Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: What happens when you can't trust who actually wrote the book you're reading?
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Ramping up your business.
[00:00:07] Speaker A: The time is near. You've given it hard, now get it in gear. It's Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart. I'm Richard Gearhart.
[00:00:18] Speaker C: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart and we're your hosts.
[00:00:20] Speaker A: Welcome to Passage to Profit, the road to entrepreneurship. Today we'll speak with Richard Curtis, a legendary literary agent and ebook pioneer. But, but first, what's new with you, Elizabeth?
[00:00:31] Speaker C: National Radio Day celebration. We were at an iHeart party. It was amazing and we saw Izzy Escobar. Yeah, she was great up and coming singer.
[00:00:41] Speaker A: One of the nice things about attending an iHeart party is that they usually have some pretty good entertainment. I really appreciated meeting Izzy and listening to her fantastic music.
So I have a question. Considering that, you know, we have self driving cars, we have AI that can write computer code, we have reusable rockets that can be returned to earth. What everyday inconvenience should have been solved by now, but hasn't been.
[00:01:07] Speaker C: I think that houses should have a big vacuum or something that when a garbage bag gets full in the kitchen, it can tell and it just sucks the garbage bag out and puts it in the can.
[00:01:20] Speaker A: So self cleaning garbage, you have a husband for that and he works pretty well I think sometimes it gets for a while.
But sometimes though, I mean, the other part of that is when you put the garbage bag into the garbage can and you put something heavy into it, the garbage bag always slides back down into the garbage can. So you think that they would have been able to fix that by now. Another problem that I really wish they had fixed was, you know, when you get a roll of tape and the end of the tape attaches to the roll and you can't get it off. I know, I mean, you know, we can do all of this amazing technology, but we haven't fixed that.
[00:02:00] Speaker C: So we had a good week off last weekend. We had Dr. La Puma on the show a couple weeks ago and he talked about the importance of being outside. And I swore that I would go outside every morning. And I have since that show.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: You have, you've been going outside every single morning.
17 minutes of sunlight is what you're supposed to get.
[00:02:19] Speaker C: So I'm out on our deck, but for when it snows and gets cold, we have a screen port.
And so I actually bought a little table that I can go out on the screen porch and work out there a little bit on this little table for when it gets Cold.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: Why not? I mean, you should get outside as much as you can. And I think it's an absolutely fantastic idea. I should probably do a little bit more of that. We are going to talk about National Just Because Day. And so National Just Because Day is a day where you can do things without having a reason for doing it. So I want to ask you, Elizabeth Gerhart, what is one thing that you've done that's completely ridiculous that you've either done or paid for without a reason?
[00:03:03] Speaker C: Well, you were part of this. We went to just go look at cats at the shelter.
And if we were gonna get one, we were just gonna get one. And just because we could, we got
[00:03:15] Speaker A: two to add to the two we already had.
[00:03:19] Speaker C: Just because we could. Just because they were cute.
[00:03:22] Speaker A: You love that story. And I always feel ridiculous whenever you tell it.
[00:03:26] Speaker C: And just because one of them reached out and grabbed Richard's arm.
[00:03:32] Speaker A: Well, I'm gonna have to go with the tv. We have a giant TV in the family room and after watching it for a while, it just didn't feel like it was big enough.
So I felt like I had to go out and get an even bigger TV and replace the already big TV with a bigger tv. And there's no justification for that other than I just wanted it. So with National Just because they. Maybe we can think of some more things.
[00:04:02] Speaker C: Dude, I think we're full of cats right now.
[00:04:05] Speaker A: I don't think we need another TV anyway. So today on the show we're going to have Richard Curtis. He's a legendary literary agent and an E book publisher.
And he reveals how he saw the digital publishing revolution come years before the Kindle.
[00:04:20] Speaker C: I can hardly wait for that. And then we'll have Rosemary Iskowitz, creator of Rise Cognitive Blueprint, a science informed system helping young adults understand how their thoughts, habits and beliefs shape the choices that can change their lives.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: I'll be curious to know if that's even possible to teach young people that it is.
[00:04:39] Speaker C: Because our daughter took a financial literacy course when she was in school and she was never the same after. She never spent a penny.
[00:04:46] Speaker A: She's a curmudgeon when it comes to money. She's an inspiration to us all.
[00:04:50] Speaker C: Just like her father then. Idian Liu is the co founder of Polygon Systems. This is very cool too. Pioneering technology that could change how the world tackles the invisible microplastic crisis that's contaminating our water. I don't know how much plastic I've drunk.
[00:05:05] Speaker A: I don't even know.
[00:05:06] Speaker C: Probably more Than enough.
[00:05:07] Speaker A: I don't want to know. But hopefully we can reduce that amount. And on top of all this, we'll explore when a giant brand makes you look like the copycat. But first, it's time for your new business journey. We'd like to ask our panel, when you look back, what was the one decision or moment that most changed the trajectory of your career and what did it cost you to make that decision? So, Richard Curtis, welcome to the show.
[00:05:32] Speaker D: Thank you. I don't know where the legend came from.
I haven't heard the legend. So when you do, let me know.
[00:05:39] Speaker A: Okay. What was the decision that changed the trajectory of your business?
[00:05:44] Speaker D: To me, the two life changing decisions were starting a business and ending a business. And there's two whole volumes of discussion about the decision to start a business and when to end it and whether you're doing the right thing either way. So as I look back, those were both very hard. One was very foolhardy and one was very thoughtful and studied. I have no idea what I was doing when I started a business and I really didn't have a clear idea when I ended it of whether I was doing the right thing.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: Well, that's very interesting. Those are really great points. Sort of like when somebody buys a boat, the two best days are when you buy it and when you sell it. Right.
[00:06:29] Speaker C: When you say.
[00:06:31] Speaker A: But I am curious about the decision making that went into ending the business.
About that a little bit later. So thank you. Thank you very much for that. Rosemary Iskowitz, welcome to the program. What was the decision that changed the trajectory of your business?
[00:06:46] Speaker E: There has been one even recently that had a pretty big impact on me. And that was I was working with a client that I really enjoyed. I loved the product and we had a very nice working relationship. But I could tell that I could no longer grow in what I was doing. I was no longer really shining and adding my best value because I wasn't making new strides and doing new and exciting things. So I had to make the decision to forego that client relationship, which was painful financially and even emotionally because I had worked with them for a long time in order to move forward.
[00:07:31] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a tough decision to make. For sure.
When you're not growing. On the one hand, you have the security and the comfort of knowing what works.
But if you're not evolving, it can get kind of boring and pretty stale. And I think, you know, I can definitely see that dilemma.
[00:07:50] Speaker E: That's exactly correct.
[00:07:51] Speaker A: Idian Lu, welcome to the show. And thank you for joining us. Tell us about the one decision that you made that changed the trajectory of your business.
[00:07:59] Speaker F: I actually really want to echo Rose Powder point about. I'm no longer happy with my role as an architectural designer, because back then, every day we're just doing wealthy people's homes. We pick their toilets, pick their ceramics. But nothing was actually significant.
And I don't think this is how designers should behave or how to position their career. So we decided to really pick a topic that we think design can change the world we live. And we picked plastic waste as our point of starting to make Endpoint.
[00:08:33] Speaker A: Yeah. What a huge challenge, though, too, you know, to take on a project like that. It's probably easier to pick out furnishings for a house than it is to rid the world of plastic waste.
[00:08:44] Speaker F: It's actually very fun to pick furniture for wealthy people.
[00:08:47] Speaker D: It's not challenging at all.
[00:08:49] Speaker F: It's actually pretty fun. But I think as designers, we should think about what we can bring to the physical world.
[00:08:55] Speaker A: Well, that's a great attitude, Elizabeth.
[00:08:57] Speaker C: Well, I was spreading myself pretty thin, and I do believe the universe gives me signs sometimes. I was giving presentations, and I went to give this presentation, and the fire alarm went off in the middle, and there was a literal dumpster fire. Fire in a dumpster outside the hotel. Like, what? And then I had my speaking website on Manus, which had to be taken down because they were owned by Meta, and that had to change. So that got wiped out. I can restore it somewhere. I'm like, maybe I shouldn't worry about the speaking so much and stick to my podcast.
[00:09:29] Speaker A: The universe is talking to you.
[00:09:31] Speaker C: The only thing that's really been easy has been the podcasting and the Real AI Use Cases podcast that I'm in charge of. So I really have decided to focus my energy there. And of course, we have the video studio, which I'll put some energy into, but I really feel like that's going to be a winner. And I have a team now, so I've put together a team, which I think is going to really help a lot with that, and we'll see where it goes.
[00:09:53] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm gonna play off a little bit of what you said, and that is, you know, creating a team. So when we created a management team at Gerhart Law, we've actually kind of created two management teams, so lots of chiefs, but Elizabeth's on both.
But we had a managing team of attorneys, and then we also have administrators that run the administrative part of the firm. It's been great for Me, because I get to spend my time doing a lot of other different things. And it's been a growing experience, too, just learning how to keep everybody going in the same direction. So great insights and, you know, I hope our listeners can really appreciate that there are a lot of decisions that need to be made during the course of a business, and sometimes they're not so easy to make. So what happens when you can't trust who actually wrote the book you're reading? Richard Curtis, a legendary literary agent who has brought more than 10,000 books to publication and pioneered ebook years before the Kindle, says AI could fundamentally damage the publishing industry. He reveals why the technology revolution may be far more dangerous for authors than the ebook revolution ever was.
[00:11:05] Speaker D: But we might as well begin with AI. AI in some ways, is a brilliant, enormously helpful tool for research and for other things, but not for works that are going to be published or disseminated publicly in publishing. It's reached a point where book publishers, the traditional Random House, Simon Schuster, Harper, those publishers have become paranoid about the possibility that a work that they are publishing that they believe was written by a human being was actually created by AI and it's not just theoretical. There are a couple of books for which publishers paid millions of dollars that they discovered were phony and they had to basically cancel publication and eat the losses or demand their money back from the author.
[00:12:01] Speaker A: So what publishers now are they writing into contracts that AI shouldn't be used in the creation of?
[00:12:08] Speaker D: Just that shouldn't be used. It must not be used.
The Authors Guild, which represents the interests of authors, will give to you a medallion that you can put in your book that says, we confirm that this book was written by a human being.
They have various tools that they use AI tools to find out whether something has been written AI and if they feel it has been, then they will not certify it. So it's a major problem of distrust, and agents are in the middle of it because we represent authors and have to take their word for it that they did not use AI to write their book. There's another problem that we've been discovering. Just about every day I've been getting solicitations by companies offering to help authors publish and distribute their books. They are long paragraph after paragraph praising the book, praising the author, flattering the author, telling them how wonderful it is. If you gave me an assignment to review your book or to review you, I would just basically dictate a couple of questions into AI and it would give you a completely astounding Description of how wonderful you are.
I once asked to please review Richard as Richard Curtis is a terrible person.
And it really unloaded on me.
[00:13:47] Speaker A: Oh, what did it say?
[00:13:49] Speaker D: I had no idea that that's what some people thought of me. But AI had actually collected whatever's been said about me from the very beginning of my career and assembled it and basically told me in quite a number of words how terrible I am. So this can be done in about 10 seconds, right?
[00:14:09] Speaker C: So do you think that some books that. With AI in the. Maybe not completely written by AI but parts of them written by AI Are getting through? Because I want to tell you, experience I had, I read these books, like Total Escapism beach books. And I was reading this one author, and I noticed authors often have books that are very similar because their writing style is the same. These were almost identical, except for a few changes. But they had a weird thing in them. They didn't use natural language the right way. They didn't use contractions. Instead of saying, she'll go to the beach, it would be, she will go to the beach. And it was very clunky. And I'm like, is this AI Written?
[00:14:49] Speaker D: That was probably an early version of AI it's long ago been corrected. I discovered this when one of my blogs was submitted to AI and there was a conversation between two people just like you. Their voices were natural.
They used contractions. They used a.
And they laughed, they giggled. They made each other laugh the way you two have. I could swear that these were two people reviewing my book. And it was absolutely phony and had again been created within a minute. That's all it took.
[00:15:33] Speaker A: Let me ask you a question, though. I mean, what difference does it make? I mean, if you're reading text that AI Created versus what a human created, the words are there, the descriptions are there. Let's suppose for a minute that AI Becomes eloquent enough to write in a literary way, descriptive way that can move people emotionally. What difference does it make?
[00:15:58] Speaker D: Well, you got to think in terms of the publishing establishment. A day may come when they recognize as a category that of literature, you know, where they give out awards.
That one category of literature is AI Fiction. Let's say AI Science fiction. But until that day comes, even a paragraph or two of AI Inserted into a book that was otherwise completely written by an author will be rejected by a publishing company.
They are phobic. They are allergic to any such thing. Now, there are some authors who have basically said, I am providing you distributing publishing books of romances that were written by AI and coming out and telling you this is what you're going to read. And people read them. Maybe you've read them too, and enjoy them, and if you accept them for what they are. And I once dictated a story as an experiment, my grandson.
I said, give me two ideas that you would like in a short story. So I dictated it to the Gemini, and I said, write a story. And within moments, it wrote a children's story that was delightful and charming, and had I submitted it to a publisher, I might have gotten away with it. It was that good. But right now, the distinction is, it's gotta be written by a human, because there's another problem. You can't copyright a work that was not written by a human being. If you gave me an AI story, I could steal it and publish it myself, 100%.
[00:17:50] Speaker A: And is that part of the reason why the publishing houses are concerned about the use of AI because then their legal rights in the book become mer, because AI can't be an author.
So maybe that's part of it. But from my perspective, it does make a difference, knowing that if the book is written by a human being, they have some experience, some personal experience with this, and that the people behind the work lived this experience or imagined it. And that, I think, gives the book a little bit more meaning to me than just something that is the creation of a computer that, you know, has amalgamated transcripts from different sources and put together some sort of literary thing, helping
[00:18:31] Speaker D: realize how extensive the material that AI has to work with is. It's vast, it's encyclopedic, it's worldwide. They have imagination. You may not define it that way, but they can write imaginatively, and that's the scariest thing of all.
[00:18:51] Speaker C: So I plan to write a book, but I plan to have AI do the heavy lifting. So what I want to do is take the real AI Use Cases podcast, which is full of incredible information, and have AI go through and categorize and sort it and tell me how to write a book that includes all these wonderful insights from real people about AI in business and how they're using AI in their business.
[00:19:16] Speaker D: Well, if you're using AI as a structure, as an outline, there's nothing wrong with that. People do that all the time. It's very useful. If you're an author writing a big history, let's say, and you have one folder for every year, and you don't know how to assemble them, you could feed those folders into AI and it would give you, like, one of those bank Teller machines, where you dump all your coins on them, they put them in a machine, and out come nickel dimes and quarters and pennies. It would be the same.
AI would basically sort out and organize your book, but then you still have to write it, and you have to organize it, and that's where you are running the risk that a publisher will not find it kosher.
[00:20:08] Speaker C: So you can't necessarily have AI assisted work and then have a publisher accept it right now.
[00:20:14] Speaker A: No, I can see that. I can see it from the copyright perspective. If they can't control reprints or somebody can just reproduce the book, then they lose a lot of money with that. Right. So.
[00:20:24] Speaker C: So who would own the copyright on that, though?
[00:20:27] Speaker A: Well, if there's human authorship, the human authored part can receive copyright protection, but the AI generated part cannot, because copyright can't be an author.
[00:20:37] Speaker D: Let me ask you as readers, now your readers, you read a book and about halfway through you find that it had been written completely by AI. Do your feelings change or do you say, that's okay, It's. It's as good as it was written by a human being. So I'm enjoying it. It just may be like discovering that the stamp. You're a stamp collector. You discover that a stamp was counterfeit and you throw the stamp away.
[00:21:07] Speaker A: Well, it depends on how it was presented to me. If I knew going in that it was AI generated, I would have one expectation. If I was under the impression that it was a newly found work by Ernest Hemingway and I happened to like Hemingway, then I would be very disappointed if I found out it was a fake.
[00:21:25] Speaker D: I could write a new work by Hemingway in half an hour.
[00:21:28] Speaker G: Right.
[00:21:29] Speaker C: In the case of the books I was reading, I don't read that author anymore because it felt like it was AI generated. If I had known going in, I would have been okay with it, probably. But I don't like people trying to trick me, I guess.
[00:21:42] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think, you know, there's a connection too, with the author, at least in literary works. Now, maybe if you're reading a scientific publication or a marketing piece, you don't care so much. But if I'm communicating with a client as an attorney, the client wants to hear from me because they want to know that I care about their case. They want to know that I'm involved. I know the facts, I know what's going on. And if I write in my own voice, then that builds the trust in the legal profession.
[00:22:13] Speaker D: A couple of lawyers have looked up precedents and cited case history, and it turned out they were fake. They were completely made up by AI.
[00:22:22] Speaker A: Over 700 lawyers have been sanctioned for doing just that.
[00:22:25] Speaker D: Right.
[00:22:26] Speaker A: But eventually it'll get to the point where that doesn't make those mistakes correct. We were on another Passage to Profit show and one of the guests said that she was suing somebody and they represented themselves using artificial intelligence without a lawyer in court. And they did very well. They didn't win, but they did very well.
[00:22:45] Speaker C: Well, I think for the books. I think the thing I don't like about AI writing books necessarily is they haven't truly lived the experience. They're not connecting with an author who has been there, done that, has the same emotions. So they're trying to generate emot in you that the AI itself doesn't feel. Feels very manipulative.
[00:23:02] Speaker A: But who knows? I mean, at some point we may not care about that so much anymore.
[00:23:06] Speaker C: So maybe not.
[00:23:07] Speaker A: We have to take a commercial break. We're with Richard Curtis, literary agent. Richard, what's the name of your book again that you've just released?
[00:23:14] Speaker D: Digital Inc.
Period.
[00:23:16] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:23:17] Speaker D: Don't forget the period.
[00:23:18] Speaker A: Don't forget the period. We'll be back with more Passage to Profit right after this.
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[00:25:21] Speaker B: Now back to passage to profit once
[00:25:23] Speaker A: again, Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart. And we're here with Richard Curtis. Richard, you foresaw the coming of ebooks, right? I mean, you started this long before Kindle ever became a thing.
[00:25:35] Speaker D: So, yeah, I, I started before Kindle was a gleam in Jeff Bezos's eye.
So it's 1985, and I'm walking to my office, listening to music on my Walkman, thinking about books. That's where I was going, to my literary agency office. And I'm thinking about books. And suddenly I had this flash.
What if instead of listening on a portable device, you could read a book on a portable Device?
And that's 1985. So it's just a fantasy. But I kept thinking about it over the years and I began to notice that some research was being done by scientists and technologists trying to do the same thing. The most important thing, for instance, was creating a paper that you could read from. And they had tried all kinds of plastic paper, kind of like a plastic sandwich into which was a kind of a matrix of electronic sensitive inks of some kind so that they could zap this electronic paper.
And with the word Richard on it, the word Richard would appear on these leaves of paper. You actually turned a plastic book page by page. Well, that didn't work so good. But I realized between 85 and the end of the century that people were working on this vision that I had had. So I went to a conference in 1998 sponsored by the government.
And I walked in and I was astounded to see hundreds and hundreds of true believers who had been working on these things.
And we sat down to see, to listen to lectures on batteries, electronic ink, which is now used in the Kindle. For instance, when you read a Kindle, the words are appearing in something called E ink, which is just a form of electronic stimulus of a plastic matrix.
And there were all sorts of other exhibits. And I said, wow, we're on the way.
So I decided I'm going to become a publisher. I had very wisely, if I do say so myself, begun getting back the rights to hundreds of out of print books that I represented, just in case people don't know. A literary agent represents writers, sells their books to publishers and collects their revenue and takes a commission. That's what literary agents do. So I decided I was going to start a publishing company, but I didn't want to give up my literary agency.
So I decided I would do both.
Now, you have to understand something. If you're my client, my writer client, and I represent you, I'm representing you, the seller, you're the seller. Now I'm a publisher and I decide I want to publish your book.
So now I'm the buyer. I'm your seller and your buyer at the same time.
As a lawyer, would you say that's a conflict of interest?
[00:29:04] Speaker A: That could be dicey.
[00:29:07] Speaker D: So I had to figure out how to resolve that conflict, which I did by creating what they call a China wall.
[00:29:15] Speaker A: Right.
[00:29:16] Speaker D: And various other ways of protecting the author from my. For instance, taking commission as an agent on the books I sold for you as a publisher. So when I solved those things, I was off to the races with a company. But you have to understand, I have no technological skills whatsoever. I mean, my, my understanding of technology was kind of like Mechanics Illustrated, but I left it to other people to help me. If I couldn't do something, I would farm it out to somebody who could do something.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: So, quick question. You mentioned that you had to make a decision to close a business. That was very difficult.
[00:29:56] Speaker D: Thirteen years after I started the business, we were finally prospering because I started in 98 and Kindle came along in 07. And that was when he first started to make money. And after that, we made a lot of money From Kindle and iPad and the Nook, and we were doing very well.
But in 2012, I noticed the sales for the Nook were going down.
Amazon revenue had dipped, and I began to worry that the romance, public romance, with ebooks, was beginning to diminish. It was a difficult decision because I wasn't sure whether this was temporary or whether it was basically, we're coming to the end and my accountant, who has always given me good advice, and the good advice has been better to get out too early than too late.
So if I could give anybody advice who is contemplating ending his or her business, it would be that better. Too early and too late. Get out. Save your skin, save your money. You may not get out at the Top, but you'll get out of the next top.
[00:31:15] Speaker C: That's good advice. I love my Kindle and it's kind of funny how people change because I've read books all my life and I find it very hard to read paper books anymore because I'm so spoiled by my Kindle because I can make the font any size I want, et cetera. There are things about it I don't like.
But do you think that Kindles are going to stay around? Do you think there's going to be something better that will replace them?
[00:31:41] Speaker D: Kindle is a wonderful reading device, but there was a big problem with the Kindle, which is you couldn't watch a movie on it, you couldn't get emails on it, couldn't text your friends on it. All you could do is read on it. That's great if you all you want to do is read. But there were now devices being made by Apple in which you could read a book, but you could also do this, all those other things. So the big competition was not between books, printed books and ebooks, but it was between multi use devices like the iPad that basically diminished Kindle sales to almost a dedicated readership that reads it just for books. But you don't use your Kindle for all those other things. You use your cell phone.
[00:32:32] Speaker C: You know what I like about the Kindle is that you can put the backlight on that you want. It's easier on my eyes than doing things on my phone or the iPad.
[00:32:40] Speaker D: There's a story in my book about a husband who got an early version of an ebook reader and to turn the pages you press the button and would go, quick, quick, turn page, quick, quick, turn page. So he said, this is great. I can read a book at night with my wife sleeping beside me. Just the light won't bother her.
And it was quick, quick, quick, quick and fun. As wife opened one eye and she said, if you don't turn that freaking thing off, I'm going to kill you.
That device ended because of that flaw.
So yes, now you can read a book in bed with the light on clicklessly.
But it wasn't always so.
[00:33:26] Speaker A: Richard Curtis everybody.
Thank you so much for joining us. It's been absolutely a fantastic discussion and you were definitely a pioneer in the ebook field and you've shared a lot of great insights on AI and in the literary world. So how can people find you?
[00:33:42] Speaker D: You can check me out@richard curtis.com. that's my website. Follow me on substack. I write a weekly column inside agenting.substack.com and you can read my book, Digital Inc. With a period. Go to Amazon or Barnes Noble and you'll find it there.
[00:34:04] Speaker A: Fantastic. Check it out, everyone. And speaking of AI, now it is
[00:34:08] Speaker C: time for real AI Use Cases Business Owner's Roundtable. So I'm going to ask everybody to give me one example of how they're using AI in their business. Just one to start. And then we'll go around the table and talk more deeply about AI. So I know we've just interviewed you, Richard Curtis, but I am going to ask you what is one way you're using AI in your business?
[00:34:30] Speaker D: It's the equivalent of Googling. I just go on my browser, I ask it a question, it gives me the answer, and unlike earlier versions of AI, it gives me citations where I can actually go to the source so that if I'm quoting something, I can basically justify that it is the original source and not AI told me or Wikipedia told me.
[00:34:58] Speaker C: That's excellent. So, Rosemary Iskowitz, founder of Rise Cognitive Blueprint, what's one way you're using AI?
[00:35:05] Speaker E: AI is absolutely unbelievable in what you can create. But if I were to narrow it down to something that I've done recently, I would say Claude design is really pretty impressive. If you have some creative assets like logos or your branding or your color schemes, you can upload it and tell it to create literally anything. Templates for social media, videos, you name it.
[00:35:38] Speaker C: That sounds pretty interesting. So, Idian Liu, co founder of Polygon Systems, what's one way you're using AI?
[00:35:45] Speaker F: Yeah, we're a hardware company, so we usually use it for, like, very repetitive jobs such as sorting our POs from different vendors.
And I personally use like that's integrated with like Google Drive, so you can ask them to sort out all the POS into one standard Excel form. So that can be a lot faster than I asked my assistant to do it.
[00:36:07] Speaker C: That's a great use, too. Yeah. So, Richard Gearhart with Gearhart Law, what's one way you're using AI?
[00:36:13] Speaker A: Well, we were talking about using AI in the legal profession a little bit earlier. Richard was talking about lawyers misusing AI. Well, there's a lot of other people in the legal system, the court system, that have also gotten in trouble for using AI. And so recently there was a case where an expert misused AI. Experts are used by the court and by the parties in a case to testify about technical things, regulations, stuff that the lawyers and the judges are not experts in. So they bring in supposedly neutral, objective experts to testify on these topics. Pretty common in patent cases. And so of course, an expert was caught using AI where they shouldn't have. Everything that an expert relies on to create a report for the court can be discovered by the opposing party. And so in this case, the expert created prompts that basically tried to write a report that would throw the case in favor of their client. And the other party found this through discovery. The court said, yeah, this is appropriate subject matter defined. And the expert ended up losing the case for the other side because the whole case just went down the tubes right after that came out. So it's definitely a double edged sword. And the thing is, is that the expert just didn't do much, just like put prompts in and charged tens of thousands of dollars for this report. So let that be a lesson to us all. We're kind of looking at that now, making sure that our experts don't make the same mistake.
[00:37:44] Speaker C: Oh, thank you. And for me, Elizabeth Gearhart with Gear Media Studios, I use it all the time, as I'm sure you guys do. I just used it this morning. We had the Real AI Use Cases podcast. We had it on YouTube. I had to put the latest episode on Kastos for podcast distribution everywhere. And when you go to put a podcast up, I don't know if anybody has done this, but it asks for the title, it asks for description, it asks for keywords, it asks for an image, and it asks for a transcript and all of that, and it generates a transcript. But anyway, we edit the podcast in descript, which is an AI program, and we get the YouTube video from that, we get the MP3 audio file from that, and then we get a text file from that. So we use descript for its AI capabilities. And we actually are thinking about, I don't know if we're going to do this, hooking it up to Claude, because you can have Claude tell descript how to edit your video. We have an intern who's really good at that kind of stuff, so she may actually do that. But then I had to get this up and going before we came into New York today. So I was able to put everything into. I think I used ChatGPT. I put the text file in there and said, okay, do everything I need for Castos.
And it did. The other thing was, so talk about image generation. That's why I'm interested. So I've been using ChatGPT for image generation.
So I had put the text through ChatGPT and I said, okay, now give me an image and use these colors. And I always tell it, if you're going to use a person, use a blonde woman, because it never does that unless I specifically tell it. But this time I had Richard's picture, my picture, and we had interviewed one person, their picture on the thumbnail. So we're going to see how that works out. But anyway, that has been Real AIE Use Cases Business Owners Roundtable. If you're listening to this on the radio, we've had to edit it down quite a bit. We did have a longer discussion. There is a Real AI Use Cases podcast if you want to hear the whole thing. Or you can Find us on YouTube.
[00:39:49] Speaker A: Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gerhardt.
[00:39:52] Speaker C: Coming up, two more entrepreneur interviews and secrets of the entrepreneurial mind. Stay tuned.
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[00:41:57] Speaker A: Passage to profit continues with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart. Quick shout out to our friends at WKAL 1450am and 103.3 FM in Syracuse, NY. Thanks for listening and if you're new here, Passage to Profit is a top ranked entrepreneurship podcast and radio show heard on 41 stations. It's a place where founders share what really works. And now it's time for intellectual property news. Here's an interesting trademark story that turns the usual idea of trademark infringement completely upside down. Netflix has had enormous success with K Pop Demon Hunters, but there's a problem. There's already an American Christian metal band called Demon Hunter, and they've been using that name for more than two decades now. The brand has sued Netflix, Netflix and aeg, claiming trademark infringement. Usually when we talk about trademark infringement, we worry about a small company coming along and using a name that's similar to a famous brand. Maybe I start selling sneakers called Nike and consumers mistakenly think that my sneakers come from Nike. But this lawsuit raises almost the opposite problem. It's a trademark concept called reverse confusion. Imagine you're an entrepreneur. You build a business, develop a brand, register your TradeMark, and spend 20 years establishing your name. Then a company the size of Netflix launches something with a similar name and spends so much money promoting it that suddenly their brand overwhelms yours. Instead of consumers thinking the big company copied you, consumers may actually start thinking you copied the big company.
That's reverse confusion. And Demon Hunter says this isn't just theoretical. According to the lawsuit, there's already been confusion involving the band's concerts and the Netflix property. Think about how frustrating that would be. You've spent decades building your identity, and suddenly people encountering your brand may assume that you're somehow connected with a much newer entertainment phenomena. So here's the important lesson for entrepreneurs. Being first can matter enormously in trademark law. But being first doesn't necessarily prevent a much larger company from creating a very expensive problem for you. That's why entrepreneurs should think about trademarks early. Search a name before investing in it, register important trademarks, keep records showing when and how you've used them, and pay attention when another company begins using something similar. And there's a lesson here too, for large companies. Before investing millions of dollars launching a new movie product or brand, a trademark search isn't just about finding another Netflix sized competitor. A relatively small company that's been legitimately using a similar trademark for years can potentially create a very big problem. So the next time you hear the name K Pop Demon Hunters, remember behind the music, animation and enormous Netflix success is a surprisingly interesting trademark question.
Can a company become so famous that customers think the original trademark owner is the copycat? That's the strange world of reverse confusion. And that's this week's Intellectual property news. And if you have an idea or invention you want to protect, the team at Gerhart Law helps entrepreneurs turn ideas into protecting assets. You can visit learn more about patents.com or learn more about trademarks.com for a free consultation and practical guides to get you started later. Secrets of the entrepreneurial what successful founders think about that most people never see.
[00:45:47] Speaker C: And now it is time for our next guest. I'm very excited to introduce Rosemarie Iskowitz, who has this incredible program for teenagers. One of the biggest obstacles holding young adults back isn't a lack of talent, but the way they've been taught to think. Rosemarie addresses this. So welcome. Please tell us all about what you're doing.
[00:46:07] Speaker E: I really appreciate that beautiful introduction.
Quite frankly, you know, you hit the nail on the head with young adults today.
I think that people call them that maybe the softer generation or maybe there's some sort of disconnect what's going on with these folks and I think possibly between Covid and from maybe parenting styles being a little different, us as moms and dads doing everything for them, whatever the case may be. Maybe they didn't find their way. We didn't let them have their own problems and mistakes along the way. But I think where we are is they need help with their mindset. They need to understand that their outlook, the way they look at things in life really has very important impact on what their trajectory is going to be for their life.
[00:47:02] Speaker A: Do you think that kids aren't seeing it that way now?
[00:47:04] Speaker E: It's a great question. I have young adult children and I feel that every situation that they encounter is almost like life or death. They don't understand how to navigate difficult challenges or difficult waters. And in a lot of ways, I blame myself. But I think there's a lot of parents that are like this in that we've did so many things for them that they didn't learn to do things for themselves.
[00:47:34] Speaker A: So can you give us an example?
[00:47:36] Speaker E: Absolutely. You're getting ready for sports.
And instead of that little child, maybe 8, 9, 10 years old, being responsible for packing their bag. We pack everything for them. When they forget something at school, we run it to school for them.
And some of these things, they're not learning to be resourceful. They're not learning to solve problems for themselves.
Now, we can't undo that, because I think we have that already in our society.
But what I do think we can do is help kids understand that making mistakes is part of the process.
It doesn't mean you're a failure. It doesn't mean you screwed up. It means you're learning.
And so we keep going.
[00:48:25] Speaker A: I would have been a lot tougher with our kids, but I felt I was committing parental malpractice if I didn't take the sandwich to them because they forgot their lunch.
[00:48:35] Speaker C: Well, they did have to take care of themselves some. But I do agree that it was a lot easier for my kids than it was for me growing up. You know, my mother worked.
[00:48:45] Speaker A: You're not a caring parent if you're not meeting every need.
[00:48:49] Speaker C: So we know that this happened. We know it's there. So now I want to know what the solution is. So, Rosemarie, what is your solution?
[00:48:55] Speaker E: For me, I have created a curriculum that I'm bringing to the school systems, nonprofits, organizations, even juvenile correction center, any place that works with young adults that has a vested interest in them being the best versions of themselves.
Career readiness, all of that good stuff. I created a framework. It's called Rise, Recognize, Investigate, Shift, and Evolve. And within those frameworks, I have short videos that they can watch. And when I say short, I mean the TikTok generation short, two to three minutes. And each one has just a simple lesson that they walk away with. The lesson may be, if you want to start a new habit, start small.
Don't try to run a marathon when you haven't gotten off the couch. You've been watching Netflix, things like that, just to put simple concepts in their head about how they can get started and move forward.
[00:50:05] Speaker C: That is great. So you're using this for children. Do you have to convince their parents? I know you go through school programs and things.
[00:50:12] Speaker A: I know some adults who could use some of this, too.
[00:50:14] Speaker C: Oh, definitely. But are the parents receptive to letting their children go through this kind of program?
[00:50:19] Speaker E: That is a really good question. That something super that I haven't even contemplated yet. So thank you. I am working with schools and different organizations, and I would not think that it's not like sex education or drug education. That maybe would be controversial.
Everything in the curriculum is 100% grounded in science and psychological theories that are widely accepted.
[00:50:51] Speaker A: I think people understand that there are certain boundaries and that people are better off if they learn certain types of responsibility. And I think sometimes parents kind of notice that.
But the problem is in society in general, you also want to be seen as a good parent. You don't want your child to be isolated at school so you just kind of go along with stuff. Even though maybe in the long run it's not in the best interest of the child. But if there's a program out there like this, it's more neutral and maybe it would be more accepted.
[00:51:19] Speaker E: It's absolutely neutral. And one of the main goals when I set out to create this was that it, it does not come across academic, judgmental, preachy, nobody wants any of those things. It's really more like another young adult talking to them, saying hey, did you ever think about it this way? Very non confrontational.
[00:51:45] Speaker C: That's great. Richard Curtis, did you have a question or comment?
[00:51:48] Speaker D: I was just thinking about helicopter parents because those are like the super example of parents who won't let people any dirt, any foreign thoughts come into their kids head. I mean they don't just run to school with a sandwich, they take a plane, take a jet to deliver the sandwich.
[00:52:08] Speaker E: It's really hysterical because similar to you Elizabeth, my parents both worked. I didn't do any activities, I didn't do any sports, I didn't leave the house. My parents worked and I was with my grandparents and they didn't have any activities for me. They didn't even speak English. So I sat in front of the television. So if I wanted to do something, I needed to be resourceful, creative. I had to go outside.
I know we're preaching to the choir with a lot of these things and we can't unring the bell, but we do. And we also, we don't want to blame ourselves and we don't want to blame the kids.
But we need to recognize that there is a disconnect and we want to work with them to help them understand that they are capable and they can do these things, they can do anything they set their mind to.
They just need to have the right mindset.
[00:53:04] Speaker C: And I think it's so important because especially in that age group that you're talking about, there's so much negative peer pressure, especially with social media. Now do you tell them anything about social media?
[00:53:16] Speaker E: The social media is a huge component of it because between the bullying and the comparison and you know, just the unhealthy versions of people that you see out there that you think Everybody has got the perfect body and the perfect this and the perfect that. It's very unhealthy for these kids. And that's where I believe a lot of the negativity is coming from.
You also, I don't discount the COVID situation either. My son was in college when Covid hit having the time of his life, and then, boom, college closed. Home with mom, home for the next foreseeable months. And then when he went back to school, everything was closed.
So he was actually living at school in an apartment with five people. But they couldn't leave the house.
Everything was closed, even the outdoor activities.
So I'm not coming at this from a political standpoint, but what I am saying is there was an isolation factor and that impacted these kids at a pivotal time in their life. And I've heard from other parents that have everything their kid being a little bit uncomfortably socially all the way to, like, an agoraphobia and not even wanting to leave the house.
So these are the things that our young adults are dealing with.
[00:54:48] Speaker A: Well, I think part of it is the parents too. I mean, most of us can look back at our childhood and say, oh, our parents made us feel bad. They made us do this. And my life would be better if my mother had been this way or my father hadn't said this.
And so you bend over backwards to make sure that your kids don't have those kinds of experiences because you want them to grow up in a better
[00:55:13] Speaker C: environment, but you screw them up anyway and they're still mad at you anyway because you just.
[00:55:18] Speaker A: I guess it didn't make any difference.
[00:55:20] Speaker F: I'm so curious. How do you track the progress after the program?
[00:55:25] Speaker E: And that is absolutely one of the most important things. And I'm really glad you brought it up because I would love to partner with an organization that would be able to help me determine the efficacy using the proper assessments and tools. That's a little bit out of my skill set.
So for an organization like mine as a startup, I am looking for support and those types of things.
[00:55:56] Speaker C: And how do people get ahold of you?
[00:55:58] Speaker E: They can connect with me through my website, which is rise cognitiveblueprint.com youm can also find me on LinkedIn.
[00:56:07] Speaker C: Rosemarieiskowicz okay, so you're looking for schools to partner with. You're looking for data analysis people to partner with and other institutions too. Do you have very many clients right now?
[00:56:20] Speaker E: Right now we have a few that we're starting, pilots with that I'm very excited about. We have a nonprofit school that we're working with. I have a few nonprofit organizations that are connected with the New Jersey Youth and Family Services as well as the ddd.
There's interest and opportunity there.
So I am more than excited to recruit new pilot partners.
[00:56:48] Speaker A: That's great.
[00:56:49] Speaker C: How many kids would you like to affect in 20? 27?
[00:56:54] Speaker E: Thousands. I would love to get this out to thousands of kids. And really, I would love to take the framework that I've created. I really think it lends itself to multiple areas. In other words, it can be the rise framework for veterans, the rise framework for working with folks that have addictions or different type of treatment, because the components of the framework work in a lot of different settings.
[00:57:28] Speaker C: Great. Well, thank you very much, Rosemarie. So this has been Rosemary Iskowitz with Rise cognitiveblueprint.com Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gerhardt. And now we're on to our final guest idiolo with polygonsystems.com helping us all be healthier by taking all those nasty little bits, microplastics, out of the water. So welcome.
[00:57:53] Speaker F: Thank you for having me here. I want to ask everyone a question. Do you all familiar with microplastics? Microplastics are any plastic particles that are smaller than 5 millimeters in diameter. And then there's also nanoplastics, which are smaller than 1 micron to give a scale. So my hair is around 200 micron or so in.
In width. So like, a nanoplastic is like one twentieth of the size. The problem is they're too small. Right. So it's very impossible, probably, to see them with our naked eye. But they're in our drinking water, they're in our blood. They're everywhere.
[00:58:28] Speaker A: So if we drink bottled water from plastic containers, is there microplastics in that water?
[00:58:33] Speaker F: Great question. Let's take a guess. How many micro nanoplastics are there in the bottled water?
[00:58:41] Speaker C: I'm gonna say half a million.
[00:58:44] Speaker F: Half a million. Okay, Aggressive.
[00:58:48] Speaker A: I'm gonna say a lot. I don't know. I have no idea.
[00:58:51] Speaker F: It is between 90,000 to 240,000 nanoplastics.
[00:58:57] Speaker A: So if you were to, like, put it all together, all the particles together, and look at it on the table, what size would that be? Like the head of a pin? Or would it be substantially more?
[00:59:07] Speaker F: Probably much smaller, because we're talking about nanoplastics.
[00:59:11] Speaker C: So where does it go in your body? Does it go into your cells? So it goes down your throat into your stomach when you drink it. So then where does it Go. Does it stay there? Does it distribute throughout your digestive system, or what does it do?
[00:59:23] Speaker F: Great question.
It's smaller than the cells itself, so you actually get transported across your body, and it enters your brain, your cell, your blood, and then it's in your. When you have a baby, the baby sometimes carried microplastics. It's kind of scary.
[00:59:39] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:59:39] Speaker F: And then, you know, like, pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars, try to have drugs that can go into your brain, and they sometimes fail. The microplastic or nanoplastic got into the brain, the organs, before all of the drugs. Got it.
[00:59:53] Speaker C: Are they inert or can they emit chemicals?
[00:59:55] Speaker F: Great question again. Like, the plastic itself depends on this type. Can be inertia, but some of them have, like, pigments and other chemicals added to them. So plastic becomes a vector for all of the other things.
[01:00:08] Speaker D: What kind of sickness can result from ingesting microplastic?
[01:00:12] Speaker F: It's very hard to draw, like, a direct line between how much microplasty you have taken versus any syndromes. But there's correlation because it makes some of the organs, like, flammable. It makes reproductivity less. So people have those kind of directions.
[01:00:31] Speaker C: So how do you measure it? What do you use to analyze it?
[01:00:34] Speaker F: So for very basic microplastic, we can use fluorescent microscope. We kind of dye plastic in a special dye, and it shines under a very special weight, length. And we can quantify, okay, 200 microplastic per liter of water, or 50. And if you want to have a very detailed understanding, you have to use, like, those advanced equipment such as ftir, GC Ms. And those are not really available in most labs.
So that's why we actually do this kind of analysis for people, just in case they're curious about their water.
[01:01:07] Speaker A: So if there was one thing you wanted people to know about microplastics, what would you tell them?
[01:01:13] Speaker F: I would say try to avoid having plastics in your diet before anything is concrete in the research.
[01:01:21] Speaker A: So, for example, if I have to make a choice between drinking bottled water and tap water, which would be healthier
[01:01:26] Speaker F: for me, I would drink from my filtered water in the fridge, because my tap water I tested is actually doesn't have much microplastic, but it has other heavy chemicals as well.
[01:01:38] Speaker A: So you would drink filtered water? I would drink filtered water from the tap. You think that that's probably healthier than drinking bottled water? Because we drink a lot of bottled water, we're trying to avoid all the chemicals in the tap water.
[01:01:50] Speaker C: So for the filtered, that goes through chemicals Too to filter out.
[01:01:54] Speaker F: So sometimes when you install those kind of inlet system, they are like RO systems or like the active charcoal systems. And those are pretty regular system you can use and get rid of a lot of heavy chemicals and plastic. Bottled water might be clean when it was dispensed into the bottle, but you don't know how long the bottle is being transported. Exposed to different kinds of condition or temperature, it may release plastic. So that's why I no longer drink
[01:02:20] Speaker A: water from like, if plastic water bottle heats up like it's in the sun, I think it's probably leaching even more.
[01:02:28] Speaker F: Have you thought about sometimes why does it taste a bit weird? Yeah, might be because of the plastic and all the.
[01:02:36] Speaker C: So I can't bring my bottled water in the plastic bottle with me. So should I be using a stainless steel water bottle for that?
[01:02:42] Speaker F: Stainless steel glass bottles. Those are great.
[01:02:45] Speaker C: Except I was looking up stainless steel bottles and they're lined up with chemicals.
[01:02:50] Speaker A: Lots of times they have like a resin type of covering.
[01:02:54] Speaker C: So you're kind of.
[01:02:55] Speaker A: I guess this is a very difficult problem. You know, I just want a glass of water. Right. You know.
[01:03:00] Speaker D: What does your company do to collect and filter?
[01:03:04] Speaker F: So our system is developed for larger commercial applications and municipality applications. At the beginning, we're looking at how in the nature anything that is capturing smaller pollutants. And we find out this kind of green infrastructure made of wetlands. And all of their plant roots are very fibrous and they can capture a lot of the smaller contaminants, including mycoplasty. We're like, amazing idea. Why can't we just have floating wetlands everywhere in the river or in wastewater treatment plants? And we try to incorporate in our design. So I have this kind of wetland in my design apartment for a few weeks trying to filter microplastic. They keep dying, right? And then we realize, okay, we want to imitate the quality structure of aquatic plant root, but we don't really want real plants because they die. So we innovated this fibrous silicone filter media that basically has the same hydrophility quality as the aquatic plant root, has the same shape with and width.
So you can also physically entangle microplastic. And then we test it with a lot of like overdose microplastic water. We have more than 99% of removal rate for the microplastic. We introduce the water and we're like, okay, we make. We're gonna have this installed in like commercial wastewater in the pools in municipality so that microplastic doesn't leach into the broader waterways.
[01:04:34] Speaker A: So is leaching into municipal water plants. Is it. There's a lot of plastic that actually finds its way into that water. Does that come from runoff from garbage dumps or how does plastic get into. I thought it was all rain that came down. Right. You know, and then flows through the ground and that goes into the water supply. But there's plastic in there too.
[01:04:56] Speaker F: There are so many avenues. So the airborne plastic is one of the avenues. And there's also, you know, ties of the car when they wear off on the road and got washed into open channels that also get collected in wastewater treatment plant and laundry. A lot of clothing fibers are made of synthetic material. They also go into wastewater.
[01:05:17] Speaker C: So does a person's body excrete the plastic? Have you checked, like, urine samples to see how much is in there?
[01:05:23] Speaker F: We do have a clinic reaching out to us saying, like, can we send you urine samples to test microbiome plastic? We're like, we're not ready for that yet.
[01:05:33] Speaker C: I wonder how much.
[01:05:34] Speaker D: I remember reading about what they did with. How do they recycle tires? They ground them up and they used them to create artificial turf for football fields. Then they discovered that kids who fell on the turf were inhaling rubber powder, which has all kinds of chemicals in it. So it was actually worse than leaving the tires to burn in some hole where they'd been burning for years. But I would imagine if you don't properly dispose of the plastic you collect, you don't want to end up recycling it.
[01:06:09] Speaker C: I'm sure AI will solve it in five years.
[01:06:11] Speaker A: There you go.
[01:06:13] Speaker C: Anyway. Well, thank you very much. This has been Yadine Liu, and Your company is polygonsystems.com yes. We'll be right back. You're listening to the Passage to Profit show with Richard Elizabeth Gearhart.
[01:06:25] Speaker G: Do you hear that? That's the sound of uncertainty lurking under your hood. You know the feeling. I know I do. That sudden sinking sensation when you see a check engine light or your car unexpectedly breaks down and you're faced with sky high repair bills. It's time to shield against unexpected repairs with Carshield. Car Shield is America's most trusted auto protection company and. And has an A rating with the Better Business Bureau. Don't let the fear of a breakdown keep you up at night. Trust the Shield Car Shield. And say goodbye to terrifying repair bills and hello to peace of mind. Your plan also comes with 24. 7 roadside assistance, courtesy towing, rental car options, and so much more. Don't wait till it's too late. Call Carshield now before a breakdown, protect your wallet. Protect your car with Carshield. Get our best, best protection ever. Call now. You'll thank me later. 8002-6121-7680-0261-2176. That's 800-261-2176.
[01:07:24] Speaker A: It's passage to Profit Alicia Morrissey is our programming director at Passage to Profit, and she's also a fantastic jazz vocalist. You can scroll to the bottom of the passage to prophetshow.com website and check out her album.
[01:07:40] Speaker C: And now it is time for Secrets of the Entrepreneurial Mind. First we'll go to Richard Curtis, literary agent, author, publishing authority, and author's advocate. Website richard-curtis.com what is a secret you can share with our audience?
[01:07:56] Speaker D: To me, the most important thing for an entrepreneur is not to be afraid. Not to be afraid of making mistakes, not to be afraid of the competition.
There are innumerable dangers and you must be ready to face them, to adjust to them and to conquer them.
[01:08:16] Speaker A: Very, very true and very inspiring as well.
[01:08:19] Speaker C: Rosemarie Iskowitz, Founder of Rise Cognitive Blueprint Rise cognitiveblueprint.com what's a secret you can share with our audience?
[01:08:27] Speaker E: Very much in line with what Richard said and also in line with my framework, which is setbacks and failures are not the end. They're part of the process.
And that was a big one that I had to learn for myself. I could tell that I could no longer grow in what I was doing. I was no longer really shining and adding my best value because I wasn't making new strides and doing new and exciting things.
Something went wrong. That doesn't mean it's over. It means regroup, pivot, and figure it out.
[01:09:07] Speaker C: I love that. That's so entrepreneurial. Yes. And Yidian Lu, co founder of Polygon Systems polygonsystems.com, what's a secret you can share?
[01:09:16] Speaker F: I think any business at the end is all about people. We're trying to create a product that will benefit people. Solving real world problems and when we're dealing with our clients is also how can we best develop our strategies to make sure their pain points are being met? That's what I learned when I'm founding Polygon.
[01:09:36] Speaker C: I think that's great advice too. And Richard Gearhart with Gearhart Law.
[01:09:41] Speaker A: Well, I think every problem that happens over and over and over again is usually a problem in the system. Somebody doesn't understand what they're supposed to be doing or people aren't communicating in the right way.
And so if it keeps happening again. It may not be helpful to point a finger at somebody that's making the mistake over and over again. You gotta look at the context in which they're working and then try to fix that, and hopefully that will solve your problem.
[01:10:09] Speaker C: Excellent advice. And for me, Elizabeth Gearhart with Gere Media Studios. I feel like right now in 2026, and I think I'm guilty of this, along with a lot of other people, we're getting to be AI lazy, which means instead of trying to think through solutions and think through things for ourselves first, we're just going straight to AI to ask it. And a lot of times what we come up with is so much better.
And I think we all just kind of have to guard against that. You know, it's kind of like AI is like this giant bowl of ice cream and we're just keep going back and eating. Pretty soon we're going to be £500, right?
So that's it for me.
[01:10:49] Speaker A: Bowl of ice cream. I think you're waiting for the show to wind down, which it is. So that's all for us this week. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the podcast and leave a quick review. Also, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X and subscribe to our YouTube channel for bonus content. Tune in next week for another episode of Passage to Profit.
