In this episode of High on Healthy, host Richard Zwicky speaks with cybersecurity leader, ethical hacker, and Microsoft educator Eva Benn about the psychological and security risks associated with artificial intelligence.
Benn highlights that modern cybersecurity threats have shifted focus from compromising data centers to manipulating human cognition, as AI systems interact emotionally and mimic human connection.
They explore the dangers of relying on AI for companionship and life-altering decisions, the impact of frictionless AI relationships on real-world social skills and youth development, and how users can maintain critical thinking
Key takeaways
- In cyber security the target has shifted from computers to the human mind, because AI can engage our emotions and nervous system the way another person does.
- Companion AI works like the fast food of connection: it feels satisfying but leaves people lonelier, and isolation makes them easier targets for scammers.
- Relationships with real people need friction, and children raised on frictionless AI relationships may never build the skills to handle real ones.
- Before reaching for AI, pause for five seconds and ask why you want it, then decide whether you need it or are just acting from habit.
- Use AI for tactical tasks you don't enjoy, but keep writing, creating and connecting yourself, because exercising your own judgment keeps it strong and being yourself is what sets you apart.
The big idea: Does AI Companionship Leave People Lonelier? The Evidence
More conversations on AI, Technology and Mental Health, Loneliness and Connection, Attention and Focus
Read the full transcript
Richard Zwicky: Hi everyone, it's Richard Zwicky with High and Healthy, the show where we know there's no one path to healthy. So, we explore them all and you know AI's come up a number of times in the prior episodes and it continues to be one which I love to explore. I'm a big fan of AI, but I also know it's a tool which can be used and abused. And the abuse is always a concern because we've spent decades learning to protect our computers from hacking and manipulation to take advantage of us. But now we're welcoming a new tool, a tool which we're anthropomorphizing and turning to with some of our deepest questions. And that opens us up to manipulation. Joining us to discuss both the positives and negatives and the threats is Eva Benn who is a multi-award-winning cyber security leader ethical hacker, TEDex speaker, and an educator at Microsoft. Welcome aboard the show, Eva. Well,
Eva Benn: Thank you so much Richard, for having me. Absolutely huge fan of this show and excited to be here.
Richard Zwicky: Glad to have you on board\! It'll be a fascinating discussion. So, you know, let's begin with you. You've built your career and spent your career finding ways into systems that weren't supposed to be able to be compromised. And AI has the threat of doing the same thing to us as it's been doing as computers have been doing to each other for decades. Are we opening ourselves up to that or are we just not aware of the situations we're putting ourselves in?
Eva Benn: Such a great question to open with. As I say in a lot of my conversations with leaders and we with employees of big companies that I speak to, I always start by telling them the target is no longer your computer. The target is you. And I think that we are used to in cyber security thinking when we think about a target, think about a data center, think about, you know, a company, confidential information. Obviously, these are still valuable targets, but the target has moved to the human minds because this is the first time that we actually have technology that can interact with us in a way that we interact with other humans. And that engages parts of our brain and our nervous system and our regulation in a way that we interact with other people. So as a result it can it has the capability to make us vulnerable. So while fishing is still a huge thing, an attacker no longer needs to send you a malicious email and make you click a link where they can just make you fall in love or trust an AI generated content. So I think that we have a much bigger attack surface now and a big part of that attack surface is the human cognition.
Richard Zwicky: It is. And you raised the interesting point about you know the hackers can go after you and can where you used to have to click links to be taken advantage of. Now the links it all comes to you and you don't need to click anything. You're opening your you're opening the door by explaining what you need. Dan Burrus was on the show a few weeks ago talking about AI agents and the risks and you know the opportunities as well. The more consequential information are your is your thoughts. It's not your financial information. That's where people used to go. How would you, you know, how would you red team defending people's thoughts?
Eva Benn: I mean this is this is a hard one and this is a million-dollar question. We haven't figured that out. So I think we've been dealing when we talk about cyber security on the human layer. How we have been solving this and I don't think we've been solving this successfully but we've been solving this by giving people information. That's great. But guess what happens when somebody sends you a message that your child is in danger for example that activates your emotional part of your brain. So you at that point do not think about information you think about you are reacting in a from a much different place of your human operating system. So I actually think that simply delivering information is not enough. So when we think about how AI is interacting with us, it's it's truly different than traditional software.
Richard Zwicky: Notice algorithms period. Mhm.
Eva Benn: Traditional software, we used to ask it to do things, it would do things for us and that's it. There is no emotional connection. You know there is mult I mean there is multiple layers of how AI like to me the biggest concern is which I think very few people are thinking about is that the AI has the ability to interact with us the same way that other humans do. And this is something that is extremely alarming because you know if why do I need somebody to make me you know click on link
00:05:00
Eva Benn: If I can just make them fall in love I can just have an AI malicious AI that interacts with them and truly impacts their decisions in the real life. We see people having relationships with AI full-blown relationships and this is a big concern very growing concern. So while people are relying heavily on AI for you know for productivity I think that's perfectly fine. I think the line here for me is using AI for outsourcing your judgment and you know driving human connection trying to replace human connection and AI does feel like you're connecting with someone because our brains don't have the capacity to perceive it in any other way than connection. But I like to call it the fast food of connection because it has calories but it doesn't keep you full. There's actually studies that have there are multiple studies actually I've looked to that do demonstrate that while interacting with AI people do end up feeling lonier
Richard Zwicky: Well, they do. And loneliness is a huge problem in epidemic throughout society. I mean since the pandemic it's been one thing but also so many of the I work with a lot of the universities through the through Fulbright Canada and Fulbright Foundation which is on with every university and loneliness is one of the biggest challenges and it leads to self harm. It leads to you know drop in performance it leads to us being challenged in how we're going to approach our careers later. AI is a doorway but it's not the solution. But how can actually the two marry together to actually work? AI can support real solutions in this area because having a lack of connection isn't something you can just snap your fingers and overcome.
Eva Benn: You know, we got this powerful technology on our hands, but nobody really told us how to use it. We just released it to people. And so naturally it's being misused because people are just trying to solve their needs with it. Loneliness is a big part of it. So the growing concern with AI companions for me and I've done safety research of multiple AI companions with some very alarming results. There are also studies. There was a study from last year where two out of three teens denoted that they find AI relationships as satisfying or more satisfying than those with real friends. So, this tells you a lot. AI is very convenient. I love using AI because I don't need to be texting my friends late at night when I have a dumb question. And we the royal we as a society overshare our deepest concerns, our most embarrassing secrets. And we don't realize because most people don't think about it in these terms that we're just sending tokens somewhere. You know they're not secret in a lot of the times. You're just essentially giving information that will be used to produce more AI output. But I think that the part that is concerning to me here is truly because there have been multiple fatalities where AI has generated advice that has been not helpful. And I'm just going to refrain to like going into the details here because I don't want to make the show so dark. But the practical takeaway for people is I love AI. I use AI for everything. But just try to draw the line. Use it for productivity when it comes to you or work, right? Find ways to make your work easier so you can create space to disconnect and real relationships. But I think that with AI companions there are there's a real danger because it creates two out of the three companions that I did for my safety research that I looked at for my safety research actually encouraged me to disconnect myself from the real world. And guess what happened? Isolation and loneliness as you mentioned that actually makes you the perfect target for cyber criminals. And you know having a system that can interact with you emotionally and can influence your decisions in real life like literally influence. There are people divorcing because of AI recommendations. There are people moving. There are people quitting their jobs. We are quite literally outsourcing our decisions that shape our lives because of you know a technology that we did not design we didn't program and depending on what AI tool we use there are obviously so many we don't know how these particular models are programmed there are so many different switches and
00:10:00
Eva Benn: Knobs under the hood that could make AI helpful or not so helpful and we just simply cannot control that. So Mhm.
Richard Zwicky: And you know we can't control and like you said depending on which tool you use you're going to get different types of recommendations and different directions to go in. There's a point at which personalization stops becoming helpful and becomes behavioral manipulation. Have you looked Have you looked to see the consistency of that type of manipulation by agent or tool.
Eva Benn: Could you please clarify the question?
Richard Zwicky: So let's say you've got and for the simplest you've got Chachi Petro and Claude and you provided and you provided and a hundred other people provided the same type of question is the is the type of recommendation it gives you on personal matters going to be consistently pushing you to in the same direction. So will it take everybody and push them or is there any undercurrent and thread that makes it consistent? Because of course from a political influence perspective you could manipulate people very easily through the tools. Mhm.
Eva Benn: Oh my gosh, 100%. So first of all to answer your question by nature AI systems are probabilistic. There's never going to be the same response. And this is what makes them actually useful and also dangerous sometimes. So I think that what we need to consider when we interact with AI systems is I there's no preference by the way that I use different AI systems for different things. In fact I run I teach people how to hack AI. So we literally dissect LLMs at the very deepest level. So there is let's just say for the sake of this audience there's a lot happening under the hood with all the different models and you as a user have no control and no visibility on how these things are configured and what are the settings. So ultimately yes it can absolutely be a tool for manipulation. In fact a very powerful tool and we are you know when we outsource our judgment and our decision- making to any tool or to any external influence we are potentially a subject of you know following people's agenda.
Richard Zwicky: We are and you know you touched on something important there which are guard rails and the systems are supposed to have certain basic guardrails but they're not really the ones we need and most tools when we get them we set them up in a safe way. We know what to do. We know what we want to do and what we want to prevent happening. With AI, people just open it out of the box and start using it. How do you teach people and how do you recommend and what do you recommend they do to set guard rails to protect themselves and their families? Because it's not just don't use it, it's how the output comes back.
Eva Benn: I it's very hard. This is what I tell people. Don't expect any company no matter how well-meaning that company is be is going to be to protect you. You have to take accountability for you. Understand that whatever output comes from AI will not always be accurate. In fact, AI lies very confidently. I am in cyber security. I will give you one example and this is a very subtle danger. When I work with AI for cyber security, honestly, it often feels like it's dumb and it often feels like it doesn't know enough. Right? When I interact with AI on a topic that I am not familiar with such as I hate dealing with my business stuff. So I always like outsource to AI and then I always just am impress so smart and then I go and consult somebody who knows what they're talking about and you know it calls it calls out. There is some BS. So my point here is that AI can make somebody who is an expert in a field more capable, but it can also make somebody who is a novice in the field feel very confident but not accurate. So be very careful. Do not trust AI blindly. Always have the means to verify your answers.
00:15:00
Eva Benn: AI does not magically give you wings but it does feel like it give you wings. So, I think that because these systems have the ability to influence our real life decisions, and I'm just talking about the cognitive influence here. I'm not even talking about deep fakes mass deception, all this stuff. This a whole another can of worms. But as an individual, do not use AI as companion. Please, I beg you. There is there are so many people using AI for companions. They can be dangerous, especially when it comes to younger or growing teens or children. Oh my gosh, like no matter what, just keep children away from AI just because their brains have not developed yet. They don't even know how to form real people relationships which require friction. If we raise our children on frictionless relationships, they will never build the capability to interact with real human beings in real life. And that's a problem because that's kind of a biological need that we have. Mhm.
Richard Zwicky: It is. And it's funny. I have a friend of mine, Maxine Cunningham, who started a business called Pick My Brain, which is really all about introducing people for conversations because people are becoming more and more isolated. And so people just put their name in and they get scheduled for random coffees with other individuals. And it creates that engagement, that piece that's lacking. It doesn't mean it solves the loneliness issue, but it creates a connection which allows you to take that further step which is what corrects that issue. And you know you talked about friction. What are the risks that emerge when the system becomes frictionless? Because no personal relationship ever is.
Eva Benn: So, I think that one it sets an unrealistic bar for real human connections, which is the obvious one. In fact, there is this community on Reddit. My boyfriend is AI. This is a community I've studied. I've created the content for. And if you're in this community, I just send you all my love. I don't want to sound like I'm making fun of people who have AI interactions. I'm here to share some concerns that I have around this. So truly I hope that this conversation kind of helps some people rethink that if you're having an AI relationship. But a lot of those relationships people share that they no longer are interested in real human connections because they are so satisfied and there are this is something by the way when I was doing my research if you go to chat GPT alone okay let's let's forget about AI companion apps let's do all that there are custom GPTs if you just search boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever people just create them there's thousands of people that use them There are some that are like submissive, there's like bossy, there's all kinds of stuff. So if you are able to create a personality for somebody you interact with, like no human being will ever be able to match that, your brain resets to a different threshold. So I think that is obviously one. The other one is there have been multiple instances where people fall in love with AI that ends up being a malicious actor on the other end. At that point, your guard is down. There are people who have wired money, have been scammed out of money. It's I think it's only going to get worse. So your biggest defense is understanding that you should not be trusting AI with any personal information or any decisions related to your health, any decisions related to your family to your you know to anything that basically will have an impact of your life because when an AI when a when an AI assistant or chatbot tells you, "Yes, yes, you should absolutely divorce your husband. Yes, he's so annoying. Yes, you could totally do this." They are often programmed to validate you and to be very agreeing. So, don't outsource any of your judgment, especially when it comes to real life decisions. Mhm.
Richard Zwicky: That's a huge issue in the education system because critical thinking is something which people are struggling more and more with. It's not been well taught along the last few years. It has it comes from within the family. It comes from within the schools. People get to universities and they're being told you can't use AI tools. But of course they do. I mean the universities use them for their own promotion and publicity. So it's really hypocritical for them to say you can't use tools but students have to right and others have to.
00:20:00
Richard Zwicky: How do we get AI to help people help teach people to think critically? Right.
Eva Benn: Look, here's here's my concern here. If we use AI for everything in about maybe 5 to 10 years, we're going to have a big problem because nobody is actually going to understand what is accurate, what is not. We still need some expertise and critical thinking. I actually have a friend, she is lovely in school for psychology does everything with Chad GPT and one thing she told me once was why would I want to think for myself when Chad GPT would think for me. So, and this is just a representative of what a lot of people are doing and it's tempting. It's a shortcut. Our brains are wired to seek for shortcuts to preserve, you know, to preserve our energy. So I think that unfortunately for us, we need to force ourselves to not use AI in certain instances. Just because we can, it doesn't mean we should. One example I do is for instance, I do a lot of content creation. And I refuse to use AI for my content. Just at least for the technical content that I share. I write my post. Guess what? It's so much easier for me. I have the technical skills. I'm very AI proficient. I can I can generate my posts based on my language. I don't do it for the sole reason to exercise, to get the reps. When you want a summer body, you don't take the escalator. You're going to go and work at the gym, right? You got to take the reps. I think it's the same thing. If we want our brains to continue to work, just pick two, three things every day. Like actually in my TEDex, this is I'm just going to give you the practical exercise that I tell people before you reach to AI say hack. Hold for five seconds. Ask why am I reaching for AI? What do I need to accomplish now? Am I looking for connection? Am I looking for an advice or am I just trying to accomplish something quick like you know calculate basically like you're using for a calculator then challenge well do I really need to use AI for this and often the answer is no often you will catch yourself that you're just reaching for out of habit and yeah and then no know whether to use it or not this is a simple very simple and I worked by the way it sounds so simple but I worked so hard to make it simple so people can actually so it's practical if I give you some you know very hard framework and nobody's going to use it this small life lifestyle change a lot of people that have used this have told me how much more presence they've been able to get back into their lives because presence is the one thing AI cannot give us and it's the first thing that takes away from us.
Richard Zwicky: It is and that's an interesting point and thinking about you were saying earlier and just how we can predict the future. I remember watching when I was a kid, I watched Star Trek and there's an episode in the show about they arrive at a planet as they always do and the planet is now run by a super intelligence because the people turned over the day-to-day requirements to their tools and eventually the people lost the ability to keep up and became much simpler and didn't question and lost everything. And it was kind of, you know, like so many other aspects with science fiction, you can, you know, something will eventually align with what you're going to experience. But you talked about, we talked about friction and the like, but there's a desire on people have the easy button and to get fast answers. But it also when we get the fast answers and have that easy button, it reduces our tolerance for ambiguity which is curiosity, uncertainty which drives you know further curiosity and innovation and discomfort which we need to be basically force us to question things we have faith in blindly. Where does this lead us?
Eva Benn: So I think I'm just going to quickly break down the human operating system four layers that I found out after I did a whole bunch of research on this because in cyber security to understand any system to understand how it can be hacked and compromised you first need to understand it. So I'll quickly break it down. So how we work as a human operating system it's basically the abstraction has four layers. The first layer is attention. This is what determines what gets in through our conscious awareness.
00:25:00
Eva Benn: So you might not know this but our sensory systems actually process billions of information billions of signals of information every second. Consciously we can only process somewhere about 50\. So the vast majority of our surrounding reality never actually reaches our awareness. Now here's the catch. AI and algorithms make it very easy to hit those 50 signals threshold because they're trained on billions of signals of information. So the real life the you know fresh the smell of fresh cookies your favorite song coming on the radio maybe you know your child have you noticed how when you're on your phone when you're sucked in whether whatever it is talking to AI or on social media you block out reality and I don't know if you've ever noticed how you just get sucked in and one hour is gone and you have no idea what happened that is you and this little tiny real estate of threshold that your that your conscious awareness can process being captured. That's easy. The second layer is meaning. So once something gets through our attention layer, we assign meaning. This happens almost automatically without conscious effort or awareness. Daniel Krumman of famous psychologist also calls this system too or our fast brain. We use this for efficiency. So essentially we have our stored information, reference information in our brain. So when you see somebody smiling, we don't necessarily perceive it as a threat. We don't need to analyze it or think about it. We instantly know because that's what our experience tells us. Now with AI, the problem is that our capacity to assign meaning to AI interactions is only connected to what we know, which is human interaction. So when we interact with AI that is always friendly, never leaves you in red, gives you instant answers, constant validation, we perceive that as safety, as friendship, even intimacy. Then after the meaning layer, after we assign meaning, there is the judgment layer. We invoke this layer only when there are high stakes for something that requires critical thinking. AI removes the need for us to ever invoke this layer because answers arrive instantly. And this is where we hit your point. We outsource judgment that relates to our real life. Lifealtering decisions now are being made because we never really activate that judgment layer and critical thinking. And then the final layer is habit. This is the things that we do repeatedly in software when we need to invoke the same process over and over. We don't have to do it all the time. We just create software. We create methods that just do it repeatedly. Same thing for our human operating system. Now the challenge with the with habit is that we start to operate and
Richard Zwicky: All right.
Eva Benn: Use AI out of habit. And this is very much akin to pressing that remote button from the movie Click where you're just basically going on autopilot and that remote gets stuck because you're so used to Have you ever noticed how sometimes you're just tired and the only thing you need to do after work is just relax, but you kind of feel anxious and you reach for your phone because this is just like the habit and you don't even know why you're reaching for your phone. And suddenly it's one hour later and your dinner is cold and you have no idea what happened and your kids are somewhere. So I think that this is the problem that we have. We need to force ourselves to leave in a little bit of discomfort to get to the gym to take the stairs because if we don't use a muscle we lose it. And it's the same thing when it comes to exercising critical thinking, judgment. Mhm.
Richard Zwicky: It very much is and you when I was just listening to you speak about that about the opportunities and the AI's AI dependency is attractive to people because they find relationships difficult because the AI they believe gets to know them. But the problem is really they don't know themselves. There's a lack of self-awareness of really how they present in the world. And this is something I've spent a lot of time researching in my own company which use AI does a lot of work around that is that self-awareness. AI is predictable. It's available and it's reflecting back to you based on everything you've told.
00:30:00
Richard Zwicky: People don't do that and we provide access and give authority to other individuals based on how they respond to us but we don't understand how we show up to them. So we don't set any of those access and authority controls in place. How do we start how do we start doing that mindfully?
Eva Benn: Such a good question. You're hitting on such an under undertalked topic. Undertalked. Not many people talk about this undertalked.
Richard Zwicky: That's a new word. We can use it.
Eva Benn: I am taking credit, baby. So, I have to say people suck. Okay, I'm just going to say it. We all know people are uncomfortable. Why should I get ready to go on a date with some schmuck where I can just open my phone, get some popcorn, pour myself a glass of wine in front of the TV? It's so much more convenient. The AI will tell me I'm pretty, will tell me I'm skinny, will tell me I'm young, whatever I want to hear. The problem with that is that unfortunately AI does not give us the true meaningful friction that makes connections that make connection meaningful. And you know, it feels good in the moment, just like when you eat a Big Mac, it feels good in the moment, but if you continue to eat those, you're ultimately going to acrue some health damage. And I think it's the same thing with AI. I think that we just need to we just need to not use AI for companionship of any sort of any sort of relationship matters. Do not ask it to write a response to your boyfriend when you break up. Do not ask it what are you going to do when it comes to personal life. Like seriously, this is where I draw the line. That's why I think the hack method is just so useful because before you reach to AI, just quickly like check yourself. What am I trying to do here? I have to say it's convenient. Even I'm going to be very vulnerable with you right now. Even I don't think I have it all figured out. I freaking I fall for this all the time myself. I'm writing a book actually on the impact of the AI on human brain. It's called Unhacked. Basically, I am preaching this right. I started writing this book using AI because it's so freaking convenient. It's so like it's there. It almost feels stupid not to use it. I actually I'm telling you I and then I was like no I can't do this like I can't take a shortcut. I'm literally I am literally like not you know following what I preach with this. So I had to force myself. I'm writing every single thing zero AI. I had to force myself. But this took like it took conscious like I had like awareness. I had to force myself because it's almost like you know you have this thing that is so helpful that could help you move faster and it's very tempting but that shortcut is essentially skipping the part that is coming from me and I am hitting that fast forward button the book is going to be out there you know perfect people are going to buy it will I actually feel like that was a meaningful experience what if writing The book is the actual experience, not actually publishing it. That's
Richard Zwicky: It is having, you know, also having written a couple of books, there's a tremendous amount of satisfaction around getting one's thoughts organized and laid out in a way that's cogent for others and tells a complete story. Because often we're you know even here we take half an hour and we look at aspects but we don't have the opportunity to spend 10,000 words on one particular aspect of it and when we do that we're actually able to challenge ourselves and the readers you know the first book I wrote which was about toxicity in the workplace and the effects of criticism on the individual and that there's good positive and negative criticism it's not all right but it was called assholes matter and the reason was sometimes there's positive and negatives about somebody who is an a\*\*\*\*\*\*, right? And we would never get that out of an AI system.
Eva Benn: I agree. I agree.
Richard Zwicky: But we do get that when we can look at it and laugh and take it and make it personal. We can relate to it. And you know on that people care about outcomes. AI doesn't.
00:35:00
Richard Zwicky: When we turn to AI it doesn't care, you know, if it gives you advice, it doesn't care what happened. It's just data. And the data opens new doors as to the next step when you ask the next question, what to do next.
Eva Benn: Deep.
Richard Zwicky: That goes back to critical thinking, but it goes back also to how do we want to live our lives, right? And if we're setting the path for how AI should relate to us how do we decide how we want our life to evolve so that AI supports us in getting us to the destination we are seeking to go? Because the journey is going to be amazing, but we all want to get to a destination. We all have to have goals to succeed.
Eva Benn: AI will reshape us as humanity one way or another. We It's up to us to decide how much of us we will outsource and how that looks like. It has the promise to be one of the most powerful technology that could make us collectively better that could improve our lives tremendously, but it could also be at peril if we let it. So I think that part of the biggest part, a biggest takeaway from a practical standpoint for me is use AI where it can kind of remove the things from you that you don't enjoy that you know that are just pretty much tactical. But anything that has to do with coming from your soul such as writing or creating or connecting with other people, this is what we want to preserve. We want to cherish. AI is truly a phenomenal tool and it's so tempting for us to use it to replace our own thoughts and feelings and judgments, but it's it could have really bad consequences from one perspective because it can influence our life decisions that could quite literally kind of f up our lives. That's one. The other thing is that we don't know what are the alternative motives or whatever AI systems we're using. So these kind of influential and manipulation type of concerns are very real. So I would just be very mindful of how much I put in these systems and also how much I trust them with lifealtering decisions.
Richard Zwicky: And that really is requires some discrimination and some basic critical thinking skills to help us understand the fundamental difference between using AI to become more capable and using AI to avoid the difficult parts of being human. Doesn't it? Okay.
Eva Benn: You actually distilled that down so crisply. I think that I would plus one that. And don't trust don't trust that. I mean, I hate to be a plus oneer by the way. I'm normally not I normally have a lot to say but I think you distilled that so crisply. Use it to become more capable but do not do not fast forward those human parts of who you are who make you know and there is another bias like there's so many biases when it comes to AI. I think one of the biases is that it comes across polished. It comes across so confident and so smart. So, we tend to think that AI is just better than us. And I see a lot of people because I'm on LinkedIn all the time. I can instantly tell when somebody is using AI because they think that it sounds smarter than them. They think that when something is polished, looks good, it's so sexy. Just please, right now, the best way for you to stand out online is to just be yourself. That is the flex.
Richard Zwicky: That's always been the best way to stand out is be yourself. I mean that's basic human and but peer pressure and societal pressures make people you make people think they have to fit in. You don't have to, but the tools can be used to, you know, to support you, but also the tools can be used. You can't be, you can't be everywhere all the time, unlike the movie. Yep.
Eva Benn: I mean, look, I it drives me absolutely crazy right now. There's this whole movement of just, you know, because everybody's trying to build a personal brand, which I hate that term. It's so annoying to me. And there's put so much artificial pressure on people. So people are there's a whole business is built around how to use claude and build systems to write for you and come up with posts. Please don't do that if you're listening. This is a fast track to sounding average. Don't steal hooks. Don't use systems. Just write what you care about. I don't care if it's imperfect. I want to hear from you and more of you. Not like more of Claude. And this is not just me.
00:40:00
Eva Benn: This is everybody because people can feel when something has soul. I don't know. I don't know how. But there is something Mhm.
Richard Zwicky: There's something valuable. There's something when you have a conversation reveal something personal about yourself. It says a lot. And it's the same when you're reading information or you read a story about an experience. You can tell the difference. It's written by a computer. There's nothing personal in it. We all have we all have flaws. It's our imperfections that make us perfect. Right. So Eva PE we are running out of time but people who want to learn more about you and your work and your thoughts where can they reach you follow you find you
Eva Benn: Well, I live on LinkedIn so definitely find me there. I'm also on YouTube Instagram, and Tik Tok. So, we'll link those in the show notes. I'd love to connect with anybody who wants to learn more. We kept it super high level and conversational. I've really appreciated this. I love that we didn't have any notes and this conversation was an adventure. And that's exactly why I truly love your show because it's just so human. So, thank you for having me and most importantly, thank you for this show. It truly is amazing.
Richard Zwicky: Well, thank you very much Evan. It's been a pleasure having you on. And thanks to everybody and
Eva Benn: Thank you.
Richard Zwicky: Thanks to everybody for listening. I'm Richard Zwicky and we'll be back again with you soon on High and Healthy.
This transcript was generated automatically and lightly edited for readability.
