TJ Walker, a public speaking coach with 40 years of experience, explains how AI cloning could merge the personalized feedback of one-on-one coaching with the reach of online courses. He built 2 million students after early failures and now sees AI as the way to scale interactive training across languages.
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Otherwise, I'd rent a house. You know, everyone has a philosophy of the future, whether they realize it or not, and they're acting. I think people are thinking that a little bit these days in terms of the house not getting blown down, especially where you live in Florida and where I live in North Carolina, it's a little more like, well, that could happen. Yeah. So when it comes to AI, to me, what I'm convinced of is this cloning technology is going to be a big deal. And I'm basing that on my own experience, because I've been doing in person public speaking training and media training. In fact, I did my first one down the road from you in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1984 when I was in college. So I've been doing this for 40 years. And what I have found consistently is that when I work one on one in person, in the same room with someone or a small group, I can dramatically improve their skills because it's completely interactive. Everything is about them. I get them on camera a dozen times in a day and they dramatically improve. They appreciate me. They're happy to pay whatever I've charged them. That's one set of experiences. So the positive there is people love it. They're happy to pay. They're happy to pay a lot. The downside is I got to travel all over the world, and I've been to 45 countries and it's been great, but I don't necessarily want to travel all the time, or they have to travel me. And it's very expensive, and 99.9% of the world can't afford it. So that's the downside. Then I started doing online training in 1998, which turns out was way too soon. I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars for 15 years. But then it did take off, and it soared. In the last handful of years, I have 2 million online students, so that's been great for me personally, financially, as a business model. The beauty of an online course, someone can access it anywhere, it's inexpensive. I don't have to fly to them, they don't fly to me. The bad news is most people don't get much better because it's a passive experience. They're sitting back watching me, and at some level it's, you might as well be watching Seinfeld, although Seinfeld's funnier and I'm not. And in an online video experience, it's one way I'm saying what I think is important. Now you have to listen to me. And, yeah, I give you an option to do homework and submit a video. But it's not the same thing of being there, giving personalized feedback, doing 10 videos in a day. So what excites me about this video, this clone is in my world, in my view, it has the potential of bringing the best of both worlds. It's completely interactive and can allow me to coach your appearance. And. And yet it's scalable because I don't have to be there. And someone can be there any, any time of day, 24 hours a day, any country, and now in any language. So that's why I'm convinced this is such a big deal.
