Dear Reader,

Every writer hits a crossroads.

You sit there staring at the page — pen in hand, coffee gone cold — wondering why the words feel heavy.

You know the topic.

You know the audience.

You even know the “right” structure.

But nothing connects.

And that’s when you realize something uncomfortable:

You’re writing from the outside in.

You’re thinking about the performance.

You’re thinking about the reaction.

You’re thinking about how you sound… instead of how they feel.

Brian Brushwood learned this lesson long before he ever cracked a million views.

Not onstage. Not on YouTube.
But in the quiet moments when he was writing jokes nobody laughed at and stories nobody heard.

He discovered that real connection doesn’t happen when the writer is trying to be impressive.

It happens when the writer is willing to be human.

Vulnerability beats volume.

Honesty beats polish.

Empathy beats cleverness — every time.

That’s what this episode is really about.

It’s not “How to Go Viral.” It’s “How to Matter.”

Brian walks us through how he writes for identity, not attention.

How he steps into the audience’s shoes and asks,

“What truth do they already carry… that I can put into words?”

Because the most shareable content doesn’t teach people who you are.

It helps them express who they are.

If you’ve ever felt stuck in your writing — if you’ve ever wondered why some lines land and others fall flat — this conversation will give you the compass you’ve been missing.

Not tricks. Not shortcuts. A way of seeing.

And once you learn to see like this…you’ll never write the same way again.

 

Watch/listen above or read below.

Todd Liles: Welcome back friends, I’m Todd Liles and this is part three of four with magician and creator Brian Brushwood alongside my friend Roy H. Williams. This one took a turn because what started as a talk about attention and generosity, became a deep dive into artificial intelligence, creativity, and the human heart behind every story. We talk about how new tools can amplify talent or replace it, and what happens when machines start to imitate imagination and why empathy and emotion will always belong to people. It’s smart, it’s funny, and it’s a little unsettling, but it might just remind you of why being human still matters most. So let’s see what Brian and Roy have to say about artificial intelligence and its future in creative advertisement. Are you a fan of Alex Hormozi’s work?

Brian Brushwood: I’m familiar, yeah.

Todd Liles: Do you know about his last book launch?

Brian Brushwood: Mm-mm.

Todd Liles: So I’ll tell Roy. Alex Hormozi, you’ve heard Alex’s name before? You don’t recall, but you will. Ryan Deiss is a good friend with him. Like Ryan, really, really, really likes Alex Hormozi. He used to live in Austin. They run in some of the same circles.

Roy Williams: Okay.

Brian Brushwood: For the record, everybody likes Alex Hormozi as best I could tell.

Todd Liles: Yeah, he’s just a really nice guy.

Roy Williams: I probably never knew his last name.

Todd Liles: He’s a very young guy. He always wears a tank top. He’s super muscular. He’s got this huge beard. Very anti brand look, he did that on purpose. He grew the beard and the mustache because he said, no one looks like to me in the world of digital advertising. So in his early days, everything he’s writing about is all call to action. He wrote ‘$100M Leads’. It’s all call to action stuff. And then about two years ago, by the way, switched to constant daily content.

He does daily daily content, probably 10 to 20 videos a day, shorts. But he also does two to three really long videos, 30, 45 minutes. And when you watch him, you go, A, he’s really smart. B, he’s put a lot of money and effort into these videos. It’s really good. And he’s attracted really, really ultra small guys. And now he’s starting to attract really big guys. Now he is saying to people, you can’t just be doing direct call to action, once you get over a million bucks, you’ve ran your course. Now it’s time to start branding. So he’s saying things that we’re saying, that’s not the point I wanna make.

The point I wanna make is that for the last two years he’s been just giving, giving, giving, giving, giving, giving, giving. And all of it’s on YouTube. He doesn’t charge for any of it. He wrote out his $100 million, I think it’s… What is it? $100 million acquisitions or something like that. It’s a $100 million playbook. He rolled this out and he talks about, he used the word harvest. It’s time to harvest this attention I’ve been gathering. He sold $100 million in 24 hours in books.

Roy Williams: Wow.

Todd Liles: Because he wasn’t just selling books. It was $7,000, you buy one of my books, but you’re gonna buy six other people books and you’re all gonna get access to my training courses. And he did it the right way. So he took two years of storytelling and attention and he made $100 million in a 24 hour period.

Roy Williams: Cool.

Todd Liles: Very cool.

Roy Williams: Yeah, I like that.

Todd Liles: And no one dislikes this guy. Not that I know of. I think he’s… Do you know if you might know someone who dislikes him?

Brian Brushwood: No.

Todd Liles: I think everyone likes him.

Brian Brushwood: In fact, if I have one beef, it’s like, shut up about him everyone. I’ve heard about him. He sounds great. [laughter]

Todd Liles: But what he said, he said it many, many, many times and you’re saying it now, is that, he used Kim Kardashian, by the way, as an example. He said he looked up one day and wanted to know, what in the world are these people doing because their story is not as good as mine, their skill sets are not as good as mine. He goes, the one thing that they have that I don’t have is attention. How do they get attention? Well, he’s not gonna go make a sex tape, so instead he’s gonna put out good content every day. That’s just… It’s like your guys with the gun show. They start gathering attention, they’re gonna grow.

Roy Williams: Instead people are always shocked. I was talking to some people today. They have no idea how many TV ads I write and how many tens and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of television we buy every year. It’s like we’re known for radio because everybody that does radio sucks. Nobody does good radio except 87 people that I know of in the whole world. They are all partners of mine, okay? You’re both one of them. You’re both two of them.

Brian Brushwood: I was like, I kind of like that.

Roy Williams: Both one of them…

Brian Brushwood: Voltron up.

Roy Williams: You’re both two of them. So the flip side of the coin is, television is all about the script. And I’m telling you, I’ve been pumping out. I decided 48 hours ago, I’m gonna learn to do this because I had some things I needed to create. I didn’t have the time to gather the people and stuff. I mean, it was a time deficit. And I said, one of the other partners convinced me that now there’s AI, that sounds like real people singing, and even musicians can’t tell it’s AI And I’m going, that’s new. That’s new. And he proved it to me. And I’m going, whoa.

Now, the two biggest names I know on radio in America, Eric Rhodes and Roy Laughlin. These guys have been nationally known all over across North America for over 30 years, both of them. And I sent this thing that I did to both of them. Both of them were freaked out. Who did you get to sing that for you? How much did it cost you to produce that? You know, it’s just unbelievably well done. And then when I said, honest to God, when you know how to write a great script, when you know how to write in meter, and I’ve been writing in meter since the ninth grade.

So when you know how to write in meter and you can put together the kinds of lyrics that work, that’s all you do when you’re an ad writer. So what I’ve been doing my entire life, I’m going, yeah. So I just started cranking out some real hit songs and everybody’s just crapping. And they’re going, oh, crap, how are you doing this? I’m going, wait a minute. Production. I’m not asking it to do creative stuff for me. I’m saying if you have a library of voices that actually use the kinds of stuff computers can’t do, and whenever you can figure out how to create voices like that and when you know how to instruct it to do the music you want. And so I was showing my wife this morning. I said, look, I learned in these prompts, figured it out. Forget pull down menus. It’s smart enough that I could say, funky jazz, comma, swagger, and get a different, wildly different sound, consistently different. Then funky jazz, comma, sweetly. Now, I made up sweetly and I made up swagger. But the AI is smart enough to know, I think I know what he means. And then when you sit and you’re going, hang on a second.

I’m getting voices and I’m getting music like, would have cost hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars plus weeks and months of time to do, and I’m cranking this stuff out. And I said, now, right now, nobody realizes I did full sing ads for, like, eight companies this weekend, and all of them just wet their pants. I just sent it to them, a full sing, 60 second, 30 about their specific business. They’re thinking, how in the world did you know? And they’re naming famous artists. I’m going, nope, I don’t know them. And I hadn’t been working on this for weeks and months. I did this 10 minutes ago. I mean, windows are gonna close here pretty soon, but right now…

Todd Liles: Let me give you a sample.

Roy Williams: Time to make magic.

Todd Liles: And we’ll put in a clean version. I’m just gonna give it… I’m gonna play the one I like the most so far, which is actually the first one he sent.

Roy Williams: Oh, this is my very first effort. This isn’t good. This is passable.

Todd Liles: I like country music.

Roy Williams: All right.

Todd Liles: And if you wanna hear the whole song, Roy, can I post it?

Roy Williams: Sure, of course.

Todd Liles: Post it in the show.

Roy Williams: Landmarks are not where they were before. Why don’t people stop at red lights anymore? And so it’s all about, superficially it’s about, people just not stopping at red lights. But the more he talks, you realize he’s actually mourning this or lamenting the forever spiraling tyranny of the merely urgent. And we’re not taking time to breathe. We’re not taking time to live. But the whole metaphor is, why don’t we stop at red lights anymore? And then he rants and rages.

So this week’s memo, I actually did it four more times. I have, I said, just to prove the exact same story told with the exact same structure, I wrote four different ones. Same exact story, same exact structure. Nothing changes except the perspective and the attitude of the writer, the singer. And so writing and the voices of four different characters, exact same story to reveal dramatically different personalities. Here’s how you feel about this person. Here’s how you feel about this person. Here’s how you feel about this person. Here’s how you feel about this person. But it was all just the lyrics. And so when you can write the lyrics, you can get AI to do the production these days, and it’s astounding.

Todd Liles: Let me add one thought to this, too. There’s this term that’s called slop now. They were calling it flankers, but now they’re calling the content that comes out slop. And Casey Neistat, who’s probably one of the best modern storytellers YouTube has, everything he does is just…

Roy Williams: I do know who that is.

Todd Liles: He’s so good. Last video he did was on AI slop. And as he told the story of AI slop, he wrote the edits and whatnot, and he would talk about things that would happen. But then he used AI to create those things that he was talking about, as he was saying were basically things you don’t wanna have happen. So, and he knew what he was doing. He never said it, but he knew what he was doing. He was simultaneously saying, AI Slop is trash. It’s going to ruin creativity. And yet he used AI to make his point very strongly. And you walk away from it going, oh, wait a minute, that was really good. Like, it was actually Casey and his stuff, but he used AI the right way. He made it really good by saying, it’s trash. And you still need a human today. Roy, I don’t know what it’ll be a 100 years from now.

Brian Brushwood: Well…

Todd Liles: Today, you need a human to be that super creative.

Brian Brushwood: Let’s speak to the customer experience today. Right now, there’s a tremendous amount of anxiety that all comes from one place. Nobody wants to be the sucker. Nobody wants to be the sucker. We talked about the font Papyrus at one of the recent meetings. In 1982, Chris Costello created Papyrus, a quirky little font that ended up in the default Windows and Mac OS pack. And so in the early aughts for a brief minute, you had this really cool font that everybody used, and everybody felt like a wizard saying, look at me, I don’t need to hire a graphic designer. I’m using Papyrus. And then five years later, as Papyrus is going on the side of banks, everybody realized, wait, we’re now sophisticated enough that we realize this is just a default Windows font. And you put it on the side of a building, you didn’t hire anyone. You thought you could get away with it.

We’re going through a similar worry about that kind of anxiety. The closest comp I can think of is late ’80s, early ’90s, when sampling culture was blowing up. On the one hand, everybody over the age of 30 agreed that Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby was just a cheap ripoff of Under Pressure, over which he rapped, therefore bad. That’s a sucker, sucker’s deal. Meanwhile, though, you had folks like the Dust Brothers, the Beastie Boys, all of these hip hop artists who were using remixes in phenomenal ways. There’s entire albums that are made only of samples from Parliament and Funkadelic songs. But it takes time for everybody to become culturally sensitive to see, as I think of it, the game is, where is the human?

Todd Liles: 100%.

Brian Brushwood: So when I listened to the song, it couldn’t get to the words fast enough because all I cared about was, where’s the human? And then finally you started getting to that part, I’m like, there it is. Now, like the opening notes and stuff, all of that is about to get artistically cheap. And I think it’s important to keep that in mind.

Roy Williams: Sure it is. Now, here’s the thing about AI though, that nobody’s thinking about right now, is that nobody’s making any money with it.

Brian Brushwood: That’s correct. It is a giant loss leader.

Roy Williams: Here’s… No, no, no, no. Here’s what’s worse, when you start deep diving, if you look at the money it cost them to build the large language models and to maintain the data farms that it takes and the amount of just raw investment from investors, and then they’re saying, okay, there hasn’t been any financial… The financial payoff the money generated.

Todd Liles: Let me give you a flip side of that. Maybe OpenAI isn’t yet, but they’re playing a game that’s not too far away from what iPhone did. Because if you look at other things that use it, especially in our industry, like Rilla and other softwares, those people that are using it as a plugin are making money. So…

Roy Williams: What I’m saying is the AI companies themselves.

Todd Liles: Yeah, yeah, I’m with you 100%. But their game, the game of software and a great book to sort of look into this is ‘The Hard Things About Hard Things’. Those people are so forward thinking in terms of how long they’re willing to lose money and just how deep in debt that they’re willing to go because they’re playing for like a long echelon. Like I don’t think Amazon…

Brian Brushwood: But it sounds like you agree with Roy that they’re not making money right now. But I think Roy had a larger point.

Todd Liles: All I was gonna say is they’re gonna make a lot of money down the road. It’s gonna be immense.

Roy Williams: Do you remember the dot com bubble?

Todd Liles: Yes.

Roy Williams: The people that went out in the dot com bubble were not the people that got rich when it came back. So the late adopters became the big winners.

Brian Brushwood: That’s correct. All the failures subsidize the future success.

Roy Williams: Early adopters came in there and lost everything. And what I’m saying is, I think there’s gonna be an AI bubble. I think that all these investors are at risk right now because nobody has been able to monetize AI worth of crap. I mean, it’s kind of like they’re vastly a long way off from breaking even. Now wait a minute, here’s the interesting part. Nobody has a business plan to show when this is gonna pay off or through what mechanism it’s gonna pay off. Right now it has been this vast gift to the world. The world’s really excited about. I’m excited because now I hate AI slop.

I was a really late adopter to AI, just happened to be lucky enough to have a partner, Gene Naftulyev, who proved to me what’s capable of being done today. I did the stupid country song, I just wrote the lyrics and then he popped it out for me and I sent it to the two people that know AI and they think they know what can be done with AI and fooled both of them. And they were both just blown away and going, my God, that’s amazing. 

Brian Brushwood: I think there’s an important word that you stuck in there. Fooled.

Roy Williams: Yes.

Brian Brushwood: Nobody likes to be fooled.

Roy Williams: But here’s the thing. When you don’t know, you don’t know.

Brian Brushwood: Exactly.

Roy Williams: And my point being this, whenever it is immediately producible, immediately you can accomplish, like right now, I didn’t think it would be music first, honestly didn’t. I thought Coca-Cola has these amazing ads that are AI generated and Steven Spielberg’s been able to do it for years, as long with George Lucas has been able to do it for years, man, he was doing it back with Star Wars. He’s doing some pretty good stuff. My point being, I said, I want when television production, when you can create visual scenes, we could do the write the scripts and do the voices. But when you can do visual screens without having to hire the camera crews and go to across the world to shoot in China or whatever and create all those scenes, believable that looked 100% real, I’m going… I’m gonna be so excited when you can produce TV ads with AI, I’ll never expect AI to write them.

Todd Liles: Right. So hold that back up because I wanna share something with you. So when I played that song for the kids this weekend, I’m like, hey, guys, listen to this. Whole family was in the living room, and they’re like, I think Will is going, is that this person? Is that… I know who that singer is. Who is that? And they’re all having a moment where they’re trying to guess the song. And about halfway through, they’re sort of bobbing their head and they’re like, they’re going, who is that? And when I go, Roy wrote that, my son immediately went, is that music AI? And it went from I’m enjoying this to, ugh. It was an instantaneous, like, they loved the song until they knew it wasn’t a real human singing it.

Roy Williams: And here’s the deal…

Todd Liles: It instantaneously turned off.

Roy Williams: Wait a minute, here’s…

Todd Liles: I’m fine with it…

Roy Williams: I’m with you. I’m with you. I’m with you. Because I feel the same way. Here’s my point. When you’re hearing something on the radio, you’re not there to tell people.

Todd Liles: No, no, no, absolutely.

Roy Williams: And if there’s nobody in the room that doesn’t know, that does in fact know, and I’m saying right now, they used to call it Deepfakes. And I’m saying that now the Deepfakes are good enough to even fool people that thought they could pick the Deepfakes…

Brian Brushwood: Well, and we’re at a moment now where everybody is figuring out that they can be fooled. And this distinction, everybody takes a lot of pride in saying, oh, but I could tell the difference. And then, spoiler alert, whether you can or can’t today, you certainly will not be able to five years from now, it won’t matter.

Roy Williams: At some number in the years…

Todd Liles: You know, the last Screenwriters Guild strike, the real big one that they had, there were many, many things they were going for. And the biggest one was not an increase in money, that’s what everybody thinks. I only know this because I have a really good friend that I graduated college with, Qui Nguyen, who wrote Raya and the Last Dragon, and he wrote Strange World and directed it for Disney. Their big push as a Screenwriters Guild was to essentially get AI banned from the world of television and movies, which they won that battle. That was the biggest battle that they were fighting, which was, no AI written slop should make it. And everyone said, yeah, yeah. And the actors got behind it too. So did you know that?

Brian Brushwood: Yes.

Todd Liles: Yes.

Brian Brushwood: I’m waiting to hear where this goes.

Todd Liles: Well, I think I have felt this way for a very long time, is that I’m proud of that guild for stepping up. I felt this way for a very long time, as long as we could think this way. I’m proud of that guild for stepping up. And I think it serves as an example to what other guilds should be doing as well, which is to say, hey, there’s a place where we’re gonna use it as a tool, but a tool, it should enhance. It should make lives better.

I don’t think that what you did was bad. I think it’s amazing. I think that if you were wanting to sell that song, that’s a great way to serve it up to a music producer and go, here’s a couple of sounds it could sound like, do what you want to now, but listen to the words. But where I’m going with this is that I do think that people will either step in, in the world of AI and draw some hard fast lines like, hey, we’re gonna use it like this. We’re not gonna use it like that. Or a bunch of autocrats, technocrats, pardon me, are gonna own something that’s really dangerous. I don’t… We’re… I wanna get off this because I have very contrarian viewpoints on the stuff, and I use it every day. I love it as a tool. I think for animators, it’s an amazing tool. Right? But there’s a difference between humans guiding it and going, I want you to do this thing for me.

Roy Williams: Let me be super specific. And we’ll submit this to Brian to see if he agrees or disagrees. Now, forget the five years. Let’s talk about the next 36 months.

Todd Liles: Okay.

Roy Williams: The one thing that I’m convinced of… Remember, did you know when songs play on the radio, this has been true since 1921 when radio was invented basically. Radio was popularized in 1921, first radio station, commercial radio station, and within two years, there were 2,000 stations across America.

Todd Liles: I didn’t realize it was only that young.

Roy Williams: Yeah. So here’s the thing. Symbolic thought, when one thing can be used to mean two other things, and when you’re talking about not stopping for red lights and people are actually hearing a whole different message. So AI cannot write brilliant lyrics, I can. Now let’s make sure that people understand, I can pump crap out all day with AI and it sounds amazing because the lyrics are awesome. Because I’ve been doing this for 40 years. Nobody, I’ve challenged anybody said, find any AI, I’ve challenged people to their face so many times in classrooms and said, give me an example. Show me where you can, and I will tell them, now, this is what… This is all the information you need. This is the product. This is the story behind the product. Ask me any questions you want about this. And then, get your AI to write a thing. And they would send it in. It’s a $1,000 prize.

I’m gonna pick one, there’s gonna be a winner. Whatever is picked is the best, I’m gonna give you a 1,000 bucks. And did this nationwide, actually internationally, many, many, many hundreds of subscribed people sent stuff in. It was all just variations of the same crap. And you know who had choose the winner? AI. And I said, all right, so all these AI ads ask AI which one of these AI ads is the best, and I gave that guy a $1,000 bucks. The point is, nobody, nobody was able to get from the AI… And I said, I’m gonna show you what I did, until you send in your stuff. Because when I show you, I’m gonna take this information, reframe it this way, and make this part incredibly important.

And an AI can’t do that, it can’t see something that is symbolic and realize the symbolism of that and then create the metaphor and the relationship. So this idea of production is available right now so that great writers… I have no intention of putting songs in the radio. See, remember the only reason I brought up radio, this will blow your mind. When a song plays on the radio, the band doesn’t get paid. Only the writer gets paid. The band gets paid when you sell records, when you do concerts, but when it plays on the radio, the only person that gets paid is the person that wrote the song. So I’ll write the songs, use AI to create the demo, and then a band can listen to it and go, oh, we wanna play that for real. And I’m going, cool. Play it with real instruments and stuff. And I make all the money on the radio. You make money on the records and on touring.

Todd Liles: Well, here’s my thought. I wanna go back to the Screen Guild thing. AI is sort of in its infancy. It’s been a concept for a long time. Alan Turing was thinking of this back during, before World War II. He just didn’t have the technology, but he was thinking about these things. We now have the physical technology between Nvidia processors. And that’s always just only getting better. I do think there will come a time where it will be so smart it will be challenging to tell a distinction between it. I really do.

But more critical than that, I go back to who owns it and what rules do we put in place now? The screenwriters fought a battle. Hopefully that battle will stand because they see the future too. They’re going… They’re really smart psychologists. It’s like Procter & Gamble hires the best psychologists on the planet. There’s no reason these AI people won’t do the same thing. They’re gonna study human nature and know it better than most humans. The real question boils down to what we as humanity will allow for this tool to do and who will have control over it. I believe that in my entire soul that if the world doesn’t set these limits, there’s gonna be real issues. I truly do think that it will become at some point indistinguishable, if not better.

Roy Williams: I watched a video just four days ago. I could probably find it on my phone. Somebody sent it to me and it was a guy that proved something. He’s a really interesting looking little character. And he said, so in these large language models. He said to plant a bug, so that whenever…

Todd Liles: I saw that.

Roy Williams: Yeah, he used this phrase, and then he says, so how many insertions do you have to do to infect the thing so that worldwide, when people do this, they get this string of just blather that means nothing. It’s just this completely non-sequitur. This phrase is inserted that makes no sense whatsoever. Do you remember how many it was?

Todd Liles: It wasn’t many. It was like three.

Roy Williams: It was 200… No, 250 insertions. So if you write 250 examples of this and feed it in, he said, now if you’re gonna do something really nefarious, it would take more than 250. But he did. He says, right now, anybody that types this in, this is what they’re gonna get using AI. He’s just a little prompt that he put in there. He said this and this, and he just basically made it go together. And so when it found 250 different examples of that in the world, the AI goes, oh, okay, this is always followed by this. And it was like, yeah, it only takes 250. You do it 250 times and post it in 250 places, you’ve infected the AI.

Todd Liles: Well, the question we don’t know is at what speed will the technology move? It’s sort of like when we learn to metalwork, we got really good at making swords to a point. And that technology lasted for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years until we learned to make modern steel. I think the Wright Brothers was 1901. And then by the 1970s, we’ve pretty much been flying almost identically the same 737 we’ve been flying. And they haven’t really dramatically improved upon that because of physics.

Roy Williams: Right.

Todd Liles: So the thing is, we just don’t know. It’s like a five year old baby that is already freaky. We don’t know what the curve is gonna be. And from my standpoint, it’s like when you don’t know what the curve is gonna be and it’s already so potentially dangerous, it’s like nuclear weapons. We better put some rules on this thing.

Roy Williams: Whenever you’re talking about ownership and I’m saying, okay, so what is the power of ownership? Because if the power of ownership is that you’re the one controlling what the ad is gonna tell people, okay, Pennie and I both in the past couple of weeks have had direct contradictions from AI. You search it and it tells you this is the answer, and you search it again and it tells you a completely different answer. One of those for me was…

Todd Liles: But I think that’s a five year old problem. I think that it’s so early in its stage problem.

Roy Williams: Let me talk about the seriousness of it. I actually had a partner that said, raising the flag over Iwo Jima, can we do a recreation of that in color as a work of our own hands, a recreation of it put on the side of a van? And I said, yes, because you’re not actually using the copyrighted photo and the copyright’s owned by the Associated Press. And so I had Googled it and it said, yep, raising the flag over Iwo Jima was a photograph by Joe Rosenthal, and he owns the copyright, but he was an employee of the Associated Press. So the Associated Press actually owns copyright to that photo. And then you ask again and it says, well, Joe Rosenthal was working for the US army, therefore the government owns the copyright, which means it’s public domain.

Now wait a minute. First it tells me Associated Press owns a copyright. And then it tells me that the government was paying Joe Rosenthal as opposed to the Associated Press. No, he was working for the Associated Press. And I know that for a fact. And so then they’re saying no. And because he was working for the government, then the government owns the copyright, which makes it public domain. So, yeah, you don’t have to worry about it. Well, I wouldn’t worry about it either way because we’re not using the photograph. You’re creating your own work inspired by that, which is always legal. But I said, wait a minute, I got two different answers five minutes apart, same question.

Brian Brushwood: Yeah, but well, what you got was two different positions, two different arguments. So that’s a little bit like being, to my ears, surprised when you go into a courtroom and you’re like, well, one guy’s telling me this guy’s guilty, the other guy’s telling me he’s innocent.

Roy Williams: Well, see, somebody owns the copyright, isn’t a matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact.

Brian Brushwood: Well, no, no, it’s a matter of judgment. That’s why we have courts and they…

Roy Williams: No. It’s a matter of law. Copyrights are absolutely registered copyrights. There is a government registry. And I’m saying, so hang on, this is not like, oh, this person says it is copyrighted, that… It is or it’s not, registered copyright is a circle R, it’s registered with the United States government. And I’m going, so it is a fact… It’s a fact based thing. It’s not a subjective thing at all.

Todd Liles: So what we’re talking about is, we’re actually talking about some of the fundamental dangers of AI. One is that it can be very inaccurate. But again, it hallucinates like crazy. And I use it all the time. So I’m speaking from experience here. It hallucinates very badly. But three, what Brian is saying is accurate. Not in the sense of is it black and white against the law or not? But in the sense of what he is saying is that this machine has developed to a point where it’s going, it’s making a judgment call in two directions. And if you asked it a question about it, it would give you…

Brian Brushwood: All it’s doing is reporting what other people say. And my guess is…

Todd Liles: Yes. So it’s read some article somewhere that’s argued that case.

Brian Brushwood: Or something similar enough that it can construct a proxy. Like, my guess is if you interviewed 100 people on the street, you would get some that would tell you, yes, it is legit to use, and others would say it’s not. So the core thing, the one thing we can know for sure with AI anything, is there is not a human on the other side of it. Or if the human is too far away, people won’t like it. And we know this because during the pandemic, everybody had the opportunity to have a high definition, incredible, lovely, simulated go outside and play experience with their VR headset. Or they could have a very low fidelity, low definition conversation with another human over Zoom. Which did people engage in? We all want other humans. All humans ever want is other humans. That is fundamental and will never change.

Todd Liles: Agreed. And I think that’s where it goes back to how do we use it as a tool that humans control and in what ways? Here’s the thing that, like I do see it as extraordinarily amazing. I almost see it in the same realms of understanding the atom. We have created MRI machines because of understanding the atom. We have created so much modern medicine. We can do amazing things other than just create nuclear bombs, but we’ve also created nuclear bombs with it. And when you kind of go through that sliding scale of good to bad, when we are looking at this, it’s… I do think it could literally cause wars. And I’m sure it’ll be very much used in the next elections, that’s a whole nother story. But I just see it as like, this thing is insanely dangerous. It’s like the nuclear bomb is being developed right in front of us.

Brian Brushwood: Yeah. There’s an excellent series from Longview called The Last Invention that gives a really interesting nuanced look into the positive and negatives of how we got here.

Todd Liles: And I do 100% believe that there are extraordinarily positive and negatives. I think the interesting thing about the state that we’re in is that the people that are pushing the progress are private companies, which of course, that’s where it would have come from. We’re past the days of governments other than maybe China, but really past the days of America as a government pushing this type of innovation. Those days are gone for us. Maybe it’ll come back. I don’t think so. This doesn’t feel like a federally funded thing. So as I’m just looking at it, I’m just like, I can tell you my kids and I don’t know why, I can’t tell you why, but I have a 14 year old and 11 year old and they have such an instinctive disdain for it, they despise it, they hate everything about it. When it comes, they’re like, dad, quit using it. And I’m like I’m… And I use it a lot. But I just… This is gonna have to be its own episode. But I feel like it has such amazing power. But man, I plead that people step up to the table and start creating some rules by which it can and cannot be used.

Use it to unfold proteins. They’ve never been able to do that before very quickly, AI can now unfold proteins when they’re doing medical studies and it can do it amazingly rapidly, which means they can go through thousands of scenarios for testing proteins, getting to this concept of individual medicine, which they’ve never been able to do before because they haven’t had the technology. Now they’re almost at the cutting edge of going, I can study your genetics and I can create a medicine based off your proteins and how they fold to where this medicine is unique to Brian and it will serve you well. That is good. We need that for AI. Using AI as a political weapon is terrible. We need rules against it.

Roy Williams: I agree with that completely about the proteins et cetera, I will subject this for your scrutiny. My observation has been currently AI is most valuable when you can aim it at a closed system. A closed system, a system where all information is available and the rules are clearly known. Physics, like engineering, the world of physics and load bearing and tensile strengths and all these things, yeah, this is… It’s a fact based thing. It’s a closed system, mathematics is a closed system, engineering is a closed system. Proteins and what can be done with the periodic table of the elements and things that can be combined and cannot be combined because it all comes down to electronic or electron parking spots in orbits. And I’m going, okay, cool. AI when it has a closed system with absolute known rules and boundaries is miraculous.

But whenever you give it something that is subjective, that is about human perception and there’s nothing that’s more human. See, remember the rational, logical, sequential, deductive reasoning left hemisphere of our brains. According to Dr. Roger Sperry, who won the Nobel Prize for that in 1981. Okay. We know this, that side of your brain, yeah, an AI can duplicate, but the pattern recognition side, the things that see connectedness and then see what is connected and how it’s connected because it’s not directly connected.

See what I mean? It’s like a human being perceives the art of that connection. The symbolism of that language or the double entendre in a sentence. And I’m saying, so those subjective things where there are not hard and fast rules, there are no formulas, there are no templates. It is right hemisphere of the brain, perceptions. AI doesn’t have perceptions. It has studying huge amounts of information and then extracting from that what to do. And I’m going, yeah, but you can’t explain to a computer what causes human emotions. So it can recognize a person who is acting emotionally, but it doesn’t know what emotion is and it doesn’t know what love actually is. So there’s certain perceptions that humans have that I don’t know if computers will ever actually have legitimate perceptions, what we’re gonna call actual awareness, consciousness. And I’m saying there’s the things that rely on consciousness and perception. Okay.

Which is why I say, no, no, no, no. I challenge the idea that in five years, that will AI be able to… Right now, AI can write paragraphs that sound like the way that Hemingway wrote or the way that Steinbeck wrote. So they can capture the word usage and the sentence structure and the kind of language they tended to use. Yeah, yeah, that sounds like them. But does it say what they would have said? Does it make the point they would have made? Does it move you? And I’m saying that’s what AI cannot do.

Brian Brushwood: Right. And for me, the math is simple. Is there an actual human on the other end? If no, person will not care. And regardless of the level of polish or uncanny valley…

Todd Liles: I agree with you, and I agree with you. But I also am just gonna submit that if I’m a corporate asshole, I will choose what makes me more money.

Brian Brushwood: Short term, until there’s a backlash.

Todd Liles: Yeah, I agree.

Brian Brushwood: Go ahead, use Papyrus. It’s a great font.

Todd Liles: I agree.

Brian Brushwood: There’ll be no downside.

Todd Liles: No, I agree. But they will do it. They will do it, so and that’ll be the sad part.

Brian Brushwood: Well, and the worst part is culturally…

Todd Liles: Can I say corporate asshole?

Roy Williams: Yeah. You have the blue cup. I’m not gonna drink out of it. That’s the asshole cup.

Todd Liles: All right, give the final thought on this. And obviously, Alex, this will be an episode all unto itself once we got into the rabbit hole of AI.

Brian Brushwood: Yeah, they went places.

Todd Liles: I might watch this one on my own. I don’t know if it’ll go out, but I do think we’re saying important things.

Roy Williams: Does anybody care?

Todd Liles: I think they may care too much.

Brian Brushwood: Is there a question in there, boss? [laughter]

Todd Liles: Final thoughts on AI.

Brian Brushwood: Oh, on AI? I’m only in the AI game for one major aspect. Look, every time there’s a new technology, all the rules change. The meta, they call it, right? In Pokemon, they introduce a new card, changes the whole game. Now, technically, you’re playing the same game you always played, but the weather has changed, there’s a new card that changes the meta of the game, the meta has changed, in storytelling. Now, where the sliding dials are in terms of what’s inbounds, out of bounds, what’s cheap, what’s easy, what’s hard, what’s brave, what’s cowardly, all of those are changing.

And I ain’t here to tell you which one’s gonna win out. But I know that we’ve seen versions of this before, and I do know that other humans get more and more sophisticated. And so, in general, you wanna pay attention to the weather. And if it feels real easy, think about what kind of permanent tattoo you’re getting. Because nobody knew they were screwing up when they’re using Papyrus on the side of that bank.

Todd Liles: That’s a good point. Yeah. Well, I’ve read the book ‘Dune’, and I know we win in the end and we get smarter, right? [laughter] So to wrap up storytelling, attention and money, I’ve got three fun questions that are both for you each. All right? So in other words, I’m gonna ask you each the same question, and we’ll go rapid fire, and then I’ll ask you to expand. So question number one. Who do you think is the world’s best author?

Brian Brushwood: Oh, Stephen King.

Todd Liles: Stephen King. Who do you think is the world’s best author?

Roy Williams: Living or dead?

Todd Liles: Either or.

Roy Williams: John Steinbeck.

Todd Liles: John Steinbeck. All right, who is your favorite author? Not who do you think is the world’s best, but who is actually your favorite?

Brian Brushwood: Maybe at the moment Neal Stephenson. He’s proven very impressive with his futurism.

Todd Liles: Okay.

Roy Williams: I got to go with Neal Stephenson too.

Todd Liles: Wonderful. And then last question is, what is the greatest book of all time?

Brian Brushwood: Oh, jeepers. I’ll go second on this one.

Roy Williams: Greatest book of all time. We have to narrow that down. See, if you’re gonna go in history, it’s actually ‘Don Quixote’. Okay. Because of the impact that it had. But if you’re saying, which one do I just like reading the most often?

Todd Liles: Sure.

Roy Williams: Strangely, this is the dumbest answer a person could give. It just happens to be true. It’s ‘Travels With Charley’ by John Steinbeck.

Todd Liles: ‘Travels With Charley’ by John Steinbeck. All right.

Brian Brushwood: Man, I’d hate to give such a cheap answer, but, man, I’ve lost count of the number of laps that I’ve taken through Stephen King’s ‘Dark Tower’ series, the Wheel of Ka keeps…

Roy Williams: But you said, what book have you read more often than any other book? For me, it’s ‘Travels With Charley’.

Brian Brushwood: Yeah, it’s probably, I hope for eventually it to be Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’. I just accidentally… I was looking for one passage, ended up reading the whole thing again.

Todd Liles: All right, so we’re actually gonna camp here for just a second. I said fun questions, but I figured it’d be John Steinbeck. I wasn’t sure if it was gonna be Stephen King. I kind of thought, it’s also Stephen King for me. And we’ve had conversations about this. So what I’m gonna do now is I’m gonna ask you to think about Stephen King and I want you to think about John Steinbeck. 

Brian Brushwood: You know, I take it back. The best book is ‘The War of Art’ by Steven Pressfield.

Todd Liles: I’ve not read that one.

Brian Brushwood: It’s fantastic. It’s the most important book.

Todd Liles: ‘War of Art’. Okay, ‘War of Art’. I got it captured. So what I want you to do is I want you to go to the book you constantly read. Right? You’re still reading Stephen King all the time.

Brian Brushwood: Sure, sure.

Todd Liles: What is one of the techniques that John Steinbeck uses, or one of the techniques that Stephen King uses that is part of what you think their superpower is? I know specifically a technique that Stephen King uses for me that I feel like is his superpower, which annoyed the hell out of me until…

Brian Brushwood: Oh, I bet I can…

Todd Liles: I experienced in real life.

Brian Brushwood: I mean, the superpower is that he understands that questions are better than answers and that you want that glamorous shadow to ruminate and fixate upon and wonder what’s just behind that curtain. Stephen King does that very, very well, to the detriment of the ends of many of his books.

Todd Liles: Because he doesn’t land them all very well.

Brian Brushwood: Not always.

Todd Liles: Not always. What’s John Steinbeck’s superpower?

Roy Williams: He can tell wonderful, amazing, fantastic, tiny little stories within a much, much bigger story. And it’s all the tiny little stories that give it the texture and the depth and the richness. And then when you see how this tiny little story here comes back three generations later in this epic novel of ‘Grapes of Wrath’ to become an important thing back here, it’s a tiny little nugget and two or three tiny little nugget stories that were kind of involved that you just thought were just little asides.

We’re talking about Neal Stephenson. Okay? This is… Neal Stephenson does it also just like Steinbeck. So the guy on ‘Cryptonomicon’, the guy’s on the boat. I’ll think of his name in a minute. And he’s by himself. He’s out on the ocean and he’s having cereal. He’s eating breakfast. He says, world class cereal eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal awash in milk is the mark of a novice. Ideally, one wants to put the bone dry cereal nuggets and cryogenic milk into the mouth. Work in small increments. You wanna put it into the mouth so that they come together in the mouth. Because in the case of Captain Crunch, if you put too much cereal in the bowl, it will turn into a pit of loathsome slime. And then he goes on, and then… So he dips the spoon in with one hand while pouring the milk with the other, not wanting to waste a single moment of that magical golden time when cold milk and Captain Crunch are together but have not begun to pollute each other’s essential natures.

Brian Brushwood: Yes.

Roy Williams: And so he’s just talking about eating a bowl of cereal and he’s going, oh, yeah, the pit of loathsome slime. When you put too much cereal in the bowl, it sits there too long and you’re just, you’re having all these experiences and it’s not even moving the story forward. It’s just a little paragraph about eating cereal on the boat. And see, Steinbeck does that. Neal Stephenson does that. These little self contained nuggets are just fantastic. And when you write ads and you’re trying to create a campaign, so you have this huge narrative arc over months and years, but it’s told in little 30 second and 60 second bites. It didn’t… It was only when you ask the question, why do you like him? It only hit me for the first time. My God. Because he’s writing little 30 second, 60 second snippets and putting them together that become this epic, epic tale of 800 pages. And all those stories connect together. It’s literally a metaphor of an ad campaign. Neal Stephenson does it. John Steinbeck does it. I’m 67 years old. I only just realized why I love those authors.

Todd Liles: Well, good, I’m glad we got that. Here’s the technique that King uses. And it’s always annoyed me when I… Well, let me rephrase that. When I first read his books, it annoyed me. And now I just get it, is that anytime he introduces the subject of Magic that along this path of magic, these characters have these amazing experiences. And always towards the end, something happens that takes them away from the magic. In it, the children come out of the sewers. If you’ve read the book, they did some things in the sewers, but they come out of the sewers. In the ‘Dark Tower’, he, Roland actually starts over from the beginning.

Brian Brushwood: Oh, Jesus Christ, don’t… What are you doing? You’re just gonna start… Anyway, I love that movie where Rosebuds a sled and Charles Foster Kane is only truly happy as a child. What a twist that was at the end. You better bleep half of the stuff that just happened on this.

Todd Liles: Hey, those books have been out a long time.

Brian Brushwood: He literally has a chapter where he warns the reader to not continue reading because the ending is so precious, they have to make the conscious decision, and only a real piece of work would foist the answer…

Roy Williams: We don’t like you anymore.

Todd Liles: Spoiler warning delayed. But what he does, and don’t forget, it’ll work out. It’ll be fine. They’ll remember this later. It’ll be even more impactful is that the character starts fading away the memory from all the magical things. And by the time you get to the end of the book, the character has almost forgotten everything other than a sense of a nagging feeling.

Brian Brushwood: Yeah, but isn’t that how it goes in real life?

Todd Liles: It is. Because the second time, after many years of going through the ‘Dark Towers’ and going back through it, and I’m starting to live the dream. And by the way, I had this whole conversation with one of my friends who’s a movie writer, creator, fellow friend of our producer, Alex, Julia Tracy. I’m like, he does this in every book. The character always forgets. I had forgotten the ending all the way to the end, end, end of the ‘Dark Tower’. And when I went back through it a second time, it hit me. It’s like I had a whole nother life experience, and I found myself going, it isn’t a cheap trick. We actually do this. We forget the magical moments.

Brian Brushwood: And we love to be reminded of them.

Todd Liles: Yes. So for me, that was like after me reading many of his books and going back to the ‘Dark Tower’ the second time. Now when I pick up ‘Fairy Tale’ or the ‘Black House’ or whatever it is, and I go. I’m like, all of these magic moments, I forgot, and I’m reliving them again. It’s beautiful. So that, for me, I appreciate that Stephen King realized something very early in his writing that most young men wouldn’t. They wouldn’t learn that lesson until they were probably his age now. And he learned it young. And I go, he’s extraordinarily insightful. I really believe he’s one of those writers that actually is writing other people’s stories. He’s just channeling, like really just channeling characters. That’s why I love the guy.

Roy Williams:  ‘Something Wicked This Way Cometh’. Have you guys read it?

Todd Liles: Is it… Is that…

Roy Williams: It’s a Stephen King.

Todd Liles: Disney movies.

Roy Williams: It’s a Stephen King.

Brian Brushwood: No, no. ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ is… Wait, that’s… Isn’t that Roald Dahl or… Oh, jeepers.

Roy Williams: Somebody gave it to me and I could have sworn it was Stephen King.

Todd Liles: I don’t know. I’ll look it up.

Brian Brushwood: No, no, no. Ray Bradbury. That’s Ray Bradbury.

Roy Williams: Is it?

Brian Brushwood: ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’.

Roy Williams: Huh.

Brian Brushwood: I’m almost certain, now I have to check.

Roy Williams: You might be right. Somebody gave me a Stephen King book to read.

Brian Brushwood: Oh, which one?

Roy Williams: I thought it was ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ or it sounded like that. It’s a book that has a title like that.

Todd Liles: Yeah, because you’re famously either not a King fan or haven’t read any of his books, right?

Roy Williams: No, no, no. What I’m saying is, stories that go into supernatural things in dark places. See, my personality type, it’s one and a half percent of the population. We’re told never to do role playing games because we will get lost in the game.

Todd Liles: Oh, you…

Roy Williams: And so what I’m saying is, no, no, no, no. What I’m saying is, anytime as having an introverted INTP, that’s the thing that doesn’t have a great hold on reality to begin with. And so we can get so lost in fiction. And so I have to be crazy, crazy careful about not turning myself into any kind of dark fiction because I can go in there and never get back out. And so, I mean, it’s self preservation for me.

Todd Liles: Then let’s make a recommendation. There are many books of his that aren’t necessarily dark. There’s a few that are pretty awesome. I think ‘Fairy Tale’ would be a great starting book.

Brian Brushwood: I don’t think I’ve read that one. But ‘Hearts in Atlantis’, I think is a fine, self contained, dreamlike story.

Todd Liles: Yeah.

Roy Williams: Okay, what’s it called?

Brian Brushwood: ‘Hearts in Atlantis’. It’s a collection of four novellas.

Roy Williams: All right. Cool. See, I think I respect him as a writer. I respect him as a human being very much so. There’s a lot of times you meet a writer and they’re kind of a jerk in real life, but Stephen King, I think is actually a pretty solid guy in real life.

Brian Brushwood: Yeah.

Todd Liles: Yeah, he… We’ll wrap this up, but I feel like he’s a magician on the page. He just… He does something every time I read it. So thanks guys for this episode. This was great.

Brian Brushwood: Yeah.

Todd Liles: Thanks for joining us for part three of four with Brian Brushwood and Roy H. Williams. If this conversation made you pause, good. That’s what it’s meant to do. Because technology is changing fast, but creativity, trust and connection still come from the same place, us. Now, next time in our final conversation, we’re gonna wrap up this four part series by going back to the roots, the stories and the authors that shape how we see the world and what they still teach us about persuasion and purpose. I’ll see you there.

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