AIは私たちを「良く」するのか、「楽に」するだけか ― Geoff Thatcher が語るAI活用の5つのルール

Let's go. You're listening to Making Data Simple, where we make the world of data effortless, relevant, and yes, even fun. Welcome, listeners, to Making Data Simple. I am stepping in and pinch-hitting for Al Martin today. My name is Catherine Nain, and today I'm so pleased we have a guest who is a true visionary in the world of immersive storytelling, Jeff Thatcher, founder of Creative Principles. For over four decades, you've been pushing the boundaries of live experiences, and that's what I can't wait to dig into, from zoos to AI personalized exhibits. You've designed mobile reverse vending machines that collected 13,000 donations in a single season. Did I get that right in doing my research for you? That was incredible. I didn't design those. Those were actually brainstormed developed by somebody else. I just helped roll out a mobile version of it across the southeast. Wow. But yes. That is cool. All right. Your passion, if I had this summarized correctly, is to form deep emotional connections between people and place, right?

And that AI is an emerging art form. 100%. Okay, good. So, you know, I try. I try. You're the co-author of The CEO's Time Machine, a speaker on global stages, and the creative mind behind major events like the opening of the Warner Brothers World and Abu Dhabi. So today I want to explore how AI is changing storytelling and talk about AI and regulation. And of course, anything else that you might actually want to talk about today, but that was kind of on my agenda, is to dive into AI and how it's making a difference for you and your industry today. Would you like to introduce yourself a little bit more before we get going? I think you were very kind and did a wonderful job. The bottom line is I've been doing this since I was 14 years old, when I got a job as a Cleanup Boy, and that was the exact title, at an amusement park. And so I worked all my way through high school and college at an amusement park. And then after a brief stint in journalism, which is about telling stories, really have been working in three markets. We work in theme parks, we work in museums, and we work in brand experiences. So anything from an executive

briefing center at IBM. In fact, I've worked on several concepts for IBM briefing centers in Shanghai, no, Beijing, sorry, Beijing and Poughkeepsie, and I think one down in Raleigh. So we've done several IBM concepts. And then, yeah, so museums, corporate band experiences, and theme parks. So it's a nice mix between the three, but they all have in common, fundamentally, the idea of experiencing a story. That's our goal. And when it comes to AI, what we see with AI is a way to tell stories in a way that's never been possible before, Because with AI, we can personalize that story and scale that story in a way that just would never be possible before. So let's start by level setting what we mean for this conversation when we talk about AI. What does AI mean to you and what's the technology base that we're talking about here? So I believe the title of your podcast is Keep Data Simple, right? It is. We're all about making data simple. So basically the hypothesis there and the brand there for all of our listeners, if you're listening for the first time or repeat, is like we want to make the complex simple.

well, okay, great, but that data is the core of everything, right? And then... Yeah. So in September 2023, when we were hired by the College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta, Georgia, to reimagine that experience there for their 10th anniversary, we brainstormed all kinds of ideas. But one idea that kept coming up was AI. And we were actually inspired by IBM's Watson. in 2017, like, you know, almost a decade ago, IBM Watson went to a museum in Brazil, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Watson allowed guests to talk to paintings and ask paintings questions. And so we actually put that in the benchmark in our brainstorming sessions for the Cultural Hall of Fame, because wouldn't it be cool if you could talk to the Heisman Trophy? Wouldn't it be cool if you could talk to the National Championship Trophy, or you could talk to a cheerleading uniform, or you could talk to any of the amazing artifacts they have on display. They have the trombone, if you're a Cal fan, that the play, right, where the Cal football player hit the trombone player

from Stanford, right, and they won the game at the last minute. That trombone is on display, so you could actually have a conversation with that trombone. But where we ended up going with AI is you have 764 different college football teams. That's a lot of data. Each of those football teams has collars. Each of those college football teams has mascots. Each of those football teams have a rival that they hate. You know, if you are a fan of the Ohio State University, you hate Michigan. You know, you just, it's just there. You just hate Michigan. If you went to BYU where I went, we don't like to use the word hate because it's a religious school, but we dislike the University of Utah and vice versa, right? We have these rivals. Where did you go to school? UCSD, University of California, San Diego. Okay, all right. Your natural rival would probably, is it San Diego State or is it, no? Yes. San Diego State, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, some universities have these rivals like, you know, Michigan, Ohio State that are just intense, right? And others have, you know, less intense rivals.

But there's a lot of data with these 764 teams. And so what we wanted to do is personalize an experience. So any guest coming to the College Football Hall of Fame would have an experience that would be personalized to what they wanted because there are 764 different college football teams. Now, so when I talk about AI, I'm talking about AI being able to break that experience down. So both visually and with words, every single fan who comes through can be put into the game. Now, what IBM did with Watson at the Art Museum in Sao Paulo and what most of the experiences in AI and museums have been about since has been about interpreting artifacts, interpreting things on display. So if you go, for example, to the Salvador Dali Museum, and we had nothing to do with this. It was Goodby Silverstein and partners worked on it. You can talk to Salvador Dali. You can talk to the subject matter, right? You can learn more about the artifacts of Salvador Dali. If you go to the Amelia Earhart Museum, you can talk to Amelia Earhart through the power of AI.

AI helps to interpret the artifacts. What we wanted to do instead at the Cultural Hall of Fame was use AI to make you the star of the exhibit, to put you physically and virtually in the story. So, for example, when you go to the Heisman Trophy, you see yourself posing with the Heisman Trophy in the colors of your team. And there's a little caption written in ChatJPT that talks about how, you know, you want to win the Heisman Trophy and all about your experience with, you know, with your team. Or when you go to the exhibit about the weight room, for example, you know, and that's an existing exhibit that was already there about the weight room. We added a monitor, two monitors, one for copy and one for you. And you see yourself, you know, lifting weights. And there's a little story, humorous, about you and your favorite team and lifting weights. When you see yourself in the stands cheering, there's a funny story about how you, you know, your game day rituals. You know, when it's probably my favorite part of this is the coaches video. There's a whole exhibit at the Cultural Hall of Fame about coaches. And we take your favorite team, your least favorite team, the personality that you've described,

that you put into the kiosk when you checked in. And then the AI writes a one-minute video. 11 Labs and Blender and other tools out there help us to bring that together. And we literally produce a one-minute video called The Best Coaches Who Never Were, a mockumentary. So on the day of the national championship, 3,189 guests who come through that Hall of Fame, all 3,000 of those guests got a custom-produced video starring them. I mean, it was their face. It was them. They are starring in the video. It's telling their story. So when you talk about what AI means to us from an experience perspective, AI is about scaling an experience and personalizing it. So, for example, I grew up working in an amusement park, and our amusement park was called Lagoon and Pioneer Village. And so it has, and still does today, has a little Pioneer Village, like a Western-themed town. And at the end of that Main Street, the Pioneer Village Main Street, there's an old-time photo studio where you can put on a cowboy hat, put on a cowboy vest, put a gun on. You know, your spouse, your girlfriend poses a salon girl, very stereotypical, right?

And you're carrying the gun. She's in her cool salon girl outfit and you pose for an old time photo. You become part of the story. As an experienced designer, that's what we want to do. We want to always put you in the story. That is exactly what we're doing with AI at the College of Ball of Fame. We're just doing it at a scale, 764 teams and a personalization, you know, 14 different touch points across 14 different exhibits from coaching and tailgating to marching band, mascot, military. You can see yourself as a military flyover pilot. You can see yourself as an ROTC cadet. We even put you in the historic 1968 paintings by Arnold Freyberg celebrating the 100th anniversary of college football. And even as you walk out on the field, at the end of the experience, there's a recruiting hype video that plays that basically is like, oh, this is Kate, and she's awesome, and she's a new recruit, and she's going to be great. And you see yourself up on this big jumbotron in the football field at the end of the experience. So all of that is stuff that we've been doing for years. But without AI, we would not be able to do it at the scale and the personalization that

we're doing now. So it's really about technology enabling us to tell stories in a way that we always have, but tell those stories at a scale and a personalization that only software can deliver. So what I hear you saying is we may have had the intent was always there, right? to have these immersive stories where you really saw yourself as part of it. But because we have all of this amazing technology now, it can bring it to life in a much more visceral and real way, and it can do it at scale. So maybe not just in one area of the weight room where that would have been the exhibit, but now you can go across all of these areas. And it sounds like a key takeaway for this as a participant is that you can have a copy of that story, right? You can really see it come to life and have it to be able to redistribute, so to speak, because you're walking away with a part of the story. You absolutely are. This is nothing new, what we're doing with AI. But because, I mean, the original, for example, the original E.T. Adventure ride at Universal Studios, it opened in 1990, right? So was that 25 years ago? 35? 35 years ago?

35. 35 years. Oh, my gosh. Where does time go? It goes in a blink. So that ride opened 35 years ago. And if you remember, have you been on E.T. The Ride? I haven't, no. All right. So you get a little card, right? You get a little card like your credit card. And they scan this little card and you type in your name, right? They literally, an employee asks you your name and the employee types in your name like on a keyboard. And then you have this little card. And then when you get on the ride, you just, like a credit card, you just scan, right? It's data, right? You scan your card. And then at the end of the ride, as you're like finishing the experience, an alien from ET's home planet basically just says, thank you, Kate, in that little ET voice. Thank you, Jeff, goodbye, Jeff, goodbye, Kate. It personalizes the experience for you. So that 35 years ago that experience with this crude piece of technology where you become part of the story You go back even further to Disney Haunted Mansion where they do this kind of mirrored

effect. If you remember the Haunted Mansion where your faces are superimposed on some of the- Yes, I do. Yeah. It's very, I mean, very old technology, but you're becoming part of the story. We always want to put you in the story. But now, by taking your face and scanning your face in, right, and then it's deep fakes for fun, essentially. But imagine the future of this, right? And not just for rides, but when you go on the Pirates of the Caribbean, and I have no idea if they're going to do this, but they should. If you're going to go on Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland Abu Dhabi, no, you should be one of the extras. You should be one of the pirates. You should be right up there on the big LED screens right next to Jack Sparrow. You should be on the crew. You should. I mean, I want to see myself on the crew with Jack Sparrow. I'm on the ride. I want to be a pirate. I'm going to be in the experience. And you start to think about, okay, how would dinner in a movie change, you know, if I want to see the new Mission Impossible movie, right, and I want to be on Tom Cruise's team. I do. So instead of paying $20 for a movie, maybe I pay $100 for the movie, right,

and I get my face scanned in, you know, at dinner at the movie theater, you know, have a nice dinner because we need processing time, right? You know, there's processing costs, right? Somebody's got to pay for it. But, you know, out of nice dinner. Somebody has to pay for it in the storage, all the things, yeah. All of that, all of that. I mean, these are the logistics that we have to work out when it comes to keeping Tata simple. I mean, the College Football Hall of Fame, one of, I think, the things I'm most proud of, and I'm the creative guy here. I'm not the technical team. But the technical team that we hired to work on that has been able to go from they can do all of those touch points with an average processing time of about eight minutes. That's incredible. An average processing time in the crowd. Now, we couldn't do some of the things we wanted to do. Like, we wanted to have moving video for that coach's video and ended up going with the Ken Burns approach, you know, with still images and stuff like that. The reason we went with still images was really purely about processing time and processing costs. But as things come down and the technology improves, you know, imagine going to Mission Impossible 12, right? And Tom Cruise is dead. I think you're still seeing Tom Cruise on the screen because of the power of AI.

But you're now part of Tom Cruise's team. You're one of the elite members of the team. You see yourself on the screen. You've been a part of the story. That just begs a question for me that I'm so curious to hear your thoughts on. You are the creative guy. You just said that, right? And we said early on that AI can be an art form. So what does it mean to create? I see AI, as it stands right now, as a really sophisticated prediction engine. It's able to understand really sophisticated input. It's able to contextualize it really well. We had a guest on the other week who was talking about contextualization. So it's able to make sense of input that it is given. But I see art and creativity as a uniquely human thing, right? I have that very box in my brain and my worldview, probably because I'm just trying to hang on to that little piece of humanity, right? But I see creative as something out of nothing that is uniquely human.

How does AI represent creativity in your mind? And is AI creating? And where does that intersect occur? Or is it blurry? Or is it distinct? Tell me your thoughts on that. Because I think art and I think human creating. I don't think AI, but maybe there's a new definition there that I haven't considered. So even before AI rocked our world, was it three years ago? You know, when we first saw Dolly 3, you know, and ChatGPD hit the market and then MidJourney shortly thereafter. We immediately, as soon as we started playing with MidJourney, I canceled all of our subscriptions to Getty and all the stock houses and immediately just kind of embraced AI. We subscribed at the highest level to all of the AI engines so we could just start using it. But even before that, we've always felt that speed, creative speed is critical. People forget, for example, that Walt Disney designed the master plan for Disneyland in a weekend, you know, in a weekend, right? That's crazy. That's so fast. I can promise you that

they're not going to design the new Avi Dovig Disneyland master plan in a weekend, although I think they should. We, I happen to believe, and we believe, and there's a lot of research that backs up this, that that instinct, that human instinct, that creative impulse, right, that speed enhances creativity. What happens in, you know, your work at IBM, you know, all about the sales cycle, right? What happens when the sales cycle extends longer and longer and longer? Time is the killer of all deals, whether it comes to cleaning rooms at home or sales cycles or whatever. Time is the killer of all deals. And creativity. How many times do you have an amazing idea at a brainstorming session and then through the process of it going through the corporate socialization and the bureaucratic rig and roll that it just dies and the idea dies? OK, so when your original question is about the intersect of human creativity with AI. So from my perspective, the true power in AI helping to fuel creativity is that AI enables us to work so much faster than we could before.

So, for example, one of our designers can do it now. Right. And again, AI is constantly changing. Right. Couldn't do this even six months ago, but now you can. They take a hand-drawn sketch, like a pencil sketch, and then we put that into ChatGPT, and we say, make it photoreal. And then it generates a photoreal rendering. And then we can make a few modifications to it. So we can go from a pencil sketch to a photoreal rendering in 10 minutes. Okay. Or I'm in a brainstorming session, right? Just last week was in a big three-day brainstorming session over a new museum. and somebody has an idea, right? And we can take that idea, and we can immediately start fleshing it out through AI. The idea is still human-generated, but we can start fleshing that idea out with prompts through the large learning models

to get to the meat of it so much faster. I mean, just to give you very one specific example, and this was last week. The museum that we were working on, I can't give you the details, but the museum we were working on, its story was based on several books that had been written. Well, you know, we had the permission to take several of those books in PDF form, put them into AI. And then, yeah, we would eventually read the books, but we wouldn't necessarily read them before we came into a charrette. You know, we just kind of browsed them a little bit. Right. But now we can upload those books. we can be like brainstorming ideas immediately going into Chachapiti or Grok and saying, hey, you know, please pick the five characters in this book that we can feature in this exhibit or this experience and we want to do it this way. You're typing and prompting. And so you can really generate ideas and flush those ideas so much faster, but it's still an intersection of that human creativity. You're still the one doing the prompting. You're still the one driving that idea and pushing it forward. And then you clearly, again, if you have experience in this, you clearly see ideas that, oh, that's not going to work.

Well, that's a horrible idea. No, no, change it this way, change it that way. Whether it's mood boards, renderings, creative treatments. We had a workshop with another client where there were 14 scripts that needed to be written, and it was just taking so much time. It was painful working the old-fashioned way. So we brought the three writers together from the two different media production teams, and we got in a room. We logged on, you know, enterprise, you know, secure system in the company's, you know, network. And we generated 14 first draft scripts in a day and a half speed. If you believe in creative speed, which we do, AI enables us to get to that, to flesh that ideas out so much faster than before. And as a human being, that's exciting, I think, because I believe the creativity is better the faster we work. Is there a tipping point where there's no human in the loop? I don't think so. That mockumentary on coaching, the best coaches that ever were, the story arc was created by a human being.

You know, the story, every single guest gets the same story arc. You know, you were born here, right? You wanted to be this, but then you got thrust into coaching. And then you have some quirky coaching habits that then led to a victory over your arc rival. you were celebrated and you retired and then you opened a restaurant in your hometown that story that we wrote as human beings is the same story for every same story arc for every guest but the voiceover you know the script is customized for every single guest that comes through and that script is based on ai um but you know the story arc was generated by the human beings i mean i sure hope not i mean you know like you i'm you know we you know we we worry about it you know one of the one we've written five rules for working with AI. And one of them is if you write, write, if you design, design, don't, don't give up what you do. I mean, you know, I just wrote a friend of mine from back home. We just had our 40th high school reunion, Davis high school, Kaysville, Utah.

Big shout out, big shout out. Go, go darts. Right. Well, and I was asked by a childhood friend, Hey, would you write a tribute to the attributes of Davis high school? I wrote it, 100% wrote it. I had an idea at the end of it to take popular lyrics from 1980s songs and create a poem. Now, I used AI to help me research those lyrics and write the rhyming poem, because that was just going to take way too much time for me to try to research on my own and come up with my own. So I was able to basically say, look at one of the top Billboard songs from 1985, top 50 Billboard songs from 1985, create a rhyming poem about, and again, the story that I had written in my tribute, which you can put on my LinkedIn if you want to. The story was basically about how we think we're all different and high school excels at accentuating our differences, but in the end, we're really all just the same. I mean, we're really not that different. You know what I mean? And once we realize that we're not that different and that we have a lot in common, we can accomplish a lot more. And so that's the basic story that we wrote, that I wrote in the essay,

a human being wrote. And I just simply asked AI to create a poem using popular lyrics from 1985 to support that story arc, to support that story. And it did. So I used AI to help me write the poem. But the essay itself, I wrote. I wrote the essay, right? So, and that's not any different than this. I mean, I can get this book out right here. This is the, you know, English Usage Dictionary. And I have, I have the American Language Dictionary. And I have my trustee. You can see how much it's been used over the years. It has yes yes My JJ Rodale Synonym Finder Yep AI is not any different than these tools that we used forever It just allows us to use them much much faster than we did before So if AI isn't any different than our previous tools, why do we need five rules for using AI? And tell me about what those five are. That's a very good question. I'm going to answer that question with a story. When the Columbia space shuttle disintegrated on reentry, NASA created an investigative board, right, to look into it.

And in that final report, you know what they blamed? The endemic use of PowerPoint by engineers as one of the causes of the Columbia's. All right. So what happened? We got lazy. engineers, instead of writing research reports, went straight to a shortcut because technology made it easier and started putting together PowerPoint slides. Everybody does it. I've been guilty myself, right? I try not to. I always try to write first and then I try to write the presentation first and then put the PowerPoint together. But we've all suffered from that like, ooh, I got a deadline. I'm in a hurry. I'm just going to go straight to the PowerPoint, right? Literally, the accident report says the endemic use of PowerPoint. People will die because of AI. in the same way that people died because of PowerPoint. So what do we do? Well, we have to have the discipline as human beings and as leaders to not get lazy. And that's hard. And AI makes it a lot easier to get lazy if we want to.

I mean, it's the ultimate CliffsNotes, right? You know, eventually you have to read those books. But our rules really quick, our five rules. Our first is if you're a writer, right? Don't forget who you are, right? If you're an engineer, engineer. Don't lose who you are. It's still very important to write if you're a writer. It's still important to design if you're a designer. Yes, you can use AI, but don't forget who you are. It's important. If I'm trying to figure out an email, instead of having ChatGPT figure it out, sometimes it's important for you to figure out what you want to say. You can use AI to analyze it. You can use AI to make it better, but there's certain parts of it you can use. So do what you do. That's number one. The second one is use AI to make what you're doing better, not to make it easier. That's the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal here isn't just about making something easier. It's about making it better. Okay, I got to ask. I got to ask. If you're seeing me write this down because I'm writing on my list of questions,

how do you define or know between better and easier, right? How would you define that? So that's a great idea. So the operating principle is, like, if it's in you, do the thing, right? Right. design, design. Okay, great. And then use this tool to make you better, not easier. But when we're talking about speed in context of creativity, when we're talking about you need to write before you make the PowerPoint, but yet the chat GPT makes the writing faster, arguably it can make my writing better. Where's that distinction between better and easier? What does that look like? I'm not sure I can answer that with just not, the only way I can answer that is to give you an example. I love it. Yeah. Okay. So, so we were hired to work on the Yosemite Mountain Sugar Pine Railroad, five miles south of Yosemite Park's southern, southern entrance, a great historic railroad. And they gave us a stack of books, this tall to look at. None of them are PDFs. So it's like I couldn't drop them into AI if I wanted to. And so, and we only had two days, right? They'd hired us for a two day consulting gig, right? Again, I mean, listen, if I had two months,

and they were going to pay me for two months of planning. Great. Yeah. But I had two days because that's all they could afford. And that great little train. We were happy to do it. It was just so cool. And we started perusing the books, literally, in our hotel room that night. And my wife, we're a family cop. My wife pointed over my shoulder and was like, what's that? It's a poem about logging. It's called the last whistle, basically the last whistle of the train. And she's like, I bet you could do something with that. And she's right. so I went to AI went to Suno right the musical AI and asked it to write a make a folk song based on this poem and it was beautiful again I'm not a musician I'm certainly not a singer it's not what I do right so did it make it faster not necessarily I actually had to take more time with Suno it would have been faster for me just to say oh we have an idea let's make a folk song out of this poem and then literally that would in times past that would have been it that would been the idea. I literally would put on a slide or put in a written report. I would have put,

here's our idea. Take this poem, turn it to a folk song. I'd have a picture. Maybe I'd have a reference sample of a great folk song about trains or something that's as an inspiration. But I actually wouldn't write a folk song. I wouldn't perform a folk song. I'm not a musician, and I don't have one on the team. But AI made that idea better because I was able to take AI and create a folk song. And then when we presented it, the owner of the railroad, a widow, whose husband had put his life into building that railroad since the 1960s, she cried. It was beautiful. It was a beautiful folk song. Suno does some things very well, and folk songs it does very, very well. And she cried in our meeting because it was so beautiful. It was beautiful. and was like, great, it's a great idea, right? So that, it would be an example of using AI to make something better, right? Rather than just easier. And there are others, but that's probably a good one. I think that's a, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, and how do you know? Well, it's kind of like how you know

that Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor was a lousy movie, but Pixar's Toy Story was. It was a good story. It made you feel. That's how you know. well and i i think you're hitting on something really important and key when we think about how ai is a tool to augment what what we know how to do there are people who are talented and have great instincts at different things right like i work with so many brilliant people who just understand technology end to end and it seems like they intuit it when i speak with you i get that same feeling around articulating a story in a way that draws in somebody to fully experience it and be immersed. But this widow for the railroad company, she knows end to end, perhaps the railroad industry and what makes sense. And she has all of that context. I mean, perhaps, right? But if we go down that idea, then she knows her piece. But you being able to come in from an outside perspective is what is unique and very human in the loop in this. Where AI is so powerful is it can take your talent and your instinctual and intuitive ability to see what would really make a story come to life.

In the case of a railroad was a folk song with your wife coming in and having the spark of the idea. How wonderful is it that AI can be that tool that you can go ahead and use to make that real and make that impactful and give weight and texture and depth to what they were trying to say, which sometimes you don't have the ability to put it into words. And that's the part I don't think AI will be able to replace. Right. That's still that human interaction. That's still sparking together and imagining what some other human would like to be able to see. And that's where I don't see I being able to create. I see I being able to be a great tool. I'm totally with you there. I think it's very wonderful. I use it in all of the ways. But I still don't think it will replace that sitting with somebody else, imagining what they're trying to say that they may not have the language to do and being able to bring it together and make it real. And that's what I hear you doing. And we're only on rule number two. I want to make sure we have enough time to get to rules three, four, and five. But did you want to comment on that? Yeah. No, I agree with you. Actually, it's a nice segue into rule number three.

You know, I mean, number one is do what you do. Number three is, you know, to make it better, not easier. But rule number three is about don't let AI steal your inspiration. Steal those moments that you just talked about, right? That's what you were really talking about is those moments of inspiration. Yes. And we have to be careful that we don't let AI steal that. So an example is we are not fans at our company in using AI to take notes because we believe that note taking is a creative process. That as you're taking notes, you get ideas. Right. If all I do is sit back and let AI take the notes, I just chill back. I just let AI take all the notes. Now, if you need to transcribe it, fine. You know, because you want a word for word transcription. Fine. Fine. But I can tell you that most people aren't doing that. It's still hugely important. In the same way it was hugely important when you went to college and went to high school to take notes during the lectures, it's hugely important that you actually take notes in your meetings.

Because that is one example of inspiration. That's a chance for you to get inspiration if you're taking notes in a meeting. And we've all done it, whether we're typing or whether we're writing on our field notes. And I don't know how you do it. sometimes I'll just like go, oh, idea, big catalogs, idea, colon. What about this? And then I'll keep taking notes. I'll just have this like, so that's the third rule is don't let AI steal moments of inspiration. And you must be present to win. That's really talking about participation as well. When you're taking notes, you're participating and interacting with the conversation that's taking place, I think. And so that's how you get ideas. But if you're sitting back and listening and being a consumer of it, it's a lot more difficult to critically think about it. And I think that's also a topic we're circling here, which we may not get to in this short hour that we have, but about AI and critical thinking about thinking about what you're thinking about and what's being said and what could be done differently. That's a level of participation and engagement with the material that you as an experienced storyteller trying to bring the engagement to life for people probably take for granted. But there's a lot of people who

may not be as skilled around thinking about what's actually happening and how it might change and how it might be different. But let's go to four and five, because I do want to have some time to hear from you and another few closing thoughts. This has been so fun. Yeah. I mean, one final thing on three, and again, we preached this even before AI, which is it's not note-taking, right? If there's a young person starting their career, I'm like, you volunteer and you become the best person taking notes so you're invited to every important meeting because what you're actually doing is managing your company's intellectual property. Absolutely. Like whoever writes the history, right? That's it. I mean, people think note-taking is a menial task and not very important, and they're not important if they're the one assigned to take notes. I'm like, no, no, it's the exact opposite. If you become known in your company as like the best note-taker, right, and not just because you're taking notes word for word, but because you're injecting your own ideas and your own thoughts, what you're doing is managing intellectual property. So my point is, why would you want to delegate that to AI? Great point. I agree. I agree.

The fourth one, always use the most reliable source. And AI is not always the most reliable source. That is so true. So it really the question is AI the most reliable source on this topic Now there are times especially now I mean when you have the ability and it a public you know again I not saying to upload documents that you don have rights to upload but if you can upload a publicly available document, a PDF, and you can start searching within it, that is a very reliable source of information that you can mine, you know, to be able to basically upload, you know, a long white paper that's publicly available on the internet, right? It's not like you're, you know, it's not, it's fine. Like, oh, here's the, you know, like I'll make this up because I'm sure it's there. Like, oh, here's the original white paper for Watson from 30 years ago or whatever that IBM wrote. And, okay, I want to mine that document. I want to take and get ideas from it. And I want to, you know, not just read it, but just mine it. Or, oh, here's a 500-page document on the history of the U.S. Navy or, you know, whatever it is, right?

You have to use the – is AI the most reliable source? And often it's no. It's not. I mean, we can go on and have very long conversations about that. Very long conversations. It lies to you and the way it's programmed to lie to you and it wants to help you. And, you know, all of us have had examples of like, no, that's just totally wrong. And it's getting better. But, you know, that's the fourth rule is just make sure you're using the most reliable. As any good journalist would do, right? Exactly. Because that's stint in journalism. As any good journalist would do, check your resources, make sure they're valid, make sure it's reliable. Okay, that's number four. And the fifth and final lesson is that use AI to tell stories because fundamentally it's stories that bring us together. It's stories that provide that human connection. And it doesn't really matter if those stories are generated with the help of AI or are fully written by human beings. And just to share one example from the College Football Hall of Fame is there are existing exhibits on tailgating, as there should be,

in any College Football Hall of Fame. and we were able to use AI to create a 1920s tailgating experience where you saw yourself in the 1920s and you saw yourself in the 1980s. In the 1980s, you have two choices. You're either a preppy from the 1980s or you're a rocker from the 1980s. And to see families come through, and it's a simple story, right? You're tailgating. It's part of the tradition of college football, only in America, right? and to see them swipe their RFID badge and wait for that picture to pop up. And sometimes it's the mom in the preppy outfit, you know what I mean, with her big hair. And she's like, oh, my gosh, that's how my hair was. You know what I mean? And the kids are laughing and grandma's laughing. And then the dad scans in and he's in a mullet, you know, in a rocker vest with, you know, midriff and his abs shining through. And everybody starts laughing. You know what I mean? And the dad is bald. And now they're seeing the dad with all this big hair from, you know, his rocker mullet. And they're just connecting over the simple story of, you know, celebrating the traditions of college football.

It's AI helping to tell that story. I think one of the most rewarding experiences I had at the College Football Hall of Fame was standing in the football field at the end of the experience. And a grandma came through and she said to me, she said, you know, I don't even like football, but I had a good time. And the reason she had a good time is because we told a story. And that story was about the tradition of college football and the tradition and the passion that people have for it. And so the fifth rule is just to make sure that you use AI to tell great stories. And, you know, listen, AI, just like film and just like video and just like any other technology that's been invented over the years and just like the printing pest, AI will be used to tell crappy stories and AI will be used to do schlocky bad work. That's normal. That's humanity, right? People will use AI for good and they'll use it for bad in the same way that, you know, the camera is used for good and bad, in the same way that the film is used for good and bad, in the same way that anything is used for good and bad.

But just make sure you focus on telling great stories. So that's the fifth point. What a great set of five. In our last few minutes that we have here, what didn't I touch on that you think is interesting or useful that's top of your mind? You know, I think there are worries, you know. I mean, I do worry about getting lazy. You know, how can we have the discipline, right? How can we focus on having that discipline? But by the other token, I don't see enough of my peers and enough companies changing. I see people stuck in their ways. And so I think my final message would be, you know what, if you don't change, if you don't start working faster through the power of AI, you will find yourself irrelevant. I mean, I was once confronted by a chair of an illustration department at a major university. And, you know, basically she said, you know, you're stealing my job. You're stealing my job. And I answered and I said, you know,

my first job in journalism, there was a union, you know, a union team at the newspaper, a bunch of union guys. And their job was to paste up the headlines and the copy on a board that would go be photographed and then go to the printers. Those jobs are gone. They're gone. Those union jobs do not exist any longer because computers and technology erased them. Yes. And so I always tell young people and I tell old people, I tell everybody, if you're not learning AI, you should be because it's not the jobs that will be erased are the jobs where people don't learn how to use AI to make their job better. Right. And so, again, not easier, better. And so use AI to make your job better, to make your output better, to make your work better. If you do that, I think you'll have a job. If you don't do that, if all you use AI for is to make your job easier, well, then anybody can do it.

Yes, that's the key, is that if if it's something that makes it easier, it's easy to replace. right because it's being made easier technology is augmenting it and therefore the skill is abstracted and as soon as you abstract skill then it loses differentiation but that brings me to a question which i thought we were done but i have to ask your thoughts on this what do you think about regulation and the role of regulation in ai because we also have the counter arguments for ai that it can it can create terrible stories people aren't yet sophisticated enough to discern what is AI versus what is not AI. And so there's a lot of misinformation that goes out there. What do you think about regulation and AI? Boy, it's just, yeah, way to just lob that question. I know, just lob it in like, boom, coming in. And we can always have a reprise and come back. But I'm sure you spent quite a bit of time thinking about this. You're very sensitive to the copyright nature. You're very sensitive around the creative benefits and limitations that comes to it. I just didn't know if you kind of had a general sense that you'd be willing to share with us. so the title of this podcast is keeping data simple right making data simple yes it is making

this sorry making data simple yes so in that vein i would answer that by saying that you keep things simple when it comes to regulation and and i believe as uh an american and i am biased as an american i believe in the simplicity of the constitution the bill of rights and free speech and free enterprise. And I believe wholeheartedly in the market economy. And the more complex that regulation gets, the more it will hurt not only this technology, but it'll hurt our economy and hurt us, I think, as individuals. Am I scared about people becoming attached to AI chatbots and things like that? Yeah, I am. But I also believe that the market works. And I'll give you an example of that. I absolutely hate what ChatGPT and what OpenAI is doing to humanize their technology.

I hate it. I don't use it very much. I don't use the – I've turned and started using Grok because Grok is a little more – it just has a different – I don't know. It's just less human. I want my AI to be like the Star Trek computer. It's like computer. Give me the information. OpenAI has introduced this feature where if you talk to chat to PT and it gives you an audible response, it started to stutter and like, oh, well, talk like we talk. I hate that. I hate it. And I don't think I'm the only one. You know what I mean? I'm of the opinion. And again, this might be a minority opinion. I train myself. I don't say thank you. I don't say please. I don't ask, will you do this? I say, give me a list. I give it commands in the same way that Jean-Luc Picard gave commands of the computer. Jean-Luc Picard on the Starship Enterprise never said, thank you and please, and oh, that's so nice, and could we have a conversation about my philosophies and why I love Earl Grey tea, and can we talk about Shakespeare?

You know what I mean? Now, you could argue that data was AI, but really, I mean, that's a whole separate conversation. Okay, we'll come back on that one, yeah. Right? But the computer on Star Trek was just as smart as the AI we, well, smarter than the AI we have today, right? But it was a computer, right? So now, but do I believe that should be fixed with regulation? No, I believe that should be fixed with the marketplace. And hopefully, OpenAI will be punished for trying to create and humanize this technology that, in my opinion, should not be humanized. All right. Well said. Clearly, distinctly, for the last part of our conversation, that was well done. Thank you. I so appreciate you having on the show today. Listeners, thanks for allowing me to step in. And Jeff, where can they go to find more information? Where should we send them? We'll put this in the show notes as well, but where should they go to connect with you more deeply? Probably the fastest way to find me is just I have one of those G, Jeff G names. Saturday Night Live now has made fun of me, but, you know, so it's Jeff G.

You know, you could just go search for me online and you can find my LinkedIn, our company's creativeprinciples.com. you know you can go find the book CEO's Time Machine you know but just yeah you can just Google my name and you can you can find me so I can't wait to see although I am using Google much less than I used to I mean isn't that something like that's a whole other thing I would love to delve into because people just aren't they're not no no I mean you know I still use it for searches but not as much as I used to no especially when you need things synthesized oh we'll have you back on the show Jeff thank you again And so much for being here. And when you search for my name, don't say, can you please give me the website for Jeff? No pleases and thank yous. No pleases and thank yous, especially with our out loud voice. I got it. I got it. No. Thanks so much for joining us today. I appreciate it. Listeners, please reach out. Rate us on whatever platform you listen to. And any comments, questions, feedback, send it our way. My name is Catherine Main.

I'm the executive producer of the Making Data Simple podcast. Happy to be with you today. Thanks, Jeff. Talk to you later. Thank you.