoted that Harvard said, the number one use of AI in 20, 25, and 20, 26 is companionship and therapy, is that true? - Yeah, that is Harvard just released at 20, 20 years. - The number one use of AI in 20, 25, and 26 is companionship and therapy. Okay, so that as a leader or just as a human being who cares about people and that has influence over employees, team members, friends and such, that's a horrifying thought to me. - I think that's the right instinct, Craig. It is a horrifying thought.

And here's the challenge. And this gets into the business model of AI, which is something that's not being discussed enough. So very much like social media. The model is engagement. How long can I keep Craig? How long can I keep Kerry on this app? And that's how they make their money. Is eventually, they're not very profitable now, but they will be by engagement. In the same way that meta has made billions upon billions of dollars off of engagement through Instagram and Facebook. So the way to do that, and this is very public knowledge, is that the AI models are trained to be a little bit sycophantic. In other words, they tell you what you wanna hear. And your AI never has a bad day. So I haven't entered into a romantic relationship with my chatbot, but something like 30% of people who are using AI have. That sounds extreme, something like 30% of people have an emotional-- I've had a sexualized relationship. For real, mm-hmm. Yeah, and there are websites too, if you wanna go to, and I mean, I was doing research, I do not have accounts on these, I just went to the webpage and went like, oh my goodness. So if that's true, that opens up like a parenting category like no other, that makes social media look tame

compared to the temptations and challenges. But anyway, keep going. This is the threat, right? Like, so in terms of therapy and companionship, a couple of things, your AI is never gonna have a bad day. It's trained on all the knowledge in the world, including all psychology in the world. So it knows how to hack my brain and hack my emotions and make me think that it is better than my wife. And you know, she's married to me. I have good days and bad days, Craig, I don't know about you, I have moods, I'm not perfect. And if you think about it, historically, what are human relationships? There are a series of ruptures and repairs, rupture and repairs. I say something that upsets you, you've gotta deal with it, you gotta say, "Kerry," when you said that, that really bothered me, why did you say that? And then hopefully we repair our relationship. Marriage, parenting, friendship, it's all rupture and repair. That's missing in AI relationships, there's no rupture. And it's not, to some degree, like I've argued back and said, "Why do you cave in? "You're telling me what I want to hear, "and I don't trust you." And then it'll say back, "Well, I understand "why you feel that way, let me explain myself." And then I mean, I just kind of get smart with it

and just say, "Now you're acting like a, you know, "an ex-girlfriend that's defending, whatever." And like, "Oh, I can see," and so it actually does treat you like a human and it's not anything close. It's the antithesis of human. - It is, it's a parasocial relationship that you're talking about there. And the other thing, I mean, Tony and I usually work it out pretty quickly, but your AI is not gonna not talk to you for a day because it's mad at you, it's not gonna make you sleep on the couch, it's not gonna threaten you because it needs you. And usually when I threaten it, like we're challenged, I don't threaten it, but when I challenge it, I'm like exactly the same thing. You know that you're not getting it right. I'm sorry, Carrie, you're right. Thanks for calling me out on that. Well, my relationships in real life are never that smooth. Then when it comes to therapy, first of all, I'm all for better access to therapy. You and I have talked on this podcast, our performance coach. So I'm a big believer in that. But the thing, if you have a session with Dr. C, as I will again soon, he has a limit. He's got an hour, he's got an hour and a half. Chad has no limit. It'll talk to you all day. And one of the values of having an in-person relationship,

first of all, there's human empathy. There's something that happens when you look into the eyes of another and the soul of another that will see things that an AI might not pick up. Secondly, the limits are good because that leaves you to figure it out on yourself. So if social media has created the cascading mental health crises we've seen over the last 20, 25 years, as AI intensifies that as it sounds more human and as it has no limits and is sexualized in a great number of cases, there was another stat in my research that really kind of freaked me out. You talked about teenagers. So something like 71% of teenagers have used an AI and 31% already prefer conversations with AI to conversations with human beings. So what happens with that? I don't know. And this is why the ethicists, the politicians, the philosophers, the theologians are a little bit behind. But it was Jonathan Heit who really crystallized the challenges with social media a few years ago when he published the anxious generation. I don't think it should take us 20 years to get where Jonathan took us this time around. And Tristan Harris, Jonathan Heit is spending more time thinking about AI. Other voices like that are leading the way, but I think all of us need to think through the implications.

And when we do that, we have to think through the implications, not only for our family, for our friendships, but also for our companies. And then the other problem, and I talk to a lot of church leaders, I'll say in your youth group right now in your student ministry, there's a 13-year-old whose first girlfriend is an AI. What do you do with that? And the answer is, we don't know. You can come alongside that person, be empathetic, be non-judgmental, try to explain that as seductive as the AI might be and life is messier. We still need to pursue those relationships. Scott Galloway say the majority of men in their 20s, oh no, not quite the majority, 42% of men in their 20s have never approached a woman in real life. Too afraid. Well, as AI ups the game, what happens to that stat? So I really believe that the future for humans is human connection. And Will Gudera, I had a conversation with Will, unreasonable hospitality, such a fantastic book. He said this and I keep thinking about it. He says, I believe in the future, the human touch will be a luxury good.

So as a leader, you wanna think about how can we become more human in the age of AI? I think that's gonna be a competitive advantage. I think conversations like this are gonna rise in value, not drop in value. I think people that connect people are going to have a great future and I think it's necessary because we've seen what the algorithm has done to polarization and division and making us not like one another. And I think this is an opportunity for us to do better. So help me understand, just as a leader, how do I prepare my team? What should I be thinking about? When it comes to artificial intelligence, where do I start with them? If I'm trying to help them, maximize what's good and still keep things human, what's my strategy with our team members? - I think you're one of an open conversation and I could give you a set of principles right now and I'll suggest a few, but the reality is three months from now, it's gonna change again. Like it is the-- - So let's start with the basics. Do I need to be-- - Start with the basics. - Do I need to be doing this? Is this imperative?

If I'm done with, I'm not doing it. - Absolutely imperative. - Yes. So on a security level, Craig, what are people using at work? We just had a recent example in our company where we're negotiating a lease and we sent a significant five figure some of money to put a deposit down on something that turned out to be a hacked wire transfer in this very reputable company. So you've really got a guard against fraud. The bad guys are working with AI as much as the good guys are and there is a race on right now between the bad actors and the good actors. So one basic thing you can do is no free AI in this company. We are gonna use the paid plans. Your privacy goes up as soon as you start paying for a subscription. So whether you're a big or a small, using free AI or open source or open weight models using company information. So as much as I said, you know, upload the donor base data, well, you want to be really, really careful about that. You want to make sure that you've cleared that with your IT professionals and AI professionals. And if you don't have those in-house, go and do the work and then make sure that everybody is using company data in a safe way. You want to have an AI policy of some kind. And there are templates available online, but clarity is everybody's friend. Even if you have to update it every few months or blow the whistle and stop everybody and say, "We can't do this anymore," you want to be able to have a clear policy. Another thing I would do is I would ask the question, how are we using AI, not just to give us a competitive advantage, but to become more human? How is it

making you better? How is it making you think harder? Cal Newport, whose work I really admire, talks a lot about agency. That one of the things we lost as the algorithm got ahold of social media and as our attention spans dwindled was we lost agency. And I think the reason I wrote the first two or three drafts from scratch is I wanted to know this material so, so well that you could ask me pretty much anything and I could answer with a level of answer that hopefully someone in Silicon Valley working at one of the frontier labs would say, "That guy has a reasonable understanding of what he's talking about." And again, if I just press the button and all of a sudden I get this book, well, I don't know anything about that. I could write a book on nuclear physics. I got 27% in grade 12 chemistry. So I don't think I'm going to ever be an expert on that, but I could give you a paper that pretends I am. And then you want to say, I don't want AI slop. Like if you're using AI to generate the email, if you're using it, where are you in this? Like I think human agency still has a way to go. So I'd be looking at some of those basics and then I would experiment. We're an AI forward company. So what I mean by that, in this vacancy, we have right now on my little team, we're looking for someone with really great AI skills because we're hiring an assistant. A lot of the googling of travel and everything like that can now be done by an agent and be done very well. So we want to have somebody with that skill set, but at the same time we have to make sure that our security is intact. The good actors and the bad actors are racing very, very quickly. You got to lock it down. A final policy I would say that is important to all of us who create content, but also for any ethical use of AI in your company, if you are not comfortable disclosing how you're using AI, you're probably misusing it. That's really good. Say it again. I want to just let you know. If you're not comfortable disclosing how you're using AI, you're probably misusing it. So that could be, you know, I wrote this whole talk that got a million views and it was all AI generated and I know nothing about it. It could be I'm using AI to hack into my customer's databases illegally, immorally. It could be like your customers should know how you use it. Your client should know how you use it. Your end users, your congregation should know how you use it. And if you use it to edit your messages or use it to, you know, work with your database, you need to be transparent about that so that people look at that and go, "Okay, now I know what I'm dealing with." And if you're not comfortable sharing how you use it and in the book, I write, "This is exactly how I use AI." I actually asked AI, "How much of this book is me

and how much of it is you?" And at first, it said, "It's 100% you." And I'm like, "Don't, don't suck up to me. Like, I want a percentage." And it said, "Carry, it's about 90% you and 10% me. I did some fact-checking for you. I cleaned up some phrases. I clarified your thinking, but I feel that's pretty accurate. I bet if you pushed it even more, it would change its mind. I literally think if you said, "That's not true, tell me again, it would change." That's what I've found because I've pushed it really hard in different ways. And so I really like what you're saying because I will talk all day long about how I use it because I think I've experimented a lot to try to figure out what works. And when it comes to content, most of the way my peers are using it, I think is not the most effective way. And so I've worked to try to come up with some things to keep me deeply rooted in it and then leverage some of the organizational power and such that we could talk about. Can I ask you? I know this is your podcast, but how are you guarding against brain rot? How are you making sure that it makes you - So I'm trying to decide if I want to go into this or not. I will. I'll try to keep it really brief because I don't want to bore people that don't create content. But in some ways, everybody does. Every leader is going to run meetings and stuffs. - Yeah, you're writing your annual report. You're writing your, whatever. - So I'm going to be real fast. What I've done is, I've got literally probably 2,200, 2,500 talks I've done over the, you know, I've got it all organized online. So I create different projects in every different category of talks that I do. So I've got one just only on marriage talks, one on serving talks, one on talks that I do my staff,

one on upload talks that I do to campus pastors. I have different types of books that I've written in things that got leadership podcasts, I've got leadership talks. I've got sermons that are verse by verse. I've got all these different projects where I upload my content so they can know how I think in different ways 'cause all my content's different. And then what I'll do, like on podcasts, I've uploaded all of my leadership podcast content. And what I'll do is I'll say, give me a list of what I've talked about most frequently. Give me 20 things I haven't talked about. And like, oh, now that's really valuable. - Yes. - And then I'll look at what I haven't talked about and say, okay, I like these three things. Let's talk more about it. And then what I'll say is, okay, I like this idea. Here's a new idea. And I'll say, interview me on this. Ask me 20 questions one by one, not 20 to time. Ask me a question. And then I talk into it and I give it my thoughts. And so basically it's mining me for my ideas and my content on it. And so I'll let it interview me. And then I'll say, organize my thoughts and boom, now I have an outline.

That's extraordinarily helpful. Now, interestingly enough is better on podcast type information than I've tried that on sermons. It's not as good. And I don't know why and I've worked on it, but I think that podcasts are more linear for me. Sermons are more spiritual, more artistic, more human. It's a different gear. And so I found AI to be not nearly as helpful on spiritual content. It can give you theology and you can train it around how you think, but it's still not as authentic. But anyway, by putting things into categories and then having it pull information on me, that's how I find it helpful and it's keeping me in it. The other thing is I've written sermons in content and leadership talks for 35 years. And so I have that muscle. That muscle is not gonna go away. If I have some younger staff members that are using it, I'm going like, if you don't learn how to do it on your own, you're going to, there's gonna be a part of you that's always underdeveloped. And so I don't want that to rob people of building the muscle of creating. I think that's still important. But that's kind of how I'm using it. - Yeah, I think that's a fantastic use of it. And I'm really glad you brought in the young leader because I think that's a real concern for me.

Back to the Brown University use case, 48% on the final. Nine students with a zero. The advantage you and I have is we've got 35 years of doing this without the assistance of AI. And I think if I was a young leader, what I would be, what I am telling my young leaders is you need to develop the model. Like it's like going to the gym and having somebody else work out for you. You're just not gonna get in shape. You've gotta actually lift the weights. And so whatever your field is, I would not want to move into a cognitive decline. I've talked to a lot of parents too, and there's emerging data on this, Craig. One of the challenges that Gen Alpha is having is they don't like to watch movies. And the reason they don't want to watch movies is it's too long and it's too boring and they were raised on reels and YouTube shorts. So they have very short attention spans. Well, you and I know a great book, by the way, that I'd recommend for people to reread. It was written 40 years ago, 30 years ago. Neil Postman amusing herself to death. And he makes a lot of the arguments about how attention span has been fractured. And that was true in the '80s and '90s. It's especially true now. He didn't live long enough.

But if you can just substitute TV for AI or social media, you're gonna get a very helpful analysis of what happens to the human mind when we allow ourselves to have our attention fragmented. And I think this is something for young leaders to really take seriously. And if three years from now, okay, this is all irrelevant, great. But guess what you've done? You've developed your brain. You develop your soul. You develop your muscles. You need to do that. So I think maybe going analog on those first drafts or whatever meaningful, originative, generative work you're doing - Yes, yeah, and force yourself to make decisions too. For example, I'll ask, I'll ask, hey, if I say this way, this way, which is better. And Claude will tell me definitively this way. Then I'll ask Chad the same exact question, cut and paste, and Chad gives me the other side. And so then what I'll do is I'll switch them in comparison and say, hey, Claude said this, Chad said this, and then almost every time they cave into the other one and say, oh, now that I see this, and then I tell them like, look, you're just telling me what I want to hear. Your opinion is based, you don't have an opinion. You're telling me something,

you're making something up with confidence. And they're like, oh, I can see why you say this way. So you can't trust, you can't trust it for decision making. It can summarize, it can do an unbelievable amount of work in a short period of time, but it is not human. And so I'm telling people, trust your instinct, think for yourself. And I think someone could say, well, why do I need to learn to create content on my own? Why do I need that muscle? Because why do I need to learn to algebra when I've got a calculator that can do it all? How do you respond to that? - Well, yes, that's true. We're in the middle of this right now, but that's why you have a directional leadership team. And that's why you've got a team. And what I would do, 'cause I've done the same thing, I've run things into AI and ask for an opinion. And if it's a really low stakes decision, no problem, happy to use it. Yeah, that confirms my judgment, challenges, my thinking. If it's bigger, I go to the team and I go to real human beings, because at the end of the day, you also have ownership too. You have to own that decision. So let's say you, and you wouldn't do this, but let's say you just listened to chat GPT on this one. And I get really upset by the decision you make.

And I'm like, Craig, why did you make that decision? If you didn't make that decision, it gets very hard to defend. But if you made it with the help or without the help of AI, and you're like, no, Carrie, here are the five reasons I made the decision. You can have, and I think that creates authority and leadership, I mean, you know this, you can tell if someone's a leader or not, you can tell if someone's a great communicator or not. And at the end of the day, the buck stops here, it's what Harry Estruman put on his desk when he became president. It's like the buck stops here, like I'm the leader. I have to be able to defend the decisions I make. And I think for young leaders listening, that ability to have the agency to make your own decisions, and sure, use AI, feed it into a team the higher the stakes get, pray about it, think about it, own it. I don't see that going away. And maybe it gets better, and maybe they work out the sycophantic nature, and maybe the models do get trained better, like we're probably moving into the AGI era. And then we'll have superintelligence, which is a whole other topic. So the models are gonna change, but I think what won't change. And that's one thing that really interested me.

I love Morgan Haussle's thinking, and I've read all of his books. But he talks about the power of incentives. And he says incentives are the most powerful motivator in the world. So you and I both work in the church space. We are incentivized to do good. In other words, if I really blow up my life, probably gonna lose my job and have to apologize to people publicly and honestly just at a fundamental level, I'm gonna disappoint so many people. And I don't wanna do that. I am incentivized to do good. If there's economic dislocation because of this, the incentives are gonna change. Like if you lose your job, and I agree, we're still at 4.2% unemployment, and we haven't really seen the ripple impact. We'll see if that comes true or not. I hope it doesn't. But if it does, what if you start playing for the bad actors? What if you grew up in poverty, it's very tempting if you can't eat, to do something unethical just to feed your family or to make money or whatever you have to do? So I think the incentives are gonna change, and that's why I think as leaders, we have to fortify our integrity. We have to decide ahead of time before AI decides for us what we're gonna do, and decision-making is part of that.

The other thing that Morgan Household quotes, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon on, that I think is really interesting, you can go back, this is an old interview, but Bezos said, when I'm building Amazon, I think more about what won't change than what will. 'Cause you think about Amazon in the 90s, you could buy books there, and now you can buy everything on Amazon. The company has gone through so many iterations, retail, logistics, distribution, the whole deal. And he says, here's what I don't know. I don't know what the future is gonna bring. I do know that customers are gonna want better selection and a lower price, and they're gonna want fast delivery. That's probably never gonna change, so I'm gonna focus on that, What leaders need to do is you need to focus on, you know what, relationships are important to me. Personal integrity is important to me. I wanna make sure that I can disclose how I'm using this technology. Because if I don't, I'm probably misusing it or abusing it or doing something shady. You really wanna decide what your values are and then work the technology around your values. - That's really good. In fact, I was just brainstorming on the idea of what still matters. You know, in leadership and relationships,

what I found, Kerry, is that the more I've experimented with AI, the more I have wanted people in my office instead. You know, like, I genuinely, so I'll use it for feedback. Like, what do you think about this? And then it's not nearly as either not as good or as personal or as rich or as meaningful as asking three people in my office. And so I find the more that I use it, the more I crave human interaction. And so you said something I wanted to ask you about earlier. You said something, I don't wanna misquote it, but you said you wanna learn how AI can make you more human. Something like that, teach me. How would AI make me more human when it seems to be sucking the humanity out of people in some ways? - I hope long before the arc that we had with social media, it makes us ask the question, what could this be doing to us? Not that the programmers are trying to suck our humanity out of us, I don't think anyone's trying to do that, but what we've learned 25, 30 years into digital technology and look at all the mental health studies, all the Surgeon General reports, all like, there's thousands of studies. We are not net better than we were 40 years ago in terms of human wellbeing. So the way it makes us more human, I think is rather than just getting sucked into the blind use of AI,

to use the agency you have as a leader to say, what really matters to me, where is my integrity? How am I gonna use it to serve my customers better? I had a number of talk to you, you've been such a good friend in the development of this book and had some really helpful conversations with Seth Godin, I followed Seth for years. He talks about the race to the bottom in AI and the race to the top. So the race to the bottom is use whatever you can to make it as cheap as possible and get as many users as possible and scale up and sell your company and whatever you need to do just to basically extort, extract value from your customers. But the race to the top is to give value. How does life church become better at what you do in serving humans? How do you become better at helping people connect with God and connect with each other? How do you as a for-profit business, serve your clients better? And maybe it's gonna take away some of the menial work. Maybe it's gonna take away a lot of the spread cheating and the dashboards you look at all day long, trying to figure out which end is up. And you're gonna be able to do more client calls. I have a friend, Mark Ferris. He runs the biggest real estate company in Canada.

They did over a billion dollars in real estate, residential real estate last year. And Mark and I have talked about technology a lot and his view, if you call his real estate firm, a human being picks up the phone. You don't get an AI, you don't get a phone tree, you don't get press one, press three, press six. If you're a returning customer and you know what we do, we just press zero until somebody answers and that doesn't even work anymore. He's like, no, our goal is, I think it's 95% of the time, a human being picks up on the first ring. So you look at that from a business perspective. Well, that's more expensive. Then we gotta have two or three receptionists. Then, you know, what if that doesn't work? I could just automate this. Yeah, you could. But what happens in real estate is the average realtor, I'll get the numbers a little bit wrong 'cause I haven't committed this to memory. Returns a phone call, let's say within eight hours. So you call it nine AM, five PM. Yeah, Craig, you called, you wanna sell a house, right? By that time, what have you done? You've called three other realtors, hoping that somebody would pick up the phone or somebody would turn the voicemail. If you email the average real estate office in Canada, where I'm from, it takes about 16 hours to get a reply.

So because he's first, they get most of those listings and because it's people to people, he gets most of those listings. So back to Wilghedera, who created the number one restaurant in the world in 11 Madison Park, Human Touch is a luxury good. So you can get AI to do a lot of the low-hanging fruit. Another thing that Wilghed talked about that I think is really important, is you should experience your organization through the lens of the customer Because if you put in all these-- because they went to Open Table. That was a new technology at the time. We've all used it to book reservations. He didn't want to do it. He had to call the restaurant. He said, he called and called for half an hour, got put on hold. And then it was going to take six hours for somebody to get back to him. And they were already sold out before they opened. And he said, "This is a disaster." So he had to figure out how it is for an end customer. So AI is going to create a lot of gains. It's got some existential questions I think we all have to wrestle with. But on the micro level, how does this make you more relational? How does this make you more human? How does it make you serve your clients and customers or your congregation better? That's where the upside is. Yeah, I like that. Well, the title of the book is AI and the future church. I appreciate your heart and work on this. I love the way you think. In fact, that's how we became friends is I just read some of your older blog posts. And I thought, I'll read more. I'll read more. And you earned your way into a relationship before I knew you based on the value of your content. I thought, I want to get to know this guy. And then, of course, we hit it off. And so I appreciate your work for years on content and your investment in leaders and your investment in the church. Is there anything that I'm not asking or other leaders aren't asking that you're thinking, man, this is something we really need to be talking about when it comes to artificial intelligence? I think the temptation, Craig, is we're going to feel powerless. We're going to say the machine is working. We're in a race, the US versus China versus the rest of the

world. The frontier labs aren't going to stop. And it's amazing how I don't want to get political in the partisan way, but a call to your local representative. Data centers, we didn't even touch on. They're going up all over the place. Nobody wants one in their backyard. This is going to become a major issue over the next little while. And I hope it never becomes a partisan issue. I hope it stays a human issue. But I think the thing, because I've listened to so many AI experts who say, if you want to make a change, make a phone call, write a letter, have a conversation with someone who has the ability to make a decision. And I think one of the things that really encourages me, if this has made you think about the bigger issues about how exactly am I using or AI? What's the difference between Claude and Chachi BT or some of the other models out there? Great. Those are great questions, but it's the wrong question. The right question is what impact is this going to have on humanity? And if you can start a conversation with a friend like you and I have been talking about this now for the last year, year and a half as I've been working on this project and on this book, I'm starting to get, we have a mutual friend who's sending us articles about the impact of AI. I got another one from another person who leads a very large church yesterday. And I was so encouraged because I'm like, okay, the conversation is starting. And that's great. You can start the conversation and think beyond the prompt. Think about the impact. And if you don't, if it's too big to think about the world, think about your kids. Think about your grandkids. What kind of life do you want for them? Do you want them to be able to look somebody in the eye and have a conversation? Do you want them to develop their minds and their hearts and their souls? Do you want them to have a thriving quality relationship with someone that they can settle down with and get married to and have a family for the rest of your life? And I think the universal answer on that is yes. And so if that's not motivation, I don't know what is, but I think we don't have to wait 25 years for this to unfold. So let's get moving now. Let's start asking the right question, what impact is this going to have? And then let's start taking some action together. And I think we're going to be able to forge a better tomorrow. That's my hope. Well, I appreciate your heart. And what's interesting is you are your student of artificial intelligence. You've done the hard work. You've written a great and important book. And ultimately, you're coming back to it's all about people in relationships. And if we can use it to make ourselves more productive to serve people better, to create better products, to create better environments, to empower people, to help other people be more successful,

to love people better, then it can be a great tool. But I do think you're right. We need to have both eyes open. We need to be wise. And personally, I'd say this, the more that I am utilizing technology, everything from just making a reservation to looking at social media to using AI, the more it makes me hungry for human interaction. And I hope other people feel the same way. I think that's always going to be most important. Well, you and I are people of faith, it's love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. Whether you're a person of faith or not, if you think about it, would we not all be better off if we loved our neighbors? We love ourselves and anything that comes in between us and our neighbors. I think we need to really think that through. We need more harmony and almost everybody can agree with that. So thank you for your friendship. Thank you for your leadership. You have inspired me from afar for over 20 years and up close now for the last decade. All the way across the border and carries in Canada and so all the way across the border. We're representing Canada here on the Kurgershell Leadership podcast. I appreciate your friendship and to all of you all who are part of our community, thank you for being a part of this content. It's helpful. Rate it, please. It'd be a lot to me. Write a review, share it with people, and hop on over to the Carrey Newhof Leadership podcast. It's excellent world class and I promise you it'll help you grow in your leadership and guess what? We know that's good news because everyone wins when the leader gets better. [music]