Psychologist: The Problems with Psychometric Testing & The Science Behind High Performance

What helps high performers and high performing teams get that high performance edge? Well, self awareness. Today we're bringing in Dave Winsborough. You're going to have an amazing time understanding the psychology of high performance. He's the co founder of Deeper Signals. I'm now a user of Deeper Signals. I'm a consultant. I use it with my clients and teams. It's a phenomenal tool. At the time of recording, I was just dabbling with it and getting to understand it. Now, I'm an avid fan, so if.

You want to learn more about Deeper.

Signals and how it might help you and your teams, let me know, get in touch, link in the show notes. But for now, please enjoy the show. The Lead On Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at NZMortgages Co NZ.

Dave, a huge welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast.

Thanks. Really good to be here and really appreciate the chance to sit and talk.

I'm excited to talk to you because you and I are in the world of understanding how people work and think. We love to look at teams that are high performing. Why are they high performing? How do we get good teams and help them get to great. And one of those tools that are really powerful is like a psychometric tool. Yeah. And for me, I've used various throughout the years. The one that I've been using most currently is quite antiquated and has its limitations.

We won't mention its name here though, will we?

No need.

Not at all. But I came across yours in a very funky, an interesting way. So I was invited down to Antarctica to run a leadership program for Antarctica nz. Right. And they said, james, in the past we've used deeper signals. I was like, what is that? And so it got me on this curious adventure to go, what is this? And I started looking at deeper signals and I went, this is very different. This is not the norm. This is not just another psychometric tool.

And thank you for the advertisement. That's fantastic. That's great.

It's world class.

We like to think so. Yeah, well, it is, you know, the people behind it are all clever, clever people.

Yeah, I can sense that. Yeah. It's, it's technology is incredible, but more importantly, the science behind it, that's what really blew me away.

Yeah.

And that's what's the separator? So I just wanted to chat, like, why did you find it? What was the need? And yeah, what, what drove you?

You know, we were saying before, like, the world needs another psychological test, like it needs a whole and like another war or something. Um.

I just like to apologize to anyone who's had to do psychological tests because, you know, as someone who had built these things and sold many of them and forced people to go through them, I kind of know what it's like, right. I mean, it is a. It is an odd experience to feel that somehow you're giving up your secrets. And.

We'Ll talk and we'll talk a bit about the science because there is nothing, you know, particularly, particularly amazing about, you know, what sits behind it. But why did we build it? Why did we build it? We built it because in the first place, the experience of doing one of these tests is. Is kind of boring. I mean, they just take ages. Like 300 questions, and they all seem the same. And. And we were working for another company in America, my co founders and I, and we were playing with the notion of can we maintain the integrity of the test but shorten the length of it, and can we make the questions a little more engaging and not game like, but just more fun to do? So that was the first thing. And then the thing that I am on a crusade about is can we just make the report itself.

Speak the language that humans speak to each other instead of using highfaluting psychological terms, which there's no need to do, none of us can apply.

Well, none of us normal humans like myself could apply those because it doesn't make sense to me. Right.

Well, I'm a psychologist and I, you know, they don't make a lot of sense to me. And, and the other thing that was very frustrating is if you use different tests, every single one of these things has its own kind of internal language test. And so, you know, you might, if we're talking about the. The mbti, you know, you're an entj, and if you're using disc or something, you're a, I don't know, whatever Disk uses. But it's just like, you know, can we just cut through all that shit and make it much, much plainer? So that was. That was the. The two kind of strong, strong things. Plus the company that we were working for closed our little lab down and made the two young guys working with whom I was working.

Redundant. And I just felt terribly responsible. And really, you know, we started the company in order that they had some sort of ongoing employment.

Incredible.

Yeah, I love that.

And for those that are listening going, hey, what's your background? Why did you feel that you could start it? So literally, just before you and I were in the hallway with a former SAS soldier And we were just chatting about psychometric testing there and we realized pretty quickly that a lot of the testing that SAs have gone through has came from you. You've helped build it, you've helped deliver it. So you've got an extensive background across many industries, including military, sport, a lot. So where did that all come from? Where did you start out? With the organizational psychology?

Yeah, the long story.

So in respect to the sas, to be clear, the assessment that they have been using is a really good scient assessment from a company called Hogan. Excellent, excellent company. Great test.

And the work that I had done with army was around creating a leadership framework with two colleagues, a guy called Mark Hunter and Rachel Stott. So that work was really about.

Giving the New Zealand Defence Force a framework on which to think about leadership and build and develop leaders. So that was, that was at work, the psychometric stuff came about, because.

I've just, you know, I was trained as a clinical psychologist and there was a moment in my career as a younger clinical psychologist when sitting across from someone, I had this thought go through my head like, holy shit, I've got problems worse than you, pal. And as soon as I had that thought, there was that realization like, you know, man, something's happening to me. I just had the feeling that.

If I stayed seeing, you know, endless numbers of unhappy people, I was just going to continue to, you know, I didn't think it was going to make my life very rewarding. And, and if I'm having thoughts like, you know, my problems worse than yours, clearly this is not the game that I should be in. And I was more interested in groups anyway. And belatedly it, you know, at some advanced stage, I can't tell you why, but I kind of got interested in statistics, which just sounds stupid. I can't believe I said it.

Yeah. What made statistics interesting to you?

Nothing to me. It's just, it's beginning to understand.

You know, if you're familiar with the notion of a bell curve, right, normal distribution, you start thinking about that and start thinking about. So. So if we think, for example, about.

Leadership or management in organizations, and people are always looking for, oh, we want a class players, we're only interested in people who are really good. And you realize that there's just not many of those people.

So just understanding that there is such a thing as a kind of normal distribution or an average transforms the way you begin to think about human attributes and qualities.

So you've got lots of low. We've got some low performers, some high performers and lots of Good performers, you.

Know, I mean.

Everyone'S looking, you know, you know, in management schools, it's like, oh, you know, you should be like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos or It's always men. I don't know what that says or.

The patriarchy at play.

You know, you should, you should. These people are outliers and you got to understand that there aren't, there just aren't many people like that. And to think that it's, it's a beguiling notion to think that, you know, you could be the next Steve Jobs. I don't know, someone out there might be, will be, but the vast majority of us, it's just not going to happen, you know, and so I think it's much more. I became very interested in trying to understand the way in which, you know, human personality in particular. But any human attribute like intelligence or height or any of that stuff is, comes in a continuum. And once you understand that it's in a continuum, it really does change the way you think about human society. And.

Yeah, so tell me more about deeper signals. What's involved in it? What, what was the science behind that?

The science behind deep signals is the same as the science behind any modern personality tool.

And the, the shorthand for it is we talk about the big five personality factors. Scientifically, we can argue that there's slightly more. So the big five factors are extroversion, which everyone knows about, what we call emotional stability, which used to be called neuroticism. Do you worry on a range from do you worry to are you calm.

And relaxed in most situations? Extroversion. Are you extroverted at one end or do you tend to be more isolated or introverted?

We talk about agreeableness. So are you warm and friendly? You know, like you obviously are? You know, you're kind of a engaging person and you listen well versus people who are cold and somewhat blunt, which is more like me.

I have to disagree. You've been asked so far.

Well, we should talk about that. Right? Because, because you know, you're, you're natural, you kind of natural style. You can, you know, you can work around it and people make an effort. Like, who wants to be unpleasant and cold and blunt? But there's benefits that come from being like that. So we said extroversion. We talked about emotional stability. We talked about agreeableness, openness. So openness is the quality of being curious, being broad minded, being interested in novelty and new things at one end or, or somewhat pragmatic and real world. And don't bother me with your highfaluting ideas. And then the last one is what we call in deeper signals, disciplined or conscientiousness. So that's people who are organized and.

Like order and structure and like to follow the rules versus people who are somewhat loose and flexible and enjoy breaking the rules. So those big five factors are common across pretty much all human society. And it was in the late 1980s that people began to realize that this really was probably the fundamental structure of all human personality. We can argue whether there's actually six factors or some people break it down into more or fewer, but the common thread behind all of those is all human beings have various combinations of these five things. And that is what makes us the kind of, you know, weird and exciting people that we are.

And for those going, okay, we all have got those in different shapes and sizes on the spectrum, what benefit is doing deeper signals? What's that going to help me with as an individual? And then secondly, as a team or a group or an organization.

I think, you know, to answer that, we got to understand that people go through their lives. You know, you live your life from the inside out, right? You have your picture of who you are, and I mean, you're probably quite happy with it, but from time to time you're like, oh, I wish I was a bit more like this, or like that. But we don't tend to know ourselves terribly well. That varies. Again, on that spectrum, some people know themselves, but most of us, I think we have an image of what we like to be like, but we don't get the information to know. I'm, for example, me, I can be blunt and cold and rude because I'm unaware of it. I'm like a fish swimming in my own ocean inside my head. And so the value of a tool like deep Signals, like our core drivers assessment, is that it holds up a mirror and says, actually, this is how you're going to come across to other people. This is how you're going to show up in a team. And here are the good things about that and here are some of the things actually that come along with the way that you are that might cause problems in relationships.

This knowledge is crucial to get that knowledge as a human. I mean, in Northern Ireland, I never did any testing. I went to Canada, nothing. It was not until I was probably 30 that I did maybe two or three different tests with over in a couple of years. And that helped me a lot in terms of self awareness going, oh, you know, that thing's right, that's a weakness. But yeah, in some respects it's also a strength. Yeah. But there was things I had to work on. So with Deeper Signals, when someone does the assessment, which is very painless.

Thank you.

Enjoyable.

Good. That's the, that was the design goal. Yeah.

Good. What can they do from there in terms of, hey, I want to get practical, I want to improve, or I want to become more aware. What's the next steps once they've done the assessment?

If you do the assessment, then instantly there's a report available to you online. If you want to print it out on paper, you can do that, but you can explore the results online and learn about what the good things are and what some of the negative things are about, about that assessment. And inside the Deep Signals platform, you can, you can go, I really want to dive deeper into this and understand how I'm going to show up in a team. So there's a little tab that shows you that, where you can, you can explore kind of development journeys which are built in and anyone can do them as part of the report. And if you do it with an organization, the organization probably you can set goals and go, I would like to tweak this part of myself. And inside the, Inside the report, you just stay inside the report. It can lead you on a kind of development journey that we call Dynamo.

I love it.

Yeah.

And I look at this and it's great for leaders, it's great for salespeople, communicators. All people within an organization can benefit from this. Even people in Antarctica sitting through a winter. Especially people like that.

Well, kind of. Especially, you know, it's dark, right. And you're all crowded together and there's not much of an outside that you can, you can go into. So. Yeah, the potential for Horror House is huge down there, isn't it?

100%. Yeah. It's like the most isolated place that and I think going to space, those are the two kind of equals. So this is a truly global company. You've got people from all over the world using this. What's something you're really proud of? Is there an organization that comes to mind? We like, we worked with this organization and we've seen some really good results.

Yeah, I think of many, but there's one here in New Zealand.

So Kinetics, which is part of Orion, which is the lines company for the central part of the south island, and Kinetics have built Deep Signals into both the kind of onboard hiring, recruitment side of things and their kind of development for leaders and managers. But they've customized.

The reports that they get with their own language and framework. Right. So they have a very sound kind of leadership model which is built right in. They use that as part of.

Bringing on board apprentices. And the big concern is, you know, you bring apprentices on for a three year period. It's an expensive process for the company. And if you lose apprentices because they don't work out, they're not suited to the role, you know, to the, to the job, then, then it's very costly and it's a missed opportunity because some other young person, you know, who was going to make it wasn't there. So they applied deep signals to that and found that they cut their kind of attrition rate for these apprentices by a third or more. You need to talk to.

That's very significant.

Mark Lewis.

Yeah. Wow.

Mark Lewis is the GM who's brought that all in and made that change. Yeah.

That's amazing. And so when we're talking about that, that kind of extent, that's for some companies, hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes even millions.

Yeah, 100%.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah, it's amazing. And when people are going, hey, why should I use that? Instead of. And they name the other three or four that they've used in the past, what would you say they should consider?

They should consider the fact that any New Zealand company that this is partly made out of Aotearoa support local. Yeah, 100% they should. You know, it's cheaper. I mean we. With technology, I mean, it's just bits and bytes. Right. So have we made it? We got to support the platform, but there's no reason that you should be paying $1,000, $800 or something for some of these assessments. It's just, you know, you don't need to pay that much money. So we try and, you know, our original positioning was we wanted to democratize awareness and insight to help people learn. And that's still part of our mission. So how can we make this as cheap as we possibly can and still keep a company going?

Yeah, you're doing a great job of that. For anybody that's interested, that's listening or watching, I'm going to put a link where they can learn more about deeper signals and if anybody wants to explore doing it, then get in touch with us. And wherever in the world you are, we can, we can get them hooked up. Also, psychology of teams, you're deeply learned in that. What would you say if you looked at a dysfunctional team? What does the psychology of a dysfunctional team look like.

The psychology of a dysfunctional team looks a lot like the French team. I don't know if you remember when the football World cup was on in South Africa.

So when they were, they used the vuvuzelas. It's the vuvuzela moment. This is going back a few years because I'm old, but the French team had an utter meltdown and one, I think the star player, Dominic Dominique, I try to remember, got sent home because he either struck or fought with the coach. The other players struck, they walked off the pitch, sat on a bus until they demanded the removal of the coach.

They, they played out the World cup, you know, came last.

This is France on the world class team.

A world class team. Yeah. You know, finished bottom of the table, went home and were just reviled. I mean that is a good example of a, of a bad team in.

Action and on the opposite side of that, a really high performing team. When you look at the psychology of a high performing team operates, what do you see?

Well, if you think about, you know, I think so the French team, clearly it was something to do with personalities. Right. People did not get on. The coach did a bad job of forming a relationship with the players to the extent that they trusted and believed that that person could add value to them. And.

And that's essential. You know, you got to have a belief in the competence of your colleagues. If your colleagues aren't competent, then it's really hard to trust them because you just, you know, you were talking to someone from the sas. The reason that those, those that the SAS train all the time with live rounds is so that in the heat of battle, you know, that the guy next to you is going to do their job because they've done it a thousand times. They've just rehearsed and rehearsed.

A high performing team, I think starts actually not with personalities. I think it starts with a really good understanding of what we're here to do and a clear understanding of what you're going to do and what I'm going to do and how we have to work together. You know, you just got to get those three elements right. You know, what are we here to do, who are we going to do it with and how are we going to do it. And that goes, I think that trumps, you know, all the dynamics, the team dynamics stuff. You got to get those basics absolutely right.

It makes sense. Get that right, get the foundation right before you start jumping into individuals, personalities and so forth.

In my game, you know, there's a lot of waffly shit, right? With team building and.

Lots and lots of, you know, it's all about trust and it's all about relationships and it's like, it's just not, you know, I think that trust comes from you learn to trust your colleagues when you are successful together.

Yeah.

Otherwise it's just like, well, you know, I mean, I can tell you I trust you, but if you continually screw up on the job, no matter what, you know where you are, it's really hard to trust you. I might like you, but you know, I just can't rely on you. So yeah, I just sometimes think we over index on all the human relations stuff. And I say that as someone who is clearly all about human relations. But you just got to get the hard foundations right first.

I have to agree. So you can do all the soft stuff, which is really important stuff in terms of empathy and love and trust. That's great, all that stuff. But if you don't trust the person beside you to do their damn job, it doesn't matter how much you love them, how much empathy you have.

Irrelevant. Right?

Yeah. No respect for them, no trust. And so getting clear on common goal. End game, we're headed there. This is how we're going to get there. Here's who we're going there with. Okay, great. Can you do your job? Okay, get off the bus, find another bus or another seat on the bus.

Or make sure, give people really clear feedback. One of the other things about what's wrong with underperforming teams is people often don't know that they're underperforming or the team doesn't know that it's underperforming. They got to get really clear signals. So feedback has to be built into that. So good teams will stop and review their performance like any crack sports team. Review the tapes after every game. And you got to look at all the, ah, shit, I really screwed up. You know, you have to look at that and with the help of your colleagues, it's, you know, the concept of psychological safety from Amy Edmondson at Harvard. People misunderstand that as being nice, but it's, it's not. She, she is all about, you know, psychological safety is the ability to make a mistake and learn from it. And you know, you have to look at it. You got to have an environment where you don't get punished for it, but you got to learn from it.

Yeah, I was looking, I was earlier looking at an incident where a high performing New Zealand athlete cyclist took her own life. And yeah, there's A inquest and some of the findings suggested that it was a very unsafe environment for her well being and that, you know, mistakes, et cetera, people didn't feel that they could be safe enough to make mistakes. So how important is it that we get the psychological safety right? I mean, in this instance, if it was connected, it's life and death.

Life and death, 100%. Yeah. I think, you know, I mean, it's not an exaggeration to say, you know, even in ordinary work, like, you know, work in an accountant's office or you work in a, you know, you work on a construction site or it's still life and death, you know this. You only have one life that we know of and you spend a third of it at work or more, you know, because the other third, you're sleeping. So of your waking hours, most of it's at work. It has to be safe. It's just, you know, it just seems fundamental to me that people. One of my passions, I just think that we are predominantly, we put up too much with bad leadership and people don't have good working experiences that they deserve. They should. There's no excuse for it. It's like we have the technology, we know all we need to know.

But yeah, many firms just don't take it seriously and don't put the effort in.

Agreed. Yeah, it seems like hard work, but actually there's a big cost and consequence to not doing that hard work.

Yeah. I think it looks like an expense actually you. Than an investment rather than an investment. Yeah, yeah.

I look at stuff like deeper signals and I go, the, that's not a cost, that's not a. There's no, no cost to the business. There's an ROI on that investment.

Yeah.

Like it's a big difference in mindset.

Right.

You spend a bit of time in the States, New York.

Putting up with bad leadership. Let's talk about that for a second. In terms of the states, when you look at what happens there at a political level, different people have got different opinions on good and bad leadership.

The incoming president at this point, President Trump, some people love him, some people loathe him.

I thought it was pretty much 50. 50, right?

Pretty much is. It's quite divisive. If you sat down with him like this, having a yarn, what's the one question you would ask him to ponder in terms of being the best possible leader he could be?

Well, I don't think he'd listen for a start, you know, like, why is he there? I think that, you know, Trump picked Up on. He's an angry man, and he has a grievance. And I think that he hit the zeitgeist.

Right.

He just got the. He got the emotional tone of America. Right. And Kamala Harris did not. There's a whole lot of other stuff, of course, but I think that young men especially look to him at a time when young men are struggling.

You know, like, girls do better at school now than boys.

Economic, kind of. The chances of economic success for them to be more successful than their parents are not. It's not going to happen. They won't be. And so I think they look at Trump, and it is human nature in times of strife and conflict and uncertainty that we look to a strong leader. And that's what Trump delivered. I'm going to fix this.

Great.

Kamala Harris talked about joy, but not much kind of practical stuff, and Trump says, I will fix it. It's like, great. That's who we need. So what question would I ask him to prompt some introspection? I mean, the man doesn't. I don't think he introspects at all. It doesn't stop him being effective, though, does it?

Yeah. And you look at some of the things he has done and say, hey, that was. That was intelligent. That was successful. I mean, there's a lot of things you would say was highly destructive.

But I agree, they come in a package. Right. So, you know, one of the things that we talk about is. Is extreme. So you have a personality. So what would be a good example for me, I am. In deeper signals terms, I am what we call passionate, which means I have low emotional stability, which means that I tend to worry. I get angsty. I think about how I come across probably way too much, and I get nervous. In situations like podcasting with the. You know, at its best, that can drive high performance, because I really want to do well, and I'm going to put in the extra effort, and I want. You know, I want to. I want to make. Create a good impression. So I think about that, how I come across, and I'm open to feedback. They're all good. And the downside is that.

The same behaviors can lead into too much anxiety and too much worry, and it detracts from performance. So it's why, again, knowing yourself and understanding.

Strengths and weaknesses from the same kind of makeup is really important. Someone like Trump is not normal, though, so we shouldn't think, you know, that. He is. He is. He's clearly narcissistic, like, clinically, pathologically, narcissistic.

Yeah, you can see it. It's. It's all there. Yeah. I was chatting with one of Australia's leading psychologists around burnout. And we went quite deep on that. That was a Dr. Gordon Parker. And I said, look, it sounds like we can all get burnout. Like we're all on a spectrum, we can all get. It went wrong. I went, what do you mean, wrong? He went, there's one exception. Sociopaths. So deeper signals. Are there any exceptions in terms of people that might not get data that's relevant or accurate, if they're sociopathic or anything like that?

We are not a clinical test. Right. And sociopath is a clinical term, so we don't go there.

That said.

One of the scales that we have is.

The Emotional Stability Scale. So you can be stable or passionate. If you get a super high score on stable, then you tend to be immune from thinking much about how you are in the world. You tend not to get a lot of negative emotion. So, you know, you tend not to worry, which is great. You know, you're calm, stable, even tempered in most situations. But the potential downside of that is that you don't notice when other people are stressed. You overlook their needs and concerns because you feel fine. So in a leader, it's really useful. It's a really useful attribute. But taken too far, then that would be a good example of someone who just doesn't pay attention to you. Combine the scales, too. So if you're high, if high, stable, and you are candid, which is the scale of agreeableness, Are you warm on the one hand or cold? And so if you don't notice people's feelings, if you're cold and. And you're kind of calm, then that's probably close to being sociopathic.

Yeah, Quite concerning.

Quick. A little concerning. So, you know, look in your own profile. What are you. What's yours?

So I haven't actually done it. Oh, no.

Oh, my God.

You know, I haven't. I want to set aside time in December. I can go deep on it.

Are we going to go. Are we going to do it on air? Do you want a debrief on here?

I would love that, 100%. Would you be up for that? Yeah. Completely done? Yeah, No, I would love to do that.

Okay.

Yeah. Because I've done lots of different tests. I'm certified in one of them that I've used for a while, but I find a lot of.

Restrictions to what is quite almost outdated, and they don't seem to be wanting to update their software. And how the usability, these little things matter to me in terms of friction. And I find that clients don't want to use this technology of the one that I've been using. And that's why when I seen Deeper Signals and the Antarctic program talked about it, I was like, I want to be right in there. So I started playing around with it.

And did, did you see the. Oh, sorry, I'm going to start doing the whole kind of. But, but we get geeky about this stuff in house. So we've just been playing with generative AI and we've got our, our beta beta team coach. So you can take the profile of the whole team, like the makeup personalities of all the players on the team and talk to this, this AI inside the app and say, you know, James and David aren't getting on. What can I do as a leader? We can say, oh, the team seemed really demotivated. What should I do? And, and we're pretty impressed with the way that the thing is responding.

So, you know, I can't wait to explore that. I've been deep with a company in the US actually been deep for the last six, seven months exploring a digital clone. And it sounds quite like egotistical really, but essentially, if people want to work with me, I'm like one person. I can't work with more than a handful of people at once. Right. So obviously I've spoken a lot of lots of podcasts individually, but also great interviews. So this clone is almost like a brain, essentially, has brought it all in and it's got two and a half million data points in there over the last seven years. And Dave, it's mind blowing. I've had clients go and I'm like, pretend it's a one to one session, ask it the questions and the profanities that come out of the gym. This is unbelievable. It's like literally you. I said, well, it's not, but it's quite incredible technology and there's certain things we still got to work on there. But the fact that you are at that like leading edge says a lot about deeper signals. Wanting to be on the forefront, not relying on past success, not relying on. That's good enough. Good enough doesn't seem to be good enough at Deeper Signals. Like you want to be world class.

Yeah, of course we do. Yeah. Well, we think we are. And, and because I'm really tense and anxious and worried as some of my co founders, we're always panicking that we're not. And so. Yeah, on your toes, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. The digital. The digital clone thing's super interesting. Right. The idea of a digital twin where there is no reason, I think, that you couldn't. We couldn't tweak that and say, let's make James even nicer. You know, if we turn that niceness knob up, what would it be like? And then we should be able to go, well, what's the gap? And what do you have to do if you want to be from this sort of James to that sort of James? There's no reason that I couldn't print out a kind of program or a change program for you.

What I've tried with this clone, you can upload any of your profile assessments in PDF or whatever file. Right, right. And it reads them and then I can say, hey, so based on what you've learned about me, what are my weaknesses? Based on what you've learned about me, I just had a disagreement with my partner and we have differing ideas. How do you think I should approach it? Here's her profile. You know, how should I have the conversation? It's fascinating. So I'm excited to do Deeper Signals and then upload that into my personal cloud completely.

I'd love for you to put us in touch with those people. That sounds fascinating.

I will. Yeah, yeah, they're in Palo Alto. I'll connect you directly.

Of course they're in Palo Alto. Where else would they be?

Yeah, totally. Now, I want to be mindful of your time. I know you're about to fly out. I'm just so grateful that we can sit down here in Auckland before you do fly out. But future, what's your vision for Deeper Signals? Where would you like to see it go?

So the generative AI thing is super interesting to us. I think that.

It is on the report side. So there are people playing around with uploading. You have to upload a whole bunch of stuff and it will produce.

A profile of who you are.

But we are shying away from doing that from a privacy perspective. We're not sure that that's the right way to go. But on the reporting side, the idea of having a report with which you can talk seems the most sensible next step. And to do things like this is to ask a question. It's like, oh, my God, I'm just not getting on with so and so. How can I. What. What is it about me that I should be able to change? What sort of tactics could I employ to form a better relationship with James? You know, that kind of stuff. So, yeah, we're going to we're going to be leaning into things like that.

I'm all over that. Yeah, I love it. So I work with some professional athletes and some professional sports teams and my God, I could imagine the coaching staff being able to have everyone go through deeper signals in the team, including management and go, okay, I'm trying to get the best out of this team.

Let me just ask you though, do you think that humans will be coached by AI at some point in the future?

In the sporting 100% it's happening, it's going to happen. I'm very confident that humans will want to be coached by AI. What do you think?

Well, tell me why you think they will want to. I think that's very interesting.

I think we are delayed. Gratification is not a thing nowadays for most humans. They want everything like that. And getting coaching with a real human, with the right coach, with maybe a world class expert, it takes time. It might be outside of a financial cost structure for an individual. People want access right away. So you know, one of the big players in North America there for many years, Anthony Robbins. Anthony Robbins. For someone to go, I want to be coached by Tony Go. 50 bucks a month you can access the Tony clone. I think people would be jumping at it. There still will be individuals who want proximity, who want intimacy, who want that one to one that won't go anywhere near a clone. And I've got clients who go, James, that was really cool. It's effing amazing. But I want to work with you.

Yeah.

And that's cool. And I think there's always going to be that.

I, I, I think, I think people do want human contact and they want connection with a, you know, a real person. I'm very curious. You know, one of the things that I think my, my understanding about AI and the way that it works at the moment, I, my, my own experience of, you know, working with Claude, for example, on writing, on my writing is I find it very flattening. It doesn't allow much in the way of creativity. And if you tell it to be creative, it's just stupid.

Yeah. It looks weird inside.

Yeah. It does sound like it's some weird American copywriter somewhere in there. Yeah. So I'm very interested in whether or not we will see that happen. I'm sure we will.

You know, I'm going to send you my clone for fun. Yeah. And you can call it and it just sounds like me and you just have a chat with me.

Get out of here.

And it's like it's mind Blowing. You can say, hey, James, who's the most interesting person you ever?

Who's raising your children? Really, James?

Well, my son rang. I said, give it a ring, Finn, See what you think. And it said, hey, dad, what should we do this weekend? And it said, finn, you and I like going to Hagley park on our bikes. I'm like, what the hell? So I've obviously said that somewhere in a solo cast or something. I've shared it with a friend and it's been recorded. Bit scary, but weird. But hopefully it won't raise my child. Have you.

What sort of conversations are you having with it?

I'm having conversations daily. Daily and about Trump and about thoughts and empathy and, you know, our Prime Minister and leadership and things I'm learning daily.

Have you learned anything from yourself, though, James?

Yeah, it's coming up with things that I would never think of and that baffles me. It's weird.

Are you you, James?

Well, right now I am. Or at least I'm pretending to be. No, Dave, I want to be mindful of your time because I know you've got to catch this flight, but I've got one last question. Question. If we were to fast forward many, many years into the future, you're highly aware it's your last day here on Earth, Someone very young that you care dearly about comes into the room and says, dave, how do I go about leading my life on purpose? What would you say?

Why? Why did you say, I need, like, a lifetime to think about that question. What would I say? How should I go about leading my life? I would say that, you know, that thing that.

Lots of old people say is, just worry less. It's all going to be okay. It will work out, you know, and. And, yeah, drink more, dance more, take more drugs, travel more.

You heard it here first, kids.

I love that. I really do. Thank you so much for sharing that, James.

Pleasure.

And I can't wait to go deeper with deeper signals. I'm really passionate about getting into it and what I can see, the tool itself and how it can transform not just my own life, but for my clients and the teams that I work with. I'm really excited. So thank you.

Great. Awesome. Thanks for the chance to talk.

Absolute pleasure. Yeah. Cheers.

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