Crafting Non-Profit Narratives in the Age of AI

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Speaker 6 There are some people that are gonna

Speaker 6 meet this challenge head-on and they are going to, you know, teach their students. They are going to adopt their curriculums.
They are going to retrain themselves as professionals.

Speaker 6 And then there's the people that

Speaker 6 aren't. And there's going to be a big pay differentiation.

Speaker 2 Let's go.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Make it look.
Make it look. Make it look.

Speaker 5 The goal of this podcast is to share original insights and conversations on the habits, mindsets, and strategies of elite performers that produce exceptional results. Let's go.

Speaker 5 Jessica, it's such a pleasure having you on the show. Thanks for spending some time with us.

Speaker 6 Hello, Ryan. Here I am.

Speaker 5 You know, in looking through your history, what you've done,

Speaker 5 you know, you've taken on a bunch of different roles, big projects.

Speaker 5 What was it that initially attracted you to entrepreneurship?

Speaker 5 We have a lot of entrepreneurs on the show.

Speaker 5 I think everyone kind of comes at it from different angles.

Speaker 5 But there are a lot of people who listen for context to you on the question who listen to this show that I know are considering entrepreneurship, that have maybe even fairly successful by some metrics, careers in other places, but they have that itch.

Speaker 5 And obviously it's been entrepreneurship's been an enormous part of your life for more than 20 years now.

Speaker 5 What was it that brought you to entrepreneurship?

Speaker 6 Well, I was raised by an entrepreneur. My father was actually in the insurance business.
He had a private

Speaker 6 investigative surveillance company.

Speaker 6 And he had, at the time he sold it, he had 200 employees, 75 vans and he investigated workers compensation insurance fraud wow so since i was five years old i was around cameras he got me one of the first apple computers uh and and so i sort of grew up and transitioned from doing more like surveillance kind of stuff like he did to marketing and fundraising and and and so raising money um you know for businesses and for nonprofits wow that's incredible so

Speaker 5 did you start your own business? Like you just saw an opportunity and said, Hey, you know, I can take these skills I've learned,

Speaker 5 you know, working with your father and take them into your own thing.

Speaker 6 You know, I moved on to Miami and I had a real job for exactly 365 days. And during that time, I built a website, I got some clients, I figured out how to transition in my income.

Speaker 6 And so, when I was 25 was the last time I've had like an official job, and I'm 44. So, yeah.

Speaker 5 Why do you think that transition is so hard for people?

Speaker 6 Well, it's because, you know, you trade one devil for another. You know, if you have a job, you hate your boss.

Speaker 6 But if you don't have a job, you have to force yourself to do sales calls and breathe down your own neck. So, you know,

Speaker 6 I think it takes a tremendous amount of self-motivation to be an entrepreneur because there are so many hardships and so many difficulties and so many challenges.

Speaker 6 It's like, you know, non-stop problem solving.

Speaker 6 And if you're not, if you don't have the energy for that, or if you can't self-motivate to get through these problems, then you're not going to last, you know, in the long run.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Was there, I find with a lot of entrepreneurs, especially early on, like purpose and meaning are like, are really what push them over the edge right if you just have a good idea we all have good ideas and good ideas hit us bad ideas hit us all the time sometimes bad ideas but it feels like when someone actually makes that move whether it's starting a plumbing business or becoming an online coach or developing a product or whatever they ended up choosing there's some sort of purpose or meaning behind it uh one i guess do you believe that that's tends to be the catalyst and two um

Speaker 5 what was that early for you

Speaker 6 well my dad told me when I was a little girl, he's like, you know, whenever you want to start a business, I'll support you. And so it took me a long time.

Speaker 6 It took me until I was 21 years old to really get, I was like, you know what? If I had to work, like,

Speaker 6 I would love to get paid to travel around the world and make short videos for companies.

Speaker 6 about the work that they're doing all around the world. So I've been to 66 countries was the last time I counted.

Speaker 6 And most of those countries have been inside of like some kind of photojournalism project. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Wow. That's that's pretty incredible.
What is that like? Like, so I've traveled

Speaker 5 most of North America, including the Caribbean. And I've been to 43 states outside of Alaska and Hawaii being the two big misses that I just have not been able to get to yet.

Speaker 5 What is that international travel like? What is it like running a business when you're on the road as much as you would have to be to be able to reach that many countries?

Speaker 6 Well, I'll never forget what my graphic designer many years ago, decades ago, I wanted to put my cell phone on my business card.

Speaker 6 She's like, well, you live in Florida, but you have a Chicago cell phone. You can't have your cell phone.
People think you're in Chicago. I'm no, no, no.

Speaker 6 I'm like, listen, it's the future that people are going to put their cell phones on their business cards, not just like their Google landline number or whatever you fake, right, on the internet to have like a local phone number.

Speaker 6 And so I've really been running an online business since the beginning. A lot of my resources have been

Speaker 6 either not necessarily in the same town as me or they have been overseas. So I work with a lot of teams.
I've employed hundreds of people

Speaker 6 in the past. One of my favorite things I use to employ people is actually called Fiverr.com.

Speaker 5 Have you heard of Fiverr.com? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I use five. I have, I think I've, I've delivered, I've, uh, have

Speaker 6 186 gigs I've done over Fiverr over the last 10 years.

Speaker 6 Um, but no, I really think that people had like their aha work virtual moment when COVID happened.

Speaker 6 And I feel like I had that, that moment happen a long time ago, especially if you can, I normally even live in Miami, but I'm at my parents' cabin in Wisconsin.

Speaker 6 And we have, you know, great internet here. So I get to spend a couple months up here during the summer, run my whole business here, do my sales calls, do my talk to my clients, work on my school.

Speaker 6 You know, I'm in a doctoral program. So all this stuff I'm doing virtually and have been for a long time.

Speaker 5 What part of Wisconsin? Manaqua. Oh, okay.
Yeah. I love Wisconsin.

Speaker 5 have done a lot of speaking in Wisconsin. I've been to Sheboygan, Madison, the Dells, Milwaukee, obviously.
I went to, I don't even know what it's called, but it used to be like a Playboy like

Speaker 5 thing. It's like this big complex, and it used to be owned by Hugh Hefner.
And then they, then they, you know, he sold it. And now it's like this big, and it's like in the middle of nowhere,

Speaker 5 Wisconsin, but it's all beautiful. And I find the people to be.
I find the people of Wisconsin to be funny and inviting and like down to earth.

Speaker 5 And I just, I love every chance I get to go to Wisconsin. It's a great place.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 5 So, okay. So, so you have this entrepreneurial spirit.
You, you make it happen.

Speaker 6 You execute.

Speaker 5 You've been tremendously successful. And then you decide to start a nonprofit.
Talk to me about that transition.

Speaker 5 Maybe what was the motivation? What did you see going on? And

Speaker 5 how, what did that look like?

Speaker 6 Well, as a video producer for a long time, since 2005 was the first time we did this, but we, I recognized a long time ago, 20 years ago, that donating my services as a video producer, like I could make a lot more money if I like worked for Vimeo or

Speaker 6 did a hundred other things to tap into my skill as a digital marketer. But instead, I've chosen, even through my corporation, two pair of productions, I work with nonprofits.

Speaker 6 And I really found out very early on the power of video for these nonprofits. My dad, we were in a leadership course

Speaker 6 called the Self-Expression and Leadership Program, and we had to do like a community project.

Speaker 6 And so my dad was like, you know what, I'm going to go to Thailand and film this footage for this nonprofit.

Speaker 6 And then he brought the footage back to me and I edited all the footage together into like a five-minute video. And we sent it over to them on like a DVD.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 they reported back to us. They called us a couple of days after we had sent it to them and they said that the whole office had watched it.

Speaker 6 And the whole office had cried because they had never even been to Thailand themselves, the staff people. They had never seen these kids on the street.

Speaker 6 They had never seen these kids like huffing glue on the corner. And so my dad was capturing all these images, and they were just blown away.

Speaker 6 And they had never had a tool like that to communicate what they were doing in the country of Thailand, you know, helping these young kids who were at the mercy of sex trafficking and prostitution and addiction and homelessness and domestic violence and all this kind of stuff.

Speaker 6 So I realized how powerful it is for these organizations.

Speaker 6 And so, you know, at first we would just donate our services here and there, but as we got a reputation for doing this, we had the demand of people asking us for free pro bono services just far outweigh my capacity.

Speaker 6 Unfortunately, I don't have like a big family trust fund, you know, to just be doing those projects left and right. So,

Speaker 6 but I

Speaker 6 eventually we created this nonprofit about 10 years ago because we wanted to have a formal application process where nonprofits would apply once a year.

Speaker 6 And that's what I'd love, you know, if anybody has a takeaway from this recording.

Speaker 6 Our nonprofit Eyes on Your Mission has a

Speaker 6 grant where other nonprofits can apply to get free video production services donated to them. Meaning, would they get a video shoot donated, one-day video shoot anywhere in the world?

Speaker 6 We edit it down into like a three-to-five-minute sizzle reel type video, and we do that through Eyes on Your Mission, which is my little hat.

Speaker 6 That was my reminder for the day to do my pitch for Eyes on Your Mission.

Speaker 6 But we love hearing from nonprofits who have really worthy stories and who really want to tell a story that they've never told before, maybe.

Speaker 6 That's really what I'm most excited about these days. And if I had a magic wand, I would just, you know, sit around and probably do like 50 of these projects a year.

Speaker 6 But we have to be sort of discerning and make some difficult decisions because the demand for it is a lot higher than the supply.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And guys, I know a lot of you listening are either part of nonprofits or sit on nonprofit boards or have influence in nonprofits.
And there is no better way to tell your story than video.

Speaker 5 And I think this is a wonderful opportunity.

Speaker 5 The episode will certainly be out before July 18th, what I think you said was the deadline to apply. So we want to make sure that if you have interest,

Speaker 5 I'll have all the links in the show notes as well.

Speaker 5 If you guys don't forget the, or if you forget the URL, so wherever you're listening, whether it's YouTube or on the audio podcast, just go down to the description and there'll be a link over and you guys can learn more and apply if you, if you think it's something that you want to do.

Speaker 5 I think, you know, that story about Thailand and about the individuals who are actually doing the work, getting to actually see the people that they're impacting, you know, that

Speaker 5 is what makes video so powerful. I have used video tremendously in my career as well.
I'm not formally trained. I'm YouTube trained, but

Speaker 5 it delivers a message in a way, especially if you're thoughtful about how you do it, that

Speaker 5 I just don't think there is another medium.

Speaker 5 uh oftentimes not even an in-person you know maybe if you were there on the streets but outside of being there in person even if you're hearing a keynote from someone who's been there if you can't see it, rewind it, listen to it,

Speaker 5 share it in that format, it just doesn't make the same impact. So, what,

Speaker 5 you know, how, let's say, you come across an organization that you feel is has a great mission, has a great message, but maybe they're hesitant to create video.

Speaker 5 And I see this all the time in the small business community as well, organizations that are doing tremendous work and helping people.

Speaker 5 They

Speaker 5 just, they're like so hesitant to

Speaker 5 put what they do on camera, and I think that's changed a lot since the pandemic, but it still is around. Um, how do you start to change that mindset?

Speaker 5 How do you convince somebody who has a great story or great message that getting it on film and or you know, I guess we don't call it film but digital film and getting it out onto the internet so that people can connect with it is

Speaker 5 an important thing to do?

Speaker 6 Well,

Speaker 6 the me, there's there, there's nothing like human connection. Even as, you know, I don't know who's listening to this recording on YouTube.

Speaker 6 I can't see their eyes, but I can see Ryan's eyes.

Speaker 6 And after this moment, Ryan and I will have connected in a way that makes us feel like we're friends, even though it's only video that we're seeing of each other.

Speaker 6 But that human-to-human connection is so important. And especially one of the things you talk about a lot, Ryan, which I love, I've watched some of your podcasts on AI.

Speaker 6 And especially with AI coming out, at first I thought that it was going to sort of like replace what I did or maybe decrease the need for what I did, which is like these short documentaries.

Speaker 6 And in reality, with people now doubting what's real and what's not real.

Speaker 6 I mean, my documentary services and the capacity to tell stories that are authenticated real, you know, that's a whole new level of important now. Yeah.

Speaker 6 And I think that it just, continues just when you think it's like plateaued, then it continues to get more and more important. Yeah, um,

Speaker 5 it's funny. I had a uh, I have a friend of mine, he's a very successful speaker, and we were just catching up and chatting about what was going on with him and whatever.

Speaker 5 And you know, he had a few concerns around AI and its impact on his business. And I said,

Speaker 5 you know, I completely disagree with that. To me,

Speaker 5 I said, I said, bud,

Speaker 5 I think that what AI does is put,

Speaker 5 it puts,

Speaker 5 it makes in-person events paramount. Because now, if I'm, you know, there will come a day in the not too distant future.
I mean, there are people who are close right now.

Speaker 5 I have a friend who's, who's working with a company that creates a virtual you, like

Speaker 5 on your website, there's like a, like a, everything you've created, every video you've done, every article you've written, it like captures it all and uses you know, AI and

Speaker 5 uh chat GPT-4 to then create like basically a you wiki with an avatar that's like talking to people. And that's cool.

Speaker 5 Don't get me wrong, I think that's cool and it's valuable and it certainly um has its place. But

Speaker 5 how do I know? Like, there will be a time in the future that

Speaker 5 you know, you're watching a video on YouTube and you won't know whether that's Jessica or Jessica's avatar who has has been prompted through AI

Speaker 5 to move certain ways,

Speaker 5 talk in your voice, use your cadence, your tone, your vernacular, and then literally knows everything you've ever put on the internet and can regurgitate it. And I don't know if that's you or not.

Speaker 5 However, in person, if you're on stage or at a mastermind or an event or whatever it is,

Speaker 5 I know it's you and I'm getting this original experience. And I'll give you one more

Speaker 5 little anecdote that I think puts a pin in this:

Speaker 5 Alicia Keys did the Super Bowl this year. And she had a moment where she missed a note.
She

Speaker 5 small, tiny, didn't impact the performance. Alicia Keys is amazing.
She did a great job, but there was a small little thing, which happens in live performances.

Speaker 5 If anyone goes to concerts, the song never sounds exactly the same as it does on the radio when you're in person. And that's the beauty of it, right? The beauty of

Speaker 5 being live and there with someone is not the perfection of the performance. It's the little nuanced things, and I don't even want to call them mistakes that create a unique experience.

Speaker 5 And I feel like people

Speaker 5 we're going to see this wave of AI come in, and obviously people are going to adopt it. And certainly it'll have an impact.

Speaker 5 But I do see a counterswing back to sharing space, breathing the same air, seeing people live, because we'll want that authenticity that we just simply will not be able to to get from AI, you know, well, at least hopefully not in our lifetime.

Speaker 6 Amen. I'm with you on the live events.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 I uh and I know and I know you do a lot of speaking and stuff and a lot of uh interviews and seeing you on TV.

Speaker 5 And uh, you know, I think, I think all that stuff is, it's, it's going to come back around. I just have to believe that it will.

Speaker 5 So. Okay, so you have the,

Speaker 5 you have your entrepreneurial career, you move into the philanthropy side, you have the not-for-profit, and then you decide to go get your doctorate, become, and

Speaker 5 now you're becoming a professor. What was the impetus of that move?

Speaker 6 I fell in love with Florida International University 10 years ago when I was introduced to a professor.

Speaker 6 named Moses, Dr. Moses Schumo.
And he and I both wanted to use cameras and digital literacies to go into

Speaker 6 the most difficult

Speaker 6 Miami communities.

Speaker 6 One of them is called Liberty City, and it is a very high percentage of African-American, very high percentage of below the poverty limit,

Speaker 6 very

Speaker 6 low graduation rates with school and stuff like that. And so

Speaker 6 we wanted to

Speaker 6 put cameras in the hands of these students and get these high school students in this community paired up with college mentors.

Speaker 6 So, a lot of these kids in these communities don't see themselves going to college, and that's because they've not been to college campuses.

Speaker 6 They don't come to college campuses every week to hang out and get Starbucks on the corner and have that be normalized as like the way that they want their future.

Speaker 6 So, I started working and doing research with Florida International University back in 2015.

Speaker 6 We got, I secured a big grant through a family foundation for $100,000, and we were able to buy a whole bunch of cameras.

Speaker 6 We were able to buy out

Speaker 6 the college class. So I was teaching the college classes with the students and able to use the

Speaker 6 credibility of Florida International University.

Speaker 6 So since then, I decided to go back to get my master's degree, and going to FIU was a really natural choice. They had a great program.

Speaker 6 It was a degree, a master's degree in global strategic communications.

Speaker 6 So,

Speaker 6 got that degree.

Speaker 6 And then, I really want to, I think, my natural trajectory, although, although I always want to be able to work for clients and run the nonprofit and donate services and give back to the community, I really would like to sort of sunset

Speaker 6 my career in academia. And I was just recently offered a job, an adjunct teaching job.
So that's

Speaker 6 my step, my foot in the door on the way to a full-time faculty position.

Speaker 6 But I'm really excited and I get to, you know, wave the FIU flag and tell everybody I've drank the Kool-Aid and they're just a really remarkable university that I'm so excited to be a part of.

Speaker 5 What is it about teaching that turns you on?

Speaker 6 Oh, I just love like blowing kids' minds like like recently i was working with a group of um a group of seniors in high school and they were making little business commercials for their their business ideas their like uh their entrepreneurship plans

Speaker 6 and

Speaker 6 i had them generate images

Speaker 6 on DALI 3

Speaker 6 for the first time in their lives. They had never generated AI images.
And so sitting with them and typing it into the GPT interface, the Open AI interface and getting these kids their pictures.

Speaker 6 And they were like, whoa,

Speaker 6 like, oh my God.

Speaker 6 Like, these ones, these ones had like a lizard as a theme, and we turned it into like a Godzilla advertisement. And it was so much fun, what you can do with AI with kids.

Speaker 6 That's really what I want to specialize in.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 I've been doing AI really heavy for the the last four or five years. And I love the space.
And I think there's so much room.

Speaker 6 There's so much things that colleges and universities need to adapt to to have the kids engage with artificial intelligence and not be working, trying to work against artificial intelligence.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 I was asked to do a keynote for an insurance conference back in the wintertime in Winnipeg, and I wouldn't recommend going to Winnipeg in the wintertime, but the people were very nice.

Speaker 5 And they wanted to hear about AI's impact on the insurance industry.

Speaker 5 And I've been kind of following along and researching and listening and playing and everything with AI for probably about the same amount of time.

Speaker 5 And I shared this quote with them and everyone nodded their head. I'm not sure that they completely understood the full meaning of it, but everyone kind of nodded along.

Speaker 5 And it was from a research report done by IBM. AI won't replace people.
People who use AI will replace people. So

Speaker 6 I like that one. I gotta steal that one.
Yeah, yeah, steal away.

Speaker 5 It's,

Speaker 5 and my point to them was that

Speaker 5 I don't think this is a technology we can sleep on.

Speaker 5 There are certain industries that are usually laggards. The industry that I grew up in, the property, casualty, insurance industry, was very much a laggard on all technology.

Speaker 5 And my point to them was that while we've been able to be successful as an industry for 440 years

Speaker 5 as a technology laggard, this doesn't feel like a technology we can sleep on. Do you think that's a fair assessment?

Speaker 6 You know,

Speaker 6 on one hand, there's an urgency to it because, like you said, I love that.

Speaker 6 AI won't replace people. People who use AI will replace people.

Speaker 6 That is so smart because I'm really, I am a big time evangelist for people just trying it. A lot of my staff, I've used it with my staff for the first time.

Speaker 6 I feel like a pioneer in the space and it's sort of like video was back like 20 years ago, you know, like AI is feeling like video 20 years ago. So, but is AI

Speaker 6 gonna change over everything overnight? Not necessarily because AI is here to stay. You know, AI is now with us as a civilization until the end, right? In whatever form,

Speaker 6 well, I'm not, I'm not a pessimist like that, but I do know that

Speaker 6 I'm actually quite the quite an optimist for the sort of the utopian

Speaker 6 societies where AI can figure out how to solve all of our problems without killing us. Yeah, that's Star Trek.

Speaker 6 But

Speaker 6 I have faith. I have faith in AI.
I have faith in, you know, my dissertation is called

Speaker 6 From Anxiety to Creativity, Factors Influencing

Speaker 6 Students' Adoption of Artificial Intelligence in U.S. college classrooms.

Speaker 6 So that's a mouthful. But it's basically like artificial intelligence meets students meets mental health.

Speaker 6 And I do think there's a mental health component to AI because

Speaker 6 I think similar to the way people are getting really stressed out by social media, that there is a very real stress around artificial intelligence.

Speaker 6 And that's what I'm studying is how students experience that kind of stress and anxiety and how we can move them from a place of stress and anxiety to a place of confidence and creativity.

Speaker 5 Where is that anxiety coming from in relation to artificial intelligence?

Speaker 6 Well, when you're looking at

Speaker 6 college classrooms, you know, first of all,

Speaker 6 they're uh afraid of getting busted for plagiarism uh they're afraid of doing something their teacher doesn't want them to do they're afraid of uh ai replacing them because they want to be a singer-songwriter but now you can write a song on ai with suno and you you know do people do i i i gave i did a survey one time where i gave students a piece of paper and they wrote one thing that empowers me about ai is blank.

Speaker 6 And then on the other side, they said, one thing that gives me anxiety about AI

Speaker 6 is blank. And I really found

Speaker 6 their answer is super interesting. And they're very, they've thought about it a lot.
You know, they're not sleeping on this. They have been now are being raised in the age of AI.

Speaker 6 And so they've thought about, you know, how does this impact their capacity to make a living? What kind of jobs do they need to be studying

Speaker 6 and getting credentialed in?

Speaker 5 Yeah,

Speaker 5 I've been working on an essay that I haven't published yet.

Speaker 5 It's taken on a life of its own, and maybe someday it'll become a book. Who knows? It's probably way too long as it is to even be an essay.

Speaker 5 But it's the working title is Art, Assets, and Artificial Intelligence,

Speaker 5 the Only Careers That Will Exist in the Next 10 Years.

Speaker 5 And the idea that the subtext I still don't love, but the first three is, you know, the main concept of the article is that, or the essay, I guess, is that

Speaker 5 my interpretation or prediction is that there are certain things that AI will never be able to replace. And I actually did an interview for the podcast, which hasn't released yet with Patrick Leonard.

Speaker 5 Patrick Leonard is a producer, a music producer. He's worked with, he did three of Madonna's albums.
He's worked with Pink Floyd. He's worked with,

Speaker 5 geez,

Speaker 5 Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen or Stephen Cohen, whatever.

Speaker 5 His portfolio, you have heard two dozen songs that this guy has either written the song or produced the song.

Speaker 5 Incredible guy. And we were having this very conversation about AI's impact on the music industry.

Speaker 5 And he's like, I'm not taking anything away from people who are using and really diving diving headfirst into AI as a way of creating their art. He said, however,

Speaker 5 and this is obviously his opinion, but I tend to agree with it. He's like, if you listen to, let's take Drake, right?

Speaker 5 Drake has, I think, almost an entire album that was written, produced, and created by artificial intelligence.

Speaker 5 He certainly has multiple songs. And

Speaker 5 it sounds like him, you know, essentially, he put it out. So obviously he's endorsing the music.

Speaker 5 But, my impression, and I'm not a big Drake fan, but I did go listen to both, is that there is a clear and distinct difference in the soul of the music between what you know he created himself and what you know was created by the AI.

Speaker 5 And so, my take is that

Speaker 5 I don't know that AI will ever be able to replace the

Speaker 5 what a human can create when they give themselves space to be a true artist. And then there are obviously physical assets

Speaker 5 that could be owning buildings. It could be whatever your thing is, taking people on adventures, you know, whatever your thing is from a physical standpoint.

Speaker 5 And everything else is going to get eaten by AI.

Speaker 5 And it's in, it's deciding which one of those buckets or which cross cut of those buckets you want to play in that ultimately becomes the decision.

Speaker 5 Because, you know, and put like a plumber in the physical bucket space, right?

Speaker 5 Like, if you want to own a plumbing franchise and be an entrepreneur and have trucks all over the place and build it out, and be we're going to need people to turn wrenches, we're going to need people to hammer nails.

Speaker 5 And AI is not going to be able to do a lot of those things. They may be able to help you solve the problems faster.

Speaker 5 You may have AI in your pocket to help you, you know, if you've never worked on this type of unit before, for sure. But we're going to need people in those spaces.

Speaker 5 And, uh, but I do think everything else, the transactional tasks, the

Speaker 5 65-year-old guy whose job it is is to take the TPS reports from this person's folder and move them over to this cabinet. Like that stuff is definitely going to go away.
And being aware of that

Speaker 5 feels necessary

Speaker 5 and how we judge what skills we develop. So all that context to be said,

Speaker 5 with these students that you're working with, where are they starting? One, do you think what I just said is accurate? I guess is there.

Speaker 6 Oh, I I love it. I love it.
Art, assets, and artificial intelligence is beautiful. And

Speaker 6 I like what you said too about it's not just picking one of those buckets, but it's

Speaker 6 creating your own like Play-Doh sculpture from all through with all three of those materials.

Speaker 6 The more that you can, obviously, you understand insurance, you understand finance. So, like, assets come natural to you.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 I think that

Speaker 6 I just love what you said. I'm going to repeat it one more time for the listeners.
It's not AI that's going to replace people. It's people using AI that's going to replace people.

Speaker 6 And even if you just know a little bit about it, like just your little subset of, you know, if you're into SEO, well, that's actually an area that's totally changing because of AI.

Speaker 6 So that's not even a good example. But

Speaker 6 if you can just learn,

Speaker 6 I have like

Speaker 6 somebody I really respect. Her name is Donna Vincent Roa, and she's an amazing,

Speaker 6 she's been a student of mine, but she's also been a client of mine. And she's created thousands of images of women, like these heroic, like art pieces

Speaker 6 using Dolly.

Speaker 6 And they're all wearing glasses and they're all turquoise in color. And she came up with like a style.
And then she started adapting the style and working with the AI to produce these images.

Speaker 6 And they've just come out and blown me away. She showed me some of them and I was like, wow, what it did stylistically and how the detail and the art.

Speaker 6 And she used it to the in a beautiful kind of way to create a collection that said something about girls with eyeglasses because she always used to get teased when she was a little girl about wearing glasses.

Speaker 6 And she's also, you know, comes from a mixed ethnic background. So she wanted to explore different kinds of ethnicity girls wearing these

Speaker 6 eyeglasses. And it's just just a beautiful collection of art.
Now, she also wants to

Speaker 6 turn that into an NFT, which is a whole other different story.

Speaker 6 But I think if you dibble-dabble, and you have enough skill sets to do hobbling together some kind of specialty so that you're known as top of, you know, top of mind, you're known when it comes to word of mouth.

Speaker 6 You're people want to talk about you the same way that I want to talk about my friend Donna Vincent Rowe and what she's doing with AI. Yeah,

Speaker 5 I completely agree with that. I think if anything,

Speaker 5 what artificial intelligence will allow us to do is be even more micro-niche in what we build. And,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 you can be the one person, you know, who would think to create turquoise-designed,

Speaker 5 you know, female archetype, you know, with glass.

Speaker 5 You know, I mean, like, that's such a niche kind of idea, but also at the same time, so powerful and moving that you're sharing it here with the audience. And that,

Speaker 5 you know, while possible,

Speaker 5 think about how long, if, say, she was painting, one, she'd have to learn the skill of painting or drawing or whatever.

Speaker 5 And then that even if she had this incredible idea and vision for what, if she doesn't have those skills or doesn't, you know, maybe she just doesn't, you know, not everyone has the ability.

Speaker 5 Like, I'm terrible at music. Like as much as I enjoy music, you put it, you know, no matter how much training you give me, I can't make the thing sound good.
It's just the way it is.

Speaker 5 I'm just not wired that way, which is fine. But, you know, I could have an amazing idea for a song or whatever.

Speaker 5 Without artificial intelligence, that idea dies. And, you know, I would have to go partner with someone or hire someone, et cetera.

Speaker 5 So I do think it empowers us to be these niche, even micro-niche versions of ourselves and truly become the one and almost create new categories that we could have never even thought of before

Speaker 5 are now realities. And that's just so exciting.
So,

Speaker 5 you know, I guess

Speaker 5 when your students are filling out this form, which I love that exercise, I love the kind of contrary and, you know, making them use both sides of the argument for themselves.

Speaker 5 You know, where are they, where are their initial takes and kind of where do you see the biggest movements as you start to teach them about these things and show them about prompting?

Speaker 5 And you're sitting there working with them as they're creating these images.

Speaker 5 What aspects of either their mentality, mindset, or just where they see their career going, where do you see the biggest shifts shifts as they start to become more

Speaker 5 accustomed to and comfortable with artificial intelligence?

Speaker 6 Well, you can either be like, you can have like a victim mentality around AI, which some of them do.

Speaker 6 It's like, well, you know, I'm 16 and I wanted to be a musician, like all the musicians that came before me, and now AI is ruining that for everyone. And, you know, you have people that

Speaker 6 feel very uncomfortable,

Speaker 6 you know, students that

Speaker 6 are afraid to use it because they don't want their teachers to think they're lazy. They don't want to get some kind of reputation.

Speaker 6 They obviously don't want to get busted for plagiarism is a really big thing.

Speaker 6 So there are things that they're scared about because they still, although they're thinking a lot about it, no one's teaching skill sets.

Speaker 6 right like i'm having to hobble together i i went to a program at northwestern university they had a program called AI for

Speaker 6 Growth, and it was all about business applications for AI. And that was like four, four or five years ago.
I did a certificate program through the Kellogg.

Speaker 6 But I think that everyone has to take it upon themselves, even, you know,

Speaker 6 especially, you know, ourselves, but especially our people who are educators and who are in charge of training the next generation of workers.

Speaker 6 I mean, we have an obligation to show them how to use these tools and how to move, again, from anxiety to creativity, because the things that they're most excited about is like, you know, I can do things so much more faster.

Speaker 6 I feel so much more smarter because I can ask it questions.

Speaker 6 I feel like I have a friend who can give me advice about my other friends.

Speaker 6 I feel like, you know, I've never created an animation before, but I was able to create an animation. And, you know, I feel like I can make a difference in the world by using these kind of tools.
And,

Speaker 6 you know, I can, I wrote my college essay with Chad GPT and all those kind of things. So, yeah,

Speaker 6 they're both excited and terrified at the same time.

Speaker 5 I think it's funny that

Speaker 5 they have anxiety around being caught for plagiarizing. And in college, I was part of a fraternity and we had an entire closet dedicated to cheating on all the tests that all the professors gave.

Speaker 5 So that wasn't as much of a, it was more, cheating was more of an art form back then.

Speaker 6 Yeah, that was serious.

Speaker 6 I love that.

Speaker 5 Having to take the test straight was anxiety inducing. You know, I needed one of those,

Speaker 5 whoever had gotten the best grade on the test, you always

Speaker 5 threw that notebook in the closet or that test in the closet if you got it back so someone can use it.

Speaker 5 That's funny. I uh

Speaker 5 do you do you think in general

Speaker 5 that

Speaker 5 this next generation that's coming up through,

Speaker 5 take the millennials out of it,

Speaker 5 you know, the, say, say maybe the generation behind them, does it seem in general like anxiety is a larger portion of their life? I mean, I remember as, you know, so I'm 43.

Speaker 5 I mean,

Speaker 5 I had shit that I didn't like, but I don't remember living each day with as much kind of

Speaker 5 like like there it feels to me like their baseline anxiety level is just higher than it has been to previous generations. I don't, I don't want to say that they haven't.

Speaker 6 Well, that's statistically, that's statistically proven.

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah. If you look at the mental health statistics, that's definitely happening.
And the, the largest

Speaker 6 offender of that is social media and cell phones. Yeah.
By far.

Speaker 6 You look at like your kids when you get and even kids that are not they're not they don't have their cell phone yet they're being impacted by kids that do have cell phones at very young ages.

Speaker 6 So, yeah, that that's that's a whole other tangent that we could go on. But that's one of the things that I wanted to look at in my dissertation: is the mental health side of this and

Speaker 6 how can we go again from that kind of anxiety about learning, you know, about growing, about trying something you've never done before, about screwing it up, about not knowing the answer, about you know, having to go to multiple websites.

Speaker 6 Oh my god, I have to to make myself an account.

Speaker 6 Oh my God, there is a word limit on the prompting. Oh my God, you know, like this is just so, I could repeat like the whole

Speaker 6 battery of anxiety. But

Speaker 6 I do think there are some people that are going to that are going to meet this challenge head on and they are going to teach their students. They are going to adopt their curriculums.

Speaker 6 They are going to retrain themselves as professionals. And then there's the people that

Speaker 6 aren't. And there's going to be a big pay differentiation for sure.

Speaker 5 Yeah. I, uh, so I have two boys, 10 and 8.
And a couple of weeks ago,

Speaker 5 I'm sure you've at least heard of it if you haven't watched the video, but the meme around fuck around and find out.

Speaker 5 I had them watch that video or I watched the video with them. I don't.
Even though they're young and everyone listening can judge me, I don't. Curse words to me are meaningless.

Speaker 5 They're just more words in the dictionary. So,

Speaker 5 you know, I have no problem with them seeing that kind of stuff. But I was like, I was like, guys, like,

Speaker 5 I want you to watch this because as much as it's been memed to death and a lot of people laugh at it. And yes, the way that he delivers it is hilarious and creative and genius.

Speaker 5 The idea that I try to impress upon them and the kids that I coach, I coach baseball and am fairly involved in that community and just the athletic community in general in my area.

Speaker 5 Is

Speaker 5 there's a sense, one of the things that I worry about with AI, and we can kind of, we can start to wrap from here, but I just, I

Speaker 5 worry that what, because I've seen it in myself. So I don't, I'm not judging kids or any generation.
I've seen it myself.

Speaker 5 You used to have to figure shit out. Right.
Like you, you, you, I want to do X. So when I started learning how to do video, I had no idea how to do it.
I didn't have creative parents.

Speaker 5 I did, I was a math major in college. No job that I had prior to that had any creativity in at all.
I worked in the accounting industry for five years and then I moved. And then,

Speaker 5 you know, I became part of the insurance industry. So like, there's no creativity, nothing, right?

Speaker 5 In the past, but I was a really shitty insurance salesman, like really, really shitty insurance salesman.

Speaker 5 And she's not my ex-wife, but my father-in-law at the time, he, he basically fired me a year into my insurance career.

Speaker 5 So my father-in-law basically pitches me a job, I think basically because he didn't want his little girl to be married to a bum.

Speaker 5 And he's like, hey, I want you to come sell insurance at my insurance company. And I said, okay.

Speaker 5 So I get a year in and he straight fires me. He's like, look, I think you're a great kid, but this is not working.

Speaker 5 And, you know, what I did, and the audience has heard this a lot, but I'll just go through it quick. I literally got down on my knees and I begged him.

Speaker 5 I'm like, please don't make me go home to your daughter and tell her that you fired me today. I'm like, you don't want to make that call either.
So, you know, I was like, let's just think about this.

Speaker 5 And he gave me an extension. He's like, I'll give you six more months, but things got to change.
I knew I had to change.

Speaker 5 And I knew that cold calling and dropping business cards off and going to network events wasn't the answer for me because I just didn't like it. I just, it, it,

Speaker 5 it was a grind. And yeah, you could say, hey, you just grind through things you don't like.
Yeah, but it just wasn't working. So I had to find something else.
And the inter this was like 2009.

Speaker 5 The internet is now not a fad anymore. And, you know, YouTube is a thing.
And I'm like, you know what? No one's doing video. I'm not a great writer, again, math major.

Speaker 5 So I'll just create videos on insurance. And I started posting videos in 2010, 11 on insurance.
And like,

Speaker 5 to do, how do you put a video on YouTube? I had to figure it out. How do you do video? Like, what does that mean? What does a video look like? How do you edit a video?

Speaker 5 Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but sound microphones, you know, all these things.

Speaker 5 I like had to, it took me years of watching YouTube videos, talking to people, going to local workshops, testing, testing, testing, testing.

Speaker 5 And my, my worry and concern about AI is that we are going to lose that fuck around and find out mentality because the answers are always at our fingertips.

Speaker 5 And to me, I think the truly successful with this technology will use it as

Speaker 5 a

Speaker 5 foundation and an amplifier, but they'll still be that, they'll still want to test everything and touch everything and break everything and pull it apart.

Speaker 5 Because if we lose that, if we lose that part, I think, of what makes us human, then we lose the soul of whatever project we're working on. That makes sense.

Speaker 5 There wasn't a question in there, but

Speaker 6 I don't know.

Speaker 5 Does that make sense? I mean, do you, how do we cultivate that?

Speaker 5 I guess as a teacher, you know, this will be something I'm assuming that you might run into is that, you know, we just start over-relying on it. How do we work through that?

Speaker 5 How do we continue to hold that idea in our head when,

Speaker 5 you know, every historical fact ever is a key punch away?

Speaker 6 Well, I think that the major lesson to learn from AI right now is it's all about the prompt, right?

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 the prompt is the human side of things. So it's like dancing tango with the

Speaker 6 AI. It like takes a human and it takes the AI, right? And they're sort of like doing the dance and moving together.
And it's sort of cool.

Speaker 6 It's, you know, if it's just the AI doing it all by himself, it's sort of like,

Speaker 6 I think the

Speaker 6 most interesting stuff I've done on AI is when I've gotten really creative and explorative with the prompts and looked at things from multiple situations.

Speaker 6 One of my favorite things to do for my doctoral work is we, in all the classes, you have to read these really crazy PDFs.

Speaker 6 I'm getting, it's like a business degree, so I had to read these PDFs about business theory, and they were so boring. And I am a color person, I like shapes, I like photos, I like artwork.

Speaker 6 And everyone else in my class would just turn in these like dumb, like presentations. They'd have like a PowerPoint presentation with like no pictures, all black and white.

Speaker 6 And I was doing stuff like I would turn to an article about about operational change, which is stressful and organizational change, I'm sorry, which is stressful for people when they get misplaced and replaced and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 6 So I built this whole

Speaker 6 PowerPoint presentation from Dali about

Speaker 6 like this lava flow, like these, these lava

Speaker 6 fields and people transverse. I mean, it was so cool.

Speaker 6 Dolly said, do you want to try the lava effect? I was like, the lava effect. And so it doesn't.
Of course I do.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 6 But then it turned out to be all these people like diving into lava pools and committing suicide and stuff. It was very dark and it was very funny.

Speaker 6 And I'll tell you what, my schoolmates will never, ever, ever forget the lava presentation. And I think images and video does that to you.
It puts you like a head above the rest.

Speaker 6 And, you know, I teach students. So I feel like there's always like the 90%

Speaker 6 of students that are just like, okay, they're fine. But then there's like the 10% where it's like, oh my God, I'd love to work with this kid.
Oh, my God. I got to hire this kid.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 6 I want to mentor this kid. Like, oh, my God, this kid's, I want to refer this kid for a job because they're so cool.
But I think students really inspire me and the whole act of learning inspires me.

Speaker 6 And so, if anything, you know, focus on what is that dance you're doing with the AI? How are you moving together with it? In fact, I'm teaching the class I'm teaching is called

Speaker 6 Writing for Video. And I'm going to make them have a chat GBT membership for the four months of the class.
And I'm not going to grade them on what comes out, what's the final end product.

Speaker 6 I'm going to grade them on the whole chat. Like, what did they do to make it better? What did they input? How did they work with it? What are the opportunities they missed?

Speaker 6 Why did they not explore this?

Speaker 6 And so I'm already changing the curriculum in certain and subtle ways to use AI to show students how they can, because if you taught a class about writing for video and you didn't teach them how to use AI, that's negligence, you know?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I completely agree. Jessica, this has been a tremendous conversation.

Speaker 5 I love,

Speaker 5 you know, it was great hearing your story, but this conversation about AI is so important. And I think the perspective that you have is unique in the conversation.

Speaker 5 You know, so many people that are talking about AI are either complete nerds, which are great. I love nerds, but they're nerds, or they're like high-level business people trying to sell you something.

Speaker 5 And this aspect of coming from it, both as a creator and as a teacher, I think is wonderful. I think that,

Speaker 5 you know, we need to hear more from you and other people like that that have your perspective because, you know, these individuals that you're launching out into the world are the ones that are going to be taking care of us.

Speaker 5 So we need them to know what the fuck they're doing. And

Speaker 5 I just, I appreciate you. Where, besides, Eyes on Your Mission, which we are going to have in the show notes linked up and everything for everybody, where else can people learn more about you?

Speaker 5 Is there socials, a website? Where can they connect with you and just stay on top of what you have going on?

Speaker 6 Eyes on Your Mission.

Speaker 6 You can see two Parrot Productions. I'm actually building a brand new site there, which is exciting.
Or do I have my, I might even have my, I'm doing a double whammy. My

Speaker 6 two parrot productions t-shirts and my Eyes on Your Mission hat.

Speaker 6 Awesome. I come representing the brands.

Speaker 5 I love it. I love it.

Speaker 6 Well, that was one of my favorite

Speaker 6 ones you did about

Speaker 6 making a brand so cool they have to work with you. Yes.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Well, John Davids is a genius when it comes to that stuff.
And he's worked with some of the biggest brands and some of the biggest creators. And I think that

Speaker 5 I think that's what it is. Right.
And to your point, you...

Speaker 5 You cannot create a brand that people truly connect to at a at a real soul level unless they can see it and it has to come with video so i i love what you're doing i appreciate you thank you for sharing your time and i wish you nothing but the best thank you ryan thank you guys for watching bye

Speaker 5 Every week, we share the ideas, stories, and insights of elite performers that you can use in your business and life.

Speaker 5 Be sure to subscribe wherever you're listening or watching and leave a comment on YouTube to keep the conversation going. This is the way.

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