Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Cal Fussman: Unleash Your Creative Genius and Innovate with AI-Powered Efficiency | E303

Episode Date: August 12, 2024

Cal Fussman declined Jeff Bezos's offer to sell his children's book on Amazon, balking at a 50% profit split. Before long, it dawned on him that he had underestimated the power of Amazon's platform. But this blunder became a pivotal wake-up call, driving him to embrace new opportunities and stay ahead in tech. Determined to seize every golden chance, Cal now confidently navigates the fast-paced world of AI. In this episode, he shares actionable tips for leveraging AI to supercharge your creativity and boost business success. Cal Fussman is a New York Times bestselling author, keynote speaker, and master storyteller known for his captivating interviews. He also hosts the Big Questions podcast, and his work has appeared in Esquire, GQ, Sports Illustrated, and ESPN.  In this episode, Hala and Cal will discuss: - Achieving clarity of ideas with AI - AI creativity vs. the human touch  - Cal’s creative experiments with AI tools  - How AI can enhance creative processes - What Cal learned from turning down Jeff Bezos - The importance of continuous learning  - Adapting to AI’s impact on the job market - Tips for boosting innovation and efficiency with AI - Why you shouldn’t fear AI - And other topics…   Cal Fussman is a New York Times bestselling author and master storyteller known for his captivating interviews. He hosts the Big Questions podcast and is a celebrated keynote speaker. Cal has spent decades connecting with some of the world's most influential figures, from Muhammad Ali to Jeff Bezos. His unique ability to make people feel comfortable and his relentless curiosity have made him a beloved figure in journalism. His work has appeared in Esquire, GQ, Sports Illustrated, and ESPN.  Connect with Cal:  Cal’s Website: https://www.calfussman.com/   Cal’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/calfussman/  Cal’s Twitter: https://x.com/calfussman   Cal’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/calfussman  Cal’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/calfussman/  Cal’s Podcast, Big Questions: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/big-questions-with-cal-fussman/id1315791659?mt=2  Resources Mentioned: Suno: https://suno.com/  Udio: https://www.udio.com/  YAP Episode 284 with Stephen Wolfram: https://youngandprofiting.com/stephen-wolfram-ai-chatgpt-and-the-computational-nature-of-reality-e284/  Kevin Surace on Big Questions with Cal Fussman: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/kevin-surace-2050-the-end-of-work/id1315791659?i=1000645969896    LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass, Have Job Security For Life: Use code ‘podcast’ for 30% off at yapmedia.io/course.   Sponsored By: Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at youngandprofiting.co/shopify  Indeed - Get a $75 job credit at indeed.com/profiting  Found - Try Found for FREE at found.com/YAP Rakuten - Start all your shopping at rakuten.com or get the Rakuten app to start saving today, your Cash Back really adds up! More About Young and Profiting Download Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com Get Sponsorship Deals - youngandprofiting.com/sponsorships Leave a Review - ratethispodcast.com/yap Watch Videos - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting   Follow Hala Taha LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ TikTok - tiktok.com/@yapwithhala Twitter - twitter.com/yapwithhala   Learn more about YAP Media's Services - yapmedia.io/

Today's episode is sponsored in part by Found, Rakuten, Pipe Drive, Shopify, and Indeed. Found gives you banking, invoicing, and bookkeeping all in one place and was created for busy entrepreneurs. Try Found for free at found.com slash profiting. Get cash back on every purchase with Rakuten, the smarter way to shop and save. Start all your shopping trips at rakuten.com or get the Rakuten app to start saving today. Streamline your sales and close more deals with PipeDrive, the leading CRM solution for salespeople by salespeople.

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The acceleration of how fast AI and technology is moving is actually going to allow us to live way longer than we can live now. AI is about as clear as you are going to get. It's not really designed to be very creative, but that's okay. It was designed for clarity. Everybody should be on these AI sites experimenting. Jeff Bezos wanted to sell your book and you said no. It really was one of the most boneheaded decisions I've ever made in my life. life. Young and Profiters, welcome back to the show. And today we're playing part two of my conversation with Cal Fussman.

Part one of the conversation was really all about networking. Cal is an expert interviewer. He knows how to get people really comfortable. And so I really tried to dig deep in terms of how he gets his guests and the people that he's interviewed in the past. He's interviewed some of the most famous people in the world to get comfortable and get connected with him. Because even though we're not all podcast hosts,

we all need to build meaningful relationships and bonds, get people to trust us, get people to open up to us. And a lot of that just takes asking meaningful questions, being good listeners. And that's what we cover in part one, how to network better, how to story tell better, and so on. In part two of this conversation, we really switch gears and we talk about AI

So Cal is obsessed with AI. He talks about it on his podcast all the time He's totally absorbed himself in AI and we're gonna learn what we need to do as entrepreneurs when it comes to AI how we can Experiment with it. He gives us some recommendations. It's really interesting stuff. I can't wait for you guys to hear it Here's part two of my conversation with Cal Fussman. Let's take this to AI. Here's the thing about AI. AI is about as clear as you are going to get because it has been designed to deliver clarity

in the form of a summary. Now, it's not really designed to be very creative, but that's okay, it was designed for clarity. So you can actually have people put their thoughts into AI and ask AI to clarify them. Now when it comes back, it may seem artificial. So now what they got to do is really look at it and see if they can go in now that it's clear and with their own authenticity, tweak things so it's human and it's clear.

And I'm going to give you the best example. Man, I can't believe you asked me this question. It's very good. It's very smart because not many people know this, but I probably know more about AI than 99% of people on the planet, just because I keep interviewing people about it. And so I'm taking everything in. And here's a great chance for people

to do something that's a creative activity that they might like. Go to suno.com, S-U-N-O, and it allows you to create music, create songs. All you got to do is you type in maybe 200 characters, a prompt saying, I would like to write a love song about, most songs are love songs anyway, and give it characters, give it situations, give it places. Then you hit a button and in less than a minute, you get a song with lyrics,

with music, with a really nice voice that you might hear on radio. To people who make music, it makes them shiver inside because it's like years of honing their craft or their voice or the way they play an instrument. It's just been handed over to AI and they just give it back to you in a finger snap. The thing about it is, but here's the point about the clarity. It could give you some really funky lyrics,

and you'll look at them or laugh at them. But you have an idea in your mind how you might want to make those lyrics clear and you can then go to a place where you can say, all right, I want to create and you can take the lyrics that they came up for you and you can put them in another place and now you can write over those lyrics. You can put in your own rhymes. You can put in the words you want,

the examples you want, the examples you want, with the possibility of even creative work of art, or you can use this in an exercise to just, I want to show that I'm thinking more clearly. I'm going to be clearer than the AI. You will write over those lyrics, hit a button, and then the song will come out with a completely different melody,

with a completely different singer, completely different instrumentals. I've done this now hundreds of times where I'm just sitting there getting the words just where I want, and then just clicking the button to listen to new voices and listen to the way they're doing the instrumentals. And what I'm doing in that exercise is I have something in my mind that's very clear. I can't sing, I can't play the instruments, but I can keep nudging either the lyrics or the prompts saying,

you know, no, no, no, no, the voice, a voice is not deep enough or I'm looking a little more for this. And what it is, is it's an exercise in clarity. You're asking it to give you something that you can't do, but when it produces it, you recognize it and say, yeah, that's what I was looking for. I love that example. We were talking about this before we got started.

And I tell people it's so important just to do this as an exercise because it allows you to see what is happening before us, how fast things are moving. And when then you see into it just fired 1800 people or 1600, whatever it was, and then said, and we're going to hire the same amount of people, only it's going to be in this area. We got to be thinking this way. Everybody's got to be thinking this way. And so just doing these exercises and look there's AI programs out that are now making videos. You just sell it the video that you want and it doesn't take very long. And so

these are exercises in clarity because they don't get it right the first time. You've got to have these really clear prompts. Yes. And they'll even let you go further where you can write the exact words that you want sung. So it's saying, be clear to your message, as clear as you can be. And if you just keep hitting that button, somehow they'll find the right voice and the right music. And when you hear it, you go, that's it. That's what I was looking for.

Have you created an AI generated version of your voice yet for your podcast? I have not done that. I have. Do you like it? Have you created an AI generated version of your voice yet for your podcast? I have not done that. I have. Do you like it? It sounds exactly like me and we've already used it in emergencies. I went on vacation and I forgot to record my intro or my outro or something like this. And it's just like, hey, this is an AI generated version of Hala's voice. She's on vacation.

And then it just says my intro or my outro sounds just like me. A lot of people were like, you sounded a little off, but until you said it was AI, I didn't know. And how did people generally react to it? Did they feel comfortable with it? Did anybody say, we like the real Hala? I think if I did it a lot, people wouldn't like it.

Because that's gimmicky, it's not me. So it's really like if I'm sick, knock on wood, I haven't gotten sick in a while. If I have a cold, it's really hard to record, and that's my job, and I still have commercials and all these things that I have to deliver. So if I'm sick or if I'm just on vacation, we're using it in those use cases only.

I think that it's very smart of you to think that way and not deny it. It's not that I'm really denying it. It's more about me waiting for the right moment when something organically comes up and I say, okay, I need it. I'm just putting my time into other areas of AI that I'm exploring. So I think it's really important for you to go through that because you now know what it's like. Yeah. So you've been interviewing people in AI. I've been interviewing people in AI.

I'd be curious to understand what are some of the biggest eye-opening things that you've learned, and then I can share also some of the things that really changed my mind about AI. One of the most recent, guy named Damon Burton, he is a SEO guru. He started out, I think back in like 2008 and he took the TV

show The Bachelor, which has its own, you know, it's ABC, it has its own website. And he created a website in 90 minutes that had to do with the Bachelor that got more clicks and response than the Bachelor's own website. He figured out a way to do this and now people like Tony Robbins uses him, and when Shark Tank puts out a product, they go to him. A lot of 5,000 companies use him. He was saying, this is really surprising,

that this idea that you just blast your low-level AI content all over the place, will get a better response than if you just put out, say, two really authentic messages that have the smell of grandma's cookies when people look at them. Grandma's cookies win. They get the more clicks. And he said that a lot of the algorithms,

like the Google algorithms, have been weighted against the AI and toward grandma's cookies. Well, as soon as that podcast came out, I was getting all these emails from business people saying, my God, I had no idea of that. I had no idea that when I take out a banner ad that only 2% of the clicks are coming through that ad and the other 98% are coming out organically. And what am I doing organically? I'm just relying on the ad.

So that's one piece. And grandma's cookies are really stories, authentic stories. A million percent. And so it's very natural. But I think a lot of people just immediately they heard AI and just wanted to throw everything into it, and they don't realize that the algorithms may be working against them, and they got no more sweet smell in the air. So, Stephen Wolfram came on my podcast. So he basically invented a lot of the code that is used for AI. And I asked him, I was like, aren't you scared of AI becoming apex intelligence and just

taking over everything? Because it's already pretty much smarter than most people. Aren't you worried that it's going to take over the world? And he's like, it probably will. However, we already live in a world that we don't control. We live in nature. And nature is something that we can try to predict it, but we don't know exactly what it's gonna do.

We have no control over it, and we just like live in nature, and we have no control over it. That's what it's gonna be like potentially in the future. We're gonna live amongst AI and not necessarily have control over it, but it doesn't mean that they're gonna just do terrible things to us, or it doesn't mean that they're going to just do terrible things to us or it's going to do terrible things.

We might just live adjacently to AI, which I just thought was a very interesting way to think about it. I did hear that podcast. It was great. Oh, you heard it. Okay. He was taking it way back to the 50s, how it started and the whole process. And when you look at it through that whole evolutionary process, and now we're going to play a game like, all right, how is going to top cow?

It really isn't about topping is really is about just exchanging information. I had a guy, Kevin Serrace, you would love this guy too, you should have him on your podcast. He was one of the inventors of the first virtual assistant. He's been in this space for many, many, many years. He explains that, if you just look through history, every time we go through this, people are so scared. Oh no, there's not going to be a job for me. I'm out of work. And he

said, in every case, more jobs are created. And he just pointed out like a General Motors assembly lines are now, they're all robotic, just comparatively very little human interaction with the car where it used to be all human. And yet the cars are costing less because of this. And GM is employing more people. It's just where the jobs are gonna go, which gets back to that place in the conversation

where companies that are firing 1,800 people to hire 1,800 people are looking for that new breed of workers, which is why everybody should be on these AI sites experimenting. You don't want to feel like I'm outside this and this comes back to my whole core about connection. You don't want to feel like, oh my God, I'm all alone and I've been working remote. You hear statistics, people saying they don't have friends anymore. There's a line on the Internet that I saw,

we live in a world where people can get a thousand likes but have no friends. You don't want to be in a position where you're feeling alone, maybe you lose a job and now you don't have a human connection to help you out. Because now maybe you're sending your resume in, maybe the algorithm doesn't like you. Maybe you're putting something on your resume that the algorithm is just not looking for and you're not even aware of it. I actually wrote a song on AI about this. It really just seems to me that for very little money you can go to these AI sites and

just start playing around with them and what you immediately see is, hey, this world is moving fast. You better do something to at least be up on it and understanding that this is how fast the world is moving. Because if you take the opposite approach of, I'm not going there, I'm done. You better have a nice amount of money stocked away in your retirement account because this world

is moving really, really fast. And I think I was telling you before, one of the futurists, Ray Kurzweil, who's made many accurate predictions, has said that in 10 years, the acceleration of how fast AI and technology is moving is actually going to allow us to live way longer than we can live now. That there'll be computer chips the size of blood cells in your body. This world is really not fathomable to a lot of people, but the people who know what's coming, they see

it. And so we have to be connected to it. We don't want to feel ostracized and outside of it because that's just gonna start to make us feel depressed. So it's one of the reasons that I decided, hey, I am completely jumping into this. There are times where I feel, oh my god, what is that doing to our creativity? It's allowing somebody who can't sing like me, who can't play an instrument like me to sit around composing songs and filling out an album. What right do I have to do that? But that is our world. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors. Yeah, fam, I'm not a finance person.

I'm a make money person. I love to innovate, create and sell. I don't like to do the boring finance stuff. I hate thinking about bookkeeping, expensing, invoicing, tax planning and organization. Blah. I hate it. So I've offloaded all those responsibilities to my business partner, who's basically our COO and our CFO, Jason.

And Jason is doing an awesome job. However, I basically handed a mess over to him and he's been having to toggle from app to app to app to get it all done. And he was looking for a streamlined solution to handle everything in one place. And we found that with found. Yes, it's called found, which is very fitting. Found is a banking and bookkeeping app that is especially made for solopreneurs and entrepreneurs.

It's made for us. You can do everything from invoicing to bookkeeping to tax planning. One of my favorite features on found is that it will actually automatically estimate the taxes that you owe and then set aside money for that. Similarly, you can create virtual cards for different things like travel or marketing and then set spending limits on them. Found is super cost effective.

First of all, it's everything in one app and there's no hidden fees or minimum balances. There is no paperwork to sign. There's no credit checks, it's a breeze to sign up. If you want to try Found for free, you can go to found.com slash profiting. That's f-o-u-n-d dot com slash profiting. Again, if you want to try Found for free, go to found.com slash profiting. Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by Pyrmont Bank member FDIC. Fount's core features are free. They also offer an optional paid product, Fount Plus. Yeah fam, one of my least favorite parts about being an entrepreneur is the hiring process.

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at indeed.com slash profiting. Support the show by letting them know that you found them on Young and Profiting podcast. Again, you can go to indeed.com slash profiting for a $75 sponsored job credit. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Young and Profiters, I love a good habit.

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I checked my mail today like a good girl. And I'm gonna open up and see what Rakuten has for me. Alright. $236. Cash back in my pocket. This is money that would have went down the drain, but instead because of my new good habit, it's in my pocket. If you want to start the good habit of Rakuten, membership is free and signing up is easy. Get the Rakuten app now and join the 17 million members who are already saving. Cashback rates change daily. See rakuten.com for details. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N. Your cashback really adds up. Yeah, it is what it is. It's there already. It's not going anywhere. It's not going to

go anywhere. It's scary, but it's exciting. I know as entrepreneurs, I think about myself, right? I'm running a company. I'm so busy running this company. I'm using ChatGVT as a tool, but I really, you've opened my eyes like, I need to do more. I need to either get my team to do more, but I feel like I personally need to be playing around with tools. Do you agree that everybody should be personally playing? It's not like I can just delegate this because then I'm just like the old person

who doesn't know how to use TikTok or whatever. It's like, you know, like you just gotta learn how to use it, right? Here's the thing. This is the crazy thing that I discovered. It's like you mentioned TikTok and, oh, I'm gonna be the old person around TikTok. If you stick to AI, TikTok's gonna be old

and you'll be in the fast lane because AI is going to have something that it's going to surpass TikTok. It may not seem like it now, but look, Facebook back in what, 2005, 2006, it was everybody jumping in on it. And now it's kind of a bastion for people in their 70s who just- New boomers. Keeping up with their childhood friends. So I would say here's the point. You got a great voice.

You love music. You were starring in musicals when you were a kid and everybody loved your voice. There's two sites. Suno, I mentioned, S-U-N-O, and U-D-O. I think it's U-D-I-O is another one, and they basically do the same thing. You're musically oriented. Go on your sites and just take

a topic that you want to express yourself in. Here's the exercise for everybody on your team, to give everybody a chance to focus on a topic, a business topic that you want a solution to, or you want some creativity around. And you say, okay, everybody go and write a song about this subject. And if they want, look, all it takes is just a simple prompt and a click. But if they really want

to work at it and become clear at it, at the end, I'm telling you, some of these songs, if you heard on the radio, you would not think that would never get on the radio. It's that level. Now, is it at the level where you're hearing Soul Sacrifice by Santana in 1969 at Woodstock that defined a generation? Something that is completely unique. Nobody had ever heard before, and when they did, it just erupted. I haven't heard anything like that on these AI sites because it's basically using the past to guide it. It's not taking us to a new place.

But still, it'd be an interesting exercise for you to go on, use your musical mind and just create a song that's going to make you smile, play around with it, adjust the lyrics, you'll have your own song, and then see what other people on your team come up with. I guarantee you, is this my ultimate point to this? This will lead to what we've lost in remote work, serendipity, where people are coming together looking at the same thing. And now ideas just may be sparking

because of what you're creating. And you're just listening to songs. That's all. But it's something that I'm encouraging because everybody's then going to say, oh man, things are moving faster than TikTok. AI is so interesting because I feel like right now, especially, it gets you like 80 percent there

and then you've got to put your human touch on it. We use Dolly for images. So I created a new podcast cover for this charity project that I had and I kept going through designers and I'm like, this is shit, this is shit. Like I hated everything. And then I was like, let's just use Dolly. So I was like using it. And then we took a few different things that Dolly produced and then used a graphic designer to finalize it and put it all together. I just feel like that's where AI is now. It's getting you lots of ideas,

it's really creative because it's taking all these inputs from history and producing something amazing, and then you take it and refine it and finalize it. And that's exactly where we're at. And look, wouldn't this have happened the same way if you were doing it with a designer where you're going to go through so many iterations or different designers or musicians?

I did a book with a guy who was the CEO of Sony Music, Tommy Mottola, and there were just so many producers he had at his fingertips or people who could play the guitar or who played the bass, and he'd hear it and say, okay, we need this outside figure to come in and it's going to elevate it. okay, we need this outside figure to come in and it's going to elevate it. And we just think that AI should be perfect,

but it's not gonna be perfect if we look at it as, what kind of idea can I get out of this? And then how can I humanize it? I think that's where we're gonna get the smell of grandma's cookies and the clarity and the speed and the time management out of AI. So it's all going to come together. And humans should not be scared of it because if we just adopt that attitude,

I had another guy in my podcast, I mentioned Kevin Srais who just said, look, if you're not with this, it's just going to run you over. You have no chance. You're like the guy who was walking with a sack on your back when the wheel got invented and just said, okay, I'm done. Instead of figuring out a way to put two wheels together, design a cart and triple your efficiency or quintuple it, whatever. And look, I'm an old dude.

And I also, I see dangers. There's obviously dangers in it. There's dangers in every technology that comes along. I just think that if you really have good purposes in mind, good things will happen if you jump into it. And at the very least, you'd be, I think you could hear in my voice, I'm pretty excited about it. Some people are scared and some people are excited. You seem very, very excited about it.

At the same time, I've given speech telling people, don't be bedazzled here. In the course of history, whatever has come along, there's been a good side to it and either a not so good side to it or an evil side to it. And that just comes with the territory. The problem is, it's just moving so much faster than we can grip it. You talked about going to chat GPT, you've seen how fast that text falls in front of you. And this is just an amoeba. It's just started. Imagine 10 years from now. So let's try and get the best out of it and hope the worst doesn't

come out of it. Yeah. Well, Kyle, this was such an amazing conversation. I end my show with two last questions that I ask all of my guests. The first one is what is one actionable thing our young and profitors could do today to become more profitable tomorrow? Okay. Well, I think we kind of discussed it, but you need starting tonight to go on an AI website that's not ChatGP, the different one, and just explore because it is going to give you ideas that you didn't have before, just like the experience you mentioned with Dolly. So tonight, before you go to bed,

take just a few minutes. Suno, they don't even know who, they don't know that I invented these songs. You need to get a sponsorship by Suno. I should have a partnership with Suno because I think what it does is it allows people to do something. Number one, they're going to go, what? I just created a song and it sounds like that and I can hit another button and it comes out a different way and I can just manipulate it to

get the voices I want, and the music, and the lyrics. Even after I've told you everything, they're going to say, what? I can do that? Two, after you do it a bunch of times, and after it's let you down because it's just like you were describing the graphic designs. It wasn't what you wanted.

10 seconds in, nope, not the voice. Boom, next, next, next, next, next. Pretty soon you're like on your 50th attempt to get exactly what you want. But it's just a lesson in where the world is going. You will be in a much better place just to have gone through this process. And what would you say is your secret to profiting in life?

I think it is the connections that you make. It's the people that you surround yourself with. They always say when you're young, you are the combination of the five people that you hang around with. So if you're rolling with people who are doing drugs and are have drinking problems, well, guess what? That's probably what you're doing too. If you're rolling with people who have straight A's and they're staying up all night studying, you're probably doing the same thing. And that's cool,

but maybe you're missing out on a little fun. So maybe if you had a mix, you would incorporate the mixture in yourself. So I think it's the people you hang around with will affect everything that you do, including the word profit. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors. Young and Profiters, I am a natural born seller. I love to sell. I've been selling for so long from when I was working at the mall as a teen to now doing six figure deals at Yap Media. And while I'm so good at sales and this face to face interaction and I feel like I could sell salt to a slug,

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I just remembered that I wanted to ask you questions about two entrepreneurs that you interviewed, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos. This is an entrepreneurship podcast. What is some entrepreneurship advice that you interviewed, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos. This is an entrepreneurship podcast. What is some entrepreneurship advice that you learned from Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos? Richard Branson, he showed up for the interview. It was supposed to be in the morning.

He had been out partying all night, not gone to sleep. He showed up and it took him like 45 minutes to just get his head straight. But one thing I always remember and I always tell my kids, I wish that I would have paid a little more attention to it earlier on, and that is always protect your downside. Because you can have all these dreams and look, this guy, you look at the things that he's created, it's not like he did one thing and then just kept leveling it up. He would start in one area. He actually started putting out a magazine, then got involved in music. And like, what's that connection

between music and airplanes? Yeah, nothing. It's like virgin music, virgin airplane. There's no, he had to learn something new every time that he set out to start something new. And when you do that, you run the risk of either making mistakes or something bad happening or the economy shifting on you, where even when you're doing something right, things went wrong.

I'll give you an example. There was a time where he was getting Virgin Air going and he took a bunch of media up for like an early ride. And I don't have the exact particulars of the long, long, long time ago when I talked to him about this. But a bunch of birds flew in to where the engine was propelling and the plane had problems while they were showing off this plane.

Oh no. So he had created this look for people to see how great a thing he was going to do. And a bunch of birds nearly takes everything down. And there was a photographer who photographed it and afterward went over to Branson, and this is no digital, this is back in the days of film. He took out the role of film and he handed it to Branson. Basically say, I'm not using this, throw it out. Because he realized that the whole business enterprise,

he could have taken it down. Now, all right, okay. This goes back to the answer to the last question, one about connections. Yeah. What if that photographer who took that was not connected to him? What if that photographer didn't like him? What if that photographer needed money to pay alimony or child support and realized, I can take this over to the tabloids and I'm out of my problems.

But in that case, somebody who wanted to connect with him or who he was connected to, basically said, I'm not taking you down. And in a way, whatever connection he had, he had protected his downside with that connection. So good. And anything from Jeff Bezos that you remember. This is one of the biggest, biggest, biggest business blunders of my life. And it's one of the reasons that when you hear me talk about AI Now, you hear me speaking the way I've been speaking

in this podcast because I went to interview Jeff Bezos at a time where Amazon was, it was there. Everybody knew about it, but it wasn't making money, principally because he was taking the money that was coming in and pouring it into the business to just make it bigger and bigger and bigger. And everybody, all the journalists at the time, were asking him, when are you going to make money, Jeff? When are you going to make money? When are you going to make money? And it just got to the point where it was ridiculous.

And so when I walked into that interview, I just said, I'm not asking him that question, because I know that, or I sense that he is not making money because maybe he's doing something with the money that's coming in, make it bigger. I didn't know, but I just said, I'm not going to ask him a question that's going to make him roll his eyes and cross his arms or just, here we go again, which is a good tactic if you're going in to interview somebody and it's doing things that you've done in this conversation.

Were you triggered or you asked questions that triggered thoughts in my mind that got me to speak about something that you didn't directly ask. And so when I'm asking questions to Jeff, maybe the question wasn't direct, but I'm actually trying to find out when's this going to make money, Jeff, without me having to say it. Anyway, I had just had a crazy experience in my house. I had a visitor come over from Spain, and he brought all of his festivals and craziness

into the house, and he basically flipped it upside down. And it was a wild experience, and we loved it, but at the same time, it just knocked the house upside down. Every festival came into my living room. There was a running of the bulls. There was like a Fiesta of Santo Antonio where pigs run to the house. Oh my gosh. And so at the end when he went back as therapy, I wrote a children's book and I knew somebody who knew an artist and she

made beautiful illustrations and we self-published a children's book. The books were coming to me right when I went in to interview with Jeff Bezos and I was telling him about this book and he said, well, why don't you just send him to me? I'll sell him. Jeff Bezos said that. Yeah, I'll take care of it. And I said, how does it work? And he just said something like, well, like, you know,

you get 50%, we get 50%. And I said, 50%! I didn't understand how business worked. I was a writer who was used to writing things and getting paid for them. Maybe said it was like 40 percent, but I heard that and I'd made another mistake in that I put a very low price on the book jacket because I wanted everybody to be able to have it. When you realize that you put twice the price and then Amazon cuts it down and then they take their profit. I didn't understand business and I'm thinking like 40 or 50 percent for the, like I can't

do this. And he said, but I'm going to sell them all. You're going to get the money. You can print more books. And I didn't get it. I didn't get it. I was young. I didn't understand business. I look back on it now. Who knows? You might have been talking to Dr. Seuss II

if I would've done that. But it really was one of the most boneheaded decisions I've ever made in my life. Jeff Bezos wanted to sell your book and you said no. We're gonna take care of everything. All you got to do is just send us the books and they're all going to get sold. That was a hard way to learn a lesson. Yeah. Get with the times, Cal.

That's why when you close this podcast, I know I'm gonna hear, trust me, Cal's with the times now. Cal, where can everybody learn about you? Find your podcast, find you on social media. Where can everybody learn about you and everything that you do? Okay, so CalFussman.com, that's the website, and then CalFussman.com, that's the website, and then CalFussman on LinkedIn.

Those are the two principal places. I'm on Twitter every day too, at CalFussman. I put up a quote every day to make people think, but you told me if you're going to zone in on social media and you haven't been that active over time and just focus on one area. So my primary focus now is LinkedIn and the website is there. And my podcast is called Big Questions with Cal Fussman. And they can go and hear Hala talking about her journey. I love it. Cal, it's always such a pleasure. I want to turn this into a two-part episode,

one about connection, one about AI. So I can't wait to put it out and help support you. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. I know that we are going to be friends for a long time. I've learned my lesson from Jeff Bezos. I've already started to implement much of the advice you've given me. As you heard, I've been talking

to people in the SEO space. In a few months, you're going to see a very different and new Cal. Can't wait to see it. Thank you, Cal. Thank you for joining us. It's always great to be connected to you in any way, Alan. Well, there you have it, folks. My thanks to Cal Fussman for such an engaging and extended conversation. The world is changing so quickly these days, and perhaps nothing is moving as fast as AI technology. If you're running or managing a business, then you need to try to keep up.

And like Cal said, it's not as hard as it sounds. There's free or inexpensive AI sites and tools all over the place now. And they're quite fun to play around with. Just try it. Like I said, I have an AI voice that I've developed and it's already been so useful for me. Sometimes AI will just be a starting point for an idea. You may create an image with Dolly, but then you can turn it over to a human graphic designer to polish it up or to combine multiple images that it spit out that you like.

So many products and creations are gonna be human AI collaborations in the near future, so you better start collabing. But don't get too reliant on AI just yet. Like Cal said, often you can still do better by putting a couple of grandma's authentic cookies out into the world rather than a whole batch of low-level AI content that might be a little tasteless. After all, there's still nothing like an organic, authentic human story when it comes

to connecting with other people. Thanks for connecting yourself with us here at Young and Profiting. If you listened, learned, and profited from this authentic human conversation with the amazing Cal Fussman, then please share the love with somebody else. And if you did enjoy the show and you learned something,

then drop us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Nothing helps us reach more people than social proof and reviews. So please, whether you listen on Apple Podcasts. Nothing helps us reach more people than social proof and reviews. So please, whether you listen on Apple, Spotify, Castbox, drop us a 5 star review and let us know what you think about the show. If you prefer to watch your podcast, you can find all of our shows uploaded to YouTube, just search Young and Profiting. You can also find me on LinkedIn by searching my name, Hala Taha, and I'm on Instagram at Yap with Hala.

Before we wrap, thank you so much to my production team, I appreciate all your hard work. This is your host, Hala Taha, aka The Podcast Princess, signing off. you