Latest / Your Money, Your Rules | Financial Mastery, Wealth Mindset, Leadership Principles, Intuitive Decision-Making, Human Design / Ep. 64 Understanding AI and using it to support us (with special guest Noah Riley)

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Ep. 64 Understanding AI and using it to support us (with special guest Noah Riley) · Your Money, Your Rules | Financial Mastery, Wealth Mindset, Leadership Principles, Intuitive Decision-Making, Human Design

• 0:00
  Noah Riley: We are already you know like a year and a half in pretty sick of seeing AI generated posts.
• 0:06
  Noah Riley: Most people who are on social media with any regularity can just pick them out instantly as soon as they see it and you're already turned off by it.
• 0:14
  Noah Riley: So it's like where do you get the value from AI in your marketing plan?
• 0:18
  Erin Gray: You're listening to generate a life Well live.
• 0:20
  Erin Gray: Podcast.
• 0:21
  Erin Gray: I'm your friend and confidant Erin Gray.
• 0:23
  Erin Gray: On this podcast podcast, we will explore all things money, business and self-development, including human design.
• 0:28
  Erin Gray: I hope you enjoy the journey where I share everything that I know and am continuing to learn along the way, as I honor my heart's desires while inspiring and encouraging you to do the same.
• 0:38
  Erin Gray: Hey, hey, my friends, how are we today?
• 0:40
  Erin Gray: So on today's podcast, I've got Noah Riley.
• 0:43
  Erin Gray: He is the owner of AI Genius Consulting and I'm super excited because I would be called a.
• 0:51
  Erin Gray: I'd probably call myself like an infant in an AI.
• 0:55
  Erin Gray: I don't know if I'd be an infant, I might be a newborn.
• 0:57
  Erin Gray: So I'm super excited to have the conversation today with Noah and for him to school us about all things.
• 1:03
  Erin Gray: And thanks, Noah, for coming on, for being here and sharing your time with us, yeah, so let's dive in.
• 1:10
  Erin Gray: So part of this podcast is like okay, let's.
• 1:13
  Erin Gray: When Noah and I talked beforehand, uh, we were talking about questions that we were going to have and I was, and Noah said you know, I, a lot of people, have a lot of fear and I'm like we're not going down the fear route right, like we literally created this with our own minds.
• 1:26
  Erin Gray: So we're going to talk about it from.
• 1:28
  Erin Gray: We're going to talk about all the ways that it can help us in business to make the things that are mundane tasks, I think, easier and faster and things of that sort.
• 1:39
  Erin Gray: So you want to dive into that for first.
• 1:41
  Erin Gray: first off, the whole process of the whole process but like, okay, what do you see Like for someone that's just starting out?
• 1:51
  Erin Gray: That's like me.
• 1:53
  Erin Gray: You know, like right now I use AI for chapter markers for my podcast, or um, I use buzzsprout on my podcast and it like this is the thing too with AI it's like it creates something and then I basically delete it all and like use parts and bits, but really it's it's like a, it's like a starter for me to like get my brain going, but I end up probably modifying 80% of it.
• 2:19
  Erin Gray: So I don't know if I'm I'm using it in its best capability, but that's kind of how I have used AI.
• 2:25
  Noah Riley: Yeah.
• 2:26
  Noah Riley: So in general, when you're trying to get some kind of benefit from using AI, whether it's in your personal life or your business life, there are kind of three levels of benefits that you get, and it goes down in tiers.
• 2:43
  Noah Riley: So the first level of benefit that you get is just from awareness, meaning that there are tools and AI tools that exist that you don't know about, that solve problems that you currently have, and so you're not getting the benefit because you're not aware.
• 2:58
  Noah Riley: And then there's another part of the awareness is that you're probably using tools that have capabilities that you don't know they have and solve problems that you are dealing with on probably a daily basis, and so that's kind of the awareness layer.
• 3:14
  Noah Riley: The next level down is workflows and optimization point, where you start to have a really broad awareness of what kinds of tools are available to solve what kinds of problems.
• 3:30
  Noah Riley: Then you have to determine whether or not like how deep does that go?
• 3:32
  Noah Riley: Are they actually good at it?
• 3:34
  Noah Riley: Because, like you just said, sometimes you get into the situation where it's like I'm using this really cool AI thing, but then you spend so much time going back over and correcting it that are you actually getting an ROI from it, don't really.
• 3:50
  Noah Riley: It's hard to say unless you're really specifically measuring how much time it's taken.
• 3:54
  Noah Riley: You you know with and without it, and so there on that, on that second level, it's finding out if the tool that you've chosen to use is actually good at solving the problem that you're trying to solve.
• 4:03
  Noah Riley: And if it is and is capable, then using it to the best of its capability, and that's where the optimization comes in.
• 4:11
  Noah Riley: So, for instance, just to use a well-known example, if we're talking about ChatGPT, maybe some levels of awareness might come from understanding what you get from the paid version, that it has the ability to analyze pictures in quite some detail.
• 4:32
  Noah Riley: It has the ability to create and analyze files like CSV, excel files, word docs, pdfs.
• 4:35
  Noah Riley: It can create and ingest those and get all the information out of them.
• 4:39
  Noah Riley: Um, understanding what kinds of different custom GPTs are available on the market and how to build your own, how to integrate those GPTs into other types of automation so that you can actually type into chat GPT hey, um, I want you to create a calendar event for me, like, how would you actually make it automation capable?
• 4:56
  Noah Riley: Those are capabilities that a lot of people don't know that chat GPT has.
• 5:00
  Noah Riley: So that's kind of the awareness level of of that, and then optimization is actually getting to know how do you actually do these things.
• 5:07
  Noah Riley: You know, like, how is it possible?
• 5:08
  Noah Riley: So then you kind of like start to dig deeper into the tools that are good at solving those problems.
• 5:16
  Noah Riley: And so, after you optimize, then you workflow.
• 5:21
  Noah Riley: So, if you're using if in your software stack, you have, let's say, you're using HubSpot for some things, and you're using if in your software stack, you have, let's say, you're using hubspot for some things, you're using google sheets for other things and you're using mailchimp for other things, and your social media is comprised of linkedin and facebook.
• 5:33
  Noah Riley: Well, how do you make all those talk to each other so that if I do something over here, it communicates to all the other applications?
• 5:40
  Noah Riley: Um and so, and what you'll notice is that going down this, that going down these layers of like workflow and then or, or sorry, awareness, workflow and optimization, and the third, third layer is automation.
• 5:51
  Noah Riley: It requires more and more technical capability to get to those outcomes, which is one of the reasons why, right now, we're kind of seeing a little AI bubble where there's a lot of people who are like, ah, ai is not all what it's cracked up to be, but that's because it does actually require some technical knowledge to get the most out of it.
• 6:08
  Erin Gray: Yeah.
• 6:08
  Erin Gray: It's a tool, right, so it's only going to be as good as the person using the tool.
• 6:13
  Erin Gray: Right Like?
• 6:14
  Erin Gray: That's my thought on it right?
• 6:16
  Noah Riley: Yes, absolutely, I mean it's and I hate to use this word, this phrase, cause it's just being overused but it's a force multiplier, so it multiplies you.
• 6:26
  Noah Riley: You know, if you have, you know, one knowledge, then it multiplies one times.
• 6:29
  Noah Riley: You know the tool.
• 6:32
  Noah Riley: So, once you get through this kind of this next layer of workflows and optimization, you go down to the third layer, which is the holy grail of all business endeavors, which is automation meaningful, deterministic automation.
• 6:49
  Noah Riley: And what I mean by that is not just automation that just spins a bunch of stuff that you have to go back and correct, but things that create meaningful outputs, which means outputs that can be used for something meaningful and deterministic, meaning that it's creates the same kind of output again and again and again, so that one time you don't get one that works and then the next time you get one that doesn't work.
• 7:08
  Noah Riley: And so this is one of the things that's really difficult for a lot of people who are in the AI implementation phase right now.
• 7:15
  Noah Riley: Tools that have been built are generalized, but they're trying to be used to solve very specific tasks.
• 7:22
  Noah Riley: So you know, chatgpt is a wide sweeping tool.
• 7:27
  Noah Riley: It has an incredible number of capabilities, but how do you actually get it down to a point of precision, to where it's usable in a business context.
• 7:35
  Noah Riley: A lot of people are struggling to understand how to do that right now, and one of the reasons is because they don't understand what these tools are capable of and they don't have the technical knowledge to even form the questions of how, or even think through the workflow of how you would get it to that point.
• 7:50
  Noah Riley: There's still definitely a barrier when it comes to understanding how to do implementation.
• 7:56
  Erin Gray: I love that Cause.
• 7:57
  Erin Gray: You didn't say it, but it's like it's the same thing that people say to me.
• 8:00
  Erin Gray: It's like I don't know what I don't know about.
• 8:03
  Erin Gray: You know finance, right, and so it's like you don't even know the questions to ask, because you don't.
• 8:08
  Erin Gray: You have no idea how it even works.
• 8:11
  Erin Gray: And so it's like, how can you even formulate questions of like where to go with it?
• 8:15
  Erin Gray: Because you don't, like I said, I mean like it's you're like a newborn with something and you're learning as you're going or you're, you know, hearing from other people, or maybe you're taking classes, but I don't know, I think.
• 8:29
  Erin Gray: I think it's the like you just don't know what you don't know.
• 8:32
  Erin Gray: So, from a from a, I don't want to say specific, but like you, you said some things that when we met and I was like what you said about like billing QuickBooks, things of that sort, I'm just curious not to go into like deep specifics, but like how exactly do you get to use AI for those types of things?
• 8:50
  Noah Riley: So when you're using let's take QuickBooks, for example QuickBooks has automation capabilities baked into it, and those automations are exposed through APIs, which means that they can be programmatically accessed.
• 9:06
  Noah Riley: I can go into a Python script on my computer and-.
• 9:11
  Erin Gray: I'm like wait, slow down.
• 9:13
  Erin Gray: Technical Okay, what is Python like?
• 9:15
  Noah Riley: Python is a programming language.
• 9:17
  Erin Gray: Okay, I'm like you got to-.
• 9:19
  Noah Riley: Okay, so I'll use general terms.
• 9:20
  Erin Gray: Sorry, I can I'm like that'd be like if I rolled out finance terms like whoa, we need to talk in layman's terms here.
• 9:25
  Noah Riley: I'll use general terms.
• 9:25
  Noah Riley: Sorry, I can write some code.
• 9:26
  Erin Gray: That would be like if I rolled out finance terms Like whoa.
• 9:28
  Noah Riley: We need to talk in layman's terms here.
• 9:30
  Noah Riley: Yeah, so let's say I could write code on my computer that can access information on my QuickBooks and I can just go into write a piece of code, run it and then it will return a bunch of information about clients, customers invoices, financial data, customers invoices, uh, financial data, and so, uh, similarly, with some like low code and no code tools like zapier or make or natan or automateio, like all of these things that are, if you're nota coder, um, you can also access that information um, programmatically, which means that you don't have to go into the user interface.
• 10:02
  Noah Riley: The user interface is when you go, you type in quickBooks online in the search bar, and it pulls up the website and you click a button.
• 10:08
  Noah Riley: You're clicking on, you're using the user interface, which is stunted in its capabilities.
• 10:13
  Noah Riley: They basically just are allowing you to see the things that they wanted you to see, because they think these are the things that people are going to want to be able to do.
• 10:21
  Erin Gray: Are important to them, yeah.
• 10:25
  Noah Riley: Right and the background is all code, like the whole entire application is running off of code, and so an API allows you to access the code that creates the interface so that you can do whatever you want with it, and so that's how you get to the automation capabilities.
• 10:37
  Noah Riley: So, for instance, I can write a piece of code that will pull out information out of my QuickBooks and say you know what, how many invoices have I sent to this customer and what were they for?
• 10:50
  Noah Riley: Like get the notes for them and then have and then run it through, something like a chat, gpt or any other kind of LLM or large language model.
• 11:00
  Noah Riley: That will Don't know what that is.
• 11:02
  Noah Riley: A large language model?
• 11:03
  Noah Riley: Yeah, that will Don't know what that is.
• 11:07
  Noah Riley: A large language model?
• 11:09
  Noah Riley: Yeah, it's like a.
• 11:10
  Noah Riley: It's what does the natural language processing.
• 11:17
  Noah Riley: So if I type into ChatGPT, hey, write me a you know a social media post for this subject and go through and spits out a bunch of information back at me in the form of text, that would be like the large language model portion of chat gpt, which means that it is processing the language.
• 11:30
  Noah Riley: It turns into little tokens, it goes into its back end and it says, hey, do you know what this means.
• 11:35
  Noah Riley: It says yes, and then it pulls a bunch of random information together not random, but specific information together, yeah, and then forms a response.
• 11:41
  Noah Riley: And so that's, that's the very you know the very basic of what large language models do.
• 11:46
  Noah Riley: Okay, and so, um, anytime you interact with an ai system that's producing text as an output, like if you type into claude or gemini or chat gpt and you type something and it gives you text back.
• 12:00
  Noah Riley: That's, that's a large language model okay.
• 12:02
  Erin Gray: So I'm thinking about this from like from a quickbook standpoint.
• 12:05
  Erin Gray: So like you could pull a report in QuickBooks that would like you could pull like all of the like you're saying you could pull, like if you want to know, like your most either profitable customer or your most um, yeah, like you said, um invoiced customer, things of that sort.
• 12:20
  Erin Gray: But what you're saying is you would have to like actually go into QuickBooks and you'd actually have to read what you did for that, for that specific invoice which you're saying.
• 12:28
  Erin Gray: I think what you're saying is you could have that AI helps you with it would basically download all of that information of, like the things that you did on each invoice for that customer and then you would be able to see all of those things.
• 12:42
  Erin Gray: Is that?
• 12:42
  Erin Gray: Am I understanding that correctly?
• 12:51
  Noah Riley: Something like that Um, you wouldn't have to download it, um, you can use it, um in what would be called like local memory, which means that it stores it temporarily so that I can look at it and then go away.
• 12:57
  Noah Riley: Okay, so you don't have to actually download onto your machine, um, but what like a practical application of that would be?
• 13:04
  Noah Riley: You could have an automation that would be running every day that would check, Like, if you, if you're, if so much of your business is based on repeat customers and you're noticing that you haven't sent an invoice out to somebody in a month, then then it'll check for the latest date of the invoice and say if it's over a month, then then pull all of the invoices that were previously sent, see what they were for and then generate an email that says hey, I was like, I noticed in the past that you have used us for these types of services and I'm wondering if you're still interested.
• 13:32
  Noah Riley: Or I'd love to reach out to you and maintain contact.
• 13:36
  Noah Riley: And so, because the reporting QuickBooks has a ton of capability in terms of reporting, but it does, it is a little clunky to you.
• 13:46
  Noah Riley: It is familiar with it.
• 13:47
  Noah Riley: It's even more.
• 13:48
  Noah Riley: It's almost prohibitively clunky, yeah.
• 13:50
  Noah Riley: It definitely figure out how to do it.
• 13:54
  Erin Gray: Yeah, I'm like old school.
• 13:55
  Erin Gray: I still use desktop.
• 13:56
  Erin Gray: Like when I told that to I've told a couple of CPAs and bookkeepers about that I'm like it's probably coming back from my construction days, just because we just did so.
• 14:04
  Erin Gray: I just did so much information and we had to have desktop and quick and online was not fast enough and I'm like talk about like it's a language right, like I'm fluent in desktop, really fluent online.
• 14:18
  Erin Gray: It takes me time and it's just like obviously I don't do the near the transactions like construction's very heavy transaction based you know, but, um, but yeah, it's like, in a way it's like old habit and it's like I don't want to, I don't want to go to online, but you know, it's like you're saying I know a lot of people that are it's, it's a, you have information, but it's still like with QuickBooks, you still don't know how to extract the information.
• 14:42
  Erin Gray: One question so, from a security standpoint, where does that like if you're extracting information about your clients and things of that sort, how it goes over to some AI obviously software, right and then where does it go if you're not downloading it and in wherever land, how does that work?
• 15:06
  Noah Riley: Now we're getting into the technical bits.
• 15:08
  Noah Riley: Does that work?
• 15:13
  Noah Riley: Now we're getting into the into the technical bits.
• 15:15
  Noah Riley: Um, so, if you, you have options in terms of data security, there are different ai software and programs that are socked to and HIPAA compliant, like they have the.
• 15:26
  Noah Riley: They are certified and they're claiming that they are well, claiming they've been certified by these.
• 15:30
  Noah Riley: You know these organizations who are certified and they're claiming that they are well, claiming they've been certified by these organizations who are saying that they are up to these standards.
• 15:35
  Noah Riley: And if you believe them, then that's up to you.
• 15:37
  Noah Riley: But it's the same level of trust that you need when you use Microsoft, when you use Google, when you use Facebook, even though we all sign the thing and it says you know we don't do anything irresponsible with your data, and then they sell it all anyways, so it doesn't really matter.
• 15:49
  Noah Riley: You know, know, there's a certain level of trust that you have to have.
• 15:55
  Noah Riley: If you don't have that level of trust and you would not want to send your information out to um, a, uh, some kind of ai system that's on the internet, that's actually on their servers, like on the cloud, yeah, you have the option to use um local llms or local, like little mini chat GPTs that have the ability to do this natural language processing and go through and do the same kinds of stuff.
• 16:18
  Noah Riley: The outputs are more difficult.
• 16:20
  Noah Riley: To get quality outputs, you have to do more fine tuning, you have to put more work into it, but you can run an entire AI system on your own machine without ever leaving your machine ever.
• 16:29
  Noah Riley: So, for people who have those kinds of needs, you can definitely do that, and there are a lot of companies who are working with that.
• 16:38
  Noah Riley: Llama, which is now, I think, on Llama 3, is Facebook's version of ChatGPT, and when ChatGPT came out, you know, meta did the smart thing, because they said, chatgpt kind of just shocked the whole world all at once.
• 16:57
  Noah Riley: They were like hey, check this out, here you go, world, and everybody started scrambling immediately.
• 17:02
  Noah Riley: Well, facebook or Meta?
• 17:05
  Noah Riley: They took a different stance.
• 17:06
  Noah Riley: They said, okay, we're not going to beat them.
• 17:07
  Noah Riley: They're way too far ahead.
• 17:09
  Noah Riley: So what we will do, though, is we're just going to beat them.
• 17:10
  Noah Riley: They're way too far ahead.
• 17:10
  Noah Riley: So what we will do, though, is we're just going to put a little wrench in their game.
• 17:14
  Noah Riley: So they quickly developed their own large language model.
• 17:17
  Noah Riley: That was a fraction of the power of ChatGPT and then they released it open source to the whole world for anyone to download and do whatever they want with, with the caveat that, of course, as you're working on it and deploying all of your stuff, they're pulling all of the best improvements in, so they have the whole world of developers working on improving their language model instead of having just open ai.
• 17:39
  Noah Riley: So that's what llama is.
• 17:41
  Noah Riley: You can go right now, you can search it on the internet and like llama 3 download and you can download it onto your machine and talk to your own AI on your own machine without ever leaving your computer.
• 17:53
  Noah Riley: So they kind of threw a wrench in the game, and it's one of the reasons why, when people talk about slowing down and trying to put all of these stops in place, I'm like this is a different kind of technology, because the infrastructure was already in place for it to be proliferated across the entire world instantly, and this is not something that's been made available to only a few people.
• 18:16
  Noah Riley: It's been made available to everybody, and not only is it just that, like, even if you shut down every single, if you shut down google, facebook, um, microsoft and apple the whole world would still have it, becausea released an open source version of it to the entire world and everyone has downloaded it already.
• 18:33
  Noah Riley: It's already out there, so we're definitely in a place where you know it's here to stay.
• 18:40
  Noah Riley: Yeah, so it's definitely worth knowing how it's going to affect your life, your job, your industry.
• 18:47
  Noah Riley: How much exposure does your job have to being affected by AI or replaced or taken over by AI?
• 18:52
  Noah Riley: These are all very, very valid questions.
• 18:55
  Erin Gray: Yeah, tell me about like the, the tech side, like, if I mean, we kind of talked about QuickBooks and things of that sort, but like, like how can it?
• 19:06
  Erin Gray: You mentioned the, the data.
• 19:09
  Erin Gray: Is there anything else that we left out in terms of how it can affect, how it can support you on the technical side of your business?
• 19:18
  Noah Riley: Oh yeah, I mean, take your pick.
• 19:21
  Erin Gray: Here we go.
• 19:21
  Erin Gray: Don't know what I don't know, so share the top three things.
• 19:26
  Noah Riley: Okay, okay, I think top three things in terms of use cases.
• 19:47
  Noah Riley: That most to it.
• 19:48
  Noah Riley: But people want to be able to chat with the entire like data set of their entire company, which can be spread across multiple kinds of documents, multiple computers, multiple users.
• 19:59
  Noah Riley: Um, we're talking like client communications, um invoices, standard operating procedures in uh inventory, uh lists, like being able to actually have essentially a chat bot where I can go in and say, hey, how many such and such did we sell last month?
• 20:17
  Noah Riley: And and and can you find me?
• 20:18
  Noah Riley: How can you find a?
• 20:20
  Noah Riley: Uh, you make me a list of things I need to order for blah blah and then make it and then send an email to jim about it.
• 20:25
  Noah Riley: You know people are looking for those kinds of solutions, but within like intra company, like like that, yeah, accurate, yeah, so that's one thing like chat with your data.
• 20:36
  Noah Riley: That's probably one of the biggest things.
• 20:39
  Noah Riley: The next biggest thing that you're seeing with people who are trying to do implementation are is customer service, okay, and chatbots that are client facing.
• 20:51
  Noah Riley: So when someone, they basically are using it, trying to use it for lead capture and lead generation.
• 20:56
  Noah Riley: So if someone goes onto my website and they're like wanting to know things about services or wanting to book or schedule an appointment.
• 21:04
  Noah Riley: They want to have chatbots that have access to just non-sensitive company data.
• 21:08
  Noah Riley: So someone could say, hey, if I'm on so-and-so's chiropractic website and be like I have this kind of pain in my, is this something that chiropractors typically treat?
• 21:19
  Noah Riley: And then say, you know, hey, with these disclaimers, I can say that these are the things that you might want to be thinking about more information, like click this button and we'll and we'll book a link right now.
• 21:28
  Noah Riley: So, but to be able to do it in a way where it's specific to the company, not just general data.
• 21:33
  Noah Riley: Also in a way where it's siloed, where you can't get the chat bot to go off and say a bunch of stuff that you don't want it to say yeah, liability.
• 21:42
  Erin Gray: Yep.
• 21:43
  Noah Riley: Um, so, um, and so people are looking at those kinds of solutions as well.
• 21:48
  Noah Riley: And also for incoming calls to not drop leads, because there are a lot of businesses who have like one secretary, for instance, or one person in their front office and if they're on the phone they miss whatever calls are coming in, and so those are dropped leads.
• 22:03
  Noah Riley: And for people especially who do high like high ticket item services, like where it's like one client could represent five figures, it's pretty costly to not be able to answer the phone because they might call you and then, when they don't answer, what do they do?
• 22:17
  Noah Riley: They call the next person.
• 22:18
  Noah Riley: So they want to have like things that will intercept those calls and be like hi, like this is blah, blah, blah.
• 22:24
  Noah Riley: Like I would love to help you.
• 22:25
  Noah Riley: I have information about the company, you can ask me whatever you want to ask me and have be able to chat live with an AI assistant and, again, that has access to company data that's able to actually give them information, schedule appointments and do things like that.
• 22:37
  Noah Riley: That's another thing.
• 22:38
  Noah Riley: That's that you're seeing.
• 22:39
  Noah Riley: And then probably the last thing, but the first thing people go to when they think about it is content marketing like social media content, um marketing like social media content.
• 22:53
  Noah Riley: Uh, specifically, when it comes to creating a content like automated, because um like actually coming up with it.
• 22:58
  Erin Gray: This is where I think is so fast.
• 23:00
  Erin Gray: Is that what you mean by that, like actually coming up with content and writing the content, or do you mean scheduling it or whatever that would be?
• 23:08
  Noah Riley: Umuling, so you don't need AI to schedule social media content.
• 23:13
  Noah Riley: They've had software that does that for a long time.
• 23:15
  Noah Riley: But there are some really interesting things that are happening in the AI space that people don't know about and are not using to their fullest benefit.
• 23:22
  Noah Riley: In terms of AI, we are already you know like a year and a half in pretty sick of seeing AI generated posts.
• 23:31
  Noah Riley: You most people who are on social media with any regularity can just pick them out instantly as soon as they see it, and you're already turned off by it.
• 23:38
  Noah Riley: So it's like where do you get the value from AI in your marketing plan?
• 23:42
  Noah Riley: Well there are, for instance uh, there are a lot of people who are in a specific industry.
• 23:48
  Noah Riley: Let's say you're in finance.
• 23:52
  Noah Riley: Let's say you're in finance, okay, there's like three main types of social media content that you're going to come up with, and it's like inspirational, educational or what's the other one, entertainment right, and so for your clientele, you might lean heavily towards educational content, right, or maybe even just updates on like kind of news things on what's going on like in the financial world that might affect your clients or that might be interested to people who would possibly hire you.
• 24:19
  Noah Riley: Well, how are you going to find that information?
• 24:22
  Erin Gray: How do?
• 24:22
  Noah Riley: you find those sources?
• 24:23
  Noah Riley: How much time do you spend looking through news feeds or looking at things like that?
• 24:28
  Noah Riley: Well, now you have things like aggregated, ai powered RSS feeds, which, which are essentially where I can go into what's called an RSS feed reader that uses AI capability to do a ton of web scraping for you.
• 24:41
  Noah Riley: You can tell it exactly what kind of content you want to look for and it will pull in all those news stories into a single feed.
• 24:47
  Noah Riley: And now and this cause I I use this for for AI stuff Now I get all my stuff in a feed and I say, oh, that's an interesting story.
• 24:53
  Noah Riley: I click on it.
• 24:54
  Noah Riley: I'm like that looks cool.
• 24:55
  Noah Riley: When I hit the button that says save to this list, it runs it through an automation that will summarize it according to the points that I find valuable.
• 25:02
  Noah Riley: And then, after it summarizes it, then it'll spit it into my content manager with the picture and the link and the summary, and then I type in my notes and what I think about it and then I just slide it over into a different column and it posts it.
• 25:13
  Noah Riley: It posts itself or it cues it to be posts posted and so like, but being able to kind of have a mixture of cause.
• 25:19
  Noah Riley: It's going out and finding the content for me.
• 25:21
  Noah Riley: Yeah, I can write down my opinions on it, but it'll do the summary, you know for me that I don't have to do.
• 25:36
  Erin Gray: you know the facts of like, what are like.
• 25:38
  Erin Gray: I'm thinking like right now, like I've talked to so many people about um, uh, I think it's called corporate transparency act.
• 25:40
  Erin Gray: It's like um, it enacted in 2021 and basically like law about like they want to make sure there's no shenanigans with businesses, basically financial Right, and so that's really like, really like, that's really what it is Right and the IRS doesn't have any um enforcing agency, so they passed it off to FinCEN.
• 25:57
  Erin Gray: And so people that I've been talking to like hey, do you know that you have to complete this report by 2020, you know 1231, 2024, if you had a business or registered, you know, before January one a lot of them are saying no.
• 26:09
  Erin Gray: So you're saying things specifically like that.
• 26:11
  Erin Gray: Like if I didn't know about that, I could go and be like what are some of the new laws that have changed, or come down the pipe or something like that that could come in and then, okay, yeah, so you can say like um, the area is finance, I'm looking specifically for law.
• 26:24
  Erin Gray: Yeah.
• 26:25
  Noah Riley: Okay, We'll have a whole feed that's just dedicated to that and it'll just feed you news stories from all over the place.
• 26:30
  Noah Riley: You can blacklist sources that you've got.
• 26:33
  Noah Riley: I was going to say so.
• 26:33
  Noah Riley: How do?
• 26:34
  Erin Gray: you know, I mean without like going and making sure, like I mean, obviously rsgov is pretty legit, but like where are the other things of like you know, coming down the pipe, of like what it doesn't?
• 26:44
  Erin Gray: It doesn't filter truth or non-truth, right?
• 26:48
  Erin Gray: Like obviously that's where the human comes in and to look and see like okay, where is this?
• 26:53
  Noah Riley: So you can.
• 26:53
  Noah Riley: You can set up an RSS feed that is only comprised of white listed sources.
• 26:59
  Erin Gray: Okay.
• 27:00
  Noah Riley: So then again, instead of you having to go to the sites, you can have it scraping from five different sites sites constantly, and then every single time a new post comes up, it just goes into that same single feed.
• 27:09
  Erin Gray: Okay.
• 27:10
  Noah Riley: You know and it knows like oh, this one has to do with AI law, so I'll grab this one, okay.
• 27:14
  Noah Riley: Or finance law yeah, I know what you meant.
• 27:17
  Erin Gray: Yeah, um, I want to go back because you said something about and I'm curious if you have clients that do that with the AI answering.
• 27:24
  Erin Gray: I don't know if you said answering the phones, but do you have clients that enact that?
• 27:30
  Erin Gray: And and are the potential clients of your client like, do they dig that?
• 27:35
  Erin Gray: Because there is nothing more frustrating to me than when I right, like, how many times have you called Dell support?
• 27:42
  Erin Gray: And like you can't understand the person or you're you know, it's just, it's like.
• 27:47
  Erin Gray: So I'm curious if that is a.
• 27:50
  Erin Gray: I know that that can be done, but is that something that like I think about high value clients?
• 27:55
  Erin Gray: It's like we don't want to be talking to a robot or a you know.
• 27:58
  Erin Gray: So I'm curious what your thoughts are if you've had clients that have used it and what they're.
• 28:04
  Noah Riley: My personal beliefs, like my personal thoughts about having a robot answer the phone, is that they're not very good at what they do, and I think we all have that bad taste in our mouth, so it's probably going to take some time to encounter one that's good enough to where it's at go.
• 28:21
  Noah Riley: Yeah so it's nice, yeah, but I do see that people are doing it and they're looking for that solution, especially to not drop calls.
• 28:32
  Noah Riley: I like it.
• 28:33
  Noah Riley: I like it for things like that.
• 28:37
  Noah Riley: Let's say, I call a place and they're not, they can't answer, they don't have people.
• 28:42
  Noah Riley: Instead of going on hold or getting an answering machine, it would be cool to be like hey, this is the AI, so-and-so You're at this number in the queue.
• 28:49
  Noah Riley: If I can tell someone's available, I might be able to help you answer questions.
• 28:53
  Noah Riley: Or, if you'd like, I can just place you on hold.
• 28:54
  Noah Riley: Like that could be a much better because what's-?
• 28:57
  Erin Gray: Yes, I agree with that.
• 28:58
  Erin Gray: Like tell me upfront and then let me make the decision if I want to or not.
• 29:01
  Erin Gray: Right, Like I love that idea very much, so More than like, let me try to pass off on.
• 29:06
  Erin Gray: I'm like you are not, Jenny.
• 29:09
  Noah Riley: Yeah, I mean, you're not Jenny Go away.
• 29:13
  Noah Riley: But there's also like a kind of a lack of creativity in the space too.
• 29:16
  Noah Riley: Yeah, I've always thought with customer service, especially if you're having, if you're fine tuning these models to have a really acute knowledge of your company and exactly what the solutions are more so than a person would be able to recall in the moment.
• 29:31
  Noah Riley: Why not flip it?
• 29:32
  Noah Riley: More so than a person would be able to recall in the moment.
• 29:34
  Noah Riley: Why not flip it?
• 29:34
  Noah Riley: Instead of having an AI or a bot answer the phone and then you have to press zero 600 times to get to an operator who's going to tell you that they don't know what to do, why don't you have these highly specialized bots who know all these areas of your company and then have a person answer the phone and route you to a bot that reliably answers the question, and then you're like you get like okay, you get the, you get the question answered, but you don't have to pick up the phone and and talk to a bot.
• 29:56
  Noah Riley: That's going to frustrate.
• 29:57
  Noah Riley: You can be like hey, I'm so, so how?
• 29:59
  Noah Riley: How can I direct your call to me?
• 30:00
  Noah Riley: The problem is.
• 30:01
  Noah Riley: And then the person who's the who's the answering the phone can be like a router.
• 30:05
  Noah Riley: You know, yeah, understand like which?
• 30:08
  Noah Riley: Which specialized bot do you go to go to one?
• 30:10
  Noah Riley: Because that's one of the things that people don't know about implementing AI is how to create an efficient, what they call a RAG system a retrieval augmented generation which means that you don't want to pull in a gigantic piece of text or a gigantic piece of data every single time you have a query, because it makes it less and less accurate, and so what you want to do is be able to identify which pieces of text are most accurate to the question that's being asked.
• 30:41
  Noah Riley: And so this is one of the problems with these systems that are being built right now is that they're not being built accurately and they're not being built efficiently, so that they're still suboptimal in their performance.
• 30:51
  Noah Riley: Like I go to ask a question to this AI bot and it doesn't know what I'm saying, or it doesn't understand the question, it doesn't understand how to find the answer, but that has to do with a lack of understanding of how these systems work, because a lot of companies are just going to some someone who claims to be AI someone and they're like yeah, of course, we'll build you that software for 50 grand and they just build something.
• 31:16
  Noah Riley: And a lot of people are doing GPT wrappers.
• 31:18
  Noah Riley: They're just kind of like using chat GPT.
• 31:20
  Noah Riley: They're wrapping it in their company's logo and then saying here you go, here's your solution, but they don't actually know how it works.
• 31:28
  Erin Gray: Use it and it works yeah.
• 31:30
  Noah Riley: Right, and so there's a lot of.
• 31:32
  Noah Riley: There's a, like I said, there's a big gap between the developer world, who's kind of in the dark right now developing these really really cool, really incredible applications using AI, and the business world, who have actual problems that need to be solved.
• 31:45
  Noah Riley: The dev people don't care about business problems, they're just making cool stuff.
• 31:49
  Noah Riley: Business people don't speak development and these two worlds they don't often collide very much.
• 31:56
  Erin Gray: We don't marry much yeah.
• 31:57
  Noah Riley: No, they don't.
• 31:58
  Noah Riley: Yeah, yeah, so that's kind of where I sit.
• 32:01
  Noah Riley: I sit in the middle In the middle.
• 32:03
  Noah Riley: I know a lot of devs who are way better than me, but I speak business language, so I can talk to a business owner and you say these are the problems I'm having.
• 32:09
  Noah Riley: It's like great, I can turn to a developer and say this is exactly how I need this, these are the specifications, this is the, this is the code that I want you to use, this is how it needs to be deployed and this is the checklist that I want you to go through, and I want you to show me the code when you're done Like, and there's not a lot of say.
• 32:32
  Erin Gray: I'm like the, the, the media.
• 32:33
  Erin Gray: I'm like the translator from the 3d and the 5d of money, right, like, I know how 3d works and also like the 3d people, the CPAs and the bookkeepers.
• 32:41
  Erin Gray: They're not connected energetically, right, and so I love.
• 32:44
  Erin Gray: I love that, so would you share with?
• 32:47
  Erin Gray: Okay, so someone is wanting, because that's really good, because that's the same sentiment I get with CPAs.
• 32:52
  Erin Gray: It's like I don't even know the questions to ask.
• 32:54
  Erin Gray: I don't even know if.
• 32:55
  Erin Gray: Like, if they tell me they're doing X amount of returns a year, is that a lot of returns?
• 32:59
  Erin Gray: Am I going to just be another?
• 33:01
  Erin Gray: You know what I mean.
• 33:01
  Erin Gray: Like am I just going to be somebody else, you know, just churning through.
• 33:05
  Erin Gray: Like what am I supposed to ask them?
• 33:07
  Erin Gray: So, like, what are some good questions if someone is wanting to start doing AI and work with somebody or have someone either develop um for them or just use what's already existing?
• 33:19
  Erin Gray: But, like, what are the questions if you're going to hire someone to help you tech wise, what do you?
• 33:24
  Erin Gray: What would be questions that you would want them to ask so that they are informed and educated, empowered?
• 33:32
  Noah Riley: Yeah, I would.
• 33:41
  Noah Riley: I mean, probably one of the best questions that you can ask is, you know, to give them, you know, give me a detailed example of something, a solution that you built for someone using AI and not everyone's going to have an answer to this because it's new enough.
• 33:52
  Noah Riley: Okay, it's not necessarily true that they may have actually done it.
• 33:57
  Noah Riley: And you're kind of in a weird spot there because, as they go on to explain it, you probably won't know whether or not what they're saying is viable, because it'll be too technical, right, if they're an actual developer or if they're a deaf person.
• 34:11
  Noah Riley: So, really, what it is is that you're you're baiting them, like ask the question and then just gauge the fluency with which they answer the question.
• 34:20
  Noah Riley: Right, watch their body language, see how much they stutter, like, ask them to say more about that.
• 34:25
  Noah Riley: You know, if they say something that sounds like fancy, like, oh yeah, we did.
• 34:28
  Noah Riley: We built a rag system for blah, blah, blah and this and blah, blah and acronym this blah and acronym this, acronym that.
• 34:32
  Noah Riley: Oh, that's really cool.
• 34:33
  Noah Riley: Could you say more about that?
• 34:34
  Noah Riley: Because my dev guy told me about that and then put the pressure on Make sure that they understand what they're talking about.
• 34:41
  Noah Riley: This is a problem that existed far before AI ever came into the picture.
• 34:45
  Noah Riley: Was that people who are business owners get taken advantage of by the technologist because the technologist speaks a language they don't understand of by the technologist because the technologist speaks a language they don't understand, you know.
• 34:55
  Noah Riley: And so all the technologist does is make a bunch of vague promises about what's going to happen, and then the business owner is like that sounds great.
• 35:01
  Noah Riley: I guess I'm not really sure what that even looks like.
• 35:03
  Noah Riley: Cool, no problem, just give me your money.
• 35:04
  Noah Riley: So there's no different with AI, and maybe even worse, because there's so much hype behind it that there are so many people out there claiming to be AI this and AI that, but they're not actually doing the work and they don't understand what happens when you actually go to try to implement.
• 35:23
  Noah Riley: They don't know what it means to inject AI into a current system.
• 35:26
  Noah Riley: They don't know how to make things security compliant.
• 35:29
  Noah Riley: They don't understand little things like rate limits you can't hit.
• 35:34
  Noah Riley: You know chat GPT a thousand times in a second.
• 35:37
  Noah Riley: So if you build an application that's that's supposed to be customer facing they're like here you go and then a bunch of people start using it.
• 35:42
  Noah Riley: It'll crash.
• 35:43
  Noah Riley: You know, like, and people don't know these kinds of things because they're not actually doing the work, and so you know it's.
• 35:50
  Noah Riley: It's difficult because, you know, as a non-technical person, it's going to be difficult to determine whether or not someone is telling the truth.
• 35:57
  Noah Riley: So what I would do because this is what I do when I'm talking to somebody that I don't know something I just keep baiting them out like more and more and more, and I'll be like, well, that's really that's interesting.
• 36:06
  Noah Riley: Like tell me more about that, can you give me some more detail about that?
• 36:09
  Noah Riley: And Can you give me some more detail about that?
• 36:10
  Noah Riley: And really, all I'm doing is trying to gauge their fluency and like how they're answering, because I can't.
• 36:15
  Noah Riley: A lot of times they're talking about things that I don't understand.
• 36:17
  Noah Riley: You know, if I went to talk to you about finance, I wouldn't understand all the terms that you're using.
• 36:21
  Noah Riley: I might ask you what does that term mean?
• 36:23
  Noah Riley: Yeah, oh, that's interesting.
• 36:24
  Noah Riley: Like, can you tell me more about that?
• 36:25
  Noah Riley: You know, and you are getting a sense that they have like good character.
• 36:36
  Noah Riley: Then maybe you want to work with them, but it's going to be difficult, you know, cause you just don't.
• 36:38
  Noah Riley: You won't have the technical knowledge to be able to decipher with another tone of truth, unless you are yourself a developer or you know really into the AI space.
• 36:45
  Erin Gray: And also I say this about I love all of the CPAs and also there have been plenty of times where you go and come to find out who you're interviewing with the partner or the business owner, right and then come to find out when you get questions it's actually like their newest CPA.
• 37:06
  Erin Gray: That's come on board and so, understanding, like going back to what you're saying, like this is so new, it's like, and also we don't need to pay full price if, if you're learning on me like that was one of the stipulations you know it's like hey, who's going to be doing taxes?
• 37:19
  Erin Gray: Because if I'm teaching your new person, I'm not paying your rate for the new guy.
• 37:24
  Erin Gray: That's coming on board, right.
• 37:25
  Erin Gray: And so, with AI, like you're saying, it's like it is so new and maybe that's just.
• 37:31
  Erin Gray: I mean I I've had, I've had several conversations with women who are in tech, that do tech, and there's this feeling of sometimes I don't cause that feels disempowered to say that we get taken advantage of but we don't necessarily, as business owners, do our due diligence to make sure and vet the people that are helping us with tech support.
• 37:55
  Erin Gray: Because, yeah, I guess it's just.
• 37:58
  Erin Gray: I think it takes some extra effort, maybe it takes slowing down.
• 38:02
  Erin Gray: Right, it takes slowing down and being like, okay, this isn't, doesn't need to be solved today, right, and so like taking your time to really vet some people and like you're saying like it is a vibe, it is like, are you because how they show you in the interviewer or the you know consultation or whatever is how they're going to be when you work with them, you know?
• 38:21
  Erin Gray: So, yeah, I think that's like you're saying, asking those questions, um, any insights that you have, like I always the thing I love about the podcast is like, okay, you know, like when I have guests, it's like opening up your side of the laptop and being like, okay, this is what I've seen so far.
• 38:40
  Erin Gray: These are the things and I think you've done a pretty good job at like sharing with us, like things that you've seen.
• 38:44
  Erin Gray: Anything else that maybe I haven't asked in terms of what you have seen with clients that have come to you, or um, that maybe we aren't aware of, that to to consider or to think about.
• 38:56
  Noah Riley: Yes, Um, so the first thing when I start working with somebody that's a retainer client like someone that's not that I'm not building a custom automation for, but that'll be working with for a period of time we do a really detailed process analysis in their business.
• 39:17
  Noah Riley: And the reason why is because the AI is static, in the sense that it's kind of just waiting to be prompted, and so you would think of it very much like an intern.
• 39:32
  Noah Riley: If you bring an intern into your business and then you're just like go solve problems, they're going to be like, uh, why?
• 39:41
  Noah Riley: Well, because they don't know what to do.
• 39:42
  Noah Riley: Yeah, you know, if you give them a very general instructions, right?
• 39:47
  Noah Riley: If I say, hey, um, increase our profits today, what are they going to do?
• 39:51
  Noah Riley: Right?
• 39:51
  Noah Riley: I mean it sounds ridiculous when we put it like that, but it's today, what are they going to do?
• 39:53
  Noah Riley: Right?
• 39:53
  Noah Riley: I mean it sounds ridiculous when we put it like that, no, but it's true, they don't have the experience.
• 39:58
  Erin Gray: Yeah, yeah, they don't have the experience yet, yeah.
• 40:00
  Noah Riley: So it's like how do you actually explain to it to do what you do?
• 40:03
  Noah Riley: Treat it like an intern?
• 40:04
  Noah Riley: Okay, you have to make sure, and this is why I'm really big into telling people listen, you've got to nail down your standard operating procedures and I know it sounds like a big job and it is a big job.
• 40:17
  Noah Riley: It takes a long time to really nail them down, but just one at a time.
• 40:20
  Noah Riley: Just take the one that's most important first.
• 40:22
  Noah Riley: How do you actually do this thing?
• 40:23
  Noah Riley: How do you actually do it Every single step of the way?
• 40:27
  Noah Riley: If you can explain it every single step of the way, you can probably explain it to AI, single step of the way.
• 40:38
  Noah Riley: You can probably explain it to AI.
• 40:39
  Noah Riley: And that's going to take your outputs that you're getting from AI to the next level being able to explain in great detail exactly what you're trying to achieve and how to go through the process of thinking about it.
• 40:47
  Noah Riley: So the first thing that I usually go through with a client is doing that process engineering and creating standard operating procedures, because to me, your processes are essentially the roundness of the wheel, and AI is like gasoline I can inject a ton of gasoline into your car, but if you don't have round wheels, I'm going to destroy your vehicle and you're going to reach a top speed pretty fast because you just don't have round wheels.
• 41:12
  Noah Riley: It is actually much better to have round wheels than it is to have a fast car or to have a lot of gas or high-octane gas and.
• 41:22
  Noah Riley: AI is very high-octane gas, but without a good system that can handle the load I you can put jet fuel in a Toyota Tercel.
• 41:36
  Noah Riley: I don't know how it's gonna turn out for you.
• 41:39
  Noah Riley: It's not really made to handle it, you know.
• 41:41
  Noah Riley: So the first thing I tell people is like, okay, let's, we got to look at the structure of the business, what is it made of?
• 41:48
  Noah Riley: And then let's, let's round out those processes, let's make it as efficient as possible.
• 41:52
  Noah Riley: Where are we losing time?
• 41:53
  Noah Riley: How many times are you repeating things?
• 41:55
  Noah Riley: How many times do you go from one application and you're copy-pasting something from this place into this place?
• 41:59
  Noah Riley: And so that's why we talk about building out this kind of ecosystem where you like a central hub for how to actually go about doing this implementation process.
• 42:19
  Noah Riley: And then it might be a pain sometimes, but if you make sure that every single application you use integrates with Zapier and it does integrate with a lot, so it's not too difficult.
• 42:27
  Noah Riley: But as long as you know that, then that means that every single thing you use can talk to every other thing that you use, no matter what it is.
• 42:32
  Noah Riley: So long as you know that, then that means that every single thing you use can talk to every other thing that you use, no matter what it is, so long as they all meet in the middle.
• 42:36
  Erin Gray: Because you have Zapier.
• 42:37
  Erin Gray: Is what you're saying, right?
• 42:38
  Noah Riley: Right, because you have.
• 42:39
  Erin Gray: Zapier, because then Zapier is the middleman that can talk to all of your other.
• 42:44
  Noah Riley: Okay, right, so you don't have to have an integration where your QuickBooks is able to talk to your Google Docs?
• 42:51
  Noah Riley: Okay, because you don't have to find a way to connect those two.
• 42:54
  Noah Riley: All you have to do is make sure they both connect to Zapier, got it?
• 42:57
  Noah Riley: And then they can talk to each other.
• 42:58
  Noah Riley: Okay, through that nexus.
• 43:00
  Noah Riley: And so if you kind of create, if you create this little ecosystem that way, and then you can start to really round out your procedures, round out your standard operating procedures.
• 43:10
  Noah Riley: How many times again, how many times you copy pasting information?
• 43:13
  Noah Riley: How many times do you repeat things?
• 43:14
  Noah Riley: How many things, how many things are getting lost, like, how do you go through your, your sales process?
• 43:21
  Noah Riley: What is your?
• 43:21
  Noah Riley: What is your first contact with you, with a potential client, look like?
• 43:23
  Noah Riley: Do you have a procedure for it?
• 43:24
  Noah Riley: Do you get their email and phone number every single time?
• 43:26
  Noah Riley: Do you always follow up with them?
• 43:27
  Noah Riley: If you don't, why not?
• 43:28
  Noah Riley: Do you have reminders set up, like little things, like where you lose these little bits along the way?
• 43:33
  Noah Riley: But you lose so many of those little bits along the way.
• 43:36
  Erin Gray: They add up.
• 43:37
  Noah Riley: They add up a lot, yeah, so that's where you get to what is the average business owner, which is a person who is highly skilled at one thing they're very good at it.
• 43:48
  Noah Riley: That's why they decided to start a business.
• 43:49
  Noah Riley: But they're not good at business, and so they haven't taken the time to learn how to do the stuff.
• 43:52
  Noah Riley: But they launch into it and, because they're good at what they do, you start getting referrals or you start getting repeat business or more business, but then you reach scale so fast because your processes are so garbage that you can't push enough through to make any sense.
• 44:08
  Noah Riley: And so then, once you're buried under all of that work, you don't have any time whatsoever to even improve your processes, and so you just stay kind of skating by, like hoping that you're going to make it someday, and maybe you do, maybe you don't, because you're just really just playing a game of luck, hoping that the market doesn't outpace you, or that some technological advancement doesn't come and completely put you out of business, or that a competitor doesn't find a way to do it cheaper and faster and better, and then just put you out of business.
• 44:33
  Erin Gray: If you're, if you're not growing, you're dying, you know if the words that came to mind was clarity, which I don't think a lot of us as business.
• 44:45
  Erin Gray: I don't want to speak for other people.
• 44:46
  Erin Gray: I think sometimes it can be it takes here we go back to slowing down, right, In order to get clear, you have to allow yourself some time to think and to ponder, and I think I don't know what your experience has been, but I have coached numerous people that have come from a high pain nine to five, call it nine to five job and they have started their own business.
• 45:11
  Erin Gray: And so we have taken habits and, um yeah, habits right From what we used to do and and put it so we're just basically like an employee in our business versus an employee, because there are parts that you've got to do right, like you are the, the brains of it, and also like the visionary, the CEO is like that's lots of space, that's lots of time to think, that's lots of time to ponder and like see the bigger picture.
• 45:41
  Erin Gray: And when you're so focused, I think I think what you're saying without saying is like when you're so focused on making the money in the beginning right, the money is is what you're trying to do to, to create and to have a business.
• 45:52
  Erin Gray: But then, now you are, money allows us to get.
• 45:56
  Erin Gray: We can get stuck with money, because that is the thing that we are.
• 46:01
  Erin Gray: Most of us are going into business for which that's a whole nother podcast emotional topic.
• 46:06
  Noah Riley: For why like if?
• 46:07
  Erin Gray: you're going into business for money, but, um, but you know, so we're doing these things and then we we have it's almost like we have enslaved ourselves with our business right, versus pondering and getting some of those standard procedures up because you're going to have to do it at some point, cause how are you going to train your person that you want to come in and right, and that takes time in terms of it doesn't take a lot of time.
• 46:33
  Erin Gray: It just takes time for you to focus and think about how do I want to teach this to somebody so they can replicate it, and then they can replicate it, versus I'm having to do this over and, over and over again.
• 46:45
  Noah Riley: Yeah for sure, I'm having to do this over and over and over again.
• 46:50
  Noah Riley: Yeah for sure.
• 46:51
  Noah Riley: And even in that arena, what tools do you use?
• 46:54
  Noah Riley: Do you write it in a Google Doc?
• 46:56
  Noah Riley: Do you do a vision board?
• 46:58
  Noah Riley: Do you record a video?
• 46:59
  Noah Riley: If so, who's my video editor?
• 47:01
  Noah Riley: Or what software would I use?
• 47:02
  Noah Riley: And these kind of compiling and compounding questions that just started exploding in people's minds when they think about doing stuff like this is what stops them from doing it, and we know this from process engineering like it is.
• 47:15
  Noah Riley: You have to find ways to remove frictions.
• 47:17
  Noah Riley: So I mean for me and this is something that I've been working on, actually personally uh, like recently is, instead of when I know there's a thing that I want to do or should do, um, to every single time that my like my mind starts coming up with excuses, try to reverse it as quickly as possible and come up with every reason why I should do it.
• 47:36
  Noah Riley: Not don't acknowledge the excuses, right.
• 47:38
  Noah Riley: And then, when it comes to like processes, uh, for yourself individually um or or in your business, like find ways to take the next step.
• 47:48
  Erin Gray: Yeah, it's just one, yeah, it's just the next step.
• 47:50
  Erin Gray: And and it's also like, first of all, we forget, because we can be so quick to be like, oh my business, like we get to have a business right, like that is a choice, like you could go work for somebody else if you wanted to, like, so quickly we forget.
• 48:04
  Erin Gray: And I think also we're so short sighted Like we think of like, like, so quickly we forget.
• 48:07
  Erin Gray: And I think also we're so short-sighted Like we think of like days and weeks and months, not like years and years.
• 48:11
  Erin Gray: Right, like you were setting like the word.
• 48:13
  Erin Gray: The other word that came to me was like foundation, right, like you can build a house on quarter inch rebar or you can build a house with like full inch, right.
• 48:23
  Erin Gray: Like you want to build a strong foundation, and sometimes that takes air quotes a little longer in terms right.
• 48:27
  Erin Gray: Like you want to build a strong foundation, and sometimes that takes air quotes a little longer in terms right.
• 48:31
  Erin Gray: But like it's, it's done from a place of like it's done correctly.
• 48:36
  Erin Gray: And when I mean correctly, I mean like you, you've done the things that you're going to be able to replicate over and over and over again.
• 48:41
  Erin Gray: You're not going to have to go back and tear down because it was the quick fix that made you know.
• 48:46
  Erin Gray: Like you're saying like you, you got it to where you're, where you are, but now you're like, oh, I don't, I don't even have time to time as a choice, right, but like training someone, or like how am I supposed to sit down?
• 48:55
  Erin Gray: Like that was one of the things that my dad and I would have a question or conversations about all the time.
• 48:59
  Erin Gray: And I'm like have you actually sat with him and taught him how you want him to do this?
• 49:04
  Erin Gray: Or do you have, like you're saying, an SOP that teaches him how to do this?
• 49:07
  Erin Gray: I don't have time.
• 49:08
  Erin Gray: I'm like you do right.
• 49:09
  Erin Gray: Like it's just like what are we choosing to focus on and how much of like this amount of time right now, going back to short-sighted right, is going to free up so much more time.
• 49:20
  Erin Gray: Years down the road.
• 49:21
  Erin Gray: We're not talking about like this week, we're talking about years down the road.
• 49:25
  Erin Gray: That by doing this right now and so, yeah, like you're saying, like figuring out like why do I not want to do it?
• 49:31
  Erin Gray: What is it?
• 49:31
  Erin Gray: And a lot of times it's like like our brains right, we don't want to do something new, we want it to stay where we are, but like how is it going to benefit me?
• 49:39
  Erin Gray: What is by doing this right now?
• 49:41
  Erin Gray: How is that actually going to help me?
• 49:42
  Erin Gray: You know, months and years down the road.
• 49:44
  Noah Riley: Yeah, and that's the.
• 49:47
  Erin Gray: you know that we all have it, we all have it.
• 49:50
  Erin Gray: Like Noah and I aren't sitting here doing like, oh, we do this.
• 49:55
  Erin Gray: It's like, oh, why am I resisting this in this moment?
• 49:56
  Erin Gray: Like I talk to myself all the time Like what is it?
• 49:59
  Erin Gray: And I think also too, I'm curious for you of, like we put too much on our calendar in a day, right, like, what are the two or three things that are going to move the needle forward?
• 50:09
  Erin Gray: Like, not like this whole to-do list that we have to do for the day, you know.
• 50:14
  Erin Gray: Like I think that comes back to like loving and nourishing to ourselves.
• 50:17
  Erin Gray: Like sometimes we're not very kind to ourselves.
• 50:19
  Erin Gray: Of like having this whole long list to do and then we don't finish it and then we feel really bad about ourselves and then we beat ourselves up.
• 50:24
  Erin Gray: Versus like what are two or three things that are like really going to move the needle forward and that are going to be helpful, and that once I'm done with that, then I get to go play or I get to play before and you know, whatever it might be, but having this huge long to-do list is doesn't feel very good.
• 50:40
  Noah Riley: Yeah, um, are you asking me what my two or three are?
• 50:48
  Erin Gray: No, I'm just saying like think that's for for the listeners, like just having a two or three things to do, right, like you were talking about, like the friction, and it's like sometimes I think the friction also happens because we load so much stuff on our calendar right that comes from like a worthiness thing, like if I I've done, like we live in a busy society, right, versus like valuing, like I have lots of space in my calendar to do other things besides my business.
• 51:10
  Erin Gray: And so I'm just saying, you know, like maybe doing two or three things that are just going to move the needle forward, and then recognizing like are you still feeling resistance or is it, you know, is it truly resistance or is it resistance from like, oh my gosh, I have so much to do, you know.
• 51:34
  Noah Riley: Yes, there's a lot in that.
• 51:36
  Noah Riley: There are high leverage and low leverage activities.
• 51:38
  Noah Riley: Every single person on earth has the same amount of time in the day.
• 51:40
  Noah Riley: Some people are billionaires and some people are in poverty, and what's the difference between what they're doing?
• 51:43
  Noah Riley: It is not that they have more time, it is not that they are working harder, because we all have the same amount of time.
• 51:50
  Noah Riley: So what is the difference?
• 51:50
  Noah Riley: How do you identify high leverage activities?
• 51:52
  Noah Riley: For one, for two?
• 51:54
  Noah Riley: There is not enough value placed on doing things that make sure that you stay in a good state of mind while you're working.
• 52:03
  Noah Riley: People will wake up stressed to the max and go to sleep stressed to the max and do it again and again and again.
• 52:10
  Noah Riley: You don't realize how much that affects your productivity.
• 52:14
  Noah Riley: Also, there is so much about being in business that people pull it into their business world, but it's not a part of their business world and they think that they're doing it because they want to be a good business person, but really they're doing it because it's about status or about what you know like.
• 52:33
  Noah Riley: They pull all these little extra ingredients that don't have anything to do with being a good business owner.
• 52:38
  Noah Riley: So what does it actually take to be a good business owner, and like what are those traits?
• 52:42
  Noah Riley: Like what are those things?
• 52:48
  Noah Riley: Um, I would say, you know, I mean, that's a whole topic unto itself.
• 52:50
  Noah Riley: But one thing that I can say that really helped me in my productivity as far as my task list is concerned, um that I heard that that made an instant impact.
• 52:59
  Noah Riley: Um was do not answer emails First thing.
• 53:02
  Erin Gray: Yes, Don't even open it up.
• 53:04
  Erin Gray: Like don't even open it up.
• 53:06
  Noah Riley: Some of the one person that some, the one person that I that I heard say this like, so that they didn't do it till noon.
• 53:10
  Noah Riley: I have to do it till 10.
• 53:11
  Noah Riley: I have my days start pretty early, um, but just let them sit there, you know don't, because what it'll get you immediately in a state of being reactive.
• 53:19
  Noah Riley: Yep, right from the start of the day, like you open up, you're like, oh, I have 20 emails that I have.
• 53:24
  Noah Riley: Oh, I just started, okay, started, okay, I got to answer this, I got to answer this, and you don't even get to, and then it just starts this endless series of meaningless correspondence.
• 53:33
  Noah Riley: But people that again, very low, low, low leverage activities that don't generate profit.
• 53:38
  Noah Riley: They don't, you don't learn anything.
• 53:40
  Noah Riley: These people aren't getting anything from you.
• 53:41
  Noah Riley: You're not getting anything from them.
• 53:42
  Noah Riley: It's just a bunch of noise.
• 53:46
  Noah Riley: And sometimes and I think that a lot of people who kind of progress through their business world realize at some point that you can't be everything to everyone your time is valuable and you should treat it that way.
• 53:57
  Noah Riley: And it's not an insult to people who are trying to get in contact with you to say like, hey, I'll have to get in contact with you tomorrow or next week or whatever, like you just have to treat your time like it means something to you, because then, when you stop reacting, then you get to the point where you actually get to spend your time doing things that mean something to you, like spending time with family or working on your passion project, or playing music or going outside or whatever, which then lowers your stress levels, makes you more productive, more clear-minded, and then you go back into work the next day and you do better, and then you do better.
• 54:25
  Noah Riley: It has a compounding effect over time, and so that, yeah, those are the whole topic unto itself, but I'm sure but yeah, I just wanted to say that about the resistance, because I think all of us feel resistance, like we.
• 54:39
  Erin Gray: We think that that it's like that's just, that's part of the brain, right.
• 54:44
  Erin Gray: And also what I was saying with the two to three.
• 54:47
  Erin Gray: It's like I think, here we go.
• 54:49
  Erin Gray: You were talking about the emails.
• 54:50
  Erin Gray: It's like the to-do list, the huge to-do list is because it makes us feel right, like we want to feel important or we want to feel productive, versus you know, I did the two or three things Like if you're going to have a business for a long time, right, like, whether it's today or tomorrow, right.
• 55:07
  Erin Gray: Like, leave some stuff on the table is what I'm saying.
• 55:09
  Erin Gray: So, um, does it.
• 55:11
  Erin Gray: You know what I mean.
• 55:12
  Erin Gray: Like we've got, we've got a lifetime, so anything else that you want to add, noah, that maybe I haven't talked about or asked that I left out, that you want to say something about?
• 55:23
  Noah Riley: Um, I think, um, something that's's important to me in my business and the way that I do it and why I do it, is this concept that I've been trying to put together in a more concrete way.
• 55:44
  Noah Riley: I call it the human premium.
• 55:46
  Noah Riley: More concrete way I'm calling, I call it the human premium.
• 55:49
  Noah Riley: This is like a thing that's happening right now, um, kind of en masse in the world where we're getting really disillusioned with, uh, the amount of information and content and automation and robot, this and and AI is really contributing to that.
• 56:02
  Noah Riley: But what it's also doing is it's really challenging a lot of people, especially in the creative spaces, uh, to kind of rethink the value of being human.
• 56:11
  Noah Riley: And to your point, you know we there are.
• 56:14
  Noah Riley: We have for a long time, especially in Western society, like placed an enormous amount of value on productivity and being busy.
• 56:21
  Noah Riley: You know people will like you say it like it's a bad thing, but that's not why you say it.
• 56:25
  Noah Riley: You're like man I had to do today.
• 56:27
  Noah Riley: You're not like maybe half of you is stressed when you say that, but the other half is actually saying that because it makes you feel good.
• 56:33
  Noah Riley: It makes you feel good to say how busy you are and how much you're doing right where, whereas, like we're, you know we're gonna die one day and I have yet to meet a dying person who was like I'm so glad that I was so busy.
• 56:47
  Erin Gray: That's what I say too.
• 56:48
  Noah Riley: No one ever wins a struggle bus award right Like there's no struggle.
• 56:53
  Erin Gray: Award.
• 56:54
  Noah Riley: Yeah, so it's something that I would encourage people to really pay attention to as we're going to.
• 57:01
  Noah Riley: We're moving into a very this will be an interesting decade.
• 57:05
  Noah Riley: There's going to be a lot of things that change.
• 57:06
  Noah Riley: Technology is developing faster than it ever has, and that will be true next year and the year after that and the year after that.
• 57:13
  Noah Riley: It's at an exponential rate and, as we start to see more and more kind of non-human technology in the form of whether it's AI or robotics, to really be thinking a lot about taking the opportunity to say, like, what does it mean to be human?
• 57:33
  Noah Riley: What does it mean to be?
• 57:34
  Noah Riley: What value do I place on my own humanity?
• 57:37
  Noah Riley: You know, like that, there is a.
• 57:40
  Noah Riley: There is a real question to be asked there, because we're encountering, for the first time in our history, a technology that has the ability to replicate some things that were untouchable by technology before.
• 57:53
  Noah Riley: We're talking about, like PhD level professors who are now feeling threatened by technology.
• 57:57
  Noah Riley: They've never been threatened by any technology before.
• 58:00
  Noah Riley: It's always been low level blue collar tradesmen type workers who get just X'd out by new technology.
• 58:08
  Noah Riley: Right Now we're talking about something where people are like why would I go to school?
• 58:12
  Noah Riley: I can literally have AI write me a quiz at a PhD level for any subject I want in my house on my phone.
• 58:18
  Erin Gray: That's fascinating because I have so many thoughts about that, because I'm like no one can ever replace a human right, like a human is like that emotional, like um, I don't know if I was listening to a podcast.
• 58:29
  Erin Gray: It's like AI is never going to be able to fix your toilet.
• 58:32
  Erin Gray: Ai is never going to be like like, yes, you might know how to do it, but I am never going to look up AI to fix my own toilet.
• 58:38
  Erin Gray: That will never happen.
• 58:39
  Erin Gray: I will always hire somebody to come and do that stuff, you know.
• 58:50
  Erin Gray: And so I think that I think that that is showing us where the fear we already have inside of us is right, because there are things that I mean COVID showed us who, the immense fear that was already existent within us, right, um, and I think AI is just bringing that up for us.
• 59:03
  Erin Gray: You know, like it's the next thing.
• 59:06
  Erin Gray: It's like, oh, where you know, like where do you already feel so much fear?
• 59:11
  Erin Gray: And sure you can learn that.
• 59:15
  Erin Gray: But the, the experience, the knowledge, the human to human connection and collaboration like that can cannot be duplicated by technology ever, you know.
• 59:30
  Noah Riley: Right and so, and it's those kinds of things that I'm, that I'm always like this is the stuff to think about guys Like this is the thing.
• 59:37
  Noah Riley: When I was speaking at BSU recently yeah.
• 59:41
  Noah Riley: Um, it was kind of a challenge that got some pushback.
• 59:44
  Noah Riley: That I put out to the teachers you know, and I was like is your job as an instructor to pass or transfer information?
• 59:53
  Noah Riley: Do you think that that's how your students see you?
• 59:56
  Erin Gray: Yeah.
• 59:56
  Noah Riley: If not because they can get information anywhere.
• 59:59
  Noah Riley: Then what is your value as an instructor?
• 1:00:01
  Noah Riley: Yeah, and I don't say that as an insult, I say that to everyone I came from the graphic design world.
• 1:00:06
  Noah Riley: Like, I got what I'm.
• 1:00:08
  Noah Riley: I mean, it's not that I think that AI can do what I do better, but the perception is that for most people that it can and for basically nothing.
• 1:00:15
  Noah Riley: So my, the perception of my value drops precipitously.
• 1:00:18
  Noah Riley: I have to reevaluate what.
• 1:00:20
  Noah Riley: What is it that makes me valuable in in this space, like in the text and the wherever, and so being willing to like ask yourself those really difficult questions, because if you don't, you'll get run over unexpectedly.
• 1:00:33
  Noah Riley: Like don't let it blindside you, this is not going anywhere.
• 1:00:37
  Noah Riley: Like we have to deal with this and our lives are going to be very different five years from now and very different five years from then.
• 1:00:42
  Noah Riley: So, like, while this is happening, like eyes up, have the conversation, be a part of the conversation If you want to be a part of ethics committees or or, you know, even resisting.
• 1:00:52
  Noah Riley: Like stay in the conversation because at some point it's going to hit your life, you know, in a significant way, and so you know, at that point it would be unfortunate to say, like well, I didn't really do anything.
• 1:01:03
  Erin Gray: Yeah, I think, I think it's too.
• 1:01:05
  Erin Gray: It's like how I always look at everything.
• 1:01:07
  Erin Gray: It's like how is it happening for us?
• 1:01:09
  Erin Gray: Right, like you're saying, like, how is it asking you to?
• 1:01:11
  Erin Gray: Like, just like that professor, how is it asking you to reevaluate and actually understand the value that you provide?
• 1:01:21
  Erin Gray: Like, okay, first of all, like value.
• 1:01:21
  Erin Gray: Like value as a human we're all valuable but like value from our brains that we can, like help others, like there's value that we, that we generate and that we that we uh give to the collective.
• 1:01:33
  Erin Gray: But like asking that professor, like you're not.
• 1:01:36
  Erin Gray: You're not just passing information, you're passing experience and stories.
• 1:01:40
  Noah Riley: And you know what I mean.
• 1:01:41
  Noah Riley: So it's like asking.
• 1:01:42
  Erin Gray: It's asking people that have always done something.
• 1:01:45
  Erin Gray: It's kind of like that book like who moved my cheese right?
• 1:01:48
  Erin Gray: It's like now your cheese has moved right.
• 1:01:51
  Erin Gray: And it's asking more of you of like how can I evolve more, how can I expand and grow more?
• 1:01:57
  Erin Gray: And I think that's what AI is.
• 1:01:59
  Erin Gray: If we want to choose to look at it that way, right, like we can look at it that way and be like how is this asking, how is this happening for us and how is this asking us to grow, from a humanity perspective, even more than we already are?
• 1:02:12
  Noah Riley: Yeah, yeah, the.
• 1:02:13
  Noah Riley: You know the pressure has been applied and now we have to respond.
• 1:02:19
  Noah Riley: Yeah, it's going to be a different world, you know.
• 1:02:23
  Erin Gray: So, Noah, thank you so much.
• 1:02:24
  Erin Gray: Where can people learn more about you and if they want to connect and and all the things?
• 1:02:29
  Noah Riley: Um, yeah, I mean you can.
• 1:02:31
  Noah Riley: You can go to the website, uh, to just kind of look at what it is that I do AI genius consultingcom.
• 1:02:37
  Noah Riley: Um, this feels weird to like give a plug.
• 1:02:40
  Noah Riley: I see people do this on the shows and now I'm doing a thing, um, but if you want to keep up with stuff that I'm doing like I'm probably most active on LinkedIn and you can search Noah Riley even Noah Riley space, ai genius consulting You'll you'll find my picture come up and and you can just you can follow me there.
• 1:02:58
  Noah Riley: I post news stories that I find like little commentary.
• 1:03:02
  Noah Riley: I post videos on some thoughts that I have, sometimes events that I do or places that I speak.
• 1:03:07
  Noah Riley: Like I promote other people's stuff who are in the space, too, that I trust.
• 1:03:09
  Noah Riley: So I'm pretty active on LinkedIn.
• 1:03:12
  Erin Gray: Awesome.
• 1:03:12
  Erin Gray: I'll put all the information in the show notes.
• 1:03:14
  Erin Gray: Thanks, Noah, for coming on and sharing your time with us.
• 1:03:17
  Noah Riley: Yeah, thank you for having me.
• 1:03:18
  Noah Riley: I appreciate it, Erin.
• 1:03:19
  Erin Gray: Yeah, and to each of you that are listening and watching, I appreciate you and thank you.