Big Leap EP #30 - How to Use Artificial Intelligence to Enhance your Creativity and Income

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Welcome to another episode of the Big Leap Podcast. My name is Mike Koenigs. I'm here today with Gay Hendricks, and this is about virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and how you can be a better augmented human. Why is that important? Well, I think Gay will give you a couple ideas because you learned a lot in this episode.

I've always been really interested in what can get the deepest message out to the most people in the most interesting way. And this area fascinates me. The whole idea of how we can use virtual reality and how AI can help us connect better as human beings. And I often describe Mike as the smartest guy I know in this area. And so here I play a lot of question guy, and Mike comes up with some answers that will just amaze you about how to use these new tools in order to make your work better, make yourself more accessible, and create a kind of experience for people that just doesn't exist yet. So it's really fascinating stuff.

All right, thank you for that, Gay. And the other thing we're going to talk about is how we're using virtual reality in our business, in our life, and something that we're doing right now and how you can participate in it, too. So look for that and more in this episode of the Big Leap.

All right, today, Gay and I are going to give you a big peek into the future, and we're going to talk about artificial intelligence, AI, and why that's so important to you and how it can be used actually enhance your creativity and your income and your potential by thinking differently. So in this one, Gay is going to be a bit more of the student in this particular episode because it's not exactly his cup of tea. But I've been exploring spending a ton of time in this space lately. I'm really fascinated by it, and it is really changing the way I think about life, society, creativity, work, business, and money. So, Gay, here we are.

Well, I've always been interested since way back in how we can use technology to deliver the message to more and more people. And it's important, of course, to keep the human element of it. I remember when I was even a graduate student and they were kind of, my professors were asking me, okay, do you intend to be a university professor or do you intend to be a private practice clinical psychologist? And I was saying, well, I'm sort of more leaning toward being a professor, which I ended up doing for 21 years, but I'm looking at something different, and that is, how can we use technology to bring. Get more messages out to more people. And at the time, things like BBS and cable TV were just getting underway. And so I became one of the first people to teach a psychology course on cable tv. And I loved it because I could be interacting with people. I was living in Colorado at the time, and I could literally be sitting in the studio at the university and have people asking me questions from some ranch way out in the middle of nowhere in Colorado that they would never be able to get near a university otherwise. And same thing, when we launched the Spiritual Cinema Circle, one of the most exciting things I ever got was an email from somebody who said they had to walk miles in Pakistan to get to a USAID library where they could watch our Spiritual Cinema movies. And I thought, what an amazing thing that a person is willing to walk across territory in Pakistan to get to a place where they can see these kind of movies. And so I'm always about making it easier and easier to reach more and more people. That's why I started writing books and making videos and things like that. When this whole AI stuff, I kind of sensed that there was some potential there. But I have to confess, it's a kind of a bewildering area. And I thought, if there's one person on earth who can explain it in a practical way, that will show me how it'll help me be able to reach more people in coaching, how it'll help me be able to be more connected to other people. That's what I want to know. So take it from here.

Okay, well, first begin and say if you don't realize it already, AI is already around us in every way possible. Like the fact that anytime you get on any social media network, content's being recommended to you. If you use any kind of an app, whether that's Uber or any of those, it's constantly paying attention to huge volumes of information and personalizing it for you. So to make it super practical and tactical, you talk to any creative person. There are a few things that are incredibly difficult for anyone who writes, for example, or does art or.

Has to market their business. And so I'm going to use again, some ultra practical tactical examples to begin with, and I'll even show my screen. So if you're watching, watching this on YouTube, you'll be able to see it. Otherwise, if you're listening, I'm going to describe it to you. So as an example, this is an app. It's called Head Lime L I M E and it is a copywriting bot. Now, basically, what you do is you can start out and you could say, hey, I.

Want to. I've got writer's block. I need some help coming up with some ideas for a article, for example, or maybe you want some ideas for a website and what you do like. The little visual that I have right now is an AI landing page generator. So you go in and you'd type in the name of your business a sentence or two about your offer. And what it does is there's an AI, which I'll explain in more detail in a moment, that has researched and essentially sucked down the information from tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of other websites, analyzing them and figuring out what best practices there are. And then what it does is it writes the copy for you based upon some very vague inputs. Now, another one that I'm showing is something called writesonic. So this is another business marketing challenge. I'm gonna go beyond business and marketing in a moment. This thing you type in your product name. In this case, the example they're showing is Yoga International. A brief description, what the occasion is and what the promotion should be. You click a button and it'll write 10 ads that you can look at and either model, copy, paste, or tweak. And then if you don't like something, it's not quite there, click another button and it writes a whole bunch more. And it's cheap. You know, it starts around 10 bucks a month.

Okay?

And then there's another one. For example, this one I was showing is Copysmith. This one will create Google Ads. Now, where it gets more interesting, gay is Microsoft recently got rid of their writers, okay? They're using AI to write their copy for articles now. Now, on one hand, that can sound super scary. I'd be like, what's going to happen to. And if you think through that limited vision, that's where you can go. Because the technology platform that a lot of these tools are using is something that Elon Musk started with another guy. He's since left it. It's called GPT3. And all it is is a cheap or almost free. You can sign up to get access to the tool and then you give it data and it trains itself. So you could have it just observe pictures of fruits or faces or animals and you can describe them and it'll start going out and making assumptions and learning, and then it's easy to correct it, but it just starts looking at information, grabbing data. And because it can analyze so much so quickly, there are tools now that you can say, I want.

A furniture that looks like an AVOCADO and it'll then grab and interpolate and interpret a bunch of different chairs. It knows what an avocado is, and it will literally draw them for you and give you like hundreds or thousands of variants. So what this means for us as humans is as a creativity tool.

You could tell the AI, I want you to create a business logo, and I like Coca Cola, FedEx and Oprah's logo, for example, and it'll immediately come up with maybe hundreds of different designs, and then you can pick the ones you like and say, I like these, I don't like these, and it'll further refine. Now what you could do is maybe pass that along to an art director or designer and say, use these as an example. There are other tools that will write your blogs, come up with article ideas. There are fiction writing bots now. And so what it means one of the things that humans are great at is coming up with a problem you want to solve. AI is not going to do that real soon and describing it. And then the AI has the ability to use literally hundreds of years of best practices or accumulated knowledge that you couldn't possibly store or interpret or execute on rapidly. And so the way I see it, the future of human AI relationship is for humans to do the first one to 5% and the final one to 5 or 10%, and the bots to do the stuff in between, which traditionally is what I would consider the crap work. It's like, as a creative, I don't want to touch the middle anyway. I like inventing, creating, innovating, and then polishing and adding something. And that's what a great producer does. So I think what we're going to move towards right now is the era of the creative producer in virtually every industry. And the net result is we'll be able to create so much more abundance and opportunity. So I'm going to stop there because I've got a couple other examples to give you, but I want to just see if you have any questions so far before I give you a couple other examples.

Yeah, well, that's fascinating. First of all, as a writer and a former copywriter, that's amazing. I can't wait to try out some of those things.

I actually recently bought the new Oculus, the kind of the affordable $300, $299 version of these.

I believe we're talking about actually delivering the big leap year in VR part of the time. So keep going.

Yeah, well, that's where I'm a little confused because I have the machine now, but could you give me a picture of how I'm going to use it when we're working with our group, for example?

Okay. So I'm going to. And again, I'm going to oscillate or toggle a little bit between. First of all, we'll talk about virtual reality, AI, the relationship between that. But also we'll talk a little bit about augmented reality and some other technologies as well, and what's going on there and why it's relevant and meaningful. So let's start first of all by answering your question. How could we use VR? And what about this Oculus 2? For someone who's not familiar with it, I'm going to get it as a prop so I can show it on screen.

This little gadget, little white thing, headset. You slide it on your head and it's basically a display, high resolution. And then you can hear in it. And then you use these little controllers and the device, it's got a trigger on it and it looks super intimidating at first. And.

The hardest thing about VR is taking it out of the box and being willing to put it on and then follow some super easy prompts where it pairs up to your phone and it logs in. And then, boop, you've got this virtual world in front of you. So recently I was at.

An event by.

That'S put on, it's called Abundance 360 with Peter Diamandis. And one of the things that we were able to do is they set up virtual reality meeting rooms. And I'm actually going to show the example. And then again, if you're listening, I'm going to describe it to you. But what we were able to do is meet each other as people in this virtual room, walk around and share our screens or talk to each other. So if you look at the screen, I'm going to just play this. This was one of the meeting rooms we were in. And you can see other people there, so they show up as avatars. And when you launch this, it just takes a picture of your face and projects it on a body. And then you can choose to share objects from the real world. So in this case, I actually brought up a little keyboard that I'm controlling with my controller. I can share a website and be talking to a person. Okay. And you can jump around, move around. And in the virtual environment.

You can either share your computer screen, so, like, everyone can be sitting in a virtual stadium if you want. And I'm going to advance the video a little bit. You can have logos so it's sort of like you can have billboards, screens, and the closer you are to a person, the louder they get. Okay. And if you're quiet, so you can basically create little mini rooms. So think of it like it's Zoom on steroids.

And like one of the environments that I've explored, for example, for us gays, we could actually allow people to do a tense speech. So you'd walk into the room, you'd sit in a theater, it literally says ted. And you'd see the person on stage, they'd have the mic. But while you're watching or listening to someone, you can engage in a micro chat with someone either with text. You can maybe say, okay, after someone does their speech, okay, everyone, you can connect with each other, go into a little breakout room and discuss, and then come back. Well, unlike Zoom, you can be engaging in a physical environment, sharing screens. You can be have very exploratory experiences that are filled with media and. And you can brainstorm together. So you can draw on the screen and. But do it in a collaborative way. So I think the biggest thing about VR is it's incredibly collaborative. And even though it might, if you're, again, you're looking at my screen, you might be like, what the hell? This doesn't make sense to me. It's so immersive. It makes so much sense while you're there. And it really is unique. And I found it to be more intimate, more connected, and more immersive. And if you made the jump from virtual to suddenly doing Zoom, you already know that. You know, you can start and do a side chat with someone, so it can actually be more intimate and more connected than real life. And of course, without the wear and tear on your body and the cost of travel, this just takes it the next level, where you can adopt a different identity, for example, and you can act if you wanted to. So there's a lot of role playing that you can do. And the tools that are being built in VR worlds, soon they'll have haptic suits. So you'll be able to feel objects that aren't even there. It'll provide pressure, you'll feel air.

Bumps and grooves. So for, again, for all kinds of experiences, it's just going to get better and better and better.

Hmm, that's really exciting. I love the idea of being able to interact with people.

You know, like in our seminars, in our live seminars, we'll present a piece of content, and then we might break people up into pairs and they go do an activity. And so it sounds like you're saying that those kinds of things can be really replicated in the virtual world. It's a little bit possible now with, with Zoom because you can break it up into small groups and everything, but it's still, you know, square heads, looking at square head, talking heads kind of thing. And this is something that's more whole body immersive. Yes.

Your brain gets used to it so quickly. And so I'll give you a for example. What I visualize happening with the big leap year, for example, is, well, you know, eventually when the world returns to normal, we may have a experience or event.

In Ojai, where you live, you know, which will be a great place to be. We'll certainly be meeting in Zoom. But what if we decide we're gonna do a presentation opportunity? Part of it will be exploring how you can use VR in your life and your business as a creative tool, as a connection tool, as an intimacy builder and bonder. But we'll say we're going to begin by meeting in a castle and maybe we'll do an exercise to get us out of our normal day to day heads. You'll adopt the role of a character and overcome some sort of a significant challenge. So we'll create a metaphor, an opportunity, and you'll be able to get feedback and coaching in this new space. And then after that, we'll bring in a virtual presenter who will present in a TED environment. And what happens is because the audio is 3D, the visuals are immersive.

And then afterwards, you'll break up into groups and be with each other. But because the auditory is so spatial in the visuals are so immersive and wrapped around you, you genuinely feel like you're there. But then when you take the mask off, it's like, oh, I didn't have to leave any place. And it's not a screen, it's not your little laptop screen. And the biggest thing that I think I'm most impressed with is this technology is cheap, affordable, and once you get past the internal.

Fear or the, you know, being intimidated. Look, I'm a tech freak and I was like, ugh, I don't want to set up another device. You know, it's. But it's easier to set up than a phone. And they've really made it so it's simple to walk through. And you know, and you know, you use a mouse already while the controller is just like a mouse, except you get to see where it's pointing. It's like a laser pointer with a trigger and you just point at the thing you want to do and answer some questions. It's stupid easy. And then you can watch your Netflix movies in there. You can watch your Amazon prime instead of having a laptop in your bed. If you ever watch, you can put this on. You can look up and lay down and you have a fully immersive movie with audio. It's not interrupting anyone. And you can lay on your back instead of craning your neck. So it's a hell of a lot more comfortable than. And it's in the light, isn't bothering anyone.

And is the resolution good? I mean, it does look as good as a high def movie.

Yes, it's really good. And I'll go off on one other little tangent, which is one more piece of technology that I'm super excited about. It is augmented reality. Now, the difference between virtual reality and augmented reality is virtual reality is where you're wearing a fully immersed mask and you could play a game. You can do a flight simulator. You could do training where you can learn surgery, for example, and do simulated surgery. And that's essentially what doctors are doing with robotic surgery. They're wearing virtual reality helmets, but they get to put on a microscope. And they might be controlling a robot that they're controlling in real time, 2,000 miles away. No travel to do it. And they're suturing. I mean, it's super precise. Now, augmented reality, on the other hand, the Pokemon game is an example where you took your phone and you'd hold it in front of you, kind of like binoculars, and you'd see objects that weren't there in the real. In the real world, but when you moved around, they were stationary. And it's. You get to see them, right? And there were ways of clicking on them and interacting. So in the Pokemon game, you'd collect the Pokemon all over a city and they'd have different points. They gamified it. Now where it's giving.

I'm just curious.

Go ahead.

Super possibly stupid question. How do those things appear in that place? Are they cell technology or something?

Yeah, it's using gps, super precise gps, WI FI signals that are triangulating. And of course, the phone knows where you are. Now in the latest generation of the iPhone, for example, it's got LIDAR built in and scanning technology. And you use an app you could point it at. I did it with my car. You can do it with a mug, but you can scan a room. And it will build a 3D model of your room, complete with textures that theoretically you could send it right into a video game. It's already there. Apple's invested tremendous amount of money. So here's what's about to occur. Apple just announced this recently. It'll be expensive at first, they say about three grand. But it'll be glasses that go over you, so you're going to be able to see through them. But in front of you will be the equivalent of 2.8k displays which are higher resolution than your eyes can tell. So the point is you won't be able to tell what reality is and what is being projected in front of you. So you could literally eliminate the need to have any screens. Okay. And your eyes will adjust, but you could wear this, let's say while you're driving. But you'll have a heads up display soon there. When AR becomes more ordinary, you won't have billboards anymore because the billboard will be projected in front of you just like an ad with information. But it'll be positional and, and you'll be soon. What's starting to happen is there's something called Earth 2.0 selling virtual real estate. It's like think of a mirror image, a copy of the Earth that you can own property in. It's already like turning into a commodity. It's like Bitcoin. So that's a mind blower by itself. But the benefit of augmented reality is.

First of all, here's the first thing most people might think is, oh, that's super intrusive. But look, if I would have said.

In the year 2000, soon you're going to have something that you're going to willingly carry around with you that spies on you nonstop, feeds you information that isn't true and will allow your spouse to know where you are 24, 7. Okay? And you'd be like, no way, I'll never have that. Just like I'm never going to use a fax machine. I'll never carry a cell phone. I don't want people to reach me. It's violation of my privacy. But the conven is so high. So augmented reality is going to make you twice as smart, twice as efficient. Going to anticipate where you are, what you need, and it'll anticipate your behaviors enough to say, hey, right now you're probably thinking about getting yourself a blah, blah, blah latte. I just noticed you start driving towards Starbucks. Should I order your usual or you want something different? Okay, the level of convenience and the, you know, we are, we already are augmented humans. This is just taking it to the next level. And what I can guarantee you is the smartest people in the world. In the world are figuring out how to package it in a way that makes it appealing and so useful.

That life's just going to get simpler. And, you know, if you're. If your immediate fear is, well, what happens when it goes away? And what if, what if, what if people smarter than us are going to figure out all the what if scenarios. And that'll be figured out long before it makes it to market.

I love it. Well, that opens my eyes a lot. I'm already thinking of all sorts of ways we can use this when we do our big leap year, our mastermind group. But one thing that opens up a possibility whenever I think of.

Is it going to take us further away from our actual organic body feelings, or is it going to give us closer? See, a lot of parents complain about their kids spending too much time in the virtual world because it deadens them to, you know, rich feelings in the real world. And what do you have to say about that?

Well, I think if anyone's ever used Headspace, the meditation app, if you tried it out, mm, it's quite good. I actually like it. I used it for quite some time. I found the animations to be super fun and funny. I like the guy's voice.

And it made meditation easy, fun, and it tracked my progress. And if you wanted to, it could gamify it too. You could help you find friends and, you know, it rewarded you in a nice, psychologically dopamine filled way without chemicals. That was also beneficial. And there's so much research being done right now on being able to induce deep meditative states using combinations of light and sound. That's been around for a long time. That's what you can expect. There are already.

Tools for the Oculus that'll allow you to meditate faster and more effective. So.

So, like anything, look on a negative side. VR porn is already in there, right? You can go in, put on your goggles, and it's very realistic.

And if you take it the next step down, when you start having haptic suits, which basically be, think of it like a bodysuit that you wear, except it presses on your parts. You know, virtual sex is so close.

If you think we have problems now with addiction and sex addiction, soon you'll be able to experience anything with anyone. And the question of is, you know, virtual pedophilia. You know, that's. That is a huge moral issue that will.

You know, it. It's a dark, dark hole. And, and, you know, how are we going to deal with that. So I'm going to just put that out there and say really, really smart people are thinking about that and have been thinking about it for 10 years. It was, it was inevitable. But back to us and we right now. I ultimately believe that technology.

Can be and will be an absolute force for good. And there's a positive and negative to anything. You know, the nature of is what is it and how to use it. You can make the most incredible gourmet meal, or it could be used in a Maryland or in a Manson murder. So I believe that the smartest people on the planet right now are figuring out how to use these tools to enhance and augment us. And nothing beats getting out in nature. I think there is a place and a time to use a tool and there's a place and a time to put it down. And what I would hope and my intention in using these tools is to be able to.

Get more done in 1/5 the time. So there's more time to spend out in nature. And also.

You know, if you chose, for example, to live a nomadic life. So the popular thing right now is get yourself an rv.

Elon's got a Starlink satellite network that is super fast and wireless. And with solar, you could theoretically right now live anywhere on the road with almost no possessions, get broadband technology, simplify your technology footprint with fewer devices and earn a great living with less.

Housing is being simplified. You know, we can pull water from the air with condensers that are affordable. You can, you know, you don't need sewage treatment systems because there's technologies available for processing it very, very cheaply and easily. And I believe that technology can increase its effectiveness at a rate that exponentially is outpacing the problems that we deal with and create a richer, more abundant life. And it's getting cheaper and cheaper for the rest of the world.

Well, that's a very hopeful view of things. I appreciate that because a lot of times the future is depicted as dystopian and that kind of thing. And I think the possibility is there for us to use these things in a really whole person manner as long as we keep our values on straight and understand that it's the connection, the amount of love you have flowing back and forth between yourself and other people that's the real crucial issue in life.

I, I agree. Again, I. What I choose to believe is that augmented humans can be kinder humans, more abundant humans, more conscious humans, and the only true enemy of civilization is mass ignorance. That is the cause of all pain. Because dictators and really bad people can't easily live and survive and get away with it for a long period of time when the masses can communicate, when they have access to truth and knowledge and cumulative wisdom. You know, we don't pay enough attention to history and science and facts. And I've always said feelings are not facts and I'd love to have feeling amplifiers, but I also want fact amplifiers. And unfortunately, due to a number of things, mobile phones have been used to cause incredible tyranny because bad actors have access to it and Facebook has allowed that to occur. And then on the other hand, it's also started positive revolutions and forced.

Transparency and any technology can get out of control and out of hand, but eventually civility can win. And I think what we have right now is anytime these tools can be used as a battle against ignorance. They're powerful allies and tools.

I agree. Well, thanks a lot for that peek into the future, Mike. That was incredibly informative. And I want to keep that issue in the forefront of our minds though, because I kind of rely on you as the guy who looks into the future of all these things and comes back to report to all us regular people that don't have quite the technical chops you have. So I really appreciate it.

My pleasure. And I think we also mentioned this throughout. But I will take this moment for a little bit Plug which is if any of this interested you and you'd love to learn more and immerse yourself in it and see how see the positivity and the power here. Gay and I are doing the big leap year and you can learn more@bigleappodcast.com you can get on our wait list and find out more about how we're gonna bring.

Non intimidating use and access to these tools in a way that's practical, it's tactical, but also powerful from a personal and self development world and how you can truly use these things to augment yourself and see how you can use them too. So if you want to use some of these resources in whether it's your personal life, your business life, or your conscious and your spiritual life, I believe there's a way to bridge all of those worlds together. And if you've tried going down the rabbit hole, I'm sure you found that this can be super overwhelming, super confusing and there's a lot of people talking about it, but they don't give you a real life, practical, tactical way to see it in a positive light and in a way that you can use it and have these kinds of conversations. So that's one of the things I'm looking forward to.

Gay. Me too. Plus sitting around brainstorming with some of the smartest people on earth. That's just a cool thing in and of itself.

Ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem. I think that's the big thing. So this is a great way to meet other like minded, abundance minded people who want to create more opportunity, more luck and break down barriers, no matter what they may happen to be.

By the way, this is completely unrelated to anything else we've been talking about, but I saw something on Broadway a couple of years ago that they've now made a film out of, a movie out of this on Hulu. And it's called in and of Itself with a guy named Derek Delgadio. Highly recommend that everybody who listens to this ought to see it. It's, it's, you'll see why when you see it. But it's everything we're talking about in a very entertaining way in and of itself with Derek Delglaudio.

All right, I'm going to hit that. I have not seen it and I didn't get recommended it by the great powers of AI and Hulu. But now I'm going to put that on my watch list. I'll check it out this week. So. Well, let's, let's wrap this episode up. Gay as usual. Always great. I love how you think the questions you ask and the value you bring into my life. I'm always looking forward to the next episode, the next episode and next episode.

Thank you. Me too. This is a lot of fun. Mike, I appreciate you for coming up with this idea and us brainstorming it into life.

Okay, so this wraps up this episode as usual. Gay. This has been a total blast. And if you've enjoyed this episode or you know one or two people who could benefit from the message inside it, share it with them. Reach out to Gay or me on the social networks. We do read and respond to the messages and of course course rate and review on itunes or wherever. You got this podcast. This is the big leap. We're looking forward to seeing you in the next episode.

Thanks a lot, everybody.