Becoming AI Ready: How to Creatively Secure Your Future

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Welcome to the AI Explored podcast, helping you put AI to work. And now, here's your host, Michael Stelzner.

Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the AI Explored podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. This is the podcast for marketers, creators and business owners who want to know how to put AI to work. I'm just going to tell you at the top of today's episode. This is a very special episode. You definitely want to listen to any everything that Kyle talks about today because it is going to connect with you at such a deep level. I'm so encouraged by what we did today. So let's now transition over to this week's interview with Kyle Shannon.

Helping you simplify your AI journey. Here is this week's expert guide.

People say that it's AI versus humans, but is that really true? In today's episode of the AI Explored Podcast, we'll explore how to become AI ready so you can own your future. My special guest is an AI community builder and strategist who helps artists, builders and educators creatively embrace change and secure their future. He's host of the AI Learning Lab, a daily YouTube live stream. He's the founder of the AI Salon, a community of artists, builders and educators who are exploring the AI frontier. And his forthcoming book is Feed your Prompt. Kyle Shannon, welcome to the show. How you doing today?

Michael? I am so excited to be here. It's an honor to join you and I'm ready To dig in. Let's get AI ready.

Love it. Well, let's start with like a little bit of your journey into AI. How'd you get into it?

Well, it's funny. So I don't know. I know, I know you can't tell by looking at me, but I'm a little older. And in my lifetime, there have been three major technical revolutions. And the first one was the PC. I was in seventh grade when I discovered the PC. One of the things that kind of broke my heart back then was I realized I was just too young. Young to be Steve Jobs or Bill Gates of that age. Right. To be in at the beginning. And it was something that always bugged me because I knew that it was like the printing press. Like these things don't come along that often, right? So I assumed I had missed this opportunity in my life. And then in 1994, the World Wide Web comes along and it seems interesting. And I learn enough HTML. I have an idea for an online magazine, an art and culture magazine, because most of the Internet was just technology. And so I learned enough HTML to put together my first issue of Urban Desires, this magazine. And I upload these HTML files to some computer in California. And three weeks later I got an email from someone that said, did you know that Urban Desires was written about in Paris in Liberation, the news daily? And I was like, no. And I was living in New York City at the time. So I went down to the international newsstand in Times Square and I bought this paper. And I'm flipping through it and sure enough, there's a full page article of this online magazine written about in Paris. And I had like full body chills. I remember in the moment thinking that, oh my God, the world just changed and no one knows it yet. You know, I'm in Times Square, there's just people all around me, and I'm like, everything's different, right? You know, geography has collapsed and time has collapsed. And so. So that was that. And I thought. And I ended UP co founding agency.com and creating one of the first digital agencies. And we made websites for the Fortune 500 before anyone knew what they were. It was really an exciting time, but I assumed that that would be the last time in my life that I would experience a change like this. And then in the summer of 2022, I started playing around with stable diffusion and image generation. And I failed nine times to get stable diffusion set up. And I finally figured it out and I was just stumbling my way through it and it was really remarkable. And then ChatGPT came out and one of my very first thoughts of ChatGPT was, oh, the Turing test has been passed. And then after I said that, I thought, oh, I should probably try to like, make it act like one of those AIs that you see in movies. And so I'm talking to. And as I'm talking to it, I realize I don't have to get it to act like one of those AIs in movies. It actually is. I'm like, this is like science fiction. And my, my big epiphany, my big sort of full body chill moment with AI was for years people have been telling me, oh, you should learn Python, you should learn Python. And I have adhd, I know how to code, I'm just not good at it. I don't have the attention span to really do it well. And so I thought, I went into ChatGPT and I said, write me some Python code that takes an input and modifies it somehow and it spit out all this Python code. And I was like, oh, that's cool. And then I had this moment of panic where I'm like, I don't even know how to run Python code. And like, normally what you would have to do is you'd have to like call a friend and admit that you're a dumb dumb and you don't know how to do it. And so I just said to ChatGPT, I don't know how to run Python. And it said, oh sure, just open up terminal and type in this command line thing. And I'm like, no, I don't want command line. Can I just copy and paste this into a website? It said, sure, here's replit. And it gave me replit. And I went in there and I tested it and then that gave me errors and it told me how to fix those. Within 90 minutes, I had written a fully functional Python application that was making API calls to ChatGPT to OpenAI and generating social media content based on a user input within 90 minutes. It was almost the identical moment I had with that magazine where I'm like, oh my God, the world just changed again. It was this sense of highly empowered self expression that this wasn't just learning Python, that this was, I didn't have to learn Python to be able to take an idea and realize it. And so it was like one of my very first experiences was large language models. Generative AI in general is an idea amplifier. And so that started everything. I knew I had to start a community and it just, it led to all the things that I'm doing right now.

Well, I love that story. And so many of the people listening to this are what I call gray hairs. We've been around before the Internet. We. We remember when we missed the opportunity to grab that really powerful domain name or when we were not early on to YouTube or Instagram or Facebook. And we wish we were.

Yeah.

And now we are in the middle of literally just three years. We are very, very early. And it's absolutely exciting.

It's so early. So early.

It's so early. Yet there's a lot of misconceptions going around right now. And I'm curious, what's one of the biggest ones you hear a lot?

I think one of the biggest ones, and it's largely fed by people who don't use a generative AI. There's a big distinction between AI of the past 30 years and generative AI, starting with ChatGPT. And I think it's fed by 50 years of Hollywood telling us the robots are going to get us and a news cycle that embraces negative stories over positive stories and things like that. And. And I think that the big. I don't know if it's a misconception. I think it's a big negative trope of AI is that it's us against AI. That, for me, is the big one, that people treat AI like this thing, that it's going to be better than me, it's going to take my job. It's like they put AI in front of them as this competitive thing. Like, I've got to compete against it. And what I know personally is probably a year and a half ago generative AI got smarter than me. Like, I already know that that's a losing battle for me personally. And, like, maybe you're wicked smart and you're as smart as. But at some point here, likely in 2026, it's going to be clear that this thing is way smarter than us. And so if you're in a combative position with it, it's a losing position. Right. Because it's just. It's. But there's another way to think about it. Rather than putting AI in front of you like this thing you're competing against, what I like to do is sort of put it behind me, kind of like a jet pack. Right. You know, remember the Jetsons? Right. We all wanted jet packs as a kid. If you put yourself at the center of the conversation, this is about human agency, in my opinion. If you put yourself at the center of the conversation and you say, here's who I am. Here's what my values are. Here's what I want to do in the world. Here's who I want to impact. And then you say, now, what AI tools can I use to amplify those ideas and bring those ideas to life? And so for me, that shift is a subtle one, but it's critical, right? Because if you have AI as a competitor, it's terrifying. And there's lots of scary things about the possibility of what could happen. Like, I acknowledge all of that, and I'm experiencing on a daily basis human beings transforming their lives, coming out of retirement, starting filmmaking careers. It's crazy when people sort of shift that perspective and say, hey, my ideas are the most important things, and I'm going to use AI to carry them forward and help me get myself into the world in a more powerful way.

I love everything you just said. It was so well said.

Thank you.

So well said.

Thank you.

Okay, so we're here to talk about getting ready, becoming a I ready, or AI enabled or whatever the phrase is. But before we get into the how, I want you to explain, like, what's the benefits? What's the upside? If people pay attention to what we're about to talk about and they actually do what we're about to talk about, what are the benefits?

So the benefits. AI readiness is a very particular term. When I first started the AI Learning Lab in the AI Salon, I thought, I'm passionate about technology. I like learning what's possible. I like learning about how it works. And so I'm going to teach people as I'm learning, right? I was like, I'm going to do this. I think there's value in that. And so for about a year, it was all about the tools. And I talked a lot about AI literacy. And about a year and a half in, I realized there was something not right about that. AI literacy, actually, right now, today, is not possible because the tools are changing so fast, Michael, that about the time you think you have your head around something, it changes. It completely transforms. Even how you prompt something or what it can do is just radically different. And so we hit on this idea of AI readiness. And within the AI salon, we've got a whole framework for that which we're going to unpack. But the benefits of AI readiness are things like, you're not just using AI as a tool to do your current work more efficiently. I think one of the things that people often do is they'll go, oh, it's a computer. There's A new technology. Let me take what I do and find a way to do that more efficiently. You can absolutely use AI for that, but it limits it to what you already know. When you shift into this mode of AI readiness, what you do is you discover that entirely new things are possible, right? Entirely new ways of working. There might be things in your life, like me with Python programming, that you're not good at, and now you are. And so that it opens up doors to just.

It's kind of like the Matrix, right?

Kind of like I can now do.

Kung Fu almost, right?

Like literally. There's a fun exercise that people do when they're talking about money transformation. They're like, you know, if money weren't an object, what would you choose to do? And that's always that thing where you're like, oh, right, I hadn't thought about it like that. And you think of all these possibilities. If your limited skills were no longer an impediment to you, what would you choose to do? That's the world we're actually in. And it's a world that's getting more and more and more powerful that you can literally say, if I was great at marketing and science and math and filmmaking and music writing and grant writing for my nonprofit, if I was good at all the things and I could literally just do them, what would I choose to do? So when you take a mindset of AI readiness, you actually transform AI from like a glorified vending machine, like a fancy Google search, into an idea amplifier. It's a personal humanity amplifier. So imagine every one of us gets a team of 10 badass professionals that we get to take any idea we have and execute it at a world class level. That's the world we're entering. I would argue it's the world we're in, just not a lot of people know it yet.

I'm loving this. Okay, so we're going to talk about AI readiness. Before we actually dig into AI readiness, why don't you give us a high level on kind of what it is we need to be thinking about and then we'll dig into some of the details.

Within the AI salon, we have this thing that we call the cycle of AI readiness. And it's really simple. It's three things and I'm going to share them with you. When you hear them, you're going to be like, oh, yeah, yeah, that makes sense, right? But it's a non obvious three things that we essentially divined out of the behavior of people within the AI salon. This Wasn't something we just made up. It was just like the people that are being the most successful with AI, what are they doing? And then we hit on these three things. And so we've had this for about two years now. And the more I learn and the more I unpack and the more sophisticated I get with this stuff, these three things are the things. So the first one is play first. And this is a cycle. So play first is like, explore AI without expectations. So, you know, instead of going in and saying, I want to make my project management more efficient, just go play with AI. Make a book for your kids. You know, make a song in Suno. Have AI write you something that you're not good at writing. Technical writing. Let's say you're okay at writing, but you're really bad at technical writing. Have it help you do that. Just explore. There are these things that I call aching gaps. So as humans, there's things we're good at, and then we've got these gaps, right? The aching gaps are those gaps that are like, oh, I really wish I was good at drawing. I really wish I was better at math, right? And just go explore. Just go play in those areas where you might not be good at something, but it sure would be nice if you were, and it will blow your mind. So that's phase one. Phase two of AI readiness is Create Excellence. And what that looks like is, oh, okay, now that I've learned a few things, I've learned what these capabilities are and what's possible. Now I can take one of these ideas that I have. Might be a work idea, might be a personal idea, might be something you never dreamed that you would be able to do, right? I just spent a year and a half writing a musical about an AI chatbot and create excellence looks like. Now start applying the AI things that you've learned to that idea. And then the third phase of AI readiness is generously lead. And what that looks like is get your butt in an AI community, right? Get your butt in community. Because everything's moving so fast, you can't keep up with it. So surround yourself with people that are exploring like this. Generously lead also looks like sharing what you're learning, sharing it on LinkedIn. You know, here's what worked, here's what didn't. I think this is absolutely brilliant. I think this is absolutely trash. All of that stuff does a couple of things. It anchors what you're learning. It forces you to start communicating what you know and how you know it. But it also establishes you as someone who's thinking critically about AI, and one of the things that we are experiencing in the AI salon consistently is that our members are surviving job layoffs because they're AI ready. Because people know, oh, they're up to something here that is probably going to be valuable for us. And so those are the three things. Play first. Create excellence. Generously lead.

Love it. Okay, we're going to dive into every one of these. So let's start with play first.

Yep.

Give us some frameworks or concepts or how to even go about doing this. Because, let's be honest, a lot of us feel like we don't have any time to play. So how do we do that when we feel like we don't have any time to play?

In the AI Salon? We just developed a framework for what we call a daily practice. We call it the AI Salon Mastermind Practice. And the whole idea is to create a practice around how you use AI. And a practice is more than just a habit. Like, one of the things that I discovered in developing this practice and rolling it out to our community is I go live five nights a week for about two hours a night talking about AI. And so when we were designing this practice, I'm like, oh, I already have a practice five nights a week, I'm out there teaching AI. And what I discovered is that I actually don't have a practice. What I had was a habit. I would just show up, right? I would just show up and do things just sort of in automation mode. A practice is a much more intentional thing. So step one of starting a practice is center yourself, understand what do you want? What are your values? What are you trying to do? What's the difference you're trying to make in the world? So that's the most important thing. So in that idea of Play first, there's kind of two major areas that we talk about. One is play with purpose. So play with purpose. What that looks like is, huh, who am I? Well, I would love to be able to write poetry more, write songs or start a business, whatever it might be. Go discover tools and AI that might be something that could contribute to that thing that you want. So step one is understand what you want, right? Have a point of view, play with purpose. And then the other part of Play first is learn across domains. And this gets back to that idea of gaps, right? So don't just say, hey, I need to write better emails. I'm going to go do that. Understand what it might mean to not only write an email to communicate with someone, but what if you sent them a song? And I know that sounds frivolous, but let me give you a specific example. So every night on my AI Learning lab live, I teach stuff. And one night about, I don't know, a year and a half, two years ago, someone made a comment, how do you make a song in Suno? And Suno had just come out and so I'm like, okay, let's go make a song. And so I'm like, you go in here and you can either write your own lyrics or it can write them and you put in the style you want and then you push the button and it makes a song. And on the live that night is one of my favorite guys in the community is this guy named Jim Ross. Now Jim works in the storage business and not in the digital storage business, like the self storage business, you know, like cardboard boxes and garage doors. And so he was a big fan of the AI Learning lab. And so that night when I was teaching songs, he commented in the live and he said, he said, hey Kyle, this amazing thing just happened. And so I brought him up on stage. I'm like, what happened? And he said, well, you were teaching us how to do songs. And I had just met with a prospective client like four hours earlier. And so I knew their name and I knew their business and I knew what they were trying to accomplish. So I just took all that and I had chatgpt write lyrics and I went into Suno and made a song and so I sent them the song. And he goes, within five minutes they responded to him and said, you got the job. He closed a piece of business because he did this thing that was seemingly frivolous, but to them it was like he took the time, like it doesn't make any sense that he could write a song that fast, that personalized, right? But it was the intention behind it and it was his ability to learn across domains and say, huh? How could I apply that to my business? And so for him that was a moment of playing with purpose that made a huge difference for him. And he's gotten really, really good at that. In fact, he has a daily practice every day he's got one of those Pomodoro timers and he sets it for an hour every morning when he's having his coffee and he does AI every morning for his business and he never knows what he's going to do. Sometimes it's for something he knows, sometimes he's just experimenting and playing. Really powerful example of someone doing this.

Well, explain what this pomodoro Thing is, I don't think my audience is going to be necessarily familiar with it.

Yeah, pomodoro is just a methodology of setting time frames for yourself. So you set 15 minutes or 20 minutes or 60 minutes. You basically set a timer. And pomodoro, I think in Italian stands for tomato. And so I think the original timer that someone used to come up with this methodology was a tomato shaped timer, like a kitchen timer. All right, Shaped like a tomato. Yeah, it's basically just setting. So he just sets an hour for himself every day and practices.

Okay, so I think what I hear you say is, hey, everybody, you got to give yourself permission to play if you want to be AI ready.

Lose the expectations.

Okay, explain that.

If I go into a session and I say, okay, I want to make project management more efficient, it's going to limit how I think about what's possible. Like, I'm only going to prompt within that specific expectation and then it's either going to hit it exactly as I expected or not. And so what happens if you have expectations is that you might go in and you say, well, that's just about as good as what I can do with this other tool. So I'm not really all that impressed. So a lot of times we'll hear people, I tried AI, I wasn't impressed. That's likely because they went in with a specific expectation. It wasn't Einstein level response. And so they're like, okay, I'm done playing, lets you go. Okay, maybe I go in thinking I want to improve project management, but I'm going to go in with an open mind. I'm going to ask ChatGPT, what are all the ways I might think about project management that I've never thought about them before? And that's going to give you ideas that are going to trigger your ideas to go, ooh, I never thought about it that way. Let me run down that rabbit hole. Right? So expectations become this limiting force. They just prevent you from discovering the new things that are possible.

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So one of the big shifts that's happening, that is a thing that appropriately freaks people out, is that our current system values skills. So it values Michael. If you're a great copywriter and I hire you for copywriting, and if you in today's mindset say, I gotta be more valuable for my client, what that would look like is I've gotta do better copywriting, I've gotta do what I do better. In this new world where the skills are gonna be democrat, because as AI gets better, lots of people are going to be able to write copy. Your skills are not just copywriting, but your skills are discernment and editing and idea generation and understanding client needs. Like you've got many more things that are valuable about you as an employee and a human being, way beyond the skills. And so the purpose thing is you really looking at, well, wait a minute, what is it that I do well? What do I enjoy? What do I want to do? Right? Do you want to be a strategist? Do you want to be someone who handles the emotional component of how you interact with clients? Like you can abstract your value up a level and divorce it from the skills. Because what we should all assume is that the tasks, the day to day tasks that we do and maybe we've been doing for 20 years and we're really good at, we should assume that those are Going to be automated and anyone can do them. And so then that begs the question, what is my purpose? What do I want?

We have to seek a higher purpose. I see what you're saying.

Exactly. Do you know the music producer Rick Rubin?

I feel like I've heard the name, but I'm not sure.

Okay, he's really cool. He's got big white hair, big white beard. He's like this guru. He's a music producer. He produced the Beastie Boys, he's won Grammys, he's produced many of the songs that you probably sing. He can't write music. He doesn't write lyrics. He doesn't know how to work the recording console. He's not in a band. His job is to have an opinion about the songs that he's hearing. And like, does it move him personally?

Because he's a tastemaker.

He's a tastemaker. One of the phrases that just keeps popping in my head is, we're all Rick Rubin now that our job in the future is going to be to have an idea to understand what that looks like for you, and then use these tools to maintain the fidelity of that idea. So that could be for a client, right? You could say, oh, this client wants to do this thing. Well, instead of me just being a copywriter, now I'm going to be an overall strategist for them. And I'm going to pay very close attention to the copy because I'm really good at that. So I'm going to make sure that the copy is good, but I'm going to do all these other things. So one thing is I can take what I currently do and do that in a more broad and more impactful way. There's a whole other piece of this, which is there's a woman in the AI salon. Her name's Joy Purdy, and she's a filmmaker. AI filmmaker. And she made us like a seven minute fictional movie about the AI salon. And it had a bunch of inside jokes in it, had all these people in it. And I'm watching sort of the premiere of this thing that she made for us on one of our presentation meetings. And it was really good, Michael. I'm like, wow. Like, it had sophisticated writing in it, had sophisticated cuts and edits and things like that. And we got to the end and I said, joy, this is amazing. I'm like, you've got a filmmaking background, right? And she goes, no, I've been a sleep analyst for 30 years. I was like, wait, what? And I said, how are you so good at some of the advanced storytelling things that are in here. And she goes, oh, all of my life I've had these stories that I've wanted to tell and I never had a way to do it until now. And I was like, oh, right. So part of the purpose thing is you may discover a new way to do your current work. Part of your purpose might be there's this whole other thing you've always wanted to do that now you can actually go do. And that's a remarkable revelation for me. And I get to see that again and again and again in the salon.

Okay, just give us a quick little what you mean by across domains. Because you said like learn across domains.

Learn across domains.

Yeah. Do you mean across different areas that you don't have expertise in or do you mean something different?

Yes. So there's a couple of things right now in the workplace. Liberal arts majors, generalists tend to be undervalued and specialists tend to be overvalued or not overvalued, more highly valued. I think that iceberg is literally about to flip where people that only have a single skill are going to be less valuable in a world where all the skills are democratized to people that can look across domains. So literally someone who could say, okay, the client wants to accomplish this. Here's how I'm thinking about it strategically, here's how I'm thinking about it from a business planning standard point of view. Here's how I'm thinking about it creatively, here's how. Right. Someone who can look across domains is going to be much more valuable in a world where everyone can execute in all domains to some level of proficiency. There's also the idea of a T shaped personality, I think they call it. I don't know who invented this. I'm sure it was one of the big thinky schools. But a T shirt shaped personality is you've got a specialty, right? So you've been 30 years at business consulting or whatever it might be at financial analysis. If you can also think across domains, if you can be a tastemaker and trusted across domains, you're going to be more valuable. And so the idea of playing with purpose and learning across domains is go play in those places where you know you're not good at something. And what you will discover is, oh, actually I am now. And so if I'm good at this thing that I thought I wasn't good at, I still have ideas. I can now just take those ideas and execute in this domain that I didn't think was possible. And if you do 10 of those, you're now good at 10 things instead of just one, your value goes up dramatically.

Love it. Okay, so we've been talking about this thing called Cycle of AI Readiness, and we spent a fair amount of time on the play first. Create Excellence is next. Why don't you explain a little bit more about that?

Create Excellence is. Now we're going to do some work. There's a phrase that AI detractors use a lot called AI Slop. It's just a slop. And you know, very often it's just like, if you used AI at all, they're just like, it's AI Slop. AI Slop is a real thing, right? AI Slop is I put in a prompt, it squirts out something, and I publish that to the world as if it were mine, right? Like, I just call that being lazy. Like, you could be a lazy Photoshopper. You open something, you fill it full of a color, and you publish it to the world. That. That's Photoshop slop, right? So there's a slop out there. What Create Excellence looks like is, again, center yourself. The whole idea of a daily practice using AI is that you're at the center. So what that starts to look like is you go play with purpose, you learn across domains, you've gone out and you've discovered, oh, there's some new things possible. Now for me, now I can start to think about, well, what do I want to do? And to your point, that might be, you know, what I want to do? I want to keep my flipping job. Well, what does that look like? Well, maybe what that looks like is, you know, that the company's working on some new initiative and they're looking for ideas. And in the olden timey world, three years ago, you would have actually had to go to a whiteboard and write a thing and spend a week or two to come up with maybe one idea that's well articulated. Well, Create Excellence looks like, well, wait a minute, let me take that idea. Let me go into AI. Let me generate 10 more ideas. Let me then, with my knowledge of the business, look at those 10 ideas and go, ooh, these three are really interesting. Now let me manifest those three ideas into a single, well designed deck. Let me go vibe code dashboards that bring those ideas to life. And let me go make a video in NotebookLM. That is a five minute podcast that talks about these three ideas and why they're super valuable. And then I can just take that whole little pack and just say, I Know, we're, you know, asking for ideas from employees here. Here's a little couple of things I put together. And people's faces will melt off their heads because you've taken a core idea, you've applied creative thinking to it, you've taken things because of AI to a level of execution that shouldn't be possible. Like, that's the thing. We're living in this world right now where you can literally just speak an application into existence. I don't know if you've played with lovable.dev but it is insane. You go, I want. You and I are kids of the 70s and 80s. One of my go to things with Vibe coding apps is make me a clone of the Asteroids video game from the 70s and it will just make you one and then you can just play it. We're in this remarkable time where you can just take some idea and go, huh, I think I'd like that. And then now you have that. And so Create Excellence is about having an idea, understanding the context of what you want, understanding what your values are, what the business's values are, and executing what I call a chain of craft, which is a combination of here's my ideas and here's some different AI tools that I'm going to use in a chain where I'm having this back and forth collaboration between me as the human and AI as the amplifier. And I'm going to come out the end of that chain of craft with something that is not reasonable that I should be able to do in two or three days or even two or three weeks. And that's Create Excellence is about that.

Okay, so when we were prepping for this, one of the phrases I wrote down was raise your game. And what I would like you to do is, first of all, I would imagine once you start into this daily practice routine, which is more than just a habit, Right. It's about doing actions with the idea that you are going to play so that.

With intention. Yep.

Yeah. You discover things. At a certain point, you're gonna have this epiphany where you've got a great idea, right. And you're gonna figure out how to like now go from just playing to excellence. So do you have any tips on, like, you seem to have a lot of concepts and frameworks. How do I go from play to actually excellence? Is there any kind of like steps or things we need to be thinking about?

Raise youe game is one of them. Right. Raise your game is just really that idea of if AI can so simply generate something that historically would be really good and anyone can do that. Then, then basically what happens is this. Like right now the floor for quality is down here and what AI's done is it raised the floor of quality to up here. Like everyone can now do this level of quality. That's still the floor. It's still garbage, right? It's still the bottom of the ocean.

By the way, for those listening to the podcast, his hands are. We're below his chin now they're at his eyes. Okay, keep going.

Yeah, ex. And then as always, there's some people that use the same tools we use, but they just do it better. Right. There's this woman I'm a huge fan of. Her name is Kelly Besch and it's spelled B O, E S, C H Kelly. It looks like Bosch. I think it's pronounced Besh. She makes a video a day. She's been doing it for three years. Her videos are staggeringly beautiful. And now that music generation is part of the vocabulary. Her music videos are all original music that she's created and original images that she's created in mid journey and animated, they're just beautiful. She's using the exact same tools that everyone else is using. They're just at a different level. And in her case, I think the secret of success is she just spoke at a festivus this past weekend. She said every morning between 7 and 8am she publishes a new video. She's been doing it for three years. So part of raising your game is just do more like, like Jordan's shooting free throws. He what he did 10,000 a week or a day or whatever, some crazy, you know, whatever he did, right. Just do the reputation. So. So raising your game is about having an awareness of where the bottom is and then taking your taste and, and raising it. There's another phrase that Liz Miller Gershfeld, who's the co host of the AI Salon and really brilliant woman, was a producer in the ad business for many, many years. And she talks about this idea of professionalizing your practice and professionalizing your practice looks like, well, we're not just going to use any old tool. We're going to understand what the tools are. We're even going to do things like understand what are the legal limitations of this tool versus that tool. And if I'm doing something on behalf of a client, professionalizing your practice means I'm going to understand, you know, what those limitations are. I'm going to discuss those with the client. I'm going to client to agree. We're going to use these four tools. If I use anything outside of that, I'll come back for another agreement. You know, things that are relatively small in a broader context. You're like, well, yeah, you, of course you would do that. It's not obvious that you would do that because AI is so new and shiny right now that everyone's just like, I need AI. Can I have AI? Could you give me AI? You can very, very quickly get yourself in trouble if you're not treating it as a professional. So the whole idea of creating excellence is not just letting it do things and assuming those are fine. It's about being conscious and conscientious of what it means to, to level it up. The other thing, you know, Liz is the one who inspired the, the AI Salon Mastermind practice. And, and she did this because she left a 22 year career as a producer in the ad business and just literally kind of, you know, leapt, leapt off the cliff and said, that's not working for me anymore. I think there's something over here with this AI stuff. And she just put herself in this practice. She's the one. Ultimately, it was a conversation with Liz Miller Gershfeld when she described how she learned AI. She said, well, I just kind of started out, I watched all the videos of past meetings and I was just immersing myself in this. And then I just started playing and I started playing with these tools. And then I thought, now that I've learned some things, I'm gonna, I'm gonna apply those. And then I started telling people in my life that I was doing this. So she, in a dialogue, actually described, play first, create excellence, talk to people about it. And when I looked at other people in the community that were leveling up their game, they all had this same kind of cycle. There's no done right. The minute you think you've got it figured out, everything's changed anyway. So you go back to play first and you just add new things into the mix and then you, you try a new project. And I'm starting a company. I've started Communities. I've written a musical, I've, you know, I'm writing a book. I've got all this stuff going on. Well, these are all outputs from that cycle. Just repeating that cycle over and over and over again. And it's, it's a tremendously exciting time to be a creator and to be alive, in my opinion, before we get to generously lead.

You did say chain of craft, give us a quick skinny. And what that concept is Chain of.

Craft is this idea. So again, there's, you know, you asked before, what's the big misconception about AI? There's so many misconceptions about AI. One of them is when people hear you used AI for this, what they assume, and this is even sophisticated, like journalists, what they assume is you wrote one prompt and it squirted out one output, and you published that. No professional that I know uses AI like that. I mean, maybe if you just want to do, like a joke meme.

I spent like three hours on one email with AI, and we went back and forth like 60 times.

You know, so that is a chain of craft, and a chain of craft is a combination of human activity, human input, AI output and response, and that collaboration back and forth. Very often that chain of craft is not just you and chat GPT. It might be okay, I did chatGPT for this, but then I didn't like the tone of writing, so I went to Claude, because Claude's a little better at that. And then I took that and I went to Gemini Nano Banana, and I made an infographic. And then that gave me an idea to go back to. So chain of craft is that back and forth collaboration, where your job as the human, and this is again, a phrase that Liz Miller Gershfeld uses a lot. Your job as a human to maintain the fidelity of the idea. That's our job. And that doesn't go away no matter how good AI gets. Our job is to have the idea and maintain the fidelity of the idea as we work through a chain of craft to ultimately get to a thing that Rick Rubin would say, yeah, that's a banger. Let's go with that.

All right, let's talk about generously lead. Talk to me a little bit about that concept.

Generously lead is again, this. This one came out of the behavior of the people in the community. When you're in an expansive time in history, you don't have competitors, right? AI right now, and for those listening, I'm sort of my hands are starting narrow together, and they're going up and going farther apart. We're in this expansive moment where new capabilities are possible. Like, everything's new and expanding. So people that you might think are a competitor, and historically you would say, I want to keep this idea close to my chest. They're not your competitor right now. They're just validators of your idea. Like, everyone's just a validator of everyone else's idea. We're also at a time where so much is happening. So Fast. You literally can't keep up with it. I started the AI Learning lab as a way for me personally to keep on top of everything that's happening in AI. I gave up on that about 18 months ago because I literally couldn't. You know, it's funny, Michael, there was a fair amount of shame in that that like, man, I set up this thing and I'm failing because I can't keep up. And then I realized, oh, it actually doesn't matter. But the implication of it is is that you can't keep up, you can't learn enough. And so the only way that you can understand what's happening is to be in a community of people who are also exploring this. Because when Jim Ross says, I just closed a client by sending them a song in my self storage business, that might seem obvious and just kind of like this minor moment for him, for someone else, that's going to be a revelation of that's an entirely new kind of marketing. I'd never thought of that. Right. So you get this amplification of other people's insights. The only way that can happen is if you're in a community that is generously leading. They're not sitting there with their arms crossed going, I'm the biggest expert here. There's a real vulnerability in it. It's a conscious thing. Why we say generously lead is it's like you have this idea if your instinct is, ooh, I should hold this one close. That's not generous leadership. Generous leadership is, here's my idea, here's what worked, here's what didn't. So it's putting yourself out there like that. It's putting yourself out there in the world. A lot of the feedback we hear, and this is getting noisier right now, is people in the AI salon are like, my wife doesn't want to hear about AI. My co workers are like, could we just not talk about AI this? Can we just have a dinner where you're not talking about AI? I'm like, talk about AI, like talk about it. Because at some point they're going to get laid off and they're going to come to you and say, how do you do this AI stuff? So there's that and then there's a third piece of generous leadership is asking for help. So if you're in a community that is generous and that is giving and if you're really good at stuff and you're constantly putting stuff out there, your instinct might be, well, I never want to show that I'm weak. I don't want to ask for help because that would make me look weak. What asking for help does is it gives someone else the opportunity to generously lead. And so generous leadership is this two way conversation of being around people and being willing to say, here's what worked, here's what didn't. I'm really good at this, I'm not really good at that. Because what all of that does is it establishes you as someone who is thinking critically, who has a point of view, who has taste, who understands chain of craft, that understands that AI is much more than just a vending machine. Push a button, get a, get an output. And again, like I said, one of the things that we've seen is those people that really practice generous leadership in the AI salon. They are surviving rounds, multiple rounds of layoffs. They're being invited onto AI councils. Some of them are now the head of AI strategy for their companies. I mean, it's a remarkable thing.

Kyle Shannon, first of all, thank you for providing such a clear and thoughtful framework that so many people that are listening are going to find exceptionally valuable. If people want to check out your live stream or they want to connect with you on the socials, where do you want to send them and if they want to potentially be part of your community, where should they go?

Perfect. So if you just want to see about me and some of the projects I'm working on, you can go listen to the soundtrack of my musical. Things like that, you can go to Bento Me, Kyle Shannon. It's like a link tree kind of site, but I've got a lot of my projects on there, I've got my socials on there. So you can find that you really should join the AI salon. So the AI salon is TheSalon AI and you can read about the organization, you can just say, join our community or you can go to community, the salon AI and that'll get you there. And then once you're in there, a couple of things that are important. First one is introduce yourself. There's a section right at the top. When you get into the AI salon, introduce yourself. And even if you're clueless about AI, go introduce yourself. It's a very generous community, it's a very welcoming community. They will embrace you because I promise you, everyone in that community still feels clueless because everything's changing so fast. So like no matter how good you are or bad you are, you're not as behind as you think you are. If you're thinking about this stuff, you're ahead of where most people are. And so do that. And then what I would also encourage you to do is check out the Mastermind, which is a subscription level of the AI Salon. That's where we're doing the AI Salon, the practice lab, we call it, which is a weekly meeting where people are designing this daily practice for themselves and leveling up their game and creating excellence and generously leading. So that's a group of badasses that are working, you know, collectively, but also individually to raise their game. So those are the places.

Kyle, Shannon, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today.

It was a real pleasure. I mean, great questions, by the way. Thank you. This was really, really well done on your part and I really appreciate the insights. And just you were teeing me up there, so feel like we're in, we're in good shape.

Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@socialmediaexaminer.com a91. Also, be sure to follow this show on your favorite podcasting app. And if you've been a longtime listener, would you give us a review on whatever platform you're listening on. And also let your friends know about this show. You can tag me on Facebook, LinkedIn and or X. And do check out my other show, the Social Media Marketing Podcast. This brings us to the end of the AI Explored podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may AI help you become more successful.

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