AI and Digital Marketing – S2E2

Travis Ketchum 0:00
is not even a matter of hours. Oftentimes, in a matter of seconds, you can get the initial groundwork that may have taken a team of four people days to complete. It’s such an impressive way to do it. Welcome to the all about digital marketing podcast, the show that dives into the best strategies, tactics and tools for entrepreneurs and marketers looking to exponentially increase their results online.

Chris Bruno 0:25
Travis, welcome back to episode two of our brand new series here on the all about Digital Marketing Podcast. Today, I’m really excited, we’re going to be talking about AI. And I know this is a huge subject, and I’m probably nowhere near smart enough to get into the real depths of it. But, Travis, as we get into this today, how do you think AI is going to make a difference for marketers? I think AI is a pretty transformational technology. You know, I I, I personally did not get as hyped about crypto web three are lots of other more recent technological advances, certainly not as much as you did, which is totally fine. But they just didn’t quite hit it for me for various reasons. But when I really got into AI, specifically, when Chad GBT launch, I think is, is when a lot of people have this same sort of moment. Like, to me, this feels like it could be on the magnitude of something like the original iPhone, where there were technologies that existed before it. But suddenly, the utility, the user facing value became so abundantly clear, and so radically accessible, sort of suddenly in the eyes of the consumer. But I think that we’re on the cusp of something really foundationally different than what we’ve been used to. Now, we’re going to probably make a mistake here of presuming that everybody who’s listening understands that, at least to a certain level, or to a level like we do about what we’re talking about here. But I think it’s going to be important as well, just to maybe stop for a second and talk a little bit about the basics here. So when we’re talking about AI, in particular, you’ve mentioned there something like chat GPT to give people an insight or a little bit of an idea of what that is, if they haven’t heard about this, and if they have been living under a rock, I guess because it is being talked about absolutely everywhere now. But let’s give everyone a chance to follow along. Yeah, well, I mean, you can probably agree with this. But naming is mostly marketing than anything else. Right? So calling so let’s let’s just get that out of the way first. So AI like it’s not sentient, right? This is not a sentient technology, the same way that, quote, wireless charging is actually inductive charging, right? True wireless charging, we’ll be walking around ever putting your phone in a pad anywhere. But we all sort of gotten this habit of calling a wireless charging, because you didn’t plug something into the buddy your phone, right. So calling you AI is part marketing. But it is interesting enough that it can sort of fool you into thinking that it’s a sentient programme, because it’s a really clever way of taking input, understanding it to some degree based on algorithms, and giving you useful output back. And so when we say AI, that’s that’s essentially what we mean, right? Whether that’s a text response, an image response, a voice response, it’s really a learned set of traits, give it an input, and it will give you a predictable output. That is essentially AI. Would you agree with that statement? Yeah, 100%. And I think the chat GPT part, especially is a language model. So I’ve got a friend of mine, who computer science and everything else. And obviously, as all of this kicks off, and as it was coming together, he sat there one night in the pub and actually explained to me how these things work, how our language model can actually know. And make sense of, okay, what word should come next. So literally putting one word after the other, and simply building out the statements in a way that it can tell whether it’s correct or not correct. And you start to kind of really dig into these and you realise how complex they are. But I think chat GPT is the one that probably most people have heard about, for several reasons. Open AI, the company behind them has recently raised an absolute fortune, I’m not going to remember the total amounts now off the top of my head, but it’s in the billions. And it Microsoft obviously has now implemented this. So for some of our users, people listening to this that do use Windows in edge if you go and use bing.com. I don’t know, do people actually do that? I’m guessing they probably do. But inside that you will now find Chad GBT helping you to come up with all sorts of natural language kind of results. So you get a little bit more. I think anyway, a little bit more of a useful result. Sometimes rather than just a search, here’s a bunch of links. So that’s probably the most common. Would you agree with that? I’d say Chad GBT at the moment.

Travis Ketchum 4:32
Yeah, I mean, that certainly is in the limelight. Right. And so people will I think probably start to associate the term GPT with AI the way that you ask for a Kleenex, not a tissue. It doesn’t mean that it’s the only way of doing the other people that make tissues. Right, but open AI out of their very sort of launching out of a cannon here in the last few months. You know, oh an overnight success. It took years and years of hard work as they all tend to do. I think for a lot of people is going to become synonymous. It’s like you don’t search for things you Google for them. But Microsoft’s trying to change that. And what what’s interesting from my perspective is that you look at this, this partnership with Microsoft, right? So I read a little bit about the history and it appears, if I recall correctly, but openly I launched Microsoft said that might be interesting in the future, here’s a billion dollars, we want to see what the table GPT launch and Microsoft went hot damn, that looks pretty cool. We’d like to have more of that, please. So they gave them an additional 10 billion to bring their total stake up to 49% ownership of open AI. So they are significant stakeholder giving priority access to interesting features. And they are to Microsoft’s credit, you know, even though I’m a total Apple, Homer, to Microsoft’s credit, they are one of the most ruthlessly competitive software companies in in the history of technology. And they are rapidly seizing this opportunity to take the underlying technology GPT four and Chad GPT and trying to integrate it into all of their products in interesting ways. The Office Suite, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Bing, etc. And so there they see this as, as a as a moment to seize because they have everything to gain. Whereas Google, which from the consumer standpoint, is looking a little flat footed, even though they like to brag that it’s their technology that sort of started GPT. Right, but opening I took him and ran with they have everything to lose from search, we can certainly talk about why that is and what that means and, and why GPT can sometimes be a confident bullshit artist.

Chris Bruno 6:35
Well, I think there’s probably a couple of things that are really interesting here, we did start to dig into this in our very first episode of this new season. And we decided to stop so that we actually had some content left for today. But one of the key things here is again, for a lot of people, I think AI was always what would come next in terms of industries in the you know, the blue collar kind of jobs when we’re talking about things like manufacturing or production lines. So we saw that with Tesla, for example, automating parts of the factory, and again, overnight success that Tesla is after, you know, 15 years of lots of failures. And

Travis Ketchum 7:08
it’s worth noting specifically what Tesla did, they tried building the machine and they failed. They failed horribly. This was during the model three ramp up that almost killed the company because they bet so hard on AI doing it and they said oops, robots aren’t so good to get that bolt on that lug nut on that border. There. We let’s get some humans in here some, some job gloves that comes through that thing.

Chris Bruno 7:30
Yeah, and this is this. This was the biggest kind of crazy moment, right? That was supposed to be what I think everyone envisioned this as being right. This would be a great way to automate assembly lines, loads of people will be out of a job. But it means that we wouldn’t have to do that kind of grunt work. And in reality, what we’re actually finding is things like chat GPT, hitting why I can’t remember what the numbers were, but it was 100 million users in weeks, like a matter of weeks. I believe we were like three weeks. Yeah. Three weeks. Yeah. So that’s the fastest growing piece of software ever.

Travis Ketchum 8:01
Smoking tic toc. And all the other ones that had previously that were literally designed to be viral. This had no viral mechanism other than people just wouldn’t shut up about it.

Chris Bruno 8:10
Yeah, and literally people playing with it that had no real use case necessarily for it when they first started playing with it. And this was the key thing, right? And so when you look at this, you go actually, the blue collar jobs at the moment seem pretty safe. Most things like a car, for example, it turns out, you actually want somebody a human eye that can look at something and go that doesn’t look right. That’s definitely not the quality that we should allow

Travis Ketchum 8:34
for so but I thought autonomous was easy. You could solve it in 12 months.

Chris Bruno 8:37
Yeah. How’s that going?

Travis Ketchum 8:39
I can 2018.

Chris Bruno 8:41
Yeah, what’s the full driving full driving mode called on the on the Tesla’s for self

Travis Ketchum 8:46
driving? And for those of you listening, I’m using very heavy air quotes.

Chris Bruno 8:51
Let’s, let’s not take our eyes off the road quite yet. But this is the truth of it. And now actually, it’s coming after what it seems like anyway, it’s coming after is the creative aspects and the creative work that I think probably you and I have done a lot of over the last 10 years, 15 years. But also that a lot of people have built businesses on I had been doing this for many years, including myself. When I started my agency back in 2008. Facebook had gone public about 18 months before that, and literally we we could see there. And then this was going to be a massive opportunity, being able to connect with millions of people having the ability to create content and share that with people. And that became a really useful bonus for us at the time. Today. However, that’s the number one thing that’s actually being threatened, I would say, by AI and by systems like chat GPT. What are your thoughts on that?

Travis Ketchum 9:42
Yeah, I think that’s the most surprising piece of this whole thing is I agree that the general consensus if you had even 12 months ago, pull people in said what’s the what will be the first five jobs to go do to AI and automation? I think most people would have very confidently I told you it would start from the generally less sophisticated, but maybe more manual effort type jobs. And they would have said the last ones to get would be the creatives or you know, or the white collar stuff but they thought especially the creatives or creatives, they are the most safe. And then now you just look at it you go, Oh, creatives are scripted. And that’s, that’s part of what adds into that feeling to me that it’s sort of like an iPhone moment. I’m not trying to overhype it, not everything has to be as big and world changing as the iPhone was for accessibility and apps and the way we interact with each other with services with products, the way we shop. Like that was a huge, huge deal. But it’s really interesting that the creative part is the first to go. And it’s it’s such an impressive way to do it. And that and not even a matter of hours, oftentimes, in a matter of seconds, you can get you can get though the initial groundwork, that may have taken a team of four people days to complete. Like that is the most mind blowing piece to me. And I think I may have mentioned this before, but like my litmus test was, I put this aqua chat GBT in front of my almost seven year old mom and my almost 83 year old dad, and they got it right away. And they they were seeking it out on their own asking it questions, you know, things that you and I would never even think to ask it like, the how do you fix a well filtration system, you know, like, very specific, you know, sort of guides on things. And they were finding the the answers to be extremely useful. Now, there is a danger in that though, right? That it will confidently tell you the wrong answer. And if you’re actively searching, this is sort of the quandary, right? Like, this is why Google has everything to lose, and Bing has everything to gain. If you’re searching for something, by definition, you usually don’t know the answer. Right? Hopefully, you’re a domain expert in a field, and you can suss out some of it. But oftentimes, if you’re searching, it’s because you don’t know the answer. And so it’s hard to know, when you’re being fed a line versus the actual answer.

Chris Bruno 12:05
I think this probably brings us onto a really good topic about this. So this is something that so everyone right now is happy, wow, chat GPT. I can write blog articles. I don’t have to do any work anymore. Right? What I do is I give it a prompt, and I say, think about this. We’re an agency. And what I’d like to do is write a blog article as a leading expert on this subject. And I’d like to write a blog article about creating a podcast. Here you go. The chat GPT does a great job, when in fact, if I can, I’ll try and put some examples up on screen. Chad UbD does an incredible job to do this. But the problem I have with that is it’s pulling for a very limited in the sense of it’s a big world. And we all have this creative ability in our brains. But it’s pulling from a limited specific set of information and data. And I know chat, GBT has now taken that forward another round joke chat GPT for sorry, has taken that forward another round. But what this is creating is a huge amount of people are now putting content out into the world that is based off of the content that already existed. That’s been written by the AI, which is now being used to fuel the next version of the AI, which is learning more from its existing content, that it’s already written itself about the original content. So it means you’re creating like this loop. And the feedback loop isn’t necessarily good. And what you were saying there, right, in terms of if a piece of content isn’t very good, and if it comes back and it’s given to you as a very, this is a confident answer. Here you go, this is what you’re looking for. You can believe that. That’s great. But if you’re going online, and you’re Googling for stuff, you will see companies reviews, who the company are what the look of that website might look and feel like or anything like this. And I do think there’s this little bit of a moment right now where everyone’s happy that they can do use this system to create tonnes of content very quickly, very cheaply. But no one’s actually taking into consideration that element there. And I think something you said earlier is really important. This is a great way to do the grunt work at the beginning to try and figure out what you might be writing the blog article about. But to me, this is definitely not a system. And I know loads of people who are using it as a system for completed content. And it really is not, in my opinion anyway. And it’s a real dangerous tipping point, I think at the same time for marketing in general. Because if everyone can put out 30 articles about what makes a good podcast, for example, then which piece of content should you actually read? And where are we getting that information? And if everyone’s using that system to do this, when the next variation of this comes out, and you asked Chad GPT five about that it’s going to Fleet Fuel that answer from that exact same content. Do you see what I mean?

Travis Ketchum 14:41
I Do I Do I, to me the magic of GPT and these AI models and specifically Chad GPT is collapsing the early cycles of creativity. Right So like, for me, it’s the blank slate problem here. is what it solves best. So if you say I give me 100 ideas about how to market your podcast, right, just spitting up 100 ideas, and then maybe even saying, Give me three bullet point examples of each idea, right? Like, up to that phase, terrific. Give me a compelling outline about how to write a webinar, right, but don’t get me the whole webinar, that those stages are incredible, because that’s usually the highest sort of cognitive load, at least for me, personally, of just getting the initial ideas brain dump out on the board, and then seeing what chess pieces I have to play with. And then once you see what sort of strikes you, you sit with it for a moment, you’ve, you’re like, Okay, these five, these 20 really hit, I’m going to select these. And now I’m going to write complete articles around these concepts. That’s what the human touch can be really excellent. I was having a really interesting conversation. Actually, earlier this week, with someone who is a vice president of HR at major corporation throughout the US in her career. She’s mostly retired now does high end consulting, but like, very, very knowledgeable. And her first question, when I was talking with her and her incredibly intelligent husband about this was, well, what’s this going to do for the workforce? Is this going to be a net positive or net negative? And, you know, even though it’s not quite whatever he human desires, which has pushed the button, have it done for you and make the money? I can’t help but think it’s probably going to be a net negative for overall employment. What do you feel?

Chris Bruno 16:40
It definitely doesn’t help things. So I have a an ex client now, who about four months ago, when are we now we’re end of March? Yeah. So about December time, had the conversation with me explaining to me in a very kind of condescending way, how they wouldn’t need an agency to help them with any social media anymore, because this amazing tool had just come out. And he asked it to write them 30 tweets, and it wrote 30 tweets, and it got some pretty good and he was really happy with it. So therefore, why would we use an agency, and I didn’t have anything to argue with him about, mainly for one reason, I don’t have time to argue with anyone who thinks that that’s a solution to a long term problem, you know, how to chat GPT Nuit know what your business is trying to achieve and what those goals are, and what your retention rate and what your lifetime value of a customer is, or actually how long your sales cycle is, all of those things that play a massive part, like, you know, like I know, in terms of how you actually market your business. So instead, I just went like, that’s great. I’m so happy for you, we’re coming up to a renewal. Don’t worry about it, you’ve got church fits here. Best of luck to you see you later. But I did realise that actually, it’s not so much that it bothered me, or I’ve used some of these tools. For myself, we’ve used these with clients as well. We’ve used them for brainstorming ideas, we try and use them in different ways that kind of try and help clients understand what they can use this for for themselves as well. But we don’t think it replaces in any way shape or form. The creativity of who we are what we do as an agency in terms of bringing together content for clients recording with them videos, for example, or doing live content, or even writing social media campaigns for them. Mainly because of the fact that no matter what people want, it’s not a start to finish A to Zed solution. It just isn’t. And if your products shit, excuse the swearing, chat GPT won’t tell you that it’ll tell you that you’ve got 25 different ideas for campaigns. But it won’t be honest with you and say, Yeah, you’re massively overpriced. It’s not a very good product. The reviews are terrible. Don’t spend money on doing that. It may

Travis Ketchum 18:50
not even be a good offer for your product. It may be a bad product with a bad offer no amount of you know, leaving the horses to water is gonna make them drink. Yeah,

Chris Bruno 19:01
I think my sister in law says it quite often to me, but like, you know, you can’t polish a turd. And it’s 100% True, right? And it’s, and I think this is the key thing that people are realising, yes, you can call on this system. And in fact, I’ve even got it baked into some of my other tools now like it’s coming up everywhere. So whilst I’m in notion where a we keep loads of stuff from cam bans of how we do these episodes, and when the editors done stuff, and whatever else, but I also use it for just my general notes. I use it for when I’m coming up with ideas for blog articles when we’re actually drafting up and skinning. And so what we’re going to write into those blog, blog articles, everything we use is in there, and now they’ve offered for a little bit more every month you can have AI and now you’re realising Okay, great. Here we go. So what does my AI give me? So inside my note taking, I can suddenly forward slash AI. Give me 20 ideas for new blog articles about x. And again, all of these things on their own as a blank page solver, I think is fantastic. What do we do with that when we get that? We then go and check SEO tools to see whether or not those keywords are something that’s worth going after or whether it’s so competitive that even if we wrote the best article in the world and got it LinkedIn, 100 of the top websites in the world, they still wouldn’t rank. And then the same thing with YouTube videos are we going to do this one, let’s go to systems like vid IQ or whatever else. And a lot of those systems are using AI that was in inverted commas for everyone, just not the Chad GBT version, but they’re using different machine learning and data models so that they can basically figure out which potential keywords and titles will be better. They’re taking the data from places like YouTube or websites, things like SEM, rush, or most was the other one that we use for keywords, tracking all of these things, and then you can actually get that breakdown. So again, from my point of view, and to go back to your net negative or net positive for for people, I don’t think we’re there yet. I think it’s fine. But I definitely think that these systems need to be used very carefully. I know lots of people right now that are banging out more blog content than they’ve ever written in their lives. And I know for a fact that they’re not writing. And I’m not going to say 95% of it, I’m gonna say 99% of people, some people I’ve seen have put stuff out. And they’ve done it without even checking the article and reading the whole thing. And this is where it gets to me anyway, crazy. And it’s, it’s madness. And in fact, actually, I can’t remember which publication it was, if I find it, I’ll put it back up on screen and the recorded version of this, but literally, there was a publication that started using it, to create articles for it, it didn’t tell the users that were reading it. And one of the ways that it got tripped up that nobody noticed, because they weren’t proofreading. But one of the ways they got notified, or people realised, was that in one of the articles, they talked about interest rates, and how somebody should have got a 5% return. So if you put 1000 pounds into this account, and the article spouted out, you’d get 1050 1050 pounds return at the end of the year. But obviously, that’s not true. Mathematically, there would be 1050 pounds in your account at the end of the year, that’s your first 1000 plus the 5% that you’ve earned for the year, but you’re not getting 1050 pound return on top of your 1000 pounds. And it’s little things like that. And again, when you realise that there are companies, big companies, this is a proper publication that has staff, there’s worldwide it’s renowned, are pumping content out that literally a computer just spouted and no one’s even reading it. That to me makes me panic as a marketer, because it’s what makes me realise that the game is about to get 20,000 times harder just to try and sift through this crap and get your message out there to a client or to a prospect. And I think that’s something that’s really worrying. And secondly, because I don’t want to see all this spouted out crap, just kind of reemerging. So it’s made me really specific about who I’ll read what I’ll watch, and who I’m actually paying attention to.

Travis Ketchum 22:58
Yeah, for sure. I mean, that kind of brings up two points that I want to touch on. One of them is, beyond just being I do think overall employment in the information space will potentially be reduced. But I think with that it will actually make domain experts more valuable, right, because now instead of having to have a team of researchers and a team of maybe, you know, first draft people and a team of editors, you could potentially have an editor that uses an AI tool to replace a lot of the early pieces of that chain, potentially. But it’s going to mean that there’s now a bigger moat, to get there. So if you’re, if you’re choosing a career path, and you say I want to be an XYZ, if there’s if there’s an informational piece that can be augmented through tools like AI, you need to go in and try to find real world experience doing it the hard way, sort of like in school, you know, showing your work, when it comes to math, to be able to sort of break through that turbulence and get to the clear skies above where you can position yourself as an actual domain expert that can sift out and know if it’s bogus or not, right, because that position is now more valuable, there’s more budget to pay for the people who actually know because that that budget for everyone else earlier in the pipeline is now deleted. The second piece I wanted to bring up though, was, you know, there may be an opportunity going forward, zig when everyone else is zagging for sites that create content that may say, you know, zero AI content, like this all, all human generated the same way that you know, in a world of blogging, the Wall Street Journal or the LA Times or you know, some other more, you know, more credible, more established publication, even though they’re still in decline, because overall rating is on decline. But those more established brands all sudden became even more important because there was a segment of the market that was seeking out More research journalism, right, they had a higher standard of which they expected to receive. And so they wanted to cut through blogging, I think the same kind of paradigm is going to have, I think a lot of people are going to read low quality generated crap. But there’s going to be a segment of probably the affluent market for being honest, that are going to seek out and prioritise human generated content, verified human generated content, and be willing to potentially pay more for that experience.

Chris Bruno 25:29
Yeah, and I think, again, like you said, you kind of had the blogging side of things that then made certain certain publications more prevalent, prevalent. You also then had, you know, companies, creating blogs, companies, doing videos, companies doing live streams, etc. And all of these things kind of helped you to gain that little bit of insight into who they actually were that they were real people that you can understand the human being behind the words are behind the company, or behind the fancy landing page, or whatever it is. And I know that you’ve done a tonne of webinars over the years, I’ve done more videos and live streams, and I can remember now, these little things I think do make a difference. And I think now they’re going to become more important than ever before. And we’re kind of seeing this with people trying to get into avatar based videos and stuff like that, you’ve got YouTube having a huge amount now of faceless channels that are doing very well as well. You’ve got all sorts of reasons that make I think this little bit diff more difficult. I think one of the key things, I guess that it just frustrates me a little bit, if you’re on YouTube, and if you’ve ever watched a video about AI or anything else, but if you just do a Google search on YouTube search, or I should say, you will find that there is a tonne of content that basically starts with make $100,000 a week, a day, a month, whatever, by using AI by using chat GPT by using. And this to me is where it’s just infuriating, I guess is probably what I’m what I’m looking at,

Travis Ketchum 26:59
oh, that’s the same bullshit different spice. I mean, people, people have been looking for a shortcut to get rich quick schemes. Since you know the dawn of time, like, how do I collect, you know, more weed seeds as overnight without actually going out and picking them? You know, like, you could probably go back to the Neanderthal times. And someone somewhere was using that caveman brain to figure out how can I get all the profit and, you know, all the food and all the all the women for for no effort like? So, somewhere in humanity, someone’s been trying to figure out the jig for that, right. So the fact that that exists does not surprise me at all you whatever the next wave is, they’re basically just trend jacking and trying to convince people that think that there’s a silver bullet, they think they can lose 100 pounds in 24 hours, they think they can make a million dollars and, you know, 24 hours, they think everything should all their problems should be able to disappear at the push of a button with no investment, no effort, no knowledge, no experience, right. And unfortunately, there’s just a second people that are always going to buy into that. And there’s millions of people out there like that. Yeah,

Chris Bruno 28:09
it’s just, I guess it’s from my side, I, we’ve been around for too long right now, that’s probably what the other thing is as well. For me, again, it was the same thing when social media was fairly new. It was an interesting kind of space, then it became like, everyone and anyone should be setting up as a social media expert or social media agency, one man bad, I’ll write tweets for you for 100 bucks a month, or whatever it is, then you realise that a lot of these things go through cyclical approaches, I think, is probably the best way of looking at this. I recently worked on an account that was madly infuriatingly hard to actually work with, but because they had such a high bar for what they would accept, and what they wouldn’t accept, and what they wanted to be considered as communications that were used by their business, they had pages and pages of brand guidelines of, of word choices, for example, and these are the things that to me, you know, none of this is going to be replaced by a call. Let me see if I can get 300 tweets out of out of a chat G fi T style system. And I think that’s something that’s really important, I don’t think I don’t think enough people understand maybe that element. And again, maybe it’s just from, from my personal side, having done so much content for so long. And for so many types of businesses, that just realising that I think too many people are looking at this as a, this is the magic button. This is the I click this and everything happens and it’s great. And I just don’t think we’re there yet.

Travis Ketchum 29:36
Well, there’s profit to be made and saying it can do that. If only you buy my 997 course that tells you exactly how to do that. Right. So

Chris Bruno 29:43
it’s got to end in the seven.

Travis Ketchum 29:47
Yeah. So you know, one piece I wanted to bring up because it’s relatively newer information by the last few days and I’m looking down because I’m reading a bit of news here, but I know that the big news is really good. Elon Musk was involved. But Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, which was one of the original Apple co founders, Andrew Yang, and more than 1000 Other people signed an open letter to AI labs, urging them to, quote immediately pause production of AI models more powerful than GPT. For the most recent update of its secondary engine for at least six months. What are your feelings on on these people asking for them to pause because I realise some people are paranoid about Skynet, you know, and the singularity and an AI will enter itself. And and that’s why I felt it was important at the beginning of this episode to sort of lay the groundwork that, quote, AI is not in its current form. Sentient self learning really. It’s it’s scouring crawling, pulling inputs, and just generating an output. But what are your feelings on this, these prominent individuals that frequently talk about AI or around the technology space asking for a six month pause?

Chris Bruno 30:58
So I think this is really funny. There’s, I’ve got a friend of mine, his wife, for years, as soon as they got an Alexa in their house, would always say, Please, and thank you. Every time I spoke to Alexa, now this is just human nature, I guess to a certain degree, she’s very polite and stuff, but she’s also in it one day, I just sort of laughed and said to her like, this was years and years ago, honestly, like one of the first elixirs and I was like, Why do you keep saying, like, please, and thank you. And she was like that one day, it will be sentient. And that day will look back and it will know. I was nice. And at that point, I was like that. Oh, just in case, I also say thank you. And please, we’ve got Google at home. But here’s the thing, right? I understand where people are coming from, we need to understand things. I think we’ve there’s been a lot of very fast movement. For me personally, I don’t think their pause is necessarily about oh, my god, we’re really scared. sentience is going to happen. And then we’re all going to end up you know, having to live and cower and hide from the, from the terminators that come next and become part of the resistance. I genuinely actually think it’s probably more to do with what’s the impact of the next round of this, when it hits jobs. And when it hits the economy. And when it hits the next phase of it, which is, again, this has gone very, very quickly. Again, you said this earlier, if you would ask people six months ago, what AI was doing and what AI was coming for in terms of jobs, or anything else, people would have given you a very, very different answer. And suddenly, that’s not the case. And I think that’s probably fueling part of this. And I know that the sentience side of things. And this isn’t the first time they’ve written there was an open letter, I want to say, like 18 months, two years ago that they wrote, and again, Elon Musk, and I think Bill Gates and a few other people had signed like saying, you know, we got to be careful in general terms about creating AI computer systems that are too intelligent. But I think genuinely, that’s what it is. I think there’s a lot of oshit moments what just happened, and I think there’s a lot of protectionism in that as well. I think there’s probably quite a few systems that all of a sudden things that have taken years to build could be literally wiped off as being useless. Because this could literally replicate it very quickly.

Travis Ketchum 33:17
Yeah, I got a couple of feelings on that. One is, you know, at least here in the United States are our government systems skews much older? Jon Stewart has some pretty funny data, the Senate looks like an assisted living centre. And so if you watch any of these hearings, right, the most recent one being with the CEO of tick tock, but you go back further to the hearings that had Zuckerberg and Tim Cook, and all those other ones, the kinds of questions that they’re asking, makes it so abundantly clear that at least here in the States, and I can’t speak for the UK, but at least you’re in the states that the people that are making decisions about legislation, have no idea what the least harmful versions of our technology, do, how they operate, how they make money, like, they just literally don’t get it. And so I have a hard time believing that they’re equipped to fully understand the potential ramifications of something like what AI can do. And I’m concerned in some ways that they’re that protectionism, as you mentioned, which I think is a great word for it is going to kick in and they may try to stop or ban things out of fear, as opposed to looking towards adaptation. Right. So when we think about, you know, if we go back a little ways, like manufacturing in North America has been a sore spot for many American voters. And you know, a lot of those jobs and positions and supply chains were offshored. China really sort of built the mecca of that right. But the secret is, those jobs are never coming back to the US. They just aren’t, right, maybe a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction with some of the new incentives for building electric batteries here for for electric vehicles, but they’re not coming back to the US. And so sometimes we focus so much on what happened? Or what will happen? And not how do we adapt or react to what happened, and maybe re educate or spend our resources shifting to the new reality that it becomes problematic. And we just fall further and further behind. Because we’re so worried about trying to hold on to the chips, we think we’re losing, instead of looking at the new chips on the table,

Chris Bruno 35:39
every sci fi film that you ever look at, and you kind of play it out, right, the dystopian futures, the whatever, it doesn’t matter whether it’s something like Ready Player, me, or if you go back years ago to like Tank Girl, right? It doesn’t matter. There’s always a company at the end of the line that has, I don’t want to say balls that everything up. But you know, that’s basically controlling whatever it is that the world needs, or whatever it is that’s left to be able to actually do. And there’s always that one kind of company at the end. I think right now we’re in a really interesting and a bit of a crazy place, geopolitically speaking. And that’s not what this show is all about. So we won’t dive into this very deep. But it

Travis Ketchum 36:20
is an important piece when it comes to technology and regulation and decision making going forward. And it heavily impacts markets artificially. So while we’re not trying to be political, there is an artificial influence on what these technologies want to do in real time. So that’s why Yeah,

Chris Bruno 36:37
but even worse than that, they’re right. We were happy to give those manufacturing jobs to other countries when we believed it was beneath

Travis Ketchum 36:44
us, or would save us $1.

Chris Bruno 36:47
Yeah, and I think that, to me, is the biggest issue, you’re now in a position where we just saw last week, I think, the president of China, meeting with Vladimir Putin in Russia, talking about the world and looking at things from a different point of view than I’m guessing we do here on the west. But literally all of these things create these moments where you’re looking around going, This is insane. So the UK, I can’t remember what the exact statistic is. But it’s like something like nearly 70% of the food we need is imported. 70%. I mean, that’s insane. It’s huge amounts that we rely on. Again, we’re an island, like we have to bring things in magically, it doesn’t just appear, we have to get chips, and we need planes, we need all sorts of these things to be done. And it’s a very dangerous situation. And I think that what’s happening in the world at the moment is there’s a bit of a realignment. And we saw that with the whole silicon chips causing massive issues, right? When all of a sudden, now we’re screwed, like we don’t make them anywhere. Actually, it’s only coming from a few select factories in Southeast Asia. I say Southeast Asia, because I believe Thailand and a couple of places also have a few little bits,

Travis Ketchum 37:54
primarily Taiwan. Now if we’re being honest, yeah. So

Chris Bruno 37:57
all of this, you’re looking at it now going, how do you ever come back from that in the same way as how here in the UK do we try and come back from the fact that we don’t produce our own food. And it’s very hard to do that, mainly because we build golf courses and go kart tracks on top of the funnel. But you know what I mean, like, it’s crazy that we’ve let things kind of slide to that point. But I do think that’s another big piece of it. You said it there, whether the US and the UK is similar in that front. The UK has no real understanding, I would say of technology and everything else. The UK after Brexit and everything I think is suffering. Again, this isn’t to get political. But I was reading some articles recently about how France currently is looking like it could be a that the leader now for European startups, and maybe even surpassing the UK, which London has never been surpassed by Paris, in any way, shape or form for startups, especially not for technology. Now seeing that and hearing those things, whilst at the same time, France, I think is currently on fire. Because nobody wants to work an extra two years before they get their pension. It kind of doesn’t add up. But it’s definitely showing you that things are changing on a global scale. I would have said before that London was only behind the US for technology for startups for things like that. Now, I definitely don’t believe that. I don’t agree with that. I think that’s showing the kind of changes that we might see going forward.

Travis Ketchum 39:16
Well, yeah, I think there’s a lot of interesting things to watch play out, which is as a fan of technology and innovation in general. You know, I have some, some reservations, but no one knows how it’s truly gonna play out. If you look at charts over time, the productivity of, of the average worker has absolutely skyrocketed. Far beyond compensation, specifically, which is interesting. And so I think that this, you know, this wave of AI tools is going to continue that trend and potentially accelerated. So the question we have to start to ask ourselves is, how do we want to use that? Do we want to maybe shift for some people work life balance? have, you know someone who’s a workaholic? So it’s hard for me to understand the concept of maybe only work 20 hours a week or something right? But like, is there a is there instead of a dystopian future? Is there a more of a utopian track that we could potentially take where this this increase in productivity, and this increase in leverage that we as humans can have? Instead of saying, Well, you always have to work 40 hours, and you have to put in overtime, and it’s always other things, and continue to push this lever that you now have that’s bigger than it’s ever been harder than you’ve ever pushed it? Do we instead say this level of output and productivity is acceptable? And now that we have new tools, do we then actually use that leverage to reduce our time that we feel places, right, reduce commuting, hours, reduce load on things and return some of that time to billions of people across the world? For more intellectual pursuits, right? doing more of that art, for real, doing walking in nature, like literally anything,

Chris Bruno 41:04
that the real thing that meshes with a crazy thing, right? Nothing’s changed in 150 years, the whole idea of working nine to five, or eight to six, or whatever you wanted to have that as the original sort of numbers, was very simple. Light. You needed to work during daytime in factories, because you could see better because we didn’t have lighting, like we have it now. Like it’s not, it wasn’t that easy to like, hold things, you had candle light and stuff. So most people worked agriculturally, industrially, whatever it was, and we’ve never really changed that. Nobody ever kind of questioned it is No, it’s cool. Like you just keep working Monday to Friday, nine to five, like that’s the way that the way things should be. So it is insane that that’s still a thing. And I think COVID probably for all the damage and bad it did it did one thing really well, which it proved that 95% of people don’t need to go somewhere to do their job. And I think that’s made massive changes as well, like you said, reclaiming two hours a day, if you’re commuting. That’s a no brainer. Those two hours you spent on your partner with your kids with your dog with a goldfish doesn’t matter with what but there’s just two hours on your own doing your own thing playing Xbox like crack on. But the key thing is, though it showed people that you’ve got this ability to do it and the tools we have, we all have the right that the fact that we do this podcast now that we’re recording on a weekly basis. I’m in the UK, you’re in the US. It’s seamless, it’s a conversation on video, we can turn this into a podcast and a YouTube video that gets sent out people around the globe can have access to that. I mean, it’s mind boggling, right? If you said this to somebody 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago, the ease at which we can use these tools is just crazy.

Travis Ketchum 42:46
And the relative affordability as well. And even for companies that feel that in person is an important piece. And I understand the argument for that in some situations, but even those models, their their understanding that probably a hybrid is actually best for everyone, not only does it return a significant portion of time back to the worker and increase their happiness. It also reduces the number of lights on at the office, the number of toilets that are flushing and the amount of food coming in the amount of you know, paper products or the size of the office. Yeah, you don’t have to service everything all at once all the time. And so it’s it’s finding efficiencies that are reclaimed, and, and also probably making some bosses really reevaluate. Do they have the right people in their organisation? Because if you can’t trust them to work at home, he probably here’s the secret, they probably weren’t working in the office, either. They’re probably just looking busy. So this is where you

Chris Bruno 43:40
start realising it, though, right? It’s the output base. And like you said, it’s not I’ve had this conversation with lots of people over the years, but I’ve had employees and everyone’s great. And as far as I’m concerned, the key thing is I hiring you to do a job I to actually get stuff done. And not to be somewhere Monday to Friday, nine to five, I don’t care where you are, what I’m interested in is, would this be edited in time? Will that go out there? And it’s supposed to go out? Is this been checked and ready to go? Is that been written has this been created, whatever it might be? And I think that’s the key difference. There are a lot of people, the bosses probably got a very good insight when you suddenly let everyone go home of who the people were that were actually doing the work and who wasn’t. But I think because we’re starting to get to about the 45 minute mark, we’re going to wrap this up. But before we wrap up, Travis, what are some of the AI tools that you use? And how do you use them? Let’s give some people some some thoughts and ideas of what they could do.

Travis Ketchum 44:33
Yeah, so there’s of course, a tonne of AI tools out there. And in fact, if it’s cool with you, I’d like to play a little newsletter actually a little side hobby we’re doing about AI style go ahead called Signs of ai.com. So if you want to learn more about some tools and get a daily newsletter about AI because signs of ai.com but some of the obvious tools that we like to use, chat GPT is Is that amazing for that ideation piece and it makes it super accessible to people who aren’t, you know, super tech savvy it it really brings that technology in a way that’s digestible. I’ve really actually enjoyed using Dali, which is also from open AI, because you can generate images. My, my mid journey, right? My journey, my journey. Yeah, it was another great image tool,

Chris Bruno 45:23
I actually created a logo for a YouTube channel, very thing that I then had to cut out some pieces because it doesn’t do text. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this. So if you ask it to include any kind of text in my journey, it just won’t do it. And it’ll give you like, fake letters. So it’s quite funny to see like they’re not real in any way, shape, or form. But it’s kind of an approximation of it. Interesting, quite fun to play with have a look.

Travis Ketchum 45:47
Yeah. So I use Dali to generate actually one of the images on the sales page for Campion refinery. So what I asked was for a, a menacing white furry monster in a purple room, checking his email. And so if you go down into the list cleaning section, there’s a Dali generated image that we’re actually using in our creative, which is kind of fun. But there’s there’s a lot of just interesting use case for these things. And then there’s a service, which I haven’t used, but I’m highly interested in the concept behind it, which is called content@scale.ai. And so what they’re using is they’re using AI to generate some initial, basically content. And then they’re running it through some neural linguistic programming, to sort of rewrite it and reformat it in a way that can be used more like pillar, SEO content format, in a certain way has worked for us integrations, that kind of stuff in a way that also passes AI protection filters, but they even they being AI companies still recommend the best use case is to have this 95% complete, and then bring in a subject matter expert to read over it and bring it home to the final mile. So those are those are my tools. What are yours?

Chris Bruno 46:59
So funnily enough, actually, I use for the ideation stuff, either in notion that I mentioned earlier, or chat GBT, because it does work really well. Vid IQ I’m using at the moment for the new YouTube side hustle and projects that we’re currently doing as well. So we’re in the process of using that a lot for the keyword ideas and options, descriptions for the videos. Again, this has been a model that’s been made by just studying 10s of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of YouTube videos. So understanding which ones work, which ones don’t, and in fact, even thumbnail generators as well now for this so they can look at what’s really worked in terms of getting a high click through rate compared to the impressions. And I think that to me is where I’m looking at these systems are being invaluable if they can harness the power of what Chad GBT does, but at the same time, look at the raw data that’s specific to the task you want to do. I think that’s really interesting. So those would be my two big things. I’ve also played with all of them. Like I said, I made a logo for one of these YouTube channels that we’re building out at the moment on mid journey, which is a lot of fun. If you did you do it on their discord. I don’t know if you use discord or not, but literally so on their discord, you can jump in, you can play, you can literally just drop in prompts there, and it will start feeding it back. But obviously, you’re not the only person doing that. So you also get to this kind of crazy insight into the world of what people are actually doing on mid journey whilst you watch their prompts come up, and then the responses that come up from it as well. So I’d say those are two of the ones that I’ve used the most sounds like

Travis Ketchum 48:33
the Venmo of AI where you just see what everyone else is up to.

Chris Bruno 48:37
It’s, it’s very similar.

Travis Ketchum 48:39
The last resource I’ll draw this is not mine, but a buddy of mine has a site called Future tools.io. And he also has a great YouTube channel. His name is Matt Wolf. I’ve known him for many years, but his AI stuff has really taken off. He’s got like 200,000 YouTube subscribers in a matter of a couple of months, and 50,000 email subscribers and he’s got this cool site that he’s reviewing products literally every single day and puts his best ones on there. So definitely worth checking that out. Nice.

Chris Bruno 49:09
Alrighty. Well, Travis, thank you very much. As always, I’d love this conversation.

Travis Ketchum 49:13
Yeah, me too. Thanks for Thanks for showing up. I’m glad we can do this worlds apart.

Chris Bruno 49:18
And if we can do this on a weekly basis, we are going to try and get this out because we have started doing this whole referencing things that have actually happened in the world. So now there’s a timer on this episode.

Travis Ketchum 49:27
Awesome. Well, let’s go

Transcribed by https://otter.ai