AI for Boomers with Joshua Mesnik

In this episode, Michelle Passoff sits down with Joshua Mesnik, a filmmaker, educator, and owner of WiseOn Tech, about how AI and everyday technology can make life easier and more creative for older adults. Josh explains what AI really is, how long we’ve been using it without realizing it, and simple ways baby boomers can start benefiting from tools like Google Gemini and ChatGPT. Together, they discuss staying curious, learning at your own pace, and using technology to reduce digital clutter and support a more organized, empowered life as we age.

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Transcript

Michelle 0:34

Welcome, viewers and listeners, to another episode of Decluttering Fifty Five Plus with Michelle Passoff. Each week we talk about another topic that can help straighten out areas of life that can be confounding and confronting when it comes to aging. Sometimes we talk about how we're doing with our health, fitness, and eating regimens. Other times we barrow through what is baffling us about where to live and what to do next in retirement. Social relationships are always fodder for entanglements. Telling your life story, financial and legal matters, and even addressing final arrangements can bring up unanswered questions you may have. That's okay. That's why we're here to demystify the mysterious. Let's face it, unless you were born with a smartphone in your crib, chances are you want to throw it against the wall from time to time in frustration. That all goes for what life is like in the electronic devices age. Well, there is some comfort in knowing you're not alone, but technology is here to stay, and anything we can do to have it work for you instead of against you is a good thing. We've invited Joshua Mesnick here today to help us use technology to our advantage instead of having it drive up our blood pressure. AI is a topic of conversation that is getting louder and louder these days. Let's embrace the if you can't look them join them theory of life and learn a little bit about AI today. It's not going away, so let's learn and live with it, but benefit by it mostly. Josh and I came to know each other because he collaborated with another techie of mine, friend, and I on digital decluttering, chapter of my upcoming self-help book called Decluttering 55 Plus, make room for what matters. We talk about next level clutter, all the areas that I was talking about, areas that we'd rather sweep under the carpet and put off another day, and we don't get things done, and then it becomes clutter. So we're going to try to combat that a little. Josh is a filmmaker, an actor, an educator, and an entrepreneur. As the owner of Wise On Tech, he coaches older adults and entrepreneurs on using technology, especially AI, for growth, health, connection, and creativity. As the co-founder of Waffle Video AI, Josh connects filmmakers and content creators with AI companies for the training of AI models. Josh is from Florida, but he lives in Los Angeles. So welcome, Josh. Before we dive into headfirst into the topic of AI, can you define what AI is in simple terms?

Joshua 3:10

AI is artificial intelligence. Okay. I'll go deeper than that. We've interacted with AI for a long time. We just might not have considered it to be the futuristic version of AI that exists now. But AI is, in one definition, could be a machine's ability to recognize patterns and make choices based on predictions that it infers from those patterns. And this is intelligent in the same way that a microorganism, when it is starting to multiply, starts to interact with its environment in what would be seen as almost a strategic way. It'll avoid things that are bad for it. It'll be attracted to good things, resources, positive temperatures that are good for the organism's evolution. So in the same way, an intelligence is something that's behaving with some sort of what seems to be an intelligent will, as though it can make decisions based on an intention. That might not be the most technical term for AI, but that's kind of how I relate to it now. That's how I see AI.

Michelle 4:14

Can you go back and talk, like how long has AI been around? And what were the first times that started kind of creeping into our lives?

Joshua 4:23

A big AI moment would be when IBM's, they created an AI system called Deep Blue that was a chess game, like a chess playing AI. It was made specifically to play chess, and it beat the world champion at that time, Gary Kasparov, and that was in 1997. And at that time, people said, Oh my God, no one's ever going to want to play chess anymore. Now, keep in mind I was six years old at that time. I wasn't saying those kind of things. But from what I've read, there was an awareness that, wow, this machine was able to play a game which has hundreds of billions of possible outcomes within the game. It's a very complex thing for an AI to do. So that was in 1997. But we interact with AI in our daily life before we had the ChatGPT moment. AI has been a part of our life. You know, it's what filters spam emails for you. That's an AI system that filters in this. Yeah. A search engine aggregating results based on your search. That's a form of AI in a way. The feeds, you know, your social media feeds, the algorithms behind those feeds that pull up certain videos and certain posts based on your behavior. That's an AI, that's an artificial intelligence system. We've been interacting with AI for a while, but we just had that Chat GPT moment a few years ago where all of a sudden it seems like you're talking to somebody instead of just a machine. That's really where we are now.

Michelle 5:44

So is Siri or Alexa, are those AI?

Joshua 5:49

Yes.

Michelle 5:50

It's just beyond my ability to be able to wrap my head around it. But I think that it comes time where you can't avoid it because you could do more than just say Siri is GPS AI?

Joshua 6:04

So I guess if you are using a Google map, for example, and you are trying to gauge a route to take, and it will help you select a route based on that one route is taking shorter. That's an AI function to help you choose between two paths, choose the best path based on the data that's provided by Google Maps for that to see that there's less traffic, let's say, on path B instead of path A. So that's another form of AI.

Michelle 6:29

I can remember when I used to travel around the country doing media interviews from city to city, and I would be at the driver's seat with a piece of white paper telling me turn left, turn right, turn left. I would call for the appointment beforehand, and boom, now you can just talk to your phone and it tells you exactly where to go. Where is it headed? Where are we going with it? And how important is it for people to learn and how do you learn? I'm asking you a million questions all in one. Let's try to break it down. Where is it going from here? And how do we learn about it?

Joshua 7:02

So just to sort of continue that, the Siri, the Google moment, the Google Assistant, you know, that's when you have an AI that can provide you information, but it's sort of an extension of a Google search. We had that AI in our life for like a decade. But we have now entered into a couple phases of AI that are novel, that are much different from just having a Google search uh find you answers that are relevant for you. We are now entering generative AI and agentic AI. The difference is if 10 years ago, if you were to ask Google, like, okay, hey, Google, by the way, I think Google's gonna be listening to me now. So never mind, create an image for me of a man with a tall uh cap standing in a field with a bunch of flamingos flapping around him. Google would have no way of creating that for you. It might be able to search on Google for that image, but it would never be able to create that for you. Now I can have the same request to Google and it will generate an image that's never existed before, specifically what I just prompted, a man with a tall cap in a field with flamingos, it will create that image for me. That image is now something that's never existed before, and now it's it's something that I've just created. So that's generative AI. There are many different chatbot assistants, or you could call them general purpose models, foundation models. You have the big players are Google, and that's Google Gemini. That's something you can access online or on your cell phone as an app. Then you have ChatGPT, again, which is available on your phone and online. They both are able to do what I'm describing, create an image, even create videos for you, and search the web and be your chatbot assistant. And then you have Claude, which is uh similar to large language foundation model. You have Grok, and that is by XAI. Again, these are all available on the web or on your cell phone. I'd say those are the major players to have in your back pocket in terms of AI chatbots or assistance.

Michelle 9:02

So you just download the app and you start asking it questions. What are its capacities to write documents, to create images? What other capacities does an AI have?

Joshua 9:14

I'll start with Google Gemini because it has, first of all, it's free. A lot of its features that are free through Google Gemini are paid features on other apps. For example, the ability to generate videos. With Google Gemini, you could search the web like you would search on Google. You could conduct what's called deep research, which is essentially like having a PhD level researcher for free at your call, and we give it any subject that you'd like to conduct deep research on, and it will search hundreds of web pages. It'll conduct a thorough analysis of that topic and provide to you a report based on your request. So that's called deep research. They're also able to code. So you can go right now to Gemini and say, I'd like a landing page for a website where I'm going to be selling handmade socks. I want it to have a main photo in the center. I want it to have these menu items. I'd like it to have a drop-down uh menu below with my credentials and my bio. Gemini will go and it'll create the front-end code to that website. So you could take that code of that landing page and put it directly into a web hosting service, or you could basically use that code to create a website. And that's what's called vibe coding right now, where basically with natural language, you can create code. So that's another thing that these chatbots can do.

Michelle 10:37

They can't say that could save you thousands of dollars.

Joshua 10:40

Yes.

Michelle 10:41

And then on the other hand, somebody is losing thousands of dollars because you're not going to them to create that website.

Joshua 10:48

Right. And that's a whole other discussion where we think about what does increased efficiency do to the job market and the economy. A lot of conversations happening around that topic.

Michelle 10:57

Well, for this conversation, I want to focus on how we can harness it to make a difference in our lives as we age. So what would you say are some of the top ways in which baby boomers can use the technology to make a difference in their lives and improve it?

Joshua 11:14

All right. So I'll start with saying that right now is the best time to be a creator. Now, unfortunately, many of us have over our lives lost the self-concept that I am a creator. I am a creative person. Some people might not have made a lot of art or been in a musical, but you might have an idea for a business, or you might have an idea for a letter that you want to write somebody, or you might have an idea for a system that you want to create around new ways to order philosophy. Your way of being creative is going to look unique to you. And AI is a tool that will help you take an idea and bring it into form, just like any other tool. But what AI can do is help to augment your inherent capabilities and make it so that you could instead of have an idea for a website and now you're gonna have to hire somebody to make that website, you could make a mock-up of your website with an AI system, which would save your web guy a lot of time and energy and help you make that website into a reality. That's one example.

Michelle 12:25

So you still might need the website guy to help you, but you will need him for less than in the short term, yes.

Joshua 12:33

In the long term, where this is going is that if you have an idea, I'll speak to you as a filmmaker. So if I had an idea for a film ten years ago, the time that it would take for me to have that idea to turn it into a feature-length film, which looks good, sounds good, is well composed, is edited well, that would take many, many months, if not years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars.

Michelle 13:01

Right.

Joshua 13:01

So where this is going for film is that I can have an idea, I can with natural language speak that idea and type it out, and an AI system will create a piece of media, a generated piece of film for me with all that natural language as its prompt, and it'll create that feature-length film for me. Now, that feature-length film may not be great because first of all, it's lacking that human touch that most great art has. But nonetheless, I just took an idea and I made it into a reality for hundreds of dollars, maybe a hundred dollars and five hours instead of millions of dollars and multiple months or years.

Michelle 13:42

Maybe with certain talents you didn't have, but the AI brought those talents to you.

Joshua 13:47

And this is where, again, it's a mindset shift.

Michelle 13:51

Yeah.

Joshua 13:51

Where you look at your life and you look at yourself, you say, What do I want to create? What do I want to do? And you ask yourself that question, you write it out, and then you can write out all the things that frustrate you about that thing that you want to do. All the things you don't know, the blocks to that. Well, I don't know how to code, or I don't know how to build a website, or I don't know, you know, how to put that out. I'm not a good drawing, I'm not good at um filming, whatever it is. And then you start to reflect on those bottlenecks. The mindset shift is, well, what if there is a way for me to actually do that with the tools that are available? And that's where you take a second, you take a pause, you go to a search system like Perplexity, and you look for tools that are available to help you with each of those different items.

Michelle 14:40

You just have to learn to ask, where do you think the best place to learn AI is? Are there classes online or websites, or where do you begin with your AI journey? First of all, I hear you say think of yourself differently. Think of yourself as a creative person. And I think that's good for everybody to say you can create your life however you want it to be. And if you don't think that, change your minds and that dump it. That would be the clutter. The first thing is get your attitude on and start creating. So think of yourself as a creator. But then you also have to be a learner. So where should you go to start learning even what AI gives you the levers and dials? Where do you get your hands on it?

Joshua 15:25

So, what I would say, and also this is with my work with a lot of older adults that have wanted to learn this technology, I would say go into your child self and get a little curious and playful. Instead of treating this like some big technology that you're gonna have to master and all the different details of that technology, I would say download or go to the website of one of these big three chatbots, Gemini, ChatGPT, or Claude. Um, I would recommend going to Gemini just because, again, it's free and there's a lot it can do for you. And you ask it. Whatever you were gonna ask me or whatever you were going to journal about, and you know, how can I, what can I, what should I, you know, that's when you start your journey of just saying, here's an idea I had. What I'll give you is a prompt, which I use and which I support my clients in using, which is very simple. I call the prompt to rule them all. It's called a meta prompt. And basically what you type into your chat is you give it the context for what you want to do. Let's say, I want to create a cookbook for my favorite vegetarian dishes. And then you say, now create a prompt, which I will copy and paste back into the chat that will show off your power to help me. And then you put in that task, create the cookbook. What it'll do is it'll create a prompt. And this goes into a whole other conversation, but prompting is the way that you get the most specific and helpful results from AI.

Michelle 16:49

Learn to ask questions.

Joshua 16:51

Learn to ask specific questions and learn to instead of get stuck and then give up, I would say get stuck and lean in and see how you might be able to solve the problem with all the tools that you have at your disposal.

Michelle 17:06

You can even ask the chat on your favorite AI app to tell you where to go to a class or where to read a book or where to make a YouTube video. There's no way we can cover everything there is to know about AI today. So we're gonna have to wrap it up and just uh wait until the next time we can get Josh to come back on and tell us more about AI.

Joshua 17:28

One thing very quick. Yes, sure. Go ahead. Go to Perplexity, which is an alternative to Google, and that's where it can send you links to YouTube videos or blogs. It'll send you specific links with specific people that can provide you more human-centered resources around the thing that you want to learn. So perplexity is a great tool for that.

Michelle 17:47

Okay, so get curious and get going. So we're gonna be moving on now and keep learning and using AI to help us in our lives. Let's take a moment to remind you guys and gals that if you want to give a gift to yourself or your friends or your family, pick up a copy of the Decluttering 55 Plus Wisdoms to Create a Legacy, not a mess book. And it's a spiral-bound book of illustrations that will prompt you to get things done. It's not done by AI. We had an illustrator actually do it, but it's a good idea for the next book. Turn it to any page and there will be a prompt to address your next level clutter. If you need some information to get going with your health and fitness routine or your finances or rest and relaxation, let's not forget that. You can buy the book at Amazon.com or filetflat.com and turn to any page and it will prompt you to get going. And don't forget to visit our website at www.decluttering55plus.com and sign up on the Let's Connect page so we can send you news you can use from time to time. Of course, we're not going to send you too often because that would be cluttered, but from time to time when we have something to share, we want to be able to do that. And we want to invite you to share with us. Subscribe and follow us on Facebook and Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, because we want to stay in touch and learn from each other. Okay, folks, that's all we have time for today. So I want to sign off for now. Be sure that you come next week for another exciting episode. Between now and then, please have a clutter free day. Thank you.