Ep221: How to Be an Irreplaceable Creative in the Emerging World of Artificial Intelligence | with Srinivas Rao

Srinivas Rao

Since the Industrial Revolution, we've never seen a such a dynamic shift in power. Because what happens now is that the power of scalability is available to the masses at a fraction of the cost like, cost is always so if you think about the foundational economic principle of division of labor in the Wealth of Nations, the reason Henry Ford could basically build an assembly line and build cars at scale was because he understood the US division of labor, and the division of labor. As somebody who works in the in our chemistry know, this has always been prohibitively expensive, right? Labor is really expensive, for numerous reasons. One is just the cost of the people to then have to deal with the people, which is a whole other issue. So now, you're basically putting the ability to divide labor and produce at scale in the hands of one individual for like, 100 bucks a month. That's beyond insane. And I'm telling you things we should probably be talking about during the actual interview. So.

Zack Arnold

Well, I was gonna say I can't imagine a better way to tee off this conversation than to start there. Just dive right into it. I'm here today with Shriti Rao, who's the host and founder of the unmistakable creative podcast, which has been described by your podcast listeners, as essentially TED Talks meets Oprah, you've interviewed more than 1300 people, ranging from bank robbers to billionaires a very, very short list of some of your guests and the scale of which your conversations range Glenn Beck, Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin, Cal Newport like 178 times, and it's hard enough to get people like Cal Newport or Greg McEwan once you've got to multiple times. And I will also say that I'm very excited about the fact that yours truly is one of the distinguished guests that has been on your podcast. And that's how we connected. And the place that I actually want to start, is, I want to read a passage from your book that you wrote a few years ago, to start a foundational conversation about what it means to be creative in the 21st century with all this emerging technology, some of the challenges that creatives face and then I would guess that knowing the way that your brain works, and the way that my brain works, and the way that we're wired, we're gonna go in 27 different directions, and come back to home base by the end. But there's a passage that I think is really, really important to read from your book. But before I do that, I am remiss if I don't say thank you for being here and taking the time to share your insights and your genius with my audience.

Srinivas Rao

Oh, my pleasure, it's very rare. But if I don't get interviewed that often, and yet, like I have, basically, you know, encyclopedic information that I did get out of my head. So this is great. I, you know, it's a rare opportunity for me to be on the other side.

Zack Arnold

Yeah. And I love the process of interviewing other people that have interviewed so many experts, because just like you said, somebody would go to your podcast, and they listened to the experts. But they're not necessarily hearing your aggregated perspective of having so many of these conversations, either just from your own memory, or from your ability to collect all this information using AI and all these new tools, which we're going to talk a lot about very, very soon. But before we get into the weeds of all the technology, and all the cool new things that are available to make us better creatives, or talking about the existential crisis, of doing creative work, on the flip side of it, there's a really important phrase that you have in your book, The Art of Being unmistakable. And this to me kind of frames where I want to start. And then we're going to just be off to the races. And this is really the foundation of a lot of the work that I do too, which is why I think you and I are such a good fit for this conversation. And the the phrase goes is this. Most people are afraid. Most people get comfortable in a life that seems tolerable enough. They don't have the time they complain. And they may actually believe it, even as they spend hours watching TV, playing video games, surfing the internet going to them all. The price is that moment near the end. By the end, we mean when you realize at the end of your life, that your life never belonged to you. You never stepped up, you've never owned it. You never showed us who you really are. If this doesn't just encapsulate who you are and the absolute enterprise, you have built of all of these great interviews with all these brilliant minds. I don't know it does. So I want to start at the beginning of this conversation talking about what it means to not only be a creative, what it means to be an unmistakable creative.

Srinivas Rao

Well, it's funny to hear you read that quote, because it's from so long ago, I wrote that book in 2013. So like that that book is 10 years old. And I like it's funny because I didn't even remember that until you read the very last part. I was like I wrote this. This doesn't sound like something I wrote. But let's talk about the notion of what it means to be a creative first. I think that one thing that we have to dispel is this notion that what it means to be creative is to be a painter or to be a writer, the things that are typically labeled as creative because we do creative things every single day. Like we come up with creative ways to organize our days, we come up with creative ways to do the dishes who would come up with creative Ways to help my mom, you know, leave me alone like for I'll give you an example. So a mother is notorious for wanting everything in the house to be a certain way my parents house because my sister had a baby about four months ago. So I camped out here for maternity leave, and they're gone to India for a month. So I was like, Okay, why would I pay rent if I can just stay here for another month, but she had this thing, she was like driving me crazy. We I met Tori's for leaving the cap off the toothpaste. And you know, this conversation was such like I told you 1000 downtimes, put the cap on the toothpaste. And, you know, after 1000 times, like, initially, I'm like, Well, you told me 1000 times like, don't you think this is going nowhere? I told my dad, you're a scientist, like any scientist who tested this hypothesis would be like, my son's an idiot, you know, he's not going to change. And so what I did was, I was like, There's got to be a better way to do this. And I was like, What is a way that I could avoid having to remember putting the cap on the toothpaste? Now people will think of this as lazy, right? Like anybody else. I'm just like, Damn strange. Just put the cap on the toothpaste like your mom says. And I thought to myself, there's gotta be a better way. And so what did I do? I went to Amazon. And I'm like, Okay, how do I deal with this problem. And I was like, Oh, I could literally get a toothpaste dispenser that literally does that I never have to ever hear this from my mom, again, that puts an end to the problem. That's a stupidly simple example of thinking creatively about the dumbest thing in your life. So the notion that, you know, only artists are creative is ridiculous, everybody is creative. And there's this something I often say is that the only difference between people who believe they're creative, and those who don't, are the people who truly believe their creativity are in the habit of expressing their creativity, on a regular basis in some form or another. And whether you realize it or not, you're always expressing your creativity in some form, or other like, you know, if you cook, you're being creative, like my mother is this amazing COVID. But something I learned when I did the research for my second book was that everybody in my family actually was incredibly critical. My dad's a prolific photographer, he's creative. But the thing is, even though he's a professor in plant pathology, like he doesn't identify as a creative, because in our world, the language that we use basically determines our identity as creatives when it really should we over identify with labels, and when you start to basically identify with the label of oh, I'm this or I'm that, that label in and of itself becomes a limitation.

Zack Arnold

And I think this for me, that and I love that you brought this up, it's I swear to God, it's like, you have my notes in front of you, where I have a feeling you and I are gonna be on the same wavelength the entire time. But to me, it's the difference between I'm creative, versus I'm a creative. There's a giant chasm between those two ideas. One is, well, this is a process or these are things that I do, but it's not who I am versus Oh, no, this is who I am. And that label can just completely change the trajectory of your life of your career if the way that you feel about yourself, of your self worth. So talk to me about the difference between Oh, yeah, I'm creative versus I am a creative, because I'm sure that you've talked to many people that identify on either side, and you're many conversations.

Srinivas Rao

Where I read this, to be honest, but it was this difference between having two verbs versus a noun or a verb versus an adjective, right? I am a creator is sort of the verb person, right? The Creator is the person who does shit. And they make it happen like creator. Basically, if you want the difference, when I say the difference between a creative and a creator, I would say is, you can see what the output is when somebody is a creator. Whereas somebody who is a creative can be like, I'm creative, and they may have nothing to show for it. It's kind of like the difference between the adjective and the verb one is basically given by action. So the person who produces a ton of stuff may not say, Oh, I'm creative, but they're great. They're creators. So I think in my opinion, it's better to be a creator than it is to be a creative, like, you know, whether, because the thing is creator itself is so expansive. Yeah, you could literally create anything you want to, especially nowadays.

Zack Arnold

Well, and we're going to talk a lot more about the the ability to create things, specifically through artificial intelligence. I know that's going to be a big part of today's conversation. But what I would love to get a little bit more background about first, because I'm a big believer, and I would assume that you have probably experienced something similar having interviewed literally, I think about seven or eight times more people than I have. And I feel pretty good about my 300 plus interviews, and all of a sudden, I'm very insecure about I've only interviewed 300 People talking to you. But I think that it's really important for people to understand the messenger before they learn about the message. And I think the messenger for in your journey is so important. So the fact that you call yourself the unmistakable creative and you talk to all these creative people, I want to talk a little bit more about how that journey happened because you originally came from having a business degree at Berkeley, and an MBA from Pepperdine. So you're the last person that somebody would look at on paper and say, Oh, clearly he has a creative so how did this transition happen?

Srinivas Rao

Entirely by accident. So you know better than anybody, as somebody who works in the entertainment industry, how this story will play out like this one sounds good. pricing tier. So I was working, I think, you know, at finish Berkeley I had had a bunch of jobs that I wasn't very good at, mainly because in those days, like this concept of like, passion, purpose, you know, self actualization, none of that was really there. And even if I had heard it at that age, we're like, this all sounds like a bunch of new age horseshit. But, you know, I gotten to a point where it's like, I need something to change. And, you know, Indian parents, like the standard path is, you know, the joke is doctor, lawyer, engineer failure. But basically, like, you know, it was just the next logical step was like, Okay, I gotta go to graduate school. I got rejected everywhere that I applied to business school, I knew. And part of it was the combination of things. I always had had this love for movies, much like yourself, and TV. And I was just getting really absorbed and all the TV that I was watching, like, I remember watching the OC, like, just religiously, which the pop culture tastes of a teenage girl, for some reason. I just love always teenybopper stuff, but I think I watched it religiously. Then I watched entourage. And like, in my mind, I thought, You know what, I know what I want to do. I want to create entertainment. Like that is the dream. Like I just like I was like, Yeah, I've always been captivated by this. And so that's what I want to do. And you know, I got rejected from business school at NYU Stern, because I applied to NYU, Columbia, USC, and UT Austin, all because I thought they would give me a foothold in Des entertainment just because USC and NYU had the film schools, Columbia also. And then I got to LA. So I chose to go to Pepperdine, because I didn't get anywhere else. I was like, Well, if I want to work in the entertainment industry, the LA is the place to be. And about two and a half weeks, and I got a rude awakening. And I realized nobody hires the MBAs to do creative work in the entertainment industry, you get to bait because I was like, Well, I don't want to sit around and be the person at Disney, who basically analyzes spreadsheets to figure out how well movies are selling, I want to be the person making the movies. And so once I came to that realization, it just kind of was an afterthought. And not only that, I was like, I'm 30 something, I can't go and work in the mailroom at William Morris for $10 an hour that just that path is not realistic at this point in my life. So I ended up getting a job at Intuit the summer between my first and second year of business school as the social media intern, and you to just like make a long story short, me and jobs are a match made in the hell? I think it was you told me right? You're great at working with people that terrible at working for them. See, that's what my memory is like, this is why, you know, like, we'll talk about that in a second. Because you're talking about aggregating all of this. So I was the same way that I ever realized. And so I've been fired from every job I've ever had, I didn't get a job offer at the end of the internship. And my boss actually said, he's like, I'll tell you what, you know, he said, You don't believe me. But right now, you know, you will realize I'm doing a huge favor by not hiring you. Funny enough. He had worked in the entertainment industry, he had been an agent, but he was, you know, on the marketing team at Intuit. And I was just like, Well, when I was like, I don't enjoy paying taxes. You know, I don't enjoy paying taxes, why the hell would I want to work on it for a living, but it was the early exposure to all things, social media. And so you know, then spent a semester in Brazil in 2008, I came back and it was 2009. So the job market falling apart. And so I started this website, literally called 100 reasons you should hire me and thinking and I copied what I saw from somebody else, like this girl, Jamie grown it had this website called Twitter should hire me. And she was like, amazing, and she got all this media attention. So I thought, well, that's clever, I need to find a way to stand out and I couldn't come up with 100 reasons why anybody should hire me. So it was just, I mean, but more importantly, what I realized was the idea was flawed from the first place. Because one, the fact that I couldn't come up with 100 reasons after getting an MBA and an undergraduate degree already was like, hugely problematic. I was like, wow, I don't have any tangible evidence of the things that I say I know how to do. And so, you know, that started two things. One, because I had run out of money and moved on to my parents house. My dad lent me $500 to sign up for an online course about how to build a blog. And I started surfing. Because surfing is a fantastic hobby for unemployed people, because it takes a ton of time, and it doesn't cost money. So I searched for six hours a day. And I wrote every day for probably eight or nine months straight. And the only reason I started any of this was to try to help me find a job. And I did, eventually running social media for an online travel company. And eventually I got like dough from that job. And so basically, the whole thing took on a life of its own that I just couldn't have planned or predicted by about 2013. I was kind of like I've been at this for four years. Like one there's not a I've interviewed all these people, no publishers coming to knock on my door to hell with and I'm going to Self Publish. And that self published book, The when you quoted from became a Wall Street Journal bestseller. And then from there, it was kind of a totally different ballgame because you We didn't start out as the unmistakable creative, like it was just a podcast for bloggers. And it didn't start out in any big way or with any grand vision. It literally was I plugged the microphone, it didn't even plug in microphone. I didn't even use a regular microphone for 200 episodes. I literally use a built in microphone on my laptop. But the first the way it started was I had this idea I uploaded an mp3 to my blog. And after 13 interviews with one guy who was one of my guests, I emailed him and I said, Hey, I want to start a multi author blog, you know, would you be a contributor. And he was like, that's a terrible idea. You're not even that good of a writer, but your interviews or something, and to this day, we joke, I have always said, I'm an average writer at best, the only reason I write anything worth reading is because I've read a lot. But he said that I had to do the interviews, and he was like, I think you should split it out into a separate site. And if you scroll through my Instagram feed, you can see the exact email he sent me. It was quoted in the book that I wrote, one hour later, with my limited design skills. I mocked up a version of a website called Blog cast FM, I emailed them back and said, Is this what you had in mind? When do you want to start? I don't think that's what he had in mind. So he ended up being my first business partner. And then you know, from there, he kind of took on a life of its own, and we became the unmistakable creative in 2014. And so now, we're going on 14 years, I think, wow. So that's, that's the condensed version of what? You know, that's the shortest, I can tell that story.

Zack Arnold

Sure. And the there's a couple of things that I want to pull out of this scenario that I want to dig deeper, but the one that I think is so important, and the reason that I wanted to start with that passage, is that you had so much pressure, either culturally or from society, here's the path, you are supposed to go down this path, and I never heard it the way that you said, and I'm pretty familiar with the whole idea of Indian culture, like you said, doctor, lawyer, engineer, I'd never heard failure added on to that was hilarious for a podcast desk. Yeah. So I loved that description. But you realized, at a certain point that I would rather leave all that be unemployed, forge my own path, because I know that moment is coming. That moment of reckoning, we're asking myself, am I at peace with how I spent my time in my life? Right? That's a big fundamental question that I asked all the time. And you should just decided I'm going to face the fear, I'm going to dive in headfirst. And I'm going to do something really authentic being myself. But that also comes at a cost. So I know that there was a period where all this media attention Wall Street bestseller, you've got this podcast going and then all of a sudden, crickets. Talk to me about going from the best year of your life to what is conceivably one of the worst years of your life.

Srinivas Rao

Not conceivably the worst year of my life. Not it was the worst year of my life. Here's a couple things, I want to comment on what you said, you know, like this whole idea of this. So one thing I realized, you know, when I got to graduating from business school, I was like, wait a minute, I have done this for 10 years, the way other people have told me to do this, and look where I'm at, I'm broke. I'm 30 years old, and I'm living at home. If I make the same decisions for the next 10 years that I did in the previous 10, where am I going to end up? And I'm like, Yeah, you know, people aren't, you're choosing uncertainty. I was like, Well, I know how that path ends. It basically ends with me getting fired. It's kind of like that scene in The Matrix where Trinity is basically in the cab, and she tells Neo, where he's about to get a cab. She was like, know where that road ends. And I was like, yeah, that's kind of what I felt was like, I don't wear that road. And so I'm gonna gamble on the uncertainty of this and see where it takes me. So yeah, for years, you know, busting my ass 2013 like a rocket ride to the moon, you know, Wall Street Journal bestseller, sold out event rebrand. And then everything goes to shit. Largely through my own doing, by the way, which is something that I did not want to take responsibility for. You know, I think that there's this difference when you do to establish you're between blame and responsibility. Like when things go bad, we tend to blame ourselves, but we don't take responsibility. And, you know, it was a combination of several factors all at once, like, I had a relationship, it didn't work that I had some financial problems. It was the funny thing is that, like, I'm describing it to you now. And like, it was nowhere as near as bad as it felt at the time. It was, like all consuming at the time, it was just really, I was not emotionally mature, I would say for being somebody who was my age, I didn't, I hadn't gone through what I needed to do to really understand. There are numerous things that that came out during that process. One is I realized, the reality of being a public figure in any way at all means that your life is not private anymore. And that the way that you behave, both publicly and privately have huge implications and like, you know this better than anybody, when you produce TV for a living, you work with celebrities like not that I'm anywhere as near as famous as somebody like Ralph Maggio. But the reality is that the moment you're in the public eye, and I've been on reality TV as well, I did not deal well with that situation. And as a result, I made it worse. To the point where we went from this sold out conference in 2013. That's all in two weeks to literally feeling like the things were just gonna blow up in our face. We pulled the plug on the conference the next year in 2015. And it was it was a low point to the point where I told my friends I'm like, You know what, if I the only reason I said this was to give them some peace of mind, like my business partner at the time was like Your parents just need to know that you're not going to take some pipe dreams. He's like, of course, that's a lie. But you just need to tell them that, give them some. So that way, they'll leave you alone for a year. So it's like, give it to the end of the year, if I don't have to get these things won't get better. By the end of year, I'll go find a job. And two months later, I got the book deal. But largely what it was was a lesson in the importance of knowing how to regulate your emotions, particularly when you are in a situation in the public eye like, yeah, I remember like, you know, fast forward a couple years later, like, you know, I'd been on Indian matchmaking and you know, I was basically paired with somebody who's the villain of the show, my mom called me a loser. And the truth is, like, I learned from my first experience of being an idiot, that there's the best thing I could do in this moment was to have composure about it, and to just deal with it with grace. And as a result, you know, the press was very kind to me. I didn't fight back on anything. Anytime I was interviewed, I was very mindful. And I still have to be clear that look, I'll talk to you about my experience the show, but I will not say anything about another person. Based on experience, we'll have a general commentary because like, what good is that going to do to go and bash them, even if they're bashing me, again, this is what happens when you're in the public eye. Because when you are in the public eye, everything you say, and do is scrutinized. And it's amplified. The same thing that I say in private to a group of friends, whatever, like, it doesn't matter. If I do that, on a media platform, like Netflix, it can get misconstrued it can get, you know, like spun out. And so that was one big thing. And I also realized, like, I don't have the luxury anymore of allowing my personal life to affect my ability to run my business, especially when you have things like investors, your agents, definitely everything I do in the public eye is a reflection on every single person who has ever been on. It's a reflection on you, Zack, if I go out and act like a jackass, because you're one of my podcast guests. So that's I think the big lesson in all of that is that it's this interesting balancing act like I had this conversation with Tim John on this podcast about the idea of 100 authenticity, I said, authenticity is so misunderstood. Nobody wants us to be 100% authentic if we're in the public eye, because they don't give a damn about our problems they want us to solve. There's like, nobody comes to us and says that, tell me about all your problems, write about them blog about the Molinos. Zack write a blog post that solves my problems. I don't care about your problems. As far as I'm concerned, you don't have any.

Zack Arnold

Yeah. And the other thing about this, too, that I think is so important with this idea of authenticity. And I'm sure that you've seen this all over the internet, especially over the last couple of years, where right now authenticity is a strategy, right? The end thing right now is being authentic. And like that is an absolutely paradoxical statement, right? Is it? Authenticity, it either is or it isn't. And you're right, you do have to be careful with a level of authenticity that you convey. And this applies to anybody that's in the public eye. I don't really think of myself in the public eye. But every once in a while, I'm reminded that I am like, I went to an industry party over the weekend. And I was just thinking, I'll just sneak in and say hi to a few friends that I worked with a few years ago and watch this screening. And all of a sudden, a bunch of people are coming up to me saying, Oh, I love your newsletter, and you helped me get this job. And I was like, oh shit, that's right. People actually know who I am. I keep forgetting that. So I have to be careful about if I'm gonna grab a second plate of dessert. Oh, wait, what do you mean Zach eats sugar. Oh, my God. I thought he was Mr. Nutritious Mr. American Ninja Warrior. And you have to think about all this stuff. But at the end of the day, I'm just going to authentically and unapologetically do these things. But the idea of authenticity being a strategy, or a tactic, I just, I could go on for hours. But what's this frustrates me?

Srinivas Rao

Well, I think one that's that's actually so I wrote about this somewhere, I have no idea where the note was, I was like, it was about authenticity as a marketing strategy, or, you know, strategy of any kind is incredibly manipulative. to your audience. Yeah. Like, if you don't realize that, like, you'll see these people, right, who will post things on Facebook, I remember some woman who had like, literally hours before she posted, this walked in on either her boyfriend or somebody else. And then she wrote about it on Facebook. And I'm like, and of course, she gets this outpouring of like empathy, sympathy from everybody. But it's like, you realize this is not really appropriate for public consumption. Like this is one of those things. Daniel poor put it best when it came to difficult communities, like I never write about challenging experience until I'm done processing it. And because at that point, it goes from being seeking pity from your audience to being something that's of service to them.

Zack Arnold

Which again, goes back to your point of I don't care about your problem solve mine. And what I have found about building an audience over the years, is that the authenticity is important, but the people that are really going to follow you are the ones that say, Hey, those problems that you had, do you have perspective on the you have solved that's the problem that I have now. And that to me is the key to building an authentic and an engaged following it As opposed to well, they say that this your strategy in 2023 is authenticity. So I'm going to make sure that that's my strategy. Like, you're gonna just surround yourself with people that have no alignment with who you are and what you do. And I think that the way that this applies specifically to those that are listening and watching today is not so much from the public, I don't have a bunch of like big name, ALA's podcasts are the two that are listening. But authenticity in my mind is such a core strategy. If you do creative work, especially this is gonna help us segue into the idea of AI. So much creative work can now be generated in mass at scale, in minutes.

But what I have said before and I know that there's there are several sides to this AI conversation, one of which is the existential crisis of oh my god, Skynet has become aware, and all of the humans are going to be replaced, and it's going to do all the work. And then there's the other flip side, and I think you're closer to this one, which is, this is an incredibly powerful tool, if you learn how to use it, and harness it and organize information, and it can help you be more productive. I'm kind of sort of in the middle right now, I don't have nearly the amount of experience or knowledge that you do with it. But my feeling is that what is so important to maintain and thrive a career as a creative is that you must be authentic, you must be unique, you need a perspective and your work has to have soul, you do that you're going to be protected from artificial intelligence until the end of time. If your work is basically mediocre, and you just aggregate other people's information, or voices or content, you're screwed. That's kind of where I stand. So I'm curious what you think of that.

Srinivas Rao

Okay, so this is this is a really interesting one, because I've spent, you know, 13 years aggregating other people's ideas, but I've also made them my own written about them. So let's, we kind of have to give people a history lesson in order to get to the point of this conversation. So let's start in the mid 90s, when I was at Berkeley, we basically were in this age of the infancy of the internet, where things like building a website, you know, took, you know, hundreds of hours, 1000s of dollars and technical aptitude, there's this thing of what I call the creativity technology gap, which is the gap between your the necessary skills that you have in life to bring an idea to life, right, the gap between you know, an idea, and your ability to bring it to life is where it is. And so what happens is, every time when you have innovations, those innovations, narrow that gap, right, and you have the intersections of multiple technologies. And this is something that I learned from John Smith. Speaking of aggregating things that you learned from podcasts. Yeah. So one thing Julian had said to me, when we first spoke was the technology is like a series of Jenga blocks. And the thing is, each Jenga block makes something possible. That wasn't possible before. And yeah, and if there's anything that anybody should listen to this entire interview to this right here, because this literally has been the foundation of billions of dollars in innovation, like almost every product you use today was conceived because of this very theory. So if we go back to the early, early 90s, right, just as the start of the internet was happening, right, Marc Andreessen was a young grad student, he creates this thing called Mosaic, which then becomes Netscape. And the only reason I know mosaic is because my dad caught me looking at porn at the university, because people universities had high speed and they had access to this. And you know, nobody at that time, you know, we didn't have the, like, ability to hide our browsing history. So you know, my dad gets to see pictures of Pamela Anderson in his office. And he's just like, you're looking at pictures of Pamela Anderson. So that was the very first thing you ever searched for on the internet. Because I've asked guys my in our age group, and any one of them who says it is important, I think, is full of shit.

Zack Arnold

So I don't have an actual first memory. I don't legitimately know what it is. But the first memory that stuck because my mom has told this story countless times, is that as soon as she got the internet, and when we say high speed, it was like dial up and like 28k, right? But she said that the week after we got the internet, by the way, she tells the story of every party and everybody she talks to, she's like, you know, the first week I got the internet, our printer ran out of ink very, very quickly. Right? Because I was going and I was it gives me this like, oh my god, it's like having, you know, the porn is a magazine. But it's on the internet, and you can get whatever you want. But essentially, you click on a button, you walk away to make a sandwich. Five minutes later, it's halfway loaded, like the kids are nowadays. They don't know what it's like, scanning down, scanning down, Almost there, almost there, almost there. So when I would scan so I wouldn't have to reload it. I would print it. My mom was always like, why is there never any colored ink in our printer anymore? So that's the short version of answering your question. Yes.

Srinivas Rao

So believe it or not, we will tie those two to something very relevant. So believe it or not, the adult film industry has like a huge, you know, like role to play in how we use the internet today. If you haven't seen it, the movie middlemen with Luke Wilson is fantastic. It's funny. So basically what happens is these two guys basically understand that you can press There's a credit card over the internet that comes from the adult film industry. So they figure that out. Marc Andreessen creates the commercial web browser, you merge those two technologies. And E commerce as you know it is. That's how you get Amazon. That's how you get eBay. That's how you get every damn online shopping site we've ever had. Right? Fast forward a couple of years to like, early 2008, the iPhone comes out, right. And when you have the iPhone, what you get is the intersection of a couple of things, mobile devices, location tracking, and the ability to open electronic walks. There's one thing that's what led Julian to create breather, which is like Airbnb for office space. When you think about just the intersection of a mobile device and location tracking, what does that facilitate Uber, you know, DoorDash, all these other things, right? All these things that wouldn't have been possible before you had GPS on the iPhone. So now we get to, you know, where we're at now, right, which is all these Jenga blocks that suddenly make hundreds and hundreds of things possible that weren't possible before. Versus when we started in the early 90s. Right, that creativity technology gap that I spoke about, was really wide. Like, if you didn't have the skills to bring it to life, you were screwed. Like I remember, I was telling a friend, I had an idea that kind of sounded similar to YouTube, like when I was walking campus, we should put TV on the internet first, like, that's happened. But at that time, like, I had no idea that you know how to do that I wasn't a computer science major. But if you look at just go, let's fix something as simple as building a website. If you look at the contrast between in the mid 90s, early 90s, to now, we then took dozens of hours, maybe hundreds of hours, and 1000s of dollars can all be done for less than $10. And under an hour for someone with somebody who has zero technical knowledge. And that's been possible for a while. That's nothing new. Okay. So, with all that framed in mind, there's one other piece of this that we have to establish. And the reason I'm thinking about this in this way is because I'm working on a book called The artificially intelligent creative. That was just a fortunate accident, but a really good example of this whole concept of work. So if you go back to the Industrial Revolution, you know, Adam Smith, in the Wealth of Nations was like sort of the foundational economic textbooks that division of labor is the key to maximizing output, which obviously, that makes sense, you work in the film industry, like you're the editor, somebody does the acting, somebody else does the script writing. So obviously, division of labor is great, because of the fact that it allows each person to do what they're great at. And it's also what allowed Henry Ford to build the assembly line and manufacture cars that scale. And it's effectively been the foundation of growth in almost any business for hundreds of years. The only problem is that the hit division of labor is incredibly cost prohibitive to the overwhelming majority of people unless you have deep pockets or somebody's given you 10s of 1000s of dollars. It's not viable, like labor is expensive. Labor is expensive, because you have to pay salaries, labor is expensive, because you have to deal with people. And so that ability to do things at scale has always been limited to a handful of people who are powerful, who have money who have deep pockets. And what AI is, is the greatest equalizer in 100 years. Because since the Industrial Revolution, we've never seen something like this where you're taking the power of scalability, and putting it into the hands of everyone. Now, let's go back to the beginning of what you said about this, right? What this does is give you that scalability, but the thing that is so vitally important to your to realize is that 50% of this equation is human. And that's where they're very uniquely human skills that AI cannot match you with. And those skills really matter a lot. Because it's no longer your ability to, you know, know how to use a tool, but rather imagine what's possible with that tool. So the thing is, like, I remember when Dali first came out, of course, I was like, just stupid image generators, like we try Dumb, dumb shit. That was like giving you a picture of Joe Biden, taking Vladimir Putin in the balls. It was like, sorry, that's against our policy. But I did what any person does with technology, you do something stupid, just to see what it can do. Now, I was showing you some of the things that I've been doing over the last couple of weeks. Okay. And I'll show you a really good example of this like in this interview. So, when you have that ability to scale, what we need to think about one is okay, if 50% of the equation is human, that means your imagination, your creativity, and your ability to communicate clearly matters a hell of a lot right because it's that whole computer science metaphor garbage in, garbage out. So, you know, I, after Kevin, who's had that crazy experience with Microsoft's chat GBD search engine, I decided I was like, let me push chat GPT a little harder to see if I can get it to have a very, you know, bizarre conversation. I couldn't quite get it there. But I was like, what, what stupid things do humans do when they talk to you? And wouldn't, like, say that humans are stupid. But eventually I got it to have a conversation with me about how to communicate with it. And I was like, okay, like, I was like, give me a simple acronym to communicate with cat jpg. And then I was like, okay, you know what? Explain this acronym as if you were explaining it to be in first person. And I was like, you know, I liked this acronym. I was like, give it to me. It's something that's really funny. And so it came up with the acronym fart. As ridiculous as that sounds right. And so after we got to the acronym fart, you know, it was basically fun questions. So it's an Ask fun and creative questions to make the conversation more interesting and enjoyable. Acknowledge and respond, chat to chat DPS answers to keep the conversation going, respectful language, use respectful and appropriate language when communicating with a chat GPT to maintain a positive and productive conversation. Remember to thank cheap chat GPD for its responses, even though it's an artificial intelligence bottle. So the funny thing is, what it's asking you to do is talk to it like you've talked to communicate with a human. So, you know, like, it's like you have the smartest person in the world, who's basically got a Harvard MBA started to honor your businesses, and can basically do something that any human could do, like, but 1000 times faster at your disposal. But it all depends on your ability to communicate. But even better, is I was like, You know what, rewrite this first person thing and do it in the voice of Samuel as if it were Samuel Jackson, talking to me about how to use chat GPT. And you're all screenshare this would be really quick, because it's so damn funny. I literally like, died laughing when I saw this, because it was so ridiculous. But so this is what Samuel L. Jackson was the fact that it could literally take its one naked acronym fart, and then to basically make it sound like Samuel Jackson to explain this. It's incredibly advanced in what you could do. But think about the promise that God had here. That's the more important thing, right, that we're talking about in this conversation, is that all of this depends, again, on you as a human having the ability to clearly communicate interesting things. One, it's the reason I thought of things like that is because I have 1000 interviews to draw from I have all these data points in my head. So I was telling a friend, I was like, basically, what we can say is, you know, AI is not going to make people who are idiots, geniuses, it's going to make smart people go a lot smarter. So I think what we have to go back to is like, okay, what are the uniquely human skills. And then the other thing, and this is fresh on my mind, because I was working on this last night. And again, a lot of this is evolved through just, you know, throwing things into chat GVT, to start looking at AI not as a tool, but as a partner. And how would you treat a partner. So imagine the scenario is that you basically are hiring somebody. But instead of hiring a person, you're going to basically create a version of that person using AI. And I literally asked Jeff to begin, like, these are all the tasks in my business, convert this into an artificially intelligent team and minimize the need for human involvement and give me five different scenarios in which this is possible. And you think about the amount of time it would take a human to do that kind of processing to put together scenarios in 30 seconds, it gave me five different scenarios that have manipulated them. And it's a great give me the tools and the tasks and everything else to basically make these scenarios a reality by that I showed you just now the artificial intelligence search engine for unmistakable that, you know, I conceived of in a drunken haze, you know, wild, it was literally an hour of conversation with Chad, he feels like Okay, great. How do I do this was like, give me the landing page, copy, give me this. I'm like, okay, recommend layout and design. Again, it's speeding up a lot of things. But what everything comes back to and this is the thing that I can't emphasize enough, is that all AI depends on human input.

That's it. Like if you understand that, that changes everything. Then you start to think about, where can I leverage, not replace my creativity, like leverage AI, but not replace you? You know, I think that that is another thing we have to understand. It's like, okay, so I'm a podcast host. I write like, I want illustrations for my blog post, you know, I'm not going to like I don't outsource my writing day because I know that's something I want to still have my quality. Luckily, the way that my second Brandon meme is set up is all my notes are written in my own words. So even when I do use its AI to write it basically uses something called Content Aware AI. So it sounds like something that I wrote, it very rarely sounds like something I did, and that's the thing. That's one other foundation No, this is data, right? So for a long time, basically what has been happening is big companies have been doing this for a very long time, Google Facebook, the reason they all know so much about you is because they have so much data on you. So as somebody who has 1000 podcast episodes and transcripts of those episodes, you can imagine, you know, add that plus 1000, Book Notes plus 1000, ideas for blog posts, all written in my own words, having access to that volume of data, is basically one of the biggest superpowers that I have. Because, like, you know, that, you know, you see bought thing I showed you, there's no way that's going to work as well, like, that would work. That's going to be amazing, with 1000 interviews, and you saw it like right now, the model had two interviews. And you saw how accurate it was, it was like that you got an answer for something. And you also have the context for the answer to what we're talking about is the ability to do things that scale and create at the speed of thought, enabled by human imagination and creativity. So really, what I can is key here, I know I've been rambling for a while, but that's kind of the nature of this is understanding like, what is it that makes us human? And what do you bring to this because this doesn't, like negate the need for originality, original thinking. It just enables people to compensate for skills, like I'm not a video guy or an animator guy. But I'm going to show you this this thing here. So and part of this is having fun with it and experimenting with it. Right? So again, when my nephew was born, being a child of the 90s, like, you know, I wanted to expose music. So we started with 90s, hip hop, boys demand. And for some reason, anytime we played Fresh Prince of Bel Air, that kid would just laugh, he would smile. Alright, so one day out of pure boredom. And this, I think, is a really good way to to example of the combination of, you know, human creativity, enabled by AI. So, I basically was like, you know, what, I was just born, I was like, rewrite these lyrics to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, about a baby that's going to daycare because my sister was going back to work, and he was going to be starting daycare. That's why I wrote the lyrics for the song called The Fresh Prince of daycare. And you know, I modified it based on a few things. And I said to my sister, she's like, this is hilarious. And so we thought, this is cute. But I was like, neither of us can rap. I got an up work. And I hired a freelance rapper, and I was like, I need you to record this for me. And he turned it around. Right? After he sent it to me. I was like, this is cool, but you know what, we even more fun if I animated this. Alright, so if I'm gonna animate this, I need a couple of things. Any characters, I need scenes. I literally threw the lyrics into tragedy PT, when I was like, generate all the scenes for me based on these lyrics. And then I basically said, I use Dolly allesley generate characters that look like 3d Pixar characters and the baby or whatever. And then I realize, okay, Adobe Character Animator, this is where my work is gonna come in, like, We're after learn how to rig puppets all this shit, you know? And I was like, okay, and I got stuck. And I was asking Chad GBT about things. Files. This is really inefficient online. You don't design a 10 day curriculum for me apply Scott Young's principles of accelerated learning and to create this curriculum so I can learn how to use Adobe Character Animator. And the result of all that was this and I think you'll get a kick out of this because it's pretty damn fun

song

Now this is a story all about how my life as a baby turned upside down and I like to take a minute just to sit right there I'll tell you how to get the principal place called daycare.

was Santa Monica born and raised in the playpen is where I spend most of my days, chillin now playing and relaxing our kupuna exploring new things and learning like I'm in school and a couple of days has not went to her job. Right to keep her over. She just wouldn't stop to see I tried to crawl and my mom felt sad. She said you're going to take care of a baby please don't be mad. I begged and pleaded with day after day. But she packed my backpack and sent me home away. She gave me a kiss. And then she gave me my laptop with my baby boy. And I said I might as well Munch for his day. Yo, this is new being the only boy with three girls to view is this what's the days and daycares like? This might be all right. But wait, I had the giggly mill just saw like is this the type of place that they should send this load? I don't think so. I'll see when I get there. I hope they're prepared for the present day care.

While the route was over, and when I came out, there was a teacher inside who greeted me with a smile. I tried to get upset yet I just got here I was eager to see like a curious little deer was led to my class. And when they got near the toilet, they're in here and books everywhere. If anything, I can say this class was fun, but I thought, Man, forget my hair

I walked out of the place about seven or eight and I waved to the teacher, yo, bye, see you later, I left him my mom, I was into her care, I was putting her car as the prince of daycare.

Srinivas Rao

So, the thing that I think that this demonstrates is that you know, the greatest quality animation No, but I think it's a glimpse into what is going to be possible. Like, keep in mind, that is the result of me first trying to teach myself something I didn't know how to do. But if you think about the number of steps in which AI was involved in the process, right, Chad GPT did all the lyrics. And human performed the vocals, Chad GPD came up with the ideas for the scenes, Turkey PC generated a curriculum for me to teach myself how to use Adobe Character Animator that in and of itself is remarkable the fact that I can say I don't know how to do this thing I needed, rather than saying, you know, let me outsource this to so i want to learn how to do this, because it still took my own imagination to do all those things. It was my own creativity that, you know, had to be involved in doing that. So what I think is that, you know, what generative AI does is it basically expands what is creatively possible for people. Like, there are a lot of things there that I could not have done before. And so if we, let's assume, for example, that that you know, what, you know, that process can be streamlined. Like, I can talk to you that right now. And keep in mind this a year from now, this is where we will be. And you don't have a conversation, there's something funny, we have an idea. And we say okay, touching PT, write the script, Dolly, generate the characters. You know, Adobe Character Animator here was free these puppets, like make sure they're all good to go. Drop it into character animator. And basically, we can effectively produce a pilot episode of like something Southpark quality, in under an hour, we could synthesize the voices of the characters, we could make it funny as shit, I already know, because I've had to catch up to you write a few scripts for me for silly ideas to see. And so that's what I think we have to realize is that, is this going to be a threat to humans? Yes, and no, but at the same time, it's like, it's an enabler. to, for example, like, I would have not, like think about what it would take for me to have created South Park 10 years ago. Versus now like, now, if I get better at Adobe Character Animator, designing the characters is a breeze, all I have to do is use AI. And the other thing is that baby that you see in the video, I uploaded like 50 pictures of my nephew and had the model train it and say make it a Pixar looking character of my nephew. Like, that's what is creatively possible, like, and so I don't, I'm not fearful of this, because what it's doing is it's given me the ability to do things faster than I could before and do things that I couldn't do before it takes us back to the very beginning of that general block, right? What is this make possible? That was not possible before? And one other question I will add to this is, as you contemplate this idea, is what can I make now that I couldn't before because my mentor, Greg, he traveled around the country right after the Great Recession, and he would meet people, and he would ask them, Do you know how to use the internet? And of course, they'd all look at him like he was a crack, then he would say, Great, show me something that you've made using the internet. And that right, there was, you know, a big thing like and for me, that's the way it is my default attitude towards technology is technology is for making things. What can you make with especially as a creator? That's my first question. Every time I see something new, I'm like, what does this allow me to make that I couldn't make before? What can I do that I couldn't do before? Anyways, that was also there's

Zack Arnold

But there's a million and a half threads that I could pull, we could go on for hours and hours. And each of these little pieces, there's two as well, maybe there's more than two, but there's at least two right now that really, really stand out for me. If we talk about this entire workflow, this entire process of whether it was you asking Chad GBT to write the lyrics or having AI create the image all these other pieces, there are even some pieces in there that I think that very, very soon, you're going to be able to go to some AI bot and say create the lyrics for me and it's gonna sound just like a human being with human flesh. I mean, or even there are products that are already doing that. Right. But here, here's the key. There's going to be two sides to this. I think that the the two areas I want Gonna go next door number one, what you didn't do was say, come up with a funny idea for a video. The the genesis of everything you talked about came from you it came from the human mind. And something that I've talked about extensively is understanding how to define what creativity is. And I don't know if you're familiar with Joe ecophon. He wrote the book, the laws of creativity, he'd be a great, great guest for your show. So we'll talk about that offline. But essentially, he talks about how creativity is not about original ideas. It's about the combination of existing ideas and unique patterns. And what you said is, I want to take the idea of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and I want to combine it was daycare. You didn't say chat, GBT create an idea for me. And it said, I know, let's make a funny video that combines the Fresh Prince of Bel Air and makes it a parody at daycare, you came up with it, that's the first key where I think it's so important is that again, the the nuance or the soul are the voice of the idea came from a human place. But here's the other part that I want to dig into. That's the antithesis of this. It all everything that we're talking about, as far as a human generated the idea and used creative images and creative, separate ideas to bring it all together into this new combination, as you did, what you said that scares me, and I think could scare a lot of other people is that AI isn't a tool, AI can be a creative partner. And that's where I as a creative would say, Whoa, that means you're gonna hire a chat GPT to do a lot of the work that I'm making my living doing now. So the the idea is that the Gen. And the third thing that I want to bring up, I knew there were three, I couldn't remember what it was. The third one is the importance of communication. Even before the internet or before AI, your ability to generate creative ideas and have a finished product was largely predicated on your ability to communicate those ideas. So especially in the world of Hollywood, you can't make things in a vacuum. If you're a painter, you can be in a room all by yourself from idea to finish canvas, it's all you and it comes out of yourself. And the world of TV and film and all of the media that's out there. Now, you can't make it in a vacuum, your ability to communicate your ideas and collaborate is key. And now we're talking about honing this creative skill of collaborating with technology instead of humans, which I agree, again, is a skill that we're all about, I think they're going to be entire college curriculums. They're gonna teach you how to communicate with AI.

Srinivas Rao

Literally I realized like that I had left that, you know, I realized after talking to a couple of friends, I was like, you know, while I'm reading this book, I was like, I need to chat. I need a chapter on how to do this. And that's how I got into that conversation with tech EBT, which led to the fart acronym, which I thought was really hilarious. So to your point, right, like, one of the things we have to still realize is that these are all language models. They're all machines, they're going to generate output. That's amazing. You know, sounds amazing. But there are a couple things. One is that Chad GPT, or any AI doesn't have preferences, it doesn't have opinions. It doesn't have emotions, right? And so.

Zack Arnold

It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse. Sorry, I just had to quote the Terminator.

Srinivas Rao

You yourself said to me, in our interview, what you do is you pink with emotion, right? As an editor, that is not something that a machine can do that maybe it can pick up syntax, but not in the way that you can you know why? Because a machine doesn't feel emotions you do. Right. But you and I talked about the you know, the playing with the boys scene in Cobra Kai, like, the the thing is that there is something about that that is uniquely human, like when I hear the my sound engineer put something together in a way that just makes me go down. Like I feel it. I can't outsource that to a machine. And at the end of the day, you're going to come up with things that are. Like I said, I think that we need to see it as a partner, not as something to replace us. And it's a partner that is smart, that works faster than 90% of humans. What is it? Like I said, I mean, to me, it's the enabler that basically takes power that was solely in the hands of a handful of large companies and powerful people like the entertainment industry, and it gives that to everybody. So, you mean, should you be worried as an individual should be worried? No, as an industry should all you would be worried? Fuck yes. Because, you know, I think it was a mistake late on a conversation with Peter Diamandis. He was like, this is gonna lead to the disintermediation of Hollywood because so let's, you know, for example, I literally went through this scenario the other night with Chad GBT, because I was like, Okay, I had this idea for a comedic sitcom, based on some of the goofy stories that my friends and I had shared over the years and I've always wanted to write this. And I was like, Okay, if I want to produce this one, I have to get actors. I have to get somebody who actually you know, is willing to read my script. I have to get all these you know, things in player, you know, and I have to get somebody In Hollywood to give me a chance as a nobody, like the chances of that happening are slim to none at. All right, let's go back to Trey Parker and Matt Stone, how the hell did they get known? They offloaded Southpark the internet right now, in that moment, my lightbulb was, well, what if I didn't use humans? To do all the acting? What if I animated it? And I was like, well, that solves one huge problem like animation done. Next thing I thought was like, What about the character voices? How am I going to do this? So I got to jet, GBT, I was like, Is it possible to synthesize different voices from my characters? And it's like, yeah, you can do that with something called Amazon Pali. But what I think what I'm trying to demonstrate here is that you notice, if you look at the way that I'm using Chad GPP, it's not to do work for me. It's so that it can teach me how to execute things that I want to execute at a much faster speed. Like, I didn't have to do any of the research. I was like, oh, okay, this is how I would do it. I'm like, synthesize the characters using Dolly. Give me the script. I mean, I, you know, I had the story of my cousin's and how they met, like, we're gonna launch a pilot episode of this podcast called how they met each other, which is about how couples have met. And I had the story of my cousin's and how they met. And so I actually went into tragic deals like here's the transcript, rearrange this in a way that makes for a beautiful narrative. Now rearrange it so that I can have it as a script for an animated short about these two people. I still had to come up with like, that's, I still had to be the one to extract the stories from them in order to get that. So again, what we're talking about is human input, largely determining your ability to do things.

Zack Arnold

And one of the things that you're talking about, I don't even know if it's still around now, or if it's going to be around by the time people hear this. But shortly after the emergence of Chad GPT, there is this AI generated version of Seinfeld. Yeah, I'm sure that this is something you heard about and watch, and it was almost unwatchable. Not quite, but it was really fascinating to see how it was consistently learning from itself. And it was getting better. It was all animated, it basically looked like, you know, an MTV Video from the 90s as far as the quality of the animation, but it was writing damn good for a machine. But the fact that it could generate itself 24/7 and had this ongoing story, that to me was both cool and kitschy, but it was also kind of terrifying, because when you think about Moore's law, and for anybody that's not familiar with Moore's law, it's the idea. And I'll probably get this wrong, because I'm not a technologist. But essentially, technology doubles itself in speed every couple of years, I believe something along those lines. So if you look at like from the advent of the first harddrive of two megabytes, or four megabytes, and how many years it took to double that in size. Now, I mean, we can basically hold multiple terabytes on a thumb drive, which for anybody that was around just 20 years ago, I remember spending $1,000 on an external drive that held like 80 gigabytes. And that was a big deal, right? I'm very much aging myself. But with the speed this is moving. Now, you could watch your animated piece, you could watch the Seinfeld thing, if it's still around and has been pulled by the time that people are listening to this. And you think, Oh, this is fun. But with the speed technology is moving, it seems conceivable to me that we could have watchable entertainment that's generating itself and a matter of years. So then it it which again, brings up this idea of, yes, we're going to be able to use AI to become I'm going to say this and huge air quotes more productive. There's a huge downside to that. That's another conversation. But there's going to come a time where if this does work, and it goes to scale, all the people that were writing all the people that were animating all the people that we're doing voices, if AI slowly starts to replace those people, it's no longer AI is a tool or a resource. It is now replacing the work that humans are doing. Is it not? Am I coming at this from the wrong angle?

Srinivas Rao

No, I like the thing that, believe it or not, I've had these conversations with chat up to you know, ask, it's like, okay, what are the things that humans are going to do? You know, and what is AI good at? Right? So, one thing we have to realize first is that, you know, like I said, AI is in a lot of ways, like a digital idiot savant that can do remarkable things and is getting better, like it's gonna get better and better. And it's going to be crazy within a year what it's capable of. But the thing is that, you know, if you think about, let's go back to like, where did all the language models come from? So like, think about, you know, how do you make it sound like Samuel Jackson? Well, somebody had to go and become Samuel Jackson, in order for us to feed it. So how's it getting better? by humans being humans, humans being humans is what enables AI to be as powerful as it is. So that doesn't mean you know, once you stop doing this, like how does it come up with a make this sound like Seinfeld? Jerry Seinfeld had to create Seinfeld for that to happen. So I think that that's, that's, you know, one way of looking at it. I don't think it can replace us like I think the fear that it's going to replace us is like Will it replace certain jobs? Yeah, there are certain places where you should be worried like if you do don't have a skill that is not replaceable. Like, you know, in a lot of ways that kind of brings us full circle to like this unmistakable concept like what is it that makes you stand out so much that nobody can compete with it, not even a machine.

Zack Arnold

And that was the whole reason I wanted to start there. Because this idea of going back to not being just a strategy, but being real is the idea of being authentic and your voice being in your work, you decided the very beginning of your career, this is not authentically who I am. And even though the path is Uncharted, and I don't know where it's gonna go, and it led to so many different directions. But you know, that everything you've been through, and I would guess that if you had to do it over again, you would still relive the worst year of your life, as opposed to the worst decades of your life working in finance, or business or whatever direction would have gone because you were supposed to. And what I find so fascinating about AI, is that if it's used correctly, it is going to augment and enhance your ability to be creative. Because like you said, and this is such a key point, what is doing is solving the problem of aggregating the massive amounts of content and information that we already have. But it needs that outside content, to combine those existing ideas. And this is one of the things that I've been talking about for years, is that this was even before chat, GPT or AI, I would say to people, information is no longer a solution. People used to have highly value information, you would spend hundreds, if not 1000s of dollars on the Encyclopedia Britannica, because that was information that not everybody had access to. With the advent of the Internet, and the proliferation of all these content of all the content, access to libraries, and books and all this other stuff, information transition from being a solution to now what I believe is one of the biggest problems that we have is how do we sift through it and find what's relevant to me, and I believe for years, that the value is no longer in information. It's in curation. And I think that's another area where AI is so important. It's not creating things from scratch. It's helping us curate the things that we need based on the ideas we want to put together.

Srinivas Rao

So I had a business partner who this phrase that always stayed with me because I just every time I heard it, that was like somebody's gonna make a lot of money with that basic idea. And he said, as content becomes more infinite curation becomes much more valuable. And we've seen it right. Like, why did all of a sudden newsletters like the hustle and you know, morning brew, and whatever the hell is going on with the skim? Like, literally, that's an email list, and it generates millions of dollars. Why? Because they curate, because there's no way that we can go through the entire Internet. But I think that, you know, that traits, external knowledge, it's your ability to curate your own internal knowledge, where your power lies, like, you know, you and I've read hundreds of books, like, if you saw the insight of what men, the notetaking app that looks like, US looks like, you'd be like, This is insane. I'm like, yeah, it's basically the equivalent of my brain uploaded the internet, every thought I've had every insight I've had every transcript ever, and all of its searchable, every bit of it linkable, every bit of it, basically just you know, possible to access using different AI prompts. And so it's like, Hey, give me a quote by Zack Arnold, when you saw the little demo of the AI engine that I showed you. You know?

Zack Arnold

Yes, I'm very, very curious about men. The reason being that I think that if when it comes to this idea of being authentic, I'll give you an example of a workflow that I have with my team now using humans, because I still haven't really learned what what the possibilities are with AI. But there's no way that I can generate a right the amount of content that now goes out with my name or my face, whether it's social media, whether it's a newsletter, whether its course content, there's only so many things I can do on a 24 hour day, especially, if in order to do it authentically, I have to do it sustainably because that's my entire message. I am not Mr. Hustle culture, you grind and you grind and you grind and to become successful. It's I want to do it sustainably knowing that I can still maintain exercise, I can sleep eight hours a night, I can help my kids with their homework. So that means I have a very limited amount of time to do things. Therefore I built a team around me of humans. And I've got hundreds and hundreds of newsletters that I've written for 10 years. And I have a member of my team that has read those newsletters that knows my voice that helps me write social media. But if I could take every single newsletter that I've ever written, throw it into this program meme and say, generate a newsletter in my voice that talks about these three topics and I give it a general outline. That to me is still maintaining my voice because it's not write a newsletter that sounds like Tim Ferriss and I'm going to steal his voice. It's right in my voice that to me is a great way to use it but maintain authenticity.

Srinivas Rao

Takes us right back to the foundation of this idea that every every aspect of this relies on human like it also like at the end of the day. Humans basically are the ones who feed AI to generate the content that it generates, like humans are 50% part of the equation of generative AI I think my cousin told me that I was like, right, like, that's huge. So this ability to communicate is, you know, wildly important. But yeah, to your point, like the reason it would sound like you is because it all based on stuff that you've written, I think the biggest beneficiaries of AI are going to be people who have huge bodies of work like somebody like me. This is basically basically a goldmine that is finally ready to be mined. Like, that's what I'm seeing, because you saw that little search engine I showed you. And I was like, now imagine that times 1000 of the smartest people in the world.

Zack Arnold

Yeah. And for anybody that's wondering, Well, what was that process? Just a walk through? Very, very briefly. Yeah, yeah. But essentially a link. Yeah, well, you can send me a link so people can see a demo. But this is something that I wanted to do for years, which is somebody can go to a search engine, and I've got the search function on my website, they can say, you know, Cal Newport, James clear, you know, show me Ralph Mateo. And it'll bring up the interview, and it's gonna have the show notes, and there's a transcript. But the difference is, tell me what Ralph maggio said about living a balanced life, boom, like that, to me is a game changer, which again, I don't even have nearly the volume that you do. But in the world of podcasting, again, 300 episodes over eight years, there's a lot of nuggets of wisdom, but it's hard to find the nuggets. So for me, my biggest challenge has been curation. And what I have found is so important about curation is number one, being able to tell people, This is what is going to be based on all the things that I have in my library. If this is your challenge, here's what I suggest you listen to next, or watch next. And in what order, this is a huge thing that I've discovered that is now something I'm very much doubling down on that, for example, you and I have a lot of similar guests in common. But in the world of productivity, time management habit formation, if we take some of the guests that I've talked to we have James clear Gretchen Rubin, Cal Newport, Greg McEwan, David Allen, right. All of them have a wealth of information. But what I've learned is that if you put the right information in front of somebody at the wrong time, it just frustrates them and they get stuck. But if you sequence and curate not only the right information, but in the right sequence, that's a game changer. And that's another area where I don't think that AI can just take over, that's an area where I feel you really need to understand the nuance of the human journey, and be able to say find these concepts from these authors or these guests, or whatever it is, and help me compile it into an outline, as opposed to take all this stuff and tell me what order to teach it. To me, that's the level of nuance where you say it's 50% human. That's the part where I feel that I have a lot of expertise, then I just bring in the experts. And I can combine these two. So I see a lot of value in using chat GBT as a teacher, as an instructor as a podcaster. So you've certainly convinced me that I need to spend an exorbitant amount of time digging into this to create more more efficiencies in the business for sure.

Srinivas Rao

Fortunately, fortunately, you don't have to spend an insane amount of time, but just you know, for real, so I'm literally in the process. And I think this will be a nice place to kind of bring us full circle, you know, I was just having a conversation on a whim with my brother in law. And I was like, go, I was like, why should make a course about artificial intelligence for creatives. And I just literally wrote a note down in mammals like artificially intelligent, creative. I was like, generate an outline for a course. And it did. And I was like, well, like, I'll come back to this. Yeah. And the nature of meme is that it uses contextual AI. So like, things will just surface randomly that you hadn't thought about for a while. And you know, I saw the note for the artificially intelligent creative, I was like, write a table of contents and a synopsis for this book. And I was like, Okay, I'm like, let me actually start working on this. And so I started going in and I am getting mine. It's always, that's an officer's was based entirely on the information that I put in all the Book Notes I've taken on I O, which were written my own words, not just quotes, put it together. And like, I think by day nine, I was like, I just wrote like nine chapters of a book in nine days, and what the hell, so then, you know, I put up landing page and I was like, alright, you know what, I'm gonna publish this, I'm not gonna wait for a publisher. Because the idea of waiting for a publisher, I email my agent, and she was like, I she said, I, my biggest fear is that the speed things are changing. This won't be timely enough if a publisher publishes this. And I was like, fair enough, that actually demonstrates why I shouldn't work with a publisher on this book. So yeah, and I was initially going to give it away for free, my brother was like, Yo, don't be an idiot. He's like, this is actually not not just to capitalize, but I know what people are like, you take things you pay for way more seriously, than otherwise, it just be another thing that ends up in people's hard drive. So I started working on this concept of the artificially intelligent creative, where I go into much more depth about a lot of the things that you and I have talked about, and that just, it seems like the most natural extension to my previous book, so it's okay, we run the unmistakable creative, the artificially intelligent creative, like that has a really nice ring to it. And the subtitle is how anyone can make anything with that. And so that is where we're at. So like, it's you know, there's a pre launch list, which you know, I'll give you guys a link I think it's, if I remember correctly, maximize your outputs slash AI creative,

Zack Arnold

I will make sure I'll whatever I sent you will make sure to put it in the show notes. So people know that they're interested in this, of which I think my audience very much would be just go to the show notes for this episode and that you will find the link there.

Srinivas Rao

But yeah, I mean, that's, you know, the fact that I could write a book like the bulk of it, 80% of it in nine to 10 days, you know, and really just have it sort of iterate like iteratively working on this and it's very short Sprint's with small notes and like put them all back together. Ai makes that possible, right? Like imagine trying to do this in a Google Doc or with 50,000. note cards, like these are literally 10s of 1000s of notes that I've compiled over the past few years. And I'm like, perfect way. Now I have it. This was just a random thought that occurred to me one morning, but nine days later, they came a book with a landing page ready to go with everything else. Like that's what I mean by creativity at the speed of thought. That right there, the ability to create at scale and created the speed of thought that is what we're going in the era we're going into. And if you don't understand this, you're going to be at a massive disadvantage. Because people are going to be so much faster than you.

Zack Arnold

Agreed, I think that it's it's going to become one of the the most necessary skills that is not in my mind, just a technical skill or a hard skill. Because for me, there's the the emphasis, or the over emphasis on hard skills, and creative fields just kind of drives me crazy. And I've had this conversation with writers, with directors, with editors, where essentially everything that we learned in our traditional educational system is preparing us to be ready for the job on day one, and then all of a sudden, we have the job on day one and realize we're completely and totally unprepared to actually not only survive it, much less Thrive it because there are so many. And the term that people use, which I hate is soft skills. I like the idea of human skills or life skills. Those to me are the much more important skills that are necessary to actually design a career that's fulfilling, especially in creative fields. I see this as being much more of a life skill than it is a hard skill because it falls under the the category of communication, not learn chat, GPT right learn Adobe Illustrator, learn Adobe Premiere learn Adobe Photoshop, the hard skill is here's where the paint tool is. Or here's how I create lines. Or here's how I insert or overwrite and edit into a timeline. But the real skill that makes you great at what you do is number one, your ability to synthesize ideas and create moments and stealing my own words from your podcast. I believe that as editors, we paint with emotions, AI can't do that. But if your job is I need to go through and sift through all these shots with this person's face. And I need to assemble them into a timeline in the right order, your job has gone away real fast, because that stuff's going to be replaced and outsource to technology. But if you need to create something original that has nuance that has soul, and you focus on generating the skills and improve your ability to do that, I believe that you're future proof against any and all artificial intelligence, at least in our lifetimes. Who knows me on that? But that's, that's where I stand right now with so much to learn. But that's at least where I stand As of recording this.

Srinivas Rao

Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess we could talk about this for five, six hours, like, you know, I'm, I'm working on conceiving a class for this idea of AI for creatives, like I, you know, part of the reason I wanted to get people on my pre launch list for this book is so that I can ask them what they want to learn if I do a class as well. Because I don't want to teach the class until I've done enough of this myself that I feel like, okay, cool. I've basically put all these concepts towards so the idea of like, an artificially intelligent team literally is just something that I thought of today, or last night, I'm like, Okay, I need to work with this idea. And you know, like, play with it to see like, Okay, what could I do? And where can I basically reduce human involvement? But yeah, I mean, why is that and we could talk for hours about this.

Zack Arnold

Well, here's the last thing that I want to close with, because I want to be very respectful of your time. But I would be remiss if I didn't talk about your ability to build relationships, given the literally over 1000 people that you've gotten on your podcast over the years and blend that with the conversation about AI. And I'm going to tee it up by sharing a story with you that I think you're going to thoroughly enjoy. Just a couple of weeks ago, at least as of recording this podcast, I went into chat GPT. And I asked it to write an outreach email to one of the highly regarded members of my field who's Eddie Hamilton, who edited Top Gun Maverick. Everybody in my field knows at Hamilton, he's held in very, very high regard. I've had him on my podcast multiple times. And one of the skills that I teach at a very high level is how to reach out to people cold, so you can build a relationship with them and really design your next stages of your career path and find your next dream job. So I said, draft an outreach email to Eddie Hamilton, the editor of maverick to see if you can get a job, and it spits something out. That was okay. And I shared it with all of my students, but I didn't tell them that it was AI. And I said, Here's somebody that has generated a message, go ahead and tear down all the things that you would change what notes will you give it? Now one person said, Well clearly this was generated by a computer, they said, You know what, this is actually pretty good. But you know, it didn't provide him enough value where it was really kind of more about them. And they shouldn't have gone right off the bat and said, Hey, are you looking for anybody? Are you available and I'm like, Holy shit, I generated this in 15 seconds. And anybody could send out this message and instantly double their ability for outreach. But again, it's missing nuance and nuance is so important in relationship building.

Srinivas Rao

But here's the funny part is all those questions you're asking. You could literally just keep iterating on that first prompt. That's one thing I think people don't understand, like, the first answer is never the best one. But that's the problem. We've been taught to look for quick answers. It's like, oh, this is a search result. This is the right answer. It's, it's like, it's a partner. And a partner, like any other type of partner in your life requires communication, you know, like real communication.

Zack Arnold

And the funny thing is, I actually went down the rabbit hole, and I kept giving it notes as if it were my student. So I gave it the exact same notes that I was giving my students when I left, so I was putting myself in the position, a student comes to me on a hot seat, and they say, I had this really important email that I want to send to somebody I admire, what are your notes, so I just kept giving it notes. And it couldn't get any better. It just kept going in different directions, but it could not get the nuance and the heart and the soul that goes with authentically reaching out to so many building relationships. So I guess this would beg the question, given how many relationships you have built over the years, do you feel you could replicate what you've done over the last 10 years getting people on your podcast building these genuine relationships? Do you think you could outsource that to AI and get the same result?

Srinivas Rao

Well, funny enough, like 90% of this process is already automated, like all the emails you've ever received from me, were not once I wrote their templates, because the process of booking the guest is literally the same thing over and over again.

Zack Arnold

But automation is different from templates, because you knew the process, you knew your voice. And you said replicate this, I've got a whole automated system myself, right there. But there's a difference between that and you send out the outreach and you give me the guess, would you be willing to put your name on an AI generated outreach message to Tim Ferriss?

Srinivas Rao

No, not right now, you know, and so we a couple things about this one, I still to this day, choose my own guests, and I do all my own outreach. I've never been willing to outsource that, because that's what I'm damn good at. Can I use AI to research? Should I be the person I want to? Interview? Yeah, but no, I mean, I, you know, like, I know, there are certain boilerplate parts of my pitch, but because I think people think that I'm way more well known than I am, you know, like, I'm the most well connected person nobody knows.

Zack Arnold

I love that. You should put that on a business card.

Srinivas Rao

Yeah, I mean, I really shouldn't. Like I know that. I've always told people if you want to rob a bank, run for president or become a porn star, I can introduce you to somebody who can teach you or help the. But I'll tell you tell you what it is like. So, you know, you introduced me by mentioning the most famous people that I've interviewed, like, you know, some of the big names. And this actually, I think speaks to how I think about the relationship building process on podcasts. Those are the least interesting people that I've interviewed. You know why? Because everybody interviews them. The most interesting people that I've interviewed are the ones that nobody's ever heard. I know you were, I just thought you had an interesting story. I didn't care like nothing about your story made me go let me see how big this guy is. Let me see how many Twitter followers that I literally was like This Guy Edits Cobra Kai, I love that show. I'm happy to talk to him. That's literally it. Like it was like that one line got, I didn't need to read the rest of the fence. Like, this is what we're about book publicists will send me these very complicated, you know, like long title, you know, things suddenly, you realize it's gonna be one line that gets me in, you cannot know what that line is, does I make every choice based on curiosity. And my most important mentor is guy named Greg. He had 150 followers on Twitter. He was six weeks into a project called $10. And a laptop. And I just thought, this guy sounds insane. I have to talk to him. He came up with the name unmistakable creative work, I wouldn't be where I am without mine. He's the guy who had 150 followers on Twitter. And I think that when it comes to relationships, like my attitude has never been to look at somebody's perceived status. At this point. Like, I didn't get high profile guests. But I still get turned down. Like, you know, I asked you to introduce me to Ralph baccio. That was a no go like it was what was his point? He's done? Fine. Whatever. I you know, like, people still turn me down. But the thing I think that was really important was that I'm never my attitude had always been do I find this thing person? Interesting. That's it. And yeah, sure, we've had some famous people now. But I've read all their books like the people who fascinate me or people like my friend, Greg hurdle that you've never heard of, or the professional dominatrix who you know, had one of those poetic sound, you know, conversations I've ever had, or, you know, a guy, Rob's throwing banks, like, I'd rather talk to the guy who robs 30 banks than Tim Ferriss. You know, because you know what, that's a far more interesting story to me than Oh, how do you become more productive and like dude, all this crazy shit. I'm like, great. I can read about that and Tim Ferriss book. How did you rob 30? Banks? Like, that's not the feeling of a movie. That is what I look, I look for a good story. And something I'm curious about, like, that's ultimately probably why I think I've had the relationship. But even keep in mind, like, I may have interviewed all these people. None of them are people that I have on speed dial and boy, yo, like, I can't call up comparison asking for a favor. You know? Like, I'm not on those kinds of terms with him.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, that's, that's something that I've seen misconstrued even on my level, where somebody has reached out to me that I barely know, like, Hey, I saw you at James clear in your podcast, can you introduce me? And I'm like, No, I barely got him on my podcast. Right. So it's, it's, there's a difference between the relationship being a transaction and really being a genuine relationship. And a lot of them are transactions, which isn't a bad thing. But you have to understand the difference in the nuance of each relationship.

Srinivas Rao

Absolutely. Like you would ask me introduce Vanessa. And I was like, I'm happy introduced Vanessa, because one, we're in the same imprint portfolio. She and I are friends, we've met in person a couple of times, like, you know, like, I've always supported her work. And so like, that's the thing like, and so there are certain guests where I have a connection, certain guests, and like, that was great. I'm done. Thank you for sharing your information. And that's it. Like, that's the extent what Cal Newport and I are friends, like, you know, I've, you know, hung out with them in Washington, DC. Cal is one of those people that, like, I'm willing to do stuff like that. But yeah, like I said, I would never be able to call Tim Ferriss and be like, Yo, Tim, here's this guy. You know, like, I couldn't, I mean, I couldn't get Tim Ferriss on my podcast, probably right now. Now.

Zack Arnold

Yeah. And the other thing, too, that and this, again, just kind of wraps up this idea of relationship building. And then I promise I will let you go, because we've already gone over time, but I knew this was going to be fascinating. But the other thing when it comes to relationship building, the people don't get, and this is something you've really learned in the world of podcasting, but can be applied to any relationship building or networking scenario, is that when you're looking for any form of a mutual introduction, you have to see it from the other person's perspective, where if I said to you, Hey, man, I saw you had Tim Ferriss on your podcast, do you think you could introduce me to him so I can be on his, you have to have the frame of mind to be like, when me being on Tim Ferriss podcast be valuable to him. I mean, sure, there might be some impostor syndrome syndrome at some level, but at the end of the day, if I look at the the quality and the size of the guests that he has, just because you know, him doesn't mean that the mutual introduction is valuable. So you're calculating in your mind? Well, number one, what is the quality of my relationship with Tim, but even if you had a close relationship with Him, you have to calculate what it looks like from Tim's perspective. And Tim would be thinking, who's this guy, like, he's great for your podcast. But I mean, I'm talking to you know, like world leaders and experts and people that are literally changing the world as we speak. So you have to understand the reciprocity of the relationship. And I just see this happen all the time, where people aren't calculating it from all directions, and it has to be mutually beneficial for all parties, if you're seeking that mutual introduction, oh, boy. So having said that, this has been absolutely fascinating in my brain hurts, from all of the ideas that you've shared, and you've just, you've definitely planted the seed, whereby I can come back to this, whether it's in six months or a year, and I look at how my entire creative workflow has probably changed. This was probably the impetus for it. So I thank you for that. And I thank you for just having don't wait six months to do it. No, I mean, that's what I'm gonna look back on this conversation, having started going down this rabbit hole, offline a little bit, and I'll do some more. But I appreciate having this debate, really opening up this conversation for a lot of people doing creative work, that probably aren't even paying attention to this. And they're not seeing this freight train coming, because as you alluded to, I've written about, and I've said, in print, now we're gonna say it in an audio recording. That's what's happening with AI is the biggest inflection point in our history, from the internet, and probably even bigger. So I think that when we look at the transition from before internet after internet, I think AI is going to be an even bigger inflection point that we don't even understand what it's going to become. So for anybody that's not paying attention, I hope after today, you're paying attention. So having having said all of that, is there any final parting words or thoughts that you feel are absolutely vital to share that we have not discussed yet?

Srinivas Rao

Yeah, this is actually one good way to sum all of this up, don't let the options in front of you blind you to the possibilities that surround you.

Zack Arnold

I love that to the idea of not letting shiny object syndrome take over your entire life, which as we really didn't even get a chance to talk about too much and could easily be an entire part to the conversation is how you and I have definitely spent too many of our adult years of not beyond managing ADHD and shiny object syndrome and everything else. So yeah, we may have to do a second or two then Yeah, cuz that would be fascinating to crawl into that portion of your brain and I have a feeling that you and I would very much relate to a lot of the challenges that we manage from that respect, but just one more time remind our listeners if they want to learn more about where you're putting together specifically to do use AI for creatives, where can we send them, which I'll also put in the show notes.

Srinivas Rao

Alright, so it's maximizeyouroutput.com/aicreate. I love it. Yeah. And you can see the book cover that was generated using an AI image generator, a landing page that was used, you know, because you know, my value is in writing the book, like, that's where I'm adding the highest value that's like, the rest of this is necessary.

Zack Arnold

And then as far as the website landing page itself, did a, I also write all the code and do all the design. So I'm assuming you at least have to, like create the shell for it and get the domain and what not

Srinivas Rao

So the shop Okay, for, for this one, A, I created the like, main, a lot of the ideas in here were based on my own notes and meme. So a lot of human but when did this one. Whereas the search engine page, I showed you unmistakable insights, which that was completely done by AI, that actually literally was not going to like there was no human involvement in conceiving any of that other than the idea.

Zack Arnold

So the one other thing that I want to make sure that we add, and I'm going to make sure in the show notes that once again, we have maximize your output.com/ai create. But you've also mentioned several times, this program called meme, which is essentially an external brain combined with AI, which I am very intrigued by, because I'm always trying to improve the capture process and downloading ideas from my head and getting them out of my head, because that's the worst place to keep them. But it's kind of a mess of various tools as it is for a lot of creatives. So where can people learn more about men, because you having showed this to me could also be a game changer.

Srinivas Rao

So I actually have an entire course on men called maximize your output, maximize your output with them. But probably, there's also a free lead magnet called the it's basically how you build your second brain and men, you know, those are some free resources. But it basically goes into how to basically build them, because that is very counterintuitive. It's not the way that you're used to organizing information. It's a network based thought it's not linear. So at first, it's very, creates a lot of cognitive dissonance. And so getting past that, I think, is part of the hurdle. But once you do, you'll never go back.

Zack Arnold

And just to clarify, mem is not your tool. You're just teaching the tool.

Srinivas Rao

Yeah, I'm just teaching. I wish mem was my tool. Yeah, wouldn't it

Zack Arnold

be nice? Well, on that note, I cannot thank you enough for being here today and chatting about all things AI and creativity. And otherwise, I know that my brain just literally hurts and I'm excited about all the things that I'm going to learn because of this one conversation. So can't thank you enough.

Srinivas Rao

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai