#9 - Leveraging AI to Become More Human - Part 1 of a Series on Artificial Intelligence with Justin Price

Could the future of philanthropy lie in the digital mind of AI? This thought lingers as we unravel the transformative role artificial intelligence plays within the nonprofit sphere, guided by insights from creative visionary Justin Price of Vers. Our conversation traverses the delicate balance between human touch and technological progress, emphasizing the growing value of genuine interaction in a world increasingly managed by algorithms. We tackle the ways AI could enhance our capacity for compassion and efficiency in our mission-driven pursuits, offering a beacon of hope for those feeling overshadowed by the relentless march of innovation.

As we explore the ethical labyrinth entwined with the union of AI and quantum computing, the episode poses profound questions about our responsibilities as creators of potentially superior intelligences. Reflecting on the sweeping changes AI brings to diverse industries, we consider how the collective voice—comprising varied ages, backgrounds, and perspectives—must inform the creation and governance of these powerful tools. With our future in mind, we call upon leaders to navigate this new terrain with wisdom and foresight, championing a vision where technology amplifies our most noble human qualities to sculpt a fair and thriving society for all.

Show Notes

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Transcript

Heredes: 0:10

Well, colin, we're here, we're doing this, we're ready Again.

Collin: 0:13

Again.

Heredes: 0:14

This is episode hashtag 1424. Yeah, if you count all the cuts in the edits of the ones that didn't make the right? Yeah, special topic today, special guest and in the spirit of the topic we're going to discuss today, which is what Colin, we're talking about artificial intelligence big hot topic for a lot of people and we're jumping into yeah, and in the spirit of that, before introducing our guests, we have a special intro for today's show. Oh, powered by AI. Are you ready? I'm so ready, all right, so listen up.

AI Guest: 0:54

Welcome to the nonprofit Renaissance, a podcast dedicated to helping nonprofit organizations go further and grow faster. The hosts of this podcast attempt to benefit nonprofit leaders by highlighting their successes and by learning from their challenges. The hosts will sometimes also attempt to be humorous. The co host Colin attempted by spewing ponds and dad jokes that are appreciated by 13% of the audience, while the other co host, H, is a handsome, smart and naturally funny human being, but only in portrait ease. Please listen at your own discretion. Today's guest is none other than the principal and founder of the award winning creative agency verse. He loves fine art, fine dining and fine podcast hosts, which is why he is here today. Please welcome Justin Price.

Heredes: 1:47

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you guys.

Justin Price: 1:48

What an intro that was great Felt, a little biased.

Heredes: 1:54

A little biased, it's intelligent. It's not artificial stupidity.

Collin: 1:57

Oh yeah, it was definitely artificial. I'll tell you that.

Justin Price: 2:02

So one thing that's clear about AI as we jump into this conversation is that, as machine learning and artificial intelligence does more work for humans, and as the internet creates more connectivity digitally, I believe that as humans, based on how we are wired psychologically, I think that our in person interactions become more valuable and if they are not more valuable, they are at least more appreciated. I think that a multi sensory experience becomes more heightened because it's scarcer, right, so it's like I spend all day in my office. I'm talking to people all over the world, I'm very successful, productive, efficient person, but when I go in and have an in person interaction, we all could have done this podcast from our homes. We all live roughly 35 minutes away from each other in a triangular pattern, and instead we met in the middle and Not for us, because a call it mainly I want to see his face, but not for a single second did I think, oh, that would not be worth the 20 minutes for any like.

Justin Price: 3:14

I mean, if I was, if I was paying for your time saying like, hey, here you go. Like I would say it's totally worth it because of the in-person experience and the way we're able to talk and communicate, and the fact that, like, I don't get to do that with everybody that I work with Makes it even more valuable to me, with the people that I can do it with, like when it is 20 minutes. And so I Think it's it's not a story of like, hey, this is going to just take everything and that that everything will be gone and that everything is like going this way. As we talk Into what it can do, as we talk about what we're doing with it, and as we use technology to be better, I hope, I Hope that we, as a Agency, can be focused on how we can be better as people with that margin.

Justin Price: 4:05

How can we be better dads, how can we be better husbands, how can we be better sons, how can we be better daughters and wives and friends? And so that, to me, is Is what's at stake. You know it's like let's figure this out, because, as nonprofits. We are Expending. We are fully bought in. We are spending our time and our energy trying to change the world. What is at stake here is that we're wasting time doing very inefficient things, but that's kind of hard is it.

Heredes: 4:41

I love that, justin, because it's you know the purpose of the why. Why margin? Why just get faster, more efficient or better at what we do if you don't have that purpose or that bottom line of being a better human or being with people, and it's not to do more, it's not just to try to accomplish more and find yourself in a hamster wheel. But I love establishing that purpose up front, because I think a lot of people get scared or miss it in that chase of which is not a trend, right? This is obviously artificial intelligence can date it back 70, 60s. You're talking. This is all news. Some capacity. It's caught up to revolution now, where you know we're looking at agriculture revolution, we've got the industrial revolution, the computational, those are the four. And then now the AI revolution. Tell us, justin, for those resisting this, all in one century, that's insane. And what's scary is what's the next century? Right? Because I think the compound effect we've seen.

Collin: 5:36

We've seen the Like, the time between those. It just continually shrinks. So I feel like tomorrow we're gonna be in the new.

Heredes: 5:43

Whatever the new revolution is talk talk to those and I love we set the purpose now so that helps. Already half the audience understand why are we talking about this. Is it just trend or is it's not clickbait? This is not just trying to. It's real because we're living it. It's the now, it's not just a future. And if you from your Netflix queue, using AI to your maps telling you where to go and offering suggestions, it's all artificial. You've been living it and right those resisting this, to those kind of like fighting it or trying to, what's your advice, what's your, what's your word to them?

Justin Price: 6:17

For one is I have empathy for you, because if you're not doing this full-time, it's hard to even keep up. You can't keep up with who's buying, who where it's at what tools working, what's not. The reality is is there's nothing so blatantly in front of you that your boss is gonna fire you tomorrow because you're not using it. The problem is is because, out of the five major companies, all five of their large language models, they're all getting better. You know, every 12 weeks almost twice as good, so it means 12.

Justin Price: 6:48

If something was like only halfway there, that means in 12 weeks it's there which means by the time you've started implementing that into your routine or your programming or your mission or any kind of systems you know oh, standard operating procedures, if you will, for those executive pastors out there that are listening, haha by the time you've implemented and trained, the tool will be twice as good. It'll be ready if it's half as good as it needs to be today. It'll be ready in 12 weeks if it's even if it's, you know, a little ways away, but it's there and it's being worked on it'll be there in six months and, and that timelines even gonna speed up more With the more we know, the more that we test more, and then it's gonna slow down. With regulation. There will be some things that'll have to re-correct. There will have to be some some major things, unforeseen Causes and things like that. So then we'll feel like we get a little bit of a breath at some point in this revolution.

Justin Price: 7:47

But for the most part, I have empathy and I would just say that, like all technology, there is a Opportunity in front of us, and if you happened to feel convicted enough to listen to this conversation, then I would encourage you to be open enough To consider how God is wanting you to use this to be considering how we can change the world in the smallest ways within your organizations by potentially taking time away from your full-time employees or part-time employees or hourly employees and you can Give them their that time back to doing the mission and less things that were necessary Before, and that that's maybe like just a really straightforward basic plea to be open enough to consider the fact that it is Probably, within the next 12 to 24 months Going to be so easy and it'll have to change the way you do things that you would get fired in 24 months if you're not utilizing some of these tools because it would just be frivolous.

Justin Price: 8:58

Your boards Should be looking at you and going shame on you for, not for burying your head in the sand, right, and I'm just trying to give you the warning. I'm not. That's not a threat, it's just a. This is where the tools are actually at and you may not know that right now and so, coming in, I hope. I hope that opens your eyes to that a little bit now.

Heredes: 9:15

I was just reading the acceleration In the scale of this. You know we're looking into those pioneering this. They're looking at quantum computing which, compared to a traditional computing, which is what we're used to in the last, you know, 30 years. We're literally talking now pulling up the coach just to make sure we're looking at performing a million times better quantum computing Than a traditional. So when you overlap artificial intelligence with quantum computing, again full started on a 60-minute article, there's a full episode on 60 minutes about quantum computing. It's incredible and scary. Right which brings me back. Justin. Don't preach at me, but preach at me for the listeners here. Are we trying to play God? Here Are we trying to play? Are we trying to take control? Are we trying to? Is the end Pretty hot, you know? Talk to that person, talk to me, talk to my mom here real quick.

Collin: 10:06

Yeah, yeah, you're talking about the worst case scenario.

Heredes: 10:08

Well, we're trying to take control. Right is that. It's at our void. We're trying to fill now with all this, and so let's get that out of the way, because obviously we have our thoughts and opinions on this, but what would you tell listener?

Justin Price: 10:18

Yeah, I mean the reality is, is what we're creating is our own God? So something if you, if you say, well, well, all knowing, right, all present, maybe All powerful digitally with, with quantum, if we have a digital currency, the ability to create wealth. You know we've got a hedge fund we work with that uses AI for trading and trading digital currencies. That like, again, that is an insane amount of opportunity, power that comes with that, healing right the Acceleration on healing, on discovering and helping the body heal faster.

Heredes: 11:03

Better detecting preventing.

Justin Price: 11:05

So let's talk about this for a second. What is the outcome, right, of machine learning? So, if you haven't, if you haven't been had enough of these conversations to go, hey, is this about like being able to have a better algorithm for Netflix, or is this like? Are you, are you suggesting that, like, churches have, like you know, robots you know give sermons? Or are you suggesting that, like, nonprofits Can start to do their programming through this or something like that? Or are we back to the metaverse?

Justin Price: 11:33

The reality is, is there's we're really talking about artificially generated intelligence, a GI being like the big question mark for humanity and how we control it. You know the ethics boards that are gonna control that will shape the future Generations pretty drastically. And we talked about, like, creating our own God. What that would look like is potentially and I think there's a great quote from Elon Musk when he was talking potentially with the New York Times. I don't want to misquote it, but it was something along the lines of like, within two years, we'll have, we will have a machine learning base that will know more than any human. We'll be able to think faster, you know, and know more than any human about anything. And I think at that point like kind of all-knowing aspect of God.

Justin Price: 12:28

Yeah, in essence, you're talking about like creating your own God, and with the power, with digital currency, with digital communications, the ability to manipulate, persuade culture, we already see the opportunity for some fairly large impact. And so when you say I don't know what this looks like, preach at me. You know what does this look like? What are we thinking and where is our place in all of this? Um, I think that what it means is that most likely 20, 30 years from now, it's. It's very difficult to imagine For me, and then I'm a futurist. I love thinking about the future, but it's very difficult for me to imagine.

Collin: 13:14

So let's just look at like a three-year horizon even that You're starting to encroach on like I, don't even hard to make an educated guess.

Justin Price: 13:25

Well, I don't think people are. People are very resistant to change. I got my cut my teeth in the in a creative industry 25 years ago making logos. I don't think there's a better like creative act you can do than to showcase how much people dislike change. I don't think there's hardly ever been a logo change in the history of logo changing and in which people have life yeah.

Justin Price: 13:51

Yeah, it could be a amazing logo. It could be really cool. It could be really great. It could function better. It could be more visible. It could be a stronger identity piece. It could be not not trendy. It could be timeless. It could be trendy and not timeless. Any whatever it is, people just won't like it because it's changed.

Justin Price: 14:08

And that's not a message that I think I have to convince anybody of. We hate change as a culture. We hate change, and so I. There was going to be a lot of resistance along the way. So I think the three year horizon we don't necessarily have to think as a terminator scenario. That's right. I go 20 to 30 years from now. I don't know.

Justin Price: 14:27

I fear for what my kids will grow up, and so therefore, ethically, and maybe I just feel convicted to be a part of working on making it the best potential future it can be for those generations. But I think for pastors, I think for nonprofit leaders, I think for CEOs who are leading creative teams and have in our creators, I think that it's super important that we are part of this conversation and that we have input and we don't just leave Silicon Valley to decide the future. And I think I'm hopeful for good regulation. But I also realize how money impacts that. I look at the regulation on a lot of the other things that are potentially not good for humans and I see where money impacts it and I can go like oh, that's not good. The food industry is a great example of that and we're all victims of it. So that's kind of me preaching at you. I think it's barheads.

Outro: 15:37

I'm ready to come forward to be honest, all right.

Collin: 15:40

So as we're now, like we said, this is gonna be a series, so we wanted these to be a little bit more shorter, a little bit more digestible, so land is for us. So, as we're talking about this, as people are maybe for the first time, they're kind of coming in and being like they're opening themselves to maybe exploring. Why is this important for people to start looking at now?

Justin Price: 16:02

Listen, I can't put conviction on anybody. All I can do is kind of share where I'm at with it. I came out of a decade of a lot of trauma and a lot of pain, with my wife on bed rest and having a chronic illness, and I had to learn how to optimize my life. I was raising a daughter with Down syndrome. I was trying to make sure she had the best opportunity at success in life. I had to leave a full-time position in-house at a nonprofit that was going great and was very successful. I started an agency from my bedroom serving lots of nonprofits because of that scenario and for me, what has come out of that over the last decade has been something incredible and beautiful. Through all of that pain but that's my conviction is that I've gone through all of that.

Justin Price: 17:08

As that chapter closed for me last year, I knew I could not waste a single second, and so, while I had optimized my life, I had to learn how to optimize my life. I designed everything. I figured out how to meal prep. I figured out how to exercise. I figured out how to take meetings to be efficient. I figured out how to mix my work and my play and when I was spending time away from my family. It was gonna be effective and check all the boxes right, and my priorities were very clear. I knew, you know, profit, like becoming rich, wasn't like the thing I was trying to do, and I knew the impact I was trying to make in the world was super, super clear, and so every minute counted right, and that hasn't changed. For me, those convictions haven't changed, and, as a strategic thinker and as a digital strategist, I've been looking for these paths for the last 10 years and the 10 years of leading creators before that. Even when we're at today, though, is that like.

Justin Price: 18:08

I feel this conviction of, like I can't afford to not consider and work on where technology is evolving for me. So, whether it is like my personal life, in a way that can streamline my calendars, streamline my inbox, delete the noise, change up my social media algorithm, change up the way I share my thoughts with the world, the way I change up the way that I think as a just as a person in my personal life, the way I shop, the way that I invest my money, I mean every single piece of my life I'm going to look for those ways to optimize, because I feel convicted that, like I need. I need every minute to count, and now that I have this lease, that that chapter, that painful chapter, is gone, I have so much. I feel so like life is so abundant that the expectation is exponential. I have to make something incredible, life changing. I have no excuses left to not leave the world an incredibly better place than before I had the opportunity, and so maybe there's somebody else who's thinking that maybe in this conversation, there's other people who feel that conviction. I can't put that on anybody else, but you apply that now to a nonprofit, you apply that to a world changing brand, and you go if there is a way I need to be spending my time figuring that out to being more effective, to making a bigger impact, and so, for the last few years, from a technology standpoint, verse started as a creative agency, and when I think about like most people think about, you do a graphic designer, you do a video.

Justin Price: 19:54

What we're really trying to do, though, is solve problems. We don't really typically sell a lot of creative services. We usually solve big, complex problems. Maybe there's an organization that needs a completely new branding because they took a different direction. There was a moral failure in there, or there was some problem with leadership, and new leadership needs something to identify this new thing. And so we're solving that problem understanding what the true identity is of that organization is. And then how do you put that into an icon or what does the wordmark actually look like to represent that within the community in which it sits right? So we're problem solvers, but as creative agency grew from problem solvers that did an old school kind of thing like drawing or video editing, that was linear.

Justin Price: 20:44

We now have technology and we moved into marketing that. So we said, well, it'd be way more valuable if we could not only solve that problem but we could also distribute that problem. And that's marketing. We said, well, let's get into doing email, let's make sure that these things are happening. Let's get into managing social media, let's make sure that the conversation goes exponential. Because if you just leave that to a staff member who's not good at that you know within the organization and you don't help them get it out there, then the problem you solved is not very valuable. The solve is not worth much. But if you can now get it out to the world, the solve was worth exponentially more for what it can actually do for the organization or its mission.

Justin Price: 21:24

Now take that a step further and you go from marketing to marketing technologies to make that exponentially more valuable, to make it exponentially more efficient, to make that exponentially more meaningful with personalization and effective. You get something that's like Wow, we really got something good. And that's where we sat as an agency just two or three years ago. We said there's marketing technology that's happening all around us. So now it's like well, churches, organizations, they've got database, they're trying to do fundraising, they're trying to figure out all of these things with technology, and they're doing almost all of it pretty poorly, but they're doing it Like they're checking the boxes.

Justin Price: 22:04

But I mean, I don't know, I'm preaching to the choir here.

Justin Price: 22:07

If you're listening to this and you think that technology has been good, it's been a great experience, that you're lying to yourself, because most people cringe at the thought of having to get into their CRM or their database management and try to pull a report and trust the report.

Justin Price: 22:23

That's a whole other story.

Justin Price: 22:24

But versus been solving these problems for the last couple of years, what we're gonna talk about in the rest of this series is how we can start applying this today to free up full-time employees to do the thing that's gonna actually mission drive the mission.

Justin Price: 22:38

We're going to stop wasting our time in bad technology and systems and we're going to finally move technology over this hump to the point where the machine learning eliminates a lot of the problems. It can do the math, it can double check, it can airproof our human errors and it can allow us to just be more human. It can allow us to be more personable with the people in the mission that we're trying to work through and solve. And so, as an agency, that's been our transformational story how we use it at work and how we use it for the clients, as we integrate a lot of these tools in for our clients. That's the exciting thing is because we're freeing up and we're allowing now all of that marketing technology to be two, three, four or five times more efficient and more powerful and have broader reach with less time and expenses, because we just we don't have more time and expenses.

Heredes: 23:36

So, Justin, we're going to land it there for this one. We hope this challenges you. We hope this helps you go further, grow faster and stay tuned. We'll be talking about the impact on nonprofits and how the fundraising sector ethical considerations. We'll be talking about community and volunteer engagement or management and how this can all help you go further and grow faster.

Collin: 23:58

Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you guys next time.

Justin Price: 24:00

Thanks, Justin, Thank you guys this was great.

Outro: 24:02

Thanks again for listening to the nonprofit Renaissance. We hope it ignites a Renaissance in you and helps you go further and grow faster. Be sure to share, rate and subscribe and if you'd like to recommend or be a guest on our show, send us an email at podcastatverscreativecom. Enjoy.