S2EP31-Derek Crager-Unlocking Superpowers: How Neurodivergent Minds Thrive with AI!

Herb: 00:00:19

Today I have the pleasure of introducing Derek Crager. Derek is a neurodivergent entrepreneur diagnosed at 50 with ASD, ADHD, and dyslexia.

After decades of being told he was too intense, too quiet, or too much, Derek discovered the truth. His brain was never broken. The system just didn't speak his language. Today, Derek leads practical AI where he.

Where he's transforming how we work, learn, and connect. And he's building a Powerful community@AI for autistics.com to help others like him use artificial intelligence to build real, sustainable lives.

Whether you're discussing mental health, neurodivergence technology, or work culture, Derek brings honesty, humor, and hope. Welcome, Derek. It is a pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Derek Crager: 00:01:11

Well, thank you both for having me. You're very kind.

Kristina: 00:01:15

Yeah.

Whenever we talked before on our pre chat, because we usually do a pre chat before our guests come on to the show, we talked a little bit about, you know, AI and your diagnosis and how we can really, hopefully reach out to families and help them through this podcast, through this show of figuring out a way to either help their child with AI or be cautioned about it. A couple of things with the AI or how you even handled some of the things you handled as you were growing and changing into the person you are today.

So welcome and we are so glad that you are here.

Derek Crager: 00:01:46

Thank you.

Herb: 00:01:47

So normally our first question has to do with your passion and where it came from, kind of. And we like go back into like early childhood and kind of bring it up, but AI isn't that old, so our passion is like relatively recent.

But there's a pre passion. So how did we get into AI and make this. However you trans transferred your life into AI for autistics, what was that path?

Because, you know, changing at 50 with a passion is an interesting story.

Derek Crager: 00:02:23

Certainly. Yeah, certainly is. So because I was not diagnosed until age 50, I, I went through a lot of, you know, why me?

Scenarios, you know, from the time I was kid through, well, until I was 50 for, for that matter. And I had difficulty connecting with others.

And I mean, I wanted to have friends, I wanted to say I had friends, but I, I really didn't have many people that I could call friends. Like, I remember two, one from grade school, one from grown from high school. And so that's only about half of my education time.

But that allowed me to. Instead of friends, I had hobbies.

ata is weird. So going to the: 1980

We're just getting into the traditional PCs and before the Internet was around, I was connecting on dial up one at a time. We called them bbs or bulletin board systems. Christina sounds like she's been there and done that.

And we had email back before the Internet, but it took these drops. It took five days for email to go from the east coast to the west coast because it would only go one region at a time.

So that was really kind of a unique thought if we look back and say it took five days to send an email.

fficially for US consumers in: 1989

And it didn't seem like a big deal because the geek or nerd community was so small or it felt small. We were all helping each other out because we didn't yet have that one too many.

d shirts and shorts. And from: 1990

And, and I, I actually closed up my shop in 93 because, get this, I thought I had saturated the marketplace with my products. So looking backwards, we think, well, that's silly, but I share that as a foundation.

Herb: 00:05:47

Jeff Bezos.

Derek Crager: 00:05:49

Absolutely. 100. I could have been one of those that lost everything in, in the 99 Internet bubble bust.

e. But it really wasn't until: 2006

So where I'm at today on AI, it's another technological knowledge boom. It's really more about the sharing of knowledge than it is technology. Technology is the platform. But the effect, the effect is knowledge.

And we're using it today to deliver instant, accurate knowledge to anybody on the planet. And the solution that we're providing is on a pot system, which is pots, plain old telephone system.

So we use AI and we simplify it, like Jeff Bezos did with the one click purchase. Because before he did that, they were just another company that sold online. They weren't even a very successful company until that. But then boom.

Last time I checked, I think Amazon.com sells 57% of all retail goods. So this time when I saw the AI it, I thought, this is another technological wave.

I'm going to grab my surfboard, I'm going to ride this one out, and I know it's early, I'm going to have eyes wide open. And I, I, I'm using it for that. But our company, even though it's called practical AI, we're not an AI company that I would call ourselves.

We're a learning company. And learning and education have always been close to my heart.

And I found out that I can use AI to do the work of a hundred people and thousands of hours and make it a one to one relationship if somebody wants to learn about something. So that's my A to Z. And if I was younger, it probably would have been quicker, but that's, that's how I ended up in AI today. Herb.

Herb: 00:08:16

Yeah. Well, congratulations, geek. You rode the wave all the way to the front of it. I got to the front of the wave a couple of times and I wiped out hard.

And then I decided to become like second wave instead of leading it. So I completely get where you're coming from.

I didn't have the, the entrepreneurship mentality to be that much out front because when I, when I got hit it, it hurt hard. So congratulations for that. Love that. Now, at 50, diagnosed with autism, ADHD, how, how did that make you feel?

That's not quite the right term, but how did that help you reconcile your life? Because I did that by learning my personality profile.

Kind of what you said at the beginning, learning about my personality profile helped me kind of do what you just said. How did you use your diagnosis to help you? Because some people take that diagnosis. Oh man, I'm this.

And they use it as an excuse for everything to get out of it. But you took it and you ran with it and you created a business. So what's the difference? How did, how did you get there?

You talked about it helping you figure out your Past. So let's go into that a little bit.

Derek Crager: 00:09:41

It's, it felt kind of like, you know, the, the key to the past. I, and I'll tell you what led up to it.

I had suspicions, but even for 10 years, and it was about 10 years, you know, going in different groups and asking questions, participating in conversations I suspected. But until you get the official diagnosis, it's, it's not a one or a zero. So, you know, we don't know.

It's a Schrodinger cat situation, I, I guess I could say. But when I got that diagnosis, I cried off and on for two weeks. For two weeks it was just tears of happiness, tears of sadness.

What did I miss out on? Well, if we would have known, we could have taught him different. I could have learned different, I could have acted different.

I could have not had all that pressure from the past trying to fit in. I mean a 14.

I remember back to being 14 years old and started my journey down the self help aisle, you know that virtual self help aisle we, we all visit and I, I would just digest everything I could trying to figure out what's the band aid that's going to fix me. And so when I turned 50 that year and got that diagnosis, I had an answer. And so I was happy for the answer. And so it was up in hill.

But after that two weeks time, I sucked it up, move forward, held my head high and I said, you know what, now I can speak from a point of knowledge rather than just being ignorant. And I don't know that's, that's hard on us humans is the not knowing. So at this time I was at Amazon, the big Amazon.

I was actually working there and I was in the learning and I was learning, I, I taught a lot of the analytical people, the people that have a higher percentage of being like us rather than just, you know, whatever average is.

And in: 2021

So I was responsible for training the managers and supervisors and regionals and giving them a train, the trainer package so they could train all their technicians and mechanics and engineers that they were hiring in. I think ultimately we, we ended up onboarding in this waterfall method, 35,000 people in about 10 months.

So I didn't see that many pairs of eyes all at once myself. But I met and I trained all of the managers and that hired them and went through. So that learning part.

And I tell that story because you asked me what was my superpower, what did I do with this knowledge? I embraced that I had autism.

I put on the bottom of my corporate email that I have autism, and that if something doesn't come across as clear, by all means, tap me on the shoulder and let's have a conversation in person or virtual. I think I had a phrase in the signature that said, hey, I'm dyslexic.

I use dyslexic, this open dyslexic font which allows me to read a little bit easier. So if you're asking a question, that's why I'm using that.

But because I embraced, became a power and I wasn't trying to hide it because any, any disability that, that we have, we, we learn to hide it because we don't want to be judged. And we can empower ourselves by embracing that. And many people before me have embraced their own differences into an advantage.

So part of that embracing allowed me to be a better teacher, a better instructor, a better instructional designer. And I got in close with what people need to learn and how they needed to learn it. And you mentioned the personality assessments.

That was, that was part of my onboarding journey as well. I, every class that we had, we had some sort of personality assessment or a behavioral assessment.

And I know Myers Briggs is the biggest one out there, but there was a company called Effectiveness Institute that used a disc variation that not only tells you what you are, but how you can make those differences your superpower. There was another company, neurocolor.com that it's, it's one of, there's, there's over 2,000 of these assessments just in North America.

But these were ones that when we just shared the knowing of who we are, let's learn about ourselves, and then let's learn about ourselves in a group with others. Now, we all know that we're different and other people are different. There's some similarities and some polar opposites.

But when we acknowledge this now, we can build a bridge between the islands and communicate. And we, we push trust and respect, and trust and respect are the planks on that building a bridge to good communication.

So that's, that's what I did with that understanding of my neurodiversity discovery.

Herb: 00:15:40

Yeah. So I, I, I want to tell you. So I hurt my head. I suffered a traumatic brain injury.

So for a large, for, for several years, that was kind of almost the conversation leader with me, especially with people that I hadn't seen in a while. I was like, hey, man, I hurt my head. And my thought was, it's going to explain why I'm different.

And, and then they had seen me before and kind of some of the weird stuff that I do now since I hurt myself. But I was told to stop telling people that I was hurt because it made, they made it sound like I was talking bad about myself.

Like, no, I got a brain injury. I'm got brain damage. It's like, so I'm weirder now. Weirder because I was weird before.

Kristina: 00:16:25

He was weird before, but I'm weirder.

Herb: 00:16:27

Now because of it. So. But I was kind of said, oh, yeah, don't tell people that, because it's like, you're, you're.

So I'm really happy that, that you were able to work through that, navigate, get that information out, because I wasn't able to communicate it that clearly. So well done on that. On that.

Kristina: 00:16:48

One of the things I want to point out here is our families are listening, our parents are listening again. It's like, when you get that diagnosis for your child. Right. What can you do to help your child?

One, understand it in age appropriate ways, in ways that they understand that their brain works a little bit differently than others. And two, how can you help them?

Phrase it like you did as a superpower instead of a disability, a way that you can be looked at different, but in a good way. Right.

And instead of an excuse of not being able to do something, so by listening to your story, parents can backtrack that and hopefully put that on their younger children and help them change that narrative.

Derek Crager: 00:19:05

Right.

Kristina: 00:19:06

Oh, instead of, my child is disabled, they can do this and this and this instead because they're a little bit different. Yeah.

Derek Crager: 00:19:13

It's the story of the ugly duckling, is it not?

Herb: 00:19:16

Oh, yeah, yeah. So you, you talked about Meyer Briggs.

That's, that's one of my favorites because it, it helped me save my life as well because I was one of the ugly ducklings.

And when I learned about personality, that's another one of those things where it's like, oh, no, don't talk about personality, because it pigeonholes people and it puts labels on it. And like, what you did with this autism, like, no, I can do this and I can do this, and you put that there. I started doing that with my personality.

So it's like, oh, I reacted this way in this situation because that's my default personality. If I want to react differently, I have to build tools on programs on top of my personality to change that behavior. And that's.

And I called it using my personality to build the character that I wanted, because, you know, we are characters. So how I wanted to be portrayed, I had to build that. And I had to use the strengths to. To cover the.

The limitations in my personality, to have the character that I wanted to present. And it sounds like you did that also with the. As with. With your diagnosis. So how did you make that change?

Because, again, like, we talked about, so many people hear that, and then there's like, oh, they use it as an excuse. How did you go from an excuse? You said two weeks. Was. Was your excuse time. Some people do that for the rest of their life. So your excuses was.

Was two weeks of, oh, poor me, why me? And then it's like, okay, now let's build from here. Two weeks. Some people take two years. Where. Where do you. How do you help that?

What's that little trigger?

Derek Crager: 00:20:59

Okay, well, let me put a temporary pin in that one for a moment. You mentioned your TBI. I, too, had a TBI, and people don't understand the effect a TBI has on personality. I had mine in November of 99.

had two. I had another one in: 2011

One was on the soccer field where two people running full speed and it was a cheap shot, but it still ended up. That one was even worse than the car accident. But the. The tbi, and there is. It does change your personality.

I was married at the time, had been married for five or six years. And when I had that tbi, my wife said I was a different person when I came out of it. And we are for perspective based on our personality.

And now to speak to the personality part, Herb, you described it perfectly, how you understood your personality, but you got to choose your behavior, right? And we know what we do. We have the tendency to do or act a certain way.

And now that we have this knowledge, whether it's Myers Briggs or Effectiveness Institute or Neurocolor or any other 2,000 are out there, we have a knowledge that it's like, okay, it's like looking at different sides of the elephant.

You know, when you know that aphorism with the blind men and they see different things with their hands, we identify what we're good at and what we have a tendency to do naturally. But now that we stop and think, we have our.

Our, you know, frontal lobe here, that does the thinking for us if we take two seconds, two seconds is all anybody needs under a non stressful situation. Say I'm going into this scenario. Do I need to be empathetic, sympathetic? Do I need to be mad? Do I need to be stern? Do I need to be quiet?

And it depends. Am I going into an eight year old's birthday party or am I going into a funeral or is it a sporting event and I'm competing? It's.

We choose those, but we can't make those choices without the knowledge. So it's that knowledge of our personality and behavior style that allows us to get there.

And I wanted to highlight that because I think that's very important. You asked me how I just took two weeks. I, I had a lot of bad days. Right, we all have had a lot of bad days.

But I want to state that it wasn't just two weeks where I decided to flip my life around. It can happen that way. My life changed at the, at the tbi.

I, I actually could, wasn't even able to speak words and sentences for three months when I had my first tbi. But when I got my diagnosis, I had already had been experimenting in education, educating myself for about 10 years and I did that all on my own.

If, if I was going to give advice today and I guess that's what I'm doing, right, Responding to your question, I'm giving advice, it would be to talk to somebody. It can be within your family, it can be a, a professional. There's. Today we have many more resources that we didn't have even 10 years ago.

And if you, if a person, if you're listening and you don't feel comfortable talking to a human, you know, you can talk to AI, you can talk, chat or you can use voice. And one of the, one of the tools my company builds is for employee HR departments for, for their employees to call and just had a bad day.

Help me through it or I've got this problem. And people are more apt, humans of all ages are more apt to talk to a non judgmental AI that sounds like a human than they are an actual human.

And there's so many barriers. I know that every job that I've been to it says, you know, call our EAP line or, or here's our health number or Mental health awareness week.

But my, my gosh, it's. If I jump through a hoop, then another hoop and now I gotta wait and then by this time I'm so stressed out it doesn't help.

But boy, if I could just pick up a phone and talk to a, an AI that, that just sometimes just listens to me. That, that just makes my day much better. And there's, there's not the barrier of availability of a professional.

You don't have the barrier of the cost of a professional. You don't have the barrier of waiting in line. Because AI is scalable to one on one. We're not so much one to many anymore. We're one on one.

So that turnaround, I think it really is up to us. At a certain point we have to say, hey, if it's gotta be, it's, it's up to me type of thing.

And the whole fake it till you make it, I mean, I still fake it today. I, I, if I get up and I don't feel top of the morning, then I gotta process.

And right now behind the screen I'm looking into, I have a list and my priorities, my top two priorities are health and wife. So if I get through that every day, then I can address everything else. So find a process, find an outlet.

You can chat on Reddit groups, you can chat on Facebook groups, you can chat on, on groups that don't even have names. There's organizations out there that have help that you can talk to, or you can just talk to a friend. But it's good just to, just to talk.

And it definitely helped me get out from under myself and, and hold your, hold my own head up high. Everybody can hold your head up high. Just read the Ugly Duckling.

I haven't, yeah, I haven't even heard that story in a while, but read the Ugly Duckling because that's, that's what we are.

Herb: 00:27:34

So when I hurt my head and life got dark, I ended up going through a psychedelic procedure to recover myself. And through that I became a psychedelic integration coach. And so I help people recover through that.

So part of what you're talking about, about being able to use AI to talk to people in a way that almost kind of scares me because it can, like it takes away a lot of coaches job.

But, but there's also within the, I guess the psychedelic and human integration kind of stuff there, there is a little bit of still leeway there because it's ineffable.

Derek Crager: 00:28:09

But.

Herb: 00:28:13

And also I'm a coach, I work with lots of coaches and we talk as like, hey, reach out if you're having a bad time. And then we find out two or three weeks later. Oh yeah, two or three weeks ago I was having a rough time, but you don't hear about it till.

So even in our coaching community, even those of us who do it, we have a hard time reaching out and asking for help even within our own communities. So sometimes it's embarrassing, sometimes it's, it's frustrating. There's all sorts of reasons. But don't, don't let that stop you.

Seriously, it's so helpful to talk to people. Whether it's AI or you get to someone. Just being able to get to speak helps drain the junk out of your brain and get it out.

So it's out here instead of in here.

Kristina: 00:29:03

Yeah.

Herb: 00:29:03

So even if you're getting it wrong, even if you just like so call for help, it's so important. So now I want to get back to kind of our topic. Your company is now about practical AI for helping autism. How did you get there?

How does that help families? Do you, do you work with families and children? And how can these tools be adapted specifically to help children on the spectrum?

Derek Crager: 00:29:34

Well, yeah, thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak on it. The practical AI is a for profit and we have solutions for corporations and enterprises and that's where we make our money. Right.

Somebody has to pay for, put food on my table. I have a non profit side of practical AI that's two levels.

The solutions that we have for corporate America, you know, allow me to give and highly discount solutions for independent practitioners for nonprofits. I have one solution. Coaches AI will never replace humans for what counts. Coaches, teachers need to be there always.

So what we're using AI is as an augmented intelligence. So I have a, and I don't want to give out a name because I don't have permission to share her name.

But, but I have a coach, a counselor, a therapist that works with 34 families right now and somebody in the family is autistic.

And so she said, Derek, I only have so many hours in a week and I can only do so many one on one, so many group calls and I would just like to help more people.

So what we did for her, and I built this for her and I gave it to her because I believe in, in helping those that have a need for it and I believe in learning and sharing of knowledge. So what we did, we allow her to focus her expertise to the times that benefit but then augment 80%.

She can offload 80% of like the same questions that you hear all the time, you know, kind of like those FAQ questions, but augment through an anthropomorphized voice that her families can call the Parents can call, the children can call 24 hours a day, seven days a week and records the conversation. And the patients know that the reports and the recordings will go to their practitioner.

And that way they, the, the counselor here, this therapist can actually stay in touch. It's a way of monitoring her clients, her patients, and allowing her to help more people.

And think of it like a heart doctor giving us, you know, they put the little heart monitor on our chest and we go home and they don't see us for two weeks. And the machine is automatically uploading information. It empowers the doctor to treat more and to treat more specifically.

So it's a way to address that realm. So you asked me about what practical AI does. So we have the voice first AI that provides knowledge to the knowledge seeker.

And we put that in a box and we speak only on that knowledge.

On the nonprofit side, we have the AI for autistics community where it's an online, it's our own platform, but it's a place that's like a Facebook or a LinkedIn where you have different rooms, you can talk about different topics. But specifically with AI, we do talk about how we can leverage AI to help us throughout the day, but that's not our primary focus.

Our primary focus is to build software, to build mobile apps, to build websites for the neurodiverse among us because autistics and unemployment rates, they don't. Companies don't like to keep us very long, even if they we get past the hiring phase.

So we excel at a lot of things that are creative, that are analytical. And so I, I see this intersection of using AI.

I am teaching people of all ages to use AI to write programs and non programmers at that because there's platforms of many different shapes and sizes. Just like we asked chat GPT, how do I make onion soup?

We can ask these dedicated specific programming and coding platforms to say build me a tic tac toe game for two people and it will go through, it will create all the files. And then you get to the point you say, all right, make the background green and make the x's red and the circles blue.

And you're just talking to it through words.

So it's empowering these individuals to create things in a day that they would have to spend years in learning to program, learning to code, and end up working for somebody else if they even got to it. And so that's the nonprofit community side of practical AI is just empowering the individuals and that's all.

There's no cost to Any of the participants.

That's all funded through our for profit side and we're allowing people to create their own business because a lot of us, hey, we work great in public for five minutes and then we need a break for an hour. And so these creative opportunities is, I just chose it as a sweet spot just because it's, it's something I know and I can share and empower others.

So that's, that's the two sides that I've been working can win.

Kristina: 00:35:42

My turn, Your turn. My turn.

Derek Crager: 00:35:44

Christina's turn.

Kristina: 00:35:45

You've been dominating this conversation.

So actually what you, what you were just talking about is exactly what I wanted to ask you is because we actually have an autistic son and we've been through the ups and downs of job, no job, not wanting to be out of the house too much, etc, and I actually gave him your link. Right. And his question me was what will this do for me? Why would I want to interact with this?

So what you just gave us as part of that, but what else could I say to him that would make him say, oh yeah, maybe I do want to go in and explore this a little bit more? Because we know that people on the spectrum are usually very black and white. There's not a lot of gray.

They're either going to go for it or they're not going to go for it.

Derek Crager: 00:36:28

Or great. It's, it's the old radio station wiifm. What's in it for me? So, you know, that's, that's the thing.

And we are all sales people on Earth because we're all selling something, even if it's, can I sit with you at lunch? I gotta sell you on the idea that I would be a good, you know, conversationalist or maybe I would just be silent, you know, I don't know yet.

That's the discovery process. So for your son, may I ask how old he is?

Kristina: 00:36:57

He's 33.

Derek Crager: 00:36:59

Okay. The what's in it for him? If he has take technology. Well, I guess technology insight or questions on the analytical.

If he's ever wondered how to program a website, if he's ever wondered how to program a mobile app. And it's the ADHD in me wants to learn how to program with the, you know, the Pythons and the Javas and the C and whatever they're all called.

But that means I literally have to learn multiple languages and I don't have the patience for that. So AI allows us, those of us that are on the spectrum and, and have different communication Adjustments we need to make and, and focus.

Sometimes we focus so deep we get too deep in it. Other times we don't focus deep enough to learn something.

So if, if he's ever felt like he's standing outside the crowd and just watching and he really wants to participate and build something despite whatever limitations we each of us have, then it's an opportunity. And if nothing else, it's not just, come on, I'll teach you how to build. It's, hey, come on over. Ask the questions yourself.

Hey, Derek, can I, hey, Derek, what does this button do? And it's really just all of us in this asynchronous community sharing thoughts and, and helping out each other.

So if any of that would appeal to him, then, yeah, come on over.

Kristina: 00:38:39

Yeah, I'll go, I'll go and approach it that direction. So I'm actually going to go to the other kind of parent now. It's like, oh, wait a minute. AI is awful.

Is going to give my kids too much information or is going to lead them down the wrong path. It's going to do something that will. It's not safe for my child.

Herb: 00:38:58

AI is evil.

You know, you read all the headlines about the seriously weird stuff it does, and not going to lie, I haven't got involved in AI except for the last couple of months when I asked Google for stuff. Now the answers says generated by AI. And there's so much more complete. And it's like, wow, that's actually helpful.

So just in the last couple of weeks I went from, oh, yeah, AI is like one of those to oh, this might be helpful.

Kristina: 00:39:28

And then the last part of that question is age. How low should we go? Kind of letting kids go on this.

Derek Crager: 00:39:37

Well, it, I think AI is under, under the, the.

Herb: 00:39:47

Oh, we just lost you for a second. Is he back?

Derek Crager: 00:39:59

No guardrail. I'm testing one, two.

Herb: 00:40:03

Oh, so you're back. And just, just as you started answering the question. So we didn't hear anything except for like the first two words.

Kristina: 00:40:10

So let's restart the answer, please.

Derek Crager: 00:40:13

Yeah, I felt like a Max Headroom moment. All right, so, so age specific, I think that AI with the, with the guardrails that we put on it in the one on one training.

And this is something that teachers decide on what's in that box or parents decide or you decide together on what's in that knowledge box.

And once you have the knowledge box, the way we devise our systems is just through a telephone call with a Bluetooth or a headset or earphones, you're talking to AI like you're talking to grandma or mom or dad or grandpa. And under those scenario where that knowledge is handpicked, then there is no lower limit. I think there's more negatives that can happen.

You know, sitting a child in front of a YouTube channel and it goes off and off and off in different rabbit holes and there's no way we can monitor 24 7.

We have to give, give our kids, you know, some, some respect that they're going to be able to choose themselves, but be able to make it an easy choice. So in that realm, they can go as low as they go and it pulls them away from the sit and watch media. I'm a zombie.

I mean, you know, how many times do we come home and we have young kids or now maybe grandkids that are just sitting here like this?

Kristina: 00:41:44

Yeah, exactly. But you should be out playing or.

Derek Crager: 00:41:47

Doing something a hundred percent. So AI, especially the voice first that we operate in, leaves the kids hands free. Like, oh, I'm playing with Play doh.

And maybe I'm talking to Grandpa AI or, or Johnny Jet AI. And what should I make with Play doh? I have blue Play doh and I have red Play doh. Well, you can make a tic tac toe board. Well, how do I do that?

Well, you take a little bit of Play doh and you rub it between your hands and you make a line and you lay that line down. It's like writing with a pencil and oh, okay, I see now. Oh, wait a minute, my hands are sticky. Why are my hands sticky?

And it's, it's this interaction that is so much better than the analog screen time. So I, I, I think AI is so valuable in that realm.

The early part of the question was what do we say to the naysayers, the negative nellies that are out there that said, you know, the Chicken Littles of the world, we really can't say too much, you know, it'll come in your own time. The Internet wave, when it came about, it's all ones and zeros and IPS and protocols. But the power of the Internet was the exchange of information.

And that information, I know accountants have this acronym, G I G O. Garbage in, garbage out, or now we say good in, good out is what we're looking for.

t on the Internet as early as: 1989

We didn't need a modem, we didn't need home WI fi, there were browsers on our mobile phones. Now we, we entered the age of the smartphone and it was that access that actually helped it be accepted, but it took 17 years.

So for the people that are saying, hey, it's too soon, it's too early and there's no way, just look back to the Internet wave, people said the same thing. And it takes nearly a generation to adopt something new. So don't, I'd say don't try to twist anybody's arm.

I would say explore it at your own time and your own pace. Look for opportunities. Don't look to throw AI at a problem that you don't have. If you have a problem, look, throw in Occam's razor out there.

The simplest solution is usually the best. So look at the easiest and simplest solution, which may or may not be AI. So you can come at it from two different realms.

We're always going to have the early adopters, early adopting teachers, the ones that are on the cutting edge of technology, sit in their classroom and listen, ask questions and gradually onboard toward yourself. But, but don't make yourself uncomfortable with it. By no means.

Kristina: 00:45:08

And I want to add to that, for those people who are also worried about this and is just from the teacher perspective, is that just like anything you do with parents and kids, you do it with boundaries and guidelines, with values set in place and parental guides. You don't just let them go on it and let them explore on their own, at least at the beginning. Right.

You give them the basis, the guardrails to help them do it successfully and carefully.

Herb: 00:45:32

Okay, so now there's also another group because we talked about the, the conspiracy. Oh, it's evil. Okay, now there's just the ones who know that there's a lot of stuff on the Internet that their kids shouldn't see.

And you talked about creating a, a book or a space or a cabinet, I'm not sure, I don't remember the exact word you use for the information that goes in that. Can you explain that? Because most people, parents are going to think, oh, AI is the Internet.

And anything you can get on the Internet you're going to be able to pull into AI. So when, when you said, oh, they're gonna, you can select the information and put it in a box. How, what does that mean? What does that mean?

How is it that the kids aren't gonna have like, oh my God, access to all the Internet. What. What is that? How would you explain that to parents who don't really know AI yet?

Derek Crager: 00:46:28

Certainly I first want to acknowledge that those parents are absolutely right, that if, if, if a child, if an adult, if grandma and grandpa are getting on Chat GPT or Perplexity or Claude or. Or the. There's actually over a million of these LLMs.

Technical side, go to huggingface.com and you can actually download and experiment on your own computer. Computer. That's one way for those.

If you have the technical ability, you can pull these LLMs that are small enough to run on your computer, and then you can set your own limits. So it's just not about me and the product I have.

But for you to empower your audience here, you can go to Hugging Face and you can have all these AI language models, and there's LLMs, large language models or simple language models models or small language models, and you can have these that actually work on your own computer, on your own laptop, on the little PI devices that are $50 or less, that you can create your own and you can experiment with your own knowledge. That's the way you can empower yourselves. The.

Herb: 00:47:39

How is one large link. How is one language model different from another?

Because again, we're talking about terms that our working parents who haven't had was like large language. This. What is that?

Derek Crager: 00:47:54

Absolutely. It's. It's how they were trained. So AI is machine learning. And they say machine learning, meaning it's gobbling up all the knowledge that's out there.

I. All of a sudden I'm thinking, the Langoliers, a movie where it was of kind.

Kind of that way digitally, it was eating up all the information that was out there. But anyway, sidebar. Sorry.

The LLMs that are out there, the Chad GPTs, the big ones that are out there, they were trained on all the knowledge of the Internet. So that's.

The parents are absolutely right because they were trained on all the knowledge of the Internet, then they had access to all that knowledge, especially when you go in without. Without a life preserver. So it's. You ask questions and you get answers which may or may not be accurate.

You know, we heard this term hallucination, and hallucination just means that out of the maybe 20 or 50 answers that every question has, the AI tries to pick the one most favorable to that conversation. But it doesn't always pick the right ones, so it picks something else and it says it's the right one.

And it never does give an answer and say, well, this is one of five possible answers. No, it just gives you the answer and we assume that it's the right answer.

So in order to get away from that, the only way to get away from that is to leave the direct input for those AIs. Whatever your favorite flavor is, and you can build it yourself at home or you can, you know, work with companies like ours that we do that for you.

And in the scenario, we have a K through 12 product that it's. We call it, you know, education or extending education beyond, you know, school hours.

So in that scenario there, the teacher or a coach like yourself presents the information. You teach, you train, you have a few little back and forths and you give them homework. And the kids go home and they practice and they do.

So what we do, we take that knowledge and it could be algebra one and two from junior high. It could be a social studies book, it could be an English book full of poems.

We take that specific document and we, we put it in this digital box and then we, we start putting things, things together. I told you I used to build with Lincoln Logs when I was a kid. And, and that type of thing, that's what we're doing today.

We put the knowledge in the box and guardrail it.

And then all the AI models, whichever model we have talking to it, it's the interface between the knowledge on one side and the human on the other, whatever age.

And so now all the questions that little Johnny or Janet or Lisa are asking goes to the AI and the AI processes it and says, oh, here's the question they asked. Let me research.

And instead of going out to the Internet, it says, boom, I'm just looking in my proverbial backyard here at a smaller set of information. And, and as far as the AI knows, that's all the information in the world.

So it's only going to pull answers from that information that mom and dad approve, that teachers approve. Somebody's going to be in the approval process to maintain and make it safe and topic specific.

Kristina: 00:51:36

Oh, that makes me feel so much better that that can happen because, yeah, I was worried about that.

Herb: 00:51:41

So the model creates a small subset of the data. So instead of going out to the every.

To the infinite universe of the Internet, it creates a section of data that has been vetted and verified within that system so that you get answers that are more appropriate to what you're actually trying to teach or learn. Is that correct?

Derek Crager: 00:52:03

100.

Herb: 00:52:04

That is brilliant.

Kristina: 00:52:05

Love it. Love it. Oh my gosh. We could go.

Herb: 00:52:08

And I learned, I learned more there because I. It's like, oh, large language models. What they just. So now that, that's like, I get that more now. That's. That's brilliant.

Derek Crager: 00:52:17

Wow. Well, good, good. Glad I could help.

Kristina: 00:52:20

This has been such a awesome conversation and we could go on and on and on. We appreciate your time so very much and so explaining all of this stuff. Right. And so we really need to make sure our families get a hold of this.

Would you please make sure you share your information out loud? Of course. Everything will be in the show notes as well.

But share your information out loud right now for those who are listening, how they can get a hold of you or how they can interact with your items.

Derek Crager: 00:52:44

Oh, yes. Thank you. So you mentioned earlier the AI for autistics.com and that's F.

Just phonetically like it sounds AI for artist for autistics.com and then on the business side, which has shows, the different industries and schools and businesses and nonprofits and it's got examples for all that that you can go to practice practicalai.app. and phonetically just like it sounds. Practicalai app. And that would be Apple. Paul. Paul.

Herb: 00:53:21

And all of that information will be down in the show notes. So if you weren't able to write it, you know, when you get somewhere safe, if you're driving, look in the show notes. It'll all be there.

Kristina: 00:53:30

We always like to give our guests, you know, one last thing that they want to say. Maybe it's something we didn't quite get to. Maybe it was a special message that you really want the audience to hear.

Go ahead and share that with us now.

Derek Crager: 00:53:41

Well, I. Two parts, if I could. If you're a company out there with a lot of money, come hire me and pay me to.

Herb: 00:53:47

To.

Derek Crager: 00:53:48

To. To earn money. Because this is the other part of it.

If you're a non profit or you have a special use case and you think you could find value in this and, and we could give it to you, then we'll give that to you. So contact me. We can discuss on what that looks like. So I just want to make sure everybody knows that that's available because.

Because at the end of the day, at the end of my life, I was asked, you know, if there's one thing that I would describe myself as in a single word. I would say teacher and knowledge is power. And we're to the point where having the right knowledge empowers ourselves. It empowers our children.

So look for ways, whether it's this way or another way, just keep your mind open and look for ways to fill that knowledge gap and give your children access to their own tools. You know, with your permission.

We talked about the approval process, but give them permission to learn on their own and give them opportunity where they want to learn on their own. And it's not just reading a book. It's not just sitting still in front of a movie, even if it's National Geographic.

But get them involved in that engaged conversation, the conversations that the that kids have with Grandma and grandpa because mom and dad sometimes work too much and grandma and grandpa teaches through doing. Give them the opportunity to do and access the knowledge so they can keep doing and answer their own questions.

I think that's the most important thing.

Herb: 00:55:20

Could not possibly agree more.

Kristina: 00:55:22

Beautiful. Beautiful. Thank you so very much.

Herb: 00:55:25

So I would like to thank you for being here today. In this day and age, so many people again get their diagnosis and bury their head in the sand.

They get the bad news, they run away or they stop living. You took your diagnosis, you took your news and you use it to improve your life.

And then you came back home and you shared that with the village to make the world a better place. That is the hero's journey in a nutshell. You left home, you fought your dragon, you came home with the treasure to share it.

So, Derek, my friend, you are a hero. You're a hero for helping families and for wanting your biggest legacy to become known as a teacher. So thank you for being here today.

Thank you so much for what you do.

Derek Crager: 00:56:07

Herb, Christina, thank you both. It's, it's been my honor. It's great experience. And a shout out to all the listeners. Just tap one person and have them subscribe.

You'll double your listenership overnight. It's the best thing you could do. If you're listening.

Kristina: 00:56:25

Thank you so much. All right, audience, it is that time.

Like, share and share some more because this message from Derek and all the other experts that we bring to you, heart centered people who really want families to succeed needs to get out there, needs to be spread around so that families can be happy, healthy and successful. Until next time. Bye for now.

Herb: 00:56:45

Bye for now.

Derek Crager: 00:56:47

Bye for now.