In this episode of Peer Effect, we explore the intriguing intersection of human interaction and artificial intelligence with Chuck Rinker, co-founder and CEO of PRSONAS.
From his roots as a cattle farmer to his leadership in tech innovation, Chuck's diverse background includes pivotal roles in battle management software, military simulations, and even directing EA Sports franchises like Madden NFL and NCAA.
Today, his mission at PRSONAS is to seamlessly integrate AI into daily human interactions without the eerie edge of human replication or the "uncanny valley."
In this episode, we explore:
• How Personas is shaping the future of AI with avatars that foster empathetic trust
• The influence of visionary leaders like Walt Disney, who pioneered the art of building trust and emotional connections through animated characters
• Redefining the role of AI in the workplace, not as a replacement but as the ultimate productivity tool that can become your hardest-working team member, freeing up human counterparts to engage in more creative and impactful work.
• Chuck’s personal philosophy of how following one’s passion, leads to the most significant innovations and fulfilling successes.
For more insights follow Chuck on LinkedIn!
More from James:
Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com
In this episode of Peer Effect, we explore the intriguing intersection of human interaction and artificial intelligence with Chuck Rinker, co-founder and CEO of PRSONAS.
From his roots as a cattle farmer to his leadership in tech innovation, Chuck's diverse background includes pivotal roles in battle management software, military simulations, and even directing EA Sports franchises like Madden NFL and NCAA.
Today, his mission at PRSONAS is to seamlessly integrate AI into daily human interactions without the eerie edge of human replication or the "uncanny valley."
In this episode, we explore:
• How Personas is shaping the future of AI with avatars that foster empathetic trust
• The influence of visionary leaders like Walt Disney, who pioneered the art of building trust and emotional connections through animated characters
• Redefining the role of AI in the workplace, not as a replacement but as the ultimate productivity tool that can become your hardest-working team member, freeing up human counterparts to engage in more creative and impactful work.
• Chuck’s personal philosophy of how following one’s passion, leads to the most significant innovations and fulfilling successes.
For more insights follow Chuck on LinkedIn!
More from James:
Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com
Over the past decade, AI has undoubtedly improved the way we live and conduct business, but what does it take to seamlessly blend the worlds of tech and human interaction? And is it possible to teach AI to communicate as naturally as we do? Well, if these questions intrigue you, then you're in the right place. Today we're exploring human-AI interaction with a true innovator in the field, Chuck Rinker. From his days as a cattle farmer to becoming a co-founder and CEO of Personas, Chuck has always been at the crossroads of diverse experiences. His journey through battle management software, military simulations and even the gaming industry with EA Sports has culminated in his current mission to make technology unobtrusive yet integral in enhancing human connections. If this is your first time tuning in, I'm James Johnson and I coach Series A plus founders to take back control so they can take their business further and live a great life. You're listening to Peer Effect, the podcast that fuels you with new ideas and inspiration through interviews with founders and experts who have made it happen the journey really boils down to.
Speaker 2:everybody asks me how I've been so diversified in my career. I mean, I've done everything from battle management software to military simulations, to a little bit of part-time music, to director for the EA Sports, sub-madden and NCAA franchises and now running this human AI and, as you alluded to, you know a cattle farmer in my earlier days as well, and what I've learned throughout my life and not throughout every career I've had. There actually is a common thread between everything I do and that's human engagement. You know we all are social creatures. We like to engage with technology and other humans, and the technology tends to create that gap between that human communication.
Speaker 2:So I've really focused on the last since, probably about 2013, on this concept of not changing, not teaching people how to use technology, but make technology disappear in our world, if you can say it that way. And the way we've chosen to do that is to teach technology how to communicate as we do as humans. We're natural at it. We don't have to learn anything, we don't have to do anything. We're raised from birth to communicate, like you and I are now. So let's just teach technology to communicate that way.
Speaker 1:I mean, hopefully you're teaching it to communicate better than humans, given how often we get the communication wrong, no matter how good we are naturally at it.
Speaker 2:That's a good point. That's a good point. How good we are naturally at it, that's a good point, that's a good point. But it does point down to a lot of our I won't call them competitors. Let's call them co-petters. Let's call people that are in the AI or digital human space what, way too often in my mind, have focused on what it means to be the physical human. What do they look like, how do they act? And they really get down to the nitty gritty of the detail and it comes across almost creepy. And you're really not trying to replicate humans, you're trying to do with gamers and you'll learn a lot about me and as we move forward, that probably a good portion of my career, even when I was doing military and I was all centered around gaming and how we engage with gaming characters, how we engage in a virtual gaming world and trying to get people's focus away from human replication and get them really to think about human communication.
Speaker 1:Just dive into that a bit more. What do you think of the core difference between, say, human replication versus human communication?
Speaker 2:Human replication is where a lot of companies focus on exactly what you look like. You're trying to make a character look as natural as possible. So you're going down this path of what we call the uncanny valley and even beyond, as far as the physical and even within the voice synthesis, they're trying to make the voices perfect. They're trying to make the humans perfect. They're trying to make them look exactly like us and a lot of them, quite honestly, are trying to make them indistinguishable. I won't mention the one competitor because we don't share the same philosophy, but he literally stood up in front of his shareholders and his employees at a big conference and said my goal is to make it so within five years. I don't want you to know whether you're talking to a human or not, and I'm going wait. That scares even me. That's not what we're trying to do.
Speaker 2:I'll reference back to one of my idols in life, and that's Walt Disney and Hayao Miyazaki and how they, in their own rights, in their own cultures, have created an entire culture. I mean Disney, as we all know, is probably one of the most beloved brands in the world and has the most loyal fans and all, and they do it by creating brand intimacy. They do it by creating an emotional bond and emotional awareness. I mean they do it with an animated deer, with a bear, with a skunk, with an avatar, and so you've created that ability to communicate, to feel, to emote, to cry over with this concept of a personality that is not rooted in the physical personality. And that's where I think a lot of people miss.
Speaker 2:If you look at the evolution of interfacing and I'm an old fellow, so I'm going to show my age here you know, when I first started engaging with computers, we literally had ticker tapes that were little strips of tape with punch holes in them and you'd run them through, and then you had had punch cards.
Speaker 2:And then we got into these teletype machines that were manual typewriters with paper, then they evolved to crts and then we got to the old mouse that we all know and love, and then voice first, communication, which is where we're at now. But what's missing from all of those pieces is that element you just mentioned, that human connection. You go from looking at this as an inanimate object to creating a loyalty and emotion and what we call an approachable empathy, a trusting relationship, and trust is something big, big, big in our vocabulary and what we strive for, that we want you to feel safe, we want you to feel represented, we want you to feel that you can trust the technology you're working with, and that requires us as humans, just like you, learn and learn my trust. We have to create that within the characters we create, so there's as much on the left side of the brain as there is the right side of the brain and our technology and how those characters really create a personal connection with the users.
Speaker 1:It sounds like this comes a slight blurring, but you're kind of bringing your AI into your culture.
Speaker 2:You're absolutely spot on. Matter of fact, you go to our website and you'll see where they always say key team members and you'll have a picture of me. You'll have my CTO senior director and right along in that top five we actually have Daphne, who is our spokes character, our personality, our brand identity.
Speaker 2:And we basically say Daphne, she's the hardest working person in the company and it's amazing you say that, because every one of our clients always name a character. That personality becomes a member of your staff, becomes a team member. It's not about replacing those staff members. It's about giving you another team member, giving you a digital employee per se that you can train, that can learn what you need to do for your customers or patients or passengers, depending on whether you're an airport hospital or passengers, depending on whether you know your airport hospital or just a general commercial customer. So, yeah, you nailed it with that. It's really a team member. They really are productive members of your team as they advance and they become more integrated into our not only our business, but into our society as a whole.
Speaker 2:I think we really have to not get too caught up in. I call it the Hollywood hype of you know, ai becoming sentient and taking over and finding the human race irrelevant and things like that. It really boils down to nobody has a problem whatsoever implementing a better way of scanning for cancer or a faster laptop, so your programmers get their work faster done faster, or even automated telephone systems right now, which not everybody loves. But the point here is that when you start looking at it as not saying I'm trying to create a hybrid workforce, you're really creating a productivity tool for your staff. If I'm able to work with a founder and the use cases and the markets we're going in healthcare being a good one for us. We have a passion for the healthcare space. And you say, wait, I'm not trying to replace your employees, but if I could take your high value human collateral businesses have a lot of time, money, resource and, quite honestly, emotion bound into their employees and the obligations they have to their employees. And instead of thinking about it as oh, I'm going to replace my employees, you think of it as well. I've just given them the fastest laptop that now has the ability to remove the training requirements to let them converse as humans converse and to use that productivity tool to give them 15 to 20 percent of their work week back to them.
Speaker 2:So then you take employee XYZ and say, okay, well, do you want to give directions to where you can get a cup of coffee or do you want to do what the high value employees do, what no machine can do right now, and that's service our customers directly? So you really look at it as returning a certain amount of work week and a certain amount of productivity back to the staff that you've invested so heavily into. Where do you see your most repetitive, mundane tasks? Where do your employees spend time that is not accomplishing what only humans can do?
Speaker 2:At the end of the day, we're all trying to improve productivity, so to me, I would look at it and go well, where are the human engagements? Where is the point of contact between you and your customer, whether your customer is a retail customer at a shopping mall, whether it's a patient coming into your hospital, where is that time spent that causes them frustration, frustration that causes burden and resource tasking on your staff, on the customer. And then how would you automate that engagement? And and what we find is we're not trying to solve the world's problems, we're not trying to create avatars that can cure cancer, we're not trying to even get down the you know, diagnosis side on the health care. We're really focusing on that, that point of contact where the trust and empathy, where that brand intimacy, if you can call it, is built up.
Speaker 2:So I guess I could sum it up as think of it as a self-service community that the world's moving to. We always move to self-service and we got more kiosk here. Everything's more at. We have atm machines, we have automated banking, we we have automated order taking at the McDonald's. Everything is moving into more of a self-service society. So now, how would you implement a self-service society if you did it with a more empathetical, approachable and culturally represented for the target audience you're getting, so that they have that trust, empathy and approachability with these digital avatars, versus let's bombard them with a you know a terminator six from the, you know from the, from the hollywood genre of scared about the ai and robots type type mentality. So it's really.
Speaker 1:It's really about putting people at ease and giving them a tool to get what they want when they want it it feels like it's an updated version of the question that CEO has been asking themselves for years, Like first, like how do I outsource this? Then it went to how do I offshore this, and now it feels like how do I sort of, how do I AI this?
Speaker 2:You're absolutely correct. I mean, ai, as we know, is something that a lot of people think is new and up and coming and the reality is ai has been around as long as technology has been around. I mean, you know, I'm a gamer from the 1980s and people don't realize. Went back and then I remember getting a one of those little mattel football games for christmas and most people don't remember but look them up on the internet these little white pieces of plastic and on the screen was a little led and you had three red dots and one red dot on the other side and that was AI to you and your brain. And this kind of proves the whole uncanny valley thing and all the goal was one of those little red dots, was a quarterback. Then you had your running back and you had your you know blockers and you had your defender trying to get them. So those four football characters when you got into the game and you were really engaging with the intelligence of how the blockers are going forward and how you're moving, you transformed in your mind those little red dots were football players with some decision-making process, so that AI has just gotten better and better and better over the years.
Speaker 2:So yes, everybody's trying to AI things and I think it's simply because AI has now moved beyond usability by the mass population and our ability to understand speech, to do natural language parsing, to do text-to-speech, to do real-time 3D animation, to put all those pieces of the puzzle together so that it no longer requires the amount of training, support, maintenance, programming to get the productivity out of it is really the breakthrough that we've made. That, I believe anyway, is going to make AI raise that bar. Regardless of how you implement it. You've either got to get on the AI bandwagon and quote unquote, keep up with the Joneses, or, unfortunately, you're going to be at a productivity disadvantage to your competitors from a business base.
Speaker 1:I think they changed my name when you said that the tipping point of going from CDs and DVDs to digital music, where there's this kind of fallacy in our heads, that change is always incremental. But you look at it, it went kind of like 5% up, 7% up, and then suddenly one year it just turned and that basically destroyed a whole chunk of industry because suddenly people didn't want to buy DVDs anymore, they didn't want to go into stores, exactly, and it's kind of like maybe at that point, and that's what's scaring people, that speed of change.
Speaker 2:And it's been building, building, but it's like that sudden impact has just hit. No, you're, you're absolutely right. Now I I can't argue that the the, the level of advancement in technology has really blown up. A lot of that centered around the ability for the algorithms that we put together. People got to remember they're very complex algorithms but at the end of the day, they're still algorithms. Um, even machine learning is an algorithm.
Speaker 2:So to your point, it's just that we've now been able to start tackling the complexities of communication that are making this AI seem so real to people. And back in the day, when it was, you know, text-based role gaming, you know when you were sitting on your computer and you were typing walk north, and then a text description would say you've entered the valley and you can see blah, blah, blah, and it was giving you like a textual description of the world. To those with overblown imaginations like mine, you could see that description. But now it's just become so advanced that we're now spoon feeding those environments to the users. So to your point, that's what's scaring people is it's becoming too human to them, it's becoming too smart, but for those that have been doing it for 30 or 40 years, they're just going.
Speaker 2:Well, you got a better picture and a better description. I no longer have to use. You know, in my days the first color computer had, you know, cyan, magenta, yellow and black, and you had four colors on the screen. You couldn't mix them, you just had those four colors and we're like wow this is amazing.
Speaker 2:You know, we've got four colors, so we, we basically just got better at what we do. And then, you're right, it turns, it gets faster and faster and it is a little bit of snowballing effect, and I think that's what scares people is when's it going to stop and is it really going to stop? And to me I say, I actually honestly say I hope not, but the change in our society and the change in how we conduct business is, quite honestly, already here and it's already knocking down people's doors to your point and and and. So we've got to learn how to control and set realistic expectations on what that can do. Set realistic expectations on what that can do, I tend to. I can point to a man again who's hasn't been with us since 1969 and that's Walt Disney himself. But he, he did something that I think is amazing and that set up the concept of it's fun to do the impossible. So I really think, to this day, those people that kind of adopt that theory that you know what, just because it hasn't been done doesn't mean it shouldn't be done and doesn't mean it can't be done. So I still, to this day, remain influenced by the Walt Disneys and the Hayao Miyazakis of the world.
Speaker 2:Disney was always never content, but not satisfied. Satisfied whenever he did anything, however grandiose it was, he always go I need to be the first one to do it and I need to to do it better than anybody else. And he always put everything he had into making something that people hadn't seen before. Because that's what the impossible? Well, you can't do that, but, yeah, you know he'd make it happen. I, I think. I think mr disney Disney would be right on board with his whole AI digital human avatar built. I mean, let's be honest, he built the first animatronics he was. He's been trying to create digital humans since they had to use mechanical devices to do it.
Speaker 2:See and it's an old phrase that plays directly into that and most people don't think it does and that's don't reinvent the wheel. I mean, we're a tiny company. There's a lot of people out there. Most people out there are smarter than myself and, uh, most of my team's smarter than I am but when you surround yourself with good people that think outside the box, we don't have to create everything from scratch. What we can do is reimagine how that can be utilized in the system. It's not like we created speech-to-text technology. It's not like we created ai. It's not like we created speech-to-text technology. It's not like we created AI. It's not like we even created 3D animation. But to reimagine how you can bring together all these IoT technologies, all these other research projects that have been done like in the deaf community, we've actually taught our avatars to do sign language and have a patent on that. It's not like we invented sign language, it's not like we invented gesture communication, but to pull all these pieces together.
Speaker 2:So when you think outside that box and, as I say, do the impossible. Do the impossible doesn't mean you have to be up here doing something that you can't bridge the gap. It means you know what you might have 40 people, or 40 technologies, or 40 people, other companies that are stepping stones in that ladder that'll get you to that point. So don't try to do everything yourself. Try to try to bring in the powers and try to imagine what you need to get to that end goal. What's the old adage? They say you know, how do you, how do you eat an elephant, one bite at a time. You know, and it's kind of that same kind of thing, and you don't have to be you know, consuming the whole elephant yourself. You get the other technologies out there and almost be a system integrator, not necessarily the innovator. Innovate the outcomes, not the steps to get there.
Speaker 1:That's really nice. Innovate the outcomes, not the steps to get there. I mean, I think we've all been first-time founders. When you feel you need to reinvent everything, I'm just going to. I'm going to reinvent this segment. I'm going to reinvent how you make pizza. I'm going to reinvent how you make cheese. I'm going to reinvent how you do a box. It's just like you waste so much energy. So I really like this concept of do the impossible, but focus on what's the impossible outcome and how you can stand on the shoulders of giants in order to do that.
Speaker 2:It's probably something I'm still struggling with. Quite honestly, I've got a little bit of um, my engineering mind outside of my creative and animation mind still gets the best of me because we, as gamers always love to solve problems. So I do find me and, quite honestly, members of my team sometimes enjoy the problem solving chase so much that we um I, I often might not look and want to go wow, I just want to do it myself, not because I think I'm that much smarter or better than people, but because that's the fun of the problem solving. So there is a propensity, especially for founders and people who are engineer minded or software minded or technology minded that are becoming these tech CEOs which are so predominant in the space these days, and tech CEOs will have a propensity including myself, especially myself to want to do a lot themselves. And that's something I struggle with day-to-day quite honestly, but something that I still advocate for and I try to do better at.
Speaker 1:That feels like quite a hard decision matrix to have. It's kind of like is this something I just want to do or is this something that is genuinely I should do?
Speaker 2:Well, it's funny you say that because another good friend of mine was one of the single digit C-suites of Cisco when they first started up and I was over his house and it was probably a Halloween party, I think and I asked him I was like you've done all this and you've done all this cool stuff and you've been up there, but you're always out doing social stuff too. How do you have time? How do you get all this done? And he said I've lived by one rule.
Speaker 2:He says I don't do what somebody else can do, meaning I don't care if it costs me $10 an hour or $1,000 an hour If I can get that done by somebody else. What I do is I do what nobody else can do, and I kind of wish I could embrace that a little more no-transcript.
Speaker 1:I think that's another really nice phrase to look at. I work with my clients on how you can really simplify things, and I think this idea of moving away from doing it yourself and focusing on getting things done to making it happen and being outcome-focused is one of those hardest mental shifts that founders have to take. Otherwise they end up burning themselves out and working 80 hours a week. But I think what's quite nice about this is this idea of almost classifying the problems that we're trying to solve as well, like it's not just tasks, it's ideas, it's problems. It's where we're spending our energy and going. Could someone else's solution fix this well enough and could someone else do it well enough so I can really focus? I think that's a really hard discipline for founders.
Speaker 2:It really is. It really is and, of course, a lot of founders, especially in the startup. It's easy to say, just have someone else do it. But there's obviously practical implementations about the funding, the costing, the resource allocation you've got and such like that. So I'll temper it with a final statement from a previous co-founder of the concept of trying to take personas to market and I look over there just because he helped on some of these other project guy named Dave Rose, really good guy, and his concept was always well, there are certain things in business that are better done than perfect. You've really got to kind of pick your battles and if this is good enough, don't spin your wheels on resources perfecting this piece here if it's not going to be an underlying contributor to your success and you're moving forward. So sometimes some things are better done than perfect too.
Speaker 1:What is a practical hack or sort of life tip that you would share with other founders to make things happen?
Speaker 2:I'm going to try to take credit for this and I'm going to see if one of your audience members has heard it elsewhere, because I say it all the time and I can't remember where I heard it. So, in my big headed, conceited way, I think I invented this phrase, but we'll see. I call it to do what you love. The money will follow, phrase Meaning when you have a passion for something. I always ask my employees, when people are being interviewed, ask them three, three questions, typically not even related to work, like you know what game, what's your favorite game? Mainly because we need problem solvers in the world. Now I still believe gamers are the best problem solvers. Then I ask them what do you do when you don't have to do anything? You don't have anything in play. I'm going to give you the whole two weeks off. What are you going to do? And if they go well, I'm going to go drink margaritas on the beach. Then you go well, that's cool and everybody needs a break. But when I find people that go well, what are you doing? You know well. You know what I play music, or you know what I I'm working on training for a marathon. Those are people in my mind that have had a goal and would do that goal because they have a passion to prove something to themselves or something to whatever. So it's kind of that concept to do what you love.
Speaker 2:The money will follow is that whatever you pursue, don't make your decision to pursue it just because you think you're going to turn your company into a hundred million dollar company. Yes, that's a hard thing to say to a C-suite and a startup company. Don't do it for the money, but honestly, don't Do something that you really think is going to make a positive impact on the world. Do something that you think somebody needs to do that hasn't been done yet, and then take that passion for doing that and turn it into something that might take like a good example. I'll I'll pat myself on the back here a little bit. We've been trying this since 2013 and still yet to get scalable traction because of a variety of reasons of market covid, this maybe picked the wrong market fit. We've tried chasing a lot of shiny object blah, blah, blah, but at the end of the day we're going. You know what people deserve to be represented. People deserve to be able to communicate, regardless of what language they speak or whether they even speak a language, whether they're they're deaf or not.
Speaker 2:People deserve to feel trusted by the technology they use. People deserve to get the information they want when they want it. Especially and you'll see, we have a passion. We've moved into the healthcare sector to really look at patients because patients are overwhelmed in. Our healthcare systems in the US and UK and across the world are just strapped to the max and we've had some unfortunate trackings through the healthcare system between my family, including my wife and myself. So we go. You know what that's an overwhelming environment and you shouldn't have to go through that. So when you apply the technologies you know so well, like gaming technologies, and then you say, okay, well, how can I use this to help passengers traveling in unfamiliar airports? How can I help this to get patients to a hospital? How can I help this to recruit the right demographic and to keep people engaged in the clinical trial for the next five years so that they can get good outcome data for that.
Speaker 2:That's where we're really kind of going with that. It's really you know what personas with a purpose type thing. You know as we joke and we say this is what happens when gamers get serious type thing, it's a thing that a lot of us do. I us every Wednesday for more inspiring stories.
Speaker 1:You work a lot harder for a lot less money but in the same day, if you're doing what you love, it doesn't really feel like work you're absolutely.
Speaker 2:It's honest to god truth. I know it's a cliche and people can say he's just saying that for the camera or the microphone, whatever the case is, but yeah, that that's absolutely true and I stick to my guns. If I retired if I was already retired what would I be doing? I'd probably be spending a good amount of my time, probably playing more music than I do, but also kind of creating some more of these technology pieces and getting my hands dirty and trying to make this a better product, a better outcome, because it really is kind of, as Walt would say, it's really kind of fun to do the impossible.
Speaker 2:And I really believe that if people really just step back for a second and take this AI phenomenon that's scaring a lot of people, and especially the digital human phenomenon that's creeping people out you're taking my jobs, you're doing this, you're gonna society's gonna take over. These things are gonna rise up and conquer the humans. If you really get past the Hollywood mentality, you'll really go wait a second. This technology has the power to simply break down communication barriers worldwide For all you Trekkies out there.
Speaker 2:You know this is the universal communicator and we have that at our disposal right now, and we started this venture as a company called personas, as you know. But the shift to communication with deaf community, communication with patients, communication with clinical trials and moving into the healthcare sector and doing something that really makes everybody feel represented is really what we use three words for. We call it, you know, personas with purpose.
Speaker 1:Thanks for tuning in to today's episode with Chuck Rinker. Today's conversation not only challenged us to rethink our relationship with technology, but also reminded us of the importance of making technology accessible and intuitive for all. Chuck's vision for a world where AI enhances human interaction without trying to replace it offers a refreshing perspective on the future of tech. Join us every Wednesday for more inspiring stories from leaders who are reshaping our technological landscape. Until next time, cheers.