The Human Advantage in the Age of AI

In today’s episode, I sit down with Rich Hua, founder of EPIQ Leadership Group, to discuss why emotional intelligence matters more than ever in the age of AI. Rich shares how his early reliance on logic and academic achievement eventually gave way to a greater appreciation for empathy, connection, and self-awareness. We talk about managing stress, seeking practical feedback, and helping leaders build stronger relationships without sacrificing analytical thinking. From personal growth to workplace performance, our conversation shows how integrating IQ and EQ can help us adapt, collaborate, and bring more humanity to an increasingly automated world. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to Office Hours. I'm David Meltzer. We're here live at, that's right, the Sirius XM Studios in Las Vegas at the Wynn, and we're blessed to have these amazing co-hosts. But our next friend here is Rich Hua. He is the CEO of Epic Leadership Group, and he is an expert in EQ, was the head of EQ at Amazon, a small little company, by the way. There's going to be a lot of IQ, EQ, and Epic Qs here as well. So it's time for the Qs for Rich. Rich, welcome to Office Hours.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  It is a pleasure to be here, Dave. Really appreciate having me.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  So my first Q is about IQ and EQ, and of course, AI, not to get alphabetical on you. But they're so interrelated, IQ, EQ, and AI. So at the Epic Leadership Group, I'm sure you reconcile the importance of each of these different things. I talk about infinite intelligence, intuition, inspiration, and energy. I believe that coincides with IQ, EQ, and even AI. For you, how do you reconcile those three different types of intelligence, AI, IQ, and EQ?

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so maybe a little bit about my story, because I think that explains a lot about how I got into this work.

• 1:17Speaker 00

  You can explain it any way you want. We're listening, man.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  So I was born in Taiwan, and I came to America when I was four years old. And I had three things going against me that were pretty challenging. One is I didn't speak English. Two is I was extremely hyperactive, sort of Tasmanian devil going around destroying everything in my, you know, in my wake. And then thirdly is I was really socially awkward. And so I had a lot of unpleasant emotional experiences. I faced racism and bullying and didn't know how to make friends. And so I basically decided-

• 1:47Speaker 00

  What did they call bullying when we were kids, though? They didn't call it bullying?

• 1:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, they called it something else. I don't know what they called it.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  It's called mean.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're mean. They're mean.

• 1:54Speaker 00

  You're mean. He's mean. There's no bullying. It's like, dude, you're a dick.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. So yes, I faced a lot of that. But what I did is I decided to turn off all my emotions because they felt unpleasant. And I didn't know what to do with them. And so I said, let me be a robot. And well, it turned out I was actually pretty smart. So I thought, let me be a genius robot. That would be the most awesome thing in the world. All IQ, hyper data, you know, driven, logical, no emotions at all. And it worked out actually pretty well for a while. You know, I got straight A's in high school. I actually got a perfect score on the SAT, eight people out of 2 million that year. I got in every college I applied to, studied electrical engineering, pure science at Berkeley. And my genius robot plan is going fantastically, until I did one thing that kind of screwed it up. I got married. And my wife didn't really appreciate the robot thing for some reason.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  She wanted empathy, vulnerability, emotional connection. And then instead of going directly in engineering, I actually became a missionary for quite a few years. I served three years in the Philippines, another 20 in the Bay Area. And so I was helping people with their deepest spiritual, emotional needs. And so I realized that IQ was totally insufficient, that there was something else that was needed, and that was on the social, emotional side. So I started learning. I read tons of books. I got mentoring, I got coaching, I took courses, and my wife and my kids and a lot of friends helped me dramatically. And I took EQ, and I integrated it with my IQ, and I became happier, healthier, kinder, and more successful in every way, both professionally and personally.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  So I'm a big believer in the integration of that. That's why I have the Epic Leadership Group. And in this age of AI, in order to be able to thrive and succeed, we need to integrate both together. I've worked with hundreds of thousands of leaders that are really, really high IQ. And the thing that's holding them back these days is not the lack of IQ. It's absolutely on the social, emotional realm, so they can be more adaptable, more empathetic, more flexible, and be more inspiring as leaders.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Well, I'm gonna throw another Q in there to mess things up a little bit. But in professional sports, working with a lot of different athletes, we had always talked about it. EQ, the athletic ability, right?

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  And then the goal was to try to increase their IQ for the sport, for basketball, whatever it was. And we realized in the 90s of the EQ, the emotional was actually more important many times than the IQ. My question to you is, is you have someone, and they want to find out, you know, which area should they focus on the most? Is it their athletic quotient, you know, being able to just be healthier and focus on that, the emotional side, the intelligence side? What's the best way to go about for anyone to find out where the weak leak is and what to do about it?

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's sort of a broad question here, right? Which is, how do I become better at blank, right? If somebody says, right, I want to become better. One thing I actually really believe in, I got this from Marshall Goldsmith, you know, one of the world's most famous coaches, right? He said, we had some conversations together, and he said, you know, one of the best things that he uses is this idea of feed forward. And essentially, basically, just go around to five to seven people, and you say, I want to become better at blank. Give me a couple of ideas about how I could improve. And you basically look at the sort of intersection where three or four people say the same thing. You go, okay, this is something that other people are definitely observing, and giving me a sort of advice on how I can grow in that area.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  One thing I will say is this, is that neurobiologically, our brains and our bodies evolve with the emotional, social centers first. And so if we don't actually know how to regulate and work with those things, all the IQ in the world is not going to help us be able to be successful. And new research has actually found that when your EQ sort of goes awry, where you're stressed out, you're under pressure, and you can't manage it well, your IQ actually decreases by up to 50 to 60%. This is studies done with the Special Forces in Australia. And so you literally become dumb, like you literally can't think straight. And so no matter how smart you are, and I've seen plenty of C-level executives do some incredibly dumb things.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Not because they were dumb, it's because they literally lost half their IQ because they're under so much stress and pressure. And you know, the same with sports, right? When you're under that stress, you can't think straight, you know, you're not gonna make good decisions, right?

• 6:13Speaker 02

  We've seen a lot of great athletes lose it because they didn't have the emotional ability.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  For sure. And shout out to Marshall Goldsmith, by the way. Been a multi-repeater offender on the show. Blessed me with an honor as a top 100 Marshall Goldsmith coach as well. So well-versed in the emotional quotient that is necessary to increase your intellect, as well as your loins.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Jackson is now an eight-year-old Ewing sarcoma survivor, two years cancer-free. The chemotherapies that he received, they are all, except for one, older than my husband and I. There has been no new treatment for Ewing sarcoma that has been successful.

• 6:53Speaker 04

  Millions across America are waiting for new breakthroughs.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  And so we're waiting for an MRI right now, hoping that it's gonna come back normal.

• 7:01Speaker 04

  Is curing childhood cancer allowed by OMB, by the Office of Management and Budget? Help protect research that Congress already funded. Go to unitedforcures.org today. Paid for by United for Cures.

• 7:17Speaker 00

  Speaking of increasing your intellect, as well as your loins, incredible Forrest Griffin.

• 7:22Speaker 05

  Mostly loins, but don't worry about that. So give me a tangible, I have a lot of questions for you. Give me a tangible definition of EQ. How do I get better at it without becoming a monk? Or a missionary? And then like, is it, do you really think, give us your thoughts on like, is this the future? Like, you know, with AI kind of taking over, is like, the emotional, the people to people? Because I keep hearing that's gonna be like the new, like, way to make money. It's like, hey, people will need to interact with people. All those questions, go.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  All right. You've asked me the billion-dollar question here. Some might say trillion dollars. So EQ, emotional intelligence, is defined as the ability to understand and manage your own emotions, and understand and manage the emotions of other people around you. A simpler one, though, is I'd say it's knowing how to have emotions work for you rather than against you. And when people have done some dumb stuff, we've allowed our emotions to work against us, right? And so it's knowing how to leverage-

• 8:20Speaker 05

  We're talking about looking internally at us.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Yes, it's on ourselves. And then also knowing how to basically have, work with other people's emotions so that we can achieve common goals, right? And so it's your emotions, or the people's emotions, knowing all of that mix. And since we experience emotions 90 to 100% of our day, it is in the mix all the time, whether we realize it or not. How do you increase it? I'd say the books you read and the people you know. Read some good books, right? Daniel Goldman, Mark Brackett, Travis Bradbury, they've all written amazing books on emotional intelligence.

• 8:50Speaker 05

  I've never heard of any of them. I've never heard of them.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Who's your top one?

• 8:53Speaker 01

  They're like probably the world's, you know, sort of foremost leaders. If you just read one, Daniel Goldman, Emotional Intelligence, it's literally called that. Amazing, amazing book, changed my life back in the mid 90s. And then I had the privilege of working with him, you know, at Amazon and doing some stuff together. Now I'm part of his consulting group, basically advising him on how to bring it to more corporations. So, you know, my hero and, you know, became sort of a colleague, which is kind of amazing. So in this world of AI-

• 9:19Speaker 00

  That's what I've been meaning you for, Forrest.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  I love it. In this world of AI, is everything that can be automated gets automated?

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Like anything that can be structured and repeatable and basically generated, that's what AI does, you know, analysis and summarization and generation, code, writing, images, all that. That's going to be far done far, far better than AI. What will differentiate humans and be our competitive advantage are interpersonal capabilities. And I call it EQ and IQ because those include EQ, things like empathy, things like adaptability, things like, you know, inspiration, motivation.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  Humor.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Humor, that's right. That's a big one. That's right. AI is actually pretty bad at telling jokes. But it's also the IQ. It's metacognition. It is lateral thinking. It is systems thinking. It's being able to put these very human things together and being able to come up with novel ideas and connections that AI is not able to do because AI was trained on all the stuff that's already out there. And so can't really create something that's not out there. Only humans can actually create those novel connections. And so there's a real power there.

• 10:31Speaker 05

  That was awesome. Thank you for the, my real question is, how do I turn it all off? But I'm gonna ask you that. I'm gonna ask you that later. Yeah. I'm gonna ask you that after the show.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  You know, Rich, like you, I went to a school full of nerds where social connection was an afterthought, so much so that there was a shirt that said, sex kills. So come to Carnegie Mellon, live forever. So what you say to people who just, it doesn't make sense, right? Emotional intelligence, it's worthless, right? I want to make money. I just want to be smart.

• 11:03Speaker 00

  I went to a school where they said, sex kills, wear a condom.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  That was too lame, baby. That's right. New Orleans at its best.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  We had to convince men to talk to the women at our school. So when you're working with people like this, how do you get them to buy in? How do you get them on that side of, oh, maybe there is something here? Yeah. So this was literally the biggest nut we had to crack, right? At Amazon, because we have.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, that came out really strangely.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, I cannot retract that statement anymore, I think. But, but the fact is, I was trying to convince some really, really successful, high IQ, data-driven, you know, techno nerdy types like myself, engineering types, about this emotion side. And so coming to them and saying, hey, would you like some emotional intelligence, empathy, compassion, they would have laughed me out of the room. And that's generally what a lot of people have done in approach. So what I said was this, how many of us would like to manage our stress more effectively? How many of us would like to be happier at work and at home? How many of us would like to be maybe healthier, right? Physically, emotionally, spiritually? Well, you know, I've got some answers that I think can help you.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  And when it came to high level leaders, I would ask, ask them about business challenges. What are the business challenges you're facing right now that could be solved with greater connection? Understanding, adaptability, you know, collaboration? And every leader had responses for that. And that's when I would follow up and say, well, I think there's some things I can help you with on interpersonal dynamics or, you know, human connection or inspirational leadership. So it was all EQ, but it was presented in a way that really talked to them about what they were facing. Right? And as you and I know, what is every nerd's real dream, right? To get the girl or get the guy or get the whatever they're looking for, even though we were afraid of doing it. And that of course is all emotions.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  And at the end of the day, what we're really doing is we're teaching people how to love. Right? How to love themselves more, how to love each other more? Because that's what we all really want. You just have to package it in a way that is palatable for that particular environment.

• 13:18Speaker 00

  And the integration and reconciliation of IQ, EQ, and the enhancement or amplification caused by AI and artificial intelligence to make humans more human. But we need humans also to make humans more human. And it takes the situational knowledge and experience of the incredible Rich Quell. Thank you so much for joining us. Check out Epic Leadership Group if you're interested in EQ evangelism and the reconciliation of AI with EQ and IQ to enhance your health, your wealth, your worthiness and your happiness. I promise you, Rich will make you rich with all of those things. Thank you, Rich, for joining us here on Office Hours.