Carrie (00:56)
Okay, I'd like to welcome Mike and Sammy from It Writes Itself on to Artificial Breakdown. Welcome.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (01:04)
Thank you so much.

Mike (01:05)
below.

Thanks for having us.

Carrie (01:07)
so this kind of came to be in such an interesting way. I'm a writer at an ad agency and all of our accounts teams were in a big, virtual summit, called sweat heads and Mike, you were there, Sammy. don't believe you were. and somebody immediately was like, Carrie, you need to get this guy on the podcast. I was like, well, worth a try. And here we are. So.

Mike (01:25)
That's right.

Carrie (01:35)
Very excited and plus we got double whammy. So we're very excited to have both of you here.

Mike (01:39)
Yeah.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (01:41)
Yeah, I'm lucky. Mike drags me along. I get to be his forever plus one.

Mike (01:46)
I don't want to have

any public conversation without Sammy's, so this is great.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (01:50)
Hahaha.

Carrie (01:53)
Okay, so where to begin?

I would love to hear about kind of both of your backgrounds. You know, how did you get to this? How did you get to AI?

Sami (It Writes Itself) (02:12)
So we do a lot of different things, but the reason that we're talking to you guys today is because we are sort of self-fashioned AI facilitators. We run a workshop slash showcase for corporate groups and also just like out in the world as a comedy show that teaches AI through play and

demystifying AI through play is like kind of our whole mission.

Carrie (02:40)
which I'm obsessed with.

Mike (02:40)
but

thanks. But our backstory is, I came up at 72 and Sunny, I did brand strategy there when there was like 30 people to 300 people. And then I went and kind of honed in on digital strategy and social strategy on Oreo 360i. And then went from there and led strategy across Comedy Central and.

those networks, MTV VH1, I kind of dabbled on all of them. And then eventually landed accidentally with Sammy. We're married, by the way. She's upstairs. right here. Yeah. Yeah.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (03:16)
That part was not an accident. Yeah, as far

Carrie (03:18)
And accidentally, got away.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (03:25)
as far as I know that part was actually not the accident.

Mike (03:26)
Yeah, was actually pretty premeditated, but then

Carrie (03:30)
Hahaha!

Mike (03:32)
that kind of led us, yeah, sorry, that's my day job. By night, I'm a magician and a mentalist. I travel around the US kind of performing at private parties, corporate events, agencies, weddings.

Carrie (03:41)
Wow.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (03:41)
Mike is being really,

he's being really humble. was on America's Got Talent last year. He blew the judges away, got four yeses. He's been on Ellen. He does all sorts of like celebrity events. He gets flown all over the place. So I just have to hype him up because he hypes me up.

Carrie (03:47)
Were you?

Stop.

Wow.

Mike (04:00)
Hello, magicmag.com. You can check it out. Hire me

for things. It's our third, we like projects. We're kind of project collectors. So Sammy's been in brand stuff by day and then voiceover by night. I'm in brand stuff by day and magic by night. And so this whole AI thing kind of came to fruition because we both also love to play and perform.

Carrie (04:22)
Yeah, I feel like this like entertaining aspect is definitely deeply rooted throughout, which is so interesting because, you know, at the beginning of AI and well, not the beginning of AI, but the beginning of open AI, everybody was like, well, this is going to be the engineers are going to take over and run the world now. And it's like, maybe not. Maybe it'll be the artists.

Mike (04:28)
Totally.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (04:45)
Yeah, yeah, the ideas are really important. The creativity is really kind of, you know, the key to all of this.

Mike (04:46)
Yeah

Peter Bishop (04:56)
It feels like there's like it's interesting to try and figure out what is the kind of common thread that weaves through it and maybe it's play but you mentioned strategy and brand Which are pretty kind of marketing heavy kind of stuff you find like it's the same Levers that are getting pulled for you as far as like when you're going through these things like are you You know, what do you get out of all of these things? Is there a common thread or is it just different and you just like being in different environments?

Mike (05:26)
That's a good question. think I always liken it, at least when I connect strategy and magic, always say that like strategy and magic are the same thing. You're just trying to figure out what people are thinking and why, and then use it to your advantage in some way to make them think or feel or do something else or buy something they don't need. And so I think when it comes to AI, I think maybe a common thread, a part of that is just understanding people and like how it's like blowing everyone's minds and expanding everyone's minds. And it's kind of fun to kind of figure out

Carrie (05:41)
You

Mike (05:56)
how everyone's feeling and interacting and kind of like, you know, I think as a strategist, you're always trying to be at the forefront of culture in some capacity. And so that's where this whole idea came because Sammy also likes to do that in her own right and her own side of advertising. And so when we sat here thinking about how this was going to take over the world pretty clearly, right? As ChatGPT came out, started ideating around like, what could we do and what could we make or play or how could we just learn for ourselves?

And I think the other, I mean, I think you also kind of nailed it, Peter. Like, I think we both inherently love to perform. And so we kind of joke that like, like we have fun having a platform where like we can just hang out and have people laugh at our own performance or like interact with us and kind of be on a stage. Like it's kind of the perfect place for us to hang out. So.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (06:26)
Yeah.

Carrie (06:45)
haha

Peter Bishop (06:46)
Ha

ha ha.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (06:49)
Yeah, but it did really come. mean, like we didn't set out to create a corporate offering for AI. We really, the accidental part that Mike mentioned was we were trying to figure out in like December of 2022, right when GPT-2 was announced and like suddenly in the public consciousness, we were both freelancing at the time and we were like, I guess we need to learn these tools now.

How are we going to do it? It's so overwhelming. You know, and also when you're sort of like at a more senior level in your career as a creative person, you know, adopting a beginner's mindset all over again, like every time there's new technology is so exhausting. And I think the piece that's the most challenging is like your taste and your abilities don't line up, right? Where like, you know, we just knew

Carrie (07:32)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (07:45)
we would be clunky on these tools. And it, you know, so we weren't going to be able to take that into our professional lives until we felt like we reached a certain level, you know, of comfort and of ability. So we were like, well, where can we like play around and be bad at this stuff for a while? Like what would make being bad at new technology fun?

And we said, okay, what if we just like invited a bunch of friends over and all of us experimented and shared our little experiments, you know, and maybe.

Mike (08:21)
like a

PowerPoint party, like if you've seen on TikTok, like what if you had 10, 15 friends come over, each person has five minutes to just like play around with AI and show something weird that they've done.

Carrie (08:24)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter Bishop (08:32)
Alright, cool.

Carrie (08:32)
I

love that.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (08:34)
So that's how it started. We were gonna just, we like emailed a bunch of friends to come over and do that. And then a bunch of people were interested. So we thought, maybe it'd be more fun if we did it at a bar. And we thought like 15 people would show up and 60 people came. And we realized that we had tapped into something.

Carrie (08:51)
Wow.

Peter Bishop (08:57)
Yeah, it's reminds me what do they call it with devs when they do that? What's the name for it? Yeah, hackathon. That's what I'm trying to get a LAN party to. Yeah, I

Carrie (09:03)
A LAN party?

Sami (It Writes Itself) (09:03)
Look at.

Mike (09:04)
Amazon, coming.

The party song

is more fun, technically, but yeah.

Peter Bishop (09:12)
Yeah, there's something really freeing about adopting a technology that is also in its very kind of infancy state where, like I remember this with Figma when it first came out, we were one of the few to kind of get on top of it. And it wasn't that complex back then. It was pretty easy. You can kind of learn it in a day or two. And then now if you try to jump into it now, they've added so many features and bells and whistles. It's actually quite a quite a more mature program. Take you a little while but

Learning as they grew and watching the features come out and adopting to those was a lot easier than trying to like jump in later. So I think there's something kind of cool about the energy around working with a software that's also kind of growing and learning at the same time.

Mike (09:58)
Totally. You know, it's funny, like the first, the very first thing we did in our very first show. So if it's not clear by this point, now this is like, basically we go show up at a bar and it's an hour and a half or an hour of our friends just showing some cool things and experiments. So the very first one I ever did was I had Chachi BT in real time come up with its own drinking game about the show. So I explained what the show was going to make me like. I don't If you have drugs, them now.

Carrie (10:21)
Whoa, whoa, whoa. It's like so meta.

Mike (10:28)
Basically the idea was like, they're gonna come up with a bunch of, know, Chad DVD comes up with a bunch of rules, everyone votes on the rules, and we implement those rules for the rest of the show. And they are super random. One of them was like, if a white man in a top hat comes up, like everyone drank, and we're like, ha ha, and it came up like seven segments in somehow. So, you know, the very first segment that anyone else did that we invited on the stage was they took

Carrie (10:40)
Wow.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

Mike (10:56)
Apple Terms of Service and they converted them into the Ten Commandments and printed them out someone knew, read them out loud like, apple, I am a jealous operating system, ye shall not. So it got progressively like fun, more fun and more weird and more existential very quickly. know, like someone did a dating game where she put in her information, three suitors from the audience came up, AI came up with the questions, she couldn't see who they were. And it kind of progressed from there and we had

Carrie (11:22)
Whoa.

Peter Bishop (11:23)
Wow.

Mike (11:26)
kind of these kind of, did a traveling show, essentially we did in LA and New York and Brooklyn and Mexico city. And, and each one had kind of escalated in terms of like the things and segments that we would do and that our friends or people that we found on the internet or TikTokers would like we'd kind of recruit to come and just like show the world. One of my other favorite examples, two favorites are, that it's Shark Tank, but AI. So AI came up with the concepts, with the pitches, with the visuals had three people come up. That was in advance. Three people came up, were handed their products.

Carrie (11:41)
Hmm.

Mike (11:55)
and you had to pitch your product as if it was yours, but you had no idea what it is. So Carrie, you walk up on stage and you're like, my product is a pocket whale. And there's a visual of a pocket whale. It's a real whale the size in your pocket. And the whole structure of the pitches were exactly like the show, because he trained it on the show. was like, the audience are for people who love whales, but wish they could travel around with them. But I want to...

Peter Bishop (12:08)
Ha

Carrie (12:19)
Ha

Mike (12:20)
for $10 million for a 30 % stake, blah, blah. And the audience votes on like who their favorite was and they ask questions and stuff. Or the other side of that that I love is like, you know, though a lot of these ends up being funny, we also like to, you know, kind of have a roller coaster of emotions and heart and depth. And so one of them, found two people that got married on Zoom, actually teams even sadder than Zoom. And they had never done vows for each other.

And so I took five bullets about what they love about each other. I went into AI and I used it to create some vows, using also their tone of voice and printed them out, gave it to them on stage. Sammy put on some wedding music, gave him a bow tie and a little thing. Thank you. And you know, thing. And they said vows to each other for the first time. And it was like kind of tear-inducing, you know? And so we were like this.

Carrie (12:57)
Stop.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (12:59)
Veil.

Peter Bishop (13:00)
Mwahahahaha

Holy-

Mike (13:09)
pretty fun and we kind of just started escalating it from there. And then the TLDR is basically realizing that like that doesn't make as much money as corporate workshops, but also the other part of it is not just money, but like it is actually fulfilling this need. Like though that's a fun show for people to go and see in the world, know, 70 % of digital transformations chain fail. And it's not just about giving your company or your, your, your teams, like the access to the tools, you know, like they have to feel confident and curious about the things first.

before or everything else kind of falls flat. And we realized that this fun, like weird kind of thing we created kind of gets these teams and people excited about AI instead of intimidating it by it in a world where all these companies trying to like scramble to figure out how to get their people to think about it and be excited about it and have these off sites that are just like super learning heavy as opposed to like creating the confidence and the curiosity and the fun first. And so we kind of just went head first into that and it kind of like

Carrie (13:59)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (14:07)
pluripred from there.

Peter Bishop (14:09)
Can sorry, can I just back up one sec just to the I'm curious about the transition from when you had 60 people showing up as a surprise To kind of the show right as you speak to it, right? So can you just talk a little bit about that transition? How did you kind of? Make go over the hump a little bit there

Sami (It Writes Itself) (14:22)
Yeah.

It was a couple of different things happened at once. think the first thing was, we started out calling it an AI open mic, because it was sort of like anyone who wants to come share something, come share something. And we would host it. you know, we, mean, literally, this was the format from the first, you know, show.

Carrie (14:45)
Ooh, I like that.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (14:58)
for the next couple, it was really kind of loose and fun like that. And then we decided to formalize it because we didn't know that we were gonna even continue these events at first, right? We did one, we didn't know if anyone was gonna come and then we're like, I guess we should do another one. And every time we did it, people would come up to us afterwards and say, oh my gosh, I didn't understand AI at all before this and now.

I'm so excited to go experiment and play. I actually have an idea. Can I be in your next show? So it kind of like built this momentum on its own and we started formalizing the structure. So we turned it into from like an open mic into a variety show, which was also kind of like a nice directive for us because, something that's that you learn really quickly when you start trying to use AI in an entertaining way is that like,

Carrie (15:33)
Wow.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (15:55)
A lot of people have the same first idea and a lot of those ideas are not actually that entertaining. Like, you know, 90 % of them are like, oh, what if I put this prompt into AI and then we read what it tells us? Nothing is more boring than watching some waiting for AI to generate and then watching someone read it out loud. It's not going to be funny. It's not going to entertaining and it's just going to be repetitive. So

Carrie (16:01)
Hmm.

Peter Bishop (16:01)
Yeah

Carrie (16:12)
Ha ha!

Peter Bishop (16:19)
Hahaha

Sami (It Writes Itself) (16:23)
The variety show piece of it kind of for us was like this ongoing challenge to make sure that all the segments were really different and fun and original. And so we would start kind of coaching the volunteers more and more, you know, to make sure like, okay, this guy had this idea for like a game show, but we already have a game show segment. So could he do something musical? We know he plays an instrument, right? That kind of thing. And

Carrie (16:50)
Hmm.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (16:53)
So that was how our stage show turned into a variety show and that got more formalized and, and, you know, our kind of community grew. But then, from there, we started feeling a little bit burnt out on these shows because we were again, still freelancing. You know, we were like, what is this really doing for us? Like, is, is there a bigger.

Carrie (17:01)
Well, and

Right.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (17:17)
play with this from an entertainment perspective? Like, are we going to go try and sell the show or something? And we decided that really wasn't what it was all about, and that the best thing about this format was actually this structure that we had stumbled upon that allowed us to help pull people out of their shell when it came to AI. And like,

Carrie (17:25)
Hmm.

Totally.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (17:43)
bring them

on this really fun creative journey. And so that's where I think we started kind of having that idea of like maybe we could actually use this as more of a teaching tool at the same time. I think just naturally some of our friends in the advertising world started asking us if they were like, I couldn't make it to your show. Have you ever thought about doing it for like an internal team?

at an agency, could I, we're looking for some entertainment for our offsite, would you guys ever think about doing a show like that, you know? And so those things just kind of were swirling at the same time and it just kind of clicked for us that this would be a great direction to take it.

Carrie (18:23)
Wow.

yeah, I'm very, very.

interested in this idea of using play to teach AI skills. Because when you think about it, if you look at kids and you look at all these other things, play is how you learn so many things. It's how you understand how another person clicks. It's how you understand how these other kids play. So now I can play a bit better. And AI, you're interacting with a very human-like interface. So why wouldn't you play around with it? Which is something that

I think I've tried to adopt when we're adopting AI within our company, but this is like tenfold, like to the nth degree. I don't even know if I have a question. I'm just like, so.

Mike (19:11)
I mean,

that's what we got really excited about is like, you know, there's this like strategically as we think about how we structure our pitch for this and how we structure it in general, it's like it's AI literacy through play. Like we know play is 30 % more effective. Play-based learning is 30 % more effective than regular learning, right? So, so like, then we're like, okay, well, what does play do? It unlocks both the things that you need for AI, creativity and curiosity.

Carrie (19:29)
Right.

Mike (19:36)
And then you're like, well, the fun thing about it right now, it's the Wild West. And so all the people that are doing anything in AI right now, even just normies, which we are, like you have to play an experiment to kind of understand it and to see how it fits in your life and to see how it can help you in your work life and your personal life. like we were kind of, I guess we weren't originally, but like my favorite thing to do is play in AI and be like.

you know, we ask ourselves a random question and like, what if we threw it in AI now? And it's like, it's just about that's where we're at with AI, not everyone, know, majority of us don't understand even the potential of it. So, you know, it's about playing to understand what we can unlock. And so we got really excited by that.

Peter Bishop (20:19)
Mm-hmm.

Carrie (20:20)
Yeah,

But AI is, it's so much, it's like trying to comprehend the whole internet without, and you never knew what it was before. So to be able to say like, okay, I'm playing within AI and that's teaching me what I need to know about AI. I don't need to know everything about AI. That would be, your brain would explode.

Like it would stop working. So like playing around with it allows you to find like what works for me. And like you said, whether that's professionally or personally, I think that's really interesting. And I think way more of a hook for people because you're allowing, I think that's what I like about this too. And maybe you can talk a bit about this. It's not about you guys going up on stage and playing with AI and showing people what you've made. It's about getting them.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (20:42)
Yeah.

Carrie (21:08)
and getting their hands dirty and getting them to play with it so they can connect with it.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (21:13)
100 % yeah, getting them like over that hump, you know, because if you haven't it's really intimidating and Yeah, like making it a safe space to fail is super important and and like forcing people To get their hands dirty has a huge impact, right? Even just seeing your own colleagues getting their hands dirty like, you know

Carrie (21:15)
Whoa.

very.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (21:43)
There's a version of what we do where we'll go into a company and we will essentially construct a show and present it. We always have a really involved like intake survey. So we know a lot about the audiences that we're presenting to and we customize all of our segments. So they're super interactive. There's a lot of surprise and delight that's like related to the people in the room, you know, so they feel very much a part of it. That's one version of what we do, but

Carrie (21:58)
Hmm.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (22:12)
the workshop version of what we do where we're essentially hosting the variety show, but the presenters are your colleagues from your team, you know, at your company.

That is, you know, I would say 40 % more impactful because there's just something about seeing your own teammates, you know, the guy who sits like across from you in the office, who you know is terrible with technology. You know, if he or she like can do something amazing with some of these tools that you never would have thought of.

Carrie (22:42)
you

Sami (It Writes Itself) (22:49)
Suddenly you think maybe I could do that too. That's not that hard You know, it's so much more effective than just me and Mike as to AI experts coming in and like showing you something cool

Carrie (22:53)
Nice.

Mike (23:00)
Which we're not,

like we like to say that we're like, you know, we are, we're not experts. This is by normies for normies, you know, like we are not AI experts, we're AI explorers and we are brought in to help people kind of like, kind of create that AI exploring mindset amongst their teams.

Peter Bishop (23:01)
Haha

Sami (It Writes Itself) (23:19)
Yeah, we want them to adopt the explorer mindset.

Mike (23:21)
Adopt, yes. Thank you.

Peter Bishop (23:24)
Do you find, this is a weird question, but it's been on my mind for a while. I remember hearing someone was talking about how when we're all little, if you were to survey like a kindergarten, ask who can draw, everyone would put up their hands. And then as you get older and older, like if you ask the same group of like, let's say university students, maybe one or two, but for the most part, we all say we can't do this. I wonder if it's similar with play where

Carrie (23:24)
Mm-hmm.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (23:50)
Yeah.

Peter Bishop (23:53)
you know, everyone used to play all the time and as you get older, you just kind of get it drummed out of you a little bit or at least you get rusty. Do you feel like that's in here at all? Do you find it's hard to get people to like experiment and fail or or kind of be a little vulnerable around each other and expect to be perfect at this?

Mike (24:12)
That's a good question. think when like, you know, so far the format is when Sammy and I are just delivering it, we have that Intel and we're creating these segments around these people's interests. And it's like easy for the, we make it really easy for them to come up and very turnkey. It's like, we're all going to do a brainstorm together. Like everyone go into your phones and use like, you know, meta AI to come up with a thing and we're going to just shout them out. It's not about judging their creativity. It's really putting it on AI. And then

Carrie (24:40)
Mm.

Mike (24:41)
What I

think is cool that we accidentally cracked open that Sam is kind of talking to is that when we do it with kind of the workshop version or the team belt show where the people are doing it themselves and we're kind of facilitating it on stage, we're usually given five or six or seven volunteers in advance that that company knows are probably pretty open or pretty cool with like sharing something. And I think that we also, we kind of go over it like we just did with you where

Carrie (25:04)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (25:10)
when we're briefing the seven people on Zoom and we work with them, right? So like, I don't remember if you already said that, Sammy, but like, like, yeah, they come to us, we brief them and then we have one-on-ones where we're like, what do you, you like bread and you like horror movies? What if you did a movie about bread, like bread based horror, whatever it was. And so when we helped them do that, yeah.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (25:18)
We coach along the way.

That's real. That's a real example.

Peter Bishop (25:30)
I love that genre.

Carrie (25:30)
You

Mike (25:33)
lot of these

things that are based on things that they care about. And so it feels more, they feel more confident in sharing a fun thing about their lives or fun, weird thing that they've created. And also, know, low key on the back end, like Sammy and I are the filter for what we know works. Like we have a pretty, as she says, two performers and people who've done the show so many times, we know kind of what's gonna hit. And we're like,

my God, like a horror movie about bread would be incredible. We know that's going to be cool. If like you did a game called bought ones where it's like, you know, it's a bot or not question and you have to ask. And if you get it wrong, you have to take a progressively weirder shot or like, that's an amazing mechanic. Let's do that. Also real. So it gets people, we kind of get people over the hump pretty easily because they're not really needing to put themselves out there in a way where they're feeling judged in any way, you know.

Carrie (26:07)
Yeah.

So good.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (26:22)
Yeah, I will say, I think like, we probably should give ourselves a little more credit for like doing that on purpose. Like, we spent a lot of time coming up with this intake survey, and whether we're, we give the same survey to the people who are in the audiences for these shows and for the volunteers. And, you know, there's one or two questions about AI, like,

Have you ever used these tools? What are your general thoughts and feelings towards AI? But then the rest of the questions are like, what's your biggest pet peeve right now? You know, what's something really interesting that you learned recently? What are your favorite hobbies? You know, things like that to kind of cut through to a deeper level of like who these people are. Because if we can tap into something they actually care about.

Carrie (27:16)
Mmm.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (27:17)
we're going to get so much farther, so much faster, right? Like showing someone just a generic AI like demo, not that interesting, not going to stick with anyone. You know, we work in advertising, we know the importance of an emotional connection, right? So I think the fact that we have this kind of survey at the beginning and that we put so much emphasis on getting to know people as human beings,

Carrie (27:28)
Yeah.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (27:46)
before we layer the AI on top of it is super helpful with getting them to that place of play. Especially because we're walking into corporate environments. These are people with their professional colleagues. It's in the middle of a work day. So yeah, being like, OK, play is also probably not super productive without structure. So we create a scaffolding for everybody.

Carrie (28:05)
Ha ha ha!

Mike (28:08)
Yeah.

Mm.

Carrie (28:14)
Mm-hmm.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (28:14)
you know, to

get to that place more easily in the time that we have. One example that just came to my mind about like how to get these people to play if like maybe they aren't in the habit of doing that every day. So we had...

Carrie (28:19)
Mm-hmm.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (28:30)
We did a workshop once where one of the volunteers was actually the global chief creative officer. And that was really awesome. It was a great, you know, way for her to model to everybody that like this was important and it's okay to like get vulnerable. So we were doing our one-on-ones and she joined the chat and she was like, listen.

I haven't had any time to think about what my segment is gonna be. I'm so sorry, you know, I'm just like, I'm slammed, you know, with everything at work. And honestly, what I really should be doing is planning my daughter's 10th birthday party, you know, and I don't even have time for that. To which Mike and I said, that's perfect. Let's use that, right? So she's a CCO at like a major creative agency.

Carrie (29:15)
you

Sami (It Writes Itself) (29:23)
What does she know how to do? She knows how to like create a pitch for a client. Okay, so now her daughter's the client. What does her daughter want for her birthday? She wants a spa slash slime themed birthday. Incredible, right? So, yeah. So what were we able to do, right? All of a sudden, this woman looking through the prism of her professional

Peter Bishop (29:37)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (29:38)
They let go on.

Carrie (29:40)
Yeah, I was like, my birthday's coming up, that sounds great.

Mike (29:42)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (29:52)
way of working, sort of like directing that into a playful direction, right? Like aiming that into a playful direction created this like magic where she used AI to come up with like the key visual for her daughter's birthday party and like what is the color scheme and like what are the games that they're going to play? What does the invitation look like? know, like just everything you could think of. are the gift bags going to have for this, you know?

Carrie (30:01)
Mm-hmm.

Wow.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (30:22)
And at the end she had like, what is the cake gonna look like? This is just an aside that is fun for us to talk about. So she, one of the elements that she put together for this like playful pitch using AI for her daughter's birthday was what is the cake gonna look like? The slime spa cake gonna look like. And she showed a bunch of these like visuals that were really out there and fun. And then Mike and I, as a surprise, actually went out and made the cake.

Carrie (30:28)
You

No.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (30:52)
And that thing is huge.

Peter Bishop (30:53)
cool.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (30:54)
was for 50 people and we brought the cake in.

Mike (30:56)
And by Mike and I, she means Sammy. It

Carrie (30:58)
Yes.

Mike (30:58)
was so sick.

Peter Bishop (31:00)
Hahaha

Yeah.

Carrie (31:02)
Guys, that's so amazing. You have to send us those pictures. We'll post them.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (31:06)
So we

brought this cake in and we made her like crazy AI invention. You we brought it into the real world. We made it real.

Mike (31:10)
yeah.

Carrie (31:11)
No way.

Peter Bishop (31:16)
wow.

Carrie (31:17)
that's sick.

Mike (31:19)
We'll you then.

Carrie (31:21)
No, I'm very impressed by, mean, that's such like a go for it-ness kind of attitude. It's just like, let's just go, go, go and see what comes out of this. And, and I like that it's, you know, a lot of happy accidents along the way that have kept moving you into kind of where you're at now.

And the other nugget I think that I will probably never forget from this is like, I like that idea of that layer of AI giving people the ability to be vulnerable by saying, well, I'm not really the one being vulnerable. AI is doing the work, but it allows them to play and kind of not focus so much on themselves, but...

secretly internally they're learning and it's like, it's like sneaking vegetables into your pasta sauce for the kids.

Peter Bishop (32:13)
Hehehehehe

Mike (32:15)
Got them.

I really love that. And I'm going to steal that for how we articulate our pitch from now on. I really smart strategic way to talk about what we're on lot like before that confidence comes of vulnerability, but like we're just allowing you to point at the thing, you know?

Sami (It Writes Itself) (32:34)
like when we first started, our tagline was smart people, dumb AI.

Peter Bishop (32:40)
I saw that on the site.

Carrie (32:40)
nice.

I like that a lot.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (32:42)
And

Mike (32:43)
Thanks,

Sami (It Writes Itself) (32:43)
yeah,

Mike (32:43)
guys.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (32:43)
we like, it's exactly what you said, Carrie. It's like deflecting, you know, the focus and the pressure onto these tools to, you know, where it's actually like, the goal is kind of to break them. It's not even to do a good job. It's to like get so weird that these tools kind of implode, you know, and then we can all laugh about that together.

Carrie (32:58)
Right.

Yeah.

Peter Bishop (33:08)
Yeah.

Carrie (33:08)
Right,

but then you also, you're learning the limits of it and you're learning exactly how far you can go with it. And I mean, I'm a huge proponent of, AI isn't here to replace anybody, but it's here to help us along. It's here to assist us. It's here to, yeah, be an assistant basically. And this has that, it rings very similar in that this is about the person. This is about their idea. It's about the human.

and the AI comes in and is like this, you know, funny side character almost. But at the end of the day, it's about like the human connection, which is like just, mwah, I love that.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (33:50)
Yeah, I think when we started doing the corporate stuff, actually were pitching it equally as a team bonding opportunity as like an educational AI, you know, opportunity, because part of the joy of our shows has really been you just like get to know these weird, quirky other sides of people through their presentations.

Carrie (33:59)
Mmm.

I find it really interesting too that, like I obviously haven't come across anybody else doing anything like this and clearly you haven't and I doubt there is, but it's kind of a perfect storm that you guys are entertainers and are interested in this technology and we're able to put this all together. Like I don't, I can't imagine maybe, I think it'd be pretty rare for this to have just happened to somebody else. So I think you definitely have something very unique that.

Mike (34:44)
Yeah.

Carrie (34:48)
that people should book.

Peter Bishop (34:51)
hahahaha

Mike (34:53)
You guys get 10 % if we book anything through this.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (34:53)
Thank you.

Carrie (34:55)
Yeah

Peter Bishop (34:55)
perfect. Yeah.

Carrie (34:57)
All Canadian sales.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (34:58)
Yeah.

Mike (34:59)
Yeah, it

is in Canadian dollars though, so it's going to be a little bit less.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (35:03)
Hehehehehe

Peter Bishop (35:06)
On that note, there, so the site, what's the URL for the site again?

Mike (35:10)
or

itwritesitself.ai.

Peter Bishop (35:15)
Okay, and in theory you could go there and book online, right? Okay.

Mike (35:19)
Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Thanks for asking. we've got some Instagram that of course is just like light, but in existence, which I think right now is it writes itself show. Wait, Sammy, what is it now? That's right. Sorry. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Okay. Yeah. That's it. Write the self.ai is the website and then write the self AI is the Instagram confirmed.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (35:32)
I think it's writes itself AI. Let me check. great. Thank you.

Peter Bishop (35:35)
We'll stick it in the show notes.

Carrie (35:37)
Mm-hmm.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (35:41)
you

Peter Bishop (35:46)
yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I think it's such a thread, especially now with, you know, there's a lot of negative that you hear around AI. And I think there's a lot of fear, which is kind of the impetus of why we wanted to do this a little bit is to try and take a little bit of the fear out. And we've always said there's nothing like doing it to actually reduce the anxiety around AI. Because I think there's always that fear of you're missing out, you're missing the boat. This is all blowing by.

Carrie (35:46)
Nice.

Peter Bishop (36:15)
passed you so fast and, and Carrie's right. When you look at it as a whole, it's, it's, it's overwhelming, but the niche that you found is such a great entry point. and I just love the encouragement of getting back to our roots and being able to play again. This is like the new Fisher price for the 50 year old, the 40 year old, right? So it's wonderful.

Carrie (36:34)
Ha ha ha ha!

Sami (It Writes Itself) (36:38)
Thanks.

Mike (36:39)
We're going to just put you on our website. That's great.

Carrie (36:42)
You

Sami (It Writes Itself) (36:45)
The last, just hearing you say like the thing about anxiety, I always like to touch on, because people often think like, oh, you guys must be like so pro AI, so optimistic about all of this, you know? And that's not entirely true. I think that we both have some concerns about it, you know, as much as we're hopeful and...

Carrie (36:56)
Mm-hmm.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (37:10)
I think like probably me more so than Mike, I have some real like fear about where some of this stuff is going. But that just sort of strengthens my resolve and like what we're doing because, you know, the genie's out of the bottle and AI is here and our best hope as humans is to get literate.

right, and understand what these tools are all about and in order to do that you just have to like get over that fear. So that's, you know, the sort of deeper meaning behind what we're about.

Carrie (37:38)
Mm-hmm.

I have

goosebumps from that. That's like, that's so legit. And I think that there is a lot of real and honest fears and worries. But I think that if you get, it's just like any other tool, you get it in the wrong hands, it's gonna do bad things. And if you get it in the right hands, like people like you, it's gonna do fun, amazing things. And if people like you just sat back and did nothing, then it would just be the terrible people with their hands on it. we got it.

Sorry, this is sounding a little good versus evil Star Wars situation, but it's like, you you gotta do what you can do to help this be a positive in the world instead of a negative. And I feel like you guys are, you're doing that, which is amazing.

Mike (38:27)
You

And thanks, I love that. I'll take that.

Carrie (38:34)
haha

Peter Bishop (38:36)
Yeah, we have 10 % commission on our end too. Yeah. Well, Sammy Mike, it's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for being so generous with your time and taking your time out of your day to be on the podcast. It's been an honor to have you on board and love to hear about this. I had no idea what entailed an AI variety show. So it's really been educational on my end just to see how I had this vision of just a gigantic screen on

Mike (38:39)
Hahaha

Sami (It Writes Itself) (38:39)
Hehehehehe

Carrie (38:44)
Truly.

Peter Bishop (39:05)
on the wall with everyone just typing in prompts. So, so not that.

Carrie (39:08)
He's like, how could this be entertaining?

Mike (39:11)
There was a version of that when we first started. We like, guess this could work. It does not work. You can explain it.

Peter Bishop (39:16)
Ha

Sami (It Writes Itself) (39:17)
You

Peter Bishop (39:20)
Okay, well thanks again and yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

Sami (It Writes Itself) (39:25)
Take care.

Mike (39:25)
See you guys in Canada. Thanks so much again,

guys. Later.

Carrie (39:28)
Yeah,

thank you.

Peter Bishop (39:35)
Yeah, well, I thought it was, I really loved that little anecdote that Sammy mentioned about the creative director who was like, I don't have time to do this. I'm busy struggling with this other problem, which ironically became the quickest thing to solve using AI. It's just such a great, it's interesting just how, you know, you separate it in your mind when it doesn't need to be separated. You know what I mean?

Carrie (39:50)
Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Well, and that just is such a, there's so many people that are like, I don't have time to use AI. I'm too busy at work. And it's like, well, if you used it to help you, maybe you would be less busy at work. not in my case, I've made myself much busier at work because of AI.

Peter Bishop (40:16)
Yeah.

Yeah, you should have kept your mouth shut.

Carrie (40:23)
But you know, for the most part, like,

yeah, I should have sat back. No Skynet for me, thanks.

Peter Bishop (40:27)
Yeah, yeah, they have been working all night again on these five blog posts. They're

taking forever.

Carrie (40:35)
But it is, it's like, yeah, if you just take the time to learn this incredible tool, then maybe it'll help you. Yeah, I'm definitely gonna incorporate some other things into my AI 101 class at work. Just like play around a little bit, you know? Get your hands dirty.

Peter Bishop (40:43)
Yeah.

Yeah, like you said, there's nothing like actually doing it yourself to learn. And then you kind of make mistakes and then your questions get more pointed and more kind of personal to yourself. Like there's nothing but good that comes out of it. It's just sometimes a little hard to coordinate everyone kind of clicking away at once, but it sounds like they cracked that, which is pretty cool.

Carrie (41:15)
Yeah, that's quite interesting.

Peter Bishop (41:17)
I also liked just the journey of like magician to AI person from strategist to It's just a crazy kind of journey, which, they all seem semi-related, but very different.

Carrie (41:30)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, there's definitely a string that connects them all, which is wild. But when you think, I liked that she was like, you you get that little moment of, you know, joy on people's faces. And she's like, hey, Mike, like when you see when you're doing magic. And I'm like, my God, right, you're a magician. That's so cool. And you can see the similarities. Yeah.

Peter Bishop (41:40)
Thank you.

Yeah.

Were you semi-disappointed

that there was no tricks on camera? Because I was kind of expecting something, some sort of canary or handkerchief thing.

Carrie (42:07)
He just disappears halfway through, but his voice is still there. Damn it. Should have asked him for a card trick.

Peter Bishop (42:09)
Yeah

Yeah, but like I said,

it was just nice. Another nice story of how like such a positive spin on all this and just two great people coming up with a good idea and, you know, making hay, obviously, while it's around, I actually think they probably have a longer runway than they might expect. You know, you can never overestimate the collective knowledge of a corporate structure.

Carrie (42:40)
haha

Peter Bishop (42:43)
Especially around tech like honestly, yeah

Carrie (42:45)
That's a very good way to put that. Well,

I was thinking that too, because I've joked about that with my title. I'm like, yeah, I'm the AI specialist. And pretty soon that's gonna be like, what are you, the head of the internet? Like, what does that mean? But I think you're right. think they probably, it's gonna, there's always gonna be a need for AI literacy. I think it's always gonna be there.

Peter Bishop (43:05)
I bet you we could do the same

thing about PowerPoint and we'd still have people asking for it. Like, just like, it's just never going to go away. And there's always going to be people who I think need the basics, right? Of just it's almost like learning how to learn. Not so much getting the tech under you. It's like learning how to adapt again to technology. And this could apply to anything. It doesn't have to be AI. could be any software, but that

Carrie (43:10)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Peter Bishop (43:31)
curiosity that they're instilling and that hands-on approach is just such a fundamental skill that I just think gets lost as we get older or we change careers. You go into management or something and you just kind of, you stop doing the stuff and you just, and you start to believe that you can't, or at least you'd learn, lose those abilities, right?

Carrie (43:50)
Hmm

Right.

I really liked, and another reason I think that they'll have longevity here is because, like they said, they were able to talk to marketers of, I think they said, like small farming communities, marketers of certain farm situation, and then also literally meta people who are building AI. So, and it's like, I would be interested in this show.

Peter Bishop (44:09)
Mm.

Carrie (44:18)
People who build AI would be interested in this show. So it's not like you're only are talking to a normie, as they put it. Like you have a huge audience here. Like from normie to never heard of it to is building it would all be intrigued with this show, think for sure.

Peter Bishop (44:26)
Mm-hmm.

Yep.

Yeah, we went through their client list and a lot of them are, should be pretty tech savvy, right? So if they're doing this, you can just imagine the next round and the next round of companies that I'd be following up. So yeah, all good. That was another, another nice little episode. I'm excited to get in and edit this slash super terrified, but it'll be good. No, it's going to be fun. Yeah. I think it'll be an easy edit for sure.

Carrie (44:50)
Yeah, good for them.

Producer Pete, it's gonna be.

Peter Bishop (45:05)
But yeah, no, it was really nice. Such an interesting use of AI. was great.

Carrie (45:12)
Yeah, yeah, and I mean, it can be doom and gloomy and this just really feels so light and fun and I hope that there's more of that in the future.

Peter Bishop (45:23)
Yeah. All right. Well, talk to you later.

Carrie (45:27)
chat soon.