Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Welcome back to GenShift. If you missed part one, hit pause and go back, because this one picks up right where we left off with Scott Zimmer. If you joined us for part one, welcome back. We're so glad you're here. Here's a quick recap of the first part of our discussion. We talked about the average trap, how AI tends to hand you the polished, middle-of-the-road answer, and why that answer can feel like magic until you ask it something you actually know a lot about.

We got into why Scott's betting on millennials to figure out AI the best, because they're sitting right between real-world experience and the drive to experiment. And we closed on that idea of the human ear, the instinct some of us have built for spotting when something wasn't written by a person, and whether that instinct can be taught or if it has to be earned the slow way.

That's exactly where we're headed today. Scott and I get into what it actually takes to build something that AI can't fake, why he thinks curated knowledge beats open-ended AI answers, and what all of this means for anyone trying to actually trust what they're reading.

Let's get into it.

Scott Zimmer: We humans don't even realize the pattern that exists when something is written by AI. It's being written about more and more. Besides just the words, there's just a tone that AI has.

You see it immediately when you read a tone that is human. You're like, "Whoa, this is refreshing. I've just read five papers, and this one I can tell was handwritten." 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Totally. 

Scott Zimmer: Which tells you the other four weren't. And and then maybe the sixth one is the one that might have that repeated paragraph mistake, and you're like, "Man" or famously, AI puts in comments for the user. "After this paragraph, you may wanna go deep into the second bullet." And that instructions remains in the paper that gets turned in, and you're like- ... "They didn't know to remove that?" 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Scott Zimmer: It's still happening.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: 'Cause they're probably moving so fast, they're not paying attention and yeah. I know. ' Cause we probably all would've done it when we were that age if it was accessible to us, right? It's kinda normal human behavior to take shortcuts.

Scott Zimmer: So now we are in a really weird mode, though, with language and knowledge fields, where I'd still say it's just like the calculator.

The fact that I can use the plastic calculator to do long division, does that affect my ability to do long division with a pencil and an eraser? Over time, yeah. It kinda does. Yeah.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Scott Zimmer: And so when people are using LLMs to produce paragraphs for them, and they're editing it so the best way to do it is you still really dive in and change it to your voice or maybe you ask it to write a draft and now you're inspired to write your own.

There's some ways, but everyone's working through that because the shortcut's just too tempting. Yeah. It's just too tempting. So are we gonna get weaker and weaker at writing? It's probably inevitable. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yep. 

Scott Zimmer: But then the people that are writing about history and these are the things I glom onto 'cause I think it's an interesting fact will someday say, " Yeah, but being really great at writing wasn't that important anyway.

It was slow... it did this that. We've now elevated above that, and, and maybe we're focused on what we say, and telling stories with verbal versus written." I don't know. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Back to passing on through oral, right? 

Scott Zimmer: Yeah. Exactly.

Exactly. Or song. Did you hear that factoid that the stories like the Odyssey were passed on via song over tradition over years?

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Makes total sense.

Scott Zimmer: It makes total sense, and I think we've all heard that yeah, oral tradition, used to be, and then it was replaced by the written word.

And so being able to be an oral storyteller who could tell a week's worth of story four hours a night for a week, that was a skill that is now gone, just the same as we're about to lose skills again in this next era but we just keep going on to whatever the next skill is.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: It's true, we do. We just keep moving forward, you're right.

Scott Zimmer: Yeah ... 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Some people feel like it's doomsday, "this is terrible, what's gonna happen?" And yeah, we're just moving through a new phase.

Scott Zimmer: I hope it's not. I hope it's not. We're all gonna live it together, it's pretty wild.

But there were a lot of historical moments where humankind thought it was doomsday.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah ... 

Scott Zimmer: In the past, and it wasn't. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Scott Zimmer: Things that are so far in the past that our generations don't even realize it. There's a lot written when the printing press was invented, it caused wars. So yeah, hopefully we don't get wars here. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Oh, let's hope not, please. We don't want that.

So tell us about recent trends you're watching in terms of the generations adopting AI.

Scott Zimmer: Yeah. There is something that's a little bit surprising or maybe it's obvious, but of course, when AI first launched the young were excited and the older were non-adopters. As the young were using it, they use it giving it a lot of confidence and believing the answers are gonna be right.

As they've started to learn, "Wait a minute, this thing isn't so right as I believed it was," and also as they're starting to see some of the potential job impact. But I really believe it's both factors, not just job. It's experience with AI. There is a decline in excitement in younger generations about using AI.

So it peaked already, and it's been declining for a while, and this was all written up in a Pew study that was out I think this summer. It's declining and turning towards fear of, hey, if the society starts to rely more and more on AI and doesn't know what I'm learning then it may not be something to be excited about after all.

So again, certainly part of that decline is attributed to the fear of job loss. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yep. 

Scott Zimmer: But part of it is also attributed to experience with it and realizing it's not as amazing as it was made out to be if you use it in the wrong ways. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yep. with Millennials and Gen Z?

Scott Zimmer: It is. Yeah, it's fascinating that it's excitement for younger generations peaked, and it's been declining steadily for a little while, which I might not have imagined. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: And I read something about that with Millennials. Yeah, just it shot up and then they were like, "Oh no."

So they're like your best quality control generation because they were all in and then they were pretty quick to discern oh, this isn't what I thought it was kind of thing. 

Scott Zimmer: Yeah, and also remember, though, Millennials are most likely the ones to be using- a limited version of AI at work that their work allows.

True. Maybe the one that Microsoft endorses, which is at the back of the pack as far as efficacy. So that might have something to do with it as well. But also, that learned experience part has something to do with it, where they see where it's wrong. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. So good.

What is one thing you never want AI to do for you?

Scott Zimmer: I don't know, replace a human relationship. 

Yeah. And I think there's a lot of worry about that.

Certainly there's some science fiction, the movie Her and some other stuff that's out there. But there's real concern and this may be generational concern, for people who are in younger generations and were introverts and just never learned to be comfortable, interacting with others when they interact with a sycophantic LLM and it says, " You're so smart.

I wish we could talk more." And then you just keep checking in with it, and it keeps reinforcing everything you say because that's what it's trained to do. I don't know that everyone would fall for that trap, but some people are falling for that. And maybe there's a good side of that coin.

Maybe some people need that, and that would give them hope and, brightness as long as there were guardrails on what the AI was doing. So maybe there's a good side of it. But for me personally, I just love my interactions with other humans. So yeah. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: And that shows.

So you mentioned your company a little bit, but tell us this company you launched, what does it do? How can people, find out about it, participate in it? 

Scott Zimmer: Yeah. Thanks. So the official name and even website is answersfrom.me, so answers from me. In the naming convention, you've got names out there like Calendly that tell you exactly what it does, and you've got other names like Verizon, that don't tell you what it does at all.

We chose an exactly what it does name. And basically we just support an expert who is sharing knowledge and has one of two challenges that we can help them overcome. The first is they're sharing knowledge and they wish they could share it with a broader audience. So they wish they could expand their reach, they wish they could have more engagement with more people over the topic that they're an expert in.

And the other kind of pain point or challenge that they might wrestle with is they're sharing knowledge and they are inundated by questions, often repeat questions, that weigh them down and block their ability to have the more meaningful conversations that they wish they could have, or maybe even weigh them down from having a personal life or something like that.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah.

Scott Zimmer: An example of that would be some professors but the assistant to the principal at a school, might say, I have all the knowledge of what's going on at this school, and every day I get 600 new emails and I can't keep up. If I could have an AI twin that could answer those basic emails for people, they would get the answer immediately, and I would be here to solve bigger, more important problems for the school."

So that's a example of kind of a knowledge bottleneck, if you will. And a different example of someone who may be sharing their knowledge and looking to share it more broadly, they may say, "Hey, I've... I do advising and I'll meet with people," or, "I've written a book." But, live me is limited and book me was written for a general audience.

So anybody that wants something in between, which is access to me when they need it or an answer to a question that is specific to me, not generalized like might be in a book or- Yeah ... a newsletter that's a whole frontier that we love, that we're just geeking out on. We just see a future where every expert with knowledge to share has that middle layer filled in, and anyone who's trying to learn from them could read the book.

Those will still exist, and they'll be important because it's an organization of knowledge that's really important, thoughtfully organized. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Scott Zimmer: Or could book the person live, and that'll be super important. But the in between is it's 11:00 at night, I have three questions. I really wish I had access to Scott.

Or in my case, I'm about to grill a burger, I really wish I had access to Bobby Flay. Who's my grilling god. And on my funny example with that one we actually do have a a content creator from Instagram who is a bit of a grilling celebrity. And doesn't need to be Bobby Flay.

He has his own following of 400,000 people on Instagram. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Oh, that's good. Yeah. 

Scott Zimmer: And he's on our platform to serve his following, if you will. And so I jump on and I'm like, " I'm thinking of seasoning burgers tonight. I've never done it before. What should I do?" And I don't have to call him and bother him.

Maybe he's spending time with his family, right? Or whatever he's doing. I don't have to read his book and page through for the section that talks about burgers. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Scott Zimmer: I just go straight for the natural language question. And because we're RAG, remember, it could have said, "Sorry, I don't have any information on burgers."

But it said, "Burgers? That's a great idea. Yes, I know just the trick." And it gave me a killer custom recipe. I told it how many burgers I was doing. And then I said, at the last second I said, "So should I put all those seasonings in the burger or on the outside only?" Which to me, i've always wondered that. He said "Don't put it in the burger because salt is one of the seasonings, and if you put it in the burger, it's gonna dry the burger out and it's gonna crumble on your grill." So yeah. Then I went and I asked Claude this whole set of things with my burgers on the grill.

I was following the first instructions. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Scott Zimmer: And I was like let me just see what Claude says." At first blush I was disappointed to learn that Claude had a great answer. So I was wondering maybe, learning from this person on our platform and their specific view isn't gonna help that much.

Claude said, "Oh, these seasonings would be perfect." And then I said, "Claude, do I put it inside or outside, or what?" Claude said, " Either one would be perfect. In fact, if you're still mixing it, put it all inside." And I was like, "Aha, there's that average." 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yes. 

Scott Zimmer: There's that generalization where it's not necessarily right, and it's guessing the right answer because it has no learned experience like my grilling expert has learned experience.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yes. Yeah.

Scott Zimmer: That's the fun example. So now, we're really early in the curve. Our experts that are on our platform are early adopters that are feeling those pains I was describing. But they're having a blast. They're sharing it with their audience and saying, "Hey, at any turn if you wish you could be pinging me for a quick question or pick my brain, now you can."

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Do you go to that expert's website, like your griller's Instagram? Like, how do you even do this? Or do you go to your site? 

Scott Zimmer: That's a great question, too. The obvious thing is to create a chat destination where they can just log in and begin to chat with that person.

We can embed on their website, so if that person has a website. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Okay. 

Scott Zimmer: Or in the case of my Instagram person, he can have the link to his AI twin would just be on the internet and he can put the link in his Instagram. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Oh, sure. 

Scott Zimmer: So people just click on it and go to it.

But that's an area where things are evolving. We wanna be wherever someone is when they have a question. So in the case of students, if a student is working on a paper and they're relying on Claude for that paper, and they're writing a paragraph about burgers. They're subscribed on our platform to this expert, they can say, "Help me with a paragraph on burgers, and be sure to incorporate the expertise from Nick."

And now, via a technology called MCP, they can do that on our platform. So it means exciting new things. You can be in one place welcoming expertise from someone you wanna learn from in creating a product or a service or a write-up or a whatever. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Wow. So instead of having 10 windows open on your desktop, you're just working in the same place.

Scott Zimmer: Yeah. Yeah, that's a perfect way to say it. And also, if you're relying on something that's helping you make something like slides or something like that, if you could ask, as it's making slides for you that you're gonna judge, ask it to pull in information from somebody who's an expert on that topic- it just increases the quality of what you're doing, and you're pulling in information from someone you trust.

I'll share as an example, if anyone wants to pick my brain about more of any of the stuff we've just talked about, answersfrom.me/scott is my AI twin, and has information on everything I know from my expertise that I've curated.

And if it doesn't have the answer for you, it'll admit it. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Love it. And we have so much we can learn from you. 

Scott Zimmer: I don't know. It's I think I have the luxury of being able to spend all day every day on this stuff, and surprising stuff is fun to share, so that's why I've got a bunch of those little factoids.

So yeah. But I'm learning from other people via the platform as well, and, podcasters, instructors, authors, any expert content creators is right in our wheelhouse because they've already been kinda capturing what they know in many wonderful ways, and their audience is already engaging with them, and this is just a chance to go deeper, after a workshop or deeper after reading an article or deeper after listening to a podcast.

So that's where we play. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Love it. You all should check it out. It's really cool, and I know a lot of people are very excited about it.

Speaker 6: Same meeting, same email, four completely different reactions. That's not a bad attitude. That's four generations looking through four different lenses. I'm Dr. Katherine Jeffrey, and I built the GenShift Framework to help organizations understand those lenses instead of fighting them. My clients aren't looking for another slideshow on generational stereotypes.

They want research they can actually use, and they get it: real data, real workplace stories, and interactive exercises that get people talking instead of just listening. I've worked with businesses, nonprofits, and educational institutions across the globe from small teams to conference auditoriums full of executives through consulting, speaking, training, and leadership development built around your team's actual dynamics.

Contact me to learn more at katherinejeffery.com. I'd love to help get your multi-generational team speaking the same language

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Let me ask you this: Do you think there's a danger that we're so focused on getting people to adopt AI that we're not spending enough time asking whether they're using it well?

Scott Zimmer: Yeah, there's a huge danger. And in fact, I think there should be more written about and more offered about, the depth of what do you mean use it well? Yeah. Because it's not in the best interest of these LLMs to tell us. They just want us to use it for everything, right? And that's where some of my storytelling and factoids about what it's good at because it's gen AI, it's good at making up stuff.

It's really great at using it for ideation. Okay, cool. So if I need, five potential ways to do this, to prepare eggs, it could make up five ways, and then as long as I'm the human that chooses the best one, I'm using it well, right? 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Scott Zimmer: And then, understanding a little bit beyond that just what it's great at.

It's really great at summarizing or synthesizing or categorizing. Things that AI can do well that means if we ever need to do those things, we should point to AI first, and with confidence. Like in my example of, record a meeting that you were in and pull out these things from the meeting, it hits a home run on that.

And you can trust it because it's synthesizing something that you gave it. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. Yeah. 

Scott Zimmer: Right? But learning what you can't trust it with, like we talked about already earlier, anything involving learned experience, anything involving human judgment, emotion, making choices, that matter in your life but don't matter in the LLM's existence.

Don't trust it for those things. And there needs to be some way for the population to learn that. Maybe there'll be some experts who, they don't have to be overly negative to teach that. They just has to, have to be exposing, " It's great at this, it's not great at that," for us all so that we can try to steer in the right direction.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: And do you feel like older generations, like it's part of our responsibility to help steward the way that younger generations are approaching it?

Scott Zimmer: We have the benefit of knowing the pros and cons of things like regulation. And I have heard it mentioned several times, even if at the face of the topic of regulation you think it's a bad idea, our roads have speed limits, and our cars have seatbelt laws. And those were created by, older generations who had lost loved ones, you can assume.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Scott Zimmer: And you can assume younger generations were probably like... My father grew up in Montana where there was no speed limit on roads between towns.

Yeah. So the day speed limits came, you can imagine everyone was cursing them. The younger population especially, right? So yeah, I think finding the right way to regulate for safety is gonna be super important, and even the leaders of these LLM companies are advocating for that as well.

It's just gonna be tricky to figure it out because, if we put a speed limit on our LLMs and other world power countries do not, that's where it gets really thorny to sort out what is the best way forward. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. That's a great point, and we're in such a global world.

Scott Zimmer: Yeah.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Okay just a couple more things. What are you noticing about how the different generations are responding to AI?

Scott Zimmer: Certainly the younger generations are feeling like it's not such a big deal and they've already incorporated it into their lives, and the older generations feel like it's a huge deal and there's a lot of fear, and we see that every day. Except for those older generations who roll up their sleeves and figure it out, and they're excited, right?

Some of that's just the classic stuff you typically see about adoption between generations, for sure.

I think we had already covered some of the other fun stuff, which is younger generations with no learned experience don't realize how wrong it is, and older generations do see how wrong it is, so maybe they're making better choices of when they use it.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. 

Scott Zimmer: That's an interesting point. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah. And then do you think our generation that's defining how we adopt AI, or is it career stage? Is it confidence? Is it fear of becoming irrelevant? All those things.

Scott Zimmer: To the extent that we learn from other humans and to the extent that the other humans we're surrounding ourselves with are primarily in our generation, then absolutely we're gonna see massive differences moving forward.

Again, like nobody in earlier generations is asking each other who's adopted this, or who's using it, because it's being used by everybody. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yep. 

Scott Zimmer: And every day. And it's no big deal. So in older generations, word will travel and they'll share, how to use it with each other. And so that'll take things at a certain speed.

But yeah, I'll bet generations are gonna make a massive difference. For sure. It is interesting that younger generations, since they're below the average, they need a lot of help with things. As I've already shared multiple times, I'm just worried that they're gonna get generic answers and believe that those are actually A+ answers when they're actually in reality they're C answers.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: And just to clarify, you don't mean they're below average, you mean they're below the average of learned experience when it comes- 

Scott Zimmer: Bingo ... 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: to AI's answers. 

Scott Zimmer: Bingo. Yeah, that's the perfect clarification, yeah.

It's a fun space because it goes back to that core value of just knowledge sharing.

So it's a meaningful space, and it's been, a real joy to have the privilege to focus on it for a while. So it's the mix of something really meaningful plus playing with AI every day is great. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah, and the fact that you can take it to this level and reach everybody, and do it in such a unique way is pretty cool.

Scott Zimmer: We gotta make AI work for us, right? We can't let it, bring down civilization. We have to have it elevate civilization so that we're better than ever, and this might be a key ingredient as we move forward. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yes. I love it. So thank you so much. I wish you all could see Scott and just be in person with him.

He's just a warm person.

Scott Zimmer: Right back 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: At you, Katherine ... you feel good. 

Scott Zimmer: Being around. Yeah. Right back at you. Thank you. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Thanks. I knew this would be a great conversation. And one of the things that I'm taking away from it is that the fastest person to adopt a new technology isn't necessarily the person who will use it the best.

And if we're gonna tackle this AI thing, we actually have to spend time with it.

Scott Zimmer: And even be curious about learning what it is built on so that we can understand what it's great at and what it's not great at. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yes. And not to be afraid of it, but to say, "Okay, how can I understand this better?"

Scott Zimmer: Yeah. 

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: And to use my voice instead of just typing. I love that. I'm gonna start. I've done it a few times, but I haven't done it a lot.

Scott Zimmer: Yeah, that microphone is there, and if you're using it on your phone, it looks like radio waves. That's the two-way voice mode, which is also really great.

Dr. Katherine Jeffery: Yeah.

Something Scott said earlier is the one I keep coming back to. Once you see the repetitive paragraphs, the hallucinations, the lack of real critical thinking, the novelty starts to wear off, and people start realizing that the tool needs rigorous human supervision, not just blind trust. So here's what I think is actually going on underneath this whole conversation.

That's the cooling off Scott described. Younger users losing enthusiasm because they're hitting the average trap in real time, and then later he talks about building his own company around a model that refuses to guess, that admits what it doesn't know instead of faking the answer. Those aren't two separate points.

It's the same story told different ways. People are losing trust in AI for exactly the reason Scott predicted they would, and he built his answer to that problem before the data even caught up to prove him right. That is care. Another one of the three Cs I keep coming back to on this show. Not care in the soft sense.

Care as in knowing your limits and respecting someone's time and expertise enough to say, " Not yet," instead of guessing. It's a harder thing to build than people think, and it's a harder thing to ask for. But if Scott's right, that might be the thing that actually earns AI a seat at the table long term.

Not how much it knows, but how honest it is about what it doesn't know. Find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook at Dr. Katherine Jeffrey. Follow this podcast so you can catch every episode, and if you've got a minute, leave us a review. It genuinely helps. And don't forget to visit katherinejeffery.com to learn more about how I can help generations in your organization thrive instead of just survive.

Thanks so much for listening.