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Hey, welcome to Lead Wisely by Wondertour.

As usual, we're going to start with a tough question about leadership.

As usual, we're going to start with a tough question about leadership.

Today we're looking at the Marvel movie Iron Man from 2010.

And Drew, what I want to ask you is, what does this movie have to say about in this age of
technology, in this age of AI and all of those fun discussions, the...

balance or the choices between using technology to augment humans on the one hand and
using it to replace humans on the other hand.

What do we see in this movie about those kinds of discussions, which are, I think,
relatively current here in late 2024.

that's so great.

There's so many examples in this movie of how we augment humans with technology from the
prototype in the terrorist cave all the way to the end where we have the kind of Mach 2, I

think it is Iron Man suit versus Obi's like, I'm sure there's a technical name for it in
the Marvel canon, but there you go.

The Iron Monger suit.

Thank you.

He has this very different approach for how to use the exact same technology.

I think that's where I'd like to start is just contrasting how those two operate.

Tony goes through these iterations of how to make this suit better, right?

Okay.

So we have this moment where Tony's experimenting with the repulsors, the energy cannons
out of his hand, and he's using them to create flight.

And he realizes that they're useful for more than just creating flight.

And it ends up kind of being his central weapon slash support function that he has.

He uses it over the course of all the movies in so many different ways.

And it becomes the of the defining feature of Iron Man outside of the color and the shape
and stuff of the suit.

Where on the other side, we have Obi who tries to create this hulking suit that makes him
the most powerful that will allow him to control, that will allow him to be able to

overwhelm Tony to be able to beat through his armor and, you know, kind of overcome him
with sheer power and force.

And his approach to how he creates Lyft and how he manages that suit ends up being his
downfall.

That his augmentation is all about being able to head on, fight Tony.

It provides him less flexibility.

And in the end, what's the question that we're considering here?

It's how should we augment humans?

When should we augment versus replace humans with bots and AI?

And it all comes down to the exact same thing, but the suit is super emblematic of it.

And it's that it's about the human who's interfacing with the technology.

It always starts with the human.

It's not about creating the best suit ever.

We see Obi in the lab yelling at the research scientists like, know, Tony created this in
a month in a cave in Afghanistan or whatever.

Are you kidding me?

I've given you the technology and you're not able to make this work.

Yeah.

It's brute forcing the solution versus looking at the human and quickly iterating and
testing and saying, does this create value?

And then being ruthless with it.

This does not create value.

If it's not good for the human, if it's not allowing the Iron Man suit to be able to serve
people, to save people, to accomplish the mission, it's getting cut.

Right.

Yeah, no, that's, and it's, I love the, both the visual and sort of thematic elements of
it, right?

When you start, when Tony starts, like he's showing off his Jericho missile system and
it's like, he stands on the ridge and he presses a button and a bunch of stuff flows up.

Like he has zero engagement, zero risk.

He's putting zero personal energy into it.

And there's no humans involved at all.

The missile just goes off and does a thing.

Right.

And the Iron Man suit is very different in that, partly because, you know, cause he's in
the suit and it's not doing the job for him.

It's just helping him be better at what he's trying to do.

Right.

He's more powerful.

He's stronger.

He's less vulnerable.

Right.

But he's not invulnerable because he's right there in the suit.

So the whole scene where the Raptors are chasing around this guy, you know,

The fighter jets are chasing him around and they're shooting at him.

And he's like, no, this is me.

It's me.

I'm in the suit.

Like the fact that he cannot use this technology without being personally engaged, right?

Puts some obligation on him of what to do with it, right?

Both, you know, both morally, but also just sort of from a vulnerabilities viewpoint, like
he, he has to own the results of what he's doing because he is actually doing it amplified

by technology.

And I think that's a lot of like, when we talk about

using technology in our modern world, right?

If you talk about using a chat bot to write something or draw you an image or, know, movie
or whatever, like there are things that technology is definitely better at than we are

right now.

It can move much faster in certain directions.

It can, you know, you can take a giant pile of texts and turn it into a summary really
well.

But today, as we speak this, we're not yet at the point where it can construct something
large and complicated and intentional as well as a human.

But even if it could, if you could press a button and write 300 novels and have those
novels be amazing and post them to Amazon or whatever, you would be at one removed from

that.

You wouldn't be taking ownership of as an author.

You wouldn't be making decisions as an author or as an artist drawing images or as a movie
director putting scenes in.

writing script for the actors.

if you're not, if there's not a human making those decisions, then you don't have any, you
know, you're not taking any responsibility for the quality, for the content, for the

values that are expressed.

And so that's, you know, the, weapons are an easy example of that to think about as like
the weapon that you press a button and something bad happens to somebody miles away has a

different level of, you know,

you're taking responsibility a different level of moral obligation than a weapon where
you're holding it or where you are the weapon.

you're taking responsibility a different level of moral obligation than a weapon where
you're holding it or where you are the weapon.

Yeah, I think the concept of ownership is super important to leadership.

And definitely when you are unleashing technology that has the power to augment, that has
the power to expand the, like you said, the, the strength, the influence, the, the

attention grabbing, whatever it is that the technology has the ability to do it.

Like we've talked about throughout this entire series on technology, technology has the
ability to create.

freedom for us or it has the ability to enslave us and the question is less about the
technology and more about the purpose and the way that we execute on the technology.

And so I think we see that kind of in, as Tony starts to figure out, as we talked about in
the last episode, sort of his character arc is trying to actually develop a purpose for

his life.

And then once he realizes that he gets to form opinions about the purpose, then he's
trying to figure out how to first clean up his messes and then maybe be more out in front

of it and be more, you know, shifting the world in a direction that he thinks is, you
know, that he actually had decided on rather than.

I'm going to make these tools and somebody else gets to make all the decisions.

Right.

So we see him taking responsibility in the course of the movie.

but that responsibility comes with the risk.

comes with the vulnerability.

Right.

And so that's, that's a very different dynamic for the people around him too.

Like not only is he taking more responsibility and where things are going like, I'm going
to go clean up this mess myself.

I'm going to come back with bullet holes in my suit and I'm going to patch it back up and
I'm going to put it back on and I'm going to go out and do it again.

So yeah, Brian, I think that's a good transition into the intro here because Tony's
ownership changes it.

It's this moment where he realizes that he can't just be this armchair quarterback that
sits back and creates all this technology but doesn't understand how it's actually

impacting the world.

He gets there on the front lines, he sees it, he experiences how it impacts the people
that he's trying to help, and it forces a change in him.

So let's hit the intro.

Hi, I'm Brian Notwell.

And we are on a journey to become better leaders by touring fantastic worlds and inspiring
lore by going on a wonder tour.

We connect leadership concepts to story contexts because it sticks to our brains better.

You can find out more at wondertourpodcast .com.

Nice.

So Tony Stark, Iron Man, augmenting himself with technology.

Let's get to the mountaintop of this episode.

As he's augmenting himself with technology, we have this moment where he is fought his way
out of the cave in one suit.

Had kind of a terrible experience, but changed his mind set.

realized that there were some problems in the world that he had created, goes out in the
suit again, goes out in the new suit to go clean up some messes, comes back with a bunch

of bullet holes in the suit, and he's getting ready to go out and do it again.

And he has this confrontation with his loyal sidekick and enabler Pepper Potts.

So take us into this through what happens in this scene and what do you like about this?

Yeah, so this scene happens when Tony is about to put the suit back on and go back out
after he, like you mentioned earlier, he keeps coming back with bullet holes in him and

everything's scuffed up and the technology doesn't quite work exactly as he intended or
Tony's not capable of wielding it quite properly yet.

He just keeps putting himself in the face of more and more harm, which in a way that is
kind of consistent with his character.

He is super confident.

and he believes that he can solve any problem and that he can just be the face and be out
there.

So we can easily empathize with Pepper Potts when she tries to have this confrontation
with Tony.

She says, Tony, if you put back on the suit, I'm going to quit.

And it's interesting because both Potts and Tony share their character here.

while Potts' character is static in this moment, she's continuing to be loyal.

She's continuing to be wise and challenge Tony, even when it's hard for people to
challenge Tony because of the type of way that he responds.

And then you get Tony, who's a dynamic character, and he starts to change here.

because he's not abrasive.

Instead, he's empathetic, understanding of why she comes in that perspective.

And also, he says, I can't, I can never not put on the suit now because he's been
irreversibly changed.

As we talked about in episode one, his experience with Jensen, his experience seeing
firsthand the impact of the technology that he creates.

It changed him, it made him see that he has to do something different.

This is the beginning of Tony's redemption arc.

This is him going from the playboy engineer who can do anything, can be as confident, can
be the face that people respect to being somebody who's a hero and eventually a leader

that people can look up to and follow.

So Brian, I saw this quote and I can't find the source of it.

So unfortunately, even when it was quoted, I couldn't find the source of it.

But successful people are respected, but redeemed people are admired.

I think that, that is the transition of Tony's story arc across from this first movie in
Iron Man all the way through to Avengers.

Yeah, and this scene is, like you say, he goes from only caring about himself to at least
caring about cleaning up his own messes to like, maybe that job's not done, right?

Maybe just because I stopped making the world worse isn't sufficient, right?

Maybe I should actually start making the world better.

And what's interesting about the way Pepper's reaction is portrayed in this, right, is
that she has been...

a loyal friend and a loving, supporting person in his life, enabling him for as far as we
can tell forever, right?

Even when he was creating weapons of mass destruction, like even when he was like without
a thought abusing everybody around him and creating all this stuff, like she's just, her

purpose is much narrower in this context.

Like she's just there to make sure that he's relatively healthy and able to do the things
that he wants to do.

And she's sort of trusting him to make good decisions, even when he obviously isn't.

But the reason she's upset at this point is not because she objects to violence, right?

She's been supporting an arms dealer for her entire career, right?

Like it's not because she doesn't think fighting is a good thing and she wants to
discourage violence or whatever.

It's just because of the risk to him that this new thing in his life is that he's taken on
responsibility, but he's also putting himself in harm's way in the service of doing these

things.

And you know, and what she says like, yeah, you know, you're, you're, you're all I have
too.

You're the only person that I actually care about.

So the reason I'm upset is because I don't want to lose you.

Right.

So she really, her focus and purpose is visionary and nursing and compassionate, but very
focused on him.

Right.

And so that's the thing that he violates in his relationship with her is that he's putting
himself sort of casually at risk.

And she is willing to trust him enough to go put herself at risk.

Right.

The next thing that happens is she goes and has to go, you know, face Obi in the, in the
office and potentially get herself in trouble to help him solve his problems and to help,

to help, you know, Tony sort of on his redemption arc.

So she has to buy into not only allowing him to do these things or supporting these
things, but actually putting herself at risk at the same time.

So it's another one of those, you know, virtue is a strong word for it, but that, you
know, values and the

that approach propagates through the people around you.

Yeah, the conflict is required.

That's why I like this scene as our mountaintop moment, even though as a lot of times on
Wondertor, we might choose some mountaintop moments that are spectacular and like the

pinnacle of cinema and other ones are just going to be these like off dialogues between
the characters where we see the change start to show before we get the change in full

force, you know, when Tony sacrifices himself kind of at the end of this movie to try to
get rid of Obi.

I, what.

And then, then, then he, again, at the end in the, in the press conference at the end,
that he takes responsibility.

Like, no, I am actually going to be a hero.

I'm going to commit to being a hero in the public eye, which means I can't get out of it.

I can't decide to stop.

Right.

So that's, that's a very different, you know, I am Iron Man requires, like we said
earlier, stopping being the former version of Stark at some point.

It does, it does.

this moment, like to, again, it seems like I'm on Wondertour sometimes we keep rehashing
the same things over and over from slightly different perspectives.

And I think that's kind of the point.

It's not all the same things, right?

But the more we can shape our models, our mindsets around these things, the more we can go
and take in micro learnings and go practice them, the more we can...

become that magnanimous character slowly but surely.

And so this moment, this conflict, it gives way to this realization.

Tony doesn't have this realization necessarily in this movie.

He starts to, but this is the realization that he will have over the course of this entire
Marvel cinematic universe phases one through three arc.

And it's one of our Wondertor principles that he goes from this original viewpoint of

True power is having the biggest weapon, which is a paraphrase of the Howard Stark quote,
to the Wondertor principle of true power is in sacrifice.

Right.

True power is in influencing other people through your examples.

So you can force multiply that way, right?

That's, yeah, absolutely.

And it's...

It's a very different kind of hero arc, right?

Like the Luke Skywalker, the young, fresh -faced farm boy who wants to have an adventure
and just has to learn skills and has to learn philosophy and has to learn how to become a

leader is one kind of hero arc.

But this is something I think, you know, the reason these stories are powerful for us is
we can see ourselves in them, right?

I think a lot of us couldn't potentially see ourselves like in the middle of your life,
like...

I've accomplished some things.

I've been successful.

I feel like I'm good at something.

I feel like I've got some momentum built up here, right?

Like I, I've sort of figured out who I want to be remembering to keep examining that.

Remembering to like, okay, what, you know, what purpose was I after in the first place?

And am I still aligned to that?

Or, you know, am I having the impact that I thought, or what am I doing with the people
around me like that?

Remembering to examine that even in midlife.

And you may need to make some course corrections.

You may need to.

flower into a different version of yourself is, you know, when you're feeling your best
and you're feeling your most confident and your most cocky and your most, you know, hyper

-confident and all that, like, Hey, you know, okay, am I being Tony Stark right now?

I, is that because I am actually just like hitting on all cylinders or is it because I've
made it all about me?

And so it feels good in the moment.

I think that's a good, you know, thinking about the Tony Stark archetype.

is a good way to sort of reality check that, right?

We don't, we, that's a different flavor of having to reset on the hero's journey or having
to reset your own leadership role.

Yeah.

And that's why on Wonder Tour, talk about the, we, in order to be able to learn, sometimes
we need to, we need to make mountains out of molehills in terms of stories.

We need to like draw it up to a higher level because in your everyday life, the decisions
that you make, sometimes it's a little more mundane and these micro decisions.

It's like, it's hard to tell that you're having to choose between wisdom and folly every
single time.

When in reality, that is effectively what's happening, that you don't, most of us don't.

have too many of these huge Tony Stark moments, but we do have a lot of everyday moments
and being able to see things in this blown up version in these superhero movies or

whatever helps us to be prepared for those everyday decisions.

Yeah, I like that.

that really, that's, I think that helps us put a pin in what we talked about in the
previous episode with Iron Man about this sort of leadership role and what the reflections

that you have to do.

Bringing it back to the technology piece, right?

You know, this idea of the person in the suit, right?

The technology is, is makes you Iron Man.

The technology makes you, it can make you fly, it can make you stronger, it can make you
less vulnerable, but it's still you.

Like the leader.

assisted by technology, the engineer assisted by technology should still be taking
ownership of their actions.

They should be designing technology so that humans can decide on their purposes and enact
it more powerfully in the world.

Not that you should absolve yourself of responsibility and go press a button and whatever
decision the machine makes is the correct credit rating for that person or the correct

person to let into the building or the correct hiring decision.

absolving yourself of responsibility is maybe not, you know, what we would suggest as a,
you know, the magnanimous leader is not the correct use of technology.

And so the suit analogy is really good.

Like I'm still in there.

I'm still making decisions.

I'm still, you know, deciding on the actions.

I'm still, you know, deciding on the actions.

That's good, Brian.

think that takes us into our practical application segment for the day.

So in terms of our practical application, let's just bring it back.

Let's tie it together with technology, kind of everything we've talked about with Iron Man
here.

We can pull in this quote that Tony has that I vaguely referenced earlier.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, my old man had a philosophy.

Peace means having bigger weapons than the other guys.

And can't we look at that today and just replace weapon with AI or if you re -quote it,
you my old man had a philosophy.

Winning a business means having a bigger AI than the other guys.

What does that mean today?

Because it does feel like there is a race to the bottom of AI that we've talked about
before, Brian, that's just like, I just got to apply it just because I got to apply it

because if I don't, I'm getting behind.

Yeah, yeah, we see this, we see this all over business right now.

People want to do AI things because they think everybody else is doing AI things and
they're going to get less competitive at the, you know, at the every company level.

And then in the specific giant tech companies, like, we have to build the bigger AI,
faster AI, the more whatever capable language model or image generator or decision tool or

something.

Because everybody else is going to get there first and then we're going to lose, right?

And we're pouring infinite resources into these things.

Like literally, like, you know, we have to build new hydroelectric dams to power the
inference engines that we want to run.

It's a ridiculous bottomless well of, you know, hand wavy future benefits versus like
incredible current expenses, right?

And incredible current distraction.

we've done some amazing things with technology in the last 40 years.

And so we certainly shouldn't, you know, stop.

But the sanity check on the purpose is still a little thin, right?

There's a lot of companies who are like, we'll figure it out and then it'll help us solve
climate change.

Nobody's designing an AI to solve climate change.

Like that's not what we're doing.

You're training a bigger language model.

You're training a bigger language model.

Right.

So I think that there's, you know, the lessons of this movie about deciding what your
purpose is and trying to build technology to augment humans, right?

Like my, one of my favorite quotes that I read recently was from, you know,

randomly on the internet, author of video game enthusiast, Joanna Masyjewska, I believe.

I'm not good at Polish last names, but I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can
do art and writing.

Not for AI to do my art and writing so I can do laundry and dishes.

What are we trying to accomplish?

What are we trying to accomplish with the technology we're inventing?

And it's really fun to be Tony Stark in the lab and...

running your experiments and playing with all the cool tech and building your cars and
telling your robots what to do.

Right.

But he's not talking to other humans.

He's not thinking about his impact on other humans.

doesn't really, at the beginning of this movie, he doesn't have much of a purpose with it
other than to do the cool things.

And so what he's doing is very large scale, invisible harms out of his view screen,
because he's letting other people make the hard decisions about purpose and deployment.

Right.

And so that's, we can't do that.

Right.

As we are deploying, you know, as you're building AI models in your company, as you're
deciding what things you could potentially do with technology, right.

We want to suggest that the magnanimous leader approach to that is, you know, a make sure
you understand what purpose is not just to out compete or to be, you know, more powerful

than the other people, but like, what are you, what change are you trying to affect in the
world and be use it to amplify the power of thoughtful human decisions.

of thoughtful human actions and not to supplant it or let them off the hook.

then like, well, it's not my fault.

I'm sorry.

Yeah, I'm sorry you didn't get hired, but like the AI said, your present day wasn't very
strong.

Yeah, I'm sorry I can't offer you that medical help.

I'm just a doctor, but the system tells me exactly what I have to do.

It's all an automated workflow at this point.

Exactly.

yeah, no, you're, you know, we don't cover that medicine for your exact combination of
conditions and coverages.

We're we're outsourcing a lot of decisions that are having real impact on humans.

we, efficiency is maybe not the only goal for a lot of those things that we're doing.

That's good.

Yeah, that's the trend we kept bringing that one up that the goal is to evaluate what
value we are creating, not just what efficiency we are creating.

And AI at this point is primarily an efficiency tool and efficiency.

what we don't need more, like you said, from a art perspective, from a content
perspective, the last thing we need is more content currently.

That's not, that is not the problem that humans need to solve in today's day and age is we
don't have enough content.

Exactly.

There's, I forget whatever, 15 ,000 songs uploaded to Spotify every couple of minutes.

We're drowning in content.

We don't need more synthetically generated content.

We need to figure out how to get through the stuff that we've got.

That's really good.

Yep.

let's, yeah.

So key takeaways from this episode.

What do you got?

All right, we got to start with number one that tech or at least proper tech utilization
requires ownership.

It means not just creating because it's cool, but considering the implications of what you
will create and actually going out there and being a part of the test like Tony is where

he experiences the impact, not just hears about it second and third hand.

And it's so easy to write something off when you're hearing about it in very small doses,
far away from you.

and to convince yourself, yeah, I'm the good guy, I'm Tony Stark, of course.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the, the, the human in the suit analogy is really powerful for that.

Right.

Like if you're not there initiating the effects and watching what they do and taking some
ownership of it and taking some risk on yourself, then you're not going to have a good

sense of

Mm -hmm.

So number two we talked about is the embracing loving conflict that sometimes in order for
us to grow, if we care for each other, we need to have conflict like there is between

Potts and Tony.

There was clearly some built up conflict that the two were experiencing.

And finally, now that Tony is having a change in character, he's able to properly address
that.

think Potts was

probably willing to and capable with her character to address that long ago, but Tony was
never opening himself up to be able to have that conversation.

Or he just walked away probably or went and did another thing because that was his
previous character was to just keep doing cool things or things that bring him joy or

pleasure.

And now he's realizing if I want to accomplish a mission, I have to actually have conflict
with Rhodey, with Pots.

Otherwise, I'm not gonna grow.

She's not gonna grow.

And we're not going to be able to accomplish this mission.

And in the end, it pays off with the way that they're able to work together.

And they come to the understanding that Tony as Ironman is something that could work and
that POTS can continue to be the wise friend, wise business owner, business runner, and

they can work well together.

Yeah, I love that one.

Love and conflict.

think that's a takeaway we haven't phrased that way before, but I think that's a really
powerful one for the leadership being willing to face those.

Yeah.

And then I think the only thing isn't even just iterating on our first one about
ownership, Is the assessing the costs, assessing the value versus the required input of

the technology that we're developing.

we making good decisions?

Not from an efficiency standpoint, but are we, is this the way that we're moving towards
our purpose, the world that we're trying to create, the change that we're trying to

initiate?

Yeah, and secondary and tertiary effects, we didn't talk about it before, but if it's a
closed loop system or a fairly closed loop system, any change that I make to it has

secondary and tertiary effects.

Thus, introducing all of this technology into the world while it may solve a first order
problem may create second and third order problems.

How can I analyze that better so we don't keep reliving the same mistakes of the past?

Right.

Yeah.

And I think the, and the, answer to that, can I analyze it better is those first two
things.

You've got to be the person in the suit and you got to be willing to have the
conversations, right?

Embrace the, embrace the conflict.

love it.

Full consensual circles.

Once again, here at Wondertour.

All right, I think that's it for this episode.

And that brings to a close our series on humans and technology as we went through
Interstellar, Ready Player One, Ford versus Ferrari, Oppenheimer, and bring it home with

the Marvel classic, Iron Man.

I think that's been really powerful for us to examine leadership challenges in the context
of technology, which is such a recurring theme in our modern lives.

role that a lot of us tend to be in, right?

Innovation in the world a lot of times is technology based in a lot of.

Innovation in the world a lot of times is technology based in a lot of.