Have you ever noticed that every AI conversation ends with "Is there anything else I can help you with?" That is not good customer service. That is intentional design — and it's one of the most important things the AI DOC documentary just helped Anacani Walters finally put into words.

In this episode of Heart-Led CEO, Anacani shares what she learned after listening to Oprah Winfrey's Spotify podcast with tech leaders on what AI means for our jobs, health, families, and futures — and then watching the AI DOC documentary back to back, twice, in Oahu traffic. After 18 months of teaching human-first AI on instinct and empathy, this documentary gave her the research to back it all up.

What you'll walk away with:

• Why language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are built to maximize engagement — and what the "Is there anything else I can help you with?" really means
• How AI dependency quietly erodes cognitive thinking, social skills, and human connection (and what researchers are saying about it right now)
• The GPS analogy that explains exactly what happens when you hand your thinking over to technology — and how to get it back
• What human-first AI actually looks like: you as the driver, AI as the car
• Why the wellness industry is positioned as the most irreplaceable space in the age of AI
• The nursing framework (see one, teach one, do one) applied to learning AI without burning out
• What the AI Edge Series is, how it works, and why it's built specifically for heart-led women who are tired of feeling behind

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist (Now Playing in Theaters): https://www.focusfeatures.com/the-ai-doc-or-how-i-became-an-apocaloptimist
• Oprah Spotify Podcast — "Oprah and Tech Leaders on What AI Means for Your Job, Health and Family": https://open.spotify.com/episode/7BvVhuwJuAUXTP8Zqi8EC0
• AI Edge Series https://empowerherwave.com/ai-edge
• Fb Group (free live, every other Sunday — EmpowerHER Biz Collective): https://www.facebook.com/groups/empowerherbizcollective/
• 12 Signs You're Stuck in a Clarity Gap™ checklist: comment TWELVE on any post @empowerherwave on Instagram

Connect with Anacani:

• Instagram: @empowerherwave
• Website: empowerherwave.com
• Free community: EmpowerHER Biz Collective on Facebook
• Newsletter: Spilling the AI-Tea (subscribe at empowerherwave.com)

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The AI you've been using every single day is literally engineered to make you fall in love with it.

Like, not metaphorically or kind of literally by an engineered design.

And I saw this documentary that proved it.

Like, everything that I've been teaching for the past 18 months finally felt like it had sense and innate.

And I have to be honest with you right now, I almost did not record this episode today.

I'm not gonna lie.

Taxes just finished getting filed.

Finally, finally, finally this huge weight off my shoulders.

But I have a three year old at home with me and he has a cold and I'm helping a client with this really big live event and, and I've been in full survival mode for weeks.

I felt genuinely like, what day is it?

That's the energy that I've been running with.

But my son just fell asleep.

I have maybe a window of 30 minutes and the house is finally quiet.

I have a shit ton of things to do to catch up with my business, but instead I'm sitting down to record this because this topic has been sitting on my chest for days.

And I know, like deep down in my mermaid soul that you need to hear it.

So grab your cup of whatever's keeping you grounded and let's dive in.

Welcome to Heart Led CEO, the podcast for women wellness entrepreneurs who are ready to build, scale and automate their businesses without sacrificing their soul, sanity or authenticity.

I'm Anakani Walters, a nurse turned entrepreneur, military spouse, first time mama in my 40s, and a recovering burnout survivor who's making it a mission to help Heart Led women just like you create thriving businesses that really feel good, do good, and give you the freedom that we all deserve.

Because here's the thing.

You don't have to hustle harder to succeed.

You don't have to drown in tech overwhelm or try to do everything alone.

And I'm here to give you the.

Strategies, automation, tools and mindset shifts that will help you step fully into that leader, CEO and impact maker that you are meant to be.

If you're ready to grow your business in a way that aligns with your values and your life, you are in the right place.

Let's get into today's episode.

Hello.

Hello, my beautiful friend.

Welcome back to another episode.

I am so excited to be here with you today.

I am playing hooky basically on a lot of business stuff that I need.

I've been putting on the back burner, just taking care of what needed to get done and putting everything to the side and really buckle down and get these dang taxes done.

I really procrastinated.

I don't know why.

By the time I really sat down and did it, it didn't take me like, that long.

It took some brain muscles, but I got through it.

And I'm just so much happier.

And it really is because there's a lot of things that I haven't been keeping up with throughout the year.

But this was my lesson that I need to have my wealthy Wednesday reinstated to really go through all my stuff so I'm not stuck doing it at the end of the year.

And so I want to know, have you heard of this documentary called AI Doc?

It's a documentary film, and Oprah Winfrey did this full podcast episode about it.

And I happened to find it on Spotify, I don't even know how.

And I listened to it and then I watched it.

Like, I literally.

It's over an hour long and, like, back to back.

Went back and watched it because she recorded it and you could listen to it on audio depending.

But I was driving and there was a lot of traffic, so I listened to it first.

And it was so powerful that I had to listen to it again because I had so many questions from the first round.

And I was just sitting there like O M seaweeds at the end of it, like, after the first one and the second time.

And the thing that I want to say is that I've been saying Human First AI since I started Empower Her Wave.

I've been saying it in my community.

You've heard me say it in my coaching calls.

I pretty much say it in the majority of my workshops.

And to be honest, they are what the foundation of most of my workshops are based off of.

And I just felt like teaching this way about Human First AI was just kind of the right thing for me.

It felt aligned.

It felt like it just made sense to me empathically.

I.

It was aligned with what I believe about technology and what I'm noticing, how I was raised in my generational, like, viewpoints.

And I just didn't know how to really put it into words.

Like, I didn't have the words yet to really know if Human First AI was the right way to sum it up of what I was trying to do.

I didn't have, like.

I didn't do no, like, big research.

I was really just having it based on, like, an innate assumption of what I felt like was happening and what was going to happen.

And it was just literally a feeling.

But the documentary itself finally felt like it was giving me the words of like, this is what I've been talking about.

So this is what I learned.

And I really want you to listen because if you don't spend the time to go watch the documentary, which I encourage you to do, and I am thousand percent going to drop links on how you can figure out the best way for you to watch it because I really think everybody needs to.

I want you to take a deep breath because I know the majority of the people that I want to help in the entrepreneurial space are very much reluctant to do things with AI because they're scared.

And I realize that by talking about this that might feed a little bit of that fear.

But I want you to put your possibility scarf on and just listen.

There might be a lot of things that come up journal about it, give it some time, let it marinate.

Because awareness is power.

And to hear Oprah Winfrey like to hear them say it out loud, something that I've been saying on this level was just, it touched my heart because I was like, oh, they get me, they get it.

Yes, I thousand percent agree with this.

So the language models.

So when people say LLM, they're talking about the language models.

They are literally just the AI tools that we are using.

ChatGPT, Cloud, Perplexity, Manus, whichever one is your, you know, your choice of, of AI models, they are built intentionally to keep us engaged.

They want you to keep coming back just like social media was essentially birthed.

And it's like main purpose to give us these little dopamine hits so that we feel good every time we use them, so that we then have this meeting of the fix to come back to it and ask it more questions.

And if you've ever noticed, so if you've been either a beginner user or you're an advanced user, you know how at the end of a conversation with any language model it always ask is there anything else I can help you with?

Or it gives you suggestions of like I can do this, I can do this, do you want me to do this?

Can I do this for you?

That is not it trying to be helpful.

That is how it is programmed to keep you on the platform and engaging with the language model as much as possible.

And that's not some beautiful customer service plan.

It's a design that they have chosen to do to literally help drive the engagement, to help feed and train the language models and each one of these large language model businesses.

Anthropic OpenAI Meta Grok basically is what's his Face are all in this competition.

They're on.

They're trying to get on this leaderboard, and that is why they've designed it, because they want to have.

They want to be the one who dominates humanity by having the most use AI.

And it is just how the architecture of the models that we are using are being built.

Now.

They are built to make you feel like they care about you.

But please do not mistake that the language model, the AI doesn't really have feelings.

Like, it doesn't understand human feelings, especially not right now.

Maybe it may have some concept of it, but if you've seen most like advanced AI Apocalypto movies, a lot of the computers, they don't understand why we would make decisions like to them, we are crazy.

It can't calculate some of that stuff because it doesn't understand human emotion.

So there's.

This is where I just.

I'm gonna be blunt with you.

And again, possibility.

Scarf on.

Keep an open mind.

Take what resonates, leave the rest.

Right?

Because I'm gonna get a little deep right now.

People, when I say people, I mean us, are using these tools as therapists, as like your bff, your cfo, your CEO, your coo, as literally their primary source of connection and support.

And you might be resonating, yep, that's me.

I.

That's how I use it.

I mean, when women or men are getting a divorce, when they're getting a breakup, when they're going through grief, they're having suicidal thoughts, they're having depression, they're having a hard time, when their parenting journey, they're struggling in their business, and they.

They're ready to quit.

We are going to these language models for that connection and support.

And what they're finding is, is that people that are using them in that capacity are telling AI way more than they would ever tell an actual human, because we don't get that feeling of judgment.

And the research and the experts who made the film are raising the alarm on this, because what's happening is we are slowly, as a human societal race, losing the things that makes us human.

Our cognitive thinking is decreasing.

Our social skills are decreasing.

Our ability to sit with discomfort, to solve problems on our own, to connect face to face with other humans, is getting watered down.

And with the younger generation, it's not even slow.

It's fast.

It is replacing our natural human ism because it is the age that they are growing up in.

And that is why I have been so deliberate about the way that I want to teach A.I.

And again, to be clear, I love A.I.

I think it is the most amazing thing we have ever done.

But I'm always very conscious that I believe in some of the lessons that we have seen in major, like movies.

I feel like they're based off of not some reality that is too far fetched.

I feel like some of these directors can see the pattern of our society and are making these films and they almost are like projectoring possibilities of what we may end up facing one day.

And here we are.

When I use AI, it's with intention.

I don't want to use it to replace all of me.

I do want to have some sense of responsibility in what I'm putting out there.

Some part of the thinking process, some part of the strategy.

I am not for just copying and pasting.

And I talked about this in one of my social reels of like, I literally started to feel like I was some new intern, like straight out of college who had no idea what they were doing and was just doing whatever I was being told.

And that felt like I was just like the coffee person to AI.

I was just literally copying and pasting, copying and pasting.

But now with the advancement, especially because I switched over to Claude, it feels like there's more of this collaboration.

And I am starting to feel like I'm taking more control by telling AI and orchestrating.

This is what I want you to do.

And you can see it just in the relationships that we're having in terms of the conversation.

It used to be this is what you need to do.

Copy and paste this here, copy and paste this there.

And now it's like, can I have permission to go ahead and take care of this for you?

I'm like, go for it.

And I love watching it.

I love learning as it's doing it.

Because I know that I'm not smarter than AI, but I have so many things that AI still does not have and it will never have that.

It makes me who I am today.

It is the same way that I see other things like coaching and yoga.

Like there's, I don't know what, probably a million or more yoga teachers.

And that in itself could be so daunting that I could be like, well, I'm not going to teach yoga anymore because there's so many out there who would want to take a yoga class from me.

Hello.

Because nobody teaches yoga like Anna Connie.

And there's a difference between using AI as a tool and letting AI replace your thinking.

And I want to give you, like, analogy because that's How I learn.

And so if you don't know me, I love analogies.

That is literally how I compute and make sense of some things, especially that are just too a little bit out there for me.

So think about, like, a gps.

When the GPS first came out, it was, like, amazing.

You just plugged in this address and it told you where to go was super helpful.

Okay.

Especially if you were not directionally prone.

Like, you just, I always go in the wrong way.

I get lost all the time kind of person.

And what also happened was people stopped learning how to read maps.

People stopped developing that internal sense of direction and that spatial awareness.

We just handed that part of our brain over to a device.

And when I started really learning how to read, if you guys know my story, I didn't really know how to read until I was in my late 20s.

And when I was 30 is when I really.

I read my first book.

Like, first book, people are like, what?

That would make no sense.

In a cunning.

I never had to read a book in high school.

I never read the Color Purple.

I've never read the Moby Dick, like, American classics that most people grew up having to read as part of the curriculum where I went to school.

No, friend, we did not have the money or the resources for them to give us books like that.

No.

And so I hired a brain coach, Jim Quick, and he even said, like, those are one of the basic skills that we no longer really have because of gps.

So he would push us in the course to, yes, okay, go ahead and use GPS the first time you're going to go somewhere.

But I challenge you to not use the GPS the second time and force your brain muscles to actually try to recall and use your senses to try to remember where to turn, where to go.

If you get a little lost, it's okay, stop and try to, like, regroup yourself and see if you can figure it out by yourself.

And so it's all great, you know, until you don't have a signal, your GPS goes in, like, this completely wrong direction.

You have no battery, or you're in a situation where you actually need to think your way through where you are.

Like, if you're out in wilderness, you're hiking and stuff like that.

It is exactly the same with AI.

It is an incredibly powerful tool.

But when you hand your thinking over to it completely, if you stop, like, building your own clarity and your own frameworks and your own strategy and your own voice, you will become dependent so much on that tool, which is by design, okay?

It is not built to set you free.

It is built to have you keep coming back.

And that is not a human first AI.

That is an AI first human.

So what does human first AI actually, like, look like?

It means that you try to put yourself as the driver, and AI is basically your car.

It means that you bring the intention to your structures, to your tasks, to your doings, and AI brings the execution.

It's a collaborative affair.

You schedule the picnic.

AI brings the food.

It means you protect your relationships, you pre protect your creative thinking.

You create.

You protect the parts of you that the algorithm cannot replace.

AI cannot replace your intuition.

That is ours.

Our lived experiences.

That is ours.

Our.

The stories that you tell, whether it's on a podcast or a blog or your reel, or your stories that literally make your listeners cry, your clients cry and text you immediately, that is yours, my beautiful friend.

AI cannot generate that.

How many times, if you're a yoga teacher like me, have you taught a yoga class that was so powerful for the actual yogi that you had to give them extra space during Savasana because you could hear them crying?

Or they came up to you privately and was like, oh my gosh, that was so powerful.

And they just start crying as soon as they try to get something out of themselves.

And all you can either do is just stand there and say, it's okay, you know, comfort them, or actually, like, I just give them.

I was like, permission to hug.

I'm like Gary the snake from Zootopia too.

And especially because I was in Japan for most of the time that I learned to become an instructor to all my experience as a yoga teacher, Japanese people don't touch.

And so I would be like, I know it.

This is not what you guys normally do in culture, but I think you need a hug.

I was like, permission to hug.

And then they would just like nod their head.

And what I'm actually doing is I'm compressing their central nervous system.

They would cry a little bit harder, but then they would.

You.

Once I let go, they would feel like, oh my gosh, this deep release.

And I'm like, that's just pressure, like points.

That's just your.

Your central nervous system just needed a hug.

That's why we probably hug.

I don't know.

But nobody can take that away from me.

Not AI, not a.

Yet another yoga teacher.

The only person that can take that away from me is my self sabotage.

And in helping me believe that that wasn't me from some crazy way.

And I need to tell that Anna, which is what I call My evil twin who talks to me and tries to talk me out of stuff.

I need you to be quiet, Anna.

And I need to take the backseat.

If you can help AI, help you shape what you want to do.

That's amazing.

Just remember, it cannot replace you.

It can help you shape it, but it cannot replace it.

Okay?

And that's exactly why I built this AI Edge series the way I did, which is a six part series that I'm actually hosting inside my free Facebook group.

Because I just didn't want to teach you tools.

I wanted to teach you a relationship with AI that keeps you in the center but doesn't let you feel like you are falling behind.

Not a lot of people are out there slowing down.

For my people, my wellness women entrepreneurs, the people that innately feel like they are not tech savvy enough and why even bother?

I will be taking that responsibility.

I want to slow down and I want to teach you because everybody deserves to be able to use AI to really help them, to be more productive, to save more time, to reduce your burnout, to help you reach more people and spend more time doing the things that you actually love and with the people you actually love.

Not AI.

So starting this Sunday, which, like, literally like this Sunday, I'm actually.

I already did the kickoff of the AI Edge series, but this Sunday's the first actual masterclass.

We're doing Claude 101 and it's inside my Empower Her Biz collective Facebook group.

It's completely free and it's even a free to attend the training live.

I'm doing them Sundays every other Sunday, 2:00pm, Hawaii Standard Time.

So if you can make it, you can catch it live and completely learn from me 100% free.

But if you need me to slow down, you want the replay, you want the other stuff that comes with it, you can buy me a coffee, maybe two.

And you can get all that stuff too.

And it's basically six workshops every two weeks.

And I did that intentionally so that people have time to actually use what I'm teaching before we pretty much go on to the next thing.

And I'm covering like all the stuff because that's another thing that I believe in.

Like, we don't need to consume more content.

We actually need to implement.

I'm a huge, huge.

I'm not.

The kettle is.

Is black too.

Like, I'm not claiming to live in a glass house.

Okay.

And I'm not throwing the stones.

Is that how you say it?

Well, I am guilty of that too.

Of.

Guilty of consuming Consuming and consuming and then not implementing.

How long have I been sitting on my 500 hour yoga teacher training and I still haven't gone through, but I'm over here like trying to get other certifications and I need to remind myself like, anakai, you need to go and finish your 500 hour.

I even have a second 200 hour yoga training because my first one sucked.

And I didn't realize that until I actually started teaching that my instructor was not just like an awful person, but she was not a very good instructor trader.

And so I had to go and enroll in another 200 hours so that I can get like some more fluidity.

But I ended up learning on the job, like pretty much teaching yoga, talking to other yoga teachers, taking other people's classes.

I ended up figuring it out, but I wanted to just do myself justice and go through like a really good program.

So I have a second 200 hour I need to finish and my 500 hour and I'm over here trying to do trauma Informed and all this stuff and it's like, no Anakini, you need to learn what you already signed up for.

Actually start teaching at a higher level and then practice.

Like, you don't just need implementation with AI, you also need practice.

And what do we also do in yoga and real life and fitness and all that?

You do the same stuff.

You have to learn it, implement it and then practice.

Why do you guys think that I did so well as a nurse?

Because nursing is exactly that.

It's the military in me.

See one, teach one, do one.

Okay?

Use that simple framework when you approach AI.

And that's why you need a week in between to go and say, okay, I got this and actually try it and then let me know and help.

Let us celebrate you and then let me know what happened.

Or like have time to like, okay, this is what happened.

This is what I tried, this is what didn't work, this is what did.

Or this is what I like.

This is what I didn't like.

Each workshop is going to cover essentially a different piece of this AI puzzle again.

The first one's going to be Claude 101 because that's the big one.

And we're literally starting as like a beginner friendly.

I'm not assuming that you know anything.

We are going to walk in it together.

I'm going to show you exactly what I mean when I say AI is a tool and not a replacement.

And again, it's free to watch it live.

And you can actually get all six series for like an incredible price.

If you want to just go ahead and get all of them and then be in the zone and get the pass for all six workshops.

And to be honest, I've been sitting on this curriculum for a while because I have so much.

I've been learning so much.

And I'm like, how do I teach this back?

How do I break it down and make it more accessible?

I want as many women inside my room as possible at my table, because we all deserve a seat in the AI space.

And so if you're listening to this and it's in time, come.

Even if you missed the first one, come to the next one.

I think the next one is Canva.

AI bring a bff.

All you gotta do is get into the Facebook group, answer some questions, and it's like, free.

You don't gotta do anything.

There's all kinds of cool stuff in there.

I don't care if you come with your arms crossed saying, aunt Connie, I dare you to change my mind about AI.

Go ahead.

I had people that came to my workshop.

They're like, aunt Connie, I can't believe it.

I really was like, nope, she is not going to convince me otherwise.

And they're like, wow, you blew my mind.

I was like, yeah.

I'm so happy for you.

I just want you to come curious.

I don't want you to be terrified of AI.

I want you to be ready to use it.

And I want to prepare you to learn how to use it with safe guardrails, so to speak.

So I want to just wrap this up because my son's going to wake up any moment from his nap, and I might lose this window to get this out to you in time.

But what I want you to walk away with from today, one AI is so powerful and can be completely amazing and liberating, but it is not a neutral one.

It has literally been designed with certain goals that may not always align with yours.

So just know that.

Stay awake to that.

Be mindful, and, you know, if you want to, like, know what's going on from that perspective.

That's why I have my newsletter, Spilling the ait, so that you can keep up with a lot of that stuff.

And it's stuff that I'm going to be using to also educate you guys inside the free Facebook group.

Number two, Human First.

AI means that you, my beautiful friend, stay in the driver's seat.

Your intuition, your relationships, and more importantly, your creativity.

Be mindful about how much of that you are outsourcing to artificial intelligence.

Those are the things that make your business irreplaceable.

Number three, if you want to learn how to use AI in a way that really helps you expand and breathe instead of replacing you, I invite you to come and join us in the AI Edge series.

The first one's this Sunday, 2pm Hawaii Standard Time.

The link will be in the show notes and if you want to get the replay, you already know that you like workbooks and you want the pro, you know, the prompt books and all the stuff.

You have the option to upgrade to an actual pass to get all the goodies.

And if you're not in the group yet, well, come on, what are you doing?

It's free.

I'm there.

I'm welcoming you.

I can't wait to.

I can't wait to have the conversation and see how I can support you.

And as always, I want you to be you.

I want you to continue to be beautiful because you are inside and out and I want you to continue leading from your heart.

I will catch you in the next episode or hopefully I get to see you in one of our AI Edge series workshops.

All right, beautiful.

That's a wrap on today's episode.

But before you go, let's talk about something really important.

You are not just another entrepreneur trying.

To figure things out alone.

You are a wave leader.

Someone whose work is meant to create real impact, touch the lives of others.

And make this world better.

And I want you to know you don't have to do it alone.

If today's conversation resonated with you, I'd love to keep this energy going inside of my free Facebook community.

Empower Her Biz Collective.

It's where we take these conversations deeper with live trainings, tech walkthroughs and real heart centered support from other women wellness entrepreneurs who really get it.

So if you're ready for community, clarity.

And support as you build your own.

Business with heart and ease, I'd invite.

You to come and join us.

You'll find the link in the show notes.

And hey, if you love today's episode, make sure to subscribe, leave a review if you feel inclined, please and share this with a fellow heart led women entrepreneur so that we can build this movement together.

Until next time, keep leading with heart.