The Ryan Hanley Show - Crafting Non-Profit Narratives in the Age of AI

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

Became a Master of the Close: https://masteroftheclose.comJessica Kizorek is an inspiring entrepreneur who transitioned from her father's investigative surveillance business to founding her storytelling ventures in artificial intelligence at the ag of 25. ✅ Join over 10,000 newsletter subscribers: https://go.ryanhanley.com/ ✅ For daily insights and ideas on peak performance: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanhanley ✅ Subscribe to the YouTube show: https://youtube.com/ryanmhanleyConnect with Jessica KizorekWebsite: https://jessicakizorek.com/Two Parrot Productions: https://twoparrot.com/Eyes on Your Mission: https://eyesonyourmission.org/Jessica shares her entrepreneurial journey, highlighting the challenges and self-motivation required to thrive. She recounts her phenomenal experiences traveling to 66 countries for photojournalism projects and how she embraced remote work long before it became a global norm. Jessica's insights on leveraging platforms like Fiverr to run a business remotely, even from a family cabin in Wisconsin, are genuinely eye-opening.Jessica also takes us behind the scenes of her passion project, Eyes on Your Mission, a nonprofit organization dedicated to offering free video production services to other nonprofits with powerful stories to tell. We explore the intricacies of providing these pro bono services, including the formal application process for grants and the transformative power of video storytelling. Jessica addresses some organizations' hesitancy in embracing video content and underscores the irreplaceable value of authentic, human-centric storytelling, especially in our AI-driven age.Our conversation later shifts to the impact of artificial intelligence on education and creativity, examining both the challenges and opportunities it presents. We discuss how AI can enhance the learning experience while also raising ethical concerns and causing anxiety among students. Jessica and I highlight the importance of viewing AI as a tool to boost productivity and creativity, rather than as a threat. Through personal anecdotes, we emphasize the need for resilience and a proactive approach in a rapidly evolving technological landscape, particularly in maintaining the irreplaceable human elements in art and problem-solving.

There are some people that are going to meet this challenge head on and they're going to teach their students, they're going to adopt their curriculums, they're going to retrain themselves as professionals, and then there's the people that aren't and there's going to be a big pay differentiation. Let's go. Yeah, make it look, make it look, make it look make it look make it look easy goal of this podcast is to share original insights and conversations on the habits mindsets and strategies of elite performers that produce exceptional results let's go jessica it's such a pleasure having you on the show thanks for uh spending some time with us hello ryan here i Here I am. In looking through your history, what you've done, you've taken on a bunch of different roles, big projects. What was it that initially attracted

you to entrepreneurship? We have a lot of entrepreneurs on the show. Uh, I think everyone kind of comes at it from different angles. Um, but there are a lot of people who listen for context to you on the question who listened to this show that I know are considering entrepreneurship that have maybe even fairly successful by, by some metrics careers in other places, but they have that itch. And obviously it's been, entrepreneurship's been an enormous part of your life for more than 20 years now. What was it that brought you to entrepreneurship? Well, I was raised by an entrepreneur. My father was actually in the insurance business. He had a private investigative surveillance company. And he had, at the time he sold it, he had 200 employees,

75 vans, and he investigated workers' compensation insurance fraud. So since I was five years old, I was around cameras. He got me one of the first Apple computers. And so I sort of grew up and transitioned from doing more like surveillance kind of stuff like he did to marketing and fundraising and raising money for businesses and for nonprofits. Wow, that's incredible. So did you start your own business? Like you just saw an opportunity and said, hey, you know, I can take these skills I've learned working with your father and take them into your own thing? I moved down to Miami and I had a real job for exactly 365 days. And during that time, I built a website. I got some clients. I figured out how to transition in my income.

And so when I was 25 was the last time I've had like an official job and I'm 44. So yeah. Why do you think that transition is so hard for people? Well, it's because, you know, you trade one devil for another. You know, if you have a job, you hate your boss. But if you don't have a job, you have to force yourself to do sales calls and breathe down your own neck. So, you know, I think it takes a tremendous amount of self-motivation to be an entrepreneur because there are so many hardships and so many difficulties and so many

challenges. It's like, you know, nonstop problem solving. And if you're not, if you don't have the energy for that, or if you can't self motivate to get through these problems, then you're not going to last, um, you know, in the long run. Yeah. Was there, I find with a lot of entrepreneurs, especially early on like purpose and meaning are like, are really what pushed them over the edge, right? If you, if you just have a good idea, we all have good ideas and good ideas hit us, bad ideas hit us all the time. Sometimes bad ideas, but it feels like when someone actually makes that move, whether it's starting a plumbing business or becoming an online coach or developing a product or whatever they ended up choosing, there's some sort of purpose or meaning behind it. One, I guess, do you believe that that's tends to be the catalyst? And two,

what was that early for you? Well, my dad told me when I was a little girl, he's like, you know, whenever you want to start a business, I'll support you. And so it took me a long long time it took me until i was 21 years old to really get i was like you know what if i had to work like uh i would love to get paid to travel around the world and make short videos for companies about the work that they're doing all around the world so i've been to 66 countries was the last time I counted. And most of those countries have been inside of like some kind of photojournalism project. Yeah. Wow. That's pretty incredible. What is that like? So I've traveled most of North America, including the Caribbean, and I've been to 43 states outside of Alaska and Hawaii

being the two big misses that I just have not been able to get to yet. What is that international travel like? What is it like running a business when you're on the road as much as you would have to be to be able to reach that many countries? Well, I'll never forget when my graphic designer many years ago, decades ago, I wanted to put my cell phone on my business card. She's like, well, you live in Florida, but you have a Chicago cell phone. You can't have your cell phone. People think you're in Chicago. I'm like, listen, it's the future that people are going to put their cell phones on their business cards, not just like their Google landline number, whatever you fake right on the

internet to have like a local phone number. And so I've really been running a online business since the beginning. A lot of my resources have been either not necessarily in the same town as me or they have been overseas. So I work with a lot of teams. I've employed hundreds of people in the past. One of my favorite things I use to employ people is actually called Fiverr.com. Have you heard of Fiverr.com? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I think I have 186 gigs I've done over Fiverr over the last 10 years. But no, I really think that people had like their aha work virtual moment when COVID happened. And I feel like I had that moment happen a long time ago, especially if you can. I normally live in Miami, but I'm at my parents' cabin in Wisconsin, and we have great internet here. So I get to spend a couple months up here during the summer, run my whole business here, do my sales calls, talk to my clients, work on my school. I'm in a doctoral program. So all this stuff I'm doing virtually and have been for a long time. What part of Wisconsin?

Managua. Oh, okay. Yeah, I love Wisconsin. all this stuff I'm doing virtually and have been for a long time. What part of Wisconsin? Minocqua. Oh, okay. Yeah. I, I love Wisconsin. I, I have done a lot of speaking in Wisconsin. I've been to Sheboygan, Madison, the Dells, Milwaukee, obviously. I went to, I don't even know what it's called, but it used to be like a Playboy like, like thing. It's like this big complex and it used to be owned by

uh Hugh Hefner and then they then they you know he sold it and now it's like this uh big and it's like in the middle of nowhere uh Wisconsin but it's all beautiful and I find the people to be I find the people of Wisconsin to be funny and inviting and like down to earth. And I just, I love every chance I get to go to Wisconsin. It's a great place. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So, okay. So, so you have this entrepreneurial spirit, you, you make it happen. You execute, you've been tremendously successful. And then you decide to start a nonprofit. Talk to me about that transition. Um, maybe what was the motivation? What did you see going on? And what did that look like? Well, as a video producer for a long time, since 2005 was the first time we did this, but I recognized a long time ago, 20 years ago,

that donating my services as a video producer, I I could make a lot more money if I like worked for Vimeo or, you know, did a hundred other things to tap into my skill as a digital marker. But instead I've chosen even through my corporation, two pair of productions, I work with nonprofits and I really found out very early on the power of video for these nonprofits. My dad, we were in a leadership course called the Self-Expression and Leadership Program. And we had to do like a community project. And so my dad was like, you know what, I'm going to go to Thailand and film this footage for this nonprofit. And then he brought the footage back to me.

And I edited all the footage together into like a five minute video. And we sent it over to them on like a DVD. And they reported back to us. They called us a couple of days after we had sent it to them. And they said that the whole office had watched it and the whole office had cried because they had never even been to Thailand themselves, the staff people. They had never seen these kids on the street. They had never seen these kids like huffing blue on the corner. And so my dad was capturing all these images and they were just blown away and they had never had a tool like that to communicate what they were doing in the country of Thailand,

you know, helping these young kids who were at the mercy of sex trafficking and prostitution and addiction and homelessness and domestic violence and all this kind of stuff. So I realized how powerful it is for these organizations. And so, you know, at first we would just donate our services here and there. But as we got a reputation for doing this, we had the demand of people asking us for free pro bono services just far outweighed my capacity. Unfortunately, I don't have like a big family trust fund, you know, to just be doing this project left and right. So, but I, I, eventually we created this nonprofit about 10 years ago, because we wanted to have a formal application process where nonprofits would apply once a year. And that's what I'd love, you know, if anybody has a takeaway from this recording, the, our nonprofit Eyes on Your Mission has a grant where other nonprofits can apply to get free video production services donated to them, meaning they get a video shoot donated, one-day video shoot anywhere in the world. We edit it down into like a three- to five-minute sizzle reel type video, and we do that through Eyes on Your Mission, which is my little hat.

That was my reminder for the day to do my pitch for Eyes on Your Mission, which is my little hat. That was my reminder for the day to do my pitch for Eyes on Your Mission. But we love hearing from nonprofits who have really worthy stories and who really want to tell a story that they've never told before, maybe. That's really what I'm most excited about these days. And if I had a magic wand, I would just sit around and probably do like 50 of these projects a year. But we have to be sort of discerning and make some difficult decisions because the demand for it is a lot higher than the supply. Yeah. And guys, I know a lot of you listening are either part of nonprofits or sit on nonprofit boards or have influence in nonprofits. And there is no better way to tell your story than video. And I think this is a wonderful opportunity. The episode will

certainly be out before July 18th, but I think you said was the deadline to apply. So we want to make sure that if you have interest, I'll have all the links in the show notes as well. If you guys don't forget the, or if you forget the URL, so wherever you're listening, whether it's YouTube or on the audio podcast, just go down to the description and there'll be a link over and you guys can learn more and apply if you, if you think it's something that you want to do. Um, I, I think, you know, that story about Thailand and about the individuals who are actually doing the work, getting to actually see the people that they're impacting, you know, that, that is what makes video so powerful. I have used video tremendously in my career as well. I'm not formally trained. I'm YouTube trained, but it delivers a message in a way, especially if you're thoughtful about how you do it, that I just don't think there is another medium,

oftentimes not even an in-person, maybe if you were there on the streets, but outside of being there in person, even if you're hearing a keynote from someone who's been there, if you can't see it, rewind it, listen to it, share it in that format, it just doesn't make the same impact. So what, you know, how, let's say you come across an organization that you feel is, has a great mission, has a great message, but maybe they're hesitant to create video. And I, and I see this all the time, uh, in the small business community as well, organizations that are doing tremendous work and helping people. Um, they, they just, they're like so hesitant to put what they do on camera. And I think that's changed a lot since

the pandemic, but it still is around. How do you start to change that mindset? How do you convince somebody who has a great story or great message that getting it on film and, or, you know, I guess we don't call it film, but digital film and getting it out onto the internet so that people can connect with it is, is an an important thing to do well the meat there's there there's nothing like human connection even as you know i don't know who's listening to this recording on youtube um i can't see their eyes but i can see ryan's eyes and after this moment ryan and i will have connected in a way that makes us feel like we're friends even though it's only video that we're seeing of each other. But that human to human connection is so important. And especially one of the things you talk about a lot, Ryan, which I love, I watched some of your podcasts on

AI. And especially with AI coming out, at first, I thought that it was going to sort of like replace what I did, or maybe decrease the need for what I did, which is like these short documentaries. And in reality, with people now doubting what's real and what's not real. I mean, my documentary services and the capacity to tell stories that are authenticated, real, you know, that's a whole new level of important now. Yeah. And I think that it just, it continues just when you think it's like plateaued, then it continues to get more and more important. Yeah.

It's funny. I had a, I have a friend of mine, he's a very successful speaker and we were just catching up and chatting about what was going on with him and whatever. And, you know, he had a few concerns around AI and its impact on his business. And I said, you know, I completely disagree with that. To me, I said, I said, bud, I think that what AI does is put, it puts, it makes in-person events paramount because now if I'm, you know, there will come a day in the not too distant future. I mean, there are people who are close right now. I have a friend who's, who's working with a company that creates a virtual you, like a, like a, on your

website, there's like a, like a, everything you've created, every video you've done, every article you've written, it like captures it all and uses, you know, AI and, and, and chat GPT-4 to then create like basically a you wiki with an avatar that's like talking to people. And that's cool. Don't get me wrong. I think that's cool and it's valuable and it, and it certainly has its place, but how do I know? There'll be a time in the future that you're watching a video on YouTube and you won't know whether that's Jessica or Jessica's avatar who has been prompted through AI to move certain ways, talk in your voice, use your cadence, your tone, your vernacular, and then literally knows everything you've ever put on the internet and can regurgitate it. And I don't know if that's you or not. However, in person, if you're on stage or at a mastermind

or an event or whatever it is, I know it's you, and I'm getting this original experience. And I'll give you one more little anecdote that I think puts a pin in this is Alicia Keys did the Super Bowl this year. And she had a moment where she missed a note. She, small, tiny, didn't impact the performance. Alicia Keys is amazing. She did a great job. But there was a small little thing, which happens in live performances. If anyone goes to concerts, the song never sounds exactly the same as it does on the radio when you're in person. And that's the beauty of it, right? The beauty of being live

and there with someone is not the perfection of the performance. It's the little nuanced things. And I don't even want to call them mistakes that create a unique experience. And I feel like people, we're going to see this wave of AI come in and obviously people are going to adopt it. And certainly they'll have, it'll have an impact, but I do see a counter swing back to sharing space, breathing the same air, seeing people live because we'll want that authenticity that we just simply will not be able to get from AI, you know, well, at least hopefully not in our lifetime. Amen. I'm with you on the live events. Yeah. I, uh, and I know, and I know you do a lot of

speaking and stuff and a lot of, uh, interviews and seeing you on TV. And, uh, you know, I think, I think all that stuff is it's, it's going to come back around. I just have to believe that it will. Um, so, okay. So you have the, uh, you have your entrepreneurial career, you move into the philanthropy side, you have the, uh, not-for-profit and then you decide to go get your, uh, doctorate become, and, umate and now you're becoming a professor? What was the impetus of that move? I fell in love with Florida International University 10 years ago when I was introduced to a professor named Dr. Moses Schumo. And he and I both wanted to use cameras and digital literacies to go into the most difficult Miami communities. One of them is called Liberty City, and it is a very high

percentage of African American, very high percentage below the poverty limit, very low graduation rates with school and stuff like that. And so we wanted to put cameras in the hands of these students and get these high school students in this community paired up with college mentors. So a lot of these kids in these communities don't see themselves going to college. And that's because they've not been to college campuses. They don't come to college campuses every week to hang out and get Starbucks on the corner and have that be normalized as like the way that they want their future. So I started working and doing research with Florida International University back in 2015. We got I secured a big grant through a family foundation for one hundred thousand dollars and we were able to buy a whole bunch of cameras.

We were able to buy the credibility of Florida International University. So since then, I decided to go back to get my master's degree and going to FIU was a really natural choice. They had a great program. It was a degree, a master's degree in global strategic communications. So I got that degree. And then I really want to I think my natural trajectory, although I always want to be able to work for clients and run the nonprofit and donate services and give back to the community. I really would like to sort of sunset my career in academia. And I was just recently offered a job, an adjunct teaching job. So that's my step, my foot in the door on the way to a full-time faculty position. But I'm really excited and I get to, you know, wave the FIU flag and tell everybody I drank the Kool-Aid.

And they're just a really remarkable university that I'm so excited to be part of. What is it about teaching that turns you on? Oh, I just love like blowing kids' minds. Like recently I was working with a group of seniors in high school and they were making little business commercials for their business ideas, their entrepreneurship plans. And I had them generate images on Dolly 3 for the first time in their lives. They had never generated AI images. And so sitting with them and typing it into the GPT OpenAI interface and getting these kids their pictures, and they were like, whoa! Like, oh, my God!

Like these ones had like a lizard as a theme, and we turned it into like a Godzilla advertisement. And it was so much fun what you can do with AI with kids. That's really what I want to specialize in. And I've been doing AI really heavy for the last four or five years. And I love the space. And I think there's so much room. There's so much things that colleges and universities need to adapt to, to have the kids engage with artificial intelligence and not be working, trying to work against artificial intelligence. Yeah. I was asked to do a keynote for an insurance conference back in the wintertime in Winnipeg. and I wouldn't recommend going to Winnipeg in the wintertime, but the people were very nice. And they wanted to hear about AI's impact on the

insurance industry. And I've been kind of following along and researching and listening and playing and everything with AI for probably about the same amount of time. And I shared this quote with them and everyone nodded their head. I'm not sure that they completely understood the full meaning of it, but everyone kind of nodded along. And it was from a research report done by IBM. AI won't replace people. People who use AI will replace people. So I like that one. I got to steal that one. Yeah, yeah. Steal away. And my point to them was that I don't think this is a technology we can sleep on. There are certain industries that are usually laggards. The industry that I grew up in, the property casualty insurance industry, is very much a laggard on all technology.

And my point to them was that while we've been able to be successful as an industry for 440 years as a technology laggard, this doesn't feel like a technology we can sleep on. Do you think that's a fair assessment? You know, on one hand, there's an urgency to it because like you said, I love that AI won't replace people. People who use AI will replace people. That is, that is so smart because I'm really, I am a big time evangelist for people just trying it. A lot of my staff, I've used it with my staff for the first times. I feel like a pioneer in the space and it's sort of like video was back like 20 years ago you know like ai is feeling like video 20 years ago so but is ai

um gonna change over everything overnight not necessarily because ai is here to stay. AI is now with us as a civilization until the end, right? In whatever form. Take over and kill us all. Well, I'm not a pessimist like that, but I do know that I'm actually quite an optimist for the sort of the utopian societies where AI can figure out how to solve all of our problems without killing us. Yeah. But I think I have faith. I have faith in AI. I have faith in, you know, my dissertation

is called From Anxiety to Creativity, Factors Influencing Students' Adoption of Artificial creativity factors influencing students' adoption of artificial intelligence in U.S. college classrooms. So that's a mouthful. But it's basically like artificial intelligence meets students meets mental health. And I do think there's a mental health component to AI because I think similar to the way people are getting really stressed out by social media, that there is a very real stress around artificial intelligence. And that's what I'm studying as how students experience that kind of stress and anxiety and how we can move them from a place of stress and anxiety to a place of confidence and creativity. Where is that anxiety coming from in relation to artificial intelligence?

Well, when you're looking at college classrooms, you know, first of all, they're afraid of getting busted for plagiarism. They're afraid of doing something their teacher doesn't want them to do they're afraid of uh ai replacing them because they want to be a singer songwriter but now you can write a song on ai with suno and you you know do people do i i i gave i did a survey one time where i gave students a piece of paper and they wrote, one thing that empowers me about AI is blank. And then on the other side, they said, one thing that gives me anxiety about AI is blank. And I really found their answer is super interesting. And they've thought about it a lot. You know, they're not sleeping on this. They have been

now are being raised in the age of AI. And so they've thought about, you know, how does this impact their capacity to make a living? What kind of jobs do they need to be studying and, and, and, and getting credentialed in? Yeah. I, I've been working on an essay that I haven't published yet. It's taken on a life of its own and maybe someday it'll become a book. Who knows? It's probably way too long as it is to even be an essay, but the working title is Art Assets and Artificial Intelligence, the only careers that will exist in the next 10 years. And the idea that the subtext I still don't love, but the first three is, you know, the main concept of the article is that,

or the essay, I guess, is that my interpretation or prediction is that there are certain things that AI will never be able to replace. And I actually did a interview for the podcast, which hasn't released yet with Patrick Leonard. Patrick Leonard is a producer, a music producer. He's worked with, he did three of Madonna's albums. He's worked with Pink Floyd. He's worked with, geez, Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen or Stephen Cohen, whatever.

His portfolio. You have heard two dozen songs that this guy has either written the song or produced the song. Incredible guy. And we were having this very conversation about AI's impact on the music industry. And he's like, I'm not taking anything away from people who are using and really diving headfirst into AI as a way of creating their art. He said, however, and this is obviously his opinion, but I tend to agree with it. He's like, if you listen to, let's take Drake, right? Drake has, I think think almost an entire album that was written produced and created by artificial intelligence uh he certainly has multiple songs and uh it sounds like him you know essentially he put it out so obviously he's endorsing the music but my impression and I'm not a big Drake fan but I did go listen both, is that there is a clear and distinct difference in the

soul of the music between what you know he created himself and what you know was created by the AI. And so my take is that I don't know that AI will ever be able to replace what a human can create when they give themselves space to be a true artist. And then there are obviously physical assets that could be owning buildings. It could be whatever your thing is, taking people on adventures, whatever your thing is from a physical standpoint. And everything else is going to get eaten by AI. And it's deciding which one of those buckets

or which crosscut of those buckets you want to play in that ultimately becomes the decision because, you know, and put like a plumber in the physical bucket space, right? Like if you want to own a plumbing franchise and be an entrepreneur and have trucks all over the place and, and build it out and be, we, we're going to need people to turn wrenches. We're going to need people to turn wrenches. We're going to need people to hammer nails, and AI is not going to be able to do a lot of those things. Maybe it'll help you solve the problems faster. You may have AI in your pocket to help you if you've never worked on this type of unit before, for sure, but we're going to need people in those

spaces. I do think everything else, the transactional tasks, the 65-year-old guy whose job it is to take the TPS reports from this person's folder and move them over to this cabinet, that stuff is definitely going to go away. And being aware of that feels necessary in how we judge what skills we develop. So all that context to be said, with these students that you're working with, where are they starting? One, do you think what I just said is accurate? I guess. Oh, I love it. I love it. Art assets and artificial intelligence is beautiful. And I like what you said too, it's not just picking one of those buckets, but it's, it's creating your own like Play-Doh sculpture from all through with all three of those materials. Uh, the more that you can, obviously you understand insurance, you understand finance. So like assets come natural to you. And I, I think that I just love what you said.

I'm going to repeat it one more time for the listeners. It's not AI that's going to replace people. It's people using AI that's going to replace people. And even if you just know a little bit about it, like just your little subset of, you know, if you're in SEO, well, that's actually an area that's totally changing because yeah, you know, if you're into SEO, well, that's actually an area that's totally changing because, yeah, so that's not even a good example. But if you can just learn, I have like somebody I really respect. Her name is Donna Vincent Roa, and she's amazing. She's been a student of mine, but she's also been a client of mine. And she's been a student of mine but she's also been a client of mine and she's created thousands of images of women like these heroic like art pieces using um using dali uh they and they're all wearing

glasses and they're all turquoise in color and she came up with like a style and then she started adapting the style and working with the AI to produce these images. And they've just come out and blown me away. She showed me some of them. And I was like, wow, what it did stylistically and how the detail in the art. And she used it in a beautiful kind of way to create a collection that said something about girls with eyeglasses, because she always used to get teased when she was a little girl about wearing glasses and she's also you know comes from a mixed ethnic background so she wanted to explore different kind of ethnicity girls wearing these these are eyeglasses and it's just

a beautiful collection of art now she also wants to turn you know turn that into an nft which is a whole other different story but I think if you dibble dabble and you have enough skill sets to do hobbling together some kind of specialty so that you're known as top of mind, you're known when it comes to word of mouth, people want to talk about you the same way that I want to talk about my friend Donna Vincent Rowe

and what she's doing with AI. Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think if anything, what artificial intelligence will allow us to do is be even more micro niche in what we build. And, you know, you can be the one person, you know, who would think to create turquoise designed, you know, female archetype, you know, with glass, you know what I mean? Like that's such a niche kind of idea, but also at the same time, so powerful and moving that you're sharing it here with the audience. And that, you know, while possible, think about how long, if say she was painting, one, she'd have to learn the skill

of painting or drawing or whatever. And then that even if she had this incredible idea and vision for what, if she doesn't have those skills or doesn't, you know, maybe she just doesn't, you know, not, not everyone has the ability. Like I'm terrible at music. Like as much as I enjoy music, you put it, you know, no matter how much training you give me, I can't make the thing sound good. It's just the way it is. I'm just not wired that way, which is fine. But, you know, I could have an amazing idea for a song or whatever without artificial intelligence, that idea dies. And, you know, I would have to go partner with someone or hire someone, et cetera. So I do think it empowers us to be these niche, even micro niche versions of ourselves and truly become the one and almost create new categories that we could

have never even thought of before are now realities. And that's just so exciting. So, you know, I guess when you, when your students are filling out this form, which I love that exercise, I love the kind of contrarian, you know, making them use both sides of the argument for themselves. You know, where are they, where are their initial takes and kind of where do you see the biggest movements as you start to teach them about these things and show them about prompting and you're sitting there working with them as they're creating these images? What aspects of either their mentality mindset or just where they see their career going, where do you see the biggest shifts as they start to become more, um,

accustomed to and comfortable with artificial intelligence? Well, you can either be like, you can have like a victim mentality around AI, which some of them do. It's like, well, you know,

I'm 16 and I wanted to be a musician, like all the musicians that came before me. And now AI is ruining that for everyone. And, you know, you have people that feel very uncomfortable, you know, students that are afraid to use it because they don't want their teachers to think they're lazy. They don't want to get some kind of reputation. They obviously don't want their teachers to think they're lazy. They don't want to get some kind of reputation. They obviously don't want to get busted for plagiarism is a really big thing. So there are things that they're scared about because they still, although they're thinking a lot about it, no one's teaching skill sets, right? Like I'm having to hobble together.

I went to a program at Northwestern University. They had a program called AI for growth, and it was all about business applications for AI. And that was like four or five years ago. I did a certificate program through the Kellogg. But I think that everyone has to take it upon themselves, even, you know, especially, you know, ourselves, but things so much more faster. I feel so much more smarter because I can ask it questions. I feel like I have a friend who can give me advice about my other friends. I feel like, you know, I've never created an animation before, but I was able to create an animation. And I feel like I could make a difference in the world by using these kind of tools. And I wrote my college essay with Chad GPT and all those kind of things. So yeah, they're both excited and terrified at the same time. I think it's funny that they have anxiety around being caught for plagiarizing.

In college, I was part of a fraternity, and we had an entire closet dedicated to cheating on all the tests that all the professors gave. So that wasn't as much of a – cheating was more of an art form back then. Yeah, that was serious. I love that. Having to take the test straight was anxiety-inducing. You know, I needed one of those. Whoever had gotten the best grade on the test, you always threw that notebook in the closet

or that test in the closet if you got it back so someone could use it. That's funny. Do you think in general, um, that this next generation that's coming up through, uh, take, take the millennials out of it. Um, you know, the say, say maybe the generation behind them, does it seem in general, like anxiety is a larger portion of their life? I mean, I remember, you know, so I'm 43, uh, I mean, I had shit that I didn't like, but I don't remember living each day

with as much kind of like, like there, it feels to me like their baseline anxiety level is just higher than it has been to previous generations. I don't, I don't want to say that they have it. That's statistically proven. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you look at the mental health statistics, that's definitely happening. And the, the largest, uh, uh, offender of that is social media and cell phones. Yeah. By far you look at like your kids when you get, and even kids that are not, they're not, they don't have their cell phone yet. They're being impacted by kids that do have cell phones at very young ages. So yeah, that's a whole other tangent that we could go on.

But that's one of the things that I wanted to look at in my dissertation is the mental health side of this. And how can we go, again, from that kind of anxiety about learning, you know, about growing, about trying something you've never done before, about screwing it up, about not knowing the answer, about, you know, having to go to multiple websites. Oh, my God, I have to make myself an account. Oh, my God, there is a word limit on the prompting. Oh, my God. You know, like there's just so, I guess I repeat like the whole, the whole battery of anxiety. But I, I do think there are some people that are going to, that are going to meet this challenge head on and they're going

to, you know, teach their students. They're going to adopt their curriculums. They're going to retrain themselves as professionals. And then there's the people that, that aren't, and there's going to be a big pay differentiation for sure. Yeah. I, uh, so I have two boys, 10 and eight. And, um, a couple of weeks ago, uh, I I'm sure you've at least heard of it if you haven't watched the video, but, the meme, um, around fuck around and find out. I, I, I had them watch that video or I watched a video with them. I don't,

even though they're young and everyone listening can judge me, I don't, uh, curse words to me are meaningless. They're just more words in the dictionary. So, um, you know,

I don't have no problem with them seeing that kind of stuff, but I was like, I was like, guys, like I want you to watch this. Cause as much as it's been memed to death and a lot of people laugh at it. And yes, the way that he delivers, I coach baseball and I'm fairly involved in that community and just the athletic community in general in my area, is there's a sense, one of the things that I worry about with AI, and we can kind of, we can start to wrap from here, but I just, I worry that what, because I've seen it in myself. So I don't, I'm not judging kids or any generation

I've seen in myself. Um, you used to have to figure shit out, right? Like you, you, you, I want to do X. So when I started learning how to do video, I had no idea how to do it. I didn't have creative parents. I did. I was a math major in college, no job that I had prior to that had any creativity and all I worked in the accounting industry for five years and then I became part of the insurance industry. So there's no creativity, nothing in the past. But I was a really shitty insurance salesman, really, really shitty insurance salesman. she's not my ex-wife, but my father-in-law at the time, he basically fired me a year into my insurance career. So my father-in-law basically pitches me a job, I think basically because he didn't want his little girl to be married to a bum. And he's like, hey, I want you to come sell insurance at my insurance company. And I said, okay. So I get a year in and he straight fires me. He's like, look, I think you're a great kid, but this is not working.

And you know what I did in the audience has heard this a lot, but I'll just go through it quick. I literally got down on my knees and I begged him. I'm like, please don't make me go home to your daughter and tell her that you fired me today. I'm like, you don't want to make that call either. So yeah, I was like, let's just think about this. And he gave me an extension. He's going, I'll give you six more months, but things got to change. I knew I had to change. And I knew that cold calling and dropping business cards off and going to network events wasn't the answer for me because I just didn't like it. I just, it, it, it was a grind and yeah, you could say, Hey, you just grind through things you don't like. Yeah. But it just wasn't working. So I had to find something else in the internet. This was like 2009. The internet is now not a fad anymore.

And you know, YouTube is a thing. And I'm like, you know what? No one's doing video. I'm not a great writer, again, math major. So I'll just create videos on insurance. And I started posting videos in 2000, end of 10, 11 on insurance. And how do you put a video on YouTube? I had to figure it out. How do you do video? Like, what does that mean? What does a video look like?

How do you edit a video? Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. Sound, microphones, you know, all these things. I like had to, it took me years of watching YouTube videos, talking to people, going to local workshops, testing, testing, testing, testing. And my worry and concern about AI is that we are going to lose that fuck around and find out mentality because the answers are always at our fingertips. And to me, I think the truly successful with this technology will use it as a foundation and an amplifier, but they'll still be that, they'll still want to test everything and touch everything and break everything and

pull it apart. Because if we lose that, if we lose that part, I think of what makes us human, then we lose the soul of whatever project we're working on. That makes sense. There wasn't a question in there, but does that make sense? I mean, how do you, how do we cultivate that? I guess as a teacher, you know, this will be something I'm assuming that you might run into is that, you know, we just start over-relying on it. How do we work through that? How do we continue to hold that idea in our head when, you know, every historical fact ever is, is, is a key punch away? Well, I think that the, the major lesson to learn from AI right now is it's all about the prompt, right? And the prompt

is the human side of things. So it's like dancing tango with the AI. It like takes a human and it takes the AI, right? And they're sort of like doing the dance and moving together. And it's sort of cool. It's, you know, if it's just the AI doing it all by himself, it's sort of like, I think the most interesting stuff I've done on AI is when I've gotten really creative and explorative with the prompts and looked at things from multiple situations. I, one of my favorite things to do for my doctoral work is we, in all the classes, you have to read these really crazy PDFs. I'm getting, it's like a business degree. So I had to read these PDFs about business theory and they were so boring. And I am a color person.

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

And I was doing stuff like I would turn to an article about operational change, which is stressful and organizational change. I'm sorry, which is stressful for people when they get misplaced and replaced and all that kind of stuff. So I built this whole PowerPoint presentation from Dali about this lava flow, these lava fields and people transferring. I mean, it was so cool. Dali said, do you want to try the lava effect? I was like, the lava effect? And so- Of course I do. Yeah. All these people like diving into lava pools and committing suicide and stuff. It was very dark and it was very funny. And I'll tell you what, my schoolmates will never, ever, ever forget the lava presentation. And I think images

and video does that to you. It puts you like a head above the rest. And, you know, I teach students. So I feel like there's always like the 90% of students that are just like, okay, they're fine. But then there's like the 10% where it's like, oh my God, I'd love to work with this kid. Oh my God, I got to hire this kid. Oh my God, I want to mentor this kid. Like, oh my God, this kid, I want to refer this kid for a job because they're so cool. But I think students really inspire me and the whole act of learning inspires me. And so if anything, you know, focus on what is that dance you're doing with the AI? How are you moving together with it? In fact, I'm teaching, the class I'm teaching is called writing for video, and I'm going to make them have a chat GPT membership for the four months of the class.

And I'm not going to grade them on what comes out. What's the final end product. I'm going to grade them on the whole chat. Like what did they do to make it better? What did they input? How did they work with it? What are the opportunities they missed? Why did they not explore this? And so I'm already changing the curriculum in certain and subtle ways to use AI to show students how they can. Because if you taught a class about writing for video and you didn't teach them how to use AI, that's negligence. You know? Yeah, I completely agree. Jessica, this has been a tremendous conversation.

I love, you know, it was great hearing your story, but this conversation about AI is so important. And I think the perspective that you have is unique in the conversation. You know, so many people that are talking about AI are either complete nerds, which are great. I love nerds, but they're nerds. Or they're like high-level business people trying to sell you something. And this aspect of coming from it both as a creator and as a teacher, I think is a wonderful, I think that, um, you know, we need to hear more from you and other people like that, that have your perspective because, you know, these individuals that you're launching out into the world are the ones that are going to be taking care of us. So

we need them to know what the fuck they're doing. And, uh, I, I just, uh, I appreciate you where, um, besides, uh, eyes on your mission, which we are going to have in the show notes linked up and everything for everybody. Where else can people learn more about you? Is there socials, a website, where can they connect with you and just stay on top of what you have going on? Uh, eyes on your mission. Uh, you can see two parrot productions. Um, actually building a brand new site there which is exciting how do i have on my i might even have my i'm doing a double whammy my uh two parrot productions t-shirt and my eyes on your mission hat awesome i come representing the

brands i love it i love it well that's one of my favorite, uh, uh, uh, ones you did, uh, about the making a brand so cool. They have to work with you. Yes. Yeah. Well, John Davids is a genius when it comes to that stuff. And he's worked with some of the biggest brands and some of the biggest creators. And I think that, uh, I think that's what it is. Right. And to your point, you, you, you cannot create a brand that people truly connect to at a, at a real soul level, unless they can see it and it has to come with video. So I love what you're doing. I appreciate you. Thank you for sharing your time and I wish you nothing but the best. Thank you, Ryan. Thank you guys for watching. Bye. close twice as many deals by this time next week sound impossible it's not with the one call close

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