Mind Games : Manipulating AI with Roland & Ryan

0:00And we ended up with an actual conversation where all the questions were generated by AI, where all of the dialogue for me and Ryan was generated by AI and taking different positions. How much more successful would you be if you had lunch once a week with insanely successful entrepreneurs who share their biggest secrets on how they think and achieve success? Grab your seat at the table because this is Business Lunch with Roland Frazier and Ryan Dice.

0:31Welcome to another episode of Business Lunch. And today's a snackable episode with Roland where he's going to get into some more tactical strategies that you can start using to live a rich and happy life. If this is the first snackable episode you're hearing, I'd encourage you to go back and listen to some of the other episodes that Roland has put out. And if you want to get notified every time we release a new episode, go to the new businesslunchpodcast.com website, and we'll send you detailed notes along with every episode. That's businesslunchpodcast.com, www.businesslunchpodcast.com. And you can sign up for the free email newsletter where you'll be able to get all the highlights and resources from the episodes.

1:07Hey, everybody, this is Roland Frazier and Ryan Dice, and you are watching or listening to the Business Lunch Podcast. Ryan, how are you doing today? I'm doing really well. I got food poisoning, so I lost four pounds, and I'm excited about that. That is exciting. I know my favorite line from The Devil Wears Prada was the girl was that she was like, I'm just one stomach flew away from my perfect size. Yeah, yeah, no, it's good. No, but I'm lean. I mean, I'm feeling good. I'm ready for lunch. So I'm guessing that you are working on your food poisoning secrets, the way to lose weight that they don't want you to know kind of thing.

1:44Yeah, the upsell is going to be tapeworms for fun and profit. I think the upsell is a glass of as a bottled Mexican water. I think that's right. Speaking of which, we were in Mexico and Ryan and I were having a conversation and he found out that that he and I had released a podcast episode, which is if I'm looking here, I think it's for let's see, it was released on July 10th, episode 439. and I was like, man, did you listen to that podcast episode that we did? And he was like, what do you mean? We haven't done one in a while together. And so I sent him the link to it and he listened to it. And you want to share kind of what was going on there, Ryan?

2:28Yeah, well, it was pretty exciting because the podcast started and I heard this voice that sounded vaguely familiar and it was my own. And it was in that moment that I realized that Roland violating just an untold number of probably privacy laws and other things had basically leveraging AI, had created a podcast between the two of us. We're going back and forth talking about AI. And so we thought it might be fun to kind of recap because most of the people who listen to it didn't realize that it wasn't us because you at the very, very end were like, hey, by the way, this was all AI driven. All the questions, the script, like everything was powered by AI, the voices, neither of us were there.

3:12100 % AI top to bottom. And so people were obviously, you know, had a lot of questions about, well, how the heck did you do that? And so given that I was a quote unquote participant on this episode, I too would love to know, Roland Frazier, how the heck did you do that? Yeah. And more importantly, I think, what is the greater implication, aside from screwing with your friends? What is the greater implication for entrepreneurs, CEOs who want to leverage AI in their business? Well, as you'll probably remember, what you said on that podcast was that I'm just kidding. What what's funny is I wanted to do so I heard Seth Godin.

3:52Seth did a podcast that was just his voice. And then at the end, he revealed that it was it was all AI, AI voice generated. I don't believe the questions were, but maybe they were, maybe they weren't. But what it made me think of was, wouldn't it be cool if we could actually have a debate on business lunch between you and me about AI that was all generated by AI, where the voices were AI and where neither you nor I had anything to do with the production. And I think it's exciting in terms of like that allowed us while on vacation to produce a podcast to stay on the content schedule that you kind of have to stay on releasing content, which for anybody that's done podcasts, we're in the 400s.

4:37Now I can tell you to release a podcast every week for 400 and some weeks. It it's something. And, um, it's, uh, it, you know, when you go away or when you've got stuff going on in your life, or you've got some other thing you're doing or an event or whatever, um, it can be hard to keep up and you try to get a few in the can so that you have some buffer. But in terms of just like being able to fill that gap with something kind of interesting, I think that's cool. Now, what we did was we started by asking, we use chat GPT. And we asked if it was familiar with the business lunch podcast. At first, was it familiar with Ryan Dice?

5:17And was it familiar with Roland Frazier? And I love because it said, uh, it said great things about Ryan. And then it said at the, the last sentence was Ryan's, uh, Ryan's presentations are generally interesting and informative and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, that's, that's, you know, generally like what are the ones that are not? And then I was like giving Ryan a hard time. And then it said, on the other hand, Roland's, I was like, what the hell on the other hand, what do you mean? So it was, you chat GPT is trained to be nice. So it said nice things about both of us. It was familiar with both of us.

5:49And wouldn't you say that those descriptions, because you've seen them, were pretty accurate about kind of your personality and mine? Yeah, yeah, it was, it definitely had consumed enough of our content to be able to describe pretty well the general tonality and things like that. So yeah, and we had not uploaded and we're not famous, right? We're maybe internet famous, a little tiny, tiny bit, but we're not like giant, well known personalities with giant followings or anything. And so it had scanned our content enough to know generally how we present and the kind of stuff we talk about. And then we ask if it was familiar with the business lunch podcast and it was also.

6:25So if you aren't known to it, then you can certainly feed information to it. You could feed a blog post or something that you felt kind of embodied your style and say right in this style. Or if like it was familiar with the business lunch podcast, but let's say it wasn't. and I wanted the podcast tone to be in the style of Joe Rogan or Marc Maron or something like that, I could do that too, right? Or, you know, a Business Wars or Morning Brew. We could pick a podcast it was familiar with and say right in that style. So we started with that. And then we went on and basically said, okay, what do we want it to talk about?

7:08And so we gave ChatGPT the role of you are a podcast producer, you create and research questions for podcast hosts to ask and talk about that will be interesting, intriguing, and somewhat polarizing, perhaps even for the audience. So that was kind of the role we assigned. And then the task, because it was AI doing this, we wanted it to be about AI. So I thought that was kind of Inception-like. It's like AI does a podcast about AI using AI. And we said, generate questions about AI and make them questions that could be discussed or argued from two different perspectives. And it listed the questions out.

7:53And then it also, in each question, gave us the perspective, like privacy and job loss versus advancement and accuracy and learning and technology to serve the people. And so it listed a question and then it would list these are the two perspectives. So then we said, create a fictitious or a fictional conversation between the hosts named Ryan and Roland, where Ryan takes one position and discusses the pros and cons and benefits, etc. And Roland takes the other. And it created a script out of each of the questions. And then we had ChatGPT separate all of the Ryan dialogue from all of the Roland dialogue.

8:42We uploaded the Roland Dialog into Eleven Labs, which is what we've been using for voice cloning. And this was before we got back, by the way, the true voice clone, which took about two months. It's not any extra cost, but you can do the regular. We upload some video and then Eleven Labs clones your voice and it does a pretty good job. But if you do the actual voice clone, it takes it took, in this case, eight weeks and they say four to six. And that one just came back recently and it's smack on. So when you hear me and Ryan talking, most people would not know that it wasn't us except people that really knew us well.

9:29So anyway, had the separated dialogue from Roland trans cloned and text to speech by 11 labs and then did the same thing with Ryan. But we had to get Ryan's consent read into the thing. So we had to edit Ryan consenting to be recorded, which was kind of this is my favorite part. You know, you basically wrote in me saying something so that you would have me consenting to say something. Yes. Yes. But we had to edit that. So that was we used Descript. So we had to basically search for you saying all the words we needed to say. And then we had to edit those together. And that was terrifying. That's probably the most amusing part of the whole process.

10:11Then we uploaded that and it created Ryan's voice. And then we use Descript and Adobe Premiere to weave those together. And we ended up with an actual conversation where all the questions were generated by AI, where all of the dialogue for me and Ryan was generated by AI and taking different positions. and then where the voices were generated by AI of having us do the discussion. And then at the end, we revealed that the whole thing was done by there. So I just love to me, I get the scary parts. The scary parts are, well, I guess we could sell our voice clones. And Black Mirror did an episode that was very interesting on this.

10:55And it was basically where some celebrities had licensed or one celebrity in particular had licensed her name, image and likeness to a company that was an AI company that created television shows that were personalized to people. And they have this person acting out the life of this person that had also consented by using the platform to have their life be content that could be available to create. And so all the crappy things that she did during the day were then reenacted by the AI actress's virtual person. And it created havoc. I mean, Black Mirror to me is an amazing show. And so that's the downside.

11:42But the good side is that for us to be able to scale ourselves like we never have been able to before, I think it's really, really cool. I want to hear what you have to say about it. And then I want to share kind of the next level of where things are going that we're doing right now. So what are your what's your take and what are your thoughts on that, Ryan? So, I mean, so to me, it definitely still feels like it's a toy in a lot of ways, which is where all this stuff begins. Right. If I go back and I listen to the and I listen to the episode, it's good. I mean, it sounds like what we would do, but but it's not us.

12:14Right. And I do think that people who know us would be able to see a difference. And I think if that were the only thing that were being put out there, it wouldn't be strong enough to really like break through and to hold an audience and to create a brand. But that's where it is today. You know, I mean, and all of this technology, as far as, you know, being available for consumer use, it's less than 12 months old. And so you can imagine where's it going to be another 12 months in 36 months. And you can absolutely see where this makes it to where I think about it like animation. You know, there was a point in animation where you needed animators to create literally every single transition that would occur.

12:54every single little motion had to be its own little paper. And then eventually they're like, well, you know, we can actually draw this scene, you know, and then we can draw this other one and computers will fill in the gap, right? Now you've got like computer-aided drawing. And so I think that's where a lot of this is going to get, where you can have a good idea. And I believe that it's going to be the ability to take good original thought and to run with it is going to be the ultimate contribution of AI, because that's been the ultimate contribution of technology from the beginning, right? Take somebody who's a good photographer, you give them Photoshop, and they produce something extraordinary.

13:32Take somebody who's a terrible photographer and give them Photoshop, and it's still crap, right? So it's going to be the ability to take amazing ideas and to really take them to the next level through the time saved by not having to do all the, you know, gritty grunt work. And also just the ability to have more time to think of bigger things because we're not focused on all the little details that really don't move the needle that much. So I think it's cool. I don't think it's there. I don't think that we could say, hey, let's take a month off and just have AI do all this stuff moving forward and come back and everything would be fine.

14:08But it gives us a picture of where things are going. I think it's going to be a pretty cool place. It'll be fun to see. So we're testing the cool thing that you guys that are joining us on Business Lunch get to see is like, we're using this stuff actively in our business and we're testing and doing all kinds of cool things. So we are in the process right now. I would argue that if you look at the value of the message versus the messenger, which I think a lot of people do, that there's a lot of like in terms of replacing you and me after we have created a whole bunch of podcasts, I think that's harder.

14:49But we're launching a podcast for one of our portfolio companies right now. And all of the subject matter is AI generated and all of the discussion is synthesized. And I'll bet you because the value of the information is there, I'll bet you that it does just fine because it's not like switching from one kind of set of personalities to another. And it's much more factual, but delivered in an entertaining way. And so as that gets launched, I think it's going to be really cool to see because we're doing it with books, we're doing it with audios, we're doing it with video shorts. And so I think it's going to be really interesting to see.

15:31We're doing it with newsletters, we're doing it with email sequences and campaigns. So I think doing it with the podcast and getting into what was formerly just creators, but having AI creators who are the personalities of these shows that deliver valuable content. I mean, look, if you've ever listened to Eckhart Tolle, who I love, love, love The Power of Now and his stuff, but if you've listened to his audio book, man, it could not be more sleep inducing. And so I think that especially with the voice clone, because the difference in the quality between the voices that you hear on the episode we talked about and on the ones that we'll create using the voice clones, it's night and day.

16:16It's truly, truly a next level up. And so I think it's going to be really interesting. So I'm excited about it because what it allows us to do is let's look at this. Let's say that company, you and I are busy and we have great ideas for content that should happen that is beyond our ability to do it. And we have two options. We can either hire somebody, which is a whole additional expense, production schedule, all that kind of stuff. Or we can have one employee who could create 20 or 30 podcasts and maintain them, providing valuable information based on even thought leadership that we're creating or the people in those companies are or whatever, and delivering the valuable content in an entertaining way, as if it's real, I bet there's not going to be a difference.

17:08It'll be kind of interesting to see. The point that you made, I think is the most, like, I hadn't heard it said that way before, is there's a big difference between starting with one thing and using AI to do an AI version of that thing. Yeah. Versus what if it's just AI from the get-go? I hadn't thought about that way i think it's really really insightful because you know again let's go back to animated you know films if you think about like the early pixar movies they looked fundamentally different from the illustrated you know old school illustrated one and it's not that everybody said like it's different or better i'm sorry it's not that it was better or worse it's that it was different it's different it felt different yeah you were okay with this being computer animated because it just felt so different than the other ones and the other ones were good you know we're good as well but if they had gone and said well now snow white is going to be you know this pixar-y looking thing i think everybody would have said like what the heck's going on if people have a hard enough time with it going into live action you know with with real actors yeah what'll be interesting is do people become accepting of ai models and actors you know are we okay with that because you're starting to see it ai models are here right and so now if you can have if studios can produce their own AI actors are we okay with that or is it that we love these actors and these people because of both who they are on screen and off screen you know and it's that it's that piece and if you if you lose that then you lose the whole thing um it'll be very very interesting to see yeah I'm I still believe that all things being equal if you're going to go, if you're going to be in the same industry, in the same market, and you've got somebody with all the AI stuff competing against, you know, competing against a person, I think the person's going to win.

19:01I think that brand will win out. Well, so there's, so I saw a TikTok by a marketing guy last night, and I wish I could remember his name, but he was talking about the use of virtual influencers. And so there has, one of them was Vicky, Vicky Verano. And so Vicky Verano is not a real person, but if you watch the videos on Instagram and TikTok of Vicky Verano, she's a bouncy model with, uh, you know, maybe unattainable proportions, but, but not, not like you could, to me, it's hard to tell she's not real. And, uh, she's not, she's completely AI generated. And, um, and there's several of those and she got 57 ,000 fans, I believe in a week.

19:48another company called, oh gosh, it's forever. Let me see if I can find them here real quick. Another company basically, let me see, what was it?

20:05Forever Voices. So Forever Voices has created a video companion by uploading 2000 hours of, I think her name was Karen. It's either Karen or Carly. I think it's Karen with a C, but they uploaded 2000 hours of her video to their system. And then they basically created a virtual her that people are interacting with. She made$71 ,000 her first week in promos. And excuse me, that was, I think that's a by the minute conversation kind of thing. And they've done this with Steve Jobs. They've done it with Donald Trump. They've done it with Albert Einstein. So it's kind of interesting to me that people do vote.

20:49There are people that are these people that don't know are forming attachments with these virtual models and they can't seem to tell the difference, even though this is early, early on. Think about how much this is going to be more, you know, how much more accurate this is going to be in almost no time. And so if you look at what Forever Voices is doing, and I wrote to Forever Voices and said, you know, hey, I teach people how to acquire businesses. And I'm interested in creating a virtual me that can basically provide information and consulting on a pay by the minute basis. and so it'll be interesting to see what they can do, right?

21:34It'll be interesting to see, can I do that? And then will that version of me, because I've already done a chat, I used Wonder Chat to do a chatbot of myself and I uploaded three of my books and a bunch of articles and it's pretty good, but it's not like talking to me and they've got Forever Voices, they can do it so that you could ask me a question And virtual me can give you an answer from tech. I mean, from voice instead of just text and from video, if they do the, you know, the video clone. And then there's lalalandai.com, which we believe Gilt is using, which is a fashion site where they have thousands and thousands of overstocks and end run clothes that they're basically liquidating.

22:18We noticed that a lot of the models are the same, wearing different, you know, all these different clothes. And so I don't know that they're using this particular one, but I believe they're using one. But if you go to lalalandai.com, that's basically a virtual model. And they start with not real models that you then specify, I want this ethnicity and this gender and this height and shape, etc. The model comes on. And then the next thing is if you've got clothing that you want to sell or that you're thinking about selling that it has doesn't exist yet, then you can take the clothing and virtually outfit them with the designs that you create and then go to straight ad and basically put put it out there and sell it.

23:04validate the idea without having to do a photo shoot without having to create prototype clothing and for about 90 % less than it would cost to do a normal shoot in a day in with no schedule instead of having to go through physical location and all this other stuff so like if you look at at that stuff I think it's gonna happen man that I'm buying so that I'll buy the the models because the reality is, is they were always generally nameless, faceless. You know, they were, they were always voiceless in terms of personality, right? A mannequin with a head. And so now we've got, I think it's a big, big, big leap to say that I'm necessary.

23:49I'm going to form long-term attachments at scale, uh, to these. And I think there's a question to ask, like, is that even healthy that I don't necessarily want to, you know, go down at this point, but I just think, And again, it's it's can it be really, really good? Sure. But we're none of this is ever being done in a vacuum. And so you're always going to have somebody else who's willing to be real. And I just think the one who's willing to be real is going to outpace the ones that are where it's 100 percent AI driven. Yeah. And Ryan, our Ryan Frazier, my son just gave us because he's he's the producer here.

24:23He just sent me Michaela, Lil Michaela, L-I-L-M-I-Q-U-E-L-A, who is a virtual influencer on Instagram with 2.7 million followers and 1269 posts. And that's a hashtag Black Lives Matter, 19 year old robot living in L.A. Check out my videos. Pretty crazy. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you're always going to see that. But I would argue that those people, and I don't mean this as like them as humans. Because I do. Well, in this case, I do because this is not a human. But if you think about that kind of generic influencer, they're all astoundingly replaceable. Agree. In that role. Agree. They're always just, you know, it's always just cotton candy work.

25:10and I think there's some people that their skills are cotton candy and there's some people that have chocolate cake skills and I think if you've got cotton candy and you're that easily replaceable then you're better off just to build an AI army of use and I guess that's my point to me the good of it the bad is there can be it can be detrimental to society because everybody ends up forming relationships with virtual companions and the population goes away and none of us have any relationships that are real None of us have the ability to deal with people who are real and it's very dystopian. But what I like about it is I think that it basically just gives us the ability to scale.

25:52Like if you think about we delegate tasks, like we'll delegate a research task or we'll delegate working the front of the shop or buying media to somebody else. And if we can create virtual versions of us or have access to people who have virtually cloned themselves so that we have access to their skill sets doing these things, that's going to be really empowering because we'll be able to scale ourselves way, way more than we ever have been. And that could potentially open up the time for us to then have virtual relationships with virtual companions. And isn't that really what we all want? That's what we all want.

26:30So anyway, interesting discussion. I'd love to hear what you guys think, how you're using AI, what you think of this kind of stuff, what you thought of the episode that we created through this and how you might benefit or what concerns you have about AI. Definitely share it with us on the businesslunchpodcast.com site. Should we tell them the secret, though, Roland, before you go? I should tell them the secret. Go ahead. This episode was also powered 100 % by AI. We're not really – I'm just kidding. This one was real. This was – yeah, this was AI, too. It's just that it was actual intelligence.

27:00we hope. So thank you guys for watching or listening. If you like this, please definitely share it with somebody else and love to hear what you think and let us know if you have any thoughts on the topic. We'll see you next time on Business Lunch.

27:27Hey, Roland Frazier here. If you're looking for a way to grow your business exponentially, to get more customers and ultimately increase your wealth, there's no faster way to do it than to acquire other businesses that already have the customers, products, services, teams, and media that you want. If you want to double your sales, just acquire a company that has the same sales as yours. It sounds simple, but far too many people end up starting new businesses that fail and forget that they could skip all the hard stuff and just acquire one that already exists. There's a reason why private equity firms, family offices, big companies like Apple, Google, and some of the smartest entrepreneurs on the planet do not start new businesses from scratch.