Leaders and Their Stories

Richard Lowe: Hello, welcome to the leaders in their stories. Podcast. I'm Richard Lowe.

Richard Lowe: the writing King and the ghostwriting. Guru.

Richard Lowe: Thank you for coming to the podcast I'm here with Trevor, who's going to tell us all about his business and AI, and how that can help you and how that can help a business, and what to look out for, and things like that. Trevor, why don't you give us a little short introduction.

Trevor Sumner: Hey, Richard! Great, great! Great! Great! To to be here! Thank you for having me on the pod.

Trevor Sumner: My name is Trevor Sumner. I'm the CEO of I Genie, which is

Trevor Sumner: an AI company that's transforming consumer insights, consumer insights, huge market very dependent on survey based data. It's increasingly

Trevor Sumner: unreliable data sets, you know. Recently there was like a 10 million dollars fraud case. And you know, there's a lot of human bias. So what we do is we synthesize

Trevor Sumner: trend, spotting, brand equity, tracking, product, benchmarking and innovation by synthesizing tens of billions of Google searches, reviews, social posts, videos on Tiktok and Instagram for companies like kenview, Unilever, Coca-cola buyer and the like. I've been a 25 year veteran of the tech space. So I've seen a couple different hype cycles and caught the 1st Internet boom in 1998,

Trevor Sumner: I've been through an Ipo and M. And A started my own company, which I grew to over a hundred people. So also an angel investor advisor to startups, so been around the block.

Richard Lowe: We've done a couple of things. Then couple of minor things.

Trevor Sumner: I'm older than my my baby face kind of pretends.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. Your persona here is good.

Richard Lowe: Alright. So AI is the big thing now. And obviously you're you're working with AI a lot. Now, you're familiar with the Gartner Hype cycle. And I think we're actually still going up to the peak and about to hit the fall

Richard Lowe: because basically the hype cycle for those who don't know is

Richard Lowe: you have your products. So AI came out. Everybody's all excited about it. They start investing and goes up up, up, up, and then

Richard Lowe: it doesn't meet the expectations or whatever happens, and it just crashes

Richard Lowe: investment we're talking about, and then it goes down to almost nothing, and then it pops back up to a new normal, which is then becomes the normal. You saw with it, with cloud. You saw with all kinds of different things technologies. So I think we're still on the big spike.

Richard Lowe: and we're about to hit the top of that. What do you think.

Trevor Sumner: On the investment side of the house. I think there's certainly something there right in that.

Trevor Sumner: Some of the valuations that we're seeing out in the market are just crazy. Right? Like pre revenue companies, like, there's a robotics company that's pre-revenue that was valued at 40 billion dollars right? Pre-revenue. I'm seeing a lot of AI disruptors who have a couple 1 million in revenue and are raising money at 250 million, like, you know, 5,100 X revenues.

Trevor Sumner: So on one hand, I think like that is definitely hype cycle. I'm a little more of an East Coast

Trevor Sumner: cultural investor right where I look at real, you know, kind of economics and multiples at the same time. We're seeing some

Trevor Sumner: companies really have exit velocities that are unlike anything that you know, we've seen before, you know, companies that are 30 people and driving a hundred 1 million dollars in revenue and being able to build that in 3, 4 years. So there's definitely something to

Trevor Sumner: a new growth trajectory around software and product led growth with self-serve models that end up going into the enterprise that seems to be working. So the disruption is real. And then the other thing I would say is, you know, I remember, you know, kind of when I caught the 1st Internet boom, and you know everybody rebranded. Ibm all of a sudden became ibm.com. We changed everything right like you know you haven't

Trevor Sumner: but it was, you know, we invested, but nobody was really spending, you know, had moved all their spend to e-commerce, and and not all of media had moved to the Internet, people still had cable TV. And what's different I think about this is a lot of people are using AI, whether it's perplexity for search, or that Gpt marketing teams are getting cut and using creative.

Trevor Sumner: You know, tools for blogging for image generation. My designer uses AI based image generation tools. It's just, you know, we can do a lot more right now. And I think that productivity is very real. Now, whether the hype that it's going to change the entire world. And

Trevor Sumner: you know, the

Trevor Sumner: cut budgets by 80% tomorrow like, that's that's a little overblown. But the amount of usage I find to be very real.

Richard Lowe: Well, I I know that I I'm on chat gpt all day long, and I stick with chat, gpt, because that's what I I know, and I don't really have the time to learn new things at this point. Sometimes I jump into new things, and the learning curves can be pretty high

Richard Lowe: but

Richard Lowe: I'll get to them eventually. But I'm literally on chat Gpt all day long, and I get my money out of that $20 a month.

Trevor Sumner: 100%, a hundred percent. And you know, it gets to know you over time. I just like.

Richard Lowe: Oh, yeah.

Trevor Sumner: I just did post it on Linkedin, you know. I asked it. You know a couple of personal questions about what it thought about me, and there's a lot of flattery there. But I also asked, Where do you think my insecurities lie? What do you think of my management style? And then it was like, do you want to know what you know, based on your management style, what some weaknesses and blind spots might be, and it nailed it. I mean it really nailed it.

Trevor Sumner: And like that's that was just like a wonderful reminder of, you know, some things that I should be looking out for as I approach big and new problems. And you know for it to be

Trevor Sumner: to you, to the way you like answers to the way you do work, to even create your own, you know, Gpts for for specific types of tasks that's actually remarkably easy. And so I think everybody should be

Trevor Sumner: starting to use it right now to kind of build its capability personalized to you and like you said, like, I would say, I've reduced 80% of my Google searches to perplexity or chatgpt. At this point.

Richard Lowe: Well, I've I did an experiment.

Richard Lowe: So I went to my doctor for

Richard Lowe: my doctor and my doctor did the usual. This is a physical usual 15 min physical that was pretty pretty lame, gave me some results.

Richard Lowe: I took all the tests that I've done in the last year with the doctor. I took all the my diet exercise program. I do everything that I'm doing now in my life.

Richard Lowe: Put it in chat. Gpt took me several hours

Richard Lowe: And then I said, Okay, based on what you just learned.

Richard Lowe: I want to extrapolate 25 years into the future.

Richard Lowe: So if I keep doing what I'm doing, what happens? It gave me a timeline.

Richard Lowe: and I said, You have a heart attack this, this tears out, and you have this happen. And this happened. And this happened probabilities. And then I said, Okay, what do I need to change to prevent that outcome? And it said.

Richard Lowe: Of course, eat better and exercise.

Richard Lowe: And I was amused. Because that's that's basically what I keep getting told. And it gave me why and wherefores and stuff to do, and a plan, and blah blah, and I'm starting to follow it even because it was far better than going to the doctor

Richard Lowe: I got I got real results, and it actually listened.

Trevor Sumner: Well, I think actually, you know

Trevor Sumner: well, some of the conclusions in in this case might be obvious. It also it also can detect more nuanced things. But what I really loved about what you said was, it created a plan.

Richard Lowe: Yes.

Trevor Sumner: Right. And so this this is the wonderful thing about Chat Gpt is going from advice to action. So, for example, when I started at Igeny. You know my background is in retail tech and marketing tech.

Trevor Sumner: but not a big background in consumer insights. Luckily, Igeny was founded by the head of consumer insights for Unilever and Coca-cola. And the team's amazing. And they have real depth there. But I said, Okay, let's say I want to become an expert in consumer insights in 60 days, 90 days, 120 days, put in whatever you want

Trevor Sumner: at, you know, suggest a set of reading and exercises over the course of the next 60 91, 20 days. Create a plan. Tell me which books I should read, which blogs which you know kind of magazines or online blog sources, and it puts it all together week by week, and creates a curriculum. And so

Trevor Sumner: like that action plan customized to you is really exciting for personal development, and that could be your health. That could be, you know, knowledge base that could be. If you think about how it's going to transform learning for kids who are right now

Trevor Sumner: primarily using chat, gpt to cheat on their homework and not do the writing and etc, etc.

Trevor Sumner: but could be used to actually enforce learning plans. See how well you're learning along the way and adapt right, and adapt that plan by like, Oh, you know I missed this week, or I did this instead of that

Trevor Sumner: readapt, you know, kind of rework the plan from here, or I took 2 weeks vacation. And now but I need to hit this new deadline rework the plan so that. And it does all of that right.

Trevor Sumner: And I think there's just a fear factor of

Trevor Sumner: of using a lot of these tools, a fear factor that they're going to tell us what to do. And God forbid, you know, like, you know, create a difference in action. People hate the notion of change.

Trevor Sumner: But the action plans are tremendous.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, what I found is they tend to sometimes be overwhelming.

Richard Lowe: So what I do is, I say, Okay, that plan looks good. But

Richard Lowe: I can't do it based on what I've got and going on in life, it's going to overwhelm me. And this is okay, trims it down. And this is the essential one. This is optional. This is essential. Look at this. Don't bother with that. I told you that before, but it's not necessary. And

Richard Lowe: you just basically get in a conversation with it.

Richard Lowe: That's what's cool about it is is you're in a conversation. You talk to it. And you say this is going on. This is what I need to fix.

Richard Lowe: Can you help me with this? Oh, sure, of course it always says, sure. And and here's here's the answer. And then you say, well, that answer doesn't make sense to me.

Richard Lowe: Okay.

Richard Lowe: what? What's what? Am I missing? Oh, okay, here's the answer. Well, that answers a little bit better. But still, it's a problem for me.

Richard Lowe: You just keep going back and forth, you know. Adjust that date to be 2 weeks instead of a week.

Richard Lowe: Okay? You know, yeah.

Trevor Sumner: And it's actually also good, you know, bringing this back to business in thinking about strategy, you know, I wouldn't take the strategy just out of the box. But, for example, if you're doing competitive intelligence, I'd buys a company called Competitor Genius, where, like they're using AI to, you know, kind of basically allow you to map out your competitors. See how the reviews from clients on G. 2 Capterra. All the b 2 b type sites

Trevor Sumner: can provide some insights.

Trevor Sumner: but also to figure out how to do that in a structured way. I think that's also like you know how we deal with like the unstructured output of Gen. AI is like, and then and then measuring it month to month. But you know.

Trevor Sumner: if if you're looking at an analysis of your website. You can put that into Chat Gpt or Claude, or these others, and say, tell me what you think of this website. How do we make it better. What do I need to do to start attracting this audience versus that audience? What tweaks would you suggest?

Trevor Sumner: And it's phenomenal. Now you know the level of suggestions and detailed, and granularity, you know, is is just, impressive.

Richard Lowe: I actually actually did that my website and my Linkedin profile. And now I'm working on my Facebook because my Facebook is a different market than Linkedin, and it gave me some details in my. I was amazed to find out. It can actually tear apart graphics

Richard Lowe: and didn't know it gotten that far, and it told me, well, this this picture is fine, but it could use this and this and this. This banner looks good, but

Richard Lowe: it needs this, and the background's a little.

Richard Lowe: is the background drowns out the text, you know, and stuff like that. It was really neat, not having to send that to other, to round to 50,000 people, or whatever to look at and get their opinions. I'm not getting opinions here. I'm getting.

Richard Lowe: It seems like more grounded information.

Trevor Sumner: Yeah, no, absolutely. And actionable and specific.

Richard Lowe: Yeah.

Trevor Sumner: Say, you know, like, Hey, you should tweet this text to be more professional. Okay, great. With that in mind. Please recommend some edits for this specific paragraph, and it'll give it to you.

Richard Lowe: Yep, yep.

Richard Lowe: keeping in mind that you you have to tell it. I don't want it to be robotic. I want it to be not take out the AI crap. I always tell it that. Put in active voice. All these kind of

Richard Lowe: you have to tune it.

Richard Lowe: Otherwise you're gonna get AI crap.

Trevor Sumner: Yeah. And and I think that's where like again, the paid plans.

Trevor Sumner: making sure it gets to know you and some of the keys that you can put in. It's like, you know, hey? The voice for this website is professional, but a little bit cheeky, it's, you know, without being silly. We always, you know, like Apple's guidelines, you know, we never say mobile phone. It's always iphone. We. We say we say these words, but never these words,

Trevor Sumner: you know we want to be helpful, but also want to be engaging and a little bit entertaining, like whatever those brand guidelines are, and you could even upload a brand presentation right?

Trevor Sumner: And then and then it has that, as it's, you know, kind of North Star for all future prompts. You don't always have to put that in there right. And so I think that's

Trevor Sumner: that's a little bit of the key about, you know, just jumping in and using those things. And then, you know, working with your teams like, I think the other thing is.

Trevor Sumner: it's a little overwhelming, because there's so many different areas right now where this can be applied. And you know, as a leader, you've got to figure out, you know, how are the teams feeling comfortable about adopting the shopify, you know. Put out the shopify. CEO, put out an amazing post on Linkedin, and beyond just talking about you know how they're going to become an AI first, st you know company and how you know everybody's.

Trevor Sumner: you know, kind of personal plan. And you know, annual review will include, you know, kind of how are they adopting AI tools? How are they pushing the organization forward on AI tools? Every new hire is going to be questioned, based upon whether that can be automated through AI, and there are other approaches to it.

Trevor Sumner: And and you know, it's an incredible world. You know, I was talking to a lot of marketing people I know who are currently looking for work. And it's a it's a terrible time to be looking for work, because you've got a lot of professionals who have been who've left Google and Facebook and and Meta.

Trevor Sumner: And so there are a lot of people working like like 1,000 people applying to jobs, you know, on every post on Linkedin, in part because they're using AI to personalize every message and every cover letter to submit to to jobs. So there's a lot of that going on.

Trevor Sumner: And so I've had a couple of people ask me, and I was like, Well, what do you think I should do, Trevor, and I was like, you know what I'd be looking for. I'd be looking for a marketing person saying like, Here's like the stack that you need right, like, so marketing is increasingly becoming a like a tech. And it function. Right? So you want to run a podcast here's, the podcast ais that will clean up all the background noise in your audio that'll cut it up into snippets that'll prepare little images based upon.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. Once.

Trevor Sumner: Can you know kind of encapsulated in the snippets and all of a sudden? I have a full content and marketing plan based upon an hour long podcast such as this. And it does it, you know, in 20 min for you to review as opposed to 10 h of work. Okay, so that's podcasting. Here's the AI you need for blogging. Here's the AI, you need for email outreach. Here's the AI I need for ads. Here's how they all work together, and I can put that together for you. So just tell me you know the stack, because I don't know the stack

Trevor Sumner: and a lot of the, you know, people who have marketing teams. Everybody's kind of like a little bit siloed, and they have their own AI Stack, but it's like hard to to figure out how they all work together, and some leadership about how to build. That, I think, is what's missing for a lot of you know, companies and marketing and other areas, too. And it's hard to measure the progress of adoption. There.

Richard Lowe: Well, AI, is not that old?

Richard Lowe: And and when I what what to me is the clue that AI is mature is when

Richard Lowe: that stops being stressed

Richard Lowe: when it becomes just normal, much like the Internet and having a mobile phone. I mean, nobody looks. Are you mobile phone ready? You know when you when you're hiring somebody. It's normal now.

Trevor Sumner: Yep.

Richard Lowe: And when AI gets to that point where it's normal where Ibm doesn't say we're AI it's just it. Better be AI. You don't have to say it, then then it becomes more mature. That's where the mature point for me.

Trevor Sumner: Yeah, no, I agree with that. But I I also think

Trevor Sumner: you know I I would expect it to be a question of every interview. You know.

Richard Lowe: Of course.

Trevor Sumner: Over the next year, you know, and again shopify also. Klarna just recently announced this, too, as a fast following.

Trevor Sumner: that that. You know, what? How do you use? AI? But you know, in your job function in your personal life, that's

Trevor Sumner: You know.

Trevor Sumner: AI is not going to replace us people who use AI better than you will replace you right.

Richard Lowe: People who use AI as a digital assistant.

Richard Lowe: as somebody, as a actually an electronic person, to help them out, get their job done and replace all those silly tasks

Richard Lowe: that people have been doing in the past like I had a spreadsheet to fill out with 1,000 names. I just said, Chatgpt. Help me fill this out. So what do you need? Here's a spreadsheet. I need

Richard Lowe: the data filled in. I was really vague. And it said, Okay, build in half an hour.

Richard Lowe: I have to give it a couple more instructions, like, Okay, or is work, you know.

Trevor Sumner: Yeah, yeah.

Richard Lowe: That's that's the important point.

Trevor Sumner: Yeah. And there's this like primordial struggle between those who say, you know, if that is going to put a lot of people out of work versus that's going to make a lot of people more effective at their job and able to accomplish more and drive more revenues. And this is where you get, you know, kind of very lean organizations getting to 100 million dollars in revenue

Trevor Sumner: versus, you know. You know. Hey, we're going to put 10 million truck drivers out of work, and the answers are probably a little bit of both. And you know anybody who tells you it's not going to put anybody out of business. We're all just going to be, you know, kind of higher level, higher order sales because of this, I think, is is being, you know, intentionally.

Trevor Sumner: techno, optimistic. And anybody who says it's just going to put everybody out of jobs is being techno pessimistic. And as always, the answer is usually somewhere in the middle.

Richard Lowe: Well, I've written 4 books on digital transformation. And all of them went into this.

Richard Lowe: that the idea is AI and and technology, and some of them are more robotics based is not based around obsoleting people. It's based around making more efficient people.

Trevor Sumner: Absolutely. And that's that's happened. You know, the the typewriter and the personal computer. We talked about how that was going to bring, you know all the secretaries and note takers and

Trevor Sumner: typists out of work. And the reality is it created millions of jobs or Instagram? Right? You know, Instagram as an app was going to put all professional photographers out of business. But what actually happened is, yes, on the, you know, kind of artistic, you know, highly paid Annie Leibowitz type of photographers. There's a lot less of those. But we also created literally billions of people

Trevor Sumner: who now consume photography for 2 to 3 HA day, and influencers. My wife is an influencer, right? And and makes a tremendous amount of money doing.

Trevor Sumner: you know, kind of influencer, marketing and helping clients produce a tremendous amount, more of content that that gets consumed. And so, like, you actually create the step change of consumption which turns out like the photography industry in terms of revenue has never been higher. And it's probably a hundred x higher right? And so, you know, we have to figure out, where are these like

Trevor Sumner: 100 X growth opportunities that happen? But a lot of them are just kind of you know. You can't see it coming. It's a little bit unintended, because, you see, these massive shifts shifts in consumer behavior, professional behaviors and things like that.

Richard Lowe: Well in the writing industry, which is, I'm in as a ghostwriter. The thing that's affecting me or affecting writers is

Richard Lowe: it's cutting out the bottom

Richard Lowe: of writers. So if you're if you're an entry level writer or you're, you're a writer who's barely making a living.

Richard Lowe: If you don't know AI, you're doomed

Richard Lowe: for higher level writers. It's the same thing. You better be using AI not to write.

Richard Lowe: but as a tool to help you to help speed up that writing cycle and make it better. You know you're you're stuck trying to think of the next thing to write about. You got writer's block.

Richard Lowe: AI is great for that. I got writer's block help. Tell me how to get out of it. Simple, prompt, and it will give you all kinds of suggestions.

Richard Lowe: and it'll ask you, you know what's going on, and you well, this and this and this and this and you just you're out of writer's block writer's block is pretty common for writers. You know what usually causes it is just staring at the screen too long.

Richard Lowe: It's fixed. It's a fixed stair.

Richard Lowe: and you get almost hypnotized. So you got to get out and go for a walk. Silly, silly thing! Silly, interesting answer!

Richard Lowe: That's in my case. I found that you. That's usually the solution. Just go for a walk.

Richard Lowe: take a break, get on the exercise bike, probably too fat, anyway, because you're sitting on your butt riding all day. That's what I'm doing, I mean for me.

Trevor Sumner: Yeah, I. But I think that's an important point, right? Like, you know, you know, one of the things about Gen. AI is it's going to output a tremendous amount of content. And the question is, how good is that content? Right? The the people with the the kind of if you look at the long tail of content. It's just going to explode out, but the high value at the the head is going to be more and more important. And

Trevor Sumner: you know, I think it's just a hard challenge, right? Because especially for people just come, you know, like, early on in their career, because what's going to happen is the people who have the wisdom and the experience to know what great content is. 10 x. Content is what Rand Fishkin would call it right. It's like just content. That's so much better than everything else out there. And you know whether it's, you know.

Trevor Sumner: outputting a ton of imagery, knowing what the best imagery is and how to get it. Just a little bit to that level and to that next level, you know, entry level. You don't have the experience or wisdom to do that. And so I think you know, a lot of these kind of transformations are very difficult for various different people where you talk about like moving from coal miners and telling them they should become coders, which is, you know, obviously unrealistic. You know.

Trevor Sumner: How do we deal with these kind of rapid changes, and for the current generations we're going to need a lot less of like some of the grunt work paralegaling, you know, base copywriting. Those things are going to get, you know, wiped out. But those were the jobs where you got the experience to realize. Oh, I provided this, and then there were these edits, and then it made it better. And then I saw the process to get from okay, content to fantastic content.

Trevor Sumner: And without that wisdom

Trevor Sumner: and experience like, how do you know, bridge the gap now that your efforts are not needed for that entry level? And so how do you get from here to that, you know, kind of wizardry status without that pathway. And I think there are. You know, we talked about ways that you know Chatgpt or others can build learning plans and get you there. But

Trevor Sumner: you know, how do you do that without a great deal of experience? That's that's something we have to solve.

Richard Lowe: I have an interesting statistic for you. What's according to the statistic that I found.

Richard Lowe: What's the biggest coding language in the world that's used right now.

Trevor Sumner: Well, now, it's English.

Richard Lowe: Coding. Well, no, it's not.

Trevor Sumner: Or I would have said, excel.

Richard Lowe: Cobal.

Richard Lowe: Caldwell runs all the financials companies, and it's worked forever.

Richard Lowe: So it's embedded in everything. It's like 70%.

Richard Lowe: It's a huge number.

Richard Lowe: Well, what's happening to all the cobalt programmers? They're aging out. Who's going to fix all this code?

Richard Lowe: When the baby boomers retire?

Richard Lowe: Nobody.

Trevor Sumner: It's a couple things. So so one I would challenge. And I would say, if if you think of natural language as a programming language, or excel as a programming language, as increasingly, it's becoming.

Trevor Sumner: you know, in terms of daily usage, and everywhere like, I think, that would explode out over cobol. But

Trevor Sumner: this is also something Gen. AI is really great, at which is, you know, migrating code. Right? So the big challenge with the cobol, and why we still have cobol is. It's just such a huge, huge effort to migrate it over. And now Gen. AI can do most of that. And so I think we have a real opportunity to sunset some of the legacy technologies that we were terrified of removing.

Trevor Sumner: So.

Richard Lowe: It's millions and millions and millions and millions of lines of code, and I'm sure at the board level they don't see it.

Richard Lowe: They don't know that this is a problem. Nobody's told them that. Oh, my God! Half of our stuff is written in Cobol. And if we don't fix this we're not gonna have anybody to support it.

Trevor Sumner: I'd be surprised. I actually think, you know, these days the technology focus, especially in finances, is pretty deep. I think they know they just don't know. Like, when's the right time? How do you go about it? And you know, how do you? What like? What's the right way to go system by system and get there. And what's the plan?

Trevor Sumner: I think you're going to see in the background a lot of this transitioning going on. And there's some companies I was trying to think of. Klarna, I think, was one of them where they didn't like, you know, one of the systems, either through salesforce or workday, or something like something along those lines.

Trevor Sumner: So you know, because you highly customize these platforms. They cost, you know, tens of millions of dollars a year to customize, or even, you know, kind of support. And they use Gen. AI to basically rebuild the system using custom software and said, like, this is exactly what I want us to do. Here are the specs, and then they built it, and you know they they don't have to pay the giant license fees right?

Trevor Sumner: And so I don't know how realistic that is, you know. You know, you have to be a pretty big organization to be able to want to create your own custom, Crm, etc.

Trevor Sumner: But the notion that these

Trevor Sumner: Gen. AI tools can actually build that for you and remove the licensing fees which are.

Richard Lowe: Oh, it's got to be astronomical. Yeah.

Trevor Sumner: Yeah. And and so like, there's a lot of talk about Sas is dead because of this. And how large scale companies are, you know salesforce and workday, and you know the oracles and sap are going to be under significant amount of threats. Look, I think they're going to respond. But I think it's going to erode at their margins, and they're not going to be able to charge the same amounts that they are in the past, so

Trevor Sumner: we'll see.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, same here, same here. I think sas, is just fine. It's just gonna evolve.

Trevor Sumner: Right? I mean again, you know, taking the Instagram, you know, it's like, Oh, it's gonna kill photographers. But it actually created all this new demand right?

Trevor Sumner: You know, from a marketing perspective like, I never thought I needed podcast. AI. I never thought. I needed blog AI. I never thought. I need sales. Outreach AI, and you know, all of a sudden you kind of add these things up. I'm like, I need like 10 new marketing softwares just to run a modern marketing stack. So obviously, it's creating a lot of new demand for tasks that I never really even thought of. And the question is, is that new demand.

Trevor Sumner: gonna you know, is that like 20% of what you know, what, what I'm replacing? Is it a hundred percent? So it's, you know, apples to apples? Is it actually going to create twice the amount of spend or 10 times the amount of spend? Because I don't have to pay somebody to do that, or because I get 10 times the value out of it, and I can get to 100 million dollars in revenue with 30 people.

Trevor Sumner: and the answer is, we don't know.

Richard Lowe: Find out!

Trevor Sumner: Camp. I think we're gonna do a lot more with little and I think you're gonna see, you know, companies

Trevor Sumner: need less and less capital to get there, and then you get back to your original question. Where are we in the hype cycle? Well, if I don't need to raise as much money to get to 100 million in revenue. You know. What is the value of my company when I need to raise a couple 1 million dollars. Maybe it's a lot more than the traditional multiples, you know, have indicated.

Richard Lowe: Well, this, this AI and its related technologies actually solve a huge problem that humanity is having right now.

Richard Lowe: I don't know how much awareness you have of it, because most people don't. It's called demographics.

Richard Lowe: I mean, the world is involved in the demographic collapse right now, and it's it's in China. It's death, I mean, they're in a demographic collapse. They're not. They can't recover literally.

Richard Lowe: Japan has been in a demographic collapse since for years and years and years. Russia, Germany, these countries are all collapsing, and the United States is even feeling it because the

Richard Lowe: the you need to have 2.1 children born per cup per per couple

Richard Lowe: to keep, at least even to. I imagine that slicing and shit. No, never mind.

Richard Lowe: And America is at 1 point us is what 1.6 right now. Well, Japan is actually below, not Japan. China is actually below one

Richard Lowe: and falling.

Richard Lowe: and their numbers that they. They say they have 1.3 billion people, they probably will more likely have more and like less than a billion, maybe even 700 million, because

Richard Lowe: they're not reporting their numbers right? Well, what Japan is doing is they're automating everything.

Richard Lowe: using AI like crazy. So they're able to make up for the. We don't have people to run our country

Richard Lowe: anymore. Because there's not enough young people.

Richard Lowe: Let's automate.

Richard Lowe: So they're becoming like masters of automation. And that's gonna

Richard Lowe: solve that solves one problem. The other problem, of course, is.

Richard Lowe: what do you do with all these people when you've got an inverted demographic pyramid which we've never had in human history before.

Richard Lowe: where there's too many old, more, much more old people than there are young people. How do the young people support the old people anymore.

Richard Lowe: These are that problem is a problem for the economists. But the technological problem of

Richard Lowe: how do you? How do you run a country? If your population is falling. AI and and other technologies, especially robotics and things, can solve that problem.

Trevor Sumner: Yeah, look, I mean, there's so many problems outlined in that demographic shift.

Trevor Sumner: Elder care is big one. I'm an investor in a company called Norbert health, which kind of like from 3 to from 3 feet away, can take all your vitals, your your blood pressure, your heart rate, your oxygenation. Things like that, and what that, you know helps is for geriatric care facilities to to better help

Trevor Sumner: care for the health of people. But they're going to live longer. How do you deal with Alzheimer's? How do you deal with mental acuity? I think we're going to get more care there? So hopefully the cost will go down. But then, to your point, like, you know, what do you do with the, you know, kind of leadership and and other things, and then like what actually changes that from 1.6 to 2.1. I mean.

Trevor Sumner: one could argue that in this age of potential abundance all the goods get cheaper because they're robotically produced. And you know you don't need truck drivers. So the cost of

Trevor Sumner: trucking delivery logistics falls through the floor. So everything gets cheaper. So you know, we don't need to spend 5 days a week working, because it's just not that kind of amount of work to do. So, okay, well, what do you do now that it's cheaper to live? You have more time. Maybe the answer is, you have children right, and you know one of the things in this country that you could argue is like, you know, we made it really expensive and difficult to have children right. Whether it's.

Trevor Sumner: you know, the cost of schooling, the cost of childcare, the the lack of tax credits, for you know, the middle and lower classes, and we could talk about policy, and I don't want to get into politics, but we've made it really expensive and difficult to have children. But what if all this makes it very easy to have children, that you have more time, and it's inexpensive. And then maybe we reverse the trend. So

Trevor Sumner: all these dynamics have huge, profound effects, right? Especially 1020 years in the future, and you know I think it's very easy to get caught in the trap of uncertainty. And oh, my God! The sky is falling when the reality is, we're really bad at predicting these things. So you got 2 choices. It's like I could just be a pessimist and say, the world is falling apart, and there's going to be nuclear winter and robot overlords, or Hey, it's going to be this like, you know.

Trevor Sumner: Utopian Nirvana, where you know, I can have as many kids as I want. I spend as much time with them, and I don't have to do much work. And again, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. The question that you have control over is like, What's your mental state in the in the near term? And so like.

Trevor Sumner: I like to be an optimist. I just find it's a better way to go through life. And there are terrible things happening in this world, less of them than ever before, arguably by most metrics. So you know, try and have a like, try and be part of the future. You know the best way to predict the future is to create it. So like, you know, you know, work on things that are exciting, bringing new things into into the future adopt these things, really understand them?

Trevor Sumner: You know, harness their potential. And hopefully, you know, keep the worries away and keep your focus on the good things.

Richard Lowe: Well, a lot of it's quite common now in the news is obviously taken advantage of by the the political parties fighting each other, and various other things going on. The algorithms.

Trevor Sumner: Engagement is engagement.

Richard Lowe: And it's of course, but when you look at it from a

Richard Lowe: statistics point of view, and from a rational point of view, I mean you go back 200 years, and there's no running water. There's no toilets. There's no there's diseases everywhere. I mean smallpox. If you ever look up smallpox on the Internet. Oh, my lord, that is not something you want. We eliminated it, and it was brutal. That elimination campaign was brutal.

Richard Lowe: Wow! It's tough to read. You know, quarantine not not like

Richard Lowe: the recent one we had, but these. These were involuntary quarantines and children being ripped from their parents and stuff. It's brutal.

Richard Lowe: But they eliminated smallpox.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, you go back further. You've got

Richard Lowe: barbarian hordes coming over the mountains and wiping out your civilization. I mean, these are things that people worried about. We've got things to worry about. But a lot of, especially here in the States, a lot of our problems are what I call 1st world problems.

Richard Lowe: Oh, my God, my cell phone's not working. I'm gonna die.

Richard Lowe: No, you're not gonna die.

Richard Lowe: You're not gonna die without your cell phone for a couple of days.

Trevor Sumner: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, we're much better off. And it doesn't mean we shouldn't be diligent about solving the world's problems, and and where there continues to be suffering, and yes, there's still a lot of it, because there are a lot of us.

Trevor Sumner: but but look look at what Bill Gates has done with his life, and how he's dedicated his life to solving things like toilets and malaria and things like that. And we and we have solutions there, and we can solve them in part because of the age of abundance and the fact that, you know we've created such such wealth

Trevor Sumner: from the accelerations that we've seen to date. And again, you can argue politically about, you know, concentration of wealth, and whether this can be government or philanthropists, and whether that's the right model. But the reality is, we're saving people from malaria. We're solving people from dysentery. And

Trevor Sumner: you know, that's that's pretty exciting. That's pretty.

Richard Lowe: And our kids don't have to suffer from 50 diseases that they used to have all the time that wiped out half the population every day.

Trevor Sumner: Yeah, I mean.

Trevor Sumner: you don't see kids with casts on their arm anymore, you know, you know, like people don't. They don't even break their arms. They have helmets like we didn't have helmets. I'm Gen. X. Which is the best generation for the record.

Richard Lowe: Of course, of course.

Trevor Sumner: You know, we you know, we were latchkey kids. We drank from the from the hose. We had to prepare our own meals. All those type of things. And I think, look there, there's some real discussions about

Trevor Sumner: mental laziness that are created by some of these tools and relying on them and and you know I can look at it myself. How much I rely on maps and how that affects. You know people's sense of direction. But

Trevor Sumner: you know there's just, you know everything's better. Almost everything's better like it's just easy to be caught in all the negativity of the day.

Richard Lowe: It is. And that's that's a positive note. It's good to end this on. I think that that as humanity, we've solved a lot of problems that if you had been back a hundred, even 200 years ago.

Richard Lowe: who could imagine

Richard Lowe: that we would have these solutions in place? Who could imagine nobody, not a single Science fiction author imagined the Internet or the mobile phone being ubiquitous, like it is.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. Dick Tracy had a little TV on this thing, but not everybody had a supercomputer literal supercomputer in their hand.

Richard Lowe: I mean, it's a it's a supercomputer better than the the old craze used to be. Imagine when quantum comes out and becomes common. Oh, my God!

Trevor Sumner: Yeah. Now, now, you've got the smartest person in the world

Trevor Sumner: at in your pocket available to answer any question, to analyze your health records to your point to help you create a plan to for self betterment, to help you create a better business, a great better marketing plan to update your website to help you in hiring all those things, and like what a wonderful world that is!

Richard Lowe: It is a wonderful world, and it's nothing to be afraid of. It might be something to be cautious about.

Richard Lowe: to be, to use, to make proper decisions. I mean, I'm I'm certainly not going to use AI, for example, to write for me.

Richard Lowe: for my for my clients.

Richard Lowe: That that would be silly. That's not what they're paying me for, but I'm going to use it to help. I just had a client that I have. I have over a hundred interviews.

Richard Lowe: Do you know how much work that would be to put together by hand? I just told told Aidas, okay, can you just put this together in some semblance of order, and it did.

Richard Lowe: and it took it like 30 min to chug through it all. But that's fine.

Trevor Sumner: Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And and you know, in in prepping for interviews like this, you know, read all the content about Richard Lowe and give me a set of questions that would be interesting that haven't been asked in any previous interviews.

Trevor Sumner: and it'll do it because it knows everything. So we just got to figure out. You know how to harness these things to think about that first.st If I knew the smartest person in the world who knew everything that's ever happened with relation to this topic. What would I ask them?

Trevor Sumner: And if you start with that mentality first, st

Trevor Sumner: it's amazing what you'll get out of these tools.

Richard Lowe: It's true. Well, that's a great note to end this on. Any final, any final words.

Trevor Sumner: No, I think this has been a great conversation. I appreciate you having me on I think, you know. Continue being an optimist.

Richard Lowe: Yep, yep. Well, thank you for appearing on the show. This has been the leaders in their stories, podcast I'm, Richard, Lowe, the writing king and ghostwriting. Guru. Thank you very much for coming.