John Corcoran: 10:04
But yeah. I mean, and it’s mind boggling how to keep track of all these changes that are happening. It seems like new tools are rolling out every week or so. How do you keep tabs on it all?
Ethan King: 10:18
Well, I have a bunch of different inputs. I listened to AI podcasts all the time. I’m. I have a task set up in ChatGPT that automatically spits out to me the latest AI news. If you go to the tasks feature in ChatGPT, then you can set it up to execute recurring prompts.
So that’s another way. And I’m just immersed in it. But the thing about it is, I don’t just put every tool in the book like I’ve seen a lot of AI speakers just throw a bunch of tools at people and you get this dopamine hit. But I only put things in there that I actually practically use in my business. So that’s the filter.
It’s like, okay, this is how because if me, my business is Closest to Greeks, we make custom apparel. So it’s not I’m not like a techie guy. So I feel like if I can apply this to my everyday business, then any entrepreneur out there can probably use the same tools.
John Corcoran: 11:16
Yeah. And are you the type of guy who’s going out there? You know, it started with ChatGPT, but there’s Claude and there’s Perplexity and there’s all these different tools. There’s Microsoft Copilot. Are you testing all the different ones to see which one works the best?
Ethan King: 11:32
Yeah, I do test a lot of them. And all of those subscriptions start to add up, right?
John Corcoran: 11:36
Yeah.
Ethan King: 11:37
But what I found right now, at the time of this recording, is that certain tools have certain strengths. For example, I do subscribe to Claude as well as ChatGPT. I think that Claude is a better writer. In most cases, it’s more human sounding, it’s more fluid. So I’ll test out material in both of them, and kind of I’ll even use content from ChatGPT.
Pop it in, Claude and back and forth. It’s like having two assistants, you know, if you have two different human assistants, they’re going to have different personalities, different backgrounds, different insights. So I think it’s good to have more than one perplexity right now. So I go there first before Google, before ChatGPT, before anyone else.
John Corcoran: 12:22
Yeah. Me too. I’m a big fan of Perplexity. Yeah, yeah.
Ethan King: 12:26
And they were the first to give you all the sources and.
John Corcoran: 12:28
Yeah.
Ethan King: 12:29
You can trust it, right?
John Corcoran: 12:30
Yeah, yeah, totally new.
Ethan King: 12:33
Search GPT feature in ChatGPT. It’s still not 100% reliable at this moment. So while they each have their different strong suits, I do still feel like ChatGPT is the best all around Swiss Army knife of the I world at this time. So if you had to pick one, I would tell someone, go ahead. Like pay for the plus version of ChatGPT.
John Corcoran: 12:58
Yeah. What about you mentioned you were an art major, and one of the surprising things about AI is that, you know, that it turns out that it was really it has been pretty good at creative. You know, a lot of people thought that I would come and replace more rote, routinized type of roles and that humans would be left doing the creative stuff. And I think that was kind of like a big shocker is that, you know, there was Dall-E and there’s these other AI artistic tools. And you know, that ChatGPT could write sonnets and poems and write fiction and stuff like that. So as a former art major and I was an English major in college, did you ever think that we’d be in this kind of situation where I would be generating creative output.
Ethan King: 13:49
No, I think that surprised everyone. If anyone tells me they saw that coming, I would not believe them.
John Corcoran: 13:56
Because.
Ethan King: 13:56
Coming for the artist first is something else. But you know, it makes sense because it is. It’s just trained on humanity. So it’s all just a big math problem, right? It’s just like Google’s predictive search feature where you start typing in a couple of words, and then it predicts what you’re going to say.
It’s really just like that times millions, you know, on steroids. It’s the same type of concept when it comes to visual image creation. Right now, my favorite tool is ideograms. Have you played around with that one?
John Corcoran: 14:33
I think I have a while ago though. Yeah, I’ll have to check it out again. Yeah.
Ethan King: 14:37
Yeah it’s improved a lot and Midjourney used to be my favorite. It would probably be my second favorite now because it produces really realistic looking images. It’s still not great at spelling, but I found it to be the best at spelling right now. So you can actually put things in. And I would say about 80% of the time, depending on, you know, how many words you have on it, it’ll actually get the spelling correct and it gives you a very realistic output for your images.
John Corcoran: 15:07
Yeah, that was a problem a while back where some of these different generators would, you’d say, put this word in the headline and make a logo and completely misspell it? Yeah, it’s gotten better at that. And what about how have you, you know, how did you bring this to your team? How did you get your team to utilize AI first or did you go task by task and say, here’s how you would use it? Or did you kind of give them the tool and say, hey, maybe this can work. Like, how did you get your company and get your team to adopt this tool?
Ethan King: 15:46
Well, my team has already been used to having an automation first mindset anyway, even before AI tools came out. We were always looking for the most efficient way to do things. So I introduce myself like, okay, hey, I built this custom GPT, put the information in here to generate the blogs for stuff4GREEKS because it’ll be in stuff4GREEKS brand voice. That’s nothing new to them. It’s just the latest automation.
John Corcoran: 16:09
Well, maybe a better question then is, is for other clients that you’ve worked with where there’s a reluctance or let’s say, you know, a team that hasn’t quite adopted this stuff, how do you introduce it? Is there a way of introducing it to a team so they don’t feel threatened by it, and so that they can see its potential?
Ethan King: 16:29
Yeah, definitely. That’s a big sore spot. And a lot of teams companies will hire me to talk to their team because they know that they have that resistance from, from some of their team members.
John Corcoran: 16:40
I’m picturing a boss that’s like, hey, guys, Ethan’s going to talk to you. I’ll see you later on. You come in. It’s like, be the bad guy.
Ethan King: 16:49
Well, some people, I mean, their bosses are very self-aware, and they know I can tell these guys all day, but they won’t listen to me. I want them to hear it from you. So, you know, I. And I have a way of breaking it down in a way that makes sense. And I tell people there are two types of people in this world, those who are like, oh no, I was going to take my job, and they’re fearful.
And then those who are like, hell yeah, I am going to take my job and it’s going to allow me to do so much more, right? So it’s that you got to because I will come for your job unless you come for AI first. So that’s what I teach people. It’s the new expected skill set will be a human being managing a bunch of digital employees. You will be expected to know how to create and deploy AI bots, digital employees, whatever you want to call them. Custom GPTs. It’s all the same concept, right? That will be an expected skill set. Just like we expect employees to know Google Docs and Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel and that type of thing.
John Corcoran: 17:53
Or if you’re a graphic designer, you come in and you say, I don’t know how to use Photoshop or something like that and be like, well, get out of here. We can’t use you, right?
Ethan King: 18:02
Right. So don’t be scared of AI. You need to be scared of not knowing how to use AI. So go ahead and jump on it early because it continues to advance so fast. The longer you wait, then the harder it’s going to be to catch up, because you don’t understand the five things that came before where we are now.
Because AI, the playing field has been leveled. Since you no longer have to be a coder to break into the AI space and start building AI apps and things like that. That’s why we’ve seen this proliferation of AI tools. If you go there’s an AI for that. Com I think last time I checked, there are 40,000 different AI tools out there.
You could just search whatever you’re looking for. And somebody probably created something. So there is no shortage because now everybody can be a developer, a web developer, an app developer, a coder. You can have it visualize data and compare charts and you and anyone can do it all in a split second. You don’t even need a computer.
You can do it on your phone with your voice talking to ChatGPT. So I mean, when you talk about the playing field being level, it’s level. And now that’s going to accelerate the rate of change, not to mention the competition that we have amongst companies. And like, you know, we have grok versus, you know, Google has their thing going on. And then Amazon called OpenAI.
But then countries we have China versus us and we want to win. And they’ve invested half $1 trillion in what’s called, Project Seagate or something. Whatever that thing they announced there they have the half $1 trillion investment. Oh, Stargate. the half trillion dollar investment in AI.
So these competitive races are a benefit means the developments are going to happen faster and faster and faster. So that’s the benefit to the consumer. But we have got to keep up. So start now because it’s actually easy. But just jump in and embrace it.
John Corcoran: 20:02
Yeah. I want to ask about how you started speaking to different chapters and different businesses and talk, you know, kind of sharing your experience of how you went from automation and Zeus’ Closet to using AI and explain different ways of doing it. And that basically turned into an agency. And you started working with clients. So maybe take us through some of the different clients that you’ve worked with. You know, what their challenges were and what they were looking to do with AI.
Ethan King: 20:29
Sure. Yeah. I work with a wide range of clients, so marketing agencies come to me. They want to know how to speak because they need they’re represent several different brands, so they need AI to be set up in a way where they can communicate in each unique brand voice for their clients and help them get set up with that. I worked with a company called Crop Defenders.
They’re an agriculture company, so they’re a very, very specialized niche market where they sell these good bugs that keep away the bad bugs to protect our crops. So instead of chemicals and pesticides, that’s what they sell to very certain specific greenhouses. So they needed to know how to increase their marketing. They’re a very sizable company. And they’re in the growth mindset.
So the way you can’t just go and plug in like just generic marketing copy. So we had to get very strategic with them on how they expand. I have another client who I can’t disclose this client’s name or company name, but we are building a digital clone of this person to really, in effect, replace them. So voice video and then building a custom brain on the back end with, with all of the content that needs to be shared, where you can call up and have a conversation with the digital avatar of this person.
John Corcoran: 21:59
And is that for like marketing purposes externally, is that for like internal training purposes, internally to share knowledge with the team or both?
Ethan King: 22:09
It is for business development.
John Corcoran: 22:14
Got it. Okay. So okay.
Ethan King: 22:16
Conversational business development.
John Corcoran: 22:18
I guess it depends on what the role of the owner or the face of that business does. And you know, to a certain point in the probably not too far off future, it could be any of those things. It could be any of the roles that we perform as an owner or as the face of a company.
Ethan King: 22:38
Yeah, I mean, an easy layup right now for any business is why do you need a call center? Why do you need humans answering your phone? So one of the features that we built in when I created my software is SimpleSuccess.ai. You can have an A, you will have an AI voice answering service, but it’s not robotic like press one for this, press two for that. You know, you’re having a conversation with a human being.
So I have dental offices that I’ve implemented that for. And you can program just like a custom GPT. You can program on the back end of your AI employee that answers the phone. They know what types of insurance this dental office takes. They know pricing so you can make it. It can have a pretty in-depth conversation and really help people.
John Corcoran: 23:25
You know, I’ve listened to these recordings before, and I remember even Google did it with restaurants before ChatGPT came out. There’s like 3 or 4 years ago there was a recording that came out that was mind boggling. But are you just telling me this right now? I’m like, no, no way. That can’t no, that can’t be. I mean, it’s like it’s just crazy that we can do these things.
Ethan King: 23:48
Yeah, it’s. Yeah. Google was very I had forgotten about that. Google was very early with that technology and it sounded real. They even put breaths in their eyes.
John Corcoran: 23:57
Voice.
Ethan King: 23:58
Pauses and ums. They were cutting edge with that. But now. So I predict that everything will be just par for the course. Every business will be expected to have that.
And soon enough. Humans, when they call a business, will prefer to talk to the AI because the AI will be very helpful and it will be very friendly. It will be there 24 over seven. It won’t be having a bad day or anything like that. So someone in my EO forum actually joked about it, and said one day, within the next five years you’ll probably call up a company, get a human being and say, can you put me on the phone with your AI, please.
John Corcoran: 24:38
I believe it because, you know, sometimes you want to communicate like a chat because all the different AI chats, some of those are, are better. You know, they’re not all like some of them are bad, but lots of them are really good. And they get you to the answer that you want a lot quicker than, you know, a human. That might take a while to figure it out. Yeah, yeah.
Ethan King: 24:59
And the level of conversation, I mean, first of all, the breadth of intelligence and knowledge that AI has, but then the ability to alter the conversation to any specific dialect or talk like Albert Einstein or Mickey Mouse or the ability to morph. All of that is so fun. And I’m thinking about where you are, where Waymo is, and where it is popular.
John Corcoran: 25:24
And yeah, that’s a great example because actually like a month or so ago at our local next door, someone brought that up, I think it was a woman who said, no, no. A man said, why would I ride in a Waymo? You know, Ubers are so much better. And it was fascinating. I mean, I do live in the Bay area, so there’s a lot of tech savvy people here, but so many people responded and said, I would much rather ride in a Waymo for multiple different reasons.
And a lot of the women said, I feel a lot more comfortable in a Waymo than some man driving me around. And of course, the man who posted it didn’t consider this at all. But I’ve ridden in a number of the different Waymo’s, and I think I saw you posted an image, a video of you online recently, and they’re great. They’re amazing.
Ethan King: 26:07
Yeah. And I actually have not been in one yet. I saw your video. I think the first time you got in one you shared a video.
John Corcoran: 26:14
Okay. Yeah.
Ethan King: 26:14
I had another friend who was out there and recently tried one. And the funny thing about his video, my friend Godfrey, he noticed that there was no one to have a conversation with. You can’t strike up a conversation with the Uber driver. The cab driver. There’s no one in the seat.
John Corcoran: 26:28
Maybe they’ll program that at some point that easily.
Ethan King: 26:31
It’s super easy. Just put an instance of ChatGPT in there and let’s talk about the weather or whatever.
John Corcoran: 26:36
Right. Right. Right. Well, because, frankly, everyone’s on their phone. That’s what they do. They, you know, it’s like mind boggling for about two minutes and then two minutes later, you’re like, you know what? I got some texts I need to respond to, and you’re just like, it just becomes normal really quickly. It’s crazy.
Ethan King: 26:53
Yeah, I think it will be normal. It will be at some point. I would love to hear your prediction on this. I think within the next 20 years, once we smooth out everything with autonomous driving vehicles and, and the whole network is autonomous self-driving vehicles and they talk to each other and humans are pretty much outlawed from driving. We will look back at this time and think how barbaric.
John Corcoran: 27:19
Yeah, we absolutely drove ourselves.
Ethan King: 27:21
Yeah. People died.
John Corcoran: 27:23
Well, 40,000 people die a year from auto accidents, which are primarily from DUIs or distracted driving or all that kind of stuff. So once, yeah, once we get to the point where we realize that it can be a lot safer than I agree. They’re going to be like, this is insane. Or, you know, you know, people have said it’ll be kind of like horseback riding, like some people will continue to ride horses, just like they’ll continue to ride, you know, cars maybe off road or something like that for the fun of it. But yeah, in terms of like day to day transportation, though, they probably won’t be. So you’ve mentioned some tools. Any other tools that you want to mention that are interesting or that are fun, or that you’re keeping your eye on, that people should be checking out these days?
Ethan King: 28:06
Well, keeping my eye on the video creation tools like Sora, none of them are quite there yet. It depends on what you’re doing. But if you want to have some fun with Sora. By the way, if you have the The Plus version of ChatGPT, you already have a subscription to Sora as well. It’s included.
Just go to Sora Comm or click on it in the left menu of your ChatGPT application, and you can create videos from a text prompt. So to have fun with this, after you’ve trained ChatGPT on your business and everything about you, which you should do in your custom instructions. If you haven’t already, ask Sora or ask ChatGPT to write a prompt for Sora to create a Super Bowl commercial for your business and see.
John Corcoran: 28:53
Wow, cool. Yeah, that’s a cool one. Yeah.
Ethan King: 28:56
Take that. Copy that prompt that ChatGPT wrote for Sora. Go over to Sora, put it in there, and just see what happens. See if it sparks some thought, and then you can remix it and play around with it. But it created a pretty cool scene for me, for Zeus’ Closet, it had this guy coming on to campus wearing his jacket, and all these girls are around looking at him, and he’s like the center of attention.
And then it focuses on the embroidery on the back of the jacket. So of course it didn’t nail it. It’s not anything that I would actually use in a production environment, but I could take it to a director or something and be like, here’s my concept. This is what I want to shoot in real life, so I’m keeping my eye on it because all of this technology is just in its infancy. It’s only going to get better and better and better exponentially by leaps and bounds. So that will be interesting to see where AI created AI generated video goes.
John Corcoran: 29:48
Yeah, well, I think it was maybe a year, year and a half ago that Tyler Perry, who you told a great story about your work with him on the last time I interviewed you, but he like, a year or a year and a half ago, had this, like, plan to, like, spend $1 billion or something to expand his campus in Georgia. Yeah. And he put it on hold after he’d seen, I think, some of those early tools and said, like, I don’t think we’re going to need to have all this physical infrastructure anymore. And that kind of sent shockwaves through the industry that that, you know, people were seeing this kind of potential.
Ethan King: 30:23
That’s exactly right. Yeah. He saw it coming before he made a major investment that he knew would turn into probably empty studio space sooner than later.
John Corcoran: 30:32
I mean, it’d be like the equivalent of, like someone who bought, like, a medallion for, like a New York City taxi ten years ago. Right? Right before, like, Uber and Lyft came along, you know, like, great. This is useless now. Yeah.
Ethan King: 30:45
Talk about bad timing. Yeah. Exactly. Right.
John Corcoran: 30:47
Yeah. Okay, so. So any other tools that you’d recommend that people check out or any other advice for people that haven’t gotten started with this yet? I’ll say one thing I did is I just decided a couple of months ago that anytime I thought of googling something, I would go straight to an AI app first. And perplexity definitely was a great one for me.
And I also found that the more specific the inquiry that you have, you know, not something like, oh, what time is the local pizza shop open? But something very specific about, you know, the problem with your car. Like what tool do I need in order to fix this light thing or whatever? Or, you know, something very specific. That’s what I found was really helpful in using the AI tools over something like googling it.
Ethan King: 31:30
Yes. And you can also take a photo of something and say, how do I fix this? Or what? What Should I do? This?
Or you can turn on the advanced camera mode in ChatGPT on the phone, and it can actually have vision. So it can see what’s happening in the camera field. And you can ask about whatever’s going on. So it’s beyond just a, a type like physically typing in a search query. In fact, search engine, traditional search engine usage has declined by about 24% in the past year.
People are starting to go to AI first, just like you and I. 100% of the people on this call are using AI first, and but people are also going to social media first when they’re when they want to research a business because they want to look, touch and feel and experience that business as much as they can. Think about if you go to Google Now or any traditional search engine, you see, what about seven sponsored ads first before you even get to an organic listing? And we’re consumers. We’re smart.
Now we know that those sponsored ads are paid. We don’t trust them. We want to see at least the organic. But even better, if I can see what other people are saying about your brand. If I can get a sense for how it feels when I walk into your shop or what it’s like to work with you, then I know that just gives you a straight answer.
No fluff. Whatever you want to know, here’s the answer: boom, boom, boom boom. And then you don’t have to guess and poke around and ask, is this a reliable resource? So the reason that that’s important is because now that changes the game for SEO, for small business owners, you need to make sure that you have long form content in as many places as possible so that you get picked up by the AI LMS, because that’s where they get their information from. Just like when you go on perplexity, it shows you all the different sources you need to be talked about in as many of those sources as possible, so that you’re still seen as an authority.
That’s the new SEO, and not just with text like articles and blogs and things like that on various websites, but also your videos. You need to have a heavy presence on YouTube with long form video, because YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine, right? And it happens to be owned by the world’s largest search engine, Google. So you get that added boost and benefit, so those are the two things that I tell people to leverage AI to really, really expand your digital footprint so that you don’t get lost as people are moving away from traditional search.
John Corcoran: 34:00
You know, we’ve had this model for the last, I don’t know, ten, 15 years where we’ve kind of an expectation that everything would be free. Google’s free Gmail is free, Google maps is free. You know, Facebook is free. Do you think that we’re going to shift? Well, two things.
Do you think that, like ChatGPT and Gemini and Perplexity will start inserting ads? Or do you think we’re going to shift to a model where we go back to a situation where we just kind of expect we’re going to have to pay for these things, so we’ll have our subscription to ChatGPT. We’ll have our subscription to perplexity. And the freemium model that we had for many years will kind of go out of favor for a while.
Ethan King: 34:38
I hope it’s the latter. I hope that they don’t have an ad based model. I can’t stand that. I’d rather just pay for it to not have ads. Now, I don’t know if I’m in the minority on that. You know, but it will.
John Corcoran: 34:50
Maybe it’ll be both. Maybe there will be a, you know, you can have ads inserted into your ChatGPT results if you want to. Yeah. Right.
Ethan King: 34:57
But the thing about ChatGPT and all of these LLMs is that they’re going to go beyond just the web browser or the iPhone app, when we all have Tesla robots walking around our house doing chores, we’ll be able to talk to those robots. And then we’re basically talking like an LLM. We’ll probably be talking to Gracchi, I guess, since Elon owns Tesla, but we’ll be talking to an LLM. So you’ll get the voice, the conversation. And it would be kind of weird to just have an ad in for your robot. Just plug a certain business or product because it’s an ad, right?
John Corcoran: 35:33
Right. Yeah, that would definitely be weird. Well, Ethan, this has been great. Really interesting hearing all the different stuff you’re working on. Where can people go to learn more about you and connect with you or shoot you a question if they have a question?
Ethan King: 35:46
Sure. Just go to my website, ethanking.com. Shoot me an email. [email protected] I try to keep it really simple so however I can help. Whether it’s you want to buy a copy of the book, or you want to book a call for a consultation to see how I can help you further. I’m big into it day and night. I’m obsessed with where this AI thing is going, so I’m happy to help.
John Corcoran: 36:10
Yeah, cool. Ethan, thanks so much.
Ethan King: 36:12
Thanks, John.
Outro: 36:16
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.