E2A 085: Writing a Book Using Generative AI…Ethically and Authentically with Ronsley Vaz 

Episode Transcript

Please note: The transcript is produced by a third-party company from an audio recording and may include transcription errors.

Scott MacMillan:

You're listening to the Entrepreneur to Author podcast.

Announcer

Welcome to the Entrepreneur to Author podcast, the podcast that brings you practical strategies for building authority and growing your business. And now, here's your host, Scott MacMillan.

Scott:

My guest today is Ronsley Vaz. Ronsley is a computer scientist, engineer, speaker, podcaster, the founder of Amplify AI and We Are Podcast, and the author of Amplify, Raise Your Voice, Boost Your Brand, and Grow Your Business, and his newly launched title, Amplify AI, Integrating Intelligence, Preserving Humanity, a Guide for Business Acceleration.

Ronsley, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.

Ronsley Vaz:

It's good to be here, Scott. Thank you. Thank you for being part of the journey.

It's also really fascinating to hear the whole title of the book, even though I wrote the book. It's so interesting when you hear someone else read out the whole title. Thank you for having me.

Scott:

Of course. Of course. It is a bit surreal, isn't it?

But listen, I shared a little bit about you in the intro, but could you share a little bit more about your background and your expertise? What's your origin story?

Ronsley:

I think most entrepreneurs have origin stories that happen over and over again, in the sense that every year seems to be like a new origin story of sorts. I know people associate me with coming out of half a million dollars of debt, from going from a hospitality restaurant business to podcasting, and now AI, I suppose. I think the best way to explain what I do right now without boring the audience is I'm a computer scientist by trade, so the first part of my career was talking to computers.

I can program in 21 languages, not that it means anything today with AI, but it's a skill that is going to be obsolete soon. And then the next part of my career for the last 12 years, I've been making podcasts for some of the most famous people on the planet, like politicians, actors, songwriters, athletes, entrepreneurs, big business, small business. So first part of my career talking to computers, second part of my career talking to humans, and then AI comes along, which is like the baby of the two.

So it seems like everything I'm doing right now is play, and it seems to be useful to people. So that's where I'm at.

Scott:

That's amazing. That's amazing. So you recently published Amplify AI.

Tell our audience about it. Who did you write it for, and what's your goal for them?

Ronsley:

Yeah, so I wrote Amplify AI for business leaders, business founders, and also more specifically leaders that report to business founders, because what is happening is there's this divide being formed. I think it's funny, we're having a recording of this today after the elections just sort of happened yesterday, and the divide in that is astounding. What is also astounding is how we have such short-term memory, because I see a lot of my Australian friends put up these posts about how the world is a darker place as a result, but forgetting that like a few months ago, Australians, 67% voted that they didn't want indigenous representation in parliament.

So the referendum got thrown out as a result, which is fascinating, which is a similar sort of result, and I think people in the UK had a similar result with Brexit. So there's this divide in AI around either you adopt it or you don't adopt it, and there is this beautiful balance of doing both, adopting it and using it for the things we're bad at, and using the things that we're good at in more abundance.

Scott:

And I want to come back to that. I want to come back and talk about how we can use AI ethically in our businesses, but first I'd like to chat a little bit about the writing process. You know, not surprisingly, you collaborated with AI to write your book.

Could you share a bit about that process? And I'd love if you could make the distinction for people between the notion of having AI write your book versus using AI to support you in writing your book.

Ronsley:

So I think because AI is so new and because it's intelligence, everyone feels intelligent when they use it. So everyone feels like they're an expert as soon as they use it, which is interesting. Which was a problem before in general in different fields.

But, you know, someone writes a book, they become a book expert. Someone does a podcast, becomes a podcast expert. Someone buys Bitcoin, becomes a crypto expert.

Someone has a Facebook account and becomes a social media expert. So we've seen this in the digital space especially, but more importantly with intelligence. So I think there's a big gap between what people feel they know and what they actually know.

So this is a dangerous space because they're claiming expertise and they have no idea. So most people that think of AI in that regard of writing a book think, oh, let me write a book in two weeks or let me write a book in a month or let me write a book, actually not even a month. People are saying dumb stuff like two days to write a book.

If you're taking two days to write a book, why would someone spend any time reading that book? You know, it is not as much as you writing the book as much as it is you refining your thought process and putting into the book what needs to be there and removing from the book what doesn't need to be there. So with AI and having AI write the book, you can have AI write the book, but that's just a vomiting information, which is, again, more information, which is, again, freely available, which is just a regurgitation.

So you'd want to be able to use AI to clarify your thought process and your thought leadership and put that in a way that is in your voice and have AI explain it to someone in a way that you probably can't because you're so far removed from who you're talking to because you're so far down the path. So your empathy is lacking in a lot of senses. So use AI for that.

And that way you can use AI to support you writing the book and you can use AI for things like project management and for reducing cognitive load by doing some research for you or asking it to rephrase something that you can't really express in the right way or, you know, taking a whole bunch of podcast episodes and saying, where does this fit into the book? So there's all these different ways that, and by the way, my book, Amplify AI, has, I think, over 50 or 55 references, not even including the podcast episodes that are referenced in the book. And that was, you know, if it was not for AI, it would have taken me five years to write a book that took 21 months to write.

So there is this big gap. And again, you have such a huge responsibility, Scott, because, you know, you help a lot of entrepreneurs and authors, you know, become authors, which means, you know, you could very easily go down the path of saying, let me do this two day thing and produce more rubbish books. But, you know, maybe it's two days to get a head start or maybe it's two days to get a boot camp or going or maybe it's two days to remove all the obstacles you think you have.

But writing a book is a process, is a process of elimination more than it's a process of, you know, content creation.

Scott:

Yeah, I'm really happy that you framed it the way that you did, because, you know, yes, there's the idea of having a manuscript that has words in it and getting that into the market. But certainly the authors that we work with, you know, have goals beyond just having a book in market, right? The goals for their book, A, it's to help people, but B, it's to help their business, right?

And to position them in the market and, you know, establish or expand their authority and their reputation in the field. And if it's not your ideas that AI is working with and if you haven't had an active hand in shaping the content that goes into the book, well, you know, I don't know how you would ever get the benefits, you know, and achieve the goals that you have for your book. And on that point of goals, you know, you and I have talked about this, you know, numerous times, and I'd love if you could share with our audience, what are your business goals for your book?

And how are you using it within your business to support what you're trying to achieve?

Ronsley:

Well, I happen to have both books here. So this is the first book, which is Amplify. And this got released in 2016.

And for me at the time, the main goal of the book was just to get a book out. I just like to get the book as quickly as possible, get it out. And it has served me very well.

It's got me into like, ridiculous places that, you know, I just felt was way past my pay grade. But as an author, it got me into these places. But even this book, when you read the book, and you take the time to read the book, it is articulated in a way that people still send me messages saying, Oh, wow, I read the book.

And this is 2024 we're talking about this was 2016. Then this book, which Wow, feels amazing. And you know, what's really interesting, Scott, is we've got some pictures of people getting the book and there's a lot of you know, images that have been captured of people just like, you know, touching the book like that.

And just like literally looking at it's, it's so crazy. So this book was very much focused on consumption. So if someone's going to read the book, I wanted them to.

I didn't want to waste their time. I didn't I wanted every chapter to be useful. I wanted every sentence to be useful.

I wanted every paragraph to be useful. And, you know, since then, there's been some really, like, it was really crazy when I was in Canada watching this book is that Jim Quick comes up to me and says, Can you please sign my book? And I was just like, first of all, in shock, because that was the first time I'm meeting Jim Quick in person.

And this and so what I'm signing the book is like, you know, I read the first part and if you don't mind, can I take a second copy? And if you don't mind signing it for my business partner? Now I was in this is crazy.

And when you think about someone like Jim Quick, who is very well known, and would not waste time on something like that for him to go through a book and say, I want a copy, I want you to sign the copy. And I wanted to give a copy to my business partner. It's just mental.

So it gives me hope that this book was written with the intention that it's sort of executed in that way. But then there's also this very reputed gentleman, Simon Bowen, who creates models for big companies, like big, big companies, and even small companies. But he uses frameworks and uses models.

And he takes their IP and puts it into a model. That's his genius. And he met me in Toronto.

And he said to me, my wife, Joanne, and I are reading the book as a Netflix series. So we're keeping, we're like, we're chapter seven. Come on.

I'm like, I'm chapter seven. Where are you at? Like, come on, catch up sort of thing.

And I was like, wow, if you're taking the time to read the book, that's crazy. So my goal for the book, to answer the long story short, was to make it useful, to make it something that people can use.

Scott:

And it sounds like the reception has been pretty phenomenal so far, huh? What are you hearing from people?

Ronsley:

It has been very phenomenal. In fact, there's this part of me that feels like I could have done more and, you know, use the momentum more, I suppose. And I still feel this is not even, it's not even, it's just a start.

It's like, there's so many avenues to explore. I've not even started to explore partnerships. And I just got, I think, the 250 copies, which, you know, 200 copies of being to the conference today, which I've got to take that.

But I've got 50 copies for an event that I'm running again on Monday, which is like 30 people. So I've just got extra copies that I can start to give people now, which I didn't have before even. Yeah, I mean, we're like, I don't know, like 700 copies in, I think roughly, you know, the book is in 700 hands rather already.

And it's been, maybe it'll be, it'll be, it'll be two months in a couple of weeks.

Scott:

Fantastic. Okay. Let's get back to talking about using AI in our business.

How do you see the opportunity for business owners? And like you said, people who report to business owners or founders with respect to AI, how do the real benefits compare to what most people expect? And then how do you see those benefits evolving in the short and longer term?

Because obviously this is a space that's, that's really moving quite quickly.

Ronsley:

I think people are thinking of it as, as I said at the start, most people think of it as a, you know, this or that, rather this and that. So the best way to explain that is, you know, we don't go around telling others that we washed our clothes by hand for three hours. That's why our clothes are better.

You know, we don't do those things anymore. So, you know, writing reports or, or even, even worse is like, we don't go and say this report, I did all the calculation by hand. In fact, you know, people would not really, people would think that there's mistakes in that if that was not done by a computer.

So in the same way, this is evolving in the way we're doing things. If you've not used AI, for example, this book wouldn't have been half the book, if not AI wasn't used in the process to write the book. But in general, in business, what happens is that, especially for founders, founders usually have a really good skill set in creating something, but they, you know, struggle with keeping up the momentum because all these other things involved with business, which is, you know, the attract, convert, deliver scale piece to, you know, shorten that and make it a framework, I suppose.

So if we can deliver really well, we don't know how to attract and convert. And then if we know attract really well, we don't really know to deliver properly, or there's this gaps in general. And then when it comes to scaling, it's another big gap, because the biggest jump is for a solopreneur to become an entrepreneur, because it's about communicating thoughts and ideas and visions in their head to others around, and then recruitment and operations and process and culture, all those things become relevant, which, you know, founders are not equipped or not.

They think that they just have to know these things, but they're not trained to know these things. AI can help with those things. There's no excuse anymore for, I did not know how to.

So the excuse that most business owners, especially in the first world, right, in the Canadas, in the Australias, in the comfortable places where you walk into a room and say, I want the temperature of this room to be 22 degrees centigrade. When you're in that kind of comfort, we have these excuses like, but I didn't know how to do that. Or I hired this person and they didn't really deliver, so now I'm in the process of hiring again.

Or I just want to be a consultant, I want to be solo. All these really good excuses, but they're excuses. So AI can help if you want to get rid of those excuses and actually do something about the creations you have.

Scott:

What about the flip side? What are some of the risks that people need to be aware of? And what I love about Amplify AI is that you're really talking about an ethical framework for deploying AI.

So what are some of those risks that people need to mitigate against?

Ronsley:

Well, the great one is one you just mentioned. Like, what if someone takes two days to write a book, right, puts it out there, puts the book out, if someone opens the first page and goes, this is shit. Can you imagine if you've been in business for 20 years and you suddenly put out a book that took two days to put out, all the brand equity you've built for 20 years is gone.

It's crazy. And I don't think people are thinking that far because we have a very short-term memory, which I've mentioned again at the start of this conversation about how people forget in general what has just happened. So, I mean, a lot of us have forgotten the fact that the Ukraine war is still going on or that the war in Israel is still on.

For example, it's just blocked off right now. The most important thing seems to be the election. So it's fascinating, right, when you talk about what are the risks here, the big risks and something that you possibly have taken your whole adult life to build can just get ruined as a result of you making an uninformed decision or even worse, taking advice from someone who is uninformed, who is just a new AI expert and is just trying to make a buck and ride the wave.

And it's not their fault. It's just they feel intelligent. They feel like they can help someone, but they are spreading misinformation, which the election is a good example of how misinformation becomes a thing.

So it's a fascinating world, really. I mean, I'm in the dark as much as everyone else is, and it's hard to predict what's going to happen, but it's moving very quickly.

Scott:

It really, really is. Okay. So, you know, I think many listeners are, if they weren't before, they're probably now intrigued by the idea of using AI to help them write their book and do it better and more quickly, likely do both, but they might be worrying, you know, is it cheating?

Right. Is this something that they should be adopting? What advice would you give to them?

How can they do it ethically and make sure that they get the best possible results?

Ronsley:

So I think there's a difference between intelligence and information. So information and intelligence. And then I would take a step back.

I want to preface all this with there's very clear, distinct ages. So there's the industrial age, there's an information age, and now there's an intelligence age, and they're all built over each other. The industrial age gave rise to the machine, the commoditized machinery or industry.

We don't think twice now about all this tech in front of us because it's commoditized. Most of us can't even imagine that someone washes their clothes by hand or, you know, doesn't have a blender, or he needs to use a mortar and pestle for things. It's really fascinating how we've taken all those things for granted, again, short term memory.

So on that, we build computers. And as a result of computers, from that industrial age, it allowed us to store data in bulk and cheaply and in masses, which gave rise to the information age. And we have so much information, which is not why you want to write a book and create more information, because we don't want more information at all.

What we want is intelligence, which is now where we're at. And we needed the industrial age and the information age to have the intelligence age. So when you think about how we've taken a lot of things for granted, you know, we're going to move to a point where intelligence is just part of the process, like calculators are part of the process, like Excel sheets are part of the process, like, you know, presentations and Word docs are part of the process right now.

And at one point, I think a lot of people thought that a handwritten contract might be more valuable than the one written up in Word or something like that. So those feelings have changed. Just look at how it has changed in general.

A lot of us didn't think that we would be clicking selfies at all. And a lot of those same of us, same people who didn't think we would be clicking selfies hated the idea of using emojis, who use emojis right now for everything. So, you know, a lot of this has changed.

So the whole idea of cheating is, I think it's more to do with the person and their insecurities than the actual act. So what is cheating, right? What, in my opinion, this book might have my name on it, but it has been built on, you know, so many other people's work.

That's why it's referenced. All the references are there, because without those people's work, there's no way that I could have built this. And I don't think anyone can.

So, you know, I don't know whether IP is a real thing. I think IP has been created by the first world for a white man to say, this is mine. That's what I think.

And if you look around, that never existed. Wisdom and intelligence and information was never belonged to only one person. It was always belonged to the community.

So why has that changed suddenly? And why are people so precious about things that are not even theirs? So this whole idea of cheating, you know, has got a lot to do with what stories they're making up in their heads, you know, how much they have cheated in the past and whether that comes up as a result.

And is that an excuse for not going ahead and doing the act, whatever the act might be? Is it too hard? I hear a lot of people say to me, like, I met friends that went to school with me, that I met in Canada and other parts of the US who I hadn't seen in years.

And they're like, I can't wrap my head around that you, Ronsley, have not written one, but two books and the patience and like, I don't know how you do it. And I'm like, it wasn't difficult. Maybe it's like childbirth.

I don't know. We forget. I think just get it out there is probably the thing and just ask yourself, what excuses are you making?

Scott:

The only thing that I'll take exception to that you talked about there is I used a mortar and pestle as recently as yesterday, and I'm never going to give that up. I'm not going to automate my spice grinding. So, uh, it does make a difference.

And fortunately, I don't think AI is going to be taking on my spice grinding anytime soon. Ronsley, how can people get in touch with you?

Ronsley:

I mean, I'm lucky I have Ronsley as a name. So just Google me. I suppose you'll be able to find anything and everything about me.

But yeah, lots of podcasts. Check that out. Lots of content.

So see if you resonate with that. I'm putting out a lot of pieces of information that will help you, you know, augment your intelligence, augment human intelligence with artificial intelligence, and hopefully align yourself with divine intelligence to solve meaningful problems that the world needs. Right now, we have hunger and obesity on the same planet.

That's a bit weird, right? So this dichotomy can be solved as a result of some of us founders that have a really impactful idea of what our business is supposed to do. We can actually use that.

We can use AI to keep the promises that we're making on our website.

Scott:

Great. So search Ronsley, but we're going to put some of the key links into the show notes so that it's easy for people to access as well. Ronsley, this has been awesome.

Thank you so much for joining us. I think this is really going to be a very popular and very valuable episode, and I'm really grateful that you've shared your time and expertise with us today.

Ronsley:

Oh, welcome, Scott. Thank you for being part of the process. Grammar Factory has been amazing.

I want to go on record to say this is the second time I'm using Grammar Factory. I mean, I used Grammar Factory in 2016. This is the second time.

I had the same editor, but, you know, different person managing the whole process, and I'm a huge fan. I very, very much appreciate you being part of the process and helping and also listening to some of the things because through the process, you know, as an author, you go through different phases of, is this good enough? Does anyone care?

And all those things. And sometimes you question something you've done and you handle the whole process extremely well. Thank you so much.

I appreciate you very much.

Scott:

Oh, Ronsley, I really appreciate that. Thank you so much. As we wrap up this episode of Entrepreneur to Author, remember this.

Now is the time. Time to write, time to publish, and time to grow. I'm Scott MacMillan.

Until next time.