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Wealthy AF Podcast
Behind the AI Curtain: Insights from Frank Mendoza on the Future of Technology and Connection
Join us as we sit down with Frank Mendoza, a celebrated analytics leader and the visionary founder of Catalytics. With a career spanning over two decades in data science, Frank offers a unique perspective on the revolutionary realm of generative AI. We navigate the remarkable potential of this technology to empower small and medium businesses and its ability to catalyze content creation, from text and audio to video generation.
Our discussion with Frank ventures beyond the capabilities of AI to its inherent risks and rewards. Together, we unpack the implications of AI on privacy and data protection, offering valuable insights on how to leverage AI for organizational benefit while safeguarding against misuse. We also unravel the best AI tools and strategies for businesses, with a spotlight on transforming long form content into short form and the significance of an AI strategy.
As we gaze into the future, we contemplate the evolving landscape of jobs and the rising demand for skills such as storytelling, community building, and information synthesis. Frank guides us through the disruptive impact of AI on knowledge compensation, emphasizing the indispensable role of human connection in our increasingly AI-dependent world. Come along on this thought-provoking journey from AI's present capabilities to its future potential, and appreciate the lasting power of human connection.
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Welcome back to another episode of Latinos in Real Estate Investing Podcasts or individuals just like you come to learn how to create wealth through real estate investing, entrepreneurship and business ownership. And today's guest is Frank Mendoza. And Frank is a highly respected and award-winning analytics leader with over 20 years of experience in strategy, customer experience and data science. He is the founder of Catalytics, a service company that helps Fortune 500 companies like Nike, Kellogg's Keurig, Dr Pepper and Jim Beam to execute actionable AI and data analytics strategies to solve their toughest business challenges. Frank man, I'm excited to have you here. Brother, Thank you for being here. I always like to learn from brains like yourself on how we can get better at users AI stuff that's really popular right now in mainstream.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much, Martin. It's an honor to be here really to kind of talk about some of these new emerging technologies and kind of introduce some of this stuff. Hopefully it's a valuable resource in the future for your audience and everybody's able to gain something from this.
Speaker 1:Outstanding brother. So tell us, man, you're from Latino background, latino descent, I suppose Frank Mendoza, right. So how did you get started, frank? Tell us that journey less than five minutes, how you got started and how you wind up being in the industry that you're in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm a mechanical engineer. My background, my undergrad, was in mechanical engineering, so I always loved problem solving. I always loved kind of figuring out how things work. I turned things up, building them back up. I rebuilt a 1968 Mercury Cougar with my father in the garage when I was younger and so always kind of tinkering with things, and what I was able to do was leverage that mechanical engineering problem solving kind of skill and early in 2000 got introduced to a methodology called Six Sigma. And so Six Sigma is a framework that allows you to use statistics and before it was called data science, but statistics and models and things like that to solve problems.
Speaker 2:And I really became enamored with that framework and started working with companies like Dell, where I was a Six Sigma black belt, and helping them kind of solve some of these challenges using data, using analysis as opposed to gut feels and things like that you fast forward to about 2015,. Is where I started catalytics. This is where I actually took the passion I had around this skill set and said you know, I think a lot of organizations are going to take our need to take advantage of this new thing called data science or artificial intelligence, machine learning, and started helping them introduce some of this stuff, and there's a lot that goes into that. We could talk about that, but certainly that's where I've been working over the last six, seven, eight years and it's been such a whirlwind, as you can imagine, with some of the news in recent around chat, gbt and things like that.
Speaker 1:What are some of the cool things that guys like myself are not aware of, but because you're in that world, like some of the cool, really cool things that are out there that are maybe not be mainstream, that that that you're, of course, allowed to share.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So I think one of the we are not aware of yet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think right now, the big hype is around what's considered generative AI. This is where something generates something. So chat, chat, gbt is probably the most popular right now. Everyone's hearing about it right On the news.
Speaker 2:What it's doing is generating text, but if your audience hasn't heard of image generation and soon to be video generation, you're going to be able to enter a very simple natural language prompts and it's going to generate really amazing kind of output the ability to replicate somebody's voice right, martin, the ability to take your voice with maybe five minutes of your audio and it being able to really synthesize that and break it down and replicate it so that you can literally create a script and you don't have to speak a word.
Speaker 2:It'll actually sound just like you. Wow, Some really cool stuff coming down the pipe. You know some. You know things are still in its evolution. I consider this its infancy right now around some of this generative AI. But I really believe that this has an opportunity to level the playing field for a lot of small and medium businesses to really compete with some of the larger players, because you don't need to make the huge investment in creating you know data repositories and huge amounts of investment and you know data scientists and things like that, you have the ability to start to take advantage of some of the what they're called APIs and tap into some of the other broader type solutions.
Speaker 1:And Frank, I have a question around what you just said. There's a lot to unpack there, my friend, but I'm just curious about you. Know, you said there's AI that can hear my voice and I have a ton of content out there in the world, right that can hear my voice for five minutes and then take that voice and then I can create a video by. So I'm trying to wrap my brain around this. So, yeah, let's just say, let's say I have my voice, boom, I put it in this machine and now I know it's my voice and it can replicate it. Cool, so now I go to chat GPT and I say create a video, create a script where I'm talking about I don't know how to become an entrepreneur in under three minutes, and then I take that script. Are you saying that I'm going to be able to take that script, drop it into, drop it somewhere, and that some other AI is going to create, take my voice from what it learned from my voice, and create that in audio and visual?
Speaker 2:So in audio right now, visual video, there are technology right now that have the ability to create basically your own avatar, right? So you enter some images and it will actually start to be able to create avatars. So in the near future I can very easily envision the ability to do all that, that whole streamlined. Right now. I would say I would only trust the audio portion up to this point, right so because so the tool that I'm speaking of, that I'm been most impressed with, is a tool called 11 Labs 11 Labs.
Speaker 1:Spell it 1111, how you spell it, so you can 11labscom.
Speaker 2:Yep, and you have the ability there. Like I said, you know, the more audio you get it, the better it is, but it can do it off of, you know, under five minutes worth of audio. Replicate your voice so you can literally do what you're talking about. Go to chat, gbt or some other text generated tool, ask it to create a script, feed that script into 11 Labs once you've trained it on your voice, and then, boom, give it there's. Although you know, if you're not so enamored with your own kind of image, there are tools like Synthesia that will create avatars. They already have created avatars. So if you're fine with someone else speaking or some other voice or face being on the image, they have tools already where you can do that and use both chat, gbt a visual representation of an audio avatar and audio to create the entire video for you.
Speaker 1:I got another question for you, my friend what are the dangers of now? Because this stuff is amazing and I love it, and then you can either be a dinosaur and just hide under a rock and I'm not going to use it, or you can embrace it and use what you can right and use it to produce more. We're going to talk about business in a minute, but just I want to learn from you and got a lot of curious questions here about how we can use this thing. I want to get your perspective. What are the dangers, frank, on this AI revolution, with everything you just explained to me, with, like, where this created content comes from them anymore? How will we know in the future whether Martin is actually creating this content, whether Frank is actually here, and this is a conversation being had with Frank and Martin.
Speaker 1:I can tell you on Instagram. I have noticed because I play with these AI stuff. I've had a few guys like yourself here that are tech guys and on this podcast I've learned a ton. I love having guys like yourself here because it's not my field and I love to learn, and I can see on Instagram I've noticed some images and some audio video stuff that I'm like this doesn't look authentic Like this. I can sense that it's. I can sense. Just my sense is telling me this is AI generated, but I have-.
Speaker 2:What you're describing right now is what considered the uncanny valley. It's the ability to recognize and say this is not a human right or so this is not. This doesn't look right, and I would argue right now that's where AI is in a lot of different areas. It's you recognize this is not completely authentic and so there's gonna take time to get there. I think the reality is like you mentioned there's a wave coming right and in some respects, the wave is here. You can either ride that wave or get crushed by the wave, right, and so what I would encourage your audience and your stuff to do is go play with this. Don't get intimidated, don't run from it, don't hide your head in the sand. Get into it, involve it and see where it makes sense for you to use it right. Where does it actually add? You know you're a strategist, right, so you understand that tech itself does not create a competitive advantage. It's only because it's available to anyone, right? Anyone can go play with whatever labs right now. Anyone can go use some of these tools. It's if you use it in the best way possible for your organization to really drive your competitive advantage does it become a strategy, right? And I think that's where you know. So what are the risks and challenges?
Speaker 2:Well, ai, just like anything else, is a tool right.
Speaker 2:You could be used for nefarious purposes, right. If I took a hammer today, I could create a house, right, but that hammer could also be used to maim and murder someone, right. It's a tool, right, and so it's incumbent upon all of us to recognize the dangers but also the opportunity involved, and determine whether or not what regulations need to be put in place, what makes sense from an ethical perspective to use for yourself and your organization, and then start to set up guidelines. And if you will guard rails to say this is how I will and will not use it, will there always be people that take advantage of it? Absolutely right, and we need to identify those. But I'm old enough to remember when the internet was first here right, there was a lot of malicious and negative uses of the internet as well. We've come a long way, but that's a function of you know, regulations, boundaries, compliance, ethics and all those types of things being put in place. But that took time, right. That took time, and so will it take time for AI as well.
Speaker 1:What are some of the dangers that you, you know you guys in your field, are talking about? What are some of the concerns that you professionals, you guys as professionals in the space, an expert like yourself in AI, are really concerned with? Right, because, as excited as you are, I'm sure that, as a human being, just from one human being to the next, you have some concerns, absolutely.
Speaker 2:So a couple of things that need to be. You know that I think there's coming to a forefront. One is around privacy of the data itself. So all this takes, as you can imagine, it takes a lot of data to actually do some of this stuff. So, authorizing, for example, the ability to use your voice right, who's gonna authorize that? Right? Could I go grab Morgan Freeman's voice right now and use it in ways that he would not approve? That's a possibility today. Right, I could do that, and I think that's gonna cause some challenges in the future, when you know fake things are gonna pop up fake news and fake memes and things like that. It's already actually started happening and started to impact some things. So privacy and access to certain information is gonna be key.
Speaker 2:Another big risk of leveraging AI and machine learning is the bias in the data sets itself. So, as you can imagine, you're straining these image generators on the images available out in the public space, right? Well, we both recognize that. You know when you're looking at anything publicly, there's a large proportion that is white, male, right, and so does that mean the AI is gonna be trained and have more propensity for, you know, that type of bias that's already out in public. And similarly, when you're building out, you know, machine learning models for, say, credit approval and things like that, you have to recognize that there's bias associated with people of color, people, you know minority groups, women that are just inherent in the data and you have to be careful when you're training these AI's that you're trying to mitigate those biases as much as possible.
Speaker 2:And then we talked a little bit about this before, you know, when you were talking about, but intellectual property ownership, right, with these new general AI solutions, that's gonna be a big question that's still unanswered, which is who owns this right? Is it the person who prompted the AI to generate this image of a unicorn? Or is it the original you know artist that the AI was trained against, that learned how to create that image of the unicorn? Or is it the AI company itself that created the model you know to generate the unicorn? There's all these questions around who actually owns the intellectual property? And then you know can that be monetized? Can that be used, you know, openly? Can I lock it down? All those questions are still out in the open in terms of risks and challenges that are gonna be faced around AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah, those, those are legitimate. Now I wanna go into actually, before I go into the business, questions on how the big companies like Nike, Kailag's and those guys are using AI and how we, the smaller companies, can leverage some of those things that they're using. Before I go into that, I wanna ask you what are some of the cool things that you've mentioned a couple. Is there any others that you're using? So you have 11labscom that's for audio, that you can create audio with. You have Synthesia. Synthesia, yes, creates avatar, so if you want an avatar of yourself, and I guess you can combine it too, where it talks, that's pretty cool stuff. Are there any other that you use that are not widely popular on the internet right now or not? People are not really talking about that are cool, but you know about them because that's your space that you can share with the audience.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you know, depending on and then we'll talk about exactly what you just mentioned, which is how organizations look at it, and this is how I'll encourage people to look at it right, which is every day. There are so many AI companies copied up right that have different use cases. I have the challenges. We have to look at specifically what makes sense for you and your organization. So let's take, for example, your self-art. So you're creating a podcast and you're like I need to create short form content based on this long form content.
Speaker 2:There's tools right now that you could feed this video into and it will analyze, it'll transcribe the verbiage that you and I are saying, it'll actually recognize and really analyze and say I'm gonna cut these one to one and a half minute sections out of this video and I'm going to create a small short term video off of this long term video. So, from an editing perspective, there's AI tools out there that will increase and enhance your productivity just because it's doing some of the tactical kind of you know, time consuming exercise that you would have otherwise done. And then there's gonna be AI, of course, that can offer you the ability to set it up for YouTube and set it up for LinkedIn and set it up for Twitter and et cetera, right, and so you really need to look at kind of your use cases and what makes sense. So there's a lot of tools out there. There's a lot of websites right now that are trying to compile all these tools so that it gives you your use case right.
Speaker 2:So there's a cool tool that Microsoft just came out with that I think is gonna compete with Canva. It's called designermicrosoftcom. It's gonna give you the ability to create, you know, say, a LinkedIn banner for X, y and Z and then create the image if you need an image created, and give you the ability to download and post to LinkedIn, for example. So you really need to look at kind of where your business plays and say when does it make sense to use?
Speaker 1:this technology. That makes a heck of a lot of sense. So where are these big companies? How are these big companies capitalizing on using AI? How are they using AI and how can we, the smaller businesses, model what the big guys are doing on our level to get similar results? I'm a big believer in modeling success, and these are companies obviously Fortune 500 companies doing it at a big scale. What can we learn and take away from what they're doing and put it into our business?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the simplest answer is you need to understand what your strategy is going to be. What is your AI strategy, right? So there's so many things that, martin, you just mentioned. There's so many things where it's a shiny object syndrome oh, this is cool, oh, this is neat, oh, I want to play with this, I want to try this out.
Speaker 2:The reality is, a good organization, a good, strong organization recognizes that I can't try everything. That takes time, resources and investment that I don't have, so I need to look at it and say what is the approach I want to do that's going to actually drive that competitive advantage that I already have in the organization, right? And then figure out what are the use cases around that. In order to do that, though, martin, you need to really understand what the capabilities are of AI, and so you need to talk with experts. You need to bring in experts who recognize here are all the different things you can do with AI. Now let's understand your customer's journey, for example, and recognize where it makes the best use for it. Once you do that, you have to align those use cases to ensure that it really is tied to the organizational vision of where they're trying to go to. So are they going after profitability? Are they going after customer loyalty? Are they going after supply chain improvements? Where are they trying to improve and then recognize are there opportunities for AI to provide you that competitive advantage to move yourself forward? Then what they do is they take a step back and say now do we have all the people, technology and processes in place to actually take advantage of this right? So, do I have the people, do I have the skill sets that are going to be able to leverage this technology and really take advantage of it? Or do I need to go look elsewhere and find partners or resources that are available that I could tap into to move faster if necessary?
Speaker 2:From a tool's perspective, you have to always ask yourself about the buy, build or outsource right. So does this make sense for me to build it internally? Does this make sense for me to buy it from someone, a startup, for example, or something like that? Or does this make sense for me to outsource it to somebody else and actually have someone else do that right? And then you have to recognize, like we've mentioned before, the ethical aspects. What are the boundaries that my organization is going to take and not take with using some of this stuff. The challenge right now, martin, is you have to ask yourself where am I willing, and where am I not willing to go with this stuff? Where do I need to be authentically human and when do I take advantage of this to improve my productivity, improve my throughput, improve my output? Sometimes, in terms of where I'm trying to go, but I think that answer is going to be difference to everybody, and so everyone has to recognize what their limits are going to be.
Speaker 1:Got it. So know your AI strategy. When you say know your AI strategy, you gave us three steps Know your AI strategy, know your people, know that. Once you know that, know that you have the people technology in place to take advantage of your AI strategy. And then, number three, recognize your ethical boundaries. Those are really good sound advice.
Speaker 2:So someone and again, don't hover over the. Make sure that they're aligned to the business objective, right, because there are, like you said, there's a lot of cool technology out there, right? So, martin, let's just take you. Does it make sense for Martin to go build 11 labs and make his own voice? And when he's perfectly comfortable getting in front of a camera and doing that? Right, and have no problem, doesn't need a script. He really can play off his own knowledge and experience, right? So would that be cool? Yes, is it the best use of your time and energy and resources to go invest in that? Maybe not, right? It depends on what you're trying to do, right? But that's a good example of something really cool and shiny and really neat I want to go play with. But is it going to actually provide me a competitive advantage in my business, in my industry, in my space?
Speaker 1:That's really good. You mentioned there is a website that, for instance, we could take this video, put it in and it'll create a bunch of short form content for us. Do you mind sharing that website with me?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's a couple of tools like that. The one I'm currently using it's called video, so it's vidyoai, right, vidyoai? And what they're doing. What I really like about them right now is they're giving 75 minutes for free. So if you go sign up with them, they give you the ability to A import a YouTube video. So if you uploaded this to YouTube, you can send a link and it'll go and get it from YouTube, transcribe it, analyze it, cut, slice and then you tell it if you want it vertical Portrait, landscape, however you want the video to be and then it does the short form content one and a half minutes, two minutes, wherever you decide and then you could edit and then it adds subtitles and things like that. It's a really cool video and, like I said, you have the ability to use 75 minutes a month for free, and then they have paid tiers where they go higher than that. So I'm not a affiliate or anything. I just really enjoy the tool and it's pretty good.
Speaker 1:Perfect. So my question back to my question. I wanted to I know you mentioned that, but I wanted to get that tool you're using and what you recommend. So back to my question. So, know your AI strategy. Make sure it's aligned with your business and strategy. So someone is listening to us. We have a small business owner, an investor. A small investor, maybe that is listening to us wants to scale their real estate, investing business and whatever their business is. We have entrepreneurs from all walks of life listen to the podcast around the globe, so maybe they're listening.
Speaker 1:How do you uncover your AI strategy? Do you have a particular type of I don't know, maybe a questionnaire, a couple of questions that someone can start with and ask themselves like, okay, what should my AI strategy be? Because I think it's. Clarity is usually cloudiness and not clarity is what impedes us from executing and really taking massive action is not having clarity. Clarity is power. So what would you? How do you help, or how can someone help themselves figure out what their AI strategy should be, and not just shiny objects in them? So for me, I'll give you an example.
Speaker 1:For me, I use chat, gpt. I need ideas, I need ideas. So the other day, my little brother got married and I needed it was authentic. But I needed something to help me spark my thinking and by the time I was done, chat GPT gave me some ideas. It was all my speech. Yeah, it was all. It was just like oh okay, yes, this time when we did this, oh yes, this thing here, and then I didn't need it, it was just more of a. It was more of a get me started.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, well, you're just starting is what I Martin. What I like to do is there's a mind shift that has to happen with some of these tools, right? And I think the mind shift is from a creator to an editor, right? So in the past, we had to have a blank sheet of paper, a blank canvas, a blank something that we had to create something from scratch, right? What I think these generative AI tools are giving you is a first draft and the ability to do something based on something that's given it. So you're moving from creating from scratch to now I'm editing something that's been given to me, and I never, ever, recommend that someone just copy and paste with chat, gpt or any of these generative AI's. Do you need to take it and then place your own human judgment on it to your point? Does this sound like me? Is this a story that really relate? How do I? So you took, instead of starting from scratch which you would have done initially, right, without a chat GPT you turned to an editor and you said I'm going to take your draft and I'm going to go finalize it and edit it and take this out and reword this, and then now it became yours, right, and so it eliminated some of the stress and friction that came along with previously, maybe, a speech that you would have created in the past, right? So I think there's a mind shift that has to happen, and this mind shift from creator to editor is going to allow us to enter what I call the age of iteration, which is you're going to be able to iterate quicker and faster and more often on things that would have historically taken a lot of time, right, and you wouldn't have iterated more as often. Right, you would have said this is going to take me a week, I'm going to do a first or second draft, but I'm going to stop there, whereas maybe you had the opportunity to do 10 drafts against it or chat back and forth with the tool to do that. So I think there is that mind shift that you have to have.
Speaker 2:So I think that's one of the first steps you have to engage with when you're starting to think about an AI strategy, which is how should I be looking at my business? Right? Should I look at it from a creative perspective or should I look at it from more, from an editing perspective? Right, and so I think the way I've worked with clients and the way I will work with clients is you have to look at your customer journey and you have to say let me understand whatever process we're trying to go after, right, whether, again, a supply chain process, or if it's I'm trying to understand, you know my customers better to provide them a better customer experience. You want to map out that journey and then you need to recognize where you can take advantage of AI. The challenge, martin, right now is a lot of people don't understand all the things AI can do, and so this is where you need to engage someone who understands a little bit, because what you don't want to do is suboptimize those use cases and say I want to do this when you can recognize AI can do this entire thing if you just make a little bit more investment, more data, more whatever.
Speaker 2:So it really is incumbent upon engaging someone who understands this technology, understands the various use cases that can benefit your organization and then recognize how they create that AI strategy going forward.
Speaker 1:Got it. So is there any question I mean? So you just said something really really key. You said you know understanding your process, your journey, and some of us are good at that. Someone like yourself have an engineer mind and you're really good at processes and things like that. Someone like me not so much. Right, I know my strength and I know my weaknesses. I'm more. I'm more a higher level 50,000. I can look at things, I can look at the whole thing and say, okay, we need to move this, this, this, this, this, this, this. But I can't necessarily. I don't necessarily I could, but I don't necessarily. It's not my strong suit to say we got to do this first, and then this thing here, then this thing here, then this thing here, then this thing here, this thing here, this thing here, and we'll get this out.
Speaker 2:So let's take a step back, right, martin, because I think there's a lot of people like that, right, that recognize, like I, can look at the entire you know moving pieces, the puzzle pieces, right, but I can't necessarily knock out every tactical task that needs to be accomplished, right. So what I would encourage you to do, right, or others like yourself, is to start looking at your day, start looking at your week, start looking at the activities that take the most time that you recognize you've probably done this right, like where are the activities that where I could delegate this to somebody right, right, you do that all the time. Right, you look at and go. This is not a value add for me. This is just, this is something tactical that has to get done. So, in this vein, right, the value add you bring is you ask great questions in this podcast, but maybe the editing function is not the value add.
Speaker 1:I can't touch it man Like I do is like I would go see if I had to edit these things.
Speaker 2:So I would argue go look at your process and when I say your process, go look at your day, go look at where you're spending time, go look at where you're spending energy, go look at where you're investing yourself in areas that are not necessarily value add or strategic work, right. And then determine okay, are those an opportunity for AI to do for me, right? The same way you would say are those opportunities for me to delegate to someone else? Are those opportunities for AI?
Speaker 2:So let's take, for example, video editing. This is somewhere you say, boy, I'm spending five hours a week editing my videos. Is this an opportunity for me to go look and see if there's a tool out there that could do this quicker, faster and more efficient? Right? Then you would go say let me go look for AI in that space, right? So rather than say I'm just going to look at for AI at everything, go find time and energy that you're investing right now and see if there's opportunities for AI. Now what I would argue is sometimes it doesn't make sense for you to do AI because, again, ai is still going to require some human judgment on top of that, right? So that's where you again need to work with someone who understands the limitations and the benefits of AI, and so they can really start to say here's a better use case for you to use AI in that vein.
Speaker 1:That makes a ton of sense. Start looking at your day and what you're spending time in, and that's really sound advice. I never thought of it that way. I kind of. I'm kind of the guy that just I learned something, I go for it and I start playing with it and I start. You know, I'm also very in tune, right. I'm very in tune to what I'm good at, what I'm not good at and what's like. Hey, this is energy, I'm not going to mess around with this.
Speaker 2:That's another. That's a great example, right, where you have your energy drains. Right, you're going throughout the day and you're doing something like I'm going to assume you don't make speeches every day for your buddy, your brother buddy, right, that might have been an energy drain, right? So you said, let me go and leverage AI, chat, gbt in this case to say let help me get through some of the hurdles that I'm getting through right now. And then, you know, that's a great gut way of looking at it, right, which is where am I energy drain? Where are my energy drains? Now, let me go see if there's an AI tool out there that can help me with that and get over that hump.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and you know there's a movement out. I read this often about hey, ai is going to replace the human jobs and you know it's going to replace a lot of work, or it's going to. People are not going to be, if indeed we have a future that looks that way, where robots are going to take over all these jobs. I mean, as an entrepreneur, I will tell you for me. So I'm kind of in the middle here, because I understand. You know, we need to people, human beings, we need to have something to do to be productive, we need a purpose, we need to get up every day, and if now we have machines and AI, what's going to be our purpose as human beings? And that's going to create a lot of addiction as a human. I'm just talking as a human. I'm not teched out, but I am a human being and I am experiencing this human experience collectively with the rest of us here, and I know that if that were to be the case, then people are going to find themselves without purpose, without motivation. What is the drive? Is there? What is the talks in your space, amongst you guys, for the professionals? Is that a possibility? And what is that future? What could that future look like?
Speaker 1:We already see, you know, we see some of these things happening in some of these fast food places where we have machines, where they see some jobs, and that's not a skilled job, right? Let's just be honest. I worked at McDonald's when I was 16, not a skilled job, living burgers, whatever but some people, you know, for some people, that's it, that's. You know they're working in Wauwa or they're working or whatever. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just it. But those jobs are being threatened right now by, you know, by AI and robotics. That's right. What is the? What do you guys see as the guys that are creating this and the masters and the professionals within that sphere, of what that future looks like for those jobs? And you know, what are you guys kind of putting together in your heads and how you're planning that out in the future?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it'd be naive to say that this is not going to disrupt. Right, this is absolutely going to disrupt a lot of industries, a lot of areas. Right, there is a lot of fear and to some extent rightly placed, that how are you going to quickly train up or skill up other folks who are in these kind of tasks? No question, I don't have the answer way above my pre grade or thought grade, but what I can argue is, like I mentioned very early in this conversation, ai has the ability to level the playing field for a lot of small players. So what I mean by that is, in the past, if I wanted to spin up a website, I'd have to go find somebody, hire somebody, code that website, hire another person to create copy for it, make sure that it has a landing page and things like that.
Speaker 2:Ai is going to offer the ability for entrepreneurs and people to almost literally say I want a website about XYZ and it's going to go do all those things for you, right, and allow you to quickly execute against an idea or a solution that you have to test against the market. Now I look at that as an optimistic thing, but don't take away from the fact that we have to figure out what the other piece of that puzzle is right For the folks who are entrepreneurial, who don't want to own their own business. What are they going to do from that perspective? I think those are challenges, martin, that I don't certainly have the answer for. I look at this and, just like most things like the Industrial Revolution and the Knowledge Revolution and things like that I believe that there's going to be more jobs created than are eliminated as a result of this, but, no question, it's going to be a different type of job, right.
Speaker 1:So your thoughts on what are some of those jobs look like? Because I think this is an important thing for people to hear, right Like hey, I'm glad that you have that perspective. Please tell me. What do you think? What are some of those jobs that are going to be created? What do they look like? What would they be? What fields do you see those job creation?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think they're going to be focused on what we talked about, which is something that AI cannot do right now, which is the human element, right? So I think you know, let me put it the ability to create content has immensely dropped right. So our ability to create images and blog posts and things like that is immensely dropped right. But that also means that content is going to proliferate, right? So if you thought the ability for influencers to be popular now, they're going to be even more necessary in the future because there's going to be more information that people have to do. So I think being able to be an influencer in the future around a specific niche is going to be immensely necessary because there's going to be so much content out there. And so you know, in the past they've said content is king. Well, I believe curation will become king.
Speaker 2:Your ability to curate and find information and being able to synthesize that down for people to ingest it and take advantage of it is going to be immensely important in the future, because there's going to be so much easy content to create, right?
Speaker 2:So I think jobs where people need to influence, people need to curate, people need to find information, but something that right now hasn't? People just make a lot of content right now and then, as a result of making the content, you look at them as an expert, right, but that doesn't necessarily mean it added value. The value is going to be in creating communities and curating content and then bringing people in to make sure that they understand how to take advantage of whatever it is right there would be, you know, athletic shoes, or a supplement, or AI, whatever that is. Your ability to curate, create community is going to be immensely important. So I think that's where jobs are going to come, which is how do you take and do the human thing, which is all around storytelling, all around community, all around finding information and conveying that information. That's where the new jobs are going to come from, because the ability to create a blog post you can do today with chat, gpt that's not where the value at Does that?
Speaker 1:make sense. That makes so much sense, frank. It's crazy because I was listening to a podcast I listened to and someone I follow, and they were saying that the jobs of the future is going to be almost a requirement. And, again, I'm a strategist, so I like to process things in terms of hey, if I do this, what could happen? And I like to think in terms of the future. Right, what I'm doing today, how is it going to be in the future? And what was saying?
Speaker 1:What this person was saying was if, with all of this technology and all of this AI on your resumes now you need to become a master prompter is what he says. So on your resume, which is basically what you're saying, a curator in a way, in a sense, is equivalent to kind of a curator where you need to. It's going to be a skill necessary for people to have to know what questions to ask, to know what information to get, to dig out the best impact, whatever the impact that you're trying to have. So, if you can become a master, he was saying a good prompter, that you know how to navigate and you got. But again, that's a skill, frank, that a lot of people struggle with, right, it's a skill that requires thinking, prompting a machine. You have a mentor that says most people want to succeed, but few people want to do the hard work of thinking. That's right. That's right. Very few people want to do the hard work of thinking, and thinking is much harder work than actually going and doing construction work.
Speaker 1:I know because I'm a business owner, I'm an entrepreneur, and I have to constantly sit here and think things through. Okay, I have four projects going on. What am I putting? Who's the person that's going to be running this? Who's doing this? Who's doing that? Managing the cash flow, managing the whole thing, managing all different aspects of the business from a high level. It requires thinking. It requires every morning silence, thinking what am I doing? Today? We've got three goals and a lot of people don't want to do the hard work of thinking. That's the skill that is going to be required. What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I like, yeah, there's three aspects, right. So there's knowledge, creativity and then wisdom. Right is the way I like to describe knowledge and just knowing, right? So, whether that be I know everything around real estate or I know that's knowledge, easy is taking 2 separate two separate things and then finding a connection between the two. And then wisdom is saying I know enough to know whether or not those two things should be connected to add value. So the knowledge, creativity and wisdom. Knowledge right now.
Speaker 2:Previous to the proliferation of AI, people got paid a lot for knowledge. People got paid a lot to just know. What, I would argue, is, ai is now going to disrupt that. You're no longer going to get paid just to know, because chat, gbt and other things can be trained and they're free, exactly, very low cost to know. Right now, it's passing things like the medical board, it's passing people. No, exactly Now.
Speaker 2:Creativity, the ability to take two desperate topics and find a connection between the two, I would argue, right now, ai is not great, right, it's not great at knowing. Hey, if I take this and this and put them together, that's something creative, that novel, that's never been done before. Right, humans are really good at that. Humans can make connections and create, so I think you're going to get paid to do that in the future. And then, with wisdom, the ability to say is there value in creating and putting those two things together? That would give somebody insight or some information that they didn't otherwise have or think differently than they otherwise have. That's going to be really where humans shine Right, and so if I were your audience, I would be investing in the creativity and the wisdom portions, because the knowledge portion is just knowing is not going to be sufficient in the future.
Speaker 1:Does that make sense? That makes a ton of sense, frank. That makes a lot of sense Knowledge, creativity and wisdom. One thing that I will say that has kind of sparked my thinking is we're having this conversation, and I'm having this conversation here with you, frank is that I think that, no matter what happens with AI, I think that, no matter how big that thing gets, no matter how much robotics come into play in the future and replace jobs and replace a lot of things, there's something that AI I don't think will ever, ever replace, and that is this human connection and the grit of a human being. The grit of a human being, the grit that a human being has.
Speaker 1:When a human being encounters a situation and has to get creative and has to figure out, because we can identify, our brains are trained to identify patterns that's where wisdom comes in. That's right. Hey, we know this, we know that. Okay, the robot does that. I know I'm going to do this so it can get this result. So I think that, no matter what happens in the future with AI, no matter what happens with all of this technology, this could never be replaced and as from one human to another human, I don't care how good an AI gets man. I'm going to know a human because of experience and dealing with humans. Right, I'm going to know when I'm talking to a human regardless, just because there's going to be this thing, that I know this connection that we're both going to feel when we're connecting and we're communicating. That makes us unique and makes us really powerful and makes us a gift to this world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think, Martin, I think the reality is, you mentioned earlier, humans need a purpose right, and I find, in my experience, purpose usually comes from community right, this connection with other individuals, and that's something humans are always going to long for right, and so that gives us an opportunity to say where should I put my time, tension and energy in the future? It's really around figuring out that human connection and figuring out how to leverage my skills, whether that be I'm a great writer, I'm a great artist, I'm a great speaker, whatever that may be, whatever it is, how can I use those skills and my strengths to create that human connection? And then, how do I delegate the other things right To potentially AI?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, my friend. Thank you so much for coming out. I can spend another hour with you here, brother. Thank you so much, man. It's been my pleasure, it's been my honor. I learned a ton from you. I got a thing full of notes as you can see here my sheets of notes and all the things I learned and all the resources and guys, if you're listening to this, this is one of those episodes you need to listen to a couple of times, because there's just so much that Frank here shared with us about the future. And, Frank, I'd love to have you back in the future, actually, as this thing continues to evolve and things can get more and more.
Speaker 1:I was making a point earlier about me being an entrepreneur and kind of being on both sides. Right, I'm excited for the opportunity when I think about my apartment buildings and I think about, hey, will I live to see what I think. I am the point where I can hire a robot. Right, I'm going Jetsons right now. Right, just my creative and my imagination.
Speaker 1:Yeah, where I can have a robot in a closet, let's say, at my 50 unit apartment building, my 57 unit apartment building, I have a robot in a closet where people go to their computer and they say my sink is leaking. When this robot comes up, knocks on the door, they make an appointment. The robot shows up, goes under the sink, fixes the sink, goes back down, puts himself away, powers himself off. Like I think about things like that, where I have a robot that can cut the grass for me, right, that's going to tremendously cut my cost down. At the same time is also going to create, get rid of a lot of jobs. So I'm kind of excited in that respect. I think I'll see that in the future and as an investor, I'll invest a billion dollars.
Speaker 2:There's going to be a continuum, right? There's going to be a continuum of things that are possible. I think it's more realistic right now and in the near future to say I'm going to have sensors underneath that sink, to say, oh, it's got a leak, right, and then you bring a human to actually go take care of that, right? Because I think being proactive as opposed to reactive is going to be something people need to shift their mindset around to, which is I'm not going to wait for that person to call me. I'm going to call people and say, hey, not in the floor. Yeah, there's more moisture in that under the sink than should be. Now, let me get in there and figure out what the problem is right Now.
Speaker 2:In a situation like that, is it again the best use case to say I want a robot that can do everything, or someone who identifies it, and then I have a human who has the creativity and the wisdom to know what to do, right? I think those are where everybody's going to have a different business. But I think it's a continuum and things are going to evolve and things are going to change, but never take away from the value of human creativity and human wisdom right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't care how good an AI is and I'll debate this with any of you guys in your space. I don't care. I've been a human for 45 years now and I love being a human being. There's something about us and our connection and the heartbeat and our brains and our senses that, I don't care how smart a machine is, it's never going to be, as it's never going to have what we have the soul, the spirit, that connection, that ability to be gritty and to create things and to outsmart certain things. As if we, you know the great books, as if you ask, you shall receive. If you seek, you shall find, and if you're knocked, the door shall be opened. And yeah, man, that's written there for a reason.
Speaker 1:No matter what you know, my dad used to say something to me. My dad used to when I was a young man. He used to say you know, human beings, no matter our situation, we adapt. So if you are a, if you, when I moved to Pennsylvania from New York City and I moved to the woods and really, really quiet, coming from New York City, he says, son, you'll adapt. Right, human beings, we adapt to everything, we adapt to all situations. If you have to go back to to being in an apartment building. Guess what? It will be uncomfortable for you at first but, son, you will adapt. Human beings, we always adapt, and that's the thing we always adapt and we always figure out a way. We always figure. We're very flexible as human beings, more flexible than we like to believe we are.
Speaker 2:And I think that's who we are right now, right In this space. Right now it's uncomfortable, it's, you know, the unknown is out there, but to your point you need to learn to adapt. So ride the wave. Don't fight the wave, because you'll become exhausted and drown. Right, so ride the wave. Figure out how to use these tools. Figure out how to use the best use cases for your specific situation. Right, and then you know delegate that stuff to it.
Speaker 1:Perfect, my friend, and we're going to go right and un-titled man. Again, we can, we can talk. I can talk another hour with you about this stuff because I could keep learning and learning from you, and again I'm going to have you back. So we're going to go into the untitled round, frank, and we're going to ask you a series of questions. It's just for fun. You don't have to think, you don't have to justify. Just one word. Answers are fine. So you ready to play? Sure, let's do it. Ai is Fun. A million dollars is Freedom. People coming to Austin, texas should try Tacos. I've always wanted to travel to Rome. Everything my advice to young people is Try the things that scare you.
Speaker 1:Good advice Family or business, family Book smart or street smart. Street smart Cats or dogs.
Speaker 2:Dogs Logic or emotion, I'd like to say logic, but it you make decisions based on emotion, even even right brain people like me.
Speaker 1:Skill or popularity, skill, wine or beer? Neither. And lastly, progress or tradition, progress. Thank you again for being such a great sport, coming out sharing with us. And if people wanted to connect with you, I mean you have a lot to share. People maybe wanted to hire you as an expert, maybe they wanted to talk to you and say, hey, can you help me through this? These three steps are knowing my AI strategy, helping me know if I have the people, the technology, or, and recognize and help me recognize what should my ethical boundaries be around this stuff. How can people connect with you? How do people find you? Frank? Where is that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so feel free to reach out to me on my email, frank at catalyticsai. That's my email address. Or if you're on LinkedIn, feel free to find me, frank Mendoza, on LinkedIn and then connect with me. I'd love to hear you know if you got any value out of this or you have any additional questions. I'd be more than happy to speak with you.
Speaker 1:Awesome brother, Thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate you coming on, Frank.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me. It's been a great pleasure.
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