Ethan Beute:
The further we go into what are these tools? What can they do for us? What can we do with them? As we define this this type of technology and start to explore and interact with it, we're also at the same time simultaneously defining what it means to be human prompted. AI is useless without us. It's like a guitar. It looks nice, maybe sitting over there hanging on the wall. But until someone picks it up and interacts with it, it's not really useful for its greatest purpose.
James Robert Lay:
Greetings and Hello, I am James Robert Leigh and welcome to episode 296 of the banking on digital growth podcast. Today's episode is part of the exponential insights series, and I'm excited to welcome Ethan Butte to the show. Ethan is the chief evangelist for Bom Bom, a video message platform that helps you build relationships by adding a human touch to email and text. Now Ethan joined me all the way back in episode tonight team for a conversation and today we're going to continue to dive in and explore together what I view as an ever increasing strategic role. That video communication will play in the age of AI to empower you, dear listeners so that you can continue to maximize growth in the age of AI at your bank at your credit union or at your fintech. Welcome back to the show Ethan, it is good to share time with you again.
Ethan:
Thank you so much. I appreciate the invite it was this one was precipitated by like some really good back and forth on LinkedIn. And you're like, we need to talk about this. I'm like, Yes, we do. So I'm excited to be back.
James Robert Lay:
We do need to talk about this. And before we get too deep into that, I want to just pull back a bit. The last time that you and I connected. And, you know, I always like to start to show off on a positive note. You were about to take a five week sabbatical. What did you learn through this experience here?
Ethan:
I think the single biggest takeaway was that not doing I'm air quoting for people who aren't watching video like not doing air quote, productive work. Like I always felt like I was wasting time, I spent a lot of time by myself, I spent a lot of time in reflection, I did spend a ton of time with family and friends as well. But I got very comfortable not doing anything in particular, which was really hard for me, I would imagine it's hard for you to it's something that has stuck with me a bit since you never have any idea how much you need that you have. It doesn't feel right for people who are highly productive. And I generally I think I would put myself in that camp. And so that was probably the single biggest thing. And I don't think I'm quite at midlife yet. But I'm glad that I had that experience and learn that in a very memorable and real way earlier rather than later. Because I don't think any of us is going to be on our deathbed saying you know what, I wish I had done three more things.
James Robert Lay:
It's interesting, you're talking about this idea of doing doing work. My mind has been curious about this, I think we attach a lot of our identity to what we do. However, as we continue to journey into this age of AI, I'm encouraging people to really consider detaching from the doing to spend some time reviewing what they have done to reflect on that as you did, to learn through those experiences and then to think about how to do even better going forward into the future with new capabilities. And I think, you know, if we look ahead to 2030 capabilities that we can't even perceive at the present moment in time. And all of this is being driven from what transpired on October 30 2022. The world entered into a new phase AI essentially reached mass consciousness on that date with the launch of chat GPT Where have you been in reflection now back to that point, because as of recording, it is maybe three four months post launch of chat GPT and we've already gone from chat GPT three point At five, or three to 3.54. What are you seeing, thinking maybe even feeling right now in the present moment?
Ethan:
Yeah, I think at a high level a couple initial thoughts. And I like the way you set that up. It's really around the further we go into what are these tools? What can they do for us? What can we do with them. As we define this, this type of technology and start to explore and interact with it, we're also at the same time simultaneously defining what it means to be human. And what we're really good at what remains unique to us, I think there's certainly a lot of fear at this intersection, because we're perhaps giving too much imagination, or too much credit to the machine and or diminishing our own strengths. And I'll just tie this back to this idea of not doing anything. This idea of just being is a thing, right, we are human beings. And I know it's a little bit trite to say, but when I think about and I'm speaking a little bit specifically to your audience, if they think that they are winning through relationship relationship is key to my success, then we need to be very conscious about the simple fact that a relationship is what you and I are doing right now, it's two people being present with one another, to understand each other, and perhaps to be of some service and value to one another. And that requires being right just being present, active listening, engagement, etc. And so I would put that in the camp of a unique human strength. And I think as we offload some of our work, there are some cautions, and we get into the nuances around that what to offload to the machine, what to keep to ourselves, what to do with the output as it as it is even with GPD for and how much work it might need before it becomes productive and reflective of you and your your brand, your philosophy etc, taking care to see the upside of who you are as a human being in terms of delivering value in your product or service experience.
James Robert Lay:
I agree with you. And I don't think it's trite at all, to pause for a moment and really contemplate the differences between being a human doer and a human being. This was a conversation that I recently had, with Chuck Allen, and we were talking about this, I think we might have forgotten some of what it means to be a human being. And we're having an opportunity to come back and essentially reconnect with ourselves as individuals, as leaders. And then when you're doing that, with your team, you're gaining a whole new perspective. Because there are new things that we could offload elevate to the quote unquote, machines. And that creates new growth opportunities, things that, you know, we maybe we have lost, because we have been so busy, quote unquote, doing work. But you make a very good point about perspective. And even fear. If and I think specifically through the lens of financial services, risk adverse industry naturally, if we fear the exponential change the exponential transformations that have happened, or happening will continue to happen. We might miss those opportunities. And I do believe it is a matter of perspective, because I think about whenever I've talked with financial brand leaders, what's your take on chat GPT. And they typically respond Oh, here is getting outlawed and banned in school districts. So it must be bad. And I go interesting. Do you mind if I provide you with another perspective? And it comes back to what you and I what you mentioned here, it's the dialogue. It's the discourse, it's the discussion, it's the conversation, and through that, that is how we make connections. And that is essentially the backbone of trust. And I think we must consider, particularly with where we're at right now, in a perceived quote, unquote, banking crisis. It is a communication crisis. That is resulting in a confidence crisis, because trust comes back to what you say, what you do, how you have these conversations, the mediums of which we have these conversations, that's the differentiator, I think, from even 10 years ago, 20 years ago, which is not that long. And that is requiring us to almost rewire neural networks to establish, maintain gain trust. How is trust transforming in this new age of AI? And what role might video play? Because you've spent a lot of time thinking and writing about this coming back to our LinkedIn dialogue and discourse
Ethan:
Where I think it goes because people on average, does not going to be fair. Bye If people on average are kind of lazy, right, we want to push as much into automation as much to the machine, we want to offload as much as possible. And what we're gonna wind up doing is producing a lot more noise, I talk a lot about digital noise and digital pollution, noise is just benign, right? sheer volume of stuff, like, oh, my gosh, I left my inbox unattended for, you know, five hours. And now look at it. You know, look at all my lit up notifications, I pick up my phone, there are 47 new text messages, what kind of group chat did I get into all this, it's just the sheer volume of noise. In addition, the layered into this digital experience that we're increasingly dwelling in longer and more on any given day accelerated, of course, by the pandemic, but everything today is inevitable, it would evolve, we would have been here regardless, right? When we talk about digital transformation, in the banking experience, it was all inevitable, but just a lot of stuff got put forward a lot more quickly. So it as as this gets more digital, because customers prefer a lot of the stuff to be done at a distance. And we get, we don't get to dictate what gets done digitally, the customer does ultimately, based on capability. There's also digital pollution. And this is the danger is frustrating on one level, it's just annoying. On the other hand, it's dangerous, right. And so certainly in a in a high compliance, secure private, conservative, appropriately so industry. This idea of is this link safe to click is this attachment safe to download is this from who it says it's from is all cranked up when you're dealing with people's personal financial information, the threat of the volume of pollution amid the noise, further, ie roads, trust. So noise makes attention hard to get pollution makes trust hard to build. And as we equip the planet, with internet access, with the ability to crank out more content faster and easier. And by the way less differentiated because it's just being shot out of a machine. Most people aren't going to go deep and get really good at I'm going to refer to as playing an instrument, right? Interacting with the chat through good prompt follow up, et cetera. It's like playing an instrument, you no one pays to watch someone who just picked up a guitar for the first time play the guitar, no one really wants to hear it. Because it's it's any of us could do that it's not differentiated versus someone who picks up this instrument and puts in the hours to get really good at it hasn't create a vision for themselves. And it's realized through their interaction with this device with this machine with this tool. Most people aren't going to get there with chat. And so we're going to crank all this additional noise into the environment. And in this case, attention will be even harder to get it'll be more difficult to sort through all the stuff. And I think it to the degree that people are not thoughtful, artful. And they don't add their own perspective, their own point of view their own expertise, when they know what to offload to the machine and what not to offload to the machine to keep for themselves. Trust is going to be harder period, it's going to be harder, because it's going to be noise, more noise, more pollution, we just sit around chat GPT how many invites to chat GPT webinars, have you seen your social media feeds? And you and you're like, I don't think this person is qualified to speak on this topic? And how do I know and how can I judge? There's just so much noise here. And so yes, you as a service provider around financial services, face the same thing. There are a lot of people making a lot of promises. And when we equip people with the ability to say 1000 times more stuff more quickly, it's just going to get even more difficult.
James Robert Lay:
The the point you're making around volume is one I think we should pause and ponder on for a bit. I'm going to take everyone back to the Gutenberg Printing Press. The Gutenberg Printing Press democratized thinking for lack of a better word. It allowed us to get thoughts in books and print those books at scale. Before that, though, thoughts ideas were shared via conversation via store what we're doing right now. Enter GPT written word is becoming commoditized. Because there is a lack or has the potential to be a lack of perspective, voice tone, like oh, well, once again, you can you can train, you can prompt. Exactly and then and I even think about you know, I've been working with my kids now with chat GPT my 12 year old my 10 year old, my eight year old, my six year old, a little bit young, but I'm wanting to introduce to them the capabilities that they're going to be growing up with and give them a jumpstart here. My 10 year old daughter had a school project around the emerald ash borer that is destroying these asteroids. I had no idea about this. But she, she did the research. And then she had to communicate the research to her peers in class, and she had different mediums in which she could do so. And I said she wanted to write a book, a story of journal. So I said, Okay, let's get a chat. GPT. She said, What's that, so just watch this. So we prompt it, and we prompt it. And we prompt and we probably spend an hour prompting GPT to co create a children's story around the emerald ash borer. And within four hours through chat GPT and Dolly, we had a fully illustrated children's book that we printed hard, you know, hardcover, everything through Canva. And I said, and I told her, I said, you're 10 years old, you've now essentially written and published your first book, it took me 39 years to do that. And she, you know, she told me, she said, Dad, but you don't have aI helping you.
James Robert Lay:
And I said that's the lesson right there. It's there's this co creation capability. But I said the ideas came, from your knowledge, the research that you did, and you're able to provide the perspective and work in tandem, to create the output to communicate what you found to others in a very engaging way. My son had to do the exact same thing. He used it to co create a presentation. But he had to deliver orally, his presentation, I said, you can't get the machine to do that. So I understand where you're coming from increase in content increase in noise. But it's now it's that human perspective that I think that's the tip of the spear. That's how we cut through the fog, to continuously provide clarity and to be a beacon to be a guiding light, it all comes back to the human perspective, the human centric point of view that elevates beyond the machine. What's your take on that?
Ethan:
Yes. And the key lesson in both I love that you're working with your kids on this. And I love both of your examples, especially the presentation I'll get to in a minute because I didn't address the video portion of your prior question. It's right there and presenting the material Yes, or presenting the ideas, owning the ideas, embodying the ideas, understanding ideas well enough that you can speak articulately to another human being in a distinctly human way that reading the same words off a screen isn't going to do. We'll set that aside for a minute. But this idea of your daughter doing the work interacting with the prompts, I want to I want to put two words in front of folks right now. One is curiosity, right? This curiosity of like, what do we need to understand about this thing in there probably a couple layers of why and what and where and when that kind of guided or thought around the slick before I go deeper into curiosity and to the other one, which is curation, by the way. Chat GPT I know that there's talk of general artificial intelligence that even supersedes this prompting dynamic, we'll just keep that because it's years away. Let's worry about that in a couple of months. Some people might say decades, but you know, people are pulling the timeline differently. But the prompted AI is useless without us. It just sits there waiting for someone to it's like a guitar, it looks nice. Maybe sitting over there hanging on the wall. But until someone picks it up and interacts with it, it's not really useful for its greatest purpose. And it's the same thing with the chat right? And so it's the human curiosity to engage with it and drive it into seek some level of understanding or expression or support of their existing ideas or whatever, like whatever the so human curiosity drives it. And then human curation of what is it telling me that I like and I want to keep and I want to use in a different way and maybe want to resequenced it or I want to ask the prompt this and ask it differently. That's just kind of curation elements. So again, that's human interacting with in order to get something that satisfies their curiosity reflects their personality and point of view through curation through manipulation of the words to kind of say it the way I might say it, not because you can ask it to say say the same thing but do it more playfully but it's still not going to nail you. I think we will get there by the way when this AI is now Literally Ethan's personal assistant and it is read the all the emails I've sent over the past two years in the way I express myself and email, it can start writing things that sounded more like me. So that's one side of it. It's it's this the curiosity of like, what am I actually trying to do here? And for what purpose? And who is it for and all of this stuff and the curation to say, what is it given me that I want to keep? What is it giving me that I want to discard? What is it given me that I want to have it give me a different way, like that's the kind of give and take that we need to do this in an effective manner, in a way to give us something that's useful and unique and valuable to us. And more importantly, the people we're trying to serve through that work to the other side. And this is just a caution for people. I mean, you can you can have it write emails, you can have it do meeting summaries, you can have it do all kinds of different things for you. And I would just challenge people to this idea of, I need to learn this material. And I'm going to use I'm going to rely on chat GPT to give me some of the feedback and fill in some of the blanks and stuff. But I need to stand up in front of a roomful of my peers, and express this in six minutes or 12 minutes, or whatever the presentation was, you need to understand it. And if you want to help other people in the future, you need to understand it. And so there is some manual work here. If you want to continue to learn and grow yourself at something besides driving the Chatbot.
James Robert Lay:
And I want to pause on that because let's come back to the two points you made curiosity and curation. I've been really encouraging financial brand leaders to fall back to the days of being a curious kindergartener in the age of AI looking at exploration knowing I know nothing essentially taking a Socratic approach to this. But the curation I think about my daughter, she did the research on this emerald ash borer, and she knew that the output from GPT wasn't 100% accurate. Oh, that okay. Yeah, there's a lot.
James Robert Lay:
So she was able to then go back with me and we are re prompting, re prompting, so curating another maybe a way of considering that perspective, editing, producing. It does, you need to have that level of knowledge and expertise for co creation. And then you take that to the next level, curiosity, curation, communication, to be able to then thoughtfully communicate that idea. And the key here, and something I've been thinking about coming out of this perceived banking crisis, it is confidence to be able to confidently communicate confidence for the subject matter. And that's where my son comes back into play. Because with his presentation, he had 15, slides, all bullet points. And I asked him how many minutes you have to communicate that. He said about two to three, four. I said, No way. That's why we got into GPT to curate things down to literally give us that two to three minute deliverable. And then he spent his time practicing. But once again, he knew the material, he did the research. And I said, you have to go first in class to set the bar super high. And he did, but he wouldn't have had that if he wasn't confident in himself and confidence. The Latin of that is essentially trust your faith in someone or something in this particular case, the self Where does communicating confidence, come back into play through mediums like video, because I do see that there is no better way to constantly communicate confidence than with video. Maybe podcasts, audio is a second to that, but video leads the way.
Ethan:
Yeah, I'm gonna go kind of a side side route here and get straight to that. One of the ways so I do a lot of teaching, I do presentations, I do webinars, stage presentations, etc. And one of my favorite structures is like we call it's the bow tie funnel, we learned it from a gentleman that's featured in our book human centered communication guy named Jaco Vander Coy and it takes the traditional funnel sales funnel of you know, awareness, interest desire action tilted on its side, and then commitment or the action or the purchase or whatever is in the middle. And then there's a whole nother expansion side where we retain customers they can we can do to solve more of their problems, etc. So I lay out any and you can map literally any business to this bow tie funnel. And so I you know, I kind of walk through the various stages of moving people through I position is it's a series of conversions, not just the big commitment conversion in the middle of you know, yes, I will, you know, move all of my assets under your management, but instead, you'll all these little yeses that we need to keep people in relationship with us over a long term, including through repeat referral business. etc. And then then we then we move the conversation to points what we call points of friction and failure. Right? Where things slow down? Where do people tend to stop? Where do people get confused? Where do you seem to have indecision emerge? Where do you lose attention, or you can't build enough trust recant generate enough confidence. And you know, you get some head nods, and you get some feedback that well, this is a point, you know, like, I can set a lot of appointments. But you know, my no show rate, for example, is a little bit higher, people will take that first appointment, but they tend not to engage and take those next two or three steps, you know, leading up to a bigger commitment. And when you look at all of the points of friction and failure, they are all human issues, they are all emotional issues. And by emotion, I don't just mean like, you know, openly sobbing or screaming, you know, in shouting in joy or excitement, I just mean like this, the trust issues, the confidence issues, the I hear what you're saying, but I don't quite like the way you said it. It doesn't inspire me, or I don't feel like you're sincere about it. And all these other judgments that humans are constantly making about one another, subconsciously, anyone listening to this episode has an opinion about me, based on my pace of speech, the way that I, you know, the way that I respond, you and all these other things, and they, sometimes it'll become conscious, but very often, it's subconscious. So the reasons people don't move forward with us any commercial relationship or human issues, their emotional issues, and ultimately, to double back on what you just said, their communication issues, because communication is at two layers. We all know the the truism, people don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care. And this comes down to the idea that every single social judgement is made on warmth and competence. Warmth, is motivation, intent, sincerity, do you seem to believe what you're saying? Do you seem to understand me? Or do you seem to want to understand me at least? And then competence is all the details, right? And so machines can help us with a lot of the details you already did raise the fact that, you know, I'll just say it this way, a calculator. That's right. 95% of the time is not very useful. We can't take output from something and say, Oh, I feel pretty good about it, you know, when we're dealing in these types of financial issues, and so you know, that the competence piece matters, but this in any piece of communication in any exchange, that warmth piece, that that subconscious, sensory, emotive competence, trust, assurance, enthusiasm, sincerity, gratitude, concern, you know, as a parent, you said something like, listen, sweetheart, it's not what you said, it's how you said it, right? The way that we say things matters. And so and we all know, within seconds of meeting someone for the first time, like you, so you're at a coffee shop with a colleague or something, someone walks by your colleague knows the person you meet them, you stand up, you shake hands, you greet them in some basic way. And you have a feeling about that person. And maybe they didn't even say anything except Nice to meet you. Right? You have a feeling about that person. And that feeling. Guide your thoughts conscious and subconscious. 95% of our mental activity is subconscious. That's to say it's sensory and emotive, not conscious and rational 95 to 98%, depending on who you read. So these feelings that we have guide our thoughts, sometimes we're aware of those thoughts. Sometimes we aren't. But certainly those thoughts conscious and subconscious guide, the things that we do, the things that we say the decisions that we make. And so our business outcomes as working professionals are dependent on the way that we make people feel. And so if you're communicating exclusively, in digital formats, in faceless typed out text, you're not giving human beings, the data, the information that their brain is desperate for through millennia of evolution, to make decisions about whether or not they can proceed with you in a confident trusting manner. That's to say, if you don't have some video mixed into your communication, when you can't be there in person, when you're stuck in digital, virtual and online postures trying to build relationship and convey competence and expertise, how these other things do encourage people to move forward. You need video to close that gap to satisfy a deep evolved millennia old human need.
James Robert Lay:
I want to stay on one point here. And this is more real time material with the recent perceived bank crisis. How quickly that unfolded through the social media firestorm on Twitter. And from our research, a good number of financial brands, quote unquote, responded but it was one communication piece. It might have been an email, it might have been a letter that our institution has okay. But perception creates reality. What people are hearing, and seeing and reading on social media. They're now feeling nervous. What's subconscious level? I've been thinking about this for a while that this industry has a EQ gap. I'm still trying to determine why that is. I might not ever figure that out. But I would diagnose that there's an emotional intelligence gap within financial services, which leads to a communication gap. With that in mind, what can a leader do to increase their EQ. And as a result, trust would be the next thing that would follow that increase in EQ.
Ethan:
Yeah, in that scenario, I'll just go back to the very beginning of this conversation, which is being present active listening, it's called Reading the room, right? Like, what is the tone in the room, and in this case, the room is the world at large, or your community within the world at large. You don't have to speak for all banks or the baking industry need to speak about your community, this is your collection of stakeholders, your employees need and want that confidence. You're all the people that do business directly with you need and want that calm confidence. All the people who are impacted by your being in this community need and want that confidence. And so it's it's a combination of reading the room, being present, listening, understanding, being curious about the way other people are feeling and why asking them about it, or at least having you know, your right hand, people, bringing some of this community feedback, stakeholder feedback, market feedback in and then coming up with a way to respond in a meaningful way. And certainly video can be a part of that video is you in person at scale video is you one on one, with anyone who chooses to click play, people are not putting on a video that you record, to convey what you know, what you don't know, what you've heard, what you have confidence in and what your what steps you're taking over the next couple of days or weeks, to close some of the gaps into to, you know, re strengthen your already strong position in these particular ways, like the no known scenario. So communicating that as a human being, and I'll just draw a bad example. Actually, this is bad and good at the same time, that press conference, you know, with that with that business leader, or that politician, or that athlete or whatever, who's in kind of a hot situation, and they get up in front of the podium, got all the national international media around them, like 55 microphones at the podium. And they say the words, and they see the words that were probably written if not approved by a lawyer, and you know, who's going exactly on script and who isn't, we can tell that immediately this person is exactly on script. And this person is a little bit off script, but they're, you know, getting the spirit of it, right, you know, that of all the people who are on script, because the people who really mean what they're saying are never off script. They're always on script, and they're reading the exact right words in the exact right order. And they don't believe a single one of them. And, you know, you could just tell, you could tell even if they were speaking Mandarin, and you don't, you could tell if they were speaking German and you don't. And so, a leaders ability to get let's just stay internal for right now, let's just say that a company uses slack, your internal communication, a leader recording a simple video at her or his desk, saying, Hey, I've heard from a number of you over the past two days, I know that you probably saw this in this channel, you probably saw it in that channel. Those are our official statements. I want to speak to you personally about what I've been hearing from some of you and some of the ways that I'm thinking about it, some of the actions that we're taking, and some of the ways that your fellow leaders here in the organization are approaching and just speak to them. And yes, you can run it by, you know, someone that you have for corporate communication to make sure that it's hitting the right points or whatever. But your ability to get in front of people and say things that you actually mean, to be honest about what you know, and what you don't know, obviously, in a legal and compliant manner and not not going too far astray. gives people a piece of communication that they can feel, I feel that you believe what you're saying, I feel like you have a good handle on this situation. I feel like you're clear about what is going on and what should be going on. I feel all of these things in an inspires in me a bit of confidence that I didn't have reading the statement.
James Robert Lay:
And that confidence coming back to the Latin word that's the faith. That's the trust in the leader in the organization. Specifically if it is a dressing the pains that people have because you're aware, and I liked what you said about reading the room, and the room could be the community at large, it could be on a much national or even a global scale of the way that things are happening. And it requires a different approach. And I think an awareness at a leadership level of how we communicate with our teams, historically. But perhaps, learning from the communication styles of other what I would call digital first leaders that like a in the banking space, like a Jill Chrystia, or a Greg Bart and a few others who have, I'm not gonna say that use the word master, but who are already practicing digital communication before the current crisis, that whenever the crisis hit, they didn't change their style, or their cadence, they just changed their message to be more relevant and practical to the pains of the people at the present moment. I want to come back to something you mentioned earlier. Offloading or elevating work, where are the potential dangers, thinking about AI, once again, that could be an impediment or a roadblock, or create more pain for us, as leaders, as opposed to helping others.
Ethan:
Yeah, you already raised one of them. And it certainly got better with GPT. Four, it'll get better with five 4.5. And better with five and better with 5.25, or however, you know, nuanced they get around it, accuracy is definitely up. But if you read some of the initial stuff over the past six months, let's say you'll read about hallucinations. And it's this idea that these machines are giving you responses to your prompts as if it is just matter of fact, it has no sense of truth or accuracy. And so you know, it's that's why your daughter had to do the research. That's why I would suggest that anyone who, whose reputation is important to themselves. Yeah, that's this stuff and understands it and uses these tools to supplement their thought not replace their thought, I know I'm bridging into a new idea there. So one of them is a lack of citation. Another one is a lack of like, you don't really know where it's coming from, like, Why do you think this is true? Or where can I go read more about this? It's one of the reasons I'm still very hesitant about, you know, a Bing or a Google replacing like a feed of of the most accurate responses where you get to judge who is saying this? How valid do they look? Is this a legitimate website or not a legitimate website, like these interactions, strip all of that away, and it's like, here is a response to your prompt. And it's stated as a matter of fact, and it may or may not be true, and may be all true, except for this one little Crux that is the key to the whole thing. So when you have this 3%, that's false, the whole rest of it falls apart, but you don't know. Because you haven't done the work. Right. So there's like, it's that I want to bring up another one, though, that's a little bit further off than then this stuff. It's another big question I have is, in theory, and certainly in reality, in the not too distant future, you will be able to have a business communication problem, you'll be able to go prompt this thing and say, Hey, I need a way to express these two ideas, include this element, include that element, and then you can have it probably point straight over to another thing because we now have API access in and out of chat GPT. It's in Zapier now, like it's about to get super wild. And so it's gonna ride over to the generative design thing that can do images and videos, assuming that it has enough training data of you, you could have a video of yourself seeing these things that you never really even consciously thought you were just clever enough to ask the machine to generate these ideas and put those words into your own mouth. Now, right now, the tech is laughably bad. This like, like fake video, like people are faking first names, for example. So reading a canned video, and then they're relying on the machine to make 1000 Different versions say, Hey, Bobby, hey, Mary, hey, Sue, I'm just here to blah blah, but like the gap between like the fake and the real is laughably bad. The lip sync sucks. It's like, it's terrible, but it will become very convincing very soon. And so my caution around that pieces, and we don't have an official statement on this as a as a brand and as a company, but I am reflecting a lot of our values here. A, that is unnecessary. Be it's a disservice to you if you're legitimately building a relationship, relationship based business. The most important filter around this it's not that you shouldn't use synthetic video. It's that you should not do something synthetic and present it as if it's something else. Anytime you're operating in deceit, where you're trying to make something appear or look or seem like something it isn't, I find that fundamentally problematic. You can call me old fashioned. I think even if humans can't detect whether a machine made this or a person or a person made this, they know what's for them and what isn't. And so this is because the reason you want to fake all this stuff is essentially to do it at scale. And when you're doing things at scale, it's it's approaching spam and a new channel, frankly, yeah, so there's, there's already a solution for this, we're providing it for banks and lenders and all kinds of people. It's your, we call them evergreen videos, you record the video once. And then it's used for every person who reaches this point in the in the loan process. For example, we have a video here, this is text, this is text, you had a video here video here. And we can do it for hundreds or even 1000s of sales producers at a time through this through this interface. But we're not saying pretend like this is for one person, we're not faking things around it. It's it's, it's you as yourself, being of service and value being relevant to what you know, where the person is in the journey. What they often face is that hey, now that this has happened, you might be wondering about this, that or the other thing, if you're like most of the people I deal with, I want to give you a couple tips and pointers. And of course, all my contact information is down below for a conversation. And so the scale that the fake video provides really isn't even necessary. And I would caution and I'll stop, I'll caution anyone from walking too far away from getting comfortable and confident in their own skin, speaking to other people, whether it's through a webcam, or whether it's in person, or whether it's over the phone. That's your strength. Yes, that is you that like you are your own best differentiator, you're the reason people say yes, and it comes back to confidence, and some of these other themes. And so your ability to present ideas, deal with ideas to be present with people to lead your lead a conversation through your curiosity, and keep steering it through active listening. This is your strength as a human being. It's not in getting clever and finding ways to scale mediocrity.
James Robert Lay:
What you say what you do, and I think even now it's what other people see and perceive around what you say and what you do. As we start to wrap up. Next step, one small thing that the dear listener can do next to maximize growth by by thinking about the way they communicate by thinking about how they can utilize video to differentiate themselves in the age of AI. What's the one small thing they can do today?
Ethan:
I know yes, for one, I'm gonna give two and one of them is self serving. But it's actually a benefit to other people too. First is if you if you're reading about this, if you're hearing about it, and you're seeing all the people offering trainings and courses and stuff around this, there's no better teacher than practice. Yes. Whether it's helping your kids with their schoolwork and experience this that way, the way that you described I love that example. So I doubled back on it. It's their free accounts, you don't even need to pay for anything right now. If you don't want to get in there and mess around, you're going to ask some clumsy questions and get some silly responses, you're going to ask, you're gonna hear to find that you're like, you're uncomfortable doing it just like if you picked up a guitar and you've never played it before. It's gonna feel awkward. You can hold it, you can make some noise with it, but it doesn't feel like your pitch. Like, that's where everything starts. So if you're not doing this start and then specifically this idea of building human connection across this increasing digital divide. Bom bom.com/free book, even I Steve's my longtime friend and team member, our CMO at bom, bom. We co authored a book to Wall Street Journal bestseller called human centered communication. And it's one year anniversary, we decided it was more useful to the world big absolutely free. So our designers enhanced the digital copy. We made it absolutely free at Bom bom.com/free book, and there are 11 Other experts and from a variety of fields, but really in the kind of in the sales, marketing and Leadership and Culture zone.
James Robert Lay:
Speaking into this idea of how do we truly connect and communicate as we become more digitally distant as attention gets harder to get and trust gets harder to build to great action plans to guide people forward. Play with it, practice fail. Maybe you get a little bit frustrated but no it's all part of the learning experience. And then second, get the book if someone wants to continue the conversation that we've started Ethan what's the best way for them to reach out say hello and connect with you?
Ethan:
Email me Ethan ethan@bombbomb.com or hit me up on LinkedIn and the last time I was on this show I had a number of people hit me up on LinkedIn. You have a very engaged and trusting and appreciative group of people that enjoy what you're producing and I'm privileged to be a part of it.
James Robert Lay:
Connect with Ethan learn with Ethan grow with Ethan. Ethan, thank you for the kind words as well as why we do what we do to help other people maximize their own growth as a leader as a marketer, as someone in lending at their bank, credit union or FinTech and thank you for being a part of the experience. This has been a fun, fun, fun conversation today. I Joy loved it. As always, and until next time, be well, do good, and make your bed.
