Episode 12: AI, Trust & the Future of Human Connection with Victor Cho

Welcome to Super Connections. I am your host, Jennifer K. Hill, helping you with the Golden Triangle of Connection, where you will super connect to yourself, others, and your purpose. Join me each week as I will share from some of my favorite tips and tools for super connecting, and I'll bring in some of my favorite friends and thought leaders To help support you on your journey to super connecting to the life of your dreams. Hello, Super Connections Tribe. It's great to have you back here for episode 12 of Super Connections, where we help you to more deeply connect to yourself, others, and your purpose. Today we have a very special guest who I had the privilege and honor of hearing speak in a mastermind that I'm a part of. And right away I said, oh, we got to get this guy, Victor Cho, on the show. He had such Deep wisdom. So in this short little 15 to 20 minute episode, we're going to give you some tidbits and insights about the interaction and the entwining of AI and human connection and how these 2 things go together and some of the pitfalls we might need to keep our eyes open for. So we have joining us today Victor Cho, who is an incredible, passionate consumer advocate and is the CEO of Imovid. Hi. the world's first authentic multimodal communication platform built for business. Before that, he was the CEO of Evite, and Victor has won numerous awards for his work, including being named the Internet Person of the Year by the Internet Marketing Association. And I just found out he is an Italian knight. What did we say it's called, Victor? It's—

It's a cavalier.

He is a cavalier. So he is receiving knighthood from the Royal House of Savoy for his philanthropic efforts. And he is also creator of the 4th Stakeholder Framework on improving stakeholder capitalism. Victor, I'm so happy our paths crossed and thank you so much for being here with us today.

Oh, Jennifer, such a pleasure. It was such a treat chatting with your crew and then also having our discussion. So I can't wait to have this one.

Yeah. So let's talk about what you're doing. It's Emovid. I think I was mispronouncing it. Say it again.

Yeah. Emovid or Emovid. It's like, I think of emojis, but with vid at the end, because we have a video at our core.

That's right. So you left Evite, you've now created Amovid, and you actually did a demo of it for us. And that's what really compelled me to want to have you on the show for a discussion of what does the future hold for us, Victor, in terms of AI and human connection? Is there space? Can we still create deep, meaningful connections with ourselves and others? And how do you see that integrating or perhaps even expanding our capacities to work with AI. Do you see it? So many people are doom-scrolling fear, like AI is going to take over the world. And I'm optimistic. I want to say that maybe there's a possibility where AI can help us to be even more deeply connected. And I got a sense of that when I saw your demo for Imovid.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I, I believe every business leader at a high level, I think, is driven I hope is driven by something deeper than just make a business to make some money. And for me, this issue of what is the impact of technology on our lives, and in particular at this moment in time, right? How do we as human beings continue to interact and have vibrant interaction in a world of AI? It's just, it's foundational to what we're doing. So one simple way I like to think about the world, to answer your question directly, is if you take a line for any business or even in your personal world and draw a line through it. And on one side, put things that are relationship-driven and on the other side, put things that are transactional. You can get a very simple picture of where the world is headed. And let's just take a business. If you're running a business, you have teams, you have customers, you draw this relationship versus transactional line. There are a whole bunch of things that sit on the transactional side that AI is gonna do an amazing job of making more efficient. And probably getting rid of the human element today, which can be very inefficient. And these are probably good things for your business because it will drive cost savings, it will drive efficiency, it'll probably drive a better customer experience for your customers or your partners, your investors, whatever that line is. But it's clear to me there has to be a relationship side to that line. It's going to be a different line for sure. But that relationship side, yeah, I agree with you. I'm both pessimistic and optimistic. I'm optimistic because I think AI can enhance that relationship side if we use it appropriately. But that really is the essence of why we're doing ImmoVid, because those words are important. Like, you have to do it with the right mindset. We have to build the technology in the right way, or we run the risk of pushing everything to the other side, right? Of literally having a world where agent bots are having all of our business discussions for us, and we're sitting there just saying, oh, what's— what do I do? Maybe nothing. Maybe I'm not needed in this world. Yeah, that's the world we want to avoid.

Yeah. So what is, how do we begin to think about this? I remember even in the talk that you gave for us for our, the mastermind group, the Epic Fit Network, you were talking a little bit about the second, what was it called? Secondhand effects. There was a really good—

Yeah. Yeah. Second order effects. So let me take a kind of one step up in terms of as a business leader, as a CEO. So I've been a CEO of multiple business lines. I think the hardest thing you have to do as a CEO is to balance what are called stakeholders, right? Who— what are the entities that you're either interacting with your business or managing directly? So customers are a stakeholder, right? Of course, you're building a business to serve them. Your employees are a stakeholder, right? They provide the energy to actually make the business run. Your shareholders are, of course, a stakeholder. And I have this firm belief that society is also a stakeholder, right? You're not building a business in a vacuum. You are building a business that's operates within the world. Like, your business is a citizen, needs to be a citizen. And so this idea of stakeholder balance and trading off across them is difficult, right? When you have to make a financial decision to do the right thing for your employees, right? That's an example of a trade-off. In terms of technology and these second-order effects, the product that you're building, the business itself often will have trade-offs with society. And these are, I refer to these as the second-order impacts. You can have first or second-order impacts, right? Your first-order impact might be really bad. Cigarettes kill people and cause cancer. It's like a first-order impact of your product. Okay, that's a problem you need to go solve. But second-order impacts are also your responsibility to deal with as a business leader. I have a strong belief of this. And those are a little bit more elusive. So those are things like social networking and causing depression, right? Or social networking and causing You know, teen suicide, right? Is— how strong is that connection? Is it a direct connection? Those are harder problems to deal with, but they are absolutely things that the companies and the business leaders need to track and be responsible for. And AI is probably— is going to create some of the most incredible second-order impacts in terms of potential downstream impact. And unless our business leaders are thinking about how do we build our businesses correctly and are we tracking that, then we could run into trouble.

So let's look at this. Imagine that it's 10 years in the future. How would you like to see us be engaging with AI? Let's talk about the— perhaps I don't want to call it positive, but the potential that we have as humans to, like you said, perhaps on the transactional side. So many of us work 8 hours, 10 hours, 12 hours a day. Look at attorneys, accountants, and so much of it is menial work of like click, replace, click, replace. Yeah. And that can all be automated.

Yeah.

If you had magic fairy dust and you could create a future 10 years from now that allowed for us to have healthy, super connected relationships through AI and using it in a way where the first order, second order effects were for the benefit of everybody, how can we do that? What would that take to get us there?

Yeah, no, I love that question 'cause it has an optimism at its core, right? That this time we free up will be used for us to have these interactions. So I think that world looks, Similar to what you've described, right? It's clear that the agent— we're at the earliest stage of AI, right? I tell people we're at day 1 of 10,000 days, 1,000 days. The functionality is going to evolve so rapidly, but we have created the most important technology I think we'll ever create. Maybe not ever. We have created the most important technology I think we will have created up until this point in time, which is we have untapped what intelligence and reasoning is in a computing system, right? We're now going to make that available to the world. So Yeah, you unleash that onto the planet in every product as a service that can be consumed by everyone, anyone building a solution, right? Technology as agents, as bots, as robots, right? That's coming over the next 30, 40, 50 years. Yeah, in that world, I think in terms of our relationship and humanity, yeah, I think it comes back to this line. There is a ton of stuff that is very inefficient. It really is a waste of death. These useless things that are just purely transactional at their core, they're not really building relationship and computers can can do them way better? Yes. Wonderful. Let's take all of that and get that off of our plate and free up time for us to do the things that actually make us vibrant and healthy human beings. So get out and exercise more and be healthier for sure. Hopefully, we can work a little bit less, achieve more, tap into Maslow's hierarchy, and actually get more people into the self-actualization top of the pyramid. And absolutely spend more time building Deeper social connections, relationships and people. This is, I think I've had this learning deeply ground into my head from Evite. It's maybe even more important than like working out and eating well in terms of your longevity and your health, right? We are social creatures at our core. We need to build these deep connections. We can't delegate that to systems and it takes time and it takes energy. So any technology that we can use that either gives us time to do that, or in the case of Imovid, I call Imovid a superpower because it allows you to suddenly interact face-to-face authentically with hundreds of people simultaneously in parallel threads. Like, that was impossible before the world of AI. Systems like this that can enhance it, I think, are gonna be very powerful.

Yeah, I agree 100%. There was a friend of mine, Curtis Eschez, who many years ago wrote a book called Your Life by Design, and there was a pyramid in it. And the whole purpose of the book was that you had different rungs on the pyramid, like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, And at the bottom is the stuff you hate doing, like taking out the trash, doing Excel spreadsheets, whatever it is, right?

Yeah.

Move up the rung and then it's, okay, what are the things I prefer not to do, but I'm willing to do? Walk the dog, whatever it is. And then you get up to the highest level of the pyramid and you look at the things that bring you deep contentment, joy, and fulfillment. Now, for any of you listening, whether you're already an adopter of AI, you're using ChatGPT, or maybe you might be a little bit concerned about it, Regardless of whatever your perspective is on it, I encourage you to do this exercise. Look at the things that if you had it all your way, you could outsource, and then begin to look at a potential roadmap and technologies, whether it's Victor's technology or other technologies that can help you to do more things that light you up and bring you joy. Yeah. And on that note, Victor, I'd love to hear from you before we wrap today's episode, a little bit more about Amovid in case it does feel in resonance with any of our listeners or viewers.

Oh, no, no, thank you. I'd love to share. Yeah, Amovu in its simplest form is the 3rd way you can finally build relationships with people at scale. So it's actually very simple if you think about, and we're a business-focused product, but in business, there's only 2 ways today for you to build relationships, deep relationships. It's fly on a plane, right? Or get together with somebody in person or do what we're doing here, Jennifer, right? Spend some time on a Zoom. Those are amazing ways to build connection, right? Because they tap into emotion, voice, right? You see the person, you see their authentic expressions. Like, these are all critical to build relationships. Those are hard to do and they take a lot of time, right? Just getting on somebody's calendar could take 3 weeks and say, oh yeah, let's get together in a month. And so what we have brought is the 3rd major communication platform to do that, but asynchronously. So. I can record a message, right? Video is the core, but we say that the system is multimodal. My video has all the emotion, all the authenticity. I send it to you, but you receive it as audio, video, text transcription. It's summarizable. So it's multimodal in the package that you receive. And we can go back and forth this way. Video, it's multimodal, right? Audio back and forth and build a relationship, but asynchronously, which has never been possible before in business. This is really the first platform to make that possible. So, it allows you, I have more relationship building threads going right now than I ever have at any point in time in my life. And it's a crazy change, but in an amazingly positive, amazingly positive way because I'm like teleporting all over having these great, incredible interactions with people, right? Whether it's investors or partners or key customers, it's, yeah.

Like voice texting back and forth. So, I know voice texting has been Huge emergence where we're all voice texting back. Yes. Sometimes I haven't talked to you for 5 or 6 months, yet we're still deeply, intimately connected because we're leaving these little voice texts as we have moments throughout our day.

Yes. Voice texting is a great example of a bimodal form, right? So it's— and the reason people do it, of course, it's 2 reasons, right? It's a little bit faster. It's faster for you to speak, right? And then you get some of your intonation. So now take that and supercharge it, because if you're building a relationship with a brand new person, you have to see them, right? It's not sufficient just to hear their voice. That's where you really build the deep connection. So imagine that. that, but to the next level. Yeah, it's a great parallel.

Beautiful. I love it, Victor. Any closing thoughts for our listeners and viewers on how we can more intimately engage with AI while releasing the fear of where it may take us?

Yeah, no, just one tactical tip. I've been sharing this one with a bunch of people. Take whatever you do for media consumption and learning today and carve out a half hour a day And have a conversation with AI to learn. And it is a fascinating— you will quickly see how it— Fast. How what? How fast the technology is evolving. But it's actually a better— it's like you being able to sit down and have office hours with all of the smartest teachers on the planet. Like whatever it is you're trying to learn, have the conversation, ask the stupid question, right? It will guide you and educate you like very rapidly. And it'll give you a sense of what is this agentic world where you're having It's not that, it's not that I'm friends with my chatbot, but after a half-hour discussion, because they're adding intonation, they're adding other things, you can see in some ways maybe some of the danger that's coming. 'Cause I clearly predict there is gonna be a world where some chunks of our conversation opt to not have personal interaction because they're gonna go into fake agentic relationships. It's already happening. You see it at, at a small level. It's going to be, I don't wanna say a problem, it's going to be there as a factor in our relationship building in the future for sure. Which is crazy. This is like the stuff of sci-fi, but it's coming. It's coming fast and furious.

I remember a friend of mine who's an investor in AI and human performance. We were talking about this a year or two ago in the Bay Area, and she was saying exactly that. She said, listen, the currency of the future is going to be trust and authenticity. And yes, and that's it. And that's where can we still be masterful at creating trust, trusting ourselves, trusting those we're connecting with, How can we still be authentic in our communication while leveraging all of these wonderful tools out there? And how do we more intimately connect to ourselves and others? And I think to your point, this can be a wonderful springboard for us in many ways to connect. And maybe for those of you out there who don't feel comfortable sometimes in human connection, maybe just starting to utilize AI to increase your confidence and ask questions like, how would I talk to a girl? How would I ask for a promotion? One of my— Yes. Some members was looking for—

Yes.

advice on an interview the other day, and I wrote a book on job hunting. It was the first company I'd exited. And I literally told this family member, I said, go get on AI and have it role-play with you in the interview and see how your answers are going. Ask it for advice. So I think there's many ways we can use it, and it's all the lens that we see things through. So Victor, this has been brilliant. Where can people connect with you, my friend?

Ah, wonder now. This has been such a great chat. Emovid URL is very simple, emovid.com. Come please check us out. Oh, I will mention actually to this idea of authenticity and trust, one of the core pieces of our IP and technology is every message that comes from us, we will validate that it's truly that person and we will explicitly and transparently tell you what's been modified down to the, even if you change your background, we'll say, hey, this is a fake background. Just, it's our ethos of transparency. But that's amovid.com. For me, you can find out all about me and contact me directly at victorchow.com.

Beautiful, Victor. Thank you to each and every one of you for tuning in wherever and whenever you're tuning in. And our intention is you take this information and use it to exponentially enhance your relationship to yourself, others, and your purpose. May we all go out and spend more time doing the things we love, work less, and spend more time with the people we care about.