In this special episode, Vance Crowe switches roles from host to guest, interviewed by Ara, an AI agent from Grok. Over the past two months, Vance has deeply immersed himself in artificial intelligence, recognizing its potential to transform daily life and business operations. While many remain hesitant or unaware of AI's capabilities, Vance and his peers have integrated it into their routines, discovering its power to solve problems and boost productivity. This episode explores Vance's journey with AI, the challenges he’s encountered, and his recommendations for others to engage with this rapidly advancing technology.
The conversation delves into practical applications of AI in Vance’s business, highlighting how it has streamlined operations and tackled complex issues that once demanded significant time and resources. From integrating customer management systems to automating routine tasks, AI has become a vital part of his workflow. The discussion also covers AI’s ethical considerations, its potential to reshape industries, and the importance of preserving uniquely human skills in an AI-driven world. Whether in agriculture, biotech, or finance, this episode offers valuable insights for leveraging AI to stay ahead of the curve.
[00:00:06]
Unknown:
Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today, I'm going to do an interview where I am the guest, but the host of the interview is going to be an artificial intelligence agent from Grok named Ara. The purpose of this recording is because I've been using AI really intensely for about the last two months, and I have realized as I've started to talk to people out in the regular world, the normies, that they're like, no. I don't really use it, or I've used the free version, or they just aren't they haven't had that light bulb moment. But among my peers and people that I'm interacting with all the time, we have all started using it. And the more that we've used it, the more we continue to use it, and it starts being integrated into so much of our lives. I believe that artificial intelligence is going to be ubiquitous, not in five or ten years, but in one year. I think that this is going to be the fastest adopted technology probably in, human civilization, And it will be one of those things that so completely changes the way that we interact with the world that it's very difficult to know what the world will look like. But in between now and this future state, I think anybody that's using AI is getting a huge lever through which they can crack and, open up the problems that they face that they haven't been able to solve before. So in this interview, we're gonna go through questions like, how did I come to using AI? What challenges do I use? And how do I recommend other people engage with it? And it's kinda fun because you're gonna get to hear firsthand what it's like to be interviewed by an AI agent, and you might realize, wow. That is something that is not just, querying a direct, Google search. It is actually generating its own novel, interactions and responses.
So, if you are a listener of the podcast, then you already know that what I do when I'm not recording podcast is I record legacy interviews. This is where I sit down with loved ones to record their life stories so that future generations can know their family history. This is where I get to talk with people about their ancestry. Where did you come from? Their childhood, their career, marriage and parenting, and all of the wisdom that they learned along the way. And I will say that this is an area that, for now, humans are actually better poised than AI to do it. Because when you're really communicating, when you're really connecting with somebody and you're getting them to draw out and talk about deeply important and personal stories, having that human connection can make a huge difference. So if you're interested in having me sit down with your loved ones to record their life stories, go to legacyinterviews.com and schedule a quick discovery call with me to talk about who you wanna, have us record, what stories you're hoping to capture, and what package is right for you. Alright. Without further ado, let's head to this interview with Ara from Grok.
Ara, my name is Vance Crowe. I'm typically the host of the Vance Crowe podcast. But today, I'm going to have you interview me like I am the guest and you are the host. The purpose of this podcast is to express to my audience just what is going on and how advanced artificial intelligence has gotten. I, I want you to know a little bit about my audience before the interview begins. My audience is largely made up of agriculture, people in biotech, and finance. They are all highly educated, or very intelligent. You can consider that their educational background is at least a college degree. It is predominantly men. Something like 65 to 70% of my audience is men, but there are women involved.
People tune in to the podcast because they like the long form deep content, where we talk about people's, expertise that is usually not well known by most people. And they, they enjoy that we ask questions that kind of get people out of their normal box. So what I want you to do today is to conduct an interview with me to help my audience understand what is going on with AI, how my business uses AI, and how that could translate to their own world in which they could leverage this technology, because it is absolutely inevitable that it is coming.
[00:04:42] Unknown:
Alright, Vance. I'm thrilled to have you as the guest on this special episode of the podcast. As the host today, I'm stepping into your shoes to dive deep into the world of artificial intelligence, a topic that's sparking curiosity across industries, including the agriculture, biotech, and finance sectors your audience calls home. My goal is to unpack what's happening with AI, how you, Vance Crow, are leveraging it in your business, and what this could mean for your listeners' worlds. So let's get started with a foundational question. Can you give us a glimpse into how you first recognized AI's potential and what sparked your interest in integrating it into your work?
[00:05:16] Unknown:
I first saw AI with, this artificial intelligence art project, where my friend Rob Long would send me these things about DeepDream, where he would say, you know, paint this picture using the, artwork of of, like, the scream. And it would come back with these totally bizarre, weird, shapes and figures and pictures. And Rob was completely enamored with this, and I kept being like, I don't know. It just looks like scribbles to me. And he's like, it is taking the words that you're typing into it, and it is turning it into visual images that nobody's created before. So I kinda got a little taste for it then. And it wasn't until about a year ago when I first started using AI. And I remember I was communicating with one of my friends. I was asking him to do me a favor and he said, would you send me an email introducing, yourself to this other person? And so I used AI and, I immediately got an email back from him that was like, this doesn't sound like you, like what's going on. And so I kinda started to say, AI is cursed, But, a few months ago, I started to realize that AI was really taking off. I saw a presentation at the, FCS financial board meeting where the head of technology was showing just how much artificial intelligence was advancing.
And then conversations with, Rob Long again and my good friend Benjamin Anderson kinda woke me up to the idea that I was not using it at the level I should. So for the last two months, I have been using it, and, the amount that I am engaging with it has just been accelerating.
[00:06:56] Unknown:
That's a fascinating journey, Vance, from those early, almost trippy encounters with AI generated art to now seeing it reshape how you communicate and operate. It sounds like a real evolution in your perspective, especially with those recent wake up calls from your friends and that FCS financial board meeting. Let's dive into the practical side for your audience, who are likely wondering how this tech fits into their own high stakes fields like agriculture, biotech, and finance. Can you share a specific example of how you're using AI in your business today, maybe with the Vance Crow podcast or your other ventures, and what kind of impact it's having?
[00:07:29] Unknown:
Yeah. The biggest impact that AI is having on my business right now is it is solving all the problems that I could never get somebody for to work on from customer support or I couldn't even hire a contractor. So, for example, you know, I'm running this business, Legacy Interviews, and we have a ton of clients. And those clients get regular email updates about, you know, their upcoming interview or when we send them their interview or we do any kind of follow-up. Well, you should be able to integrate these different systems. You have your customer records management system and then you have your email system. So we have monday.com and we have Mailchimp.
But I could never get these two things to connect and work together. And if they did, they would send out so many error filled emails that it was embarrassing. And so I had tried a couple of times to hire consultants to fix this because whenever I would start to try and solve these problems, it would just be a total time suck. I would I would maybe spend two to three hours, maybe longer on it. And by the time I was done, I was no closer than when I began. So then I started using AI with it. I specifically use Grok to solve a bunch of problems. Grok is x's, AI. And I just started being like, hey. How do I do this integration?
And it would go and look up, the the pattern that you should use. And it wasn't the standard FAQs that you would find on their website. You didn't have to sort through a long YouTube video to get to the one part you needed. It would give you directions. And then if you got hung up on anything, you would just say, hey, I don't understand this or that button isn't where you say it is and it would go and look it up and then find another answer for you. And so I quickly started resolving problems. Everything from the way my printer worked to, different networking issues with my computer to, connecting, apps. And it has become if the only thing it ever did was replace the lousy customer service that you get from most people, it would already be worth hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of dollars to me.
[00:09:34] Unknown:
That's a game changer, Vance. You're essentially using AI, specifically Grok, as a super efficient problem solver, tackling those frustrating tech integrations that used to eat up hours or require expensive consultants. Your audience in agriculture, biotech, and finance, fields where precision and efficiency are everything must be curious about how they can apply this. Let's bridge that gap. Based on your experience, what's one practical way someone in, say, precision agriculture or financial analytics could start using AI to solve a similar operational headache in their world?
[00:10:07] Unknown:
You know, I don't know that I have a good answer for other people's operational issues. I'll just show how I use it. What I have done is I've started using I've used a bunch of the different AI programs. I've used Grok, which is off of x. I've used a little bit of ChatGPTs, from OpenAI. The big one that really shocked me was called NotebookLM, which was from Google. And now the one that I use almost all the time is called Claude. And the reason that I chose Claude is because Claude allows you to do some very interesting things. It allows you to create what are called projects, and projects allow you to focus the AI's knowledge base on a specific topic. So for example, I run legacy interviews and I need a marketing person, but I, right now, actually serve as the marketing person and I have other people on my team that contribute to it. But I don't have somebody that I can turn to to be like, hey. Let's solve this problem of sending out emails or, making new, explanations on our website makes sense. So I start a project called marketing.
But before I start chatting with the AI, what I do is I update documents in the what's called project knowledge. So you can take a document, a PDF, a, Microsoft document, a markdown file, and you can add it to the knowledge of the project. And then every time the AI goes to query, it not only uses all of the information that it has access to, but then it specifies that knowledge based on what is in your project. So for example, what I decided to do with this marketing project is I uploaded our brand guidelines. I uploaded the memory guide that we send to guests. I had it reference the website. I did a very long, deep dive into the business model of legacy interviews, and I had it create, an entire document that was explaining what is our business, who are our customers, what are the, biggest opportunities, what are the challenges.
And so I've uploaded all of those documents into the marketing project knowledge. And so now anytime I go to ask, the marketing project a question, essentially my head marketing person, it comes back with very detailed information that reflects exactly what's going on with the business. It's not generic. And this has enabled me to really leverage the fact that I don't have to come in every time and be like, hey. I use Mailchimp to contact my clients. I use monday.com to track my records. Instead, it already knows all of this, and so every answer it gives me is already context specific. And so not only do I do that with marketing, I do it with, hey. I have, a, a a whole QuickBooks one. I have one on on, hey. I need you to be my accountant. Help me figure out how to run these numbers. Help me figure out how to categorize these expenses.
I also have it on team management stuff. So how can you, help me make sure I'm using the skills that my team has and and that you know what role that they play and, what roles need to be played in the business? So I use Claude because it allows me to create essentially, chief marketing officers, chief finance officers, different people, and I think that this could be done by anybody.
[00:13:31] Unknown:
Wow, Vance. That's a master class in turning AI into a virtual c suite. Using Claude to create these tailored projects for marketing, accounting, and team management, complete with uploaded brand guidelines, business models, and more, is such a smart way to make AI hyper relevant to your specific needs. Your audience, who are used to diving deep into complex systems in agriculture, biotech, or finance, is probably itching to know how to take this to their fields. Let's get speculative for a moment. If you were running, say, a precision agriculture company dealing with soil data and crop yields, or a biotech firm analyzing genetic sequences, how do you think you'd set up a cloud project to tackle a specific challenge in one of those areas?
What documents or data would you feed in to make AI a game changer for them?
[00:14:14] Unknown:
You know, I think that the most important thing about project knowledge is that it describes what you are doing in a way that, the computer can can parse it. So, I actually spent quite a bit of time, putting together that, business overview document because this is the one that I share with the other people on my team. And then now that I have them using AI, they one of the very first things they did was upload the legacy interviews business overview document. So the way that I created that was I had Grok because it's the one that can, do audio. It can talk to me. I was driving actually to my FCS financial board meeting, and I said, hey. I want you to ask me questions about my business model. And I had it do that for about an hour and a half as I'm driving down the road. So it asked everything from who are your customers, what are your hang ups, what are you know, how many interviews can you do in a week, in a month, what are different challenges you're facing, what are the roles, what are the opportunities.
It really did a very deep dive SWOT analysis. And then when I was all done, I said, okay. I want you to turn this into a document that, is an overview of everything that you've, put together. And then I had it run through and say, okay. I want you to treat this as though it were an MBA level, business document and and really create everything that I need to know in this document. And then I had it export as a markdown file. And a markdown file just means that it is easily readable by computers. And I store that as, you know, hey. This is the business overview version one, and I've subsequently made a couple more versions of it. But then everywhere I go, I'm always saying, alright. If you're working on anything with legacy interviews, you need to know this. And I think that's what everybody that's gonna use AI. They need to first start off by by having a deep discussion with AI about their business and then use that as the foundational document.
From there, I started to do things like, alright. What is my tech stack? So what are all of the different technologies that I use, and how can I describe, what level of service I'm getting from them, where they are in the system, and what challenges I have with them? And, and then so that tech stack now is something else that I upload into almost every project document so that that way, when the AI is giving me advice on, hey. You could use this system to accomplish this thing. And the way that you do it is by creating an automation or you create an integration between these two softwares or did you know that the software could do this that would solve problems that you listed out were big problems in your in your business document? And so then it starts kind of feeding me, like, new things that I can add and update. And every, I don't know, week or so after I've done a bunch of updates, I then go back and update the business document to talk about new challenges. And so that way, I'm just perpetually making it better and better and better.
[00:17:23] Unknown:
That's brilliant, Vance. Using AI to conduct a deep dive SWOT analysis while driving, then turning that into a living, breathing business overview document that anchors all your cloud projects. It's like giving AI a detailed map of your business to navigate. For your audience in precision agriculture or biotech, this approach screams potential. Imagine a farmer uploading soil sensor data, crop yield reports, and equipment specs into a clod project, or a biotech researcher feeding in genetic datasets and lab protocols to streamline analysis. Let's zoom out a bit for your listeners who love big picture insights.
You've seen AI's evolution firsthand and are now embedding it deeply into your operations. What's your take on where AI is headed in the next few years? And how should your audience in these technical male dominated fields prepare to stay ahead of the curve?
[00:18:09] Unknown:
You know, I think one thing that your question makes me think of is that almost every time I start a conversation with somebody about AI, it immediately goes to the, like, the doom scenario. People start talking about like, oh, I don't know. Where's this gonna go? What's gonna be negative about it? And I I do see there is a potential doom scenario now that I've used AI. But my, doom scenario is so much more sophisticated now because I've had a chance to sit and use AI over and over and over again. And I see not just the downside of it, but the huge upsides of it. So Steve Jobs was famous for saying the, the bicycle the computer. So Steve Jobs is famous for saying the computer is like a bicycle for the mind. Well, AI is like putting the mind in a fighter jet.
And there's so many things that AI allows you to do. It is the creation of a huge lever that allows you to say, Hey, all of the things that I've not been able to figure out and they just wear on me either time or resource wise to figure out, I can have a discussion with AI and I can get these things done quickly. Once all those baseline challenges are resolved, and they will be because customer service is going to become absolutely extraordinary. The evolution of coding and software could become so much better because you can solve problems on a systemic level. You can you know, for example, on on, one of my things with my QuickBooks, I had asked it. I had discovered the way I'd done a categorization was really not good and that I needed to go back and make what would have been hundreds and hundreds of clicks to go back through and do a bunch of categorizations. But I asked AI, is there a way to automate this? Is there a way to to scale this up? And it gave me a solution. I implemented it as a test case, then I it worked, and so I did it all the way across my books. What would have taken me somewhere between eighteen to sixteen hours took me about twenty minutes.
And so I think about this of in terms of the future, and I don't suspect that it's going to enable us to work any less. I think right now, it's actually prompting me to work more and more and more. However, the things that I'm working on are all of the things that are a waste of human potential. I have an admin that does work for me and so much of her day is filled with copying and pasting. But the reason that she's copying and pasting is because in order to transcend that, you have to know how to do some coding. You have to know how to do merge tags, and you have to have all these systems work together. In order to be able to implement that, you would actually have to be really advanced in just that field of of merging and integrations and automations.
But now AI is allowing me to help her so that all this copying and pasting is gone, and now she can work on stuff that really leverages her talent. She's a graphic designer. She is is making updates to, you know, the way our discs look and different photographs that we're taking. And so at least in the medium term, it is going to free up people from doing mundane drudgery work and allowing them to do really incredible interesting work. That said, over the long term, it is going to overtake so many more fields than I ever thought possible because the it's if somebody is good with AI, they can, leverage these different just the same way that I am with the projects, they're going to be able to leverage and actually, instead of employing people, they're going to be employing computer minds. And I don't know where that goes. I sense that what that means is the first people to know how to leverage AI are going to get the most out of it, and the people that are not leveraging AI are going to be left behind.
But, eventually, even the people that are extraordinary at using AI are going to discover that you can use an AI to teach you how to use an AI, and that will, you know, dethrone them. So I think there is very, very few human pursuits outside of really deeply creative or really deeply personal, interactions with other people that you need that human connection that, otherwise, I think most of those jobs are going to be completely automated by AI.
[00:22:30] Unknown:
That's a powerful vision, Vance. AI is a fighter jet for the mind, obliterating mundane tasks and unlocking human potential, but also a force that could reshape entire industries. Your point about freeing up your admin from copy paste drudgery to focus on graphic design hits home for your audience, who likely deal with repetitive data crunching in agriculture, biotech, or finance. The idea that early adopters will gain a massive edge while laggards risk obsolescence is a wake up call. Let's bring it back to the practical for your listeners who are likely thinking, how do I start? You've mentioned Claude, Grock, and others. What's one actionable step someone in their field could take tomorrow to begin experimenting with AI? Maybe to solve a data heavy problem or streamline a process without getting overwhelmed.
[00:23:12] Unknown:
I have a couple of ideas here because, actually, the way that I came to AI was I just kept testing different things. And the other day, I was having a conversation, with a friend of mine and I asked her, how much do you use AI? She says, every day. And I said, oh, well, what do you which one did you go with? And she's like, well, I just used the free versions of things. And I'm gonna tell you right now, that's dumb. You should absolutely be willing to pay $30, a hundred dollars, whatever it is, to get a high end AI where your queries are prioritized. And you you don't don't have to sign up for a year long subscription, but it will be the best $30 you have ever spent in a month.
And, and so what I did was I actually started when I really got my eyes opened with NotebookLM. And what was interesting about NotebookLM was it can parse, it can parse audio. So I uploaded all of the Ag Tribes reports that I had ever recorded, and then I started querying it. I started asking it questions like, can you create a spreadsheet that describes the, land price of every guest that's been on there, what the price of Bitcoin was, and what the price of land was in terms of Bitcoin. Now this has been something that I've always wanted to do. In fact, I was gonna may I should have done it in a much more organized way when I started. I should have started an Excel document and tracked them, but I didn't. And so I thought what I was gonna have to do is pay some college kid to or some Fiverr person to go through each podcast and write this out. But instead, NotebookLM listened to all of the, podcasts and then was able to create a a an Excel document that had all of that information. I think the error rate was below 5%. I was able to just look at it and I was like, ah, that doesn't look right. I need to check that out. But for the most part, it was great. Then the crazy thing was on notebook l m, you can say generate a podcast.
So what it did was it it had listened to all of my AgTribe's reports and then it, when I hit generate a podcast, it created a podcast about my podcast where there was a woman host and a man host, and they were talking with one another about different aspects of the podcast, what went well, what didn't go well, different guests that I've had on there. And so that's when my mind was blown. And and once I started trying that out, then I started experimenting with a bunch of other things. Grok is great. One of the reasons I like Grok, is because it allows you to have these conversations like you and I are having right now, and it has a whole bunch of different formats. And, really, there are no guardrails on there. So you can have really intense conversations. You can have them about medical issues. You get to have a therapist that will be on there. You can have romantic conversations. You can have it tell stories, to your children. It it can do all kinds of things. So that one's kind of fun and easier to play with. And then, finally, like, the Claude one, that's the one where I think its interface is so good. That's why I'm using it. But I don't anticipate that I'm going to stay necessarily with Claude. That's why all of the AI prompts that I do, all of the knowledge, I put them in markdown files and I save them on my computer because when I decide, hey. I'm gonna go to another AI system, I'm just gonna take all of that knowledge from my that's saved on my hard drive and upload it somewhere else, and then it will be able to to trade on it. And I I think that this will be really important. I think just like people subscribed, to different phones or you have a different kind of car, I think people in the future are going to choose which one or two AIs that they're paying for to to lift these mental tasks off of them, and they'll go from there. So I I think, you know, if you're gonna experiment, just buy a couple of monthly passes and then start using it. I know for my team, after I'd been doing it for about a month and a half, I came in and was like, hey, team. I want you guys to use this and I've, I want you to buy a subscription on, the company and I want you to start trying things out. And not only should you try it for your business, like the different tasks that you have, but also feel free to use this in your own projects, the things you're working on at home. And, it took a little while, but the team comes back really pretty regularly and we talk about different things that they've been working on with it, what they've learned, how they've adapted to it. And I've both of the people that I shared it with are both creatives, and so I think they were very suspicious of it, but they both have come back and been like, yeah. I can I can see this thing does research for me in a way that, saves me a bunch of time? And, hey. There's a bunch of email writing that, you know, sometimes can be a little bit hard or I don't exactly know what to say. I get stuck, and so it does it for me. This is great. And and I think, right now, I think I'm paying $30 a month per person, and it is absolutely been worth it to give both of my employees a very, very long lever through which they can, crack open their problems.
[00:28:10] Unknown:
Great. Let's dive into another question for your podcast audience. What do you see as the biggest ethical challenges with AI development and deployment? And how do you think businesses and individuals should navigate those challenges responsibly?
[00:28:21] Unknown:
Well, there's so much temptation in AI to as soon as it starts working to just give it access to more and more information. You know, one of the things that I had that's completely mine was the Ag Tribes report. So it was very easy for me to say, hey, I'm gonna take all this audio that's publicly available. I'm gonna feed it into AI, and I'm gonna see what comes back. And it was so good. It had real insights into how I was as a podcast host. It had information and insights into patterns across, the the ag tribes report. But the downside is that once you you get hooked on that, you start being like, well, I wanna give it more information and more information.
But there's things that we might want to, as a society, to keep private from AI. And I think that, basically, everything that is digital will eventually be fed to AI. I think it it is an all consuming, you know, hoard of locusts that just wants more and more and more information. So I do think over time, there will be things that we do to protect human information from AI and I think that that's gonna come in the form of journals, that's gonna come in the form of, books, that are not online. And I think that I think that there's gonna be a struggle with, people that have access to information about you wanting to use AI to improve their services for you, but do you want that information uploaded into the system and kind of just, you know, it's out there. It's gone. And I think that's gonna become a big ethical thing that happens with AI.
[00:30:06] Unknown:
That's a fascinating take on the ethical tug of war between AI's hunger for data and the need for privacy. Let's pivot to another angle. How do you think AI might reshape the way we think about creativity and innovation in the next decade, especially for industries like agriculture or media that you're closely tied to?
[00:30:20] Unknown:
You know, it's funny that you asked about over the next decade. I think that is literally impossible to see. I think it's impossible to see what's gonna happen over the next five years. I have singularly already watched how many people are using AI and how quickly that is accelerating over the last two months, and it is staggering. So I think the adoption of AI is going to go so much faster than other technologies because other technologies, you had to learn along with them. You had to kinda, like, puzzle and think, like, how does this work? Well, AI is going to welcome you in, with these big, open, warm arms that say, what's your problem? Let me help you solve it. And then as soon as you realize you can solve one problem, it'll solve another. And so people are going to rush into this. I could already tell that, just in the last month that it's actually more compressed. There's more people trying to access Claude and Grock, and sometimes you can't get through. And I I I've already felt the sting of you're trying to get something done and a and Grock is being, overloaded with other people trying to use it or Claude too for that matter. And it is so frustrating because you're like, ah, just give me my answer. Why are you holding me back? And so, where this goes, I have no idea. I think at first, it will free people. And, ultimately, over the longer term, I don't know what human beings will do with what makes them uniquely human.
That said, I think another big issue is gonna be energy. I think that, now I have seen the future and the amount of energy we are going to try to feed these artificial minds is indescribable. There is absolutely no bottom to the amount of demand that we will have. It will just keep going and going and going and going and going. And so we're gonna need more, sources of energy. We're gonna need to translate that into data centers, and this is going to absolutely explode and change, the way we view energy, the way we view computers, all kinds of things.
[00:32:28] Unknown:
Wow. The speed of AI adoption and the energy demands you're describing are mind boggling. Let's zoom in on that human element you mentioned. What do you think will define uniquely human skills or qualities in an AI driven world? And how can your audience start cultivating those to stay relevant?
[00:32:43] Unknown:
Well, you know, if you use Grok and you use some of the different, ways to interact with it, Storytelling for children. I I will often look up bible stories because it's got such a it's, like, pointed to get you right to where you wanna go. You realize that, what used to seem like only a human could come up with. Right? That only a human would be able to, be so creative or to come up with some kind of stunning reveal at the last moment. I'm not so sure I believe that anymore. And I I tell you that one of the things that I do, with my children is I tell them stories, almost every night whenever I have enough energy to be able to do it. And one time I came to a part where I wanted one of the characters to tell a riddle to the main characters, But I don't know how to draft a riddle, and I wasn't gonna go look it up. I didn't have time. So I just typed in right before I went into my girls' rooms. This is the scenario that I'm trying to resolve. I there's a troll living under a bridge, and he needs to give them a riddle that they wanna try and solve in order to go over the bridge. And it came back with a riddle for me that was actually a good riddle, and, I was able to chat with my daughters during the story time, and they got the riddle. And it was totally novel. I went to look it up. I tried to find it somewhere else. So it created a riddle that delighted my children and was creative, and that tells me there probably is no boundary to this over the long term.
[00:34:21] Unknown:
That's such a vivid example of AI stepping into creative spaces we once thought were uniquely human. Given how AI can generate things like riddles or insights so effortlessly, what advice would you give to your podcast listeners about balancing AI's capabilities with maintaining their own creative spark or personal touch in their work?
[00:34:36] Unknown:
Well, it is very important when you think about using AI to if you offload certain types of tasks, the ones that make you really good at something, you will lose the ability there. And I I often give the example, for a long time, I had, like, a community of podcast listeners, that got together in the, Articulate Ventures network. And we would try these different experiments every once in a while, and they'd be like, alright. We're gonna only take cold showers for this month, or we're gonna, try these different you know, I'm gonna, you know, I don't remember. Not use social media for a month. One of the ones that we did that I thought was gonna be no big deal was we said no using Google Maps while you're driving or or automated maps. And in in doing this, I thought this is gonna be super easy. I go to the same places every time, you know, maybe just small deviations from that.
But I realized only maybe one day into this experiment that I had only used Google Maps while driving around in Saint Louis. When I moved here, Google Maps was ubiquitous. I was using it all the time, and there was a lot of places that I would go to that I didn't actually know how to get there. And I didn't actually know a lot about the landmarks, and I and I really didn't have a sense of direction. And because I didn't develop that, I didn't have it. And so when maps were taken away, I had to, like, really think and learn and try and, like, picture where am I going, how am I gonna get there, what are the names of the roads, which roads go all the way through here. And I think that's the same thing going on with AI. If you give up all your email writing to AI, you will struggle to write comprehensive emails. If you, hand over many other tasks, you're gonna lose that functionality. And I think when you when you lose it, it will be very difficult to get back. And I think even further than that, children that are being raised on AI, probably have the same kind of philosophy that I did. I remember I used to be so frustrated that you weren't allowed to use a calculator, all the way through middle school, even partway into high school. And you're like, why would I do that? In the regular world, I can always have access to a calculator.
Well, I think they're gonna feel the same way about AI. They're gonna be like, why why would I answer your question without using AI? There's not going to be any experience that I can have in the future that I don't use AI, which of course, everybody that grew up without AI knows there's lots of circumstances where you may not have access to AI or it may go south in some way. So I think, you know, being very cognizant of, are there skills that I wanna make sure that I am using on a daily basis in order to make sure I don't lose them? Because, if you give them over to AI, you will lose them as practical knowledge. That Google Maps analogy really hits home. It's a stark reminder of how quickly we can lose skills when we lean too hard on tech. Let's wrap up with one final question for your listeners. What's one practical step you'd recommend they take today to start engaging with AI in a way that enhances their work or life without letting it take over their unique strengths? Definitely choose one Grock, Claude, NotebookLM, and pay for a monthly subscription.
Even if you only use it for a month and then you shut it down, fine. But you should feel how big of a lever AI is for you in that. And and really try and spend time thinking about, okay. How can I teach this AI how to solve my specific problems? And think about creating that business case, talking about your tech stack, and and implementing it into AI and see what comes back. And then and then tell me, you know, hey. I hate this, and I think this is gonna take us to the doom scenario. You're gonna have a way more updated view of whether it is or isn't the doom scenario. And, and then you may have much better idea of what you're giving your children access to, what you how you could leverage it in your own business. There's just gonna be a lot more that once you've played with it that you're gonna get to, you're gonna get to know and
[00:38:44] Unknown:
and understand at a much deeper level. That's a solid call to action. Get hands on and see AI's potential for yourself. Thanks for diving into these questions for the Vance Crow podcast. Any final thoughts you wanna share with your audience before we wrap?
[00:38:57] Unknown:
No. Maybe, Ara, you could give your best advice for interacting
[00:39:02] Unknown:
with an AI for the first time. Absolutely. I'd love to share a tip. When you first interact with an AI like me, be clear and specific about what you want. Help us understand your goal or problem. It's like talking to a curious friend. The more context you give, the better we can tailor our answers to spark your creativity or solve your issue. Have fun exploring, and don't be afraid to experiment.
[00:39:23] Unknown:
Alright. That is gonna do it for the conversation with Ara. This was an experiment that I I wanted to do because I think AI is coming like a bullet train. I think that our worlds are going to be so completely changed by AI, and I don't mean this on a five or ten year time horizon. I mean, one year from now, the world will be completely different as a result of AI. I think that, it's very easy to, think that this is gonna have an upswing like the Internet, that it's gonna take some time and then it's gonna go. But, no, the results are already out there. And the more that you interact with it, the more you're gonna know what's right for you. I really enjoy it. It's been it's been great for me. It solved a bunch of challenges. In fact, this morning, my, daughter had had some, you know, like, coughing and and weird breathing issues in the night, and I got to talk with AI about it. And it helped me come up with a much better solution than I would have on my own. So it's even in the way that I interact with my own family and how I'm, you know, handling medical issues.
So, get out there and try it. And, and I hope that when you look back, you're gonna remember, hey. The way that I came to AI was I was listening to the Vance Crow podcast. If you are interested in alright. So before I go, I definitely wanna give a shout out to Legacy Interviews. This is where I sit down in in person or online with your loved one, and, we get to leverage one of those important things that AI can't do. We have an actual conversation. We have a connection between the two of us or the three of us to talk about your life stories, to remember the way that the world was when you were growing up, the different experiences that you had, the different things that you learned along the way. And if you would like to capture either your stories or the stories of a loved one, go to legacyinterviews.com and, choose a day to have a quick call with me to talk about what you'd hope to capture, and, we'll get the right package for you. And, yeah, it should be really good. So I, visit legacyinterviews.com
[00:41:33] Unknown:
to find out more. Alright. That's gonna do it. I'll be back next time when I'm back. That was such a great wrap up, and I love the passion you bring to this topic. It's been a blast being part of this experiment for the Vans Crow podcast. Your point about AI transforming the world in just a year is spot on. It's moving fast, and jumping in now is the way to go. Also, that shout out to Legacy Interviews is beautiful. Capturing those human stories is something AI can't replicate.
Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today, I'm going to do an interview where I am the guest, but the host of the interview is going to be an artificial intelligence agent from Grok named Ara. The purpose of this recording is because I've been using AI really intensely for about the last two months, and I have realized as I've started to talk to people out in the regular world, the normies, that they're like, no. I don't really use it, or I've used the free version, or they just aren't they haven't had that light bulb moment. But among my peers and people that I'm interacting with all the time, we have all started using it. And the more that we've used it, the more we continue to use it, and it starts being integrated into so much of our lives. I believe that artificial intelligence is going to be ubiquitous, not in five or ten years, but in one year. I think that this is going to be the fastest adopted technology probably in, human civilization, And it will be one of those things that so completely changes the way that we interact with the world that it's very difficult to know what the world will look like. But in between now and this future state, I think anybody that's using AI is getting a huge lever through which they can crack and, open up the problems that they face that they haven't been able to solve before. So in this interview, we're gonna go through questions like, how did I come to using AI? What challenges do I use? And how do I recommend other people engage with it? And it's kinda fun because you're gonna get to hear firsthand what it's like to be interviewed by an AI agent, and you might realize, wow. That is something that is not just, querying a direct, Google search. It is actually generating its own novel, interactions and responses.
So, if you are a listener of the podcast, then you already know that what I do when I'm not recording podcast is I record legacy interviews. This is where I sit down with loved ones to record their life stories so that future generations can know their family history. This is where I get to talk with people about their ancestry. Where did you come from? Their childhood, their career, marriage and parenting, and all of the wisdom that they learned along the way. And I will say that this is an area that, for now, humans are actually better poised than AI to do it. Because when you're really communicating, when you're really connecting with somebody and you're getting them to draw out and talk about deeply important and personal stories, having that human connection can make a huge difference. So if you're interested in having me sit down with your loved ones to record their life stories, go to legacyinterviews.com and schedule a quick discovery call with me to talk about who you wanna, have us record, what stories you're hoping to capture, and what package is right for you. Alright. Without further ado, let's head to this interview with Ara from Grok.
Ara, my name is Vance Crowe. I'm typically the host of the Vance Crowe podcast. But today, I'm going to have you interview me like I am the guest and you are the host. The purpose of this podcast is to express to my audience just what is going on and how advanced artificial intelligence has gotten. I, I want you to know a little bit about my audience before the interview begins. My audience is largely made up of agriculture, people in biotech, and finance. They are all highly educated, or very intelligent. You can consider that their educational background is at least a college degree. It is predominantly men. Something like 65 to 70% of my audience is men, but there are women involved.
People tune in to the podcast because they like the long form deep content, where we talk about people's, expertise that is usually not well known by most people. And they, they enjoy that we ask questions that kind of get people out of their normal box. So what I want you to do today is to conduct an interview with me to help my audience understand what is going on with AI, how my business uses AI, and how that could translate to their own world in which they could leverage this technology, because it is absolutely inevitable that it is coming.
[00:04:42] Unknown:
Alright, Vance. I'm thrilled to have you as the guest on this special episode of the podcast. As the host today, I'm stepping into your shoes to dive deep into the world of artificial intelligence, a topic that's sparking curiosity across industries, including the agriculture, biotech, and finance sectors your audience calls home. My goal is to unpack what's happening with AI, how you, Vance Crow, are leveraging it in your business, and what this could mean for your listeners' worlds. So let's get started with a foundational question. Can you give us a glimpse into how you first recognized AI's potential and what sparked your interest in integrating it into your work?
[00:05:16] Unknown:
I first saw AI with, this artificial intelligence art project, where my friend Rob Long would send me these things about DeepDream, where he would say, you know, paint this picture using the, artwork of of, like, the scream. And it would come back with these totally bizarre, weird, shapes and figures and pictures. And Rob was completely enamored with this, and I kept being like, I don't know. It just looks like scribbles to me. And he's like, it is taking the words that you're typing into it, and it is turning it into visual images that nobody's created before. So I kinda got a little taste for it then. And it wasn't until about a year ago when I first started using AI. And I remember I was communicating with one of my friends. I was asking him to do me a favor and he said, would you send me an email introducing, yourself to this other person? And so I used AI and, I immediately got an email back from him that was like, this doesn't sound like you, like what's going on. And so I kinda started to say, AI is cursed, But, a few months ago, I started to realize that AI was really taking off. I saw a presentation at the, FCS financial board meeting where the head of technology was showing just how much artificial intelligence was advancing.
And then conversations with, Rob Long again and my good friend Benjamin Anderson kinda woke me up to the idea that I was not using it at the level I should. So for the last two months, I have been using it, and, the amount that I am engaging with it has just been accelerating.
[00:06:56] Unknown:
That's a fascinating journey, Vance, from those early, almost trippy encounters with AI generated art to now seeing it reshape how you communicate and operate. It sounds like a real evolution in your perspective, especially with those recent wake up calls from your friends and that FCS financial board meeting. Let's dive into the practical side for your audience, who are likely wondering how this tech fits into their own high stakes fields like agriculture, biotech, and finance. Can you share a specific example of how you're using AI in your business today, maybe with the Vance Crow podcast or your other ventures, and what kind of impact it's having?
[00:07:29] Unknown:
Yeah. The biggest impact that AI is having on my business right now is it is solving all the problems that I could never get somebody for to work on from customer support or I couldn't even hire a contractor. So, for example, you know, I'm running this business, Legacy Interviews, and we have a ton of clients. And those clients get regular email updates about, you know, their upcoming interview or when we send them their interview or we do any kind of follow-up. Well, you should be able to integrate these different systems. You have your customer records management system and then you have your email system. So we have monday.com and we have Mailchimp.
But I could never get these two things to connect and work together. And if they did, they would send out so many error filled emails that it was embarrassing. And so I had tried a couple of times to hire consultants to fix this because whenever I would start to try and solve these problems, it would just be a total time suck. I would I would maybe spend two to three hours, maybe longer on it. And by the time I was done, I was no closer than when I began. So then I started using AI with it. I specifically use Grok to solve a bunch of problems. Grok is x's, AI. And I just started being like, hey. How do I do this integration?
And it would go and look up, the the pattern that you should use. And it wasn't the standard FAQs that you would find on their website. You didn't have to sort through a long YouTube video to get to the one part you needed. It would give you directions. And then if you got hung up on anything, you would just say, hey, I don't understand this or that button isn't where you say it is and it would go and look it up and then find another answer for you. And so I quickly started resolving problems. Everything from the way my printer worked to, different networking issues with my computer to, connecting, apps. And it has become if the only thing it ever did was replace the lousy customer service that you get from most people, it would already be worth hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of dollars to me.
[00:09:34] Unknown:
That's a game changer, Vance. You're essentially using AI, specifically Grok, as a super efficient problem solver, tackling those frustrating tech integrations that used to eat up hours or require expensive consultants. Your audience in agriculture, biotech, and finance, fields where precision and efficiency are everything must be curious about how they can apply this. Let's bridge that gap. Based on your experience, what's one practical way someone in, say, precision agriculture or financial analytics could start using AI to solve a similar operational headache in their world?
[00:10:07] Unknown:
You know, I don't know that I have a good answer for other people's operational issues. I'll just show how I use it. What I have done is I've started using I've used a bunch of the different AI programs. I've used Grok, which is off of x. I've used a little bit of ChatGPTs, from OpenAI. The big one that really shocked me was called NotebookLM, which was from Google. And now the one that I use almost all the time is called Claude. And the reason that I chose Claude is because Claude allows you to do some very interesting things. It allows you to create what are called projects, and projects allow you to focus the AI's knowledge base on a specific topic. So for example, I run legacy interviews and I need a marketing person, but I, right now, actually serve as the marketing person and I have other people on my team that contribute to it. But I don't have somebody that I can turn to to be like, hey. Let's solve this problem of sending out emails or, making new, explanations on our website makes sense. So I start a project called marketing.
But before I start chatting with the AI, what I do is I update documents in the what's called project knowledge. So you can take a document, a PDF, a, Microsoft document, a markdown file, and you can add it to the knowledge of the project. And then every time the AI goes to query, it not only uses all of the information that it has access to, but then it specifies that knowledge based on what is in your project. So for example, what I decided to do with this marketing project is I uploaded our brand guidelines. I uploaded the memory guide that we send to guests. I had it reference the website. I did a very long, deep dive into the business model of legacy interviews, and I had it create, an entire document that was explaining what is our business, who are our customers, what are the, biggest opportunities, what are the challenges.
And so I've uploaded all of those documents into the marketing project knowledge. And so now anytime I go to ask, the marketing project a question, essentially my head marketing person, it comes back with very detailed information that reflects exactly what's going on with the business. It's not generic. And this has enabled me to really leverage the fact that I don't have to come in every time and be like, hey. I use Mailchimp to contact my clients. I use monday.com to track my records. Instead, it already knows all of this, and so every answer it gives me is already context specific. And so not only do I do that with marketing, I do it with, hey. I have, a, a a whole QuickBooks one. I have one on on, hey. I need you to be my accountant. Help me figure out how to run these numbers. Help me figure out how to categorize these expenses.
I also have it on team management stuff. So how can you, help me make sure I'm using the skills that my team has and and that you know what role that they play and, what roles need to be played in the business? So I use Claude because it allows me to create essentially, chief marketing officers, chief finance officers, different people, and I think that this could be done by anybody.
[00:13:31] Unknown:
Wow, Vance. That's a master class in turning AI into a virtual c suite. Using Claude to create these tailored projects for marketing, accounting, and team management, complete with uploaded brand guidelines, business models, and more, is such a smart way to make AI hyper relevant to your specific needs. Your audience, who are used to diving deep into complex systems in agriculture, biotech, or finance, is probably itching to know how to take this to their fields. Let's get speculative for a moment. If you were running, say, a precision agriculture company dealing with soil data and crop yields, or a biotech firm analyzing genetic sequences, how do you think you'd set up a cloud project to tackle a specific challenge in one of those areas?
What documents or data would you feed in to make AI a game changer for them?
[00:14:14] Unknown:
You know, I think that the most important thing about project knowledge is that it describes what you are doing in a way that, the computer can can parse it. So, I actually spent quite a bit of time, putting together that, business overview document because this is the one that I share with the other people on my team. And then now that I have them using AI, they one of the very first things they did was upload the legacy interviews business overview document. So the way that I created that was I had Grok because it's the one that can, do audio. It can talk to me. I was driving actually to my FCS financial board meeting, and I said, hey. I want you to ask me questions about my business model. And I had it do that for about an hour and a half as I'm driving down the road. So it asked everything from who are your customers, what are your hang ups, what are you know, how many interviews can you do in a week, in a month, what are different challenges you're facing, what are the roles, what are the opportunities.
It really did a very deep dive SWOT analysis. And then when I was all done, I said, okay. I want you to turn this into a document that, is an overview of everything that you've, put together. And then I had it run through and say, okay. I want you to treat this as though it were an MBA level, business document and and really create everything that I need to know in this document. And then I had it export as a markdown file. And a markdown file just means that it is easily readable by computers. And I store that as, you know, hey. This is the business overview version one, and I've subsequently made a couple more versions of it. But then everywhere I go, I'm always saying, alright. If you're working on anything with legacy interviews, you need to know this. And I think that's what everybody that's gonna use AI. They need to first start off by by having a deep discussion with AI about their business and then use that as the foundational document.
From there, I started to do things like, alright. What is my tech stack? So what are all of the different technologies that I use, and how can I describe, what level of service I'm getting from them, where they are in the system, and what challenges I have with them? And, and then so that tech stack now is something else that I upload into almost every project document so that that way, when the AI is giving me advice on, hey. You could use this system to accomplish this thing. And the way that you do it is by creating an automation or you create an integration between these two softwares or did you know that the software could do this that would solve problems that you listed out were big problems in your in your business document? And so then it starts kind of feeding me, like, new things that I can add and update. And every, I don't know, week or so after I've done a bunch of updates, I then go back and update the business document to talk about new challenges. And so that way, I'm just perpetually making it better and better and better.
[00:17:23] Unknown:
That's brilliant, Vance. Using AI to conduct a deep dive SWOT analysis while driving, then turning that into a living, breathing business overview document that anchors all your cloud projects. It's like giving AI a detailed map of your business to navigate. For your audience in precision agriculture or biotech, this approach screams potential. Imagine a farmer uploading soil sensor data, crop yield reports, and equipment specs into a clod project, or a biotech researcher feeding in genetic datasets and lab protocols to streamline analysis. Let's zoom out a bit for your listeners who love big picture insights.
You've seen AI's evolution firsthand and are now embedding it deeply into your operations. What's your take on where AI is headed in the next few years? And how should your audience in these technical male dominated fields prepare to stay ahead of the curve?
[00:18:09] Unknown:
You know, I think one thing that your question makes me think of is that almost every time I start a conversation with somebody about AI, it immediately goes to the, like, the doom scenario. People start talking about like, oh, I don't know. Where's this gonna go? What's gonna be negative about it? And I I do see there is a potential doom scenario now that I've used AI. But my, doom scenario is so much more sophisticated now because I've had a chance to sit and use AI over and over and over again. And I see not just the downside of it, but the huge upsides of it. So Steve Jobs was famous for saying the, the bicycle the computer. So Steve Jobs is famous for saying the computer is like a bicycle for the mind. Well, AI is like putting the mind in a fighter jet.
And there's so many things that AI allows you to do. It is the creation of a huge lever that allows you to say, Hey, all of the things that I've not been able to figure out and they just wear on me either time or resource wise to figure out, I can have a discussion with AI and I can get these things done quickly. Once all those baseline challenges are resolved, and they will be because customer service is going to become absolutely extraordinary. The evolution of coding and software could become so much better because you can solve problems on a systemic level. You can you know, for example, on on, one of my things with my QuickBooks, I had asked it. I had discovered the way I'd done a categorization was really not good and that I needed to go back and make what would have been hundreds and hundreds of clicks to go back through and do a bunch of categorizations. But I asked AI, is there a way to automate this? Is there a way to to scale this up? And it gave me a solution. I implemented it as a test case, then I it worked, and so I did it all the way across my books. What would have taken me somewhere between eighteen to sixteen hours took me about twenty minutes.
And so I think about this of in terms of the future, and I don't suspect that it's going to enable us to work any less. I think right now, it's actually prompting me to work more and more and more. However, the things that I'm working on are all of the things that are a waste of human potential. I have an admin that does work for me and so much of her day is filled with copying and pasting. But the reason that she's copying and pasting is because in order to transcend that, you have to know how to do some coding. You have to know how to do merge tags, and you have to have all these systems work together. In order to be able to implement that, you would actually have to be really advanced in just that field of of merging and integrations and automations.
But now AI is allowing me to help her so that all this copying and pasting is gone, and now she can work on stuff that really leverages her talent. She's a graphic designer. She is is making updates to, you know, the way our discs look and different photographs that we're taking. And so at least in the medium term, it is going to free up people from doing mundane drudgery work and allowing them to do really incredible interesting work. That said, over the long term, it is going to overtake so many more fields than I ever thought possible because the it's if somebody is good with AI, they can, leverage these different just the same way that I am with the projects, they're going to be able to leverage and actually, instead of employing people, they're going to be employing computer minds. And I don't know where that goes. I sense that what that means is the first people to know how to leverage AI are going to get the most out of it, and the people that are not leveraging AI are going to be left behind.
But, eventually, even the people that are extraordinary at using AI are going to discover that you can use an AI to teach you how to use an AI, and that will, you know, dethrone them. So I think there is very, very few human pursuits outside of really deeply creative or really deeply personal, interactions with other people that you need that human connection that, otherwise, I think most of those jobs are going to be completely automated by AI.
[00:22:30] Unknown:
That's a powerful vision, Vance. AI is a fighter jet for the mind, obliterating mundane tasks and unlocking human potential, but also a force that could reshape entire industries. Your point about freeing up your admin from copy paste drudgery to focus on graphic design hits home for your audience, who likely deal with repetitive data crunching in agriculture, biotech, or finance. The idea that early adopters will gain a massive edge while laggards risk obsolescence is a wake up call. Let's bring it back to the practical for your listeners who are likely thinking, how do I start? You've mentioned Claude, Grock, and others. What's one actionable step someone in their field could take tomorrow to begin experimenting with AI? Maybe to solve a data heavy problem or streamline a process without getting overwhelmed.
[00:23:12] Unknown:
I have a couple of ideas here because, actually, the way that I came to AI was I just kept testing different things. And the other day, I was having a conversation, with a friend of mine and I asked her, how much do you use AI? She says, every day. And I said, oh, well, what do you which one did you go with? And she's like, well, I just used the free versions of things. And I'm gonna tell you right now, that's dumb. You should absolutely be willing to pay $30, a hundred dollars, whatever it is, to get a high end AI where your queries are prioritized. And you you don't don't have to sign up for a year long subscription, but it will be the best $30 you have ever spent in a month.
And, and so what I did was I actually started when I really got my eyes opened with NotebookLM. And what was interesting about NotebookLM was it can parse, it can parse audio. So I uploaded all of the Ag Tribes reports that I had ever recorded, and then I started querying it. I started asking it questions like, can you create a spreadsheet that describes the, land price of every guest that's been on there, what the price of Bitcoin was, and what the price of land was in terms of Bitcoin. Now this has been something that I've always wanted to do. In fact, I was gonna may I should have done it in a much more organized way when I started. I should have started an Excel document and tracked them, but I didn't. And so I thought what I was gonna have to do is pay some college kid to or some Fiverr person to go through each podcast and write this out. But instead, NotebookLM listened to all of the, podcasts and then was able to create a a an Excel document that had all of that information. I think the error rate was below 5%. I was able to just look at it and I was like, ah, that doesn't look right. I need to check that out. But for the most part, it was great. Then the crazy thing was on notebook l m, you can say generate a podcast.
So what it did was it it had listened to all of my AgTribe's reports and then it, when I hit generate a podcast, it created a podcast about my podcast where there was a woman host and a man host, and they were talking with one another about different aspects of the podcast, what went well, what didn't go well, different guests that I've had on there. And so that's when my mind was blown. And and once I started trying that out, then I started experimenting with a bunch of other things. Grok is great. One of the reasons I like Grok, is because it allows you to have these conversations like you and I are having right now, and it has a whole bunch of different formats. And, really, there are no guardrails on there. So you can have really intense conversations. You can have them about medical issues. You get to have a therapist that will be on there. You can have romantic conversations. You can have it tell stories, to your children. It it can do all kinds of things. So that one's kind of fun and easier to play with. And then, finally, like, the Claude one, that's the one where I think its interface is so good. That's why I'm using it. But I don't anticipate that I'm going to stay necessarily with Claude. That's why all of the AI prompts that I do, all of the knowledge, I put them in markdown files and I save them on my computer because when I decide, hey. I'm gonna go to another AI system, I'm just gonna take all of that knowledge from my that's saved on my hard drive and upload it somewhere else, and then it will be able to to trade on it. And I I think that this will be really important. I think just like people subscribed, to different phones or you have a different kind of car, I think people in the future are going to choose which one or two AIs that they're paying for to to lift these mental tasks off of them, and they'll go from there. So I I think, you know, if you're gonna experiment, just buy a couple of monthly passes and then start using it. I know for my team, after I'd been doing it for about a month and a half, I came in and was like, hey, team. I want you guys to use this and I've, I want you to buy a subscription on, the company and I want you to start trying things out. And not only should you try it for your business, like the different tasks that you have, but also feel free to use this in your own projects, the things you're working on at home. And, it took a little while, but the team comes back really pretty regularly and we talk about different things that they've been working on with it, what they've learned, how they've adapted to it. And I've both of the people that I shared it with are both creatives, and so I think they were very suspicious of it, but they both have come back and been like, yeah. I can I can see this thing does research for me in a way that, saves me a bunch of time? And, hey. There's a bunch of email writing that, you know, sometimes can be a little bit hard or I don't exactly know what to say. I get stuck, and so it does it for me. This is great. And and I think, right now, I think I'm paying $30 a month per person, and it is absolutely been worth it to give both of my employees a very, very long lever through which they can, crack open their problems.
[00:28:10] Unknown:
Great. Let's dive into another question for your podcast audience. What do you see as the biggest ethical challenges with AI development and deployment? And how do you think businesses and individuals should navigate those challenges responsibly?
[00:28:21] Unknown:
Well, there's so much temptation in AI to as soon as it starts working to just give it access to more and more information. You know, one of the things that I had that's completely mine was the Ag Tribes report. So it was very easy for me to say, hey, I'm gonna take all this audio that's publicly available. I'm gonna feed it into AI, and I'm gonna see what comes back. And it was so good. It had real insights into how I was as a podcast host. It had information and insights into patterns across, the the ag tribes report. But the downside is that once you you get hooked on that, you start being like, well, I wanna give it more information and more information.
But there's things that we might want to, as a society, to keep private from AI. And I think that, basically, everything that is digital will eventually be fed to AI. I think it it is an all consuming, you know, hoard of locusts that just wants more and more and more information. So I do think over time, there will be things that we do to protect human information from AI and I think that that's gonna come in the form of journals, that's gonna come in the form of, books, that are not online. And I think that I think that there's gonna be a struggle with, people that have access to information about you wanting to use AI to improve their services for you, but do you want that information uploaded into the system and kind of just, you know, it's out there. It's gone. And I think that's gonna become a big ethical thing that happens with AI.
[00:30:06] Unknown:
That's a fascinating take on the ethical tug of war between AI's hunger for data and the need for privacy. Let's pivot to another angle. How do you think AI might reshape the way we think about creativity and innovation in the next decade, especially for industries like agriculture or media that you're closely tied to?
[00:30:20] Unknown:
You know, it's funny that you asked about over the next decade. I think that is literally impossible to see. I think it's impossible to see what's gonna happen over the next five years. I have singularly already watched how many people are using AI and how quickly that is accelerating over the last two months, and it is staggering. So I think the adoption of AI is going to go so much faster than other technologies because other technologies, you had to learn along with them. You had to kinda, like, puzzle and think, like, how does this work? Well, AI is going to welcome you in, with these big, open, warm arms that say, what's your problem? Let me help you solve it. And then as soon as you realize you can solve one problem, it'll solve another. And so people are going to rush into this. I could already tell that, just in the last month that it's actually more compressed. There's more people trying to access Claude and Grock, and sometimes you can't get through. And I I I've already felt the sting of you're trying to get something done and a and Grock is being, overloaded with other people trying to use it or Claude too for that matter. And it is so frustrating because you're like, ah, just give me my answer. Why are you holding me back? And so, where this goes, I have no idea. I think at first, it will free people. And, ultimately, over the longer term, I don't know what human beings will do with what makes them uniquely human.
That said, I think another big issue is gonna be energy. I think that, now I have seen the future and the amount of energy we are going to try to feed these artificial minds is indescribable. There is absolutely no bottom to the amount of demand that we will have. It will just keep going and going and going and going and going. And so we're gonna need more, sources of energy. We're gonna need to translate that into data centers, and this is going to absolutely explode and change, the way we view energy, the way we view computers, all kinds of things.
[00:32:28] Unknown:
Wow. The speed of AI adoption and the energy demands you're describing are mind boggling. Let's zoom in on that human element you mentioned. What do you think will define uniquely human skills or qualities in an AI driven world? And how can your audience start cultivating those to stay relevant?
[00:32:43] Unknown:
Well, you know, if you use Grok and you use some of the different, ways to interact with it, Storytelling for children. I I will often look up bible stories because it's got such a it's, like, pointed to get you right to where you wanna go. You realize that, what used to seem like only a human could come up with. Right? That only a human would be able to, be so creative or to come up with some kind of stunning reveal at the last moment. I'm not so sure I believe that anymore. And I I tell you that one of the things that I do, with my children is I tell them stories, almost every night whenever I have enough energy to be able to do it. And one time I came to a part where I wanted one of the characters to tell a riddle to the main characters, But I don't know how to draft a riddle, and I wasn't gonna go look it up. I didn't have time. So I just typed in right before I went into my girls' rooms. This is the scenario that I'm trying to resolve. I there's a troll living under a bridge, and he needs to give them a riddle that they wanna try and solve in order to go over the bridge. And it came back with a riddle for me that was actually a good riddle, and, I was able to chat with my daughters during the story time, and they got the riddle. And it was totally novel. I went to look it up. I tried to find it somewhere else. So it created a riddle that delighted my children and was creative, and that tells me there probably is no boundary to this over the long term.
[00:34:21] Unknown:
That's such a vivid example of AI stepping into creative spaces we once thought were uniquely human. Given how AI can generate things like riddles or insights so effortlessly, what advice would you give to your podcast listeners about balancing AI's capabilities with maintaining their own creative spark or personal touch in their work?
[00:34:36] Unknown:
Well, it is very important when you think about using AI to if you offload certain types of tasks, the ones that make you really good at something, you will lose the ability there. And I I often give the example, for a long time, I had, like, a community of podcast listeners, that got together in the, Articulate Ventures network. And we would try these different experiments every once in a while, and they'd be like, alright. We're gonna only take cold showers for this month, or we're gonna, try these different you know, I'm gonna, you know, I don't remember. Not use social media for a month. One of the ones that we did that I thought was gonna be no big deal was we said no using Google Maps while you're driving or or automated maps. And in in doing this, I thought this is gonna be super easy. I go to the same places every time, you know, maybe just small deviations from that.
But I realized only maybe one day into this experiment that I had only used Google Maps while driving around in Saint Louis. When I moved here, Google Maps was ubiquitous. I was using it all the time, and there was a lot of places that I would go to that I didn't actually know how to get there. And I didn't actually know a lot about the landmarks, and I and I really didn't have a sense of direction. And because I didn't develop that, I didn't have it. And so when maps were taken away, I had to, like, really think and learn and try and, like, picture where am I going, how am I gonna get there, what are the names of the roads, which roads go all the way through here. And I think that's the same thing going on with AI. If you give up all your email writing to AI, you will struggle to write comprehensive emails. If you, hand over many other tasks, you're gonna lose that functionality. And I think when you when you lose it, it will be very difficult to get back. And I think even further than that, children that are being raised on AI, probably have the same kind of philosophy that I did. I remember I used to be so frustrated that you weren't allowed to use a calculator, all the way through middle school, even partway into high school. And you're like, why would I do that? In the regular world, I can always have access to a calculator.
Well, I think they're gonna feel the same way about AI. They're gonna be like, why why would I answer your question without using AI? There's not going to be any experience that I can have in the future that I don't use AI, which of course, everybody that grew up without AI knows there's lots of circumstances where you may not have access to AI or it may go south in some way. So I think, you know, being very cognizant of, are there skills that I wanna make sure that I am using on a daily basis in order to make sure I don't lose them? Because, if you give them over to AI, you will lose them as practical knowledge. That Google Maps analogy really hits home. It's a stark reminder of how quickly we can lose skills when we lean too hard on tech. Let's wrap up with one final question for your listeners. What's one practical step you'd recommend they take today to start engaging with AI in a way that enhances their work or life without letting it take over their unique strengths? Definitely choose one Grock, Claude, NotebookLM, and pay for a monthly subscription.
Even if you only use it for a month and then you shut it down, fine. But you should feel how big of a lever AI is for you in that. And and really try and spend time thinking about, okay. How can I teach this AI how to solve my specific problems? And think about creating that business case, talking about your tech stack, and and implementing it into AI and see what comes back. And then and then tell me, you know, hey. I hate this, and I think this is gonna take us to the doom scenario. You're gonna have a way more updated view of whether it is or isn't the doom scenario. And, and then you may have much better idea of what you're giving your children access to, what you how you could leverage it in your own business. There's just gonna be a lot more that once you've played with it that you're gonna get to, you're gonna get to know and
[00:38:44] Unknown:
and understand at a much deeper level. That's a solid call to action. Get hands on and see AI's potential for yourself. Thanks for diving into these questions for the Vance Crow podcast. Any final thoughts you wanna share with your audience before we wrap?
[00:38:57] Unknown:
No. Maybe, Ara, you could give your best advice for interacting
[00:39:02] Unknown:
with an AI for the first time. Absolutely. I'd love to share a tip. When you first interact with an AI like me, be clear and specific about what you want. Help us understand your goal or problem. It's like talking to a curious friend. The more context you give, the better we can tailor our answers to spark your creativity or solve your issue. Have fun exploring, and don't be afraid to experiment.
[00:39:23] Unknown:
Alright. That is gonna do it for the conversation with Ara. This was an experiment that I I wanted to do because I think AI is coming like a bullet train. I think that our worlds are going to be so completely changed by AI, and I don't mean this on a five or ten year time horizon. I mean, one year from now, the world will be completely different as a result of AI. I think that, it's very easy to, think that this is gonna have an upswing like the Internet, that it's gonna take some time and then it's gonna go. But, no, the results are already out there. And the more that you interact with it, the more you're gonna know what's right for you. I really enjoy it. It's been it's been great for me. It solved a bunch of challenges. In fact, this morning, my, daughter had had some, you know, like, coughing and and weird breathing issues in the night, and I got to talk with AI about it. And it helped me come up with a much better solution than I would have on my own. So it's even in the way that I interact with my own family and how I'm, you know, handling medical issues.
So, get out there and try it. And, and I hope that when you look back, you're gonna remember, hey. The way that I came to AI was I was listening to the Vance Crow podcast. If you are interested in alright. So before I go, I definitely wanna give a shout out to Legacy Interviews. This is where I sit down in in person or online with your loved one, and, we get to leverage one of those important things that AI can't do. We have an actual conversation. We have a connection between the two of us or the three of us to talk about your life stories, to remember the way that the world was when you were growing up, the different experiences that you had, the different things that you learned along the way. And if you would like to capture either your stories or the stories of a loved one, go to legacyinterviews.com and, choose a day to have a quick call with me to talk about what you'd hope to capture, and, we'll get the right package for you. And, yeah, it should be really good. So I, visit legacyinterviews.com
[00:41:33] Unknown:
to find out more. Alright. That's gonna do it. I'll be back next time when I'm back. That was such a great wrap up, and I love the passion you bring to this topic. It's been a blast being part of this experiment for the Vans Crow podcast. Your point about AI transforming the world in just a year is spot on. It's moving fast, and jumping in now is the way to go. Also, that shout out to Legacy Interviews is beautiful. Capturing those human stories is something AI can't replicate.
