Crafting Non-Profit Narratives in the Age of AI

Host: There are some people that are going to meet this challenge head on, and they're going to teach their students. They're going to adopt their curriculums. They're going to retrain themselves as professionals. And then there's the people that aren't, and there's going to be a big pay differentiation. Let's go.

[Intro music plays]

Host: Yeah, make it look, make it look, make it look easy. The goal of this podcast is to share original insights and conversations on the habits, mindsets, and strategies of elite performers that produce exceptional results. Let's go.

Ryan Hanley: Jessica, it's such a pleasure having you on the show. Thanks for spending some time with us.

Jessica Kizorek: Hello, Ryan. Here I am.

Ryan Hanley: In looking through your history, what you've done, you've taken on a bunch of different roles, big projects. What was it that initially attracted you to entrepreneurship? We have a lot of entrepreneurs on the show. I think everyone kind of comes at it from different angles. But there are a lot of people who listen, for context to you on the question, who listen to this show that I know are considering entrepreneurship, that have maybe even fairly successful by some metrics, careers in other places, but they have that itch. And obviously, entrepreneurship has been an enormous part of your life for more than 20 years now. What was it that brought you to entrepreneurship?

Jessica Kizorek: Well, I was raised by an entrepreneur. My father was actually in the insurance business. He had a private investigative surveillance company. And at the time he sold it, he had 200 employees, 75 vans, and he investigated workers' compensation insurance fraud.

Ryan Hanley: Wow.

Jessica Kizorek: So since I was five years old, I was around cameras. He got me one of the first Apple computers. And so I sort of grew up and transitioned from doing more like surveillance kind of stuff like he did to marketing and fundraising and raising money for businesses and for nonprofits.

Ryan Hanley: Wow, that's incredible. So did you start your own business? Like you just saw an opportunity and said, "Hey, I can take these skills I've learned working with your father and take them into your own thing?"

Jessica Kizorek: I moved on to Miami and I had a real job for exactly 365 days. And during that time, I built a website, I got some clients, I figured out how to transition in my income. So when I was 25 was the last time I've had an official job and I'm 44. So yeah.

Ryan Hanley: Why do you think that transition is so hard for people?

Jessica Kizorek: Well, it's because you trade one devil for another. If you have a job, you hate your boss, but if you don't have a job, you have to force yourself to do sales calls and breathe down your own neck. I think it takes a tremendous amount of self-motivation to be an entrepreneur because there are so many hardships and so many difficulties and so many challenges. It's nonstop problem solving. And if you don't have the energy for that, or if you can't self-motivate to get through these problems, then you're not going to last in the long run.

Ryan Hanley: Was there – I find with a lot of entrepreneurs, especially early on, purpose and meaning are really what pushed them over the edge. If you just have a good idea, we all have good ideas and bad ideas hit us all the time. But it feels like when someone actually makes that move, whether it's starting a plumbing business or becoming an online coach or developing a product, there's some sort of purpose or meaning behind it. One, I guess, do you believe that tends to be the catalyst? And two, what was that early for you?

Jessica Kizorek: Well, my dad told me when I was a little girl, he said, "Whenever you want to start a business, I'll support you." So it took me a long time. It took me until I was 21 years old to really get it. I thought, "If I had to work, I would love to get paid to travel around the world and make short videos for companies about the work that they're doing all around the world." So I've been to 66 countries was the last time I counted. Most of those countries have been inside of some kind of photojournalism project.

Ryan Hanley: That's pretty incredible. What is that like? I've traveled most of North America, including the Caribbean, and I've been to 43 states outside of Alaska and Hawaii being the two big misses that I just have not been able to get to yet. What is that international travel like? What is it like running a business when you're on the road as much as you would have to be to reach that many countries?

Jessica Kizorek: I'll never forget when my graphic designer many years ago, decades ago, I wanted to put my cell phone on my business card. She said, "Well, you live in Florida, but you have a Chicago cell phone. You can't have your cell phone. People think you're in Chicago." I said, "No, no, no. Listen, it's the future that people are going to put their cell phones on their business cards, not just their Google landline number or whatever you fake on the internet to have a local phone number." So I've really been running an online business since the beginning. A lot of my resources have been either not necessarily in the same town as me or they have been overseas. I work with a lot of teams. I've employed hundreds of people in the past. One of my favorite things I use to employ people is actually called Fiverr.com. Have you heard of Fiverr.com?

Ryan Hanley: Oh, yeah. I use Fiverr. I think I've done 186 gigs over Fiverr over the last 10 years.

Jessica Kizorek: I really think that people had their aha work virtual moment when COVID happened. And I feel like I had that moment happen a long time ago. I normally even live in Miami, but I'm at my parents' cabin in Wisconsin, and we have great internet here. So I get to spend a couple months up here during the summer, run my whole business here, do my sales calls, talk to my clients, work on my school. I'm in a doctoral program. So all this stuff I'm doing virtually and have been for a long time.

Ryan Hanley: What part of Wisconsin?

Jessica Kizorek: Manaqua.

Ryan Hanley: Oh, okay. Yeah, I love Wisconsin. I have done a lot of speaking in Wisconsin. I've been to Sheboygan, Madison, the Dells, Milwaukee, obviously. I went to – I don't even know what it's called – but it used to be like a Playboy thing. It's like this big complex, and it used to be owned by Hugh Hefner. And then he sold it. And now it's like this big thing in the middle of nowhere, Wisconsin, but it's all beautiful. I find the people of Wisconsin to be funny and inviting and down to earth. I love every chance I get to go to Wisconsin. It's a great place.

Jessica Kizorek: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan Hanley: So you have this entrepreneurial spirit, you make it happen, you execute, you've been tremendously successful, and then you decide to start a nonprofit. Talk to me about that transition. Maybe what was the motivation? What did you see going on? And what did that look like?

Jessica Kizorek: As a video producer for a long time – since 2005 was the first time we did this – I recognized a long time ago, 20 years ago, that donating my services as a video producer meant I could make a lot more money if I worked for Vimeo or did a hundred other things to tap into my skill as a digital marketer. But instead, I've chosen even through my corporation, Two Parrot Productions, to work with nonprofits. I really found out very early on the power of video for these nonprofits. My dad and I were in a leadership course called the Self-Expression and Leadership Program, and we had to do a community project. My dad said, "I'm going to go to Thailand and film this footage for this nonprofit." Then he brought the footage back to me and I edited all the footage together into a five minute video. We sent it over to them on a DVD and they reported back to us. They called us a couple of days after we had sent it to them. They said that the whole office had watched it and the whole office had cried because they had never even been to Thailand themselves, the staff people. They had never seen these kids on the street. They had never seen these kids huffing glue on the corner. My dad was capturing all these images and they were just blown away. They had never had a tool like that to communicate what they were doing in the country of Thailand, helping these young kids who were at the mercy of sex trafficking and prostitution and addiction and homelessness and domestic violence and all this kind of stuff. So I realized how powerful it is for these organizations. At first we would just donate our services here and there, but as we got a reputation for doing this, the demand of people asking us for free pro bono services far outweighed my capacity. Unfortunately, I don't have a big family trust fund to just be doing this project left and right. But eventually we created this nonprofit about 10 years ago because we wanted to have a formal application process where nonprofits would apply once a year. And that's what I'd love. If anybody has a takeaway from this recording, our nonprofit Eyes on Your Mission has a grant where other nonprofits can apply to get free video production services donated to them. Meaning they would get a video shoot donated, one day video shoot anywhere in the world. We edit it down into a three to five minute sizzle reel type video. And we do that through Eyes on Your Mission, which is my little hat. That was my reminder for the day to do my pitch for Eyes on Your Mission. But we love hearing from nonprofits who have really worthy stories and who really want to tell a story that they've never told before, maybe. That's really what I'm most excited about these days. And if I had a magic wand, I would sit around and probably do 50 of these projects a year. But we have to be sort of discerning and make some difficult decisions because the demand for it is a lot higher than the supply.

Ryan Hanley: Guys, I know a lot of you listening are either part of nonprofits or sit on nonprofit boards or have influence in nonprofits. There is no better way to tell your story than video. I think this is a wonderful opportunity. The episode will certainly be out before July 18th, but I think you said was the deadline to apply. So we want to make sure that if you have interest, I'll have all the links in the show notes as well. If you forget the URL, wherever you're listening, whether it's YouTube or on the audio podcast, just go down to the description and there'll be a link over and you guys can learn more and apply if you think it's something that you want to do. I think that story about Thailand and about the individuals who are actually doing the work, getting to actually see the people that they're impacting, that is what makes video so powerful. I have used video tremendously in my career as well. I'm not formally trained. I'm YouTube trained. But it delivers a message in a way, especially if you're thoughtful about how you do it, that I just don't think there is another medium. Oftentimes not even an in-person experience – maybe if you were there on the streets – but outside of being there in person, even if you're hearing a keynote from someone who's been there, if you can't see it, rewind it, listen to it, share it in that format, it just doesn't make the same impact. So what do you do when you come across an organization that you feel has a great mission, has a great message, but maybe they're hesitant to create video? I see this all the time in the small business community as well, organizations that are doing tremendous work and helping people. They're so hesitant to put what they do on camera. I think that's changed a lot since the pandemic, but it still is around. How do you start to change that mindset? How do you convince somebody who has a great story or great message that getting it on digital film and getting it out onto the internet so that people can connect with it is an important thing to do?

Jessica Kizorek: There's nothing like human connection. I don't know who's listening to this recording on YouTube. I can't see their eyes, but I can see Ryan's eyes. And after this moment, Ryan and I will have connected in a way that makes us feel like we're friends, even though it's only video that we're seeing of each other. That human to human connection is so important. Especially one of the things you talk about a lot, Ryan, which I love – I watch some of your podcasts on AI. With AI coming out, at first I thought that it was going to sort of replace what I did or maybe decrease the need for what I did, which is these short documentaries. And in reality, with people now doubting what's real and what's not real, my documentary services and the capacity to tell stories that are authenticated real – that's a whole new level of important now.

Ryan Hanley: It's funny. I have a friend of mine, he's a very successful speaker, and we were just catching up and chatting about what was going on with him. He had a few concerns around AI and its impact on his business. I said, "I completely disagree with that." I said, "Bud, I think that what AI does is it makes in-person events paramount." Because if I'm – there will come a day in the not too distant future. I mean, there are people who are close right now. I have a friend who's working with a company that creates a virtual you. On your website, there's everything you've created, every video you've done, every article you've written, and it captures it all and uses AI and ChatGPT-4 to then create basically a uWiki with an avatar that's talking to people. That's cool, don't get me wrong. I think that's cool and it's valuable and it certainly has its place. But how do I know? There will be a time in the future that you're watching a video on YouTube and you won't know whether that's Jessica or Jessica's avatar who has been prompted through AI to move certain ways, talk in your voice, use your cadence, your tone, your vernacular, and then literally knows everything you've ever put on the internet and can regurgitate it. I don't know if that's you or not. However, in person, if you're on stage or at a mastermind or an event or whatever it is, I know it's you and I'm getting this original experience. I'll give you one more little anecdote that I think puts a pin in this. Alicia Keys did the Super Bowl this year. She had a moment where she missed a note. Small, tiny, didn't impact the performance. Alicia Keys is amazing. She did a great job. But there was a small little thing, which happens in live performances. If anyone goes to concerts, the song never sounds exactly the same as it does on the radio when you're in person. That's the beauty of it. The beauty of being live and there with someone is not the perfection of the performance. It's the little nuanced things. I don't even want to call them mistakes that create a unique experience. I feel like we're going to see this wave of AI come in and obviously people are going to adopt it and it'll have an impact, but I do see a counter swing back to sharing space, breathing the same air, seeing people live because we'll want that authenticity that we simply will not be able to get from AI. At least hopefully not in our lifetime.

Jessica Kizorek: Amen. I'm with you on the live events. I know you do a lot of speaking and a lot of interviews and seeing you on TV. I think all that stuff is going to come back around. I just have to believe that it will.

Ryan Hanley: So you have your entrepreneurial career, you move into the philanthropy side, you have the nonprofit, and then you decide to go get your doctorate and become a professor. What was the impetus of that move?

Jessica Kizorek: I fell in love with Florida International University 10 years ago when I was introduced to a professor named Dr. Moses Shumo. He and I both wanted to use cameras and digital literacies to go into the most difficult Miami communities. One of them is called Liberty City, and it is a very high percentage of African-American, very high percentage below the poverty limit, very low graduation rates with school and stuff like that. We wanted to put cameras in the hands of these students and get these high school students in this community paired up with college mentors. A lot of these kids in these communities don't see themselves going to college. That's because they've not been to college campuses. They don't come to college campuses every week to hang out and get Starbucks on the corner and have that be normalized as the way that they want their future. So I started working and doing research with Florida International University back in 2015. I secured a big grant through a family foundation for one hundred thousand dollars and we were able to buy a whole bunch of cameras. We were able to buy out the college class. So I was teaching the college classes with the students and able to use the credibility of Florida International University. Since then, I decided to go back to get my master's degree and going to FIU was a really natural choice. They had a great program, a master's degree in global strategic communications. I got that degree. I really want to – my natural true trajectory, although I always want to be able to work for clients and run the nonprofit and donate services and give back to the community, I would really like to sort of sunset my career in academia. I was just recently offered an adjunct teaching job, so that's my foot in the door on the way to a full-time faculty position. I'm really excited and I get to wave the FIU flag and tell everybody I've drunk the Kool-Aid. They're just a really remarkable university that I'm so excited to be a part of.

Ryan Hanley: What is it about teaching that turns you on?

Jessica Kizorek: I just love blowing kids' minds. Recently, I was working with a group of seniors in high school, and they were making little business commercials for their business ideas, their entrepreneurship plans. I had them generate images on DALL-E 3 for the first time in their lives. They had never generated AI images. Sitting with them and typing it into the GPT OpenAI interface and getting these kids their pictures – they were like, "Whoa, oh my God." One of them had a lizard as a theme, and we turned it into a Godzilla advertisement. It was so much fun. What you can do with AI with kids, that's really what I want to specialize in. I've been doing AI really heavy for the last four or five years. I love the space. There's so much room. There's so many things that colleges and universities need to adapt to to have the kids engage with artificial intelligence and not be working against artificial intelligence.

Ryan Hanley: I was asked to do a keynote for an insurance conference back in the wintertime in Winnipeg. I wouldn't recommend going to Winnipeg in the wintertime, but the people were very nice. They wanted to hear about AI's impact on the insurance industry. I've been following along and researching and listening and playing with AI for probably about the same amount of time. I shared this quote with them and everyone nodded their head. I'm not sure that they completely understood the full meaning of it, but everyone kind of nodded along. It was from a research report done by IBM: "AI won't replace people. People who use AI will replace people."

Jessica Kizorek: I like that one. I got to steal that one.

Ryan Hanley: Steal away. My point to them was that I don't think this is a technology we can sleep on. There are certain industries that are usually laggards. The industry that I grew up in, the property and casualty insurance industry, is very much a laggard on all technology. My point to them was that while we've been able to be successful as an industry for 440 years as a technology laggard, this doesn't feel like a technology we can sleep on. Do you think that's a fair assessment?

Jessica Kizorek: On one hand, there's an urgency to it because I love that quote – "AI won't replace people. People who use AI will replace people." That is so smart. I am a big time evangelist for people just trying it. A lot of my staff, I've used it with my staff for the first times. I feel like a pioneer in the space. It's sort of like video was back 20 years ago. AI is feeling like video 20 years ago. But is AI going to change everything overnight? Not necessarily, because AI is here to stay. AI is now with us as a civilization until the end, in whatever form. I'm not a pessimist like that. I'm actually quite an optimist for the sort of utopian societies where AI can figure out how to solve all of our problems without killing us. Like Star Trek. I have faith in AI. My dissertation is called "From Anxiety to Creativity: Factors Influencing Students' Adoption of Artificial Intelligence in U.S. College Classrooms." That's a mouthful. But it's basically artificial intelligence meets students meets mental health.

Ryan Hanley: I do think there's a mental health component to AI. I think similar to the way people are getting really stressed out by social media, there is a very real stress around artificial intelligence. That's what I'm studying – how students experience that kind of stress and anxiety and how we can move them from a place of stress and anxiety to a place of confidence and creativity.

Jessica Kizorek: Where is that anxiety coming from in relation to artificial intelligence?

Ryan Hanley: When you look at college classrooms, first of all, they're afraid of getting busted for plagiarism. They're afraid of doing something their teacher doesn't want them to do. They're afraid of AI replacing them because they want to be a singer-songwriter, but now you can write a song on AI with Suno. I did a survey one time where I gave students a piece of paper and they wrote one thing that empowers me about AI is blank. And on the other side, they said, one thing that gives me anxiety about AI is blank. I found their answers super interesting. They've thought about it a lot. They're not sleeping on this. They are now being raised in the age of AI. They've thought about how this impacts their capacity to make a living. What kind of jobs do they need to be studying and getting credentialed in?

Ryan Hanley: I've been working on an essay that I haven't published yet. It's taken on a life of its own. Maybe someday it'll become a book. It's probably way too long as it is to even be an essay. The working title is "Art, Assets, and Artificial Intelligence: The Only Careers That Will Exist in the Next 10 Years." The subtext I still don't love, but the main concept of the essay is that my interpretation or prediction is that there are certain things that AI will never be able to replace. I actually did an interview for the podcast, which hasn't released yet, with Patrick Leonard. Patrick Leonard is a music producer. He worked with three of Madonna's albums. He's worked with Pink Floyd. He's worked with Leonard Cohen. His portfolio – you have heard two dozen songs that this guy has either written or produced. Incredible guy. We were having this very conversation about AI's impact on the music industry. He said, "I'm not taking anything away from people who are using and really diving headfirst into AI as a way of creating their art. However," and this is obviously his opinion, but I tend to agree with it, "if you listen to Drake, right? Drake has almost an entire album that was written, produced, and created by artificial intelligence. He certainly has multiple songs. It sounds like him. He put it out, so obviously he's endorsing the music. But my impression – and I'm not a big Drake fan – but I did go listen to both, and there is a clear and distinct difference in the soul of the music between what you know he created himself and what you know was created by the AI." My take is that I don't know that AI will ever be able to replace what a human can create when they give themselves space to be a true artist. And then there are obviously physical assets – owning buildings, taking people on adventures, whatever your thing is from a physical standpoint. Everything else is going to get eaten by AI. It's deciding which one of those buckets or which cross-cut of those buckets you want to play in that ultimately becomes the decision. Put a plumber in the physical bucket space. If you want to own a plumbing franchise and be an entrepreneur and have trucks all over the place and build it out, we're going to need people to turn wrenches. We're going to need people to hammer nails. AI is not going to be able to do a lot of those things. They may be able to help you solve the problems faster. You may have AI in your pocket to help you if you've never worked on this type of unit before. But we're going to need people in those spaces. I do think everything else – the transactional tasks, the 65-year-old guy whose job it is to take the TPS reports from this person's folder and move them over to this cabinet – that stuff is definitely going to go away. Being aware of that feels necessary. And how we judge what skills we develop. So with all that context, with these students that you're working with, where are they starting? One, do you think what I just said is accurate?

Jessica Kizorek: I guess. Oh, I love it. I love it. Art assets and artificial intelligence. It's beautiful. And I like what you said too, about it's not just picking one of those buckets, but it's creating your own Play-Doh sculpture from all three of those materials. The more that you can—obviously you understand insurance, you understand finance—so assets come natural to you. I think I just love what you said. I'm going to repeat it one more time for the listeners: it's not AI that's going to replace people, it's people using AI that's going to replace people.

Jessica Kizorek: Even if you just know a little bit about it, like just your little subset—if you're into SEO, well, that's actually an area that's totally changing because of AI, so that's not even a good example. But if you can just learn... I have somebody I really respect, her name's Donna Vincent Roa. She's an amazing woman. She's been a student of mine, but she's also been a client of mine. She's created thousands of images of women—these heroic art pieces—using DALL-E. They're all wearing glasses and they're all turquoise in color. She came up with a style, then started adapting the style and working with the AI to produce these images. They've just blown me away. She showed me some of them and I was like, wow, what it did stylistically, how the detail in the art—she used it in a beautiful way to create a collection that said something about girls with eyeglasses, because she always used to get teased when she was a little girl about wearing glasses. She also comes from a mixed ethnic background, so she wanted to explore different ethnicities of girls wearing these eyeglasses. It's just a beautiful collection of art. Now, she also wants to turn that into an NFT, which is a whole other story.

Jessica Kizorek: I think if you dabble and you have enough skill sets to cobble together some kind of specialty so that you're known as top of mind, people want to talk about you the same way that I want to talk about my friend Donna Vincent Roa and what she's doing with AI.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think if anything, what artificial intelligence will allow us to do is be even more micro-niche in what we build. You can be the one person who would think to create turquoise-designed female archetypes with glasses. I mean, that's such a niche idea, but also so powerful and moving that you're sharing it here with the audience. While possible, think about how long it would take if she was painting. One, she'd have to learn the skill of painting or drawing. And even if she had this incredible idea and vision, if she doesn't have those skills—not everyone has the ability. I'm terrible at music. As much as I enjoy music, no matter how much training you give me, I can't make the thing sound good. It's just the way I'm wired, which is fine. But I could have an amazing idea for a song, and without artificial intelligence, that idea dies. I would have to go partner with someone or hire someone.

Ryan Hanley: So I do think it empowers us to be these niche, even micro-niche versions of ourselves, and truly become the one. It almost creates new categories that we could have never even thought of before, and they're now realities. That's just so exciting. So, when your students are filling out this form—which I love that exercise, I love the contrarian aspect of making them use both sides of the argument for themselves—where are their initial takes? And where do you see the biggest movements as you start to teach them about these things, show them about prompting, and sit there working with them as they create these images? What aspects of their mentality, mindset, or where they see their career going—where do you see the biggest shifts as they start to become more accustomed to and comfortable with artificial intelligence?

Jessica Kizorek: Well, you can either have a victim mentality around AI, which some of them do. It's like, "Well, I'm 16 and I wanted to be a musician like all the musicians that came before me, and now AI is ruining that for everyone." You have people who feel very uncomfortable. Students are afraid to use it because they don't want their teachers to think they're lazy. They don't want to get some kind of reputation. They obviously don't want to get busted for plagiarism—that's a really big thing. So there are things they're scared about because, although they're thinking a lot about it, no one's teaching skill sets. I'm having to cobble this together myself.

Jessica Kizorek: I went to a program at Northwestern University called AI for Growth, and it was all about business applications for AI. That was like four or five years ago. I did a certificate program through Kellogg. But I think everyone has to take it upon themselves—especially ourselves, but especially people who are educators and who are in charge of training the next generation of workers. We have an obligation to show them how to use these tools and how to move from anxiety to creativity. The things they're most excited about are like, "I can do things so much faster. I feel so much smarter because I can ask it questions. I feel like I have a friend who can give me advice about my other friends. I've never created an animation before, but I was able to create an animation. I feel like I could make a difference in the world by using these kinds of tools. I wrote my college essay with ChatGPT." So yeah, they're both excited and terrified at the same time.

Ryan Hanley: I think it's funny that they have anxiety around being caught for plagiarizing. In college, I was part of a fraternity and we had an entire closet dedicated to cheating on all the tests that all the professors gave. Cheating was more of an art form. Having to take the test straight was anxiety-inducing. You needed whoever had gotten the best grade on the test. You threw that notebook in the closet or that test in the closet if you got it back so someone could use it.

Jessica Kizorek: That's funny.

Ryan Hanley: Do you think in general that this next generation coming up—take the millennials out of it, say the generation behind them—does it seem like anxiety is a larger portion of their life? I'm 43. I had shit I didn't like, but I don't remember living each day with as much anxiety. It feels to me like their baseline anxiety level is just higher than it has been for previous generations.

Jessica Kizorek: I don't want to say that they have it. That's statistically proven.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah.

Jessica Kizorek: Yeah. If you look at the mental health statistics, that's definitely happening. The largest offender of that is social media and cell phones. By far. You look at kids—even kids who don't have their cell phone yet are being impacted by kids who do have cell phones at very young ages. So yeah, that's a whole other tangent we could go on. But that's one of the things I wanted to look at in my dissertation—the mental health side of this. How can we go from that anxiety about learning, about growing, about trying something you've never done before, about screwing it up, about not knowing the answer, about having to go to multiple websites? "Oh my God, I have to make myself an account. Oh my God, there's a word limit on the prompting." There's just a whole battery of anxiety.

Jessica Kizorek: But I do think there are some people who are going to meet this challenge head-on. They're going to teach their students. They're going to adopt their curriculums. They're going to retrain themselves as professionals. And then there are the people who aren't. There's going to be a big pay differentiation for sure.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah. I have two boys, 10 and eight. A couple weeks ago—I'm sure you've at least heard of it if you haven't watched the video—the meme around "fuck around and find out." I had them watch that video. I watched it with them. Even though they're young, and everyone listening can judge me, I don't think curse words are meaningful. They're just more words in the dictionary. So I have no problem with them seeing that kind of stuff. I said, "Guys, I want you to watch this because as much as it's been memed to death and a lot of people laugh at it, and yes, the way he delivers it is hilarious and creative and genius, the idea I try to impress upon them and the kids I coach—I coach baseball and I'm fairly involved in that community and the athletic community in general in my area—is there's a sense..."

Ryan Hanley: One of the things I worry about with AI—and we can start to wrap from here—I worry that, because I've seen it in myself, so I'm not judging kids or any generation, I've seen it myself. You used to have to figure shit out. I want to do X. When I started learning how to do video, I had no idea how to do it. I didn't have creative parents. I was a math major in college. No job I had prior to that had any creativity in it at all. I worked in the accounting industry for five years, then I moved, then I became part of the insurance industry. There's no creativity in the past. But I was a really shitty insurance salesman. Really, really shitty insurance salesman. My ex-wife's father—my father-in-law at the time—basically fired me a year into my insurance career. He pitched me a job, I think basically because he didn't want his little girl to be married to a bum. He said, "Hey, I want you to come sell insurance at my insurance company." I said okay. I get a year in and he straight fires me. He says, "Look, I think you're a great kid, but this is not working."

Ryan Hanley: You know what I did? I literally got down on my knees and I begged him. I said, "Please don't make me go home to your daughter and tell her that you fired me today. You don't want to make that call either." So I said, "Let's just think about this." He gave me an extension. He said, "I'll give you six more months, but things have got to change." I knew I had to change. I knew that cold calling, dropping business cards off, and going to networking events wasn't the answer for me because I just didn't like it. It was a grind. And yeah, you could say, "Hey, you just grind through things you don't like." Yeah. But it just wasn't working. So I had to find something else. The internet—this was like 2009—the internet is now not a fad anymore. YouTube is a thing. I thought, "You know what? No one's doing video. I'm not a great writer, math major. I'll just create videos on insurance." I started posting videos at the end of 2010, 2011 on insurance. To put a video on YouTube, I had to figure it out. How do you do video? What does that mean? What does a video look like? How do you edit a video? Sound, microphones, all these things. It took me years of watching YouTube videos, talking to people, going to local workshops, testing, testing, testing.

Ryan Hanley: My worry and concern about AI is that we are going to lose that "fuck around and find out" mentality because the answers are always at our fingertips. I think the truly successful with this technology will use it as a foundation and an amplifier, but they'll still want to test everything, touch everything, break everything, and pull it apart. If we lose that part of what makes us human, then we lose the soul of whatever project we're working on. Does that make sense? I guess as a teacher, this will be something you might run into—we just start over-relying on it. How do we work through that? How do we continue to hold that idea in our head when every historical fact ever is a key punch away?

Jessica Kizorek: I think the major lesson to learn from AI right now is it's all about the prompt. The prompt is the human side of things. It's like dancing tango with the AI. It takes a human and it takes the AI, and they're sort of doing the dance and moving together. It's sort of cool. If it's just the AI doing it all by itself, it's sort of meh. I think the most interesting stuff I've done on AI is when I've gotten really creative and explored it with the prompts and looked at things from multiple situations.

Jessica Kizorek: One of my favorite things to do for my doctoral work—in all the classes, you have to read these really crazy PDFs. It's a business degree, so I had to read these PDFs about business theory and they were so boring. I am a color person. I like shapes, photos, artwork. Everyone else in my class would turn in these dumb presentations. They'd have a PowerPoint with no pictures, all black and white. I was doing stuff like I would turn an article about organizational change—which is stressful for people when they get misplaced and replaced—into a whole PowerPoint presentation from DALL-E about lava fields and people traversing them. It was so cool. DALL-E said, "Do you want to try the lava effect?" I was like, "The lava effect? Of course I do." All these people diving into lava pools and committing suicide. It was very dark and very funny. I'll tell you what, my schoolmates will never, ever forget the lava presentation. I think images and video do that to you. It puts you a head above the rest.

Jessica Kizorek: I teach students. I feel like there's always the 90% of students that are just fine. But then there's the 10% where it's like, "Oh my God, I'd love to work with this kid. I got to hire this kid. I want to mentor this kid. I want to refer this kid for a job because they're so cool." Students really inspire me, and the whole act of learning inspires me. Focus on what is that dance you're doing with the AI. How are you moving together with it? In fact, the class I'm teaching is called Writing for Video. I'm going to make them have a ChatGPT membership for the four months of the class. I'm not going to grade them on the final end product. I'm going to grade them on the whole chat—what did they do to make it better? What did they input? How did they work with it? What are the opportunities they missed? Why did they not explore this? I'm already changing the curriculum in subtle ways to use AI to show students how they can. If you taught a class about writing for video and you didn't teach them how to use AI, that's negligence.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I completely agree. Jessica, this has been a tremendous conversation. I love hearing your story, but this conversation about AI is so important. I think the perspective you have is unique in the conversation. So many people talking about AI are either complete nerds—which are great, I love nerds, but they're nerds—or they're high-level business people trying to sell you something. This aspect of coming from it both as a creator and as a teacher is wonderful. We need to hear more from you and other people like you because these individuals you're launching out into the world are the ones who are going to be taking care of us. We need them to know what the fuck they're doing. I appreciate you. Besides Eyes on Your Mission, which we are going to have in the show notes, where else can people learn more about you? Is there socials, a website? Where can they connect with you and stay on top of what you have going on?

Jessica Kizorek: Eyes on Your Mission. You can see Two Parrot Productions. I'm actually building a brand new site there, which is exciting. I might even do a double whammy—my Two Parrot Productions t-shirt and my Eyes on Your Mission hat.

Ryan Hanley: Awesome. Representing the brands. I love it. That was one of my favorite ones you did—about making a brand so cool they have to work with you.

Jessica Kizorek: Yes. John Davids is a genius when it comes to that stuff. He's worked with some of the biggest brands and some of the biggest creators. I think that's what it is. To your point, you cannot create a brand that people truly connect to at a real soul level unless they can see it, and it has to come with video.

Ryan Hanley: I love what you're doing. I appreciate you. Thank you for sharing your time and I wish you nothing but the best.

Jessica Kizorek: Thank you, Ryan. Thank you guys for watching. Bye.

Host: Every week we share the ideas, stories, and insights of elite performers that you can use in your business and life. Be sure to subscribe wherever you're listening or watching, and leave a comment on YouTube to keep the conversation going. This is the way.

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