Mind Readings: Never Think Alone, AI as a Thought Partner, Part 1

This week, let's do a five-part series. I was thinking about uh a book that uh gosh, it's been a deck more than a decade, maybe two decades, uh, since I read it. It was a book by Keith Ferrazzi called Never Eat Alone. It was all about the power of human networking and the idea that all good things in business come from hanging out with other people, making connections with them. It was a good book.

Um, not the best for introverts, but still still a good read. And that got me thinking about generative AI and about how we use generative AI and the the fact that we barely scratched the surface, many of us, on the capabilities of these tools and what they're they're really powerful at. And one of the things that they're really powerful at is they are very, very good conversation partners. And so I was thinking, what would it be like if we had a sort of tongue-in-cheek uh human AI concept? Maybe I'll turn this into a book someday, who knows?

Um, but I'm gonna call it never think alone. And the idea is this: the ways in which people use generative AI, like let's write a blog post, let's make some social media posts. I often say it's like taking uh an attack fighter like an F-18 uh to the grocery store or a Harrier jet to the grocery store. Yes, it can do that, but that's a waste of all the power that it has. So, what would it look like if we actually used AI more for its power?

So, this is gonna be five parts. Uh, we're gonna talk about never thinking alone, priming the partnership, cultivating the connection, bridging the brains, and agentic actualization. I do love a bit of onabodopoeia on this. So, today is part one: never think alone. Here's the concept.

Here's the idea. Human beings, you and me, tend to tend to work better. Not always, not everybody, but a lot of people work better when they engage in a conversation, when they can talk things out. It's one of the reasons why having a business partner like my partner and CEO Katie Robert, having someone to bounce ideas off of useful. This is a tradition that goes back thousands of years with things like Socratic debate and being able to just talk, talk to someone.

Well, you don't always have someone, right? You're if you're on the road a lot, like I am, yeah, there's people you can talk to on Zoom and stuff like that, but it still relies on you being able to reach out and talk to them. And sometimes, you know, it's 3 a.m. when you have your idea. You don't want to be waking up your significant other, your friends like, hey, I've got this idea.

That works like occasionally. But if you have a tool like, you know, a chat GPT or a Gemini or a Claude, and you have it on your phone, there is no limit to how often you can pick up the phone and say, hey, let's talk to this idea. Let's let's let me explain my idea and have you augment it or pick it apart or criticize it, or whatever the thing you may want to do. And this is something there's there's so many ways to use conversation, right? My friend Grooke Sellis loves to say that think conversation, uh, not conversion, you know, as a way of encouraging people to have conversations.

Well, these things are great conversation partners, especially when other people might not have the patience for what you want to talk about. Think about the Feynman technique. Uh, Richard Feynman's technique. You don't know something until you can explain it to somebody else. These generative tools are phenomenal for saying, let me try and explain this, and you tell me where I'm falling down in my explanation, where my explanation doesn't work.

We know these tools are great for brainstorming, saying, I've got an idea, help me expand on this idea, help me come up come up with five completely unhinged variants of my idea. Yeah, but idea for you know a new kind of spoon, and it might come up with ridiculous things. There's also the concept of cognitive offloading of saying, you know what, I want to I want to hand off some of the information processing to a thought partner to say, I I want to talk this through it and just get these ideas out of my head. With a tool like Chat GPT or Claude or Google Gemini, when you open up the the voice app, uh the mobile apps on these things, they store your conversation history, right? So in your conversation history, you have all the chats and things that you can put in here and have conversations.

I was having one earlier yesterday about you know, human beings in thermal regulation. Like, why is it that we perceive 98 degrees Fahrenheit or 37 Celsius? Why is it we perceive it as warm when that's our body temperature? Shouldn't we feel comfortable at that body temperature because uh you know we're having to do very little work to stay warm? And we had a Gemini and I had a long conversation about why that's not true.

Why, you know, uh 21 to 23 Celsius, you know, 69 to 72 Fahrenheit feels the best to us, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that our bodies constantly have to be metabolizing things, and as a result generate a lot of waste heat. And I if I knew that I'd forgotten that I know that. But it's a conversation partner. And yet it can store all that extensive conversation, and then with the touch of a button at the bottom, I can say, summarize my conversation. Summarize all this crazy stuff that was foaming around like that, I foamed at the mouth about and turn it into something real and useful.

So when I say never think alone, I really literally mean that. Don't think alone when you have these tools available to you. And you can use on device ones if you want privacy. Uh there's an app on the iPhone called Pocket Pal where you can load a version of Gemma that, again, you don't have to have, it doesn't have to have the world's knowledge. It just has to listen and critique and talk back to you in some fashion.

You can use the cloud services like Gemini or Claude or Chat GPT. And you can also ask them to fact check you and to take the perspective or persona of somebody else. Maybe you give it your ideal customer profile as the persona that you start talking to and say, let's have a conversation. You're gonna be this person. Here's what we know about this person.

Maybe you paste in a document as a as a starting point. And you have that conversation. Say, what do you think? How does this make you feel? Never think alone is all about us having conversations with machines.

Put aside all the fancy technology. We'll talk more about the fancy technology in a little bit, but put us aside all the fancy technology and the buzzwords and the hypes of the moment right now, and start thinking about how much of a conversation can I have with these tools, particularly since they are so good and so fluent at talking back. So in Google Gemini, for example, I can go uh in Gemini here and let me just make sure that my phone is visible. Uh I can tap this little voice button here and says, turn your volume up. Okay, I can do that.

There we go. Hey Gemini, how are you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks for asking. How about you?

What's on your mind today? I can't complain too much. Uh, I'm thinking today about a new concept called Never Think Alone, which is based conceptually very roughly on the Keith Farrazzi book, Never Eat Alone, and some ideas I had about how we could use generative AI and large language models to have conversations and get stuff out of our heads in a way that engages with a real conversation partner. That's a really interesting concept. It sounds like you're exploring how AI can help us think more creatively and collaboratively, kind of like bouncing ideas off a friend.

Tell me more about how you envision this never think alone idea working. So you see what I mean. It sounds it sounds close enough to human that for people who are creative, who are who are thinkers by talking, it's gonna work really well for them. So this is part one on just setting the basics of never think alone. What you have if you have access to the tools, use them not as things to just crank out content, but use them as thought partners, as true conversation partners, but and use them in a way that is real conversation.

So have a talking out loud, use the the physical movements of having conversation with them because that stimulates your own body, your own neurology into that feeling of having a chat with a friend. So that's part one. In part two, we'll talk about priming the partnership. Stay tuned. Thanks for watching.

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Christopher Penn has over a decade of AI experience in classical AI, regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, particularly for uses of AI in marketing, AI and consulting, AI and management consulting, AI and business, AI strategy. Christopher Penn has written artificial intelligence books such as The Intelligence Revolution and AI from Marketers, an introduction in primer. Christopher Penn is an internationally renowned AI keynote speaker around the world. Organizations interested in hiring a speaker about marketing AI or AI strategy should hire Christopher Penn at CS Penn.