AI Agents Are About to Change Everything (Here's Why)

The day that we're recording this has been one of the craziest weeks in the world of AI. It's crazy what these tools can do.

I think by this time next year, it's not going to be about, like, the single AI agent that you're using. It's going to be like, what is your team of AIs that you manage and you're the CEO of. What is your team doing?

Hey, welcome to the Next Wave podcast. I'm Matt Wolf. I'm here with Nathan Lands. And today we've got a third co host. Today we're chatting with Don Allen Stevenson, the third nerd. He worked at DreamWorks, he's in tight with Meta, been featured on stage at meta works with OpenAI, given TED talks. He's an author of a book, Make a Seat. He's done some amazing stuff in the AI world. He's basically an AI wizard. And today he's going to chat with us and break down some of his AI wizard spells. On this show. We're going to talk AI agents, we're going to talk AI workflows, going to break it all down. Let's just go ahead and jump right in with Don Allen Stevenson.

So really excited to dig in and. And thanks so much for hanging out with us today. Out in where? You're out in San Francisco at the Masters of Scale Summit. So, yeah, yeah, this is a first. This is the first time we've chatted with somebody while they're hanging out outside of a conference. Oh, first time we've had a conversation with somebody hanging out outside. So cool. Kind of a different fun feel to it. But how are you doing?

Oh, I'm doing great. Yeah, it's a. It's a really fun atmosphere right now. They have a lot of people in different tech spaces coming together. Reid. Reid Hoffman hosts this every couple of years to kind of bring a lot of minds together and talk about stuff. And so, yeah, I'm here to take notes and observe and report stuff on online.

Amazing. Amazing. Well, we're going to get into a lot of the sort of current happenings in the AI world. The day that we're recording this has been one of the craziest weeks in the world of AI. Anthropic released autonomous agent functionality. Mid Journey, released some stuff. Runway released some stuff. Ideogram, Mid Journey, all of these companies dropped some really, really cool new features. We're going to get into all of that, but I think before we do, let's kind of get to know you a little bit. I know your background is in visual effects at DreamWorks. Would you mind breaking it down real quick? You know, how, what were you doing before this and how you got to doing what you're doing right now?

Yeah, so before I was doing all the independent content creation stuff that I do now. I was a teacher, specialist trainer at DreamWorks. So I taught all of our software. I worked on how to train your Dragon and boss baby and trolls. My job was to teach our artists how to leverage both the proprietary and the third party software that we've used to make the films. I loved it, but I decided to resign because I wasn't too thrilled with some of the direction, some of the technology was going internally and I thought it might be easier to innovate and future proof outside of the studio. I still love my friends and, you know, family, you know, at DreamWorks, but I found that I was easier to do some innovation stuff outside of that. And yeah, now I do a lot of content creation writing books, use AI. I taught, you know, trained in AI to interview me and then had that helped me write some books, do a master class on creativity and AI and then consulting. I don't know, it just kind of changes every day. Just depends on who's, who's asking. I'll just change the hat.

So some of, some of my favorite stuff that I've seen from you on Instagram is when you kind of get like theoretical, right? You start using your phone and going, this is what could be right? Like you'll be walking around in a grocery store and maybe you pick up a box of cereal and point your phone or look at it with your glasses or something, right? And it'll start pulling up all this information and stuff flashing on the screen. And from what we've seen in the world of AI, it looks like stuff that we might have right now, but it's all sort of conceptual and theoretical and you're playing with it. And I just love those videos that you make on Instagram. I'm curious where, like, where does, where does that like, inspiration come from? Like, where, where do all these like really cool sort of futuristic ideas that you shoot videos around come from?

Yeah, believe it or not, I mean, a lot of that inspiration comes out of a response of the show Black Mirror. I was watching the show and I, you know, I like it, but at the same time I've just been noticing it's been giving people very little hope for the future and I'm kind of tired of that. So I started that series called Clear Mirror to do the opposite of black mirror. And instead of calling it white mirror, I call it clear mirror. Because I want to have a more transparent relationship with technology. It's not just a dark opaque system that you can't look into or assess or observe. And so, yeah, I really just wanted to have more positive use cases, more positive stories to tell. And the result is these fun little videos out. I often shoot them with these glasses and then add VFX onto them afterwards because to your same point, I think we're going to have a lot of that stuff like now, you know, like, it's not, they're not that far. They used to be so far in the future. And now people are like, oh yeah, that's pretty normal. I'm like, wow, damn, time's zipping by.

Yeah, yeah, sometimes I'll just scroll by the video and I'll just see it on mute, right? Like I'll just be scrolling Instagram. I'll see it on mute. And at first I'm usually thinking that these days, oh, that's a real thing. That's, that obviously exists. And then I'll watch the video and go, oh no, this is one of those like concepts that he's playing with. But I mean it feels like the, the really getting closer and closer together, right? Those like theoretical sci fi things are starting to feel more and more real and it's hard to. Hard, harder and harder to tell. Like, is, is that actually something we can do? Because I mean, looking at those Orion glasses that we got to see, you know, a few weeks ago, a lot of this stuff you were showing off, like those glasses do, like, it's pretty crazy.

100%. Yeah. I mean like on the Orion's like, you know, they got down the form factor. They, they track well. You can, you can have, you can talk to AI characters you can talk to in person. Avatars that are both either a stylized version or a photorealistic version. So it's like, oh, that, that exists now. It's not, that's not sci fi. That's a real thing. Whether it's, you know, ready for consumer adoption still, still to come. But at the same time it's not, it's not fantasy anymore.

Yeah, yeah. So anybody that's like listening to the audio that might not be watching the video, you're wearing the meta Ray Ban sunglasses. We've talked about them a lot on this, on this show. I'm, I'm a fan of them. But you mentioned that you managed to like hack them and run chat GPT I'm curious, is that like, is that a really hard process to do? Is that something you can share? Like, how does that actually work?

Yeah. So I full disclosure, I told Meta about this, so they know that. That. And I was like, hey, what are you going to do about it? And they're like, well, they actually thought it was kind of cool, but maybe, you know, they didn't. Like, they're like, why not just use their AI? But yeah, in general it is pretty friendly to do. I can't code at all. So how I did it was I've had it for about a year, by the way. And I got chat. I just asked ChatGPT how to do it.

And ChatGPT 4. Not even 4. Oh, not even the reasoning. Not the 01 open the. It was the old one, ChatGPT 4. And what I asked it was like, hey, I have an API key to, you know, chatgpt with voice and I have the Apple Siri shortcuts built onto my iPhone. Is there a way that you can give me step by step instructions that would allow me, someone who cannot code, to understand how to plug and play in Apple Siri shortcuts to get a thing where if I hit the action button on my Apple watch or if I hit the action button on the iPhone 15 or 16 to trigger voice back and forth conversational mode with ChatGPT. But on the Ray Ban glasses, I would say it's not too hard to set up, but maybe it's a few weird steps. It's kind of like built in now. So I think now you probably don't even have to do the whole shortcuts thing. I think ChatGPT recently released a widget that does that. And I was like, oh my God, that's a thing. But before the widget, you could do it with the action button. And then, yeah, it triggers the voice mode. And the main use case was just more conversational. You know, you can talk back and forth and have. And you can interrupt it. And it was when it had the model that sounded kind of like Scarlett Johansson is when I was using it. And I loved having that. I was like, wow, her is real. I have Samantha on the glasses. And then they, you know, canceled the sound alike person. And then now I lost that voice. But hey, it was great while it lasted.

Yeah.

Which voice are you using now?

The British sounding one I thought was kind of fun. I don't know the character's name.

That one's cool. Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

That's awesome. I appreciate you sharing that with us. I mean, it's crazy what these tools can do, like Claude and ChatGPT where you can just like I built a whole video game using ChatGPT once, just going back and forth saying, uh, this is what I'm trying to make. And then when there was an error, I would just go back and say, I don't know how to code. So what's this error and how do I fix it? It would tell me how to fix it and then, I mean it. It took me several hours to get to where I wanted to go, but still, several hours to develop a game is a lot better than the old fashioned way, 100%.

And do you have a coding background?

I don't. I mean I know how, I know how to do HTML and build websites, but that's about the extent of it.

Yeah, I mean that says everything right there. It's like you can have a game in a couple hours with today's tools. That was not a normal thing even like six months ago.

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Well, you know, speaking of, of Claude, they just rolled out a new feature and now I just want to kind of get into like all of these news stories that came out. We can all just sort of like riff on our thoughts and where this is all headed. But you know, as of this recording, Claude just released a brand new feature called, I think they called it Computer Use.

Which Computer Use?

Not my favorite, like naming convention for it, but like Anthropic just released Computer Use, right. And I actually went and tested it yesterday and it was pretty cool. It ran into some issues. I ran into like rate limit issues where it would go through a whole bunch of steps and then it would say, oh, you've run into a rate limit and it wouldn't continue for me. And I ran into some stuff like that but it was really, really interesting to actually watch it. Go and like open up Firefox for you, go move the mouse to the command bar, type in a search for you. And then once it searches, basically I gave it the prompt. Go to Matt Wolf's YouTube channel, find the top five most popular videos and tell me how long they were all published, how long ago they were all published, and then add them to a spreadsheet for me. And it actually managed to go through every single one of the steps. Go to my YouTube, click on popular, sort by popular, grab the title copy, paste it into a spreadsheet, and it filled out a spreadsheet of the top five most popular videos. Now, if I'm being honest, I could have done that process myself, you know, four times as fast. But the implications I think are really, really cool, that I could just give it a command, this is what I need you to do now. Go off and do it. And I could walk away from my computer and it'll just go through all the steps until it completes the thing, but. Pretty crazy. Have you played with it at all yet?

I actually haven't. There's been so much stuff. I've been reviewing it and watching videos on it. But I mean, I think by this time next year, it's not going to be about the single AI agent that you're using. It's going to be like, what is your team of AIs that you manage and you're the CEO of, what is your team doing? And you're going to be like, oh, I'm Matt and my team does all these things. You'll have all these agentic properties. I'm excited for that. It's gonna get weird though, because we'll be like, wow, Remember when it was so slow way back in 2024, things were so slow. All pre agents days.

Yeah.

You had to do work on your computer. You actually had to use the computer to do work.

Yeah, I know this might seem like an obscure reference, but you know Wall E, do you watch the Wall E movie? Do you remember the captain in the movie Wall E? Yeah, yeah, yes, that. Yes, that gentleman. Do you know his main issue was that he was like the only person on earth of the humans that could still read. And he had the reading level of maybe like a fifth or a four or five year old. And it just made me think like maybe down the road in a more negative light, we might be returning to that where we're like, we lose some of our, you know, if I. If we have so many AI agents doing every single task. We might forget some of that basic stuff. Like, oh, remember when I have to, like, he tries to open up a book by voice commanding it. He's out of nowhere open. And then. That's a black. That's a black mirror, right?

That's a black mirror.

Yeah.

Let's stay on the clear mirror.

Sorry, my apologies.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I, I feel like this technology too though, could like be teaching everyone to read better and things like that. Like, you know, maybe spend less time on the computer and more time in the real world, the physical world as well.

So, yeah, I feel like there's like almost two potential paths, right? There's going to be people who use AI and they get way lazier as a result, right? They're like, oh, this does all my work for me. I'm just going to let it do everything. I'm going to go and smoke weed and play video games, right? Like there's going to be that sort of sector of people. But then the way, like, ever since AI has sort of bubbled up over the last three years for me, it's made me go way deeper on stuff, right? Like, it's made me go, oh, this is really interesting. I want to dive deeper. I'm going to go to Perplexity and have Perplexity dig into all these resources for me and do some research and I'm gonna learn more about it. I'm gonna go to archive.org and some of these, like white papers that these people put out that I tried to read in the past, but like, oh yeah, once it starts putting like letters into the algorithms and different symbols that I don't even recognize, these papers are over my head. But I can now pull them into Notebook LM and have Notebook LM give me a podcast that explains it to me. Perfect, right? So I think, I feel like there's those two potential paths.

The.

I'm gonna get way lazier as a result or I'm gonna use this to really up level, you know, I thank you for that.

Kind of remind me of the Queer Mirror. You're right. Like, I, I will not go down that route here. It's, it's very positive. Um, you know, you can have like, I would love to have an AI agent that I build. Like, one of the first thing I'm gonna try to do with, with computer use is get a little AI to be my professional critic and email me how it feels about my content. I've been training a critic based off of all the best critical Feedback I've gotten online over the years. I've been collecting it anyway on like a Google Doc. And they're all feedback source. Not like haters, but like comments that hurt me because they were right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I was like, oh, dang. So, yeah, like, I'm at. I'm going to. Basically, I would love to have Claude use periodically check my content and then inform me on things like, hey, you're not this about this. You know, just get like that nice formal critique where it's like a thoughtful, actionable thing.

Yeah. When it comes to these. These AI agents, you know, I want to go back to something you said where you're almost like the CEO and you have like a bunch of agents underneath you. And I love that idea of, like, from a YouTuber perspective. Right. Like, I would love to be able to use one of these agents and say, all right, here's the transcript from a video I'm about to publish. Take this transcript and, you know, write a title for me. But to write a title, go do some research on YouTube and find out what style of title is working really, really well right now. Based on what you find, give me 10 potential titles. That's AI agent number one. AI agent number two. I need a good thumbnail for this video. Go look on YouTube, find the thumbnails that are performing the best, take some screenshots of them, and analyze what works really well for thumbnails right now. Come back, give me some ideas for a thumbnail. Give me, like 10 ideas. I'll pick from those 10. And then once I pick one, you go and make that thumbnail for me. Right. And now it's just like, I made the video, I give it the transcript, and it, you know, like, I'm the producer role, and all the little roles under me know exactly what they're supposed to go do to complete the rest of the process. And that, to me, is like such an exciting world because it's like, it's not really taking away a lot of the creative tasks that I enjoy doing. It's taking away more the monotonous tasks that I don't enjoy doing.

You know, I feel like this world has been coming for a while and it's. It's refreshing. Like, you know, any of you Harry Potter fans or watch any of the Harry Potter movies?

Oh, yeah.

So do you remember in the last movie when Dumbledore walks up to all the paintings and gives them a series of complicated tasks to secure the castle, and then the character in the painting left the frame Went into the wall and basically did autonomous things around the castle, like setting up shields, notifying the right people. That's what I think we're going to be all having, like that fantasy, that magic of talk to the painting. The painting will go do something on your behalf. That's like, here, now. And I'm excited for everyone to have magic.

Yeah, that's such a good analogy. Yeah. My wife's a huge Harry Potter fan. I've seen them all. I wouldn't say that I'm like the biggest Harry Potter fan, but I've seen them all because my wife and kids all watch them. So I've seen them all at least three times. But no, that's a. That's a great little analogy, a great picture of, of what's happening here. And I mean, to me, that's. That's a super exciting world. And I think it's going to get to a point too where you have the agent that is also like the CEO or producer who is like going and telling each of these other agents to go do their role. Right. I think you're going to have like multi. Multiple levels. Right. Where you just train your CEO and then the CEO agent goes and tells the other agents what to do.

Yeah, it's like sci fi and fantasy have like, combined now. Like, these were things that were really sci fi. Like, remember that magical feeling of like seeing a painting talk and interact and like the fact that it could hear you, it could hear the characters, the fictional characters. That's like. We have that now. And if we add a, you know, some of the other tools I know we'll talk about like AI Studio or sorry, not AI Act One. You could almost build that actual painting character. And it's actually. It would look that way. So we could. We could take it the whole mile.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's kind of shocking to me, like, how fast humans adjust. All of this. Like this stuff is purely magic. Like, if you really think about. If you step back and look at it, it is magical and people just get used to it. Like after a day it's like, yeah, of course it does that.

Right?

What do you know?

It's like, what?

Yeah, it's funny. It's funny you say that because I recently. I mean, I actually read it several years ago, but I recently reread it. There's a obscure book called off to be the Wizard. I don't know if any of you have ever heard of it.

Oh, wow.

No, but it's about this kid who. He opens up his computer one day and he finds this like mysterious file on his computer. And he starts looking through this file and realizes that he can like tweak things and it actually tweaked things in real life, right. So he would like, he found like his bank account and the number that was in his bank account and he added an extra zero. And then he logged into his bank account, there was an extra zero there. Right. And so he figured out how to like tweak the real world by tweaking the code. But then what he, but then like the feds caught on to him and said, this guy's obviously doing something illegal. How does he have all this money? Like, I don't know how he did it, but there's something weird going on. And so he decides I'm going to travel back in time. So he goes back in time to the medieval age, but he goes back with his iPhone and all of his computer devices and all that kind of stuff. And he convinces everybody in medieval times that he's a wizard. But all he's really doing is using today's technology, but he has it back in medieval time. And that's the whole premise of the book. And it's amazing book. Such a fun, fun read. But it's like that's what, what we're seeing right now. It's like if you went back a hundred years ago and chatgpt boys sunglasses and started having a conversation with them, people would think you were a freaking wizard.

Sorcery. Yeah. Like what? That power that they have. I feel like we've been using technology to kind of anthropomorphize and create almost every Greek God. Do you remember Hermes? He was the messenger God. And his magical power was like sending a message instantly across vast distances. Now it's like you get a phone call and you're like, I don't want to answer it.

That was a godlike power in earlier, you know, belief systems. Like I just think that's so interesting to your point that you made, you know, Nathan around how quickly we get used to things that was, that was the land of gods and goddesses and then now it's like declinable.

Yeah, yeah. One thing I see coming too is like these sort of multi steps, tool use things are probably coming to like the meta ray bans pretty soon as well. Right. Like it's probably only a matter of time. I mean you probably even have more insight than we do on this. But it's probably only a matter of time where you just like look at something with your glasses, and then say, oh, that's a cool backpack. Go buy that for me on Amazon. Right? And then, like, you know, you get an email confirming that this was purchased on Amazon, and it's sitting on your door the next day, right? Like, combine the glasses with the ability to go do the shopping for you, and it's like, anything you see in the real world, I want that. Okay, I'll go get it for you. Right?

Like, that's coming as well. I think I even seen, like. Well, I haven't seen a live example of this, but it's a theory I have that a lot of the next generation of ads are going to be for AIs to see. And then that AI knows you've given it. Some allow some allowance, some permissions, even, like, an allowance, like, hey, you're allowed to spend up to this amount per month on what you know about me, what I've approved. And then the ad that that AI is going to see is going to hit your AI that's trained on your preferences, and it will go make that purchase. And then it just seems like it magically appears on your doorstep.

Yep, yep, I could see that. Well, let's. Let's talk about some of this other really cool stuff, because you obviously have a background in, like, visual effects that DreamWorks and stuff like that. And we just got to see this Runway take one, which, if you're listening and you haven't heard of Runway take one, it's this new feature. I. I believe they're rolling it out. I don't have it in my account yet. I believe it's, like, rolling out fairly soon, though. But it's a feature where you can take a video and sort of record yourself on video, feed it to this Runway act one, and then it will make, like, a cartoon animation, and it will be lip sync to you, and it will follow the same emotion. So, like, if you look happy, if you're laughing, if you're sad, if you're angry, those emotions theoretically will show up on the face of this cartoon character based on the emotions that you had in your original video. And I'm just curious your thoughts, because I know, you know, coming from a background of, like, visual effects and Hollywood and all of that kind of stuff, I know there's, like, fear around a lot of these tools, too. So, like, what are your initial thoughts on it? The people that you do know that are working in video, in Hollywood, like, what is the general consensus? Are people excited about stuff like this? Are people really fearful about stuff like this. Like, where do your thoughts lie with this?

So it really comes down to two words. Generalists versus specialists. My generalist friends are thrilled. They're like, this is so exciting. This is all great. Like, they're already generalists and this is just another tool that they can add that will enhance what they're doing. My specialist friends, specifically the ones I trained, are thrilled because their specialist skills were like facial rigging. Like, that's a whole job at Dreamworks and Pixar and Illumination film. Someone who rigs a 3D puppet to allow it to emote and to like, create all those faces. So, like, if you're a specialist in the animation and film world right now, you're not thrilled with a lot of these AI developments. In fact, you're, you're scared and angry. But if you're a generalist, you're like, oh, my goodness. And then another framework is size of studio. So the larger studios are more specialists and the smaller studios have more generalists as artists. So you're going to see smaller, smaller studios, smaller animation films, teams, companies. Small studios are going to adopt a lot of these tools because they already are wearing all the hats. The larger studios are not going to want to adopt these tools because they have mostly specialists. So they're not, they're not going to. They don't want to scare all their talent away. They will replace their talent when they can.

Yeah. So, I mean, being somebody that, you know, you've kind of had your foot in both worlds, like the, you know, the video production world as well as the AI world, Like, do you have advice for the people that are scared? Like, what, what kind of stuff do you tell the ones that are, are sort of freaking out? Maybe more of the specialist.

Yeah. Right now the main advice I give to, like, my fellow specialist friends that have deep skills is they have to start actually using these tools. They can't just ignore it anymore. Unless they only want their skill to be a hobby there. If they just want it to be a hobby, then don't change a thing. But if their idea is, you know, you want to also have a career in this thing, you cannot, like, roll your eyes at the latest AI update anymore. That's, I mean, that's like, that's what's been my advice. The other one is they could, you know, double down or triple down on purely human generated content. Like, they can go like the craftsman, artisanal Etsy. I also recommend that to some artists that are really anti the AI stuff. If they go down that route, they have to basically increase their prices dramatically. It has to be a luxury product. It's not. If their idea is like, oh, I want to make my artwork and my film really accessible to lots of people and I'm going to make it from scratch by hand. The only people that I believe are going to be able to afford that are high end luxury clients. So it's like if they want for a general audience, they might have to use AI tools now. And they can't just be like, oh, no.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. From what you've seen, how close do you think we are to these tools being able to completely replaced like riggers and things like that.

It depends because like, I used to. Well, I used to think that there was a threshold of quality that was required to be met. I don't believe in that anymore because I've learned that quality content is relative. There's some people who find that skippity poop.

Me that has. Or animation. There's a lot of. There's a certain audience that actually finds that to be quality animation and quality content. And the rigs on those things are terrible. The rigs, you know, the way that the mouth blends and there's like this, you know, the rig is terrible. And if you showed that to an artist at Pixar or Disney or DreamWorks, they would say, that's a terrible rig. No one's going to watch that. But then they do. So I think you can use a lot of these tools today. Like a creative person can use these tools to tell stories and provide value today. Because I think value is subjective. I don't. And I get, I get a lot of anger online from saying that. Some my, my more film and specialist friends want to say that value is not relative, that there's a difference between quality content and. I kind of disagree with them, unfortunately.

Yeah, yeah, I can see that. I mean, I look back like 20 years ago, right? And I was. The videos that were going viral 20 years ago on the Internet were like silly stick figure videos of, you know, like stick figure death videos of, you know, stick figures falling off cliffs and then like sort of splatting and had sort of cartoony blood and stuff like that. But they were like the most basic looking animations and those were the videos that everybody was looking at that were going viral because they were humorous, they had some sort of story and there was comedy and the, the sort of like visual aspect of it was sort of the last priority of it. Right. But people love that stuff and they would go viral and you Know, there's examples of stuff like that today. Right. There's. You can find YouTube channels that are. I mean, south park.

Right.

Like, look at South Park. It's like fairly crude looking construction paper animation. And it's still one of the most popular comedy shows today.

Yeah. I mean, just to add to that same point, the type of animation that we do at a lot of animation studios called an animatic. And for those that are half familiar, it's a really rough pass of an animation that gets its story down. But the actual display and the actual audio that you're hearing is usually temporary or in flux or being changed out a lot. And my proof that I hope more big studios actually listen to is that we would do audience testing for films with just the animatics where basically no shot is done and they're all at different stages. Some stuff is fully rendered in 3D, some stuff is just hand sketched, some stuff is basically a early comic. But when you see the audience reacting to it, they love the story. They're laughing at the right times, they're responding. I wish more DreamWorks artists, Disney artists and film TV in general. Film in general acknowledged an animatic can actually work on its own. Like there's certain situations where you might not need to spend $300 million on rendering to tell that same story that the audience loved. They loved the story, especially when there's like a lot of talent behind it. And that was very eye opening. We had like a whole. We brought like a big elementary school once to do an early screening of how to train a Dragon 3. And it was only an animatic form. And the, the kids loved it. They like were laughing and cracking up and the shots would be like stick figures at times, like rough sketches, and then other times would be a fully 3D rendered model. And I'm sitting there thinking, like, don't they know that it's like not done? Like the film's not done yet. How do they enjoy it so much? It didn't matter.

Yeah. It feels like all of this really levels the playing field. And I think it's going to allow so many new kinds of films to be created. Right. Because I spent a little bit of time in Hollywood, so I was partners with Barry Osborne, the producer of Lord of the Rings and the Matrix. Spent about a year and a half trying, trying to create a movie studio together. Like this crazy scenario where like we had a friend who was early crypto investor and he was going to help fund things and pulled together capital. And so I Spent like a year and a half, like, going out to New Zealand, going out to Hollywood, meeting all these people, and. And he would take me on like a. Like a Disney movie set and had all these different heads of departments tell me what their job was and explain everything to me and answer any questions.

And.

And I was just, you know, it was shocking how much money all this cost, like. Like to make a film. Now. Like, there's. When they created. When they greenlight a film, it's almost. It's almost always a sequel or something like that, right? Because. Or based on some existing IP that people love because it costs $300 million to make. Right. You can't take any creative risk. $300 million.

Right.

Or very little. And so, you know, with this kind of technology, you'll start getting the cost of films possibly down to millions or tens of millions, and then you can take a lot more risk and you'll see new kinds of stories emerge that would have never happened before. So that's what I'm, you know, as a. As a consumer, very excited about this. He, like, actually new stuff that's not just a sequel of a sequel or based on some book that I never read or.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it totally democratizes. I know that's a buzzword, but it totally democratizes, like, video creation. Right. Like, there's so many people out there that are probably amazing storytellers but have, like, no skills in visual effects.

Right.

Well, now this stuff is allowing them to at least roughly tell their story in some way. Right. And to me, that's. That's what's exciting as well. Right? Because I've never been very technical when it comes to a lot of, like. Like, I don't know how to use after effects very well. I don't know how to use any of the, like, blender or any of the, like, 3D animation tools or any of that kind of stuff. I think I can tell good stories. I think I can make decent music. And if I want to put video over it, I now have options to sort of do something with the video portion of it where I never felt like I had the skills to be able to do that before. You know, are my videos going to look as good as somebody who's been doing it in Hollywood for the last 30 years? No, but I can. I could get something out into the world that prior I wasn't ever able to get out into the world. And to me, that's what's most exciting about it. One thing, Don, one thing I wanted to ask And I don't know if this is stuff that you're allowed to share, so if you can't, just don't worry about it. We'll skip past it. But you're one of the few people that I know that actually has been able to use Sora already. I'm curious if you're able to share any of your experiences actually getting to use Sora.

Nothing I can share yet.

Yeah, no worries.

Had to ask. When I can, I will share a lot.

Very cool. What about. What about Meta? So we saw you and I were both at the Meta Connect event this year. We both got to see the Orion glasses and all of the stuff they've been working on. One of the coolest things I saw on Instagram was your first person view of you walking out onto stage and shaking hands with Mark Zuckerberg. I'm like, there is literally no better use case for these meta Ray Ban glasses than showing yourself walking out on stage in front of a huge audience and shaking hands with Zuckerberg. Like, literally, that is the ultimate use case for those glasses right now. But I'm curious, like, how did, how did that whole thing come about? How did you know? I know you're one of the first people who's used the AI. What's the feature called, where it's like an AI version of yourself that people can go and chat with. You're one of the first people that's gotten to use that. How did that all come about?

Yeah, so two stories there. So that AI product is called Creator AI and is part of AI studio within Meta. They have the ability to allow creators to build a custom AI model that's trained on your social media data that you consent to. So I could check a list of what things it's allowed to learn from and train from. And then it's added into its knowledge graph. Kind of similar to building a custom GPT, if that GPT updated on the fly based off of how I use social media. So if I post a thread tomorrow, that will be part of its brain, if I leave a really long comment replying to an answer to a common question that's also now added to its brain. So it really speaks and communicates very much like me. When it came to filming with the. The Ray Bans and, and, and shaking Mark. Mark's, you know, hand on stage, I actually did not get permission to film that or to share that. Um, I decided I thought this would be a really appropriate thing, but I was nervous they were gonna say no if I asked So I just was like, I'm gonna film this and I'm gonna share it. And I shared it right when I got onto a plane, it was posted. I didn't see any feedback for several hours. And I was like, I'm either gonna get a lot of anger when I land or a lot of joy. And then there was a lot of joy. They're like, this is a great use. I was like, yeah, the. The idea there was like. You know, they talk about the. The advantages of that kind of form factor. I've been using their Ray Ban glasses, I think, since 2021, with their first versions that back then was called the Ray Ban Stories. And I like them because it's like a less distract, you know, less distracted viewing experience, less distracted capturing experience. Believe it or not, the old versions of these glasses, when I proposed to my wife, I wore the glasses while I proposed to her and, like, got her. Got her. Got my first person view of her response saying, yes, thank goodness.

I mean, to be fair, it probably would have gone viral either way, so.

Right. But, yeah, there's certain moments from. Okay, this makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't. It would have been really inappropriate for me to pull out my phone when I was proposing to her and, like, put the phone in front of us. Like, what do you. What. What's your answer to this? You know, it just, like, glasses, and they were the transparent ones, so they weren't the shades. My eyes. You know, we were looking at each other's eyes. We could still capture that memory. Um, and then, yeah, the. The reason why META reached out for me for those products is I sh. It's those concept videos, believe it or not. It's. I. I make those theoretical concept videos, I post them on Instagram of what I want to see out in the world, and I try to do the opposite of the show Black Mirror. And, you know, a lot of people will try to tie their technologies to more dystopias. And then I'm, like, actively not doing that. I'm trying to come up with creative, positive uses so they see that consistently. And I was just doing it, you know, on my own, that they're like, wait, maybe if we, like, support him, maybe he can do this more. And it's been. They have. So I'm like, oh, great, I can tell more positive stories and I'll use your tech to do it.

Super cool. Well, there's one last, like, gadget I want to ask you about, because you mentioned it before we hit record. You're wearing like the little plod thing, right. It's basically, it's a device that sort of records all day long and kind of keeps notes for you. Right. Is that.

Yeah, this is the plod AI notepen. It has a magnetic back. You can, you know, wear it like a lapel on your shirt, like a button. It also comes with like a necklace, so you could wear it as a necklace. And it also has like a wrist worn interface so it looks like a watch and you can kind of wear it there. So. And a clip, they have like a magnetic clip so you can like pin it onto a bag or something. But yeah, what it does, if it takes a listen and summarizes your day, you get a nice transcript out of whatever you record. And then their tool actually then summarized it and organize it based off of some templates so you can make it for meetings, make it for, you know, conferences, make it for, you know, random tasks. And it'll reorganize that transcript and give you a nice summary. I love it. It's useful. And they have a, they have a.

Card version as well. Yeah. So if you're just like at a conference all day long, you can just wear it. It will take notes on everything you see.

Perfect for conferences. So right now I'm at the Masters of Scale conference and all these speakers, I can't actually process how much information they're sharing. It's a lie. So you turn on the plot AI note pin and I can trust that it's going to ingest all of this and then give me a transcript. And if you're not pleased with the summary that it makes you have that transcript, copy it, paste it into your language, you know, your large language model of choice, and then say, you know, what was like the three biggest takeaways today? And it does a great job at quickly and instantly giving you the three best takeaways. And if you don't like them, you can say, well, actually any others you know, and like you could just have a regular conversation. It's like having a journalist or an assistant with you who can just document your day. And you know, that's super helpful if you're a content creator and you are trying to ingest a lot of things. I can't research all this stuff, but I can help, you know, alleviate that. And I can review it saves you.

From having to carry a notepad around and take notes all day too, which for me, I love that. So it seems like you're like a pretty big gadget guy. I love gadgets. I'VE got like pretty much every AI gadget that's come across. I've got it. I've got the rabbit, I've got the plot, I've got the compass, I've got the. I've got like all the things. The plot is actually on the way. I don't have it yet, but I got a notification that it shipped like a couple days ago. But are there any other, like really, really cool gadgets that you're that like more people should know about?

It's the. Actually I'm wearing it right now. For those that don't see it. It's the Hollyland Lark M2 microphone. I recommend it because two reasons. One, it's got AI noise canceling built right in. So. And it comes with two lapels so you can like have two people do an interview. And it's very good quality sounding mic. And then let me just adjust it. Yeah. And then the other thing ON that is iOS 18 on iPhone now has a new voice memo feature that has.

And now I'm sitting here like wick, do I still need to use my plod for everything? If I could just have that right. In the voice memos app. And it saves your transcript right alongside the audio file and then searchable. So you can just search in text. Your audio file. It looks for the word and then it plays the word. It's like a, like a, you know, like lyrics videos where like the word pops up and you hear this, the lyric. It does that in the freaking built in iPhone and iPad and, and Mac. I think in all. All iOS 18 devices can do that now sitting there like, oh, shoot. Okay.

Huh.

So right now I'm kind of using them both for note taking.

That's.

But we'll see which one's best.

You could compare notes to pull them both into a large language model later and be like, hey, what did this one find that this one didn't find? What did this hear that this one didn't?

Audio quality is different. You know, the plaid one is not for your audio quality. It's a very low quality mic. Just. It's high enough to get the details of what happened, but not high enough that you'd use it professionally for audio. Whereas the, the, the, the Hollyland Lark M2, you could actually use that audio as well as, you know, you use it as a tool for capturing the data.

Right, Right. I imagine the plod's probably like optimized for battery life because they expect people to just have it on all day long. Right. Where the other One that's probably more designed to be turned on and turned off as you.

Yeah. And another AI device I recommend, I'm using it right now for my tripod. It's the, the Insta360 Flow Pro.

It's nice. I have it attached to my iPhone right now, and it's a robotic arm that can actually do person tracking. And so I'm making a lot of content on the go. And it's like having a kind of a camera operator with me wherever I go. And then it folds out three legs. So it's also a tripod. It has an extending neck so it looks like a selfie stick. And with the tap of a button, you can orient it as horizontal content or vertical content.

It kicks butt. So. And if everything fits in this tiny little bag that I carry with me.

Somebody should just make like a. Somebody should just make a bag like a, like a fanny pack type bag, where the whole bag is just like a wireless charger. And anything you throw in the bag, it just charges it up. Somebody should make that listeners do it.

Please, I mean, tag us. I would like that product.

I think, I think we covered a lot of ground on this one. I know you're at a conference and probably anxious to, to get back in and hear what everybody's talking about. Is there any place that people should go and check you out? I know Insta. Instagram. You post a lot of amazing videos and some of these concepts over there. Shout out your Instagram account.

Yeah, Instagram is my go to. I do a lot of live streams. I share a lot of stuff on threads, a lot of reels. So it's, it's at D O N A L L E N I I I I am Don Allen Stevenson III by. Go by Don Allen III on Instagram and, and Twitter. But, but yeah, just Don Allen I, I, I.

And you have a new book. I've got it in my hand here. Make a seat. Quick, quick. Elevator pitch. 30 seconds. What. What's the book about? Why do people want it?

So I talk about how I get all. How I make opportunities for myself. The whole idea of making a seat is how do you make opportunities? And I use a lot of AI to do that now. So I decided to kind of write a book in three parts. How to discover opportunities with AI, how to leverage technology like AI. And then also how do you build resilience? There's a lot of change that's about to happen and I figured, let me share a bunch of my life stories and tools and techniques. And put it all into a book. I train an AI to interview me and then a separate AI to organize that into chapters and a third AI to organize the chapters into a book written in two months. It's about 30,000 words and I stand by it.

Very cool. So it's a book co written by Don Allen Stevenson III and a very much so.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for, you know, taking time out of the Masters of Scale event to come chat with us. This has been so much fun. Always a blast nerding out with you about AI and tech and gadgets and stuff. So once again, thanks so much for joining us today. Really, really appreciate it. It's been fun.

Likewise. And thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. This is so much fun. And yeah, all the stuff that you do inspires me. I reference your work all the time and it's just like, it's so cool that we can be even bumping into the same circles over and over again.

Absolutely. Appreciate it, man. Good talking to you.

All right, thank you.