The Flourish Feed Podcast

An AI trainer on who owns your expertise once a machine has learned it, why women need to be in the room before the strategy is written, and why nobody calls a calculator cheating.

Kristina Shea is the founder of WomenUp™ and BlueSky BlueOcean AI. She hosts The Kristina Shea Show and trains Canadian companies and their teams to use AI. Through WomenUp she helps women build the skills and confidence to use it in their work. She joins Gillian Stovel Rivers for Season 4 of The Flourish Feed.

It starts with the digital twin and the question Kristina cannot let go of: if a company trains a machine on thirty years of someone's judgment, who owns it when they leave? From there it moves to who sits at the table while AI is being built, why women call using it cheating, and the late mother Kristina would love to hear from one more time.

For families thinking about what they pass on, the values matter as much as the assets. This conversation asks what happens when wisdom itself can be kept.

Chapters:
00:00 Who gets access to AI?
02:30 What a digital twin captures
14:41 Why women need to be at the table
20:20 Who owns your mind?
25:51 Talking to her mother again
39:18 Why women call AI cheating
42:38 Who has access because you had access?

This program was prepared by Gillian Stovel Rivers, who is a Senior Wealth Advisor with CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. This is not an official program of CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. and the statements and opinions expressed during this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. This show is intended for general information only and may not apply to all listeners or investors; please obtain professional financial advice or contact Gillian to discuss your particular circumstances prior to acting on the information presented.

Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself.

Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures.

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A five-time Canadian long drive champion on why a contact is not a relationship, why she refuses the phrase giving back, and the question she leaves behind: who has access because you had access?

Fareen Samji, Far to everyone who knows her, grew up in Mombasa, Kenya, won the Canadian Women's Long Drive Championship five times, and now runs Smashing Nines, a nine hole scramble series for women where nobody keeps score. She joins Gillian Stovel Rivers for Season 4 of The Flourish Feed.

Golf, she says, is the vehicle and connection is the objective. At corporate tournaments she counted 140 men and four women, and the women were the ones selling raffle tickets. Her programmes give them somewhere to be a beginner first. Then the harder half: why she refuses the phrase giving back, why her Kenya trips are called knowledge shares, and what her father the Rotarian said when she asked how to help everybody. Her own test is blunt: am I creating change, or doing something that makes me feel good?

Underneath it is the question Gillian keeps asking this season, what counts as wealth. Far's answer is that relationships are among the most valuable forms she owns, time is another, and for anyone with money to direct the question is where it goes rather than how much is given. Who you hire, who you buy from, who you introduce, where you create opportunity.

Chapters:
00:00 The returns you cannot calculate
03:34 Golf is the vehicle
12:55 Vulnerability creates connection
15:15 A contact is not a relationship
23:46 The problem with giving back
36:50 Where your money actually goes
53:00 Which way does the pendulum swing?

Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself.

Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures.

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A two-time Chief Investment Officer on why capitalism fails, why he walks out of profit pitches, and why a gated community is proof something already broke. 

Peter Hofstra spent 24 years running institutional money, twice as Chief Investment Officer, after helping build a technology company that went public. He opens Season 4 of The Flourish Feed with Gillian Stovel Rivers. 

He explains why he has never owned a tobacco stock, why capitalism is a tool and not an answer, and what a founder gets wrong by opening with the money. Then the harder question: we price financial appreciation to the decimal and have no line for the coach who produces a generation of athletes or the parent who stays home and holds a neighbourhood together. His answer is that we have fit the world to the math instead of bringing the math to the world. Universal basic income, why the happiest countries got their desperate to zero, and why gated communities are a symptom follow. 

For families with more money than one purpose needs: not every dollar has to do the same job. Some of it is meant to compound. Some of it is meant to fund a skating program. 

Chapters: 
00:00 Humanity Does Not Lack Capital 
10:17 The Stock He Has Never Owned 
12:29 Capitalism Is a Tool 
32:03 What Money Cannot Count 
43:39 Not Every Dollar Has the Same Job 
49:22 AI Is Infrastructure 
57:49 Bryan Johnson, Human Lab Rat 

Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself. 

Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures. 

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The bottleneck in the age of AI is not the technology. It is the human brain, which is prehistoric and was never built for infinite information.

Steven Kotler is a bestselling author and the field's best known writer on flow. He thinks the fear around AI is massively overhyped and that the real difficulty is older and closer to home: an ancient nervous system trying to operate in an environment of unlimited input, where the skills that matter are not the ones anyone was trained for.

Which reclassifies a whole category of abilities. Creativity, focus, meaning making and resilience are not soft skills. They are survival skills for this century, and the people who will do well are the ones who can keep reinventing themselves rather than the ones who picked correctly once.

He goes at technological unemployment directly rather than around it, and at using the tools for skill development rather than fearing them. Flow is his answer for younger generations in particular, and adaptive flexibility is his name for the trait that everything else rests on.

The instruction underneath all of it is simple and hard. Stop fearing the future and start training for it.

Chapters:
00:00 The crisis of human alignment
02:49 What AI actually is and does
09:54 Job displacement, honestly
17:48 Prehistoric brains, modern problems
27:11 Flow in an age of abundance
33:08 What cooperation costs
34:10 COVID as a cooperation catalyst
36:02 Group flow
38:16 The AI job market
39:59 Using AI to build skills
42:06 Flow for younger generations
49:38 Meaning in an abundant world
57:37 Adaptive flexibility

Steven's work is at https://www.stevenkotler.com, the Flow Research Collective at https://www.flowresearchcollective.com and Syneurgy at https://www.syneurgy.com/

Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself.

Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures.

Connect with Gillian:
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers
https://x.com/GillianStovelR
https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial
https://flourishfamilywealth.com/

#flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself

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The thing that predicts trust, learning and performance is not found inside a single brain. It is found between brains.

Dr. Michael Mannino is a neuroscientist, an AI strategist and Chief Science Officer at the Flow Research Collective. His field is interpersonal synchrony, and the finding is literal rather than poetic: when people are genuinely connected, their brains, bodies and behaviour align in measurable ways, and that alignment predicts cooperation, creativity and results.

He has watched it in classrooms, boardrooms, elite esports teams and therapy rooms, using hyperscanning to record more than one brain at once. Which leads somewhere useful for teams: synchrony is not sameness, and a group needs enough diversity to stay intelligent while staying aligned enough to move.

The physiology is the surprise. The vagus nerve, gut health and the brain as a prediction engine all turn out to sit underneath what we experience as intuition and rapport, which means connection is a bodily state before it is a social one.

And the question the whole conversation bends towards. As machines get more capable, what gets more valuable is not raw intelligence, it is the ability to connect, coordinate and make meaning together. In a culture obsessed with optimising the individual, the next gain is between people.

Chapters:
00:00 Alignment and performance
03:14 Finding the neuromarkers of synchrony
06:18 How hyperscanning developed
10:32 Physical, cognitive and relational performance as one thing
14:47 Synchrony against diversity in a team
20:23 Context and dopamine
23:55 The brain as a prediction engine
26:35 The vagus nerve
28:49 Gut health and synchrony
29:41 Team flow and collective ambition
31:15 Synchrony in team dynamics
32:57 Why it feels so good
34:31 The brain state of team flow
36:50 Competition against collaboration
39:29 Why it decides performance
40:50 Synergy, and AI in team synchrony
43:13 What COVID did to teams
46:41 Building human connection deliberately

Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself.

Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures.

Connect with Gillian:
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers
https://x.com/GillianStovelR
https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial
https://flourishfamilywealth.com/

#flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself

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Leadership built for scarcity does not work in abundance, and most leaders are still running the old operating system.

Andrew Cohn runs Lighthouse Consulting and arrives with an unusual combination behind him: law, leadership consulting, higher education and spiritual psychology. He has coached inside Fortune 500 companies and mission driven nonprofits, which is why the conversation moves between stakeholder capitalism and the internal state of the person leading without either one sounding like a digression.

His claim is that presence and internal clarity are leadership assets rather than personal indulgences. A leader who cannot pause cannot ask the question that changes the room, and the impactful question is most of the job. Group flow and psychological safety follow from the same place.

The rift he names is worth sitting with. Organisations invest heavily in external capability and almost nothing in internal development, then wonder why capable people come apart in transition. Identity is what is actually under pressure at those moments, not competence.

For anyone leading through a change they did not choose, and for anyone whose achievement has stopped meaning anything.

Chapters:
00:00 The human operating system in abundance
03:53 What makes leadership hard now
07:30 Shareholder to stakeholder capitalism
11:36 The impactful question
15:18 Group flow and psychological safety
19:35 Internal against external development
24:13 Identity in transition
28:07 The power of the pause
33:50 The emotional environment a leader creates
36:16 Where AI fits

Andrew's work is at https://lighthouseconsultingllc.com and he hosts the Spirituality and Leadership podcast.

Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself.

Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures.

Connect with Gillian:
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers
https://x.com/GillianStovelR
https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial
https://flourishfamilywealth.com/

#flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself

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Success is a debit. We treat only losses that way, and miss that achievement costs enormous energy on the way to being worth it.

Dr. Sarah Sarkis is a clinical psychologist turned executive coach, and her frame is the metabolic budget. Energy is finite and it is spent across every domain of a life at once, so ambition in one place is quietly withdrawn from somewhere else whether or not anyone accounts for it.

Overspend and the system corrects without asking. Her phrase for it is regressing to the average of your best habits, which is what burnout actually looks like from the inside before anyone calls it that. The fix is not more discipline. It is oscillation, moving deliberately between flow and recovery rather than trying to hold one state.

She maps five autonomic response patterns, urgency, withdrawal, control, overconnection to threat, and regulation, and the value is in recognising which one you default to under pressure. On a team it matters more than individual capacity, because a team can only move as fast as the person who withdraws the most.

And the line to keep for a world that is not getting simpler. Anybody who says stress can be eliminated is selling something. It cannot. You adapt to it. So be careful what you allow to become normal.

Chapters:
00:00 Energy as wealth in uncertain times
02:20 The metabolic budget
04:00 What ambition costs
06:40 Overspending, and regression to the mean
08:00 Five factors of flourishing and their price
10:00 Undoing an imbalance
12:00 Balanced against burnt out
14:00 Oscillating between flow and recovery
16:00 Small consistent experiments
20:00 The neurochemistry of flow
24:00 Persistent stress and the intentional pause
30:00 The myth of an optimal state
35:00 Urgency and withdrawal
40:00 Control, threat and regulation

Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself.

Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures.

Connect with Gillian:
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers
https://x.com/GillianStovelR
https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial
https://flourishfamilywealth.com/

#flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself

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The issue is not talent. The issue is proximity to opportunity, and that is a design problem rather than a pipeline one.

Andrea Mac is a revenue strategist, and she is on to argue that the coming transfer of wealth to women changes nothing on its own. Inheriting money is not the same as generating it, directing it, or deciding where it goes. The systems that determine who earns, who owns and who gets funded carry on unless somebody redesigns them.

Her overlooked lever is sales. Not as a personality trait, which is how it is usually framed and why so many women opt out of it, but as a repeatable predictable system that can be learned. She treats revenue generation as the skill that has to come before investing, because you cannot deploy capital you never produced.

The reframe that lands hardest is what counts as capital allocation. Every referral, every vendor contract, every hiring decision is one. Which means the power to redirect money is already in far more hands than the investing conversation suggests, and it is exercised weekly by people who do not think of themselves as allocators.

Her name for what that builds is a female informed economy, and her definition of it is reciprocity over extraction.

Chapters:
00:00 Why women holding 40 percent of global assets matters
02:48 Where the growth is coming from
04:13 The myths, and the design flaws underneath
05:55 Revenue before investing
06:32 Sales as a system, not a personality
08:22 The training gap
09:48 Aligning values with revenue
11:42 Household and partnership dynamics
13:09 What unpaid labour costs a career
15:05 Flexible paths and income stagnation
19:42 Proximity, networks and deploying capital
20:40 Ownership and agency
26:13 Supporting women led businesses on purpose
30:40 Building an inclusive economy
39:36 Revenue as the accelerator
43:51 Community driven financial systems
44:20 Women in capital allocation roles
45:23 Using AI to widen access
48:38 Getting real output out of the tools

Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself.

Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures.

Connect with Gillian:
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers
https://x.com/GillianStovelR
https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial
https://flourishfamilywealth.com/

#flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself

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Skills are additive. Attributes are what show up when everything becomes uncertain, and you cannot apply a known skill to an unknown environment.

Rich Diviney spent twenty years as a Navy SEAL officer and now writes and teaches on performance. His distinction between the two is the spine of the episode. A skill is trained for a situation you can name. An attribute is the elemental driver that decides what you do when the situation is one nobody prepared for.

That makes attributes the thing worth knowing about yourself, including the low ones, which he treats as blind spots to account for rather than flaws to fix. On a team the balance across people matters more than any individual's profile, which is why the same person can be excellent in one group and ineffective in another.

Then identity, and his sharpest line. The words I am are two of the most powerful in the language, because identity drives behaviour and physiology rather than merely describing them. The best thing you can do under uncertainty is decide which identity serves the moment.

And the reason it is on a wealth show: in a world shaped by AI, human value may lie less in what we do and more in how we behave when things stop being predictable.

Chapters:
00:00 Attributes in uncertain times
02:51 What SEAL training teaches about skills
06:07 Mindset
09:05 Attributes against skills
11:55 How attributes drive performance
15:03 A worked example
17:51 Low attributes and blind spots
21:04 Balance in a team
23:53 Self-reflection and growth
31:26 Extraversion and introversion
32:58 Task switching
35:44 Self-awareness
36:52 Insouciance and humility
38:40 The power of identity
45:31 Identity through change

Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself.

Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures.

Connect with Gillian:
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers
https://x.com/GillianStovelR
https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial
https://flourishfamilywealth.com/

#flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself

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Women live longer than men and spend 25 percent more of that life in poor health. The system driving that gap has never been measurable.

Kiran Kumar founded Timeless Biotech and is building the first ovarian age clock. Her claim reframes the organ entirely: the ovary is not only about fertility, it is the master regulator of longevity, with downstream effects on heart, brain and metabolic health.

Menopause, on this reading, is not a moment. It is a multi-year biological transition, and treating it as an event is why intervention usually arrives after the window that mattered. Ovarian age and chronological age are different numbers, and knowing the first one changes what a woman can decide and when.

What AI adds is translation. Hormone data is complex enough that it has stayed the property of specialists, and turning it into predictive, actionable intelligence is what makes it usable by the person whose body it is. Predicting menopause timing, personalising fertility and career decisions, intervening earlier with HRT or lifestyle.

Underneath the biotechnology the subject is agency. Planning a life around a system nobody would show you was never a fair ask.

Chapters:
00:00 The invisible system
04:09 Ovarian age as a vital sign
05:51 Why the data is hard
10:02 How Kiran got here
15:08 What makes menopause different
16:34 Learning from hormonal phases
19:26 Ovarian age against chronological age
21:27 How long the transition lasts
23:00 Managing it proactively
27:42 Lifestyle and ovarian aging
29:45 Working with Timeless Biotech
32:56 Why awareness matters
33:54 HRT and timing
36:41 How often to test
38:12 Agency

Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself.

Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures.

Connect with Gillian:
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers
https://x.com/GillianStovelR
https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial
https://flourishfamilywealth.com/

#flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself

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