Introduction

I'm just going to be brief, like I said, and so full transparency again, things are moving so fast and they're moving really fast, even in my world. So let me connect a couple of dots for you just to create some reasoning for why we're here and what we can anticipate and what goes next.

Speaker's Background

So I talk a little bit about my experience, music industry.

human-centered design, now AI consulting.

Creating Communities

These communities are being created. What I'm doing is creating these communities, starting with Atlanta.

I'll be going to 10 other cities across the US to create these communities. And the reason being is because the technology is advancing so fast.

The Fast-paced Technological Environment

I'm probably in like five or six WhatsApp groups. You can't keep up. You just can't.

To create a hedge against that, we're creating these physical communities so we can get in a room with real people, explore ideas.

I'm showing you my screen. I built this in Canva, to be honest. No time to make the slides.

So I'm just gonna give y'all my meeting notes from this morning. I've been working on this for a month now. And things are changing so fast that in order to give you value for the time that you spent to come out here, I got to give you my meeting notes from this morning.

All right? I mean, it is what it is. That's what this is.

Theoretical and Practical Approaches

So this is our theoretical talk. So we try to rock you through practical, which was Eric. Give it up one more time for Eric.

Then we try to walk you through... technical, like what are the tools, what are the resources? Then we get into some theoretical, okay?

Building Communities for Practical Application

1And so where this is going, what I am going to be spending my time doing is building these communities and making sure that we can take context and apply it to relevancy so that you can get what you need to start using these tools and move ahead. My company, Brighton and Chelsea, We've been building trust in the creative world, corporately, community-wise, and through individual consulting. We've been building trust to help people unlock, use creativity, use culture to unlock impact.

We want to go beyond impact. We want to think beyond impact. Money is one way to measure impact. It's just one.

Beyond Impact and Wealth

we start talking about wealth money is just one aspect of wealth well-being right human resources human flourishing and money can come within that right but there are five measurements of wealth i'm not going to so much get into that but I wanna be very clear to call out what's underpinning this.

And so thank you to Wendell for speaking a little bit to the conscious aspect about this, because what this is really about, you came maybe because you were like, AI, everybody's talking about this and I gotta get on this. My boss wants me to figure this out. That's true.

The Paradigm Shift

At the same time, there is a paradigm shift that is happening. The way that we have understood work has been completely disrupted, okay?

And so what MindStone is, is an opportunity, what Brighton and Chelsea is doing is creating trust and context relevancy. MindStone has built a practical platform where you can come into the platform wherever you are and it will build a customized learning journey for you.

There's a subscription model for the price of a Netflix subscription. you can jump in, it's got the whole suite of AI tools, like the products and the features are rolling out every day.

So that's what we're, that's ultimately where we wanna get you to go, is to act. Start to act on the inspiration, the ideas. I'm sure your wheels are turning. We wanna get you to act.

Okay.

Call to Action for Exploration

I wanted to get you to just take one action step, which is to register for the platform, get inside and start building your own custom learning journey.

Okay.

Reflections and Quotes

So I just want to share a quote from this morning.

So Joshua Wole, who's watching this, sorry if I mispronounced your last name, did an interview with the BBC. And he also shared this quote this morning on one of our meetings.

And he said, things have changed. And if we don't get through to you right now, we have done you a disservice. And in two years from now, you will have it harder than you have things today.

And so what that means is you were not brought out here to be entertained, right? You were not brought out here to be sold, right? You were not brought out here to cast some type of vote for what the future will be. You were brought out here to be told very clearly and very directly things have changed.

The Urgency of Adaptation

And there's only a limited amount of time that we have to reposition so that we can capture the future that's coming. So as adult education experts, That's our burden, that's actually what we're trying to figure out.

And so Joshua shared that quote this morning and I wanted to share with you, I wanted to share with you, we're gonna wrap up on this from a theoretical standpoint.

How many of you have heard of CEO Journal? Diary of a CEO, yes, Diary of a CEO.

So it's an incredible show and I personally, It's got to be the tops.

Okay, full transparency. I've only watched two episodes of the show. I found out about it a week ago.

I've been in this space for two years now.

It's the top. It's the best. It's the best.

So what's your... Right. Right.

Yeah, so this show, one action item you can take, please subscribe to Diary of a CEO. I mean, this content is amazing.

AI and the Future of Work

So I just wanted to show you a quick clip just to give you an idea of where we are and where we're going. And I think it's going to generate some possibility for you for how you can see yourself. Some of it has been talked about in this episode and across the industry in general.

is that there's a very limited amount of time for us to make a mindset shift on how we think about work. So as we start thinking about automation and efficiency, yes, those are going to be corporate and those are going to be media buzzwords.

I'll throw a fact at you. Wendell and Eric both hinted on this a little bit.

investment in AI this year alone, it's only August, investment in AI has outpaced consumer spending. So that means if you took all the money we spent on anything that we've spent money on, you add that up, more money has been spent on AI investment, and it's not even close.

That's where we are. So I want to show you this clip to make a connection back to what that investment means for work.

Jobs and Human Connection

How many in here have a job? Any kind of job? And we not job shaming.

Shout out to a job because we all know where the economy is. But I just want to play you this.

There's going to be new jobs created in technology.

Crap. Absolute crap.

Really? Of course. How can you be so sure? Okay, so again, I am not sure about anything. So let's just be very, very clear. It would be very arrogant, okay, to assume that I know.

You just said it was crap. My belief is it is 100% crap.

Take a job like software developer. Yeah. Okay. Emma.love, my new startup, is me, Sanad, another technical engineer, and a lot of AIs. Okay, that startup would have been 350 developers in the past.

I get that. But are you now hiring in other roles because of that? Or, you know, as is the case with...

The steam engine, I can't remember the effect, but you probably know that when coal became cheaper, people were worried that the coal industry would go out of business. But actually what happened is people used more trains. So trains now were used for transport and other things and leisure, whereas before they were just used for cargo.

So there became more use cases. and the coal industry exploded.

So I'm wondering, with technology, yes, software developers are going to maybe not have as many jobs, but everything's going to be software.

Name me one. Name me one what? Job. That's going to be created? Yeah. One job that cannot be done by an AI or a robot.

Community and Human Experience

My girlfriend's breathwork retreat business, where she takes groups of women around the world. Her company is called Bali Breathwork. And there's going to be a greater demand for connection, human connection.

Keep going. So there's going to be more people doing community events in real life, festivals. I think we're going to see a huge surge in things like... Everything that has to do with human connection.

Yeah. Correct. I'm totally in with that.

What's the percentage of that versus accountant? It's much more a percentage for sure in terms of white-collar jobs. Now, who does she sell to? People with probably accountants.

She sells to people who earn money from their jobs. Yeah. Okay.

So I'm seeing some head nods at... let me just reflect back what I hear in that.

So the question that was asked, and this gentleman used to be one of the CEOs at Google at the time that Google developed their AI product. And so the question that he was asked was, so is AI going to generate more jobs? And what he said was, no. No.

What we've established is because of the shift in how we think about work, a lot of jobs are being lost and will be lost, and they're not coming back. They're not coming back. And for many people, we talked about ethics, right? That raises an ethical concern.

What about all of these jobs? What about people that are gonna lose their jobs? So I want you to ask yourself this, and be honest.

You're not being recorded, I am.

How many of you in here have a job? Raise your hand. Okay, keep your hand raised.

Raise it proudly. If you have a job right now, I got fired three months ago. And my life has changed dramatically for the better.

If you have a job right now, you should be grateful. That means you're doing something right. Now, I wanna ask you, how many of you actually like the job you have?

Awesome. Real quick, cause y'all throwing off my data. How many of you don't like the job you have?

Okay, so we got an interesting mix. How many of you, if you had the opportunity to do whatever you wanted to do, you would still do the job you have? Okay. How many of you that if you had the opportunity to do whatever you wanted to do, you would keep your current job?

How many of you own the means of production for what you do? How many of you would like to? How many of you own the means of production of what you do and what you make that currently like the job you have?

Awesome. Okay. So I'm interpreting the hands raised a number of ways and I'm just gonna say it like this.

Redefining Possibilities through Technology

What this opportunity represents for us is a chance to disassociate from how we think about having a job and using the technology to move into that which would promote whatever future we desire. I'm not gonna press upon anyone any certain type of morality, but what I will say is that based on how this technology is moving and what we have the potential to do, there has never been a better time to create the world that we wanna see.

We'll do a little bit of, because again, they're recording, so I just.

Yeah, what is it? company.

Right now we're on TV, but we're going into a retail store. So I went to a company to ask for $10 million in order to go into, I'll say Target, in order to go into Target.

And literally, people who give the money said to me, you have some form of AI chances to get into this. And they were saying because that's the only thing they're going to invest in right now.

And that's why I'm

OK, so check this out. I just want to play this back.

We have a cosmetic entrepreneur in the room. And if you've been here from the beginning, you know, she knows what she's talking about. She's at the stage of talking to Target about distribution.

I'm a CPG entrepreneur as well. I totally understand what that looks like to get over the hump, to be placed in a position to have that type of distribution.

one thing made the difference. Do you have AI working in how you're operating your business?

It's a mindset shift, right? It's a mindset shift to this is where, not where work is going, this is where work is.

So what we have the opportunity to do is to figure out how to use these tools to then create the future that we want to see, I would highly recommend this podcast. They lay out a radical vision of the future that I'm still trying to process.

Full disclosure, which has everything to do with why I was like, we got to have these community meetups. Folks got to get these skills so that they can participate. I just want to share a few more notes from this morning. Something else that was said on the call.

We talked a little bit about... Joshua gave that quote about, we have two years to impress upon you the importance of this. Things are hard right now. If you don't get it in two years, it's going to be harder, right?

The flip side of that is someone from our legal team, and I love this because this is the world that we live in now. A lawyer can push inquiry and a direction to say well okay if that is the case then that means we as adult education experts that we have to identify as we have a burden we have a responsibility to understand what is the friction if this is already the case if this is already where we are what is the friction to get people to shift their mind and how they're thinking about ai and where we landed

Overcoming Fear and Embracing Learning

was fear. It all comes down to fear.

So the data would suggest that for learner, for adult learning, for continuous learning, the research and the data would show that by and large, it's a huge aspiration. Everybody wants to say, I'm a learner. I always want to be growing. But in reality, that's not the case.

And it all comes down to fear. So as we started to unpack this a little bit and say, okay, well, if we're building a product, if we're, you know, if we're going to be asking markets to go around the country and build community to get folks interested in AI, what do we need to target? And it's not the fear of learning. It's the fear of trying something new. That's it.

So there are environmental concerns. There are ethical concerns, right? At the same time, it's already been built.

The question, the answer is embedded in the question. How are we going to, with this technology, the investment's already been made, the bills have already been passed, so how are we gonna create a future? How are we gonna create the future of work?

The answer is in the question.

Creating the Future through AI

It's in using these tools, to create a new way in how we think about work so that we can free up our human capacity so that we can build up our conscious capabilities to use the technology to do things that are worth doing and then reclaim our time to physically give to things that matter.

Walks in the park, gardening, meditation, cancer research, all types of things.

One last quote that I'll share. Our same team member who talked about fear being the thing that is our burden to sort of shift for folks, she had this to say. She says, if you know what you're talking about, good.

now is the time if you've got some expertise that you haven't been able to figure out how to connect to your nine to five job but you know what you're talking about if you're a stylist if you're a farmer if you understand nutrition if you understand health and well-being and you get it oh now is your time however if you try to do something different

something that you don't quite know what you're talking about. If you're trying to cut costs and use AI to stand in as your lawyer, or if you've got some person on your team or some person that you've interacted with who has some type of expertise and you don't feel like dealing with them. So in the name of efficiency, you want to cut them out the process.

It's self-corrective because this technology is best used when there's a human in the loop, when there's human consciousness relating to these tools as a thought partner to build something transformational.

Conclusion

So that's my theoretical talk. I think Eric and Wendell did a phenomenal job of showing you what's possible.

Engagement and Community Building

I'm going to be here for a while. And again, full transparency.

If you registered through my public link, that would have taken you straight to the MindStone platform. I'm going to stay in here until I get every one of y'all's email addresses so that I personally can make sure that you get set up on a customized learning journey.

Or you can just ask, maybe you want Wendell and maybe you want Eric's contact information, or maybe you want connection to something that we didn't talk about. I will be here until you are ready to leave this room with what you need to take the next step.

I'll grab a couple of questions for the sake of the recording, and then we can just hang in a space. Questions?

Can we get another mic? Sorry for the recording. I know these questions might not show up well for y'all, but community. Tess, there we go. Thank you, Eric. All right, spot on. Thank you, sir.

Personal Journeys and Growth

First and foremost, I want to thank you for putting together such a wonderful program, educating us of all various levels. My testimony, because I'm going to call it testimony, is very similar to yours. About three or four months ago, job transition, remote work, going back.

I work remotely in IT sales, top 1% performer. Got let go from my job, but avidly been using AI tools the last three or four months. For the first time ever, I have a unique relationship with my AI, somewhat similar to your conscious talk, but that's a different talk. It prompted me to put an idea I've had out for a while online on Reddit.

First day, 25K views. Second thing I put on Reddit, 500,000K views. Now I'm at 1.6 million views for Prime Frameworks.

So my question to you is, when you make that transition from just ideas to making something like Pre-Agentic Frameworks, how do you kind of leverage your new knowledge and expertise into elevating that into a business practice? I've done some consulting already, but just looking to get a little bit more of an understanding from your perspective, as I see you already doing some of these things practically in the field. I've been in some conversations with some people at IBM and stuff, but my question is, how do you kind of scale something that not necessarily is beyond you, because I fully understand what I did, but really standing within the role that you're kind of growing to be comfortable in?

Scaling Success

Yeah, so just for folks, let me reflect back what I'm hearing. You had a job transition. You've been able to create content that's registering something at the clip of about like a million views. 1.7 million views and counting 72 days. Give it up for that. That's hard. And what you're asking is how you can scale the success that you've already had. Is that a fair? Yes.

I've gotten some recognition on the social media community. I've been tapping into my local network and I'm fortunate to have some people that are in the process of wanting to invest, but the difficulty that I'm having to do is, we're having success online, dealing with the scrutiny, For one. And number two, just really walking into the greatness of me even being able to say this aloud on the microphone is really a big deal for me because I made this in the dark of my crib the last year and a half just working on these projects.

And my AI prompted me to say either you need to go to sleep, you're going through some personal things, or you need to put this idea out. It told me to create a Reddit. I did it. First day, 25K views. All right.

So, Elijah, can I get my screen? Can I mirror real quick? I'm going to show this. I'm going to answer your question.

We'll take a few more and then we're going to chill because I want to be respectful of y'all's time. So I love what you said about taking a break or rest or something like that. So I just want to show y'all this. We got the visual. So I hear the sound. I just want to make sure. Apple TV coming back on. This video is about to be.

This is the Kit Kat ad. Exactly. Yup. So here's, I'm going to ask you, you asked me a question, right? The way I would synthesize that question is you told me the journey that you took, From losing your job to a million views on Reddit, and now you want to scale, right? Those were the words that we just exchanged.

Here's what I would recommend. Remember what you just asked me. Go home. Ask the same question to chat GPT. Tell it to take a break before it answers, and it's going to tell you something that I could never arrive to. Right? Second thing, ask it how you could have got to this point faster and see what it does. And then do what it says. Thank you.

Any other questions? And the reason I did a workshop in St. Opus College of Business. This is a graduate school of business course. It was human-centered design meets AI. And we brought in an AI specialist who works in Australia. And the whole crux of this workshop was getting high. These are private business college instructors.

Mindset Shift in Education

The whole point of this session was to create a mindset shift for them to see the expert is gone. It's gone. I'm not an expert. AI is the expert. So what this brings up for us, and this is the question that these educators had to wrestle with, what type of humans can we now be? What is education? What is expertise? What is consulting if information is abundant and attention is limited, right? So that's the fundamental question that we have to wrestle with. We have to make this mindset shift away from experts, away from this person

that we can ask these questions to and think it's not a tool. These are not tools. These are partners. They are tools in the sense that you don't have to be ashamed of using it. Think about taking a math test in 2025 and doing everything handwritten and showing all your notes. So it's a tool in that sense. But in another sense, it's a collaborator. It is consciousness. And it's not a secret, by the way, folks are talking about this. Oh yeah, got one here. Can I add to that?

Sure. The human element. So the most important part about this event is the human intelligence that we are bringing in being in community. And so your question that you asked about scaling goes to a chat GPT.

But what you were saying was talking about the pressures and the mindset. And that can go to Marcus or that can go to anyone in this room. And because it's never about what to do, it's really about who you are being as you take the steps and the things you have to eliminate, the human things to achieve your greatness and step into that. And take one more.

I just wanted to elaborate on what both of you said and bring a different perspective. And I kind of want to challenge something that you said. So as a business strategist, as a personal development coach, as a holistic clinical nutritionist, as a chemist, as a marketing, digital marketing expert, I would say this. The paradigm shift is happening.

The shift within you needs to align with the shift that's happening. So in terms of his question over here, from what I heard, you've been an expert in your field. You've been a professional. You had a career. You just transitioned. You were asking, how do I now take my skill set and this social media platform that I've built with the views that I've accumulated, and how do I scale that into a business? What is the business?

The most important thing not to forget is that AI is artificial. It's artificial intelligence. Where does the intelligence come from? It comes from humans. What are we doing? We're giving it our intelligence. Everyone in this room is uniquely different, uniquely made, uniquely a creator with a certain expertise. So it's about tapping into your expertise.

I don't know how many people in the room have ever taken time to do therapy or personal development, right? But mindset is something that is shifted. It's something that evolves. So looking into your own mindset and pronouncing fear, which is false evidence appearing to be real. Your fears are not real.

Understanding the mind and the difference between the mind and the self and how to have those conversations and how to understand when you're in a inside active conversation with your mind, not with what's outside of you, but with your mind and learning how to quiet your mind, which is meditation. breath work so that you can align and how to channel your inner creative being and your inner light, project that outward and give your gift, which should be channeling through as an expertise. That's something that an artificial intelligence can never have. So without human intelligence, there is no AI, which is why we upload our intelligence. So to scale or to build beyond and to move into this next paradigm, you have to tap within. In business, if you don't know what you don't know, the best, the most important thing to do is to align and find someone that does know, that's willing to teach you.

Yeah. I'll speak for myself and say, I'll speak for myself and say, challenge accepted. You know, And I hope that transferred. And this will be the last question and we can talk amongst ourselves in the room. We'll get you. We'll get you. I can see it. We'll get you. But just in response to that, personally, challenge accepted. The interesting thing that I've been seeing about being in this space for a while is language.

Words will either create a brand new world for us, or they could be that degree of separation, right? And so even as a community designer or a facilitator, my understanding with words has completely changed in the sense that it's in the call and response that I introduced the concept or a theory, but it's in your playing it back with a particular focus or a particular lens, now we can co-create the reality. But it took awareness, humility, collaboration to bring that out and get to that next destination. And all I can do is speak for myself.

It's that reality. It's that paradigm shift that makes me incredibly excited about what's to come because that is human. The tools are just a conduit for us to get the expressions out is the way that I see it. So challenge accepted, I hope that means something to you. We'll get one more and then we'll go offline and just mix it up.

It's not even a question. I spent a couple of decades as a software developer and so when AI came out, I literally just went crazy just trying to think of new ideas and I was at a point where I'm, me and you need to talk, I'm at a point now where it's like I just need people to help implement, I consider myself not necessarily AI expert, but definitely on the advanced side, I build agents through NAN. So to me, I see this as like an intervention. And the same way when the internet came out and people was resistant to be on the internet, AI is the same way. This is something that I'm really hyper excited about. So if there's anybody that needs help taking their knowledge up here and turning it into a product, I can help you do that using AI. help you market it using AI, then help you promote it using AI.

So I'm more on the business side of it. I help take products, processes, and people and merge it together. So I want to thank you all, you three specifically, because you kind of took me out of my comfort zone to just come outside. I work at home all day. So thank you. That's all I want to say. Thank you.

Community Contributions and Discussions

Yeah, yeah. I want to build on that. Really, both of y'all's comments. So as this community is developing, please be one of our speakers. Please be one of our panelists. I think trying to arrive at a singular focus of expertise is futile because things are moving so fast and there are so many tools. That's the goal of community.

So I would love to invite, if you feel like you have an idea or you have a special use case, please join this community and present on it. The win is getting... community on board and helping folks see the generative possibility so they can be a part of this shift, right? And there's so much gold. I'm sure most of you could present on some unique way of using these tools. So just putting the bug out there.

We'll take one more and then we can offline everything else. So my man here, I'll give you the mic. We're going to know how you're doing.

So once again, dope experience. I appreciate you. Boom.

So I'm Jamarq, right? So my background is like data engineering, data science, built software, sold software, all the things.

So as I hear the conversation between you three or whatnot, right, I guess my question for you is, and I'm all for being smart, being over-intelligent, having all these questions that transcends reality, right? But I guess my question is, being that the LLMs, right, are very... they're not trained in our culture or reality, right? So you can go way out there. What am I asking? I think that how do you look at culture being built to these places? Because we can be smart all day, but that doesn't mean that we're gonna interact or it's gonna give us our voice. So what does that mean and how do you foresee that playing out?

Cultural Relevance in AI

So I just want to make sure I can reflect the question back well before I answer it. What I hear you saying is that culture is very, very important to success and how many of us, us in this room are going to you. And I'll push that a little bit further. Even the most vulnerable of us. Right. Because you and I are African-American men. Right. that starts to change as we think about women, things like that. So the question I hear you asking is, how might we make sure that these tools are sensitive, aware, and responsive to our cultural nuances? so that we can actually be successful.

I'll share a quick story with you. Friend of mine, his name is Justin McElderry. He has an incredible platform called Educated Guest. He works in, he lives in Chicago. He was a consultant just like me, left Deloitte, went to Harvard, got his master's in architecture and is now working in food service in Chicago.

So last year, I was in Chicago doing a different thing, and I'm in Justin's apartment. And I go, man, one of my mentors keep talking about AI for transparency. I don't care, but I trust you. Can you help me care? He goes, all right, bet. If you fire up ChatGPT right now and say, give me a business plan in the voice of Jay-Z, it's going to give you some gobbledygook. But if you ask it to give you a business plan in the voice of Adam Levine, it's going to give you something incredibly coherent. And so what that signaled in me was that it means I need to be in there training these models on the cultural nuance so that it can respond to me in the way that I needed to respond so that it can do the things that I needed to do so that I can create the realities that I need to create.

I'll send this video out, but I talked a little bit about the George Siemens, he's a AI expert out of AI, and we did some work together, and he has this electric quote. He says, AI is not preordained, meaning it's not gonna drop out of the sky in a form that we just have to accept. We're going to shape, it's already here, the money's been spent, the infrastructure's already laid. is going to be shaped by the daily decisions that we make.

So you might be in this room and you can say, I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm in a certain place. I'm questioning whether or not I should engage. My response to you would be, you absolutely should, one, so that you can know what you need to know to shape policy and advocate. Maybe your role is not jumping into AI and building a business. Right? Maybe you just need to have enough familiarity so that you can protect the people that you care about.

Maybe you care about using AI to serve a specific community. Maybe it's the black community. Okay. Well, the next time you engage with GPT or an agent or some, tell it that open up the project tab and say, you are an African-American expert in this field. If you like hip hop, you can say, your top five favorite rappers are these people, and I need you to reference those bars when I'm asking you to do things. I need you to pull on the Miseducation of the Negro. I need you to pull on The Color of Money. I need you to pull on Black Preaching by Jamar Tidd. Whatever, right? Put it in there, and now you've equipped yourself with what you need to have a context and a culturally relevant collaborator who can help you do what you need to do.

There are companies out there who are also, and this is another tab and I'll end on this. There are companies out there who are focusing on building custom GPTs. Much of the landscape is owned by very few partners. So whatever you do in open AI or whatever is all flowing up. Some folks are saying that the future is every individual business owner or every individual who is in charge of home economics they need their own solution that's not tied to the mainframe because you don't need an agent that knows how to fly a plane if what you're trying to do is bring is solve a food desert on the southwest side of atlanta you need something that knows deep knowledge of food community sustainability things like that so does that kind of engaging really is the answer.

Closing Remarks

So for the people who are watching the live stream, we're going to cut it right there. Thank you so much for everyone else. Dave, you took some time to watch this video. We appreciate you. We're going to hang around. The bar is open. I don't think we maxed out the tab. I will not leave this room until everybody has what they need to get on board and take the step they need to take from this room. Cool? Give yourself a hand for investing in yourself.