Digital Twins for the Win! Exploring and Creating with Kyle Shannon

Transcript

1. 0:00hey everybody good afternoon good morning good evening whatever time of day it is wherever you are welcome I'm
2. 0:06so glad you're here we have a special show today and I'm really excited to introduce you to my friend Kyle Shannon
3. 0:13in just a minute um for those of you who haven't been here before this is the AI empowered fundraiser show I'm an Murphy
4. 0:21we um are just continuing in our series of we don't know what we are doing here in a I in making a live cast in showing
5. 0:34up on camera and talking about things that we are barely you know sort of beginning to wrap our arms around and
6. 0:43that is like what the vibe of our extended Community is that it's totally okay and you are most welcome to show up
7. 0:55as the hot messy human that you are being in The Beginner's mindset doing things with AI that you aren't supposed
8. 1:05to know how to do no one woke up one day and was like oh I know how to write a prompt or I know how to test the user
9. 1:16interfaces of five different Frontier models or remember like the I don't know 8,000 or something new AI platforms that
10. 1:26are out there all of us in this space no matter how much what you know we are all on a journey as a beginner compared to
11. 1:35others what my friend Kyle who's coming on in a second what he taught me is that when you can be the fifth grader to the
12. 1:45fourth graders in this space that's when you are ready to go that's when you are ready for prime time that's when you can
13. 1:53start teaching other people how to use the tools and he was way more than a fifth grader to the fourth graders when
14. 2:00I started learning from him I'm excited to introduce you to him and invite you and encourage you to spend time with him
15. 2:08he shows up on Tik Tok almost every single night for the past I'm gonna guess it's like maybe 380 390 days or
16. 2:18something at this point it's a lot of days and he's there every single almost every single night teaching all of us
17. 2:26how to use the tools and also making it super fun and we've all become friends and we've all joined this community
18. 2:35called the AI Salon where you will meet other beginners other people who are aspiring you know moving in the
19. 2:44direction of moving away from being a beginner but none of us show up thinking or like fronting that we are experts in this space and
20. 2:55so I'm um like I said really happy we're going to I just dropped the the URL who disses everyone I just dropped
21. 3:05the URL into the chat so that's how you'll find Kyle's Kyle and his friend Leah fast's Community called the AI
22. 3:14salon and you'll find a whole bunch of really really nice people there um before I bring Kyle on I wanted to
23. 3:23highlight a little bit of what we're doing in the AI empowered fundraiser World um one of the things that Kyle and
24. 3:30I talk about a lot is how important Community is and I always like to say that the three things that you need to
25. 3:39be you know quote unquote good at AI are a curious mind a willingness to be vulnerable and community and what I
26. 3:48found over time is that even better than Community is friendships and so along my AI journey I met a lot of
27. 3:57women who were really Ed in building relationships around Ai and sometimes it's just like AI is this foil character
28. 4:06and what we're really doing is repotting ourselves right trying new things together like becoming more of who we
29. 4:16always thought we would be looking for opportunities to step into leadership roles like being a leader in the AI
30. 4:22space is an incredibly profound role that you can play in society right now and this group our incubator membership
31. 4:29community Community is a bunch of women who are leading the way in AI we are all friends we connect um on Mighty networks
32. 4:37all day all night we have special events we're talking about a book club we're talking about a podcast we would love to
33. 4:45have you in there or at least check it out so there's a QR code in the corner there if you point your camera at it and
34. 4:52take a picture or um put your camera at it and press the little button that pops up you'll be able to explore the
35. 4:58incubator and we would love to um chat with you who if you have any questions so I wanted to let you know that that
36. 5:06exists and now I am going to bring on no one other than well first let me do this stop screen sharing I bring you my friend and soon
37. 5:18to be yours Kyle Shannon hey and Murphy so everybody who if you don't know Kyle this is Kyle and like prepare
38. 5:32now that you know Kyle you he you'll see him everywhere he's it's one of those things now that you know him you're
39. 5:38gonna see him everywhere and that is a really good thing for your life so while we have him on here I'm gonna embarrass
40. 5:42him a little bit so Kyle I I well I love first of all I loved your your intro and I I I enter as the enthusiastically
41. 5:52clueless so yes there we go yes we are we are the enthusiastically clueless and I think uh one of the things that um
42. 6:01really drew me to Kyle and learning from him early on was just that sense of nobody's trying to say here in this
43. 6:11community nobody's trying to trying to act like we know what the hell is going on and we've got all the answers and
44. 6:17we're literally learning together I have watched Kyle figure stuff out in the moment hours and hours and hours of my
45. 6:25life and I've learned so much in that process so first I want to say thank you for being willing to show up like half
46. 6:35baked right you're not you're not saying like I'm I'm ready I'm I'm the leader of the leaders I know all the things and
47. 6:43you have the chops you have the experience you could be like that but you're not and that allows all of us to
48. 6:48show up and learn as well I could you know note to self I'll try to be douchier in the future but um no it's just like I feel like I
49. 7:02feel in a lot of ways less capable than I ever have because the tools the tools are evolving and getting so capable that
50. 7:10that you know my ability to understand what to do with them is actually going down but um but yeah I I I think it's
51. 7:16just um I think it's more fun to be in a beginner's mindset but I actually think it's actually critical for where we are
52. 7:22with AI right now so thank you I'm I'm really exced to be here okay say more about The Beginner's mindset what does that mean to you
53. 7:38well be willing to be in that uncomfortable place where that internal voice in your head is going you're just big fat dum
54. 7:48dum like let yourself just be the Dum Dum like it I don't know for me personally the way I sort of operate is
55. 7:55I love figuring stuff out and and I kind of hate being in that place where can't figure it out and I happen to have a
56. 8:00brain that's good at figuring out things fast this AI stuff is a completely different way of using a computer like
57. 8:09you know with with traditional Computing it's programmed it's it's deterministic where you put in an input and you get
58. 8:15back a predictable output AI is not that AI is you kind of say your words right you I think of like training a toddler
59. 8:25okay say your words you want cake say you want cake and that's kind of like where we are with AI and and you say I want cake and then it
60. 8:35gives you back something that may or may not be what you want and and people that go into that place of wanting to
61. 8:45figure it out and wanting to to have it be predictable I find I I watch them I witness them being increasingly
62. 8:53frustrated because it it doesn't quite give them what they want and then those people that are just like well let me
63. 8:59see what I get and I'll come in here and I'll just ask it for what I want and it gives me that and then they go well
64. 9:03that's not what I wanted but that's kind of cool and then they're willing to expand on that or iterate on that they tend to be much more
65. 9:11um you know happy for one thing like less frustrated but they also tend to do really remarkable work because the the
66. 9:19the difference between say what we used to do with Google which was put in a single prompt and get back you know your
67. 9:25search results um AI is much more like a conversation and and it it really is like having a conversation with you know the most
68. 9:35educated clueless intern you've ever hired right where it knows lots of stuff but it doesn't know anything about you
69. 9:42or what you're trying to accomplish and and the minute you sort of flipped your mindset into oh it's like it's like
70. 9:48someone I have to get up to speed on things but once I do that it gives me remarkable results that's that's kind of
71. 9:55it so for me that's a beginner's mindset where where you know our ability to to be masters of these tools I I don't
72. 10:05think is ever going to really exist I think it's going to be an ongoing conversation uh with with tools that are
73. 10:12just increasingly capable and that that intern at some point is going to be more like a you know first year graduate and
74. 10:19then it's going to be like a you know uh you know a you know someone with a 10-year employment history and then at
75. 10:27some point they're just going to be way better than us on all levels and everything and we just got to Humble it up we got to Humble it up
76. 10:36I when when you play charades right and you're the person who's acting the thing out and nobody can guess what you're
77. 10:44acting out it's like well who's the dummy is it the person who's it's the person who's acting it out and doing a
78. 10:51horrible job like you know you're like this and they're like oh and you're like it's a sailboat obviously they're like I
79. 10:57thought it was an orange or a blueberry it's not their fault it's not your fault right but it's that's like talking to
80. 11:03Chad GPT where you learn for yourself like oh if I go like this they're gonna know that it's a sailboat not a
81. 11:11blueberry if I go like that we're totally gonna run a ground yeah it's a bit of a dance right it's a bit of a
82. 11:18dance and and and like and that's not I mean I mean you and I are of an age like we we've been around really since the
83. 11:25the dawn of personal computers they've always behaved a certain way and with this AI stuff they don't behave that way
84. 11:32so like like we're not used to dancing with them and you know the the new advanced voice from chat GPT it can understand your emotions as
85. 11:41well as your words and it can respond in kind and it and it's we're not used to computers actually acting like the
86. 11:50stuff that was always in science fiction movies when we grew up and it's this is something that we're going to have to
87. 11:55learn how to how to interact with and it's it's not learn learn it like we used to learn it no it's not learn it
88. 12:02like we used to learn it so today we were working I have a our one of our AI boot camps is going on right now my
89. 12:10friend Rachel Kimber and I are running it and today we were working on a fundraising initiative and our our project was to come up with some
90. 12:19messaging but kind of working against a couple of different personas so like the old you know retired engineering guy the
91. 12:28you know Jen Z you know startup whatever and testing our messaging against them and when I walked when I you know set up
92. 12:37this exercise my goal was really very you know output oriented let's be sure that we have messaging that's going to
93. 12:44work and what I realized halfway through it was that's not actually the exercise the exercise is having it not work well
94. 12:53having watching Everybody try one thing and then try another thing you know yep much more important to to kind of like
95. 13:02roll up your sleeves well play first like we talk about in the AI Salon everyone wants to we're thinking about
96. 13:08efficiency right we think we I think AI gets kind of like a little bit oversold on the efficiency front than some of the
97. 13:17quality and the creativity and stuff but let's say we're using it to be super efficient and we're thinking about we're
98. 13:23here we want this outcome we haven't made time and space to play so what we were all you know talking about was how
99. 13:32do you find time in your life just to play with AI and I shared with all of them like all of your peeps in the AI
100. 13:41Salon we just don't sleep as much as we used to that's a possibility there there's there's another piece of it though one
101. 13:50of the i i i my relationship to AI as an efficiency tool transformed probably about a year ago because the first thing
102. 14:00I did when I started playing with AI I was like oh I can make the stuff I do it work more efficient and at some point it
103. 14:06hit me that thinking of AI just as making the stuff that you do today more efficient is actually dramatically
104. 14:14limiting because all you're thinking about is here's what I do today and I want to make that more efficient that's
105. 14:21how we've historically thought of computers right it's this machine that's going to do something for me so here's
106. 14:27what I do today I want to make that more what struck me was part of the part of how we got to play first is that if you
107. 14:35say okay well this is what I do today but we now have the possibility of saying what if that weren't the best way
108. 14:42to do things what if we could do things completely different so rather than making this thing more efficient what if
109. 14:47there's something completely different we could do the only way you can really get to that is to essentially drop your
110. 14:54expectations entirely right just put your expectations to the side and say okay I'm going to go do something
111. 15:00ridiculous here so let's say you you want to work on um I I'll do something really extreme let's say you've got a uh
112. 15:08I don't know an email process that that you want to make more efficient you know how you would typically do that is you'd
113. 15:13figure out the process You' go to zappy or You' figure out which parts go to open AI well what if you took that same
114. 15:19time you were going to do that and you went to sunno and you said I want to write a song about how to do
115. 15:25emails that doesn't make any sense at all it makes right and then what'll happen is it'll write a song about
116. 15:32emails that will go give you an idea of like wait a minute maybe I should actually send songs to my clients
117. 15:38instead of these shitty update emails and that's Jim Ross who I think is watching on the stream um he he manages
118. 15:44self storage units and he's super he is I would I would call him AI native like he he tries to think first about using
119. 15:52AI to solve his problems and he's just really adventurous he does something for his business with AI an hour a day every
120. 15:58morning morning which I think is amazing and and one night on the Tik Tok lives I was I was saying here's how you make a
121. 16:04song and Jim was just like well I've got a client I just met with a couple hours ago why don't I just make them a song
122. 16:10about their business and he did and he closed the business within five minutes right that's not something that makes
123. 16:18sense right it doesn't make any sense um and and yet if you do that it it will open up all sorts of other avenues and
124. 16:27you will learn the tools in a way that you're going to be able to go back to that you know that efficiency
125. 16:34project that you had with a completely different mindset so so for that's again that kind of goes back to the beginner
126. 16:40mindset just being don't be tied to outcomes as much as we were historically absolutely and and think about it as an
127. 16:48opportunity like have it in the back of your mind all the time that this might be an opportunity to break what's
128. 16:53already broken for example your email newsletter that you're trying to automate probably sucks anyway all of them do all of ours do I
129. 17:04have one it kind of sucks like I mean it's good it's the you know it's but it's also it's still an email newsletter
130. 17:10and there are 85,000 of them in my inbox right now that I haven't read yep and so when you're when you have the attitude
131. 17:18the approach of like let's break what's already broken and you get a wild hair you or you've like been on the AI Salon
132. 17:25you're like they were what was the name of that thing was it suo was it clug was it Crea was it cling was it
133. 17:33whatever yeah all what was it and you may not even you may get it wrong and all of a sudden you're in a different AI
134. 17:39application yeah but then all of a sudden you're like oh maybe I should be sending songs to my clients rather than
135. 17:46another same newsletter that I've been sending them for the last three or four years so there's so much room for
136. 17:52creativity I've learned so much about like my own in my own Journey about how creative I actually am I never ever
137. 18:01thought of myself as a creative and that's one of the things that you know that we've talked about is like how do
138. 18:08you kind of step into what you're learning about yourself that may have always may have been there forever but
139. 18:17you just didn't have a way to uncover it you know that that strikes me when I was doing um I was the chief creative
140. 18:25officer and the co-founder of a an early digital agency in the in the 90s called agency.com and at one point we started to have some
141. 18:34some cultural problems where the creatives the you know the the ones that were called you know creatives were like
142. 18:41well we're creative and everyone else is not creative and the fact of the matter was that the account people were
143. 18:47creative and how they engaged with clients and the project managers were creative and how they did project
144. 18:51management and one of the things that that we distinguished that made a big difference was there's a very big
145. 18:58difference between the creative process and the creative product so the creative product is like I make pictures right so
146. 19:05maybe you're not good at pictures an maybe you're not good at drawing right maybe you're not even good at design but
147. 19:09you're really good at the creative process and what happens with AI now is you now have tools that allow you to be way more creative um
148. 19:19creative especially in terms of the creative product but you've always been creative right and so what this is doing
149. 19:25is kind of connecting those two worlds and I I think that's incredible powerful the newsletter that that you just
150. 19:31mentioned I I just had an epiphany today so one thing I've been pretty good at over the past I don't know year or so is
151. 19:38I'll have an idea for an article and I'll put the article out there and I go oh I should make an image for the
152. 19:42article right which historically I would never have done that it would have been just words so if your newsletter is just
153. 19:47words maybe think about putting pictures in it and then the thing that struck me today I I applied for the uh the
154. 19:53creators program for some new video tool and I thought wait why am I just putting pictures in my LinkedIn articles I
155. 20:01should have moveed I should have video in there we've got these amazing new video tools right so so historically you
156. 20:08would never have necessarily thought about original artwork for a newsletter well now maybe you could start to think
157. 20:13about original video that goes with you know your article why if nothing else people will look at it right people like
158. 20:20moving pictures so so anyway so um first of all I have to tell you I want to move into a little bit of the existential
159. 20:27which will include our conversation about digital twins but here's here's a jumping off point it'll it'll give I
160. 20:33wanted you to take a second to talk a little bit about your backstory and what you're up to right now and Story vine
161. 20:39and the salon and um kind of where you're going with some of your content but I'll I'll kick it off by saying that
162. 20:47we're so for folks who are who are here we're also streaming to Kyle's Tik Tok Channel which is probably like gonna soon be like 247
163. 20:58um and a I was watching the comments as as one does and a minute ago somebody said are you retired or is this the
164. 21:08job so Kyle oh that's fascinating describe your job right now what do you what would you say your job is well my
165. 21:18my job at storyvine I'm the I'm the co-founder and CEO of storyvine so I'm running Story vine um I I tend not to do
166. 21:27one of the reasons I go live at T talk at night is because that's what I do when I go home so um so if I'm doing a a
167. 21:33podcast or something like this that that invades in the day so I've got that as my day job a big part of so storyvine is a an
168. 21:42automated video storytelling platform we've been around for 12 and a half years um we do a lot of work in the
169. 21:48healthcare and Pharma space the platform the core platform itself let's call it storyvine 1.0 didn't actually use a lot
170. 21:55of AI it used more traditional computing assembly XML and just more traditional kind of stuff fully automated right we
171. 22:03have an app that somebody answers questions in an app that goes up to the cloud five minutes later you've got a
172. 22:08fully edited video so really powerful platform but because so so a little part of my background I've got a storytelling
173. 22:18background I've got a degree in acting I moved to New York City out of school ran a theater company wrote a bunch of
174. 22:23screenplays just you know Pursuit a life in the Arts and then in the mid 90s when the worldwide web when I when I stumbled
175. 22:29upon this thing called the worldwide web it it struck me that this is a completely new way to tell stories and
176. 22:36so I started an online magazine and I started you know agency.com this early agency where we built a lot of the
177. 22:43websites for the Fortune 500 and what struck me was this is you know sort of telling a brand story in this
178. 22:49interactive environment it's still storytelling um Story vine is that as well right it's AI came out what hit me square between the eyes
179. 23:00especially you know for me November 30th 2022 is the Turning Point the seminal moment um of of what I'll call Modern AI
180. 23:10um the generative AI movement that date is the date that chat GPT launched and chat GPT from where I sit does for AI what
181. 23:21the worldwide web did for the internet so let me unpack that a bit the internet had been around for decades and decades right all these
182. 23:29computers connected together and the the only people that could really use them were scientists and researchers and
183. 23:34things like that because it was a commandline computer interface and you had to know know IP addresses and it was
184. 23:39just it was very technical and the worldwide web made it just simple as like clicking a hyperlink to be able to
185. 23:46jump between these computers and that's the foundation for all of you know sort of modern Communications was that simple
186. 23:52Innovation chat GPT was the first thing that took all this power of machine learning and Ai and put it in this
187. 23:58simple box that where you just ask it for something and it it answers it or you know gives you the picture or
188. 24:03whatever it is um so that became the beginning of it and and for me having been at the beginning of the worldwide web and looking at the
189. 24:12potential of AI this era that we're in feels a thousand times 10,000 times a 100,000 times more impactful longterm
190. 24:24than the worldwide web was and we know how transformative that was so the minute I had that Epiphany about AI like
191. 24:31being at the beginning of this new era um I just went all in so I I essentially spend all of my free time just looking
192. 24:39at Twitter looking at these things just paying attention to it and one of the reasons that I started the salon and one
193. 24:46of the reasons I started the Tik Tok channel was just to keep myself in the conversation on a daily basis like that
194. 24:53to me is everything because it's moving so fast that that if not in the conversation it's literally accelerating
195. 25:01out away from us even if you're in the conversation right um and so so you know my typical day just kind of looks like I
196. 25:09wake up I start looking at stuff on the internet uh I'll make a Tik Tock video occasionally um I come and do my work
197. 25:17and then you know if news pops up during the day I'll go look at that and pay attention to it and then I talk about
198. 25:23that at night and the you know one of the big surprises of the Tik Tok channel is that the way I had it in my head was
199. 25:32you start a Tik Tok channel it's a it's a media channel and you make content and you have an audience that watches that
200. 25:38content and what it very very quickly became was this collaborative jam session where people come and hang out
201. 25:45and like there's more activity going on in the comments between people than there is between me and the audience
202. 25:52right it's it's this really just fluid amazing just jam session and and for me that's that's tremendously exciting
203. 25:59because what it means is people are in there exploring this AI stuff independent of what I'm doing and that's
204. 26:05that's the whole idea it's so true like we are sometimes you're like the foil character up there and we're riffing off
205. 26:14of sometimes what you're talking about sometimes we're making fun of you yeah exactly so appropriately appropriately making fun it's so easy
206. 26:25Kyle that's why I'm there but like last night so I'm going to Paris tomorrow and last night I was like oh my gosh I know
207. 26:34that I've heard which applications are the best to use for translating in real time I was like of course I can ask tgbt
208. 26:43of course I can figure this out but you know what it'll take me eight seconds to just ask somebody in your comments and
209. 26:50within you know about 10 seconds P had had written back and said use this this is how you do it I'm like okay boom it's
210. 26:57such a wealth of information and so one of the things that um Kyle and I have both learned and seen in action and
211. 27:06watched other people like grow and Blossom is that when you create a container for this kind of relationship
212. 27:15building it gives people something to hold on to it gives them a little foothold a reason to talk about AI or a
213. 27:22forum for talking about AI today after you've worn out your spouses your kids your parents your dogs we don't want to hear about your stupid
214. 27:36AI I can't handle it anymore then you have your new friends your AI friends to talk your weirdos yeah exactly well and
215. 27:45and so the here's the other thing that there's a couple of reasons why Community I think become way more
216. 27:52important one is it you you have a place to connect with other people but the other one is kind of what you did with Pate there
217. 28:00AI just gener just let's just call it generative AI even if you're just talking about large language models the
218. 28:06word things right yeah that part of the industry is already bigger than any single person's ability to master it and
219. 28:14so what ends up happening when you're in a community is you'll have some little piece of the puzzle and what I
220. 28:21experience regularly is that people consistently apologize for how little they know and then they share this
221. 28:29little thing that they know that to them is obvious because that's what they it's who they are right they they their world
222. 28:36view is they understand whatever it is like with you fundraising right and you share this little thing about
223. 28:41fundraising that to the other people in the room are like oh my God I never would have thought about it like that
224. 28:46like all of the individuals people's points of view I I find them you know I I I work hard to get people to not
225. 28:55apologize for what they don't know because it's what they do know that is the thing that's going to break things
226. 29:01open for someone else so that part of it's really really important yeah you know I have seen a a transformation
227. 29:11among all of us that we have done such a we've like really moved out of that space of apologizing as much as we used
228. 29:19to yeah we had somebody in our group today apologizing for something and we just uh had this conversation about
229. 29:26impostor syndrome yeah exactly hit them a whole bunch but you know that this is this is a time when uh you know like
230. 29:37showing up and feeling uncomfortable is is the is the work it's the work that that's a great way to put it that that
231. 29:44just being in that uncomfortable SP place and doing it anyway is the work right that's the definition of of
232. 29:51Bravery right or of Courage you know taking action in the face of fear that yeah you don't know everything and yeah
233. 29:58historically you had to have a PhD in mathematics to be good at Ai and your fear might be well I was never good at
234. 30:04math what you're going to discover is you don't need to be but you do have to go through that Gauntlet of of knowing
235. 30:12that you can't do it only to discover that not only can you do it you might be really really good at it you might even
236. 30:19be really really really good at something you thought you would never in your life be good at and that's the
237. 30:25inspiring thing for me it's so inspiring and it's so addictive that I'm now looking for things that I don't know how to do to do yeah
238. 30:35so that playful thing right just oh it's so fun so I'm applying I'm I'm submitting a a proposal for this gig
239. 30:43that it's not like Way Beyond my zone of Genius but it's beyond my zone of Genius right but I also know I can figure this
240. 30:54out like I have enough intuition enough experience using AI tools now that I trust myself I trust my judgment yeah
241. 31:02that I will be able to leverage the tools at my disposal to do something that I don't have a track record that's
242. 31:11proven that I can do the thing anymore that's what's so exciting about all of us you were talking about I wanted to
243. 31:17shift into a little bit of the existential space that you've been talking about like the future of work
244. 31:22that's what's so exciting to me is we are now at the mode where it is imperative that organizational leaders
245. 31:31understand that you are not hiring for somebody's track record anymore or SK or their skills their skills or their
246. 31:39skills or their skills and that's gonna seem really counterintuitive if you're if you're on the outside of this AI
247. 31:44conversation because we're not there yet but like where this is trending where this is heading is that the AI tools are
248. 31:51getting more and more capable and they're going to increasingly do the Tactical part of your job and so the
249. 31:57thing you went to college for the thing that you might have been doing for the last 10 or 15 or 30 years it's going to
250. 32:03do it doesn't mean you don't have value it's just that that particular piece of it now becomes less and less and less
251. 32:11required right so yes so talk a little bit about where your head is at because a bunch of us there's been a group of us
252. 32:20who I think have been going through a similar kind of Reckoning or rethinking of our p path forward if you will and
253. 32:29what's happening around us and what we want to focus on and it's been remarkable to me how many of us have
254. 32:35been in pretty very pretty similar Milestones along the way and one of the things that has come up and that you've
255. 32:41been talking about is that you know where where your thinking is beyond the tools that you've done a lot to help us
256. 32:52figure out the tools but like the the conversation is actually bigger bigger than that now so can you talk a little a
257. 32:59little bit about that yeah so again I'll I'll I'll sort of use my experience in the the early days of the web as as
258. 33:06reference because I I actually I'm realizing now it's it's actually an important reference point the early days of the worldwide
259. 33:15web the technology of of HTTP and HTML was actually quite simple and there was a lot of work that was required to make
260. 33:27it UB and it evolved and things like that but it didn't necessarily change all that much so you know for five or six years it was
261. 33:36really all about the tools it was like if you learn the tools and you just you know keep up with how things are
262. 33:40evolving you can do it I mean that was one of the remarkable things about that is it democratized this incredibly
263. 33:47powerful thing when generative AI first started and there was chat GPT and then there was stable diffusion and mid
264. 33:54Journey for images and I don't there were a couple of Music things but udio and sunno weren't really out yet and
265. 33:59weren't really known it was it was a really small set of tools that you needed to know and then as time went on
266. 34:06there became more and more and more and more and one of the things that's happened in the past six months you know may maybe
267. 34:14this past month you know Let It Go but the six months prior to that was open AI kind of stagnated they they said they
268. 34:21were going to launch a bunch of stuff and didn't and what happened was in that time a lot of other tools caught up with
269. 34:28it and so so all of a sudden kind of over the course of the summer all these tools became remarkably capable and they
270. 34:35they did all sorts of different things like Claude you can ask it to write a computer application and it'll write it
271. 34:41and you can just start playing a game that you just created by asking for it and then perplexity does this cool
272. 34:47research stuff and you know open AI has all these different modes that you can play like all of the tools just got
273. 34:53really sophisticated and and there became so many of them that it essentially became impossible to keep up
274. 35:02with it right and so part of it was just overwhelm of like even if like I you know it was my self- declared job I
275. 35:08created this thing called the AI learning lab where I'm going to teach people how to use these tools and what's what's struck me and
276. 35:15what I've I've been in a bit of mourning for I think is the Simplicity of that that if if it were just about the
277. 35:24tools that would be awesome but it's it's not and and there's a couple of things that have happened in the past
278. 35:30month or so the release of of advanced voice from chat GPT where when you talk with it you're you're talking with an
279. 35:38entity whatever it's doing technically I don't care there's all there's always these semantic arguments well it's not
280. 35:44really emotional it's not really this it doesn't the the the impact of talking to it is not like anything we've ever
281. 35:50experienced before the 01 reasoning model that that open AI just released is this incredibly capable thing that looks
282. 36:01kind of like what chat GPT looked like before but it's essentially like having a PhD at your fingertips that can do PhD
283. 36:08level problem solving at your request I don't know how to ask for I wouldn't know what to ask a PhD you know to say
284. 36:16like what am I supposed to solve here like I just I feel like all of a sudden the the the these tools sort of elevated
285. 36:24above where my cognitive boundaries were what they can do is significantly beyond what I understand I should use
286. 36:35computers for yes yes and so then that puts me in a place of that well first of all they're only going to get better so
287. 36:43if they're already above that place like what's it going to be like when we do hit AGI artificial general intelligence
288. 36:49or ASI artificial super intelligence where these machines are smarter than you know the smartest human on the
289. 36:56planet and we've all got you know a 100,000 you know genius level agents working on our behalf what does that
290. 37:03world look like I don't have a clue right and so and so now I'm just in this place of like I think we need to start
291. 37:12asking questions more like why then how it's not how do you do this it's like wait well what am I trying to do why would I do this like you
292. 37:22know I don't know like what makes me happy like it it you go into these into just much more highlevel existential
293. 37:30conversations and this is one of the things that is has been an instinct of mine for a while and this this feels
294. 37:36like it's amplifying is I feel like these tools are going to force us as humans to answer the question what what
295. 37:45value do we really serve because historically our value was tied to the stuff we did right the work product we
296. 37:52did the skills we had and now it's going to come to you know do I make Anne happy do I connect with her do I make a
297. 38:00difference in her life do I right you know are are we connecting as humans like I think it counterintuitively the
298. 38:08robot robots are going to push us to be better people but that transition is going to be weird and painful and
299. 38:15surreal and so so that's what I'm kind of in the middle of is just this S I don't know like this primordial soup of
300. 38:24I don't quite know what work looks like and and you you know it still looks like what it looks like today but not for
301. 38:31long uh if you are a a coach a therapist a psychologist but you're about like they are going to be busier than the patent
302. 38:42and copyright attorneys absolutely we are all flailing about in these communities having like existential
303. 38:51meltdowns not like we can't this is unfathomably confrontational to our identity what we think like how we're
304. 39:00oriented what we do when we wake up in the morning and we're just trying to help each other out we don't know what
305. 39:05we're doing we need somebody to help us like have a framework for how to apply this stuff because I I absolutely agree
306. 39:14with you that it's so much more about um it's not well certainly not about the volume that you're putting out like it's
307. 39:24not about o I did this thing and I did a ton of it that means I am valuable and it's not going to be what this weirdness
308. 39:33that we've had in our society for literally since slavery of my value is measured by Time by by the hours I put
309. 39:43in how many hours I put in and like that that little thing right there of and I've I've heard people say I I've got
310. 39:51I've gotten an arguments over this where they're like but that only took 10 seconds well okay does that it's less
311. 39:57valuable right and it's you know there's this famous um it was Picasso I think was it Picasso or vano I think it was
312. 40:03Picasso someone said make a sketch for me and he made a sketch and he said that'll be a million Franks and she said
313. 40:08well it only took you a minute he goes it took me 40 years you know to to be able to do that in 10 seconds um yeah like like
314. 40:17t a lot of historically us putting in the two hours to write the email was where we measured our personal value and
315. 40:26where other people me measured the value and so now if that's just done instantly the instinct is to go oh it's valueless
316. 40:32but it's not no because it's still us curating it it's still us choosing what is the stuff we want to present to the
317. 40:39world like I think we're all still just as responsible for what we put in the world how we generate that is in my
318. 40:46opinion no one's business no one's business anymore like I don't you don't ask me if I use Microsoft Word or if I
319. 40:53touch that up in Photoshop like right it's just like like is it good or not and if it's not then just tell me the
320. 41:00work's not good if it's good then it's none of your business how I made it so that's that's part of my philosophy of
321. 41:06did you use AI who cares who cares yeah definitely like decoupling value and time is gonna be I think one
322. 41:16of the biggest pain points that we have because people are so used to feeling worthy based on putting time into
323. 41:26something and we're you you don't know by the way what might be the worst thing that happens initially is if we all do
324. 41:33seize the time that is newly available if we've if we're just trying to do something faster right and we have let's
325. 41:41just say you have one new hour a week you are faced with what seems like a not very big decision but is actually a huge
326. 41:51decision what are you going to do with that one hour soon you're going to have 40 hours right or 35 hours so well this is I'm WR
327. 42:01I'm writing a musical on the weekends like I have a degree in theater I've never written a musical I'm not good
328. 42:07enough with music to write it but it it's good like it's good it's really good and it's just like this weekend
329. 42:14project right and it's like and it's I'm not taking you know eight hours a day on the weekend it's like I do an hour here
330. 42:20an hour there and and I'm cranking this out and that that idea of so so one of the other things when you were talking
331. 42:27about we're all in these existential dreads I don't want to make it sound like it's always existential dread
332. 42:32negative it's what I'm finding is that there's these really big oscillations these emotional oscillations of oh my
333. 42:38God it's amazing oh my God what do I do with my life oh my God it's amazing I I I I I for the past month and a half I've
334. 42:45been in one of the troughs right I've just been in like what is this what's it mean all that sort of stuff and I saw
335. 42:50this LinkedIn post from Ali K Miller who talks about um you know AI stuff and the opening line of her LinkedIn post was um
336. 43:01holy crap I wrote a whole uh course this weekend or something like that and and just her starting it with that that term
337. 43:09holy crap was I realized that if you just play with AI and and play with it in your spare time play with it at work play with it just
338. 43:21mindlessly yes what you stumble upon are these holy crap moments that actually run you in completely different
339. 43:28directions like writing a musical or it might be something at work that you know rather than the two hours of automating
340. 43:34that email process I just mess around for two hours but but I discover something completely new and have a holy
341. 43:40crap moment that's going to be a breakthrough for my business or a breakthrough for me profession professionally and so I wrote a I wrote
342. 43:46a piece called the uh Ai and the holy crapp ification of work which is sort of the positive you know other side of this
343. 43:54if you get curious with these tools and really dive in with them um they are increasingly going to surprise you in
344. 44:01positive and really powerful ways that may be transformative for your business you know your professional life or your
345. 44:08personal life or all three all three all the same yes and I should say that that the existential space that a lot of us are
346. 44:18in is is in part be pretty joyous and kind of like surprising right you're like constantly surprised it's the
347. 44:28constant Kevin McAllister moment that we talk about yep um okay so to give the people what we promised can we talk
348. 44:36about digital twins uh teach me first Dena is saying what word processor are you using exactly to write musical Kyle
349. 44:47what what yeah exactly what brand of notepad are you taking your notes on right now an right that's really
350. 44:52important for us to know so annoying um all right so talk to us about digital twins can you start with like what are
351. 45:00we talking about hell is a digital twin yeah yes so historically the the term digital twin twin um really emerged out
352. 45:09of the simulation world and a digital twin might be you have a digital twin of a physical object or or you know a
353. 45:16system um my friend Richard Boyd has been doing a simulation work and 3D work for years and years and years and one of
354. 45:24the digital twins he made for the defense department was a digital twin of a nuclear submarine so it was a fully
355. 45:30functional nuclear submarine that people you know Sailors could go into with you know goggles or computer screens and
356. 45:38like all of the dials worked all of the things did the things and they could basically go in and run a submarine
357. 45:44virtually right so the so the the history of it is that the the the digital twins that I've been working on we kind of stumbled upon
358. 45:53so I'm the chief generative officer for this Mark organization called um content Evolution and content evolution is is
359. 46:02it's basically just a a Federation of marketing organizations PR firms things like that um founded by Kevin Clark who
360. 46:09used to run IBM's Global brand and he basically just said he wanted to retain the relationships of the people that he
361. 46:15liked working with and right so it's this it's this very collegial group and one of the challenges of it is you know
362. 46:24if if a business comes to Kevin or to anyone in the organization and says hey who should I work with within content
363. 46:30Evolution to do this who should I talk to so so this exercise started out is just basically we wanted to create a
364. 46:37directory like how do I know who to talk to and and then what we what we thought about is you know maybe we'll we'll make
365. 46:43descriptions of the companies and we can just make a like a GPT that makes it easy to find them and then we thought
366. 46:50well it's not really the companies that are interesting it's the people that are interesting and so our initial thing was
367. 46:55well what if we scraped LinkedIn and we got their LinkedIn profiles and and then we could you know search you know use
368. 47:02chat GPT to search for who I should talk to and what struck us was LinkedIn is this really limited view of sort of the
369. 47:13historical artifacts of a person right like their work history and even that it might not be complete depending on how
370. 47:19much they do right and and and you know maybe in that is you know a link to a book that they've written but they wrote
371. 47:25that book 30 years ago and so that might not reflect who they are today so so we stumbled upon in trying to figure out
372. 47:33how to how to use LinkedIn we stumbled upon this problem of well who are they today because who are who they are today
373. 47:41is really interesting and so what's nice about content evolution is you got a bunch of smart people in there that are
374. 47:46really good at things like you know writing structured questions and and surveys and things like that and so
375. 47:53Cindy was a part of it and we've got this group called collab which is our little AI you know uh Skunk Works
376. 47:59within content Evolution and so we design we decided to design a structured interview that is designed to capture
377. 48:08who a person is today and so it's things like you know what's your educational background what's your work background
378. 48:14all that sort of stuff right like the sort of dog tags but then it's things like you know what was a piece of art
379. 48:20that inspired you you know inspired you in your life you know talk about a failure you've had so we've got you know
380. 48:26sections of about how do you solve problems and we've got sections about you know uh you know how do you what's
381. 48:31your worldview and things like that and so and so we worked with chat GPT to come up with the basic framework
382. 48:38and reorganize it and then we manually went in there and tweaked it and what we've since learned is that that
383. 48:44structured interview is really important but the specific one that we made for Content evolution is essentially
384. 48:50irrelevant like any sort of structured set of interviews like just think 20 questions and think about it for a use
385. 48:57case because I could write a set of 20 questions to really get to who you are emotionally an versus who you are as a
386. 49:05problem solver yeah and and and so we've learned a couple of things that that that structured interview is really
387. 49:13important that answering it by writing answers doesn't work the gpts are not good when you do it by writing answers
388. 49:23because how you write words is not how you say words and very often if you read transcripts of what someone says you're
389. 49:29like this isn't even English like does this person ever complete a sentence right two very different worlds but who
390. 49:37but how you talk really does represent who you are so what what we did is we made an executive decision that anyone
391. 49:44we're going to make one of these digital twins for we have to do a video interview where they're going through
392. 49:50and answering these questions so we have someone being the interviewer someone being the interviewee we then take the
393. 49:55transcript of of that and that becomes the foundation for a GPT so that's so the digital twin right now is just a GPT
394. 50:04with this interview of who the person is then we came upon the problem of because again where where we started was
395. 50:13we need a directory like how do we find people right and we said well we've got these gpts where someone could have a
396. 50:19virtual conversation with virtual Kyle and that's kind of cool and we we sort of put them out like you can have a
397. 50:24conversation with virtual Kyle right now and nobody really cared right because it's like no one knows what that means
398. 50:31what does it mean to have a conversation with virtual Kyle so we kind of flipped it upside down and said well maybe
399. 50:37instead of asking other people to figure out how we would use our digital twins maybe we should figure out how we use
400. 50:42our digital Twins and so where we've kind of gotten to recently is that um all of the people within collab have
401. 50:51basically committed to use their digital twins to do things like brainstorming like rather than brainstorming with you
402. 50:57I'm going to brainstorm with the virtual version of me but I can also brainstorm with the other people within content
403. 51:03Evolution and I've got access to them 247 so we took all these individual gpts and we put them into a master GPT so
404. 51:11we've now got this little digital community that represents the world views of all the people within content
405. 51:18Evolution and we're using that GPT to write articles on behalf of content Evolution and even quote the people that
406. 51:27are most appropriate to talk on that subject it it's wild and and and so every time we do that um you know Kevin
407. 51:34will reach out to the individuals that are quoted and says you know is this what you would say for the most I've had
408. 51:40one thing where it said the opposite of what I said but for the most part it's like yeah that's exactly what I would
409. 51:45say wow and so that idea of so so there's a couple of things here one is you can make you know a digital twin of
410. 51:53yourself but you could also make multiple digital twins of yourself one could be the professional version of you
411. 51:59one could be the social butterfly one could be the jokester that that just does jokes one could not even look like
412. 52:05you and not have your name but you want to control it yes and then thinking of so if you think about the way llms work large language
413. 52:17models the reason they feel human is that we are essentially tapping into the collective intelligence of all of the
414. 52:25people that have contributed anything to the internet over the past 70 80 years right and and longer than that right
415. 52:32because of historical documents that got put on there so you're literally tapping into all of the people that came before
416. 52:38so the digital twins are actually just a really specific representation of a person who exists in the world or we've
417. 52:47also done these for people who have died you can also do the same thing for people that have died and put all their
418. 52:52Works in there right um and then we're just sort of creating a little sandbox where you can now have
419. 52:58interactions with them and you can group them together and it's it's absolutely remarkable um it's it's uncanny how
420. 53:05close they are to how people answer questions and solve problems and as we move into things like you know real time
421. 53:12synthesis of faces and voices and things like that we're going to be able to FaceTime with virtual versions of
422. 53:18ourselves and and I think this skill of thinking about how do I I Kyle want to be repres ented in the world feels to me like an important
423. 53:30skill to learn right now because we're going to be represented in the world whether we want to be or not and if
424. 53:36you've got some Acuity for how to do that with today's janky tools you're going to be a much better shape when these things get more
425. 53:46sophisticated there are so many use cases like bouncing around in my brain it's crazy right but crazy when the one
426. 53:57of the ideas that I have that I like so far the best of the ones that have been flying around would be the ability for
427. 54:06people to create their own board of directors to help them decisions yes well in fact we've talked about that
428. 54:14we're we're in content Evolution one of the things we're talking about is putting together um board of directors
429. 54:20and executive committee um GPT set so think about a board of director s you got all these important people on this
430. 54:28board of directors you get to meet with them quarterly for an hour or two you have drinks with them and right and you
431. 54:33can solve the big problem what if you had 247 access to some version of them yeah right and same with your executive
432. 54:40teams that 247 you could just say hey you know hey team what please all give me your opinion like I'm about to make
433. 54:48this decision and I want you to weigh in right and do it from your point of view if you've got a well- constructed
434. 54:54digital twin of those people you're going to get all sorts of diverse points of view 247 247 amazing all the all of the like you
435. 55:05know all the folks who wish they had a mentor or wish they had a sponsor right who doesn't they don't have connections
436. 55:15to you know the people where they can just sit around with them and and chop it up without fear of saying something
437. 55:22dumb right yeah right like now you get to have that and it's whenever you want on whatever topic you want and you're
438. 55:32going to get that feedback in a totally safe environment and like access this wisdom that you have no
439. 55:41business having right like it's it's not on you that you don't have that wisdom yet or you haven't had that life
440. 55:46experience yet and you get to you get to make the most of all of that yeah let the commercial applications like I know
441. 55:55we talked about you know if you're an author right now and you're publishing a book man have a digital twin that goes
442. 56:02along with it so people can either interact with the characters in the book because you've made digital twin for the
443. 56:07characters which that would be so dope y or interact with the author right the the yeah I've got one right now for AI
444. 56:15Futures the the Anthology Book where we've got in a in a GPT we've got the book itself and then we've got these
445. 56:21interviews with each of the authors so you can go into that GPT right now and just talk about the concepts of the book
446. 56:28but just ask the authors hey Cindy what would you think about this it also it it radically shifts you know right now we talk about
447. 56:37if you want to be good at AI treat it like a conversation and you know it's not just like a prompt and get it back
448. 56:42if you know you're interacting with you know the the virtual Irregulars right from the Tik Tok Channel you're G to
449. 56:48interact with that in a very different way than if you're just interacting with chat GPT which is kind of this amorphous
450. 56:54you know because it's everything it's nothing kind of kind of and so so when you kind of limit the scope to these
451. 57:02digital twins it it really does put you in this place of well how do I want to interact with them and what questions
452. 57:07would I ask a virtual board of directors oh like yeah I might I might make decisions in a very different way if I
453. 57:15knew I had that as a resource absolutely and everybody here on this call you should know Gwen she's amazing and she's
454. 57:22absolutely the kind of friend who will say who will remind you that you need to summarize for people and tell them and
455. 57:31tell tell them like give them some some some takeaways so yes it's I think that it would be something like come up with
456. 57:40a list of questions yeah well I I would say first off figure out who's your who like who's the audience like what's or
457. 57:47what's the purpose of the digital twin is it professional is it personal um like what's your intent with it so so I
458. 57:55would say Don't just don't just limit yourself to having one digital twin maybe do like this might be a good
459. 58:01exercise maybe one is the professional one and one is the fun one and so what would be what would those interviews be
460. 58:07like for you know professional Kyle versus fun Kyle so that's the start and then yeah work with chat GPT or Claude
461. 58:15or your llm of choice and say I want to come up with a structured interview of 20 to 25 questions or whatever you're
462. 58:20comfortable with you know 20 to 25 questions is probably half an hour like a half an hour interview if you're if
463. 58:26you're like really answering the questions um so that's step one get those questions and then edit them like
464. 58:32actually read them and see if there's anything you feel is missing and you know organize them um so that it makes sense for the
465. 58:39person answering them um the other thing you should put in there is basic you know biographical information name job
466. 58:46you know educational background things like that so that your twin knows your your history um and then really important is
467. 58:55record that interview on video and ideally have some third party be there as your back channel so when you answer a question someone that
468. 59:07knows you or someone that makes you push deeper hey that was kind of a stingy answer dig deeper on that like maybe you
469. 59:12have a a side chat where you've got someone just you know really watching you and you're talking to them because
470. 59:19you'll talk in a very different way than if you just do it yourself yeah then you take that transcript of that thing you don't need
471. 59:29to clean it up this is one of the things that was you know we talked before about people that expect it to behave in a
472. 59:35certain way get really frustrated some people are like well it doesn't you know say this accurately or that accurately
473. 59:40or I need to go in and I need to edit my no you don't because it's just gonna hallucinate anyway yeah all it needs to
474. 59:47capture is your essence so so that becomes the core data element of a GPT you can also put other things in there
475. 59:55like things that you written or books or links to your company things like that you can do that we chose to keep these
476. 1:00:02things simple and keep it just that interview because we wanted to see how they performed when we did this across a
477. 1:00:07number of people yes yes and then that's basically it you I mean you need to write the you need to write your system
478. 1:00:14prompt in such a way that it that it kind of responds like you would respond and you need to give it some rules like
479. 1:00:20that but that's basically it and then it's all about how do I use it where do I use it why would I use it yeah
480. 1:00:26absolutely and um I'm so happy that you pointed out the part about the video because what I I tried to I was doing
481. 1:00:34this while I was on a road trip I was asking my well I was like in my head asking a question and then just like
482. 1:00:39answering it or telling life stories and I got so bored listening to myself just talk in the car nobody will ever want to like engage
483. 1:00:52with this because I'm even bored with it but having somebody there it's youed talk differently about your life and
484. 1:00:58whatnot with with with advanced voice I would argue that you could probably do this with advanced voice and have it
485. 1:01:04dynamically write the question set while you're having the conversation because it'll record all that just do that in
486. 1:01:10the car that might be an interesting experiment I I think that that would be really fun and this was also before advanced voice so it was
487. 1:01:19tedious become so we've become such spoiled brats even I have to type something oh I know okay so Gwen hopefully we will um
488. 1:01:32hopefully those are tactical enough that it allows people to charge ahead and I think it's like so many other things
489. 1:01:40just play this there's nothing at fake like like yes I could give you the prompt yes I could give you the question sets
490. 1:01:48but they're not gonna like content evolution is a very particular kind of business how we write those questions is
491. 1:01:55very particular and how we did it for the book project was completely different so it's really more learn the
492. 1:02:01concept and then just go play with it yes and also you know some someone said well I'm not comfortable putting myself
493. 1:02:07out there then okay put out someone that's called you know Looney Kyle that's like Looney Bob and and it's you
494. 1:02:15maybe answer some questions truthfully but you you make sure that you know it's not you it's just Looney Bob and Looney
495. 1:02:20Bob's going to have his own Persona and things like that right so so don't feel like the digital twin has to be this big
496. 1:02:27vulnerable place you go um you can make it about you but you can also just experiment with creating these entities
497. 1:02:34that you're going to interact with make a character that you can then find out what the heck they would do in your
498. 1:02:41story y um as we wrap up I yeah Rick I typing is so 2024 we will not you know Paul retzer says by the end of 2026
499. 1:02:53we're all going to be talking to our computers I mean every everyone in every office everywhere so yeah or thinking or
500. 1:02:59thinking to them yes EXA yeah or thinking to them unless you're in a webinar exactly quen so everybody I hope
501. 1:03:09you found this as fascinating as I did I could talk to Kyle Shannon for hours and hours on end it's fun to have a chance
502. 1:03:15to actually chat back to you because of you're up on the screen and we're we're all like we have these um what is it
503. 1:03:22called the psychosocial or uh the relationship that people have with people on screen oh yeah yeah parasocial
504. 1:03:31a Paras yeah yes but but nobody out there feel that way because Kyle is a real everyday downto Earth normal human
505. 1:03:40being and you should connect with him follow his content join the AI salon and if you're looking for people to you know
506. 1:03:51rap with about AI you can always hit him up you can always hit me up we are so here for it we're here for you
507. 1:03:58in every every bit of your journey along the way and we're learning like we're still The Beginner's mindset as well um
508. 1:04:06Kyle thank you so much for coming on the show and thank you honestly just for being you because you're having just be
509. 1:04:14you being you is H such a huge gift and so many of us have have learned from you and have been able to go on and make a
510. 1:04:23difference for other people so you're creating quite the quite the family tree of AI nerds I appreciate that you're you're
511. 1:04:31you're one of I am a fan of yours you're one of my favorites you've been there pretty much from the beginning of my
512. 1:04:36journey so so happy to do this anytime yeah I hope this was valuable and useful and interesting thanks everybody see you later