It's a privilege to introduce Mars the Marketer as our guest on this week's episode. Mars has been the secret weapon for some of the biggest names in online marketing, like Brendan Burchard, Tony Robbins, and Gora, just to name a few. Today we'll be going deep on creating AI-generated videos for your content, marketing, and sales efforts. And Mars knows a thing or two about this, having generated almost $20 million in revenue for clients using AI-generated video with tools that any of you can get your hands on right now. We had a lot of fun doing this episode, and like with every interview I do, I learned tons. Let's get started. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. So, as I mentioned in the intro, everybody, I'm very excited to have my old buddy Mars on with us today. Uh, and how Mars and I got reconnected was through some pretty incredible stuff that he's doing, leveraging AI and a former employer that I had, Agora, uh, where they spend tens of millions of dollars per year on their uh developing marketing creative. And what Mars is doing with them is saving them and making them a ton of money. So uh Mars, why don't you just take a second and introduce yourself to the audience?
SPEAKER_00Sure. Uh I'll I'll just start with my, I'm probably most famously known as Mars of Launchmen. I started what I would consider to be the original like launch team. Walker, Jeff Walker did the original, you know, like product launch formula, and then I would say we mastered it, reinvented it, and put it into such a formula that like literally everybody and their brother was able to do it. I'm pretty proud of some of the records we set, but I'm not here to brag about records, but we set them, smashed them, set them, smashed them over and over again and got really known for doing that. And then from there I moved into a lot of the live streaming stuff. Like before live streaming was something that you could just turn on Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever and just live stream. It used to be quite a technical thing, which is essentially where we're at with AI, which is what I want to share with everybody, because back before everybody could do it is when all the money was to be made from it. All the all of the business growth, all that came from the fact that it wasn't quite so easy for everybody to do it. They could play around with it, but they couldn't actually do it. So that's actually what I want to share today. Beyond that, I obviously add at doing things for ad campaigns and doing things for you know in various spaces, including fitness, finance, you know, uh coaching, uh personal coaching, life coaching, business coaching. I'm just up and down the gamut. I would honestly say a lot of people are specialists and they're usually coming from their one, like the pickup game, and maybe they shift to digital marketing as a digital marketing trainer, or they're in some sort of uh they've been doing coaching, like uh business coaching their whole their whole time or whatever. I believe when I talk to people, just based on the feedback that I get, that I have operated at a high level of like accomplishment and success in more industries that you know, from even many celebrities I've worked with launching their stuff the way that we do, like as a sort of like a in the digital marketing space. That's the one thing I'm probably proudest of, other than my team. Because what I really am best at is actually putting a good team of people together who enjoy serving people and helping them get results. Everybody says that, but that's it's like I'm a service provider, uh
director is essentially what I just accepted a long time ago. So in a nutshell, famous for doing a lot of launches, and before that, my previous life was in advertising, but it's always been the same thing. I put together a good team, and I and then I pick the horses that are very likely to win, anyways. It's nothing miraculous that I'm doing with all the records, it's just pick the right horses. J JCron's actually the one that told me that. That's my my knack is actually just pick the right horse. That's actually mostly what I'm doing. So that's pretty much in a nutshell yet. I'm just good at doing campaigns, and I think what I'm best at is actually managing teams and noticing new trends in uh you know marketing material technology, which is what we're here to talk about today.
SPEAKER_01So, speaking of noticing those trends, what was the transition for you from traditional tech forward marketing, but starting to leverage AI into what you were doing? What was that? What did that look like?
SPEAKER_00Well, uh, you know, at risk of like sounding like a aloof, okay? But this is actually what happened. So I the guys that I tend to partner up with um and make and actually make friends with, right? Like they're guys like Rich Sheffrin, Roland Frazier. They're people that are actually, they tend to like notice trends before they happen. Like they're doing the thing before before it becomes like a normal, like a normal uh thing, right? And so this one came largely through Rich because he's been talking about AI for six years. Everybody else has been talking about it for two years max. And if they're talking about it for two years, they were ahead of the what we consider to be the curve. Rich was on that early adopter phase where he kept asking me to do things with AI that I would never have done if he wasn't like, hey dude, can you help me? I need to do this thing with A with AI. This seems like a really cool thing to do inside the business from a creative standpoint or from like an administrative uh standpoint, like doing processes and things using different AI technology. And I was like, ugh, and really I resisted it. Like was like pulling teeth. Um to credit Rich. He just like convinced me and broad broad me into it, you know.
But the the most recent iteration of it was uh right before chat uh GPT 3.5 came out, which is sort of what I would consider to sort of be the fulcrum tipping point for AI, I think everybody can kind of agree. But Rich had me into it before that, and including all of the uh the image generation, mid-journey, and stable diffusion and those types of things. And I was like, oh man, this is very much essentially if you've been a creative director for your whole career, which is really what my actual role is, you're prompting humans all day. That's a brief, a creative brief, is just a giant prompt. That's all it really is. And you have to figure out how to word it and how to phrase it and how to triangulate in a way that motivates the action to get done with the least amount of friction in the most efficient manner. So it while AI is some sort of technological bot of some sort, it's basically an amalgamation of a bunch of creative people who produce something that it's learning from. So it automatically makes sense in my head. I everybody thinks they're great at prompts, but I think every time I show somebody one of my prompts, they're like, what the f- I didn't ever even think about doing it like that. And it's just to me, it's not even like I'm not even doing anything all that impressive. I honestly believe it is from 30 years plus of having to deal with very complicated, you know, uh NI, natural intelligence, humans, right? Organic intelligence or OI, I guess you can call it. So essentially Rich pulled me into it and was like, dude, uh I want to try this, this, and this with the this Chat GPT. And then he pulled me into the AI video stuff, which is the main thing that I've been sort of getting known for again, and by asking me if I could produce him uh 100% AI generated avatar. He was the first one that did it. I can doc I have that documented. He was the first one in the digital marketing space where the entire video was an AI version of him, and it was only because Rich pushed me into it, and I hated it. But then he challenged me and I got over the hatred of it, and now I'm in love with it, and I actually really enjoyed doing it. So, short answer is Rich Sheffrin pulled me into it.
SPEAKER_01So that's a couple points. So if you're a listener and you're not familiar with who Rich Sheffrin is, go to Perplexity, not Google, go to Perplexity and and find out more about Rich. Rich is a um a brilliant marketer, and and the fact that Mars was able to get involved with Rich early in the AI environment doesn't surprise me at all. Now, one of the things that you brought up though, I'm starting to see a trend. A couple of weeks ago, we had a friend of mine, Edward Frank Morris, who is commercially a prompt engineer. He's working with big companies coming in, doing uh like a prompt library that he might build for them, might include a thousand prompts, right? So he's doing this his background, not tech, journalism. And he's credited exactly like what you're talking about. You've been creating creative briefs for you know decades now, and that ability to translate the thought and the outcome into words or instructions for either an individual or a model is the difference. So anybody who's out here who's not like well, I'm no prompt engineer, I don't, I'm not an engineer. I'm not I'm wired to be creative. If you're wired to be creative, you've got a huge advantage when it comes to 100% the prompt engineering. So that was a great point. Now you mentioned the video stuff. What was it like? Uh when did you and Rich create this avatar video? How long ago was that?
SPEAKER_00It will it would have been we started the thing just on like a dare. He was doing a thing with uh Jay Abraham or J. Abraham, and uh essentially what we did was we we built the entire campaign in uh all using AI, all the images, all the copy, the sales copy, all the emails. I did it just to see if I could do it. But we started it in uh like a year and like right like almost immediately after uh November when GPT 3.5 broke of 2022. So it was right, it was right then, and the and the video stuff just was not there yet, to be honest with you. So we we toyed with it kind of like I don't know if everybody remembers the movie Lawnmower Man. You have to be really showing your age if you remember Lawnmower Man. Yeah. But Lawnmower Man was like the whole idea of like virtual reality before like the metaverse, kind of, if you will, before that was even like a real thing. And so the it's very polygon graphic, looks super fake, but they leaned into it. They leaned into it as like this is the best we got right now, so let's run with it. That's essentially how we approached it back in November of 2022. We worked on it from November of 2022 until November, December, January, February, until February of 2023. That's how long it took me to actually like figure out what we were doing, write the copy, and then find the AI tools that I could do all the things with and get them all working together. And then on top of that, I have a team, so I kind of had to train them up. But we it was about it was about two, two, uh, you know, like uh sorry, so about about a year, year and a half ago, let's call it.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so here's a question that I'm always interested in. What was the difference between doing it the old way, even though there was a learning curve because you hadn't used these tools before? What was the resource requirement, old way versus new way?
SPEAKER_00You mean you mean like let's talk are we talking uh resource requirement as in how much would it have cost me based on team members that I would have needed?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so then this is the best freaking question you could ask, and of course, this is why I'm on this interview with you, Dr. Dave. Okay. That is how I actually expressed it to Rich because I bit I when we when I he did my interview because I was part of it, it was called the AI 5. And it was essentially like five AI experts that came in and like talked to him and Jay about like how they were doing what they were doing. One was in business, one was in video, which is how I connected with Josh owns Hey Gen, which is the main video tool I use. And then uh a couple of them were copywriter and some other some other thing with with AI. But essentially mine was on like essentially AI creative, like the sort of visual side of things, a little bit with the video, but that was new to me at the time, but it was mostly the visual stuff. So I actually every time I do a campaign like that, I know exactly how many people it takes just based on the number of items that are required to complete the campaign, right? So I and I broke it down like this during my during my my like uh master my master class, that was part of it. Essentially, it would have taken me 12 people, 12, in order to achieve what I achieved over the course of about two, two and a half months. And the actual work took about half that time. And in the end, after we figured out what we were doing, and I'm talking executing all the graphics, the video, all that stuff, it took about six weeks to get it done versus essentially what would have amounted to more like you know, 12 weeks basically. Um it took me a little bit, a little bit, slightly more than half of the amount of time, and it was uh four people versus twelve people. So one third of the people and uh half the time, and this was I can do it faster now because it's the text much more there, and then there's people that are dialed in. So essentially, I just do things on a grander level than I did it with him with about the same amount of people. It's about four or five people it takes to complete all the elements for what amounts to a farm, you know. And I would say uh specifically with the numbers, because I told you this, like production, once you train an avatar, I'm looking at about a quarter, about a quarter of the cost. Uh if you count all the flights people have to fly in, go to the studio, the time it takes, the team that has to process the video, the people that add the graphics, I mean, all this kind of stuff. Uh it's it costs about a quarter of what it uh what it would typically take. And then they're doing a side-by-side comparison analysis cost, especially at Agora. And then like from a team member standpoint, they don't actually know how many people I have working on it, but from a team cost standpoint, okay, time time-wise, it's about a uh time-wise, it's about a uh probably also about a I'll say half. It probably takes half the time or one-third of the time to get it done, and about a quarter of the team cost. But let's just call it, you could call it about a uh half and half, because it depends on the thing, but it's at least a 50% savings for what I would consider to be actually better quality at much at a much faster rate. So you're basically looking at if you count the time cut in half and the money cut in half, you're looking at a quadrupling of your effectiveness. It's essentially the way to actually think about it.
SPEAKER_01So for most of you who haven't started using this stuff, typically if somebody says, Well, what kind of what kind of benefit can I expect? I tell them that pretty safely, whether it's whatever that KPI is, introducing generative AI into the process can affect about a 20%, you can expect about a 20% delta from where you are today versus what. However, I I consider that on the low side, it is what you're talking about with quadrupling the output is so so folks, it doesn't matter if it's writing an email or doing something as robust as what Mars is talking about here with a with what used to require 12 people and flying people. These videos that you're producing, they're not you sitting at your desk talking about these are production studio environments, these are really big efforts to create these things, and to be able to do that and not have to go into the studio anymore is a pretty significant win for everybody. What really got me intrigued was somebody threw out a number and the number it was an eight-figure number as far as revenue that had been generated from their efforts of doing exactly what you just talked about in their business. It was Agora. So what was what are you doing differently now with the avatars and the the video production using AI as compared to a year and a half ago when you were just getting started with three?
SPEAKER_00Well, well, first of all, I figured out like so let's so let let's let's get into the dark side. And depending upon how you edit your teasers, I would lead with this. Let's talk about the dark side of AI uh creative technology. Okay. There's it does certain wonky things, like people will know mid-journey, like you know, six months ago, you couldn't produce decent hands to save your life. You know, you better cover those damn things up. Now
you can you can actually like you know fix them or they turn out much better because the AI is trained. But certain elements, the AI, just at that point, it hadn't figured out yet. Same thing with video, okay? Um Hey Jan is by far the best, uh the best uh uh platform for actually producing like very realistic uh AI generated uh video, especially direct to camera. The camera has to be stationary, so that's one limitation. In other words, the cameras can't be moving around yet because the AI isn't smart enough to figure out how to like move the background and the format. It's it's locked off. That's one drawback. So but for a VSL or like a talking head video, there isn't anything better. And then the other limitation is little small things like just little quirky things it'll do. Like sometimes it'll do a face that that human being, no human being would ever actually do at that moment with what it's saying. And it's only because AI is just a statistical calculator, uh, statistical calculator. It's basically trying to guess what is the most likely thing it should do next, whether it's generative AI or what uh language AI or whether it's you know uh image uh image AI or whether it's video AI. It's basically saying, according to what I know from this point and what I've been trained on, what is the next move I should make? What's the next character I should type? What's the next word I should combine the characters into, and how like what should the whole body look like, and then scanning it and going, yep, this looks like what should what should go here. So what happens with that sometimes, and you'll know this if you've even just played around with one of the image generators or with GPT, is like, what the hell? Why did it do that? So there are what what you can call AI anomalies, right? And so, in order to cover the AI anomalies, there's a couple different ways to do it. And I would say since I've been doing production for so long, and even before I got into the like the uh internet marketing slash digital marketing online entrepreneur space, I was doing production anyways for like you know, like shotgun, shotgun advertising, like commercials, car commercials, I mean things like that was what I was created directly. Restaurant, like Burger King was one of my one of my agency's uh clients. And um, so I come from a background of sort of knowing what things should look and feel like anyway, but with AI, it's you can't do some of the things that you just accidentally sort of capture in a natural setup. You got two cams or three cams that you can kind of just cut between the cover. You you kind of have to do that with AI. So, what I do is I train two different camera angles. This is one little nuance of what of what I what we do. So there's an A cam and a B cam. The B cam, you can't really do more than the 30% angular variation because it's the triangle sort of three-quarters of profile, the AI starts getting confused. It's basically been trained from about a range of 60% uh left to right on the human face. So I train an A cam and a B cam so that if the AI is for general attention reset. Like in other words, I don't want people to get bored with the video. So instead of just doing the pop zooms, you know, zoom in, zoom out, we do that too. Uh, I want to do a different angle to make it just more visually interesting. And then on top of that, on the video side of things, like on the AI generated video side of things, we do a uh like a C camera that's doing like just random B-roll, like rack focusing on things, like panning from a ward that's on the wall down to the person's you know hands or something like this. It's just the stuff that I typically have a real uh production team doing during a during a real in real life shoot. Because the my reason for that is about efficiency, because it's not your job to have to put graphics or or even like alternate b-roll of something, you know, a different video to cover, to reset the attention. Tell me a movie where they're completely cutting away to gra or cutting to graphics, or graphics are always flying on the screen, or they're cutting away to some other shot in the movie. No, no, no, no. A scene runs for a long time, it goes A cam, B CAM, A CAM, B CAM, maybe A CAM, B CAM, C CAM, tight shot, wide shot. But it's basically the same subjects for 10 minutes at a time in a decent movie if you're well well acted, well written. So you don't have to change the the completely change the visual uh uh uh uh represent uh visual uh presentation. You don't have to do that. You but you do want to reset it a little bit. So A cam, B cam, like straight on, 30-degree angle, straight on, 30-degree angle, zooming in and out on the straight, straight cam, and then out to something totally random, like the person like twiddling their thumbs or you know, tapping their finger on the table. I capture a library of that stuff and AI can't do it. So we just put it into a library, and then I cut away to that so I don't have to spend a lot of money on graphics. There's one of the reasons why the cost is actually down, just because that's my style, anyways. So instead of having to produce some graphics to cover the AI or to reset the attention, I just cut away to something that's sort of like cinematographically, cinematographically interesting for the uh for the audience that sort of conveys some sort of emotion. If they're talking about something very serious, maybe I'm gonna show them like tapping on the table or touching their ear or shoot over their shoulder. And then the last thing, and then I'll then uh please ask me about all this because I'm random at this point. Yeah, the the other thing that I just started adding is I realized the AI does not do pauses very well. Again, this is dark side of AI. If in a especially in a talking head video, a lot of times you're at you're you're at you're doing a query of some sort. In other words, you say, does that sound fair? Or what do you think about that? Or how did that feel? There's a pause that somebody does when they're actually talking like that in a video that is very human and that AI does not know what the heck to do at that moment. So I see a series of about eight to ten questions where I say, What's the funniest thing that's ever happened to you at work? Okay, what's the toughest decision you've had to make recently? And then I have them answer the question, and then I just be quiet for five seconds, and I put all that into a library as well. And then I use that. If somebody says something in the in the video, whether it was just naturally, like just in other words, if it's a VSL or if it's just like content, I still cut to that C camera V roll of the twitching and the hands and all that, and then I also bring in those pauses that nobody, dude. I hire people sometimes, bro, like that have been working with me. This is just it happened to be today. Dude has been working with me for a month. He he he's a research, he's a research doer, so he researched the company. He's based here in Vietnam where I live. And today, I just figured out that he had no idea that the videos he went and researched on the company were produced with AI. None. Zero, and it's like it's like people, Vietnamese people, speaking with a Vietnamese accent, because it's some my wife's a lawyer here, and her law firm is like right near us. And so it's her partners talking in videos with a Vietnamese accent and just like doing natural hand gestures and stuff. And he's a Vietnamese guy. Had no clue that that wasn't really those people until just today, after one month, because it doesn't specifically. This is AI generated. And it's because I'm capturing those in-between shots and then doing those hanging pauses. That's really what's making what's selling it. And selling anything is selling everything. You know? So but please query query me, sir, because I'm sure I just rattled off too much crap for anybody to contain in their brain.
SPEAKER_01No, this is awesome, and we've got geeks that listen to this show, so they're following for sure. That's great. Um so here's what I recently did, and I think I may have shared this to you with you. I wanted to create the avatar because we're um with the chief AI officer, we're putting out a lot more content, we're putting out a lot more marketing material, and that sort of thing. I'm okay being in front of the camera, it's not my favorite thing. I'm just not used to it. So I said, hey, let's do what Mars is doing and let's build the avatar. So um I using Hei Gen, the stuff that I was able to do, like sitting at my desk was okay. Um so I got interested in wanting to do this the studio version. So I found a studio here in New Mexico, and this is a hint for anybody who's out there. The first studio I called was the public access channel.
SPEAKER_00Said, hey, do you guys you know, can you help me?
SPEAKER_01And you know what they said? Yeah, just come on down. I was like, okay, well, how much is your studio time? They're like, Oh, it's free. So I was able to go into a like a studio, a beautiful setup, and they ran the cameras and they did all this stuff for free. I got three different versions, fine-tuned it in Hey Gen, and what ended up happening is if I was presenting an extremely serious topic, these would be fine. But that's not that's not how I am. I mean, I use my hands. Uh so I'm interested how you are taking those B and C roles and you're feeding them into Hey Gen, and Hey Gen is is doing this, or you're actually doing this like outside of Hey Gen.
SPEAKER_00No, this is this, dude, you're really good at asking. You've never interviewed me before. You're asking seriously, this is not this is not gratuitous, okay? You are asking really good questions, okay? So whoever, if you guys are listening to this guy and you're questioning, is this a good first time? Keep listening to him. The questions he's asking, I should have said it, but he's actually Dr. Dave was probing it out of me. So the on the on the B, the like uh the B-roll stuff that I shoot, that goes into a library. I don't put it into the uh avatar trainer at all. It's just I have the video person, they uh they know already now, like if the AI isn't selling me, I'm gonna tell them to fix it and then make them feel slightly guilty for not for making me do their work. So basically they know to cover with like uh what I call C cam B-roll. It's the third camera, and it's just shooting like just random stuff in the environment. But the um the emotional stuff, the like the emotional pauses and things like that, I pretty much have to tell them where to do it at. And so neither the emotional pauses nor the C camera like B-roll stuff goes into the AI avatar at all. But but so that's those are things that we edit in traditional like editing style, right? Okay. Um, but to answer your question about the sort of dynamic range of the avatar, okay, I'll tell everybody right now, and look literally, if you listen to this podcast right now, here is your value walk away. Because what I'm about to tell you is exactly how you do it. And it took me several, several frustrating times because I can't deal with stuff that looks like that doesn't achieve the outcome that I'm going for. I can if something's meant to look fake, I can deal with something looking fake if that's what I'm trying to do. But like in this case, I'm trying I'm trying not to. So here's how I solved that. And uh I'm putting out a bunch of like videos uh over the next couple months. So Daigle, I'll I'll share them with you. Yeah, I'd love to
see them. But um in a nutshell, it's like this. Since essentially what uh what AI of any kind is, is essentially an average engine. Meaning if I do a dynamic range from super happy to super angry, let's say, that that was my emotional range in the training material, okay? If I'm doing little nuanced things, like you know, uh flashing my eyes, or and I only do it once or twice, even though that's super important from an emotional intelligence standpoint. Like, you know what I mean? Like a you that's a cue that says, oh, this person is really pissed right now, right? Or if I do something that really goes to like the happiness thing, which is just like twinkle my eye or something, and I only do it once or twice in the uh training footage, AI is not going to include that. It's gonna guess this is a random anomaly, and I should not include it because it's not safe. Okay? It'll pick up sometimes and it'll do it at like random times. But to keep it really consistent, I look at it like if you were to think about from one to ten being your dynamic range, think of it like um the way that I actually think about it, this is gonna be like an off-color reference, but I think your audience will be able to handle it. In normal society, at the opposite two ends of this spectrum, from very uh emotional and empathic and very sociopathic, there's essentially 2% of the population who is either high empath or sociopath. Everything else in the middle doesn't count in those things. So there's sort of those things are sort of out, they're outliers, basically, right? And AI is essentially simple doing that similar. It's not going to catch the super sociopathic stuff or the super like uh empathic stuff relative to like emotional states. So what I do is I overdo it. Like I ask a series of three basic questions. I have the person read a script, like read off the prompter and just read something for me so I can get general cadence. And the other part of my training, which is I think everybody will tell you, is like this this is the secret sauce. So take out your pen and paper or your device and take some notes here, because it's this is really it. If you want your avatar to look to feel super real, you have to increase the dynamic range. So you're going outside of normal level one and normal level ten. And so I asked the here's the three questions I asked. You could you could tweak these questions, but for these ones, I just have the person answer these three questions for three to five minutes without me interrupting them. So I say, here are your three questions. Question number one, what is the most meaningful thing you've done in your career? Okay. And I say, question number two, what in your in your uh personal life, what is the thing that has been the most difficult and frustrating for you? Okay. And then I say, if they have kids, or depending upon pets or their family, whatever their structure is, I say, what is your favorite memory uh with your children? Okay, because to me, if they have kids, that's gonna be your strongest thing. So what I get is like a like a triangular dynamic range that trains the AI to catch normal me, like real me, right? Versus me reading only off the prompter or me just doing this one sort of mode. Because the in order, so in other words, that lasts for about five minutes. And typically, my the gal who actually trains me AI uh avatars, which I just I have a whole team, but I only have one person who's truly gifted at this because it's some sort of weird art. What the sections that she picks to train with, her name is Dash, by the way. So I'll probably share this podcast with her. Dash, I love you because you're freaking a genius at what you do. She just picks the right sections, but we're we're pretty good at like actually making sure she's got a lot to actually choose from. But achieving that dynamic range where you sort of scale outside of what would be like a more narrow window window of like uh an emotional range, uh, is the key. Because then you're left with something that still feels like very real because it's now included in the average. You know what I mean? There's not just your outliers are a little bit stronger. They're not outliers anymore, they're normal part of the population, so to speak. That's the act. This is I think probably the most important thing I can share with you about how to train an AI avatar, is increase your dynamic emotional range. And I try to do it from three ranges, sort of like sentimental, okay, to uh to uh happy uh and and poignant to uh a little bit like uh frustrating and like angry. And then I don't interrupt them the whole time. I and if they if I do have to interrupt them, we have to start over from the beginning. And I do this on Zoom with like with Gorus people. I get on just on with uh Addison from Gore the other day, yeah, training his first avatar, and like it was so funny to hear the production guys keep interrupting him because they felt like he wasn't for one second, his emotions went off, and I'm like, these guys are pros, they've been doing it longer than me, but they still are thinking old school, and I'm like, no, no, no, no. Yeah, you guys gotta stop interrupting him. The AI will learn all from everything that he's doing. Just let him answer all three of the questions from end to end, and that's my training material for the like sort of natural version of Addison, right? So that's what I just told you really the like what I consider to be my I'm gonna say stroke of genius, Chris, but it's it is.
SPEAKER_01It's my like, how did I get it to just and you heard it here, ladies and gentlemen? Bam! We got that nugget, and I'll tell you, that is contrary to the instructions that Hey Gen gives you.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_01Right? So that's right. Anybody who's wanting to do this studio level avatar, you're gonna print out the thing from Hey Gen, and it's gonna basically be stand and act like a square and don't move too much. However, I got to see one of our uh guests recently was Molly Mahoney. She uh does a lot of like content training, she's incredible at what she does. I watched some of her Hey Gen videos and had, and look, dude, I mess with this stuff all day, every day. I mean, I've got a good eye for synthetic, right? And I could not tell because she had done that. She's looking up in the corner, she was she was being herself. So for those of you who are gonna be recording these and building these avatars, please listen to what Mars just told you and don't follow exclusively follow the directions that Hey Genesis.
SPEAKER_00So to be to be clear, let me actually address that because uh, you know, I I do have like some access that other people don't have because Josh is always the owner of Hey Gen is always giving me like stuff. And again, Rich is the one who introduced Sheffrin's the one who introduced me. So um, but but first of all, Molly's a really, really good friend of mine. Tell her hi next time you're next time you're talking to her. So you know she's great. Mars says hello, and she'll be like, oh Mars, because I I love Molly. She's a she's a character from I have it. Everybody's great. Essentially, that Molly is an actress, she's a trained actress. So that is but the reason why Hey Jen does that, the reason why Josh puts that out is most people are not trained actors and actresses. So what I what I do is essentially really coach people to is essentially act. In other words, I'm coaching them for an emotional reaction that if I were to tell them, act happy, they're gonna do it in the most fake way possible, right? And then anybody who knows them, and probably any other human is gonna be like that, somebody doesn't look right about that. So I don't do that. I just literally say, I scott, I don't even tell them the questions ahead of time. That's the other thing. I say, I got three questions for you, I'm gonna ask them to you spur the moment, and I want you to answer all three straight in a row. If you if you mess up, keep going, it doesn't matter. And then they're they just go into that emotional state because they're talking about stuff that they're emotionally anchored to, and then that way I can that's why I say it's not really all that genius. It it's it's my definition, there is a true definition because it's so stupid simple that you should everybody should be able to figure it out. But so far, as I'm the only one that's put it into a formula, I think. Molly's doing it naturally because she's she's a great actress, actually. Trained actress.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a beautiful quote from from Einstein, I think it is. Genius isn't adding to, it's taking from, it's taking away from, right?
SPEAKER_00That's the one I was reaching for. Thanks, Dougle. Yeah, no, it's awesome.
SPEAKER_01And uh then you're bringing up a lot of old names from folks that I used to work with at Agora, and I know these people personally, so I'm very excited to see what their videos look like. Now, for those who aren't familiar with Agora, uh there's rumors that Agora does, you know, over a billion dollars a year, essentially in online marketing, selling uh financial uh advisory for individual investors, right? Kind of a dry topic. However, the bulk of their billion plus in sales, a lot of it is driven from uh like character videos. Here's the expert and this sort of thing. So, and I was involved in in the production of some of those, and we rented out studios, and we filled those studios with audiences that we had to pay to sit there, and we had you know it looked like shooting a movie, and it was I I have no idea the expense associated with it. And now you're telling me that with five minutes of training, you're in Vietnam, uh Addison is in Baltimore, that's true, right? And if this is happening and you're able to do this, so give me an example. Okay, you've you've got Addison's uh training material for the Hey Jen Avatar. Now what are you gonna do?
SPEAKER_00Well, we already did it. And I already produced the first video uh for Joe, and they just they just they just put they just put it out because I but we produced it last week. When we f when we talked uh a week and a half, two weeks ago, I was just starting that process, and then and I told you, even at that point, uh you asked me how long it takes, I and I told you it's it's about a quarter of the time that it takes for them to produce it, and you guessed the right amount. You said so whether like two weeks, and I'm like, yeah, that's exactly how much time it'll take. So we must have talked two weeks ago because that is when we started and we got it finished, and Joe just put it up, and I'm pretty sure it'll it'll I don't want
to give away their numbers, but it'll do a lot of money, and they're really enthused right now because for that we use the old old footage where he's just sort of sitting there very stiff. But again, dash my gal just picked the right footage, and so it looks pretty real. But the training, the training footage, we already trained the avatars. We trained, we had him shoot three different scenes. That's another thing that I didn't mention. Typically, you want to shoot, like Dave will mention on on like you mentioned, Chris, on your stuff, is uh uh you know, three or four different scenarios, like scenes. Do you in different clothes whether you're sitting on a couch in one and you're sitting on a you know on a uh uh at a podium in another one, and whatever, whatever the scenes are that match with your sort of audience's expectations and needs. But essentially, uh we are we trained it already, and then uh I'm doing I'm in the middle of doing a long-term deal with with with uh Joe right now because of that come coming out of that. Because like he's like, well, I mean, okay, to be fair, the main reason if I'm gonna be honest about it, it's it's super great, the AI and everything, but it's just those guys usually have to babysit a lot of that stuff. They're almost all copywriters inside of Agora, and they the the words matter a lot to them, and when the production team is either not reinforcing them strongly, or worse yet, stepping on the words, that's problematic. You know, it's like, dude, what are you why did you put that there? That's totally detracting from the words. You're not highlighting the right words, or you've got the, you know, it's self-distracting from the audience from from the words that are like driving the response, it's direct response, right? But you know, Joe sent it over to me, and I was like, he's like, How involved do you need me? And I'm like, Joe, I don't want to insult you, but like pretty much zero. Tell me what do you want us to feel like? And uh he was he's worked with me, so he already knows that that's probably true. Yeah, but I think even he was like, holy no, he he actually said it. He actually used explicites to describe his reaction to it. So the answer to your thing with with Addison is this. We shot with him. I only did the first avatar because I don't need to babysit the process once the production guy gets the gist. And anybody who's listening to me can kind of like wing it and probably do pretty okay. But I did the first uh avatar, like the first scene uh the avatar shoot with with Addison, and then they did two more without me. And they actually I think they actually did better on the second two than they did in the one with me because the the Andy, the production guy, actually synthesized the process once he got what I was what we were when I was trying to get him to understand. And so that that avatar already is like it'll it's it's better than any performance Addison has given in the past because typically, in order to get him to say the words, you've worked with him. And Addison, if you ever happen to hear this or see this somehow miraculously, we love you, forgive me for what I'm about to say, but I'm pretty sure you'll agree. His general delivery is very stiff. But I just asked him the questions that I told you, and his delivery was super natural because when he's not trying to like perform, quote unquote, like perform and be that like his, he's quite engaging to talk to. He's an entertaining rascal, you know? And so fusing those two together, it's it made it really natural, and I can't wait to like blow Joe's mind with the new avatar from the from the current like uh training session. It's gonna be awesome, dude.
SPEAKER_01Obviously, if you're listening to this, what we're talking about is high-level commercial level production occurring from uh what what level of Hey Gen subscription do you have? How much do you pay for Hey Gen a month?
SPEAKER_00Uh I can't say because I have a contraction alternative, not because I have an enterprise account basically, but most of my clients are at about like $250 a month level. $250 a month.
SPEAKER_01Okay. If I were to go into a production studio and and try to replicate what's happening here, doing it the old way, I would pay $250 an hour, maybe and if I'm shooting uh so if if you're marketing, if you're creating content, you want to get in front of your audience or your potential prospects or whatever as often as possible. With this, I can have an idea while I'm eating a sandwich. I can say, hold on, I can go, I can think about the script while I'm you know finishing that last bite. I can go in, I can enter that script, or I can record the voice even at that moment, feed that into hey gen, and by the time my uh you know lunchtime is over, that video is done and ready to go. As compared to a 12-week, four-week, two-week cycle of okay, we got to align everybody's schedule, we got to do all this on a sundae. This is incredible. And if you are a small business and you're not doing video, well, I'm not comfortable in front of the camera or whatever, be comfortable for two to five minutes, do exactly what Mars said, and you don't have to get in front of the camera anymore. Yet you can produce talking, like you talking to your audience as much as you want. This is extremely powerful and gonna level up your marketing, your content, your brand, your thought leadership recognition, all those things. Fantastic.
SPEAKER_00Let me let me give them one nugget before we before we like wrap up, uh, Chris. Because I I do like what I told you, what I've told you so far is you can apply it all to you uh setting up your iPhone and lighting yourself well, and you don't need to go into a studio. Just shoot yourself in a couple scenes from a couple angles, and you can shoot them, you don't have to shoot them uh simultaneous. You can shoot you can shoot them in a uh you know sequential manner. Like in other words, train camera A just by answering those questions that I told you, then train camera B at a 30-degree angle just by moving the tripod, and then you don't have to shoot it all together. You don't this none of this requires a studio. It's just the studio guys can kind of facilitate it. So it's something anybody can do with a couple decent lights and an iPhone quite easily. But I want to give you one simpler than that, because I did uh an event earlier today, actually, about about uh about uh about 12 hours ago. I did uh I
did a call earlier with a guy uh based in Vegas, and he he largely works with um, I want to say his main his main audience is like network marketers who have a huge like following on uh on like Instagram and that type of thing. That's his it's people who are picking up their audience through social, basically, and then putting them into a big, you know, like a whatever you think about network marketing, immaterial. But my point is the thing that I shared with him today is the thing, if you got a business, we what I talked about up till now is back end stuff. In other words, after you get people in, how do you sell them? Like how do you actually what do you what do you give them uh that you can actually like put something together and it's basically a sales message essentially. You're explaining something to them, uh uh agitating the problem a little bit, then alleviating the problem with your solution. But I want to give you one better because like only recently, and and HeyGen does, there's a couple of platforms that do this even outside of Hey Gen, but I'll stick with HeyGen since it's what we've been talking about. They have a what I consider to be one of the best prospecting tools ever. And I tried developing this myself about two or three years ago. Tech just wasn't there, and it's like they made it exactly how I wanted to. And what it is is, and I and I made, I wish I could, I should if I'd have known, I should have like made some some of these videos for you, but it but just to visualize it just through uh language and uh vocal delivery here. Essentially, you shoot one video, let's say like a 30 30 seconds, or maybe I think you can do up to one minute video that's like, hey, so-and-so, I saw that you responded to my message or my my post or whatever, but the so-and-so, you're actually saying the person's name. It's like, hey, Chris, or hey Chris Dagle, I saw that you responded to my uh to my post. I just wanted to reach out to you real quick through Facebook messenger, email, whatever uh access that you have to the person. And essentially it sends them a personalized message, and you might say, Okay, so you said their name. No, no, no. I can put a prompt into Hey Gen and have it go scroll their website, okay? I can put a prompt in there that talks about whatever, I can have them fill out like a job form where they tell me what industry they're in, and they tell me what uh what their major problem is or whatever, and the video will say, I'll say it as if I'm making the video for you, Chris. Essentially, hey Chris, I just saw that you answered my uh response and you signed up for the uh for the masterclass that I'm having. Listen, I went and checked out your website, their website is scrolling, okay? I see a couple things that I could probably help you with on your on your website. And first of all, since you're in the uh fitness industry, I think the biggest thing that I could tell you is thing A, thing B, thing C. Okay? And uh what I really want to deliver to make sure I help you with that problem of not being able to get enough leads for your fitness business is thing X, thing Y, thing Z. Now the A, B, and C, the X, Y, and Z stays the same, but the name of the person, going and scrolling their website, talking about their particular uh industry that they're in and their pain point, and then linking that directly to your solution so that they show up for your webinar or so that they sign up for your email, whatever the thing is that you're trying to do, this is something that they just came out with. And I got on these network marketers today. There was like 20,000 people on this freaking uh Instagram. Like serious, I think there's probably more than that when I stopped looking. But their minds were blowing, dude. Because for that type of people who have like a business that's more of an on-the-ground level, they don't have a you know $10 million budget and that type of thing. That's what I'm used to working with because that's just the level that I work at. But for these guys who are running a business out of their garage, or maybe they're even upline. From the other people, and maybe they're maybe they're making six or seven, even seven figures a year. Their minds literally literally exploded one because I demonstrated what I just told you to them. There's a thing in there that's it's just out of beta, but you basically you shoot your like your core video, and then you can just put the variables in, just like an email. Like when you're when you bring in variables into an email and it populates, only it's it's you or whoever your spokesperson is talking to them, like literally, they just responded and signed up for your freaking webinar or whatever, and then now you're following up with them, and they're like, why is this this person made me a freaking video? Holy crap! And you can't you it the video could be better, and I'm sure six months from now it'd be flawless. It's like 99% though. And I honestly think everybody knows an email isn't real, but they still respond to them because somebody took the time to send it to them, and a lot of times they seem personalized or too bad. That's a nugget that I actually want to leave because where I see it going in terms of impacting businesses of every kind. I don't care if you're like an auto-body shop, dude. Doesn't matter to me if you're a chiropractor, if you're a dentist or whatever you are, if if I'm getting that kind of like personalized attention from you, at least for the next year or two, because everybody will be doing it a year or two from now. So what you need to do before I before we wrap this up is keep listening to Dr. Daigle, okay? Go go check out tools like Hey Gen, but Hey Gen is the one that I would actually recommend that you go at least set up a uh free account with. And then um essentially start digging into these tools that are super simple to use, they're just not complicated. They don't really require, like everybody always says it doesn't require technology. It literally doesn't, dude. It really, really doesn't. I I when I made the video today before I got onto that call, Chris, it was like I was like, oh crap, I gotta demo this. And I don't and I didn't want everything to be high level, so I was like, let me actually show them something that just a regular, kind of like like person who's not super up and running can actually do. And like the response I got from that, dude, it was just me like that was the first thing that I could think, because I'm using that right now. I'm I sending out videos to people in my contact list just explaining the um the what we're doing with AI. And if it's they um do you know what my response rate is, by the way? Because normally if I send out like a like a bulk email to like maybe a thousand five hundred or a thousand people, because I don't send out to eighty thousand, I'm a service provider. Normally, if I send out an email to like like let's say, let's say a hundred people, okay? I might, I might, even though these are people that have met me at events or even I've worked with some of them before, I might get out of a hundred emails, I might get like maybe five responses or ten responses. Um, but uh right lately I've been getting 50% response because I send this video, it says their name in it. That's my real numbers currently, like the way webinars used to be. A webinar used to get you used to get 50% of the people showing up. Now you're lucky if you get 5%. And it's all just about the time uh the adoption point. So if you're not adopting this, listening to what Dr. Degel was telling you about not just video, but all the things with AI that you can do inside of your business, you're you run the risk. I mean, and I'm serious about this, of be I see AI, I'll end with this, Chris, because this is a this is the most poignant thing I think I could actually say. I see AI like an asteroid that has already struck the earth, okay? And the the shards are now going up, the debris
is going up into the clouds, and it's completely changing the environment. If you are not a smart dinosaur, you will be an extinct dinosaur before you freaking know it. Okay? I'm I'm I would say in video stuff, I'm one somebody that you should be taking some of my advice. But all the stuff that Chris brings this knowledge on for you guys to actually listen to, do not miss a single episode of what of the content that he's putting out for you guys, because at the end of the day, you don't want to be a dinosaur. You don't want to be a dinosaur. That's it's just and it's happening so fast that you have to take in what Chris is is putting out there because he's one of the only people that's really doing it at this level. So I'll end with that, Chris, just to like give you a decent plug and a call to action because I truly believe what I just said.
SPEAKER_01Thanks, man. Well, and I I want like you there's a lot there's AI podcasts out there, but they're not asking these types of questions from users to users. They're more like theory or whatever, but the stuff that Mars like I do this stuff all the time, and the stuff that Mars just shared with me, as soon as I get off this, I'm booking more time in that studio, and I'm gonna ask myself those three questions and give myself that dynamic range. But folks, again, there's free accounts. You can sit at your desk and you can record this with your iPhone, and you can it may not be the best version of the avatar that you'll get, but within a minute, two minutes, you will actually be able to say, Holy heck, I just made that. And you'll understand, oh, this stuff isn't that hard. This isn't building a website. This is pushing a couple of buttons and maybe speaking some words or or getting in front of a camera. It's please don't be intimidated by the learning curve. The second that you learn one tool, you are now the AI expert in your peer group. Trust me. People aren't doing this. You being on this pod, you listening to this podcast. Maybe we talked about stuff that you just don't, you're like, that was way over my head. Today it was. Come back and listen to this episode after you've played with Hey Gen for a half an hour, and all of this stuff will start to make sense. It's pretty incredible. So, Mars, I know that it's late for you over there, and I really appreciate you jumping in. How do people find out more about what you're doing or your thought leadership or seeing your craft?
SPEAKER_00Well, I'm I I'm I came on to just deliver some content. And for the geeks, the middle part, I probably should have switched the order and done the the like simpler stuff at the beginning, I realize. But like overall, that is what you said is accurate. Go play with it, and it's really seriously not rocket science. I'm a little bit afraid to admit that because it takes a little bit of time, you know, like edge away. But like I'm trying to keep it innovative. So to find out about me, you can just you can look me up at marzthemarketer.com or launchman.com. There's and if you honestly, if you're on Facebook, send me a friend request because we
probably already have you know 10 or 20 friends in common just because I'm probably plugged into a lot of people, a lot of the people that you know. Mars the Marketer is my main handle, but ultimately if you just if you type in Mars on Facebook and we have two or three connections, there ain't a whole lot of Mars's out there. So you'll probably find me just in case you're listening to this, only in audio format. I always have a uh a backwards paperboy cap, looks like a beret, and then and I have like a 10-inch uh beard, 10-inch goatee. You kind of can't miss me. So just look me up analysis if you have any questions or whatever. I if I can't answer it, my assistant checks my Facebook every day, religiously, four times a day. And anybody that sends me a message gets a response of some kind, same thing. LinkedIn, Facebook, you know, email. And my I I don't hide my information because I'm not like a 100,000-person guru. I'm more of like a in a service provider, you know, manager. So hit me up and I will I'll coach you through pretty much, or somebody from my team will at least respond and give you an answer to your question.
SPEAKER_01Okay? It's very generous. Thank you, Mars. I really appreciate you taking the time, and I hope that everybody listens to this and does the stuff because I'm gonna be doing it as well. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you on the next episode. Thanks for tuning in to using AI at work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work. And a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI Officer, for empowering businesses with AI education and training. Visit their website for a free AI readiness assessment and AI strategy guide to help you get started using AI at work. That's www.chiefaiofficer.com. Thanks to our producer, Evan Desalnier, for making this episode possible. Follow us on Twitter at the handle UsingAI at work and visit www.usingai at work.com for free resources to help you harness AI in your role.