Everyday AI Podcast – An AI and ChatGPT Podcast - EP 289: From Conversations to Content - AI's Role in Storytelling and Productivity

Episode Date: June 7, 2024

Tired of valuable content collecting dust? Videos. Recordings of meetings. Interviews. Those are all sources of valuable knowledge and a spring of evergreen content. But what are you doing with it all? Jason Chicola, the CEO of Rev, dishes some answers. Newsletter: Sign up for our free daily newsletterMore on this Episode: Episode PageJoin the discussion: Ask Jordan and Jason questions on AI and contentRelated Episodes: Ep 212: Your Voice + Your Context – How To Scale A Content Engine With AIEp 95: Creating an AI Content Strategy to ScaleUpcoming Episodes: Check out the upcoming Everyday AI Livestream lineupWebsite: YourEverydayAI.comEmail The Show: [e-mail] with Jordan on LinkedInTopics Covered in This Episode:1. Large Language Models and Transcription Services2. Optimization of Meetings and Communication with AI3. Personalized AI and Work Efficiency4. Future of AI ToolsTimestamps:01:25 Daily AI news04:05 About Jason and Rev08:48 Open source audio transcription not effective, AI growth.10:46 Technology replacing note-taking. Person-to-person connection important.15:33 Using transcription to capture customer insights officially.18:54 Rev to release Voicehub, a comprehensive conversation platform.23:11 VoiceHub serves as a personalized AI tool.25:41 Discussion on AI, jobs, upskilling, and reskilling.28:09 Adapt to technology for higher-value work.31:11 Quality meetings are crucial for human connection.33:47 Experiment with AI tools to improve effectiveness.Keywords:Large language models, OpenAI, NVIDIA Canary, Whisper speech engine, automated transcription, speech-to-text technology, Rev transcription service, transcription industry growth, AI note-taking, AI summaries in meetings, improved productivity, investigation on AI industry, Humaine Pin, AI safety research, Jason Chicola, gig labor economy, automatic speech recognition, virtual meetings, Zoom fatigue, AI tools for productivity, customer insights, conversation summarization, storytelling via AI, VoiceHub platform, personalized AI, Evernote, technology and job evolution, balancing AI and personal interaction, quality over quantity in meetings,Send Everyday AI and Jordan a text message. (We can't reply back unless you leave contact info) Start Here ▶️Not sure where to start when it comes to AI? Start with our Start Here Series. You can listen to the first drop -- Episode 691 -- or get free access to our Inner Cricle community and all episodes: StartHereSeries.com Also, here's a link to the entire series on a Spotify playlist. 

This is the Everyday AI Show, the Everyday Podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business, and everyday life. Meet Firefly AI Assistant, now live in Adobe Firefly, the All In One Creative AI Studio. Just describe what you want to create and the assistant handles the rest, orchestrating multi-step workflows across Photoshop, Premiere Express, and more in one conversational interface. You direct the outcome. The assistant accelerates execution. Meetings can be kind of terrible sometimes, right?

Like when they're stacked up back to back to back. And it seems like you're saying sometimes the same things over and over. And then what happens with all of that, right? Like what happens with all of those great insights between you and your team or you and potential customers? What do you do with them? That's your company's IP. that's your company's secret sauce, that's your knowledge.

How can you take that and not just be more productive with it, but tell better stories that maybe help you sell more, create better relationships and grow your company and grow your career? That's one that we're going to be talking about today. And what I'm personally very passionate and excited about. So I can't wait to talk a little bit about from conversations to content and how AI's role in storytelling and productivity is completely changing. All right.

So before we get into that, if you haven't already, like, why haven't you? Go to your everyday AI.com, sign up for the free daily newsletter, written by humans for humans who want to grow their companies and careers. All right, before we get into today's topic, let's go over as we do every day, the AI news. A lot of spicy stuff going on today. So first, Open AI, Microsoft, Nvidia, and, well, they might be in some hot water right now with federal regulators. So the U.S. Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission are launching investigations into NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Open AI for anti-competitive behavior in the AI industry. This is part of a wider effort by the Biden administration to challenge monopolistic

practices in various industries. So the FTC has a particular interest in the AI industry with these investigations between big tech and AI developers. So yeah, we'll see how that happens. I mean, part of it is like, okay, are they being anti-competitive or are they just so far ahead of everyone else? I mean, that's what I've been saying since day one. All right, next piece of AI news. Well, the AI wearable that few people thought was a good idea is now reportedly looking for a buyer.

So AI hardware startup Humane, which founded the Humane PIN, was founded by ex-Apple designers. Well, they are now reportedly seeking a buyer after lukewarm reception of its AI device. The company has hired an investment bank and is in talk right now with potential buyers. So like I said, Humane is seeking a buyer after its AI device was met with a kind of tepid reception, with reviewers calling it untrustworthy and not very useful. The company did raise $100 million in funding before announcing its device, bringing its funding to over $200 million. So make sure you stick around. We'll be talking about that when and if they do actually find a buyer.

All right. Last but not least, Open AI is showing off inner workings of its chat GPT model after facing some criticism. So Open AI just released a new research paper showcasing its efforts to improve AI safety and explainability after former employees of Open AI criticize the company for taking risks with potentially harmful AI technology. So Open AI has faced recent turmoil with some high profile departures and leadership. changes. So this new research focuses on making the inner workings of AI more transparent and controllable. Other companies such as Anthropic are also working on AI interpretability. So we'll have a link to that so you can read that. And another thing, well, find out why Apple is going to start calling AI Apple intelligence in our newsletter. All right. So that's enough about

the AI news, but you know, make sure to go to your everyday AI.com if you haven't already. So if you're listening on the podcast, we always leave those show notes. If you're joining us live. I am stoked for today's guest. So here we go. Please help me. Welcome on the show. There we go. We have Jason Chakola, the CEO and founder of Rev. Jason, what's up? Thanks for joining the everyday AI show. Hey, Jordan. Great to, well, great to do this with you. Really excited to be here. Enjoy your show and happy to talk about AI. Oh, let's get after it. So, I mean, tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about Rev. Um, I never sought out to be an AI. entrepreneur. I kind of fell into it, maybe tripped into it, almost accidentally.

You know, my story is in the gig economy. So 20 years ago, I left a venture capital firm and helped to start a company called Upwork, which is a labor platform where people work online. It's the largest platform where people do services on the internet, it's all the company. And what appealed to me about gig labor is it levels the playing field. It really allows people anywhere in the world to live their dreams. You know, most of us are kind of stuff. stuck in an office, stuck in a cubicle, work for a company. And when you unshackle yourself for a regular job, when you're a freelancer and you are a freelance,

I mean, the word freelance comes from the middle ages and being a freelance with like a weapon, which is not really what's about, but a freelancer is free to do what they want. And the freelancer's on Upwork, and freelancers on Rev, get to wake up at the morning and decide, what do I do I do work today?

Do I take a hike? Who do I work for? That freedom, I think, is very powerful. It also levels the birth lottery. I've worked my career in cities like San Francisco and Boston with a lot of opportunity. What about the guys in Siberia or the folks in small towns? I think freelancing, you know, remote freelancing is such an opportunity. It doesn't get enough focus because we all think about the Uber driver, which is important.

But what about all the geographies they can't get there? I started Rev to create jobs for people, period, full stop. And what we discovered early on, we wanted to create a job where technology would be transformative. We had early success in jobs. It takes speech to text. We have large marketplaces around transcription of audio, captioning a video, and subtitling videos. All three of the services are basically speech in and text out.

So you could think of Rev as like, quote, Uber for typing, right? So why am I on this podcast? I haven't mentioned AI one time in an effort to make those jobs better, to make those jobs more lucrative, to make those jobs more productive, to serve the client. faster to make more money for people and to make more money ourselves, we developed AI from scratch, proprietary out of the box, to assist the worker. So our first act was to build AI, to make gig jobs better. We've done that and the byproduct of that is we've been able to produce an AI model for converting speech to text, a so-called ASR, automatic speech recognition

that is the best in the world. It's most accurate. I can prove it seven ways to Sunday. some of the world's biggest platforms like Fimeo and Axon run all video and audio through Rev because of this. And our logo, which I have here on my shirt, is a stylized human ear. Right. Because what does the ear do? It listens. We think listening is really important for human interaction and our technology the forefront of listening. And, you know, it's interesting, right?

Because in, in a way, Rev was before, right? before this, you know, AI craze that we're all seeing now. And now it seems like just about all of these large language models are starting to offer some sort of, you know, transcription. So, you know, I've got to ask your take then since, you know, you were kind of, you know, before, you know, before everyone else. I mean, what's your take on, you know, all these large language models now offering, you know, transcription among other things? Large language models like opening in particular have really raised the bar in the world of the text. Open AI, of course, has open sourced a product called Whisper, which is a whisper.

Whisper is a good open source. Beach Engine, there's another one from Nvidia called Canary. It's also, I think, worth checking out. And what these guys have done, I mean, for our business, there's two effects. You know, it's a double-edged sword. They certainly have commoditized a certain part of the market, whereas if you have really clean audio, like a podcast, frankly, this podcast is easy to transcribe because I'm sitting here with with microphone and sound booth and all this great acoustics.

So for really clean audio that's recorded in a professional studio, the open source ASRs are pretty good. Rev tends to operate in a world of kind of real world audio. Typical meeting is a much messier environment. Audio is not nearly as good. And in those environments,

the open source models aren't that effective and ours really shines because we have a decade of transcribing world's most challenging audio. But I mean, I'll just summarize it in what these LLMs have done is they've woken the world up to the fact that every conversation is an opportunity to convert voice to text input. And so the world, the world of transcription is growing exponentially right now, more than ever before.

I've been doing transcription for more than a decade. And the curve on audio transcribed is going vertical, right? And AI is driving that growth because you can do it everywhere. Jensen Wong was on stage at GTC in April with like 20 robots and they all have to listen. So that's in short, how is that affected my business? There's certainly some commoditization at the low end of clean audio is not easy to transcribe with open source. But the big opportunity is everyone in every industry now is thinking, hey, this application would be more effective if I was listening. So I think there's a market expansion that's happening.

It's pretty exciting. You know, you bring up a great point because, you know, even as I'm sitting here talking with you right now, I'm taking notes, right? Which I think when you're in a meeting, you know, when you have a meeting transcription, it helps with this. But, you know, I'm curious, how have you seen meetings change or maybe how do you think they should change? Because, you know, someone like myself, I'm a former journalist, right? So it's habit for me to always be typing nonstop. And then sometimes I realize, oh, when I'm typing notes, I'm not actually an active participants. How do you think, you know, this new kind of world of, you know, transcription on demand,

kind of like what you said, it's, you know, in some ways commoditizing, but it's bringing, you know, light to how we meet. So how do you think that transcription is changing just meetings in general? So first on notes, you know, I went to college in the late 90s, right? and you have 100 students sitting there taking notes, doing kind of lousy transcription, which really seems like a horse and bucky moment in a world of today.

We're like, why are they doing that? Why don't we just transcribe it all? Clearly today, you know, automated transcription and replace note taking in a lot of context. To your point, you know, we want to live in a world of connection where you build real relationships. And if I'm looking at you, I mean, you know, I'm looking at you in the eyes right now through a camera, right?

you know, body language like mirror, physical mirroring is important. If you know anything about human relationships, you know that it's important to connect and have those relationships, which is why being in person is better than remote, really better than a phone call, right? If I'm sitting down with my head, we're not connecting, right? So you certainly get out of the meeting. Any good salesperson will not take notes and they'll engage the person

to try to connect, right? But then let's go forward to why are you taking notes? You're probably not reading them later. You're probably trying to remind yourself what you're going to prompt me on. So I'll tell you, I think, where this is going. One of our service lines that that's really floating right now is we're helping people in the legal space with, say, transcribing depositions and things in the courtroom, right? And if you're a lawyer deposing somebody else, you're asking questions. Now, you're not making a friend.

You're in an adversarial context, trying to ask somebody tough questions to maybe catch them in a lie or catch them in the case. And what you want the AI to do is not give you notes, but tell you what to ask them. have someone else tell you what to say. So I think note taking is really antiquated. It's going to be replaced by automated notes in a really smart AI. If it understands your objective, it's going to prompt you of what you should be saying or asking the text. So I think it's going to change in a big way.

How do you see that changing, right? Because it's something I think about all the time. I start to think about, you know, oh, our meetings even needed or do 50 people need to go if we have great transcription technology, you know, like Rev or some of the other, you know, models that you mentioned. I mean, how do you see just transcription helping or changing how we meet? I'm going to give an example of one of my employees I spoke to yesterday as name Ryan. He was telling me that, you know, his job is to make our engineers more productive.

And he's looking at what a lot of teams are doing. And he was saying he was trying to be in like 10 meetings a day. and he realized he was killing himself. And so now his calendar will have like five meetings at one time and he attends zero of them often, right? And then he gets to AI summaries, which allows him to then check in with the leaders and say, oh, how is that one project doing? Is it on track or not? How can I help you with, oh, I see you're stuck on this feature.

How can we help you over here? Right. So the first thing I would say, the first kind of rule of meetings in the AI world is attend fewer meetings, right? Be really thoughtful about your time. most meetings should have fewer participants like two or three, not 20. And when in doubt, skip the meeting, get the summary, look at the summary, and then ask yourself, am I accountable for anything in that meeting? There's an issue here.

Let me pick up the phone and call the guy for two minutes and talk about, hey, let's make sure that we're on track with this one thing that I need to work with you on. You know, it's a shortcut. Skip meetings, use the summary. But I would say communicate with the people involved, right, about the issue you care about because what happens is most people in the meeting attend those hour long meetings for the one minute that's relevant to them 59 minutes that they wasted right and that actually creates I would say some cultural toxicity right and here's how when you're in a meeting is your

camera off I would say not good manners dude right I mean that that's not that's not nice I don't want to be in a meeting like why is somebody there are they you know are they flipping me the bird are they on the toilet like why why is the camera off okay and so people do that because I joined this meeting for that one minute, right? So we've reached a state where people use meetings the wrong way. And yet, skipping meetings, that's the start of more productivity. Yeah, let's go down that, that productivity path. You know, as someone that, you know, yes, I do a daily podcast. So I have a lot of audio and, you know, so I use different AI tools and I can see how, you know, using transcription services like Rev can lead to greater productivity. So,

So maybe Jason for those business leaders out there that aren't convinced, right? And they just maybe have, you know, recordings of their meetings or they're maybe in meetings all day and they don't even record them. What are they missing out on ultimately when it comes to being more productive? So I'll give an example that I used like, you know, in the last few weeks. And then I'll go from there and talk about how storytellers can use it. I love using beating transcription to capture customer insights in a more official way. In business, when you're trying to get things done, we want to sell your ideas, not with

anecdotes, but with data. And how do you get data out of conversations? Summization is a great way to get data out of conversations. The big kind of formula I would tell you guys is that conversations are ways. are where the most important stuff happen. The most important information in your life is in conversations, and you're probably filing it in the trash can. You probably keep your, if you get a tax return,

you probably get and put into Dropbox if you're a responsible person, but then you never look at it again, right? Your files go in a Dropbox, but your conversations are lost. If you, ASR plus LLM leads to insights, and so here's what you can do, and here's what I'll do, if I have a series of conversations with some of our customers in the storyteller space or the legal space. We run those through our software.

And what it does is it distills really clearly. The customers are annoyed about X, Y, and Z, and they want us to build A, B, and C. I can then show that by my teams, and they're like, you, we've got to get that done. Right. And now it rises above the level of, like, one person said it yesterday,

but like, they're all saying it now. Right. And so the job of a leader, well, I'm a leadership. Everybody can be a leader. I'm a leader of a company, but everyone in my company can be a leader if they're leading people to do the things that matter. How do leaders lead? They communicate.

How do they communicate if they're good at it through a story? How do you tell stories by listening? How do you listen with our technology in the ear? If you want to be a better leader, you communicate. You communicate every day. You're creating ideas and impressions. In your business, the more conversations you can adjust, you're going to find pattern. So this voice AI finds patterns, the data that you can get better insights and make your case and be more persuasive.

That's how it helps every leader in every company. And I feel, you know, speaking of just stories, Jason, right? Like, that's to me, that's what sells. That's what makes, you know, whether you're in, you know, B2B sales or, you know, B2C, I don't think it matters. My take is, you know, the AI and large language models have kind of made the average, you know, piece of text or block of sales email commoditize. It's not as good. So like, you really need to bring out that human side and that, that storytelling, I think,

is going to be a huge skill set, you know, moving forward. So how does AI in general and being able to capture all those conversations and like what you said, turn all this, you know, unstructured, you know, data and unstructured conversations in to data and the ability to tell stories. So how does this just help people tell better stories, right? Like if I have all these transcriptions, how can I use those transcriptions to tell better stories, whether it's internally or, you know, to external stakeholders? Obviously, I'm happy you ask.

So we're about to, Reb's about to release the most important product of product development in our history at the end of Q3 at the end of August, called Voice Hub, which is intended to be far more than a tool to transcribe one meeting, but rather a platform to take all the important conversations in your life, put them in one place. And when you go for one meeting and one transcript, which you can get out of Zoom, to everything in your life, it's so much more because so what people need to do, and they can do this wherever or other places by piecing it together is you want to remember stuff. You want to capture all your conversation, all your meetings, all of the people, all of the all the recordings you do, interviews of people, dictation notes to self.

At night, I walk my dog with my kids are asleep and I dictate things I need to do. And you take all that content and you put it in one place. And then what's going to happen is that when you want to make it, when you want to write a story, you have the ingredients there for you. When you want to get insights and make the case for what your customers need, what your business should do next, you have it there. If you want something to prompt you, over time, what we're going to be able to develop is actionable prompts.

If last week you said five times, you needed to like take the dog to the vet, it's going to remind you, why did you, why did you do that? I don't see that on your calendar. Like, or, you know, you said you're going to follow your taxes. Have you done that? Are you sure?

Hey, I just lost the image here, so maybe it'd be great if you could fire back up. Can't see anything here. So, indulge me a second. I want to just compare what we're doing to what people are seeing from big LLM companies, which are so inspiring.

I mean, Open AI is a once in a lifetime company that has really opened the world up to what AI can do. What opening I did that's so amazing is they taught the world of the power of LLMs. But there's a couple of things about the company that I think are funky, and I want to compare the impressions they're putting people's minds,

particularly through the release of 40, with what we're doing. So Open ads, it's a funny thing. company because it's not open, it's a closed model. It's not really AGI. It's a machine learning for predicting what word comes next, which is cool. It feels like, you know, the LMs feel like AGI. It's not quite, but it's pretty smart in a sense.

When you go deeper, what you find is that because it's built for every use case in every tool, it's never going to be that accurate or that on point for one purpose, but it's certainly provocative. Now, there's a vision. There's something that people are craving. Okay. But what's the craving is maybe best captured from the movie her. The movie her, okay, is in people's heads.

It's like inception imprinted info, right? And so why did Open AI 4-0 launch with a voice that sounds just like Scarlett Johansson? Because they wanted people to think about her. That's why Scarlett-Johansson is suing them because they didn't get, you know, pay her for her likeness. Okay. But the movie her is deeply imprinted in people's heads. Hey, this idea of this AI is going to help me in my life. And what people can feel at their gut is that's going to happen or some version that's going to happen.

But now let me tell you what I think is going to happen. And so we're not building her per se. Opening eyes, trying to build her and let you think they're building her. I'd compare what we're doing to a product that those of you who are probably over 40 will recognize called Evernote. Do you remember Evernote? Oh, yeah. So I was big on Evernote in 2010.

I went to Evernote conferences. My co-founder wore Evernote socks, who wore socks with Evernote. Evernote on, okay? So Evernote, for those that don't know, has, is a tool. This is before audio was relevant, all your text in one place. And their logo was the elephant. And the logo was the elephant, because elephants supposedly have a great memory. I have no idea of elephants have great memory. People think they have great memory. So the idea of Evernote was you never forget anything, right? And that's really appealing. So the CEO, I saw him speak one time and he's like, we're going to be your digital brain. We're going to be your infinite memories. Do you never forget a thing?

Okay, that's really powerful. Now think about her. How would you build her? In the world of LLMs, do you want LM that's just sort of generic that knows where Pets is? You want an LM that knows you, right? So the LLMs have this thing called a context window where it knows this much about you

and the rest is generic information. If you want a great AI to tell you what to do and be more effective, it needs to really understand you. Rev, Voice Hub is your context window because you put in all your information And now we're not going to tell you about random stuff in the weather. We know all about you.

Or this tool will know all about the things in your life. And so our view, my vision, our vision for Voice Hub is that every person has an opportunity to capture conversations at one place and then be way more effective. We decided this could be useful for anybody because who wouldn't want an infinite brain? We had to decide who's going to build it for. We decided to build it for storytellers. In part because you have a ton of reporters and media folks that you're our product, but in part, because I'll give Steve Jobs credit for this quote that I really like.

When Steve Jobs bought Pixar, he said, the most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation. Storytelling, storytellers punch above their weight. Journalists punch above their weight. Leaders who tell stories punch above their weight. And so we felt, let's make this tool productive stories. So how it's going to help? But here's what a reporter can do with Rev.

Every interview they conduct, they capture, via mobile, be a meeting, be your other device. Then when they go to write a story, we're going to help the write a faster. Transcripts, summaries, and in the near future, drafts of the story. But what everyone's afraid of AI content, you said in your opening, our newsletter is written by humans for humans. So to be clear, I don't recommend reading artists. written by AI. I don't want to read articles written by AI, right? But I want great articles written by people assisted by technology. Okay. So, you know, people like to talk about AI pilots, air co-opouts. Nobody says I want to add pilot, right? Nobody wants to air pilot to fly the plane. We want to add copilot with a human in charge. But I want to read article by a great journalist. They used AI to help them. And so in a world where journalists are under pressure to write so often, right, they're not paid well. They don't have much many tools. Our AI,

Rev's Voice Hub is going to help reporters by giving them a draft of the story. And that's going to help them be more effective. It's like every reporter gets an intern for free. If you had an intern, that's what they would do. And that's what a voice hub can do for storytellers. Man, so many, so many, like I could ask you like 30 follow-up questions, you know, as a former reporter. I mean, we just touched on, you know, her and GPT40 and all these things.

But, you know, Jason, what I want to get to you and what's interesting to me out of all of this You know, you're talking about, you know, voice hub. And, you know, you brought up this, you know, example of the Evernote CEO talking about being your digital brain. I think, and this is maybe just a hot take, but I want to hear your thoughts on this, right? For me, you know, when it comes to AI and jobs, right, when we talked a little bit about this yesterday, you know, I do think that there's going to be a lot of displacement, you know, this isn't what the show is about. But anyways, but I think, you know, people, always talk about upskilling, reskilling, and how can you keep your best employees and what should they be doing? And my hot take is something around something like Voice Hub. I think that there's

going to be an increased need for employees to capture all of this internal information. I think in the future, you know, we're not going to be relying on, you know, a large language model 90% of it and then using 10% rag. I think it's going to be the opposite. So, I mean, what's your thought on that? just in the future, you know, are we going to see a lot more emphasis on big companies, small companies, Fortune 100s, essentially having internal data collectors and storytellers who are just having conversations, right? I was just having, you know, working with a huge company and talking about this same thing. Do you see that happening and just, you know, services like, like Rev and other transcriptions being an integral part of essentially collecting a company's internal IP,

and that secret sauce and putting it all into like a hub for everyone else to work with. Adobe just introduced an entirely new way to create, bringing the power and precision of its creative suite into one conversational experience. Meet Firefly AI Assistant, now live in the Adobe Firefly app, the All In One Creative AI Studio. Powered by Adobe's creative agent, Firefly AI assistant lets you start with your vision, just describe what you want, and shape the outcome as it takes form with the assistant. The assistant orchestrates multi-step workflows, drawing on 60-plus pro-grade tools across Adobe Creative Cloud apps, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom Express, and more to help

bring your ideas to life. You can also get started with creative skills, a growing library of pre-built workflows for common creative tasks, like batch editing photos, creating mood boards, portrait retouching, and creating social variations. Every step the assistant takes is visible so you can refine, redirect, or take over at any time. You stay in the driver's seat as the creative director. Adobe Firefly AI assistant now in public beta. See it today at firefly.adobie.com. I think the key answer is that whenever there's technological change, the winners are people that embrace that technology, use it and run with it. If you ignore the technology or an ostrich, put your head in the sand, right, you're not going to win.

And I got to college in the late 90s and I was in college where the internet was happening. And fast forward, you know, 10 years later, I'm in the workforce. Okay. And I'll mention something a little bit spicy that everyone's seen. You know, you look at resumes and somebody applies for a job in 2010 with an AOL email. And somebody go, somebody to team goes, oh, like, and they literally say can they use the internet? They ask that question. Okay.

May or may not be a fair judgment for folks with AOL email accounts, right? But there was an understanding by 2010 that using the internet. that was really important and you needed to do it and embrace it to be an effective part of society. And so every cycle where there's new technology, certain jobs go away, many new jobs created. Nobody can totally predict the jobs in the future, right? But I would predict that there's going to be tons of people that are crafting stories and insights to make decisions. And they're using AI, a pipeline of AI tools to make them more effective. What I'll tell you, maybe I'll go to a bright spot here because people ask this question with fear of, oh, our job's going to go away.

I'd flip it and say, do you like taking notes? Do you like grunt work? Does any internet like transcribing? Right? You know, we serve folks in market research. And their job is to go and say, which guy can you vote for the election based upon your views on the economy, the board, or whatever? And those market researchers spend half their time digesting notes and summarizing what people said. Right. If the AI does that well for them, they could do much more higher value at it stuff.

When the AI does the shitty parts of your job, your job gets better and you got to embrace it. And it's a lot more fun to stand on the shoulders of giants and use tools to do more work and less time. It's like you have a staff behind you and you can do it on your own. I think it's pretty cool. I mean, geez, if that wasn't just like the biggest, you know, like get up and go do something, you know, powerful, something meaningful, you know, stand on the shoulder of giant. Stop doing all this groundwork. Love to hear it. So just want to get to one question here from our audience, Jason. So Cecilia, kind of asking, you know, so saying, you know, agrees with the toxicity of meeting sometimes,

but how do you capture the benefits of meetings and building relationships? If you skip meetings and reduce participants, it's a great question from Cecilia there that I wasn't even thinking about, you know. We have this example if, you know, 100 people are generally going to a meeting and it's hour long, like, do you need that? Right? But if you only send five people and 95 note takers, what happens? So how can you find that delicate balance? You know, Jason, of still, you know, being able to leverage technology, you know, your, you know, your kind of call out there was, what if you only need one minute of that 60? So how do you find that balance between, yeah, using AI and transcription tools, but still getting that, you know, looking you in the face,

body language, making a connection. How do you find that balance? Cecilia, a great question. Thanks for riffing on it. I would say a meeting is, to me, a meeting is sort of toxic. If I have 20 people in a meeting, two cameras on, eight cameras off, right? That's a unpleasant meeting. I'm talking. I have no idea who I'm talking to, how they're feeling, or why they're even there, or why their cameras off. That's not ideal. What would I rather do? Let me be huge. for a moment. I'd rather not be in a Zoom meeting, to be honest. I'd rather be sitting around a table with a handful of people. Have a real conversation, joking, laughing, a little small talk,

maybe we get some food, maybe a coffee afterwards, a little chit chat, human connection, a little bit of personal interaction, a little bit of how are you feeling, people being revealing and open. So my answer is meetings are quality over quantity. Quality has, you know, what are the things that you value when you sit around the table with your family? It's like a smile, a laugh, somebody caring about you, somebody asking real question. The meetings are much better. Here's the litmus test. If someone's in a meeting, they don't say one word and their cameras off. Why are they in that meeting? That means better without them. So I think human connection is deeply important. If I work 40 to 60 hours in a week, I don't need to do 27 meetings.

Maybe, you know, I might actually, but I probably shouldn't. I'd probably be better off doing 10 meetings in a week and having them be real human connection. I would feel. focus every meeting on like, you know, when you interact with your family, it's probably not through Zoom, right? Probably good things happen through that interpersonal relationship. So I would try to bring basic relational skills, your meetings at work, right, have fewer of them. And if you do it right, what's going to happen? Just like, you know, we have an office and I believe in coming to the office. I'm in the office right now in Texas. And I believe that when employees walk out of a meeting and they walk over to get a cup of coffee after that meeting, and they chat for two minutes

about what happened that meeting, that might be more important than the whole meeting itself. It's the little human connections that matter. And so I'd say optimized for human connection, fewer people engaging, talking, body language, and camera off, no talking, get them out of the meeting. Love, hey, love that.

And you know what? Probably that person that said zero words didn't want to be in that meeting anyways, right? Like how we started the show is it's like, there's too many meetings, Zoom fatigue, And yeah, I mean, I'd say the majority of people don't want to be in the meeting anyway. So that's a good call out. All right.

So we've talked about literally so much in today's conversation, Jason. You know, I mean from LLMs and how you and Reb were kind of ahead of this whole trend to even how this may impact, you know, transcriptions and generative AI, how it might impact the future of work and meetings. But, you know, as we wrap up, what's your one biggest takeaway for people, you know, that they can really use this, you know, and to be more productive and to tell better stories. What is that one piece of advice that you really want people to leave with? Look, my macro advice for all followers of your show is to try the AI tools, play with the tools

and see what works for you and to experiment with them. Like, if you want to use chat GPT, work on prompting, learn how to do better prompts, like play with the tools and try to make them part of your routine to be more effective. As it relates to the power of voicing conversations, there's a lot of tools you can try. We're launching our new platform. Most important release in our history, Lake Q3, users who want to try it can go to rev.com slash waitlist. Rev.com slash waitlist.

And we'll give you free credits for a free account. And we'll probably invite many of you to the beta. So if you want to try platform for getting all your conversations making you more productive, rep.com slash waitlist, something you can try. I would tell people just tomorrow, look at your calendar. look at all these meetings and get rid of a third of your meetings, right, and see what happens. That'd be the thing that I would act on today. And I think you'll have a better week next week.

I couldn't agree more. I'm looking at my calendar next week. And I'm like, who, which ones can I get rid of? All right. Well, hey, Jason, thank you so much for coming on the everyday AI show and sharing your insights. We really appreciate your time. Jordan, thank you. pleasure.

All right. And hey, as a reminder, you all right. all like a lot of great information there. As always, our guests are just bringing you the heat. This was a game plan, right? And you have to be able to look at the game plan and put it into action. And that is what our newsletter is all about. So if you haven't already, go to your everyday AI.com, sign up for the free daily newsletter. If you're joining us on the podcast, hey, I know, I got fat thumbs. I don't want to type that in. We have that in the show notes. Make sure you check that out. If this was helpful, please let us know, share this, tag someone who needs to

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