Speaking and Communicating Podcast

DeepResearch, I don't know if you ever do DeepResearch reports, but like, it'll, ChachiBT will just go away for seven, eight, nine minutes and come back with the most incredible research report on anything you want.

So it's all linked and everything.

It's just like page after page of great information.

And if it's important to you, how valuable is that?

Welcome back to The Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host Roberta Ndlela.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning in to.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

And by the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify and leave us a rating and a review.

Now let's get communicating.

With our guest today, Erich Archer.

Erich is from Massachusetts.

He is an Emmy Award TV producer.

He produced shows such as Masterchef, The Biggest Loser.

He is an AI video expert and a creative media strategist with over 20 years of experience and is here to show us, especially us beginners in the field of AI, on how we can use it for content creation, problem solving, decision making, and so many other ways that it can help our lives.

Before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show.

Hi, Erich.

Hi Roberta.

Thanks for having me.

My absolute pleasure.

Thanks for being here.

Please introduce yourself to our listeners.

Well, you said most of it or a lot of it anyway.

I've been in the television industry for over 20 years now.

Got my start in New York City, doing a lot of sports and music and reality type of stuff, and then out to LA for a bit, got into some bigger network experience, and then back to my hometown of Massachusetts, where I've been running a nonprofit community media center for the last 12 years.

In the last couple of years, I've just gotten really obsessed with generative AI and all of the new tools to mainly make video content, but some of the other stuff also.

It's interesting that someone who was in the lights of Hollywood would now be in a nonprofit.

That's quite a shift.

What brought that about?

That was not intentional really.

I moved back to Massachusetts to get married and settle down.

That move from LA to Massachusetts was not a career move.

It was a life move.

So I had to figure out what to do now that I was not at NBC working on big shows and stuff.

I was back in a small town in Massachusetts without half as many television opportunities, and I found this nonprofit public television space that not only kept my career alive in television, but also awakened me to this whole mission-driven television space that I wasn't even really aware of, that I've come to really love and has been 15 years of my life, and now a really big part of it.

That is amazing, and congratulations on getting married.

Now, let's talk about AI.

Some say AI has always been there.

What we call AI now, which looks like it's new, it's generative AI.

Would you like to explain to us what that means?

I think what really changed was when things got so conversational with ChatGPT, at least for me, that's when things really started opening up, and I think for most people too.

At the same time, Mid Journey came out, which was the image generation tool, one of the first on the scene and it's really good.

Between those two things, that was for me when AI showed up for me.

I know AI has been here for a long time with your Netflix recommendations and all that stuff, but it wasn't really accessible to me until ChatGPT came along, and Mid Journey came along right around the same time in early 22, I think it was, and it was just a recognition that this was the new technology.

It wasn't anything more than that.

We've gone through so many iterations of technology in this business, from analog to digital, green screens and drones and all the new camera technology and software technology.

Being someone in charge of the television center, I have to learn about the new technology coming out.

It's part of my job to anticipate these things and understand them.

So that's all it was for me at first.

Then once I started to play with them, I started to really understand, oh, this is really going to change things.

This is very powerful technology.

That was evident really quickly.

It was going to go way beyond just being a nice new resource for my non-profit, which was one of the other things I saw was like, oh, Chachi Buti can help me write more and research better and slam things better and maybe write a grant or something.

So it was like, oh, there's more resources here in this thing.

So that's cool as a non-profit leader.

Then as a TV leader being like, oh, now I can make imagery out of thin air.

Where can I use that?

All that sort of stuff.

That's how it started to take hold for me, if that makes sense.

You actually did explain it well though.

I'm about to ask you, because you hear a lot of people say, most of us use it like Google.

We just ask basic questions.

Somebody said the other day, AI is like my therapist because they know how to prompt it, whereas a lot of us ask it typically what we would ask Google.

I think that's the difference in getting value out of it.

Yeah.

One of the biggest things I think, comparison to a Google search is, Google search, you're almost trying to use as few words as possible, and then you're getting these search results versus what I like to tell people with Chachi PT is to front load it with as much information as possible, as opposed to Google search, how do I bake chicken or whatever.

I'm about to bake the chicken and I'm using this stove and I like it this way, and all of the context you could possibly imagine, stuff it and that's not a great example.

A better example would be something that you really want a better understanding of.

Like what's something in your life that if you had a better understanding of it, you'd be better off.

Let's start there with Chachi PT and give it every ounce of context we can think of to give it, and then converse from there with whatever you get back.

So it's just a little bit of flipping that Google search on its head to be like, instead of giving it the least information, I'm going to give it the most.

That little switch tends to be pretty powerful people, I think.

So giving it the most makes it give you the best results.

So does it actually work as a guide as well?

Well, it really can when it has that level of information because it's really good at considering all of those parameters and giving you these really richly contextualized answers and deeply researched hyper-personalized answers.

That's why people start to feel like it can be their therapist or their professional coach, give them medical advice or teach them anything.

It's because it's got so much information at its fingertips.

What I'll do is I'll make a project in ChatGPT and have stats in it for a client folder.

And so every time I have a conversation about a particular client, I have it in the same thread.

It just knows everything about this client.

So now when I go to that thread, you can ask it a quick question, but it's got all this rich context to draw from.

That's before you're even like uploading training documents.

Like I've uploaded my brand guidelines, all my policies, every important document for my work so that it has it at the ready.

And that makes it a pretty powerful thought partner when I'm trying to plan anything.

So give it as much context and as much information as possible.

And the best way to do that is with voice.

Because oftentimes, I will not want to type a whole lot, just be like lazy.

I don't want to give it all the context right now.

But if you just switch to voice and you just speak it, it goes so much faster and then you look at it and you realize, it was only a paragraph.

I could have probably typed that, but you may not have.

So the voice just removes even that little extra friction of typing a lot.

So if you get into that pattern, it goes really, really fast.

And so the outputs you get are really pointed and helpful.

And that's the main trick of it, I think.

Not so much about the specific prompts of roles and objectives and all that stuff that they'll teach you.

Just give it all you got and then converse.

Yeah.

Now let's go back to the video one.

Since you were in the television industry, you worked in reality shows.

If we watch something and it looks sci-fi and somebody's flying over trees, were they using AI in creating that scenery?

Well, it's more and more likely now.

It's certainly easier, cheaper, more accessible for most people to do it with AI.

Otherwise, you're using CGI animation style technology that is harder to learn and fewer people know it.

If you see it today, it's more likely that it's AI.

It depends.

I think feature films aren't using it that much.

They're still using more traditional methods, but you can certainly make any amount of wild new imagery you want.

I think that's one of the actual real values of AI video.

When you look at where it fits in the whole media ecosystem, I don't think it's as interesting to replace traditionally shot video one-to-one with AI video.

I think it's more interesting when you're doing things that you couldn't previously never do.

They were impossible for one reason or another.

It was a different time and place or a different time period or a different world or just imaginary or whatever, but things that would have just been really, really hard to shoot or impossible, now you can generate.

That's a more interesting space to this new rather than like, oh, now I can just, instead of buying stock video, I can make it.

That's not that exciting versus like, oh, I could make never seen before B-roll.

That's kind of cool.

Does it mean we're not going to be as impressed with anybody?

Because if you think about it, even with the Oscars, they will have an award for somebody who uses that technology to create these sci-fi scenes.

So now we're not going to be as impressed anymore because all of us are going to be doing this.

It does feel like that a little bit.

I mean, I see really amazing stuff on line all the time now that people made with AI, that if I had seen it three years ago, I would have been very excited about it.

Now it's like, yeah, okay.

Maybe it's because they know how easy it was to do or something, but I am less impressed.

Maybe it hasn't been the case as much because incredible visual effects were really compelling.

Thinking about like the Matrix or something like that.

But if you don't have a good story, it still won't matter.

It's always been about story ultimately, and I think it still is.

There'll just be a lot more distracting, interesting visual stuff that we'll be ignoring and looking for really good stories.

Which I wanted to ask you next because I know you are an expert in storytelling and making engaging presentations which we talk about on this show.

Now that we are in this age of AI and you want to tell this story.

I mean, somebody sitting on top of a building eating a hamburger, obviously you know that's AI.

How do you then tell the story in a way that still keeps your audience excited?

Because they know it's AI, they can just be.

Yeah.

I mean, it's really always been about the story and always will be.

That is the most important thing in whatever piece of content that you're making.

The more authentic, the more personal, the more unique, obviously visual.

Emotions are hard with AI.

It's not like anyone can just go make some great piece with AI.

It's more possible than before, but it's still really hard to do and be compelling with it.

It's still going to take skill and craft and education and practice.

Only the best will cut through.

I think people will get very indifferent about all the bells and whistles and all the wild visuals if it doesn't have a great story behind it.

And as you say, humanized technology, which sounds like an oxymoron because we think, okay, once technology kicks in, the human part leaves.

AI is said to be taking away our jobs.

So what do you mean when you say humanized technology?

Well, so, for example, the first AI piece that I made was about an ancestor of mine.

My dad had done some ancestry research and found some family pictures and data and had all like a folder of stuff that he had dug up from different places.

And I decided to make a short documentary about one of the people he had uncovered that was interesting to me.

A guy that lived through the 1800s, he was my great, great, great grandfather.

We had a couple of pictures of him and knew some about him.

So I took the information I had and the images I had and I made a bunch of AI images and I used LLMs to write the script and I made a custom GPT to interview him in a simulated way and stuff like that.

So it was a very personal project leveraging all the newest AI tools.

And people really responded to that because it was personal to me.

I had a lot of personal, real, authentic investment in it.

My family, my dad's story and the story of how I figured out how to make it.

I told that story as part of the story too and shared how meaningful it was to my family when I was done.

All that sort of personal stuff that went along with the story of the film and the story of the technology was received really well.

It really didn't get a lot of that negative sentiment around AI of these ships that you made pictures of aren't real, they're not what the ships really look like, that's not what the harbor really looked like, it's not what the barrels really look like or the clothing or even the language.

None of that mattered as much because I was so transparent, that wasn't really the point.

The point was here's this prototype that demonstrates the state of the art now with a personal story and it went over really well.

And I followed that up with a piece about even deeper history, so I had to do a lot of learning and I talked about that.

And it was a human story based on real things.

I think people just really appreciate that human-ness.

It's my story, it's the story of the material, it's the story of the tech and of all together trying to make some new work.

The way you described it, you remind me when the Titanic was made, how James Cameron, he literally went and dug up some of the pieces from the bottom of the ocean.

I remember when they made The Pursuit of Happiness with Will Smith, the old computers from the 80s with those.

Yes, the digital stock prices and everything.

Even us viewers, we love seeing that the authenticity of those times, some of the materials to remind us, it adds to the whole story, like you said.

Right.

Yeah.

It's always really educational in a number of ways making these pieces.

You learn a lot about the subject matter, you learn a lot about the technology.

I often learn about myself and sharing all that out as it's all part of it right now.

That may not always be the case when the technology gets more mature and we're all more used to it and everything, but right now we're all in the same sandbox and it's just all brand new to all of us.

Just being honest about that.

Where it didn't work, where it did, what you learned, where you failed, all that stuff really helps.

Right.

Now, let's talk about the generation that's growing up now.

What's the earliest that kids should be exposed to learning about AI, how to use it?

Because you also have the flip side of that coin, which is, now you have college students just copying their homework from ChatGPT and submitting this as an essay.

Yeah.

I have four kids, two to 12, and they're very involved with the AI work that I do.

I really like to show them what I'm doing and involve them, teach them.

We'll do everything from having ChatGPT tell us jokes before bed, to the kids will make pictures and books.

I'll explain to them, you can't have it right for you, but you can have it help you with ideas, do research and I'll do it with them and that kind of thing.

Oftentimes, if we're hitting a snag, we homeschool.

Oftentimes, if we hit a snag with a lesson, I might call up ChatGPT for a little extra contextualized help like, hey, ChatGPT, I'm here with Caroline, my nine-year-old and we're going over this math lesson and she's really into unicorns.

Can you help her understand this using unicorns as an example?

It'll be like, oh, sure.

Three unicorns plus four unicorns.

It's just always there to be a little helpful extra adult if you need it.

If a kid has a question and you don't know the answer, it can be a great way to pull up the guide.

Like this morning, I was talking to my 12-year-old son and he wants to learn how to make video games.

He plays Minecraft and he wants to learn next level stuff.

So I didn't really know what to tell him.

I called up Jack Shabity on the voice mode so we could both hear it.

I said, hey, my son's a Minecraft-er.

I know that there's Unreal Engine out there for professionals, but I don't know what's in between.

Can you help us figure out what is appropriate?

He's only got an iPad, he doesn't have a computer, like all this context.

It gave us all the apps.

A few minutes later, he's got one downloaded.

By the time I left for work, he was already happy through three tutorials, like learning Unreal Engine.

So he's going to build video games.

He's learning how to code by himself right now.

It's like amazing.

I just think there's so many great ways to use it for kids in education.

All you hear about is cheating on homework.

As a pseudo teacher myself, as a part-time homeschooler, I can tell you there's so many ways to inject it into a learning moment, to enhance it, to make it richer.

There's always better information, more information available to you now.

It's really helpful.

That is fantastic.

I'm thinking during COVID, when kids were home, couldn't go to school, if they had known how to use it like your son, like the way you just described, how useful it would have been.

Because you had parents who said, I can't help him with his math homework.

I wasn't good at math.

Right.

It's an incredible tutor, incredible tutor.

I mean, I find that I learn stuff so much faster.

Anytime I need to learn something, I go right to Chatjiti Tina.

I'll just do a DeepResearch report, and then oftentimes I'll take that DeepResearch report, throw it in Notebook LLM to turn into a podcast and listen to that on the way home from work.

You're listening to the research, it's great.

It's just an incredible educational tool, unparalleled really.

Right.

That example you just gave, that it can turn that into a podcast.

Just like we were saying earlier that some of the jobs will be obsolete.

Does that mean podcasters too?

Because you can just throw information into AI and it can turn into a podcast episode, so they will be obsolete as well?

I mean, I think they'll be both.

I think we'll see higher and higher percentages of content that we consume, video, audio, that's AI.

We'll be watching 40 percent AI content on Netflix someday, 60 percent human-made, same thing with podcasts.

I think we'll see a lot of that for sure.

But I think that there will still be human-made content also.

There's millions of creators out there and so many have access to being a creator for the first time in their lives.

I mean, I've had so many conversations with people who have shifted their careers because they wanted to be a creative all along, but they didn't have access to the production industry, and now you do.

That's amazing.

Yeah, I think there'll be a lot more people making stuff, but they'll be using AI tools to do it, and there'll be big companies figuring out their ways to do it.

If you throw a DeepResearch report into Notebook LM, the podcast is two people that sound like humans with human intonation.

I do it in the middle of a live workshop.

It's so fast.

Just to prove a point, like this is a great educational tool.

Just think about that.

Anytime you need to really understand something, it's such a great exercise.

DeepResearch, I don't know if you ever do DeepResearch reports, but ChatGBT will just go away for 7, 8, 9 minutes and come back with the most incredible research report on anything you want.

So it's all linked and everything is just like page after page of great information.

And if it's important to you, how valuable is that?

And then it's just a matter of like, can I learn this faster by listening to it?

If you think about the college textbooks, some of which are 700 pages, if you follow the same system you just described, so that means instead of me reading 700 pages of a semester on that subject, I can have that information in 7 to 9 minutes and understand the context.

Well, I don't know about that short a timing.

I mean, you still do have to absorb the information.

And if you had a full textbook, it would take way longer to make a podcast of all of that material.

But still, I mean, more or less, yes, you know, you could do it chapter by chapter.

You know, if I was in school right now, I would absolutely be listening to my lessons on the way to class or whatever.

It's just a great way to take advantage of that transportation time and learn through listening, which I find is easier or I absorb more than if I'm reading it.

Oftentimes, I just don't have the time or the energy to read it.

You know, it's a long report, but if I'm driving home for 20 minutes, I can listen to that.

Yes, people listen while jogging, walking to the mall, driving.

Yeah.

And then what did you mean when you say you can use it for strategic decision making?

Well, it can become an expert on whatever you're needing to make a strategic decision in.

You know, in my case, with my video production work, I might be developing a new television series.

And I need to make a series of smart decisions around that based on target market, budget, creative, all kinds of different stuff.

Until a couple of years ago, I was on my own with that.

You know, you sit down and try to figure it out.

You do your research, you write up a deck and wordsmith it to death, and you try to communicate that out.

It was a lengthy manual process.

The better you get at sort of customizing and training your favorite LLM, in my case, ChatGPT, the better you can get really targeted answers around that stuff and develop systems where it's like it already kind of anticipates that you're going to talk to it about that.

So like if there's something that you do on a regular basis, like I have to write a monthly report to my board of directors for my current job.

And that monthly report always pretty much includes the same type of stuff.

It's just that stuff changes.

But it's a template that I follow and I read it every single month.

And so I can predict this.

And so it's like, okay, if I make a custom GPT and ChatGPT, which is a very easy thing to do, you know, underneath the hood of ChatGPT, I can give several versions of my monthly reports to this thing and say, these are examples of successful reports.

I write these every month and every month I'm going to come and just give you the raw information and I want you to write this, put it into the report.

Now I can, on the way to work, call up this GPT and say, okay, this month we did 15 municipal meetings, we covered three live events, we did four original programs, got 16 new members, held a couple of workshops, blah, blah, blah.

And then I just hit go and it populates this report for me.

In my language, writes it all nice and pretty.

And that takes me no time now instead of the better part of the day.

The speed of thinking and processing, the elimination of wordsmithing, the speeding up of research, that's just amazing.

The amount of extra horsepower it can give you and the extra brain power.

If you're doing market research, you're doing any kind of research, you're thinking about frameworks or mental models or it's a genius, right?

It's right there in your pocket, ready to be spoken to about anything.

A general purpose genius, 24-7 at your fingertips.

I mean, it's just a matter of getting good at talking to this genius.

But on us is on us at getting good in talking to it so that we get the best results out of it.

Yeah, and that's just practice.

That's just reps, just your biggest problems.

Take it what you're thinking about that day, what you're challenged by and treat it like a person.

Be like, hey, here's what I got going on today.

I got this work problem.

Here's everything I know about it.

Help me act like a world-class strategist and help me.

I guarantee you if talking to it about something that really matters to you, you'll start to feel the power right away because you'll see the value right away.

You'll be like, oh my God, this is the information I needed.

There it is.

And if you talk about something that really matters to you, you will feed it very differently versus if you just generically ask a question.

Yeah.

If you're just trying to chat with it because someone told you to learn chat should be teed and it's a little bit like, whatever, what are we going to talk about?

That will not be as fulfilling or immediate as what are you really working on right now?

What are you really challenged by?

Bring it that in all seriousness and all rigor.

Bring it that, all right, let's go to work on this problem.

Me and you, ChatGPT, here's everything I know and it will help you, guaranteed.

It's almost hard to have it not.

It's just understanding how to use it like that.

So many of us are beginners on this AI journey.

What would be your words of wisdom?

The last thing that you want us to go after listening to you and start working on step by step to get better at this.

We don't want to be clueless, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Well, I would just double down on what I was saying.

I really think when you're starting out, start with ChatGPT and bring it your toughest problem.

Personal, professional.

Professional is better because usually it's safer to input that information than maybe all your personal information, but bring it your biggest problem and give it all the information you can.

Try going at your biggest, hardest problem, ideally something where a deeper understanding of it would be really beneficial to you.

We all have those things that we think about them a little bit.

What scenario we really need to learn more about.

Then go experiment with DeepResearch.

It's right within ChatGPT.

ChatGPT has a few little tools within it.

DeepResearch is one of them, Dolly Image Generation is another one.

There's a few different things.

Turn on DeepResearch and point it at one of your biggest problems.

It'll ask you some clarifying questions to get more context out of you, and then it'll disappear for 10 minutes and come back with the most incredible report you've ever seen, and then just read it.

Then remember that you're in a conversation with that report.

So you can bring in your follow-up questions.

You can save that conversation and go back to it whenever you want.

It can become this really great resource on this topic for you.

You can do that as many times as you want, with as many things as you want, and just be good at keeping them organized, label them, put them in project folders, stuff like that.

So when it saves that information previously, and you go back to that, the more that it generates for you, it is also fed by the previous information.

Right.

Over time, it can't keep track of everything, but for quite a long time, it can be an incredible guide for you and thought partner.

You could have one to be your podcast conversation.

Everything podcast-related is in there.

Everything teaching-related is in here.

Everything community-related is over here.

I've got all my family-related stuff in one, a million different work ones, one for every client.

They're just like, okay, I've got a call with this client.

I want to prepare real quick.

I'm going to go to that conversation and be like, I've got a call coming up.

This is what we're talking about.

Here's the e-mail that they sent me about the call coming up.

Let's prepare.

It's like, okay, no problem because I remember everything about this client.

So where do you want to start?

It's amazing.

It's amazing.

So you can slowly build all these little thought partners for yourself, that really can be a force multiplier of you.

Your own thought partners.

Words of wisdom from Erich Archer, the Emmy Award-winning TV producer, AI expert in video creation and media strategy.

Thank you so much, Erich, for helping a lot of us.

I think the fear of using AI is what prevents us from all the things we've spoken about today.

Hopefully, after listening to you, we'll be much more courageous and tackle it the way that you've explained it.

Thank you very much for being here today.

My pleasure.

Good luck.

Thank you.

Before you go, would you like our listeners to reach you and where can we find you online?

I'd be great.

Thank you.

I have a website.

It's cgacreative.com.

Named after the initials of all my kids, C-G-A creative.

I'm very active on LinkedIn.

I spell my name, Erich, with an H-E-R-I-C-H Archer.

I'm on there pretty much every day engaging with people.

So either place is great.

Okay.

I will put the website and Erich Archer on LinkedIn on the show notes.

Thank you very much.

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