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Fascinating conversations with founders, leaders, and experts about product management, artificial intelligence (AI), user experience design, technology, and how we can create the best product experiences for users and our businesses.
Kyle (00:03.624)
All right, welcome back to another episode of Product by Design. I am Kyle and this week we've got another awesome guest with us, Chuck Rinker. Chuck, welcome to the show.
Chuck Rinker (00:13.902)
Thanks, Kyle. I appreciate you having me.
Kyle (00:16.2)
Well, we're excited to have you. Let me introduce you briefly, and then you can tell us a little bit more about yourself. But Chuck is the founder of Personas, one of the earliest digital human and AI avatar companies, where he currently serves as its chief executive officer. As an innovative tech leader, Chuck is also deeply committed to transforming businesses through cutting edge technology, which we're going to talk a lot more about, and I'm excited to.
But before we do that, Chuck, why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself?
Chuck Rinker (00:49.126)
Yeah, I'm an ex cattle farmer of all things, turned human AI expert, grew up in a small farm, got into technology at an early age, which we'll dive into later if there's some interest there. And kind of got into the entertainment aspects of technology software, did a lot in aerospace, kind of spent my whole career in training and simulation work and things like that, including moving into the entertainment space with the
engagements I did with the gaming industry, the EA sports, and took all that and kind of rolled it into a commercial venture which ultimately focuses on what does it really mean to be human and how do we engage, how did humans engage with technology.
Kyle (01:36.352)
Well, there's a lot to unpack there and I'm excited to talk more about it. Yeah, definitely. But before we do, maybe you can tell us a little bit more about what you like to do outside of the office and outside of work.
Chuck Rinker (01:41.348)
I kinda set myself up for that one didn't I?
Chuck Rinker (01:52.898)
Ah, you're one of the first people to ask me that I'm a jack of all trades, lover of learning, that kind of thing. Play tons of music instruments. Probably not good at any of them, but my head I am, um, fly airplanes. I'm a pilot, um, uh, non-commercial pilot just for fun. Um, started as a cattle farmer and did it by another cattle farm. So I got cows and tractors, um, spent a lot of time in the mountains. So pretty much anything I haven't done before is what I want to do.
Kyle (02:23.588)
Um, that sounds so familiar and I, I can relate very, very much to that. Anybody who's seeing the video of this can see multiple musical instruments, not only behind me, but I also have several in front of me, which you cannot see, which I, I do something very similar. I have an interest in learning lots of different musical instruments. And then like you said, mastering none of them, but it
Chuck Rinker (02:26.463)
I'm sorry.
Chuck Rinker (02:46.446)
Well, I'm going to point out for your audience that you have got something I have never seen and it actually ties into some backstory. You've got a couple of manual typewriters back there. You a writer?
Kyle (02:56.304)
I do, yeah. So I do a fair amount of writing. And then one, so one is a Lego typewriter that we built. And then this one is an old, it's actually a real manual typewriter. It used to belong to my great grandma and then got passed down to my grandma. And yeah, I got it here and started to restore it and put some new ink in there and it's now functioning again. And...
Chuck Rinker (03:15.342)
Amazing
Kyle (03:25.)
has some paper in there that we've been writing on it. So yeah, it's been passed down through the family. So very, very cool piece. I love, yeah, I love that one. So yeah, we could probably go into a number of different things and maybe we'll touch on a couple of those things that you mentioned briefly as well. But I do want to dive into, one thing you mentioned about starting out as a cattle farmer and then getting into technology.
Chuck Rinker (03:25.999)
Very cool.
Chuck Rinker (03:32.571)
Very nice.
Kyle (03:53.404)
Maybe walk us through a little bit about that. You know, where did you start? And you mentioned, you know, still having cattle farms potentially. You know, where were some of your beginnings with that? You know, what were you doing? And then what ultimately kind of drew you into technology and AI?
Chuck Rinker (04:02.573)
Mm-hmm.
Chuck Rinker (04:14.042)
Yeah, I'm going to probably get a little, little teary-eyed there. Cause a lot of it was an influence by my parents, very supportive parents. Um, mother passed last year, but my dad and I talk about this a lot when I was young cattle farmer, he kind of jokingly used to say I was too smart to grow up to be a cattle farmer, cause I used to take everything apart, the little toys I would get, and I had one of the original Mattel football games that people, people see in the, you know, museums nowadays, but I used to play on those as our first digital games and such.
And so he took me down to, we lived outside of DC. So he took me to DC and introduced me to a couple of people he knew in the technology space and got me some early programming going on. You know, a lot of people say they flipped McDonald's hamburgers for their first job. I started programming at the age of 15. And if you know anything about how old I am, you know, TRS 80s weren't even out on the market hardly at that point. So the computers were brand new and the computers were as foreign as spaceships.
Um, so the point of the story is that I've always, as mentioned, been on that front of what is new, what is different. And that got me into the technology space and how humans really use technology. And we'll unwrap a lot of this lately, but the whole career, my entire career has been trying to make it more effective and more efficient and quite honestly, to make technology invisible as much as I love it and I'm a tech head. The ideal here is to stop.
teaching people how to use technology and start teaching technology how to communicate as humans. And that's pretty much been the whole career.
Kyle (05:48.14)
That's really, really interesting. And I love that idea of really making technology much more about how can it be effective for people as opposed to making people more effective for actual technology. So bridging that gap more towards the human side. Now I'm interested too, because you mentioned you spent part of your time in gaming, building games.
What was that like? What were some of the things that you worked on? And what was that experience? And how did that play into some of your career as well?
Chuck Rinker (06:26.846)
Well, it's very much more relatable than people think. Everybody hears chat, GPT, generative AI and all, and you know, AI is nothing new, quite honestly, it's a, it's gotten better. It's a more powerful tool, but it's still a tool at the end of the day. So how did that stuff all influence in the gaming space? Before the gaming, I did a lot outside of what we call the beltway bandit out, out in DC, all the government contractors and all. So we were building military simulations and military training tools.
So even way back then, we were trying to predict how humans would, you know, move our machinery around and our battle movements and such. So it was kind of the old classic war gaming from the eighties and nineties. And then that led me into the entertainment space. And then I learned that, you know, it's really, really hard back in the late nineties when I was doing the NCAA franchise and ultimately the Madden franchise for a short stint, um, how do you coordinate?
a team of 22 players on the field at once. And some are passing, some are blocking. Some are passing off football. Some are trying to catch footballs. They're running routes. They're gang tackling. One's hitting high, one's hitting low. That was a lot to think about. And naturally as football players and humans, we just do it. It's just natural. You're training, it's little muscle memory. But think about what you have to do to train, to teach with little if-then statements and conditional statements. How do you make a digital character do that?
And we were doing that in the 90s. I mean, Pac-Man in some sense was an early AI engine. Um, um, the little purple men running around and chasing another ghost. And those little ghosts were getting chased by you, the Pac-Man. So that's all AI. Where we're at now though, and how that got gaming, um, in my head as, um, kind of that automated human engagement, we ultimately started applying that towards marketing and retail. And then we go, you know what? I've spent.
30 years for almost 40, just teaching technology how to be more human. And, um, after my wife had two bouts of breast cancer and I had late stage colon cancer all within a five year period, we're going, you know what? There's kind of gotta be a better purpose for this digital human platform we've done. So we started this brand we call eye health assist and we really started going on.
Chuck Rinker (08:45.298)
lessons that I learned as a patient in the healthcare and what I had to do as a caregiver with my wife and vice versa. She cared for me and aging parents and all that good stuff. And you know what? The patient journey is overwhelming for humans and an incredible burden on our healthcare professionals. I have many family members, a couple of sisters who are in the healthcare space as well. And the system is so stressed and burdened, we kind of jokingly, I wouldn't say jokingly, it's not a joke, but
Ironically, we call it person personas with a person, a purpose. I'm sorry, I kind of messed up on a person is with a purpose. What can we do with all this wonderful AI and technology that will make our healthcare system better, relieve some of the burden and stresses, make the healthcare professionals more effective, more efficient, and mostly, how do we create a patient experience and a patient journey that is less stressful and mentally taxing on the patients and how can we enable
these patients to use all this wonderful technology without it becoming overwhelming.
Kyle (09:50.26)
So I'm really interested in that because I think you've touched on something that is such... Until you've been there, I don't think you can really understand the complexities and difficulties of navigating the healthcare system. And especially as a patient and somebody who may be sick or caring for somebody who's sick, like this starts to get incredibly overwhelming, both like the...
the mental part of it, but also the emotional and physical parts of it, as I'm sure that you and your wife were experiencing as you're going through this. So what were some of the things and lessons that you were taking from this that you were seeing as a patient, as a caregiver, that these are things that we need to be addressing or that we can address that maybe could be better or that technology could help with, that we want to be...
making better for patients and for health caregivers and for caregivers in general.
Chuck Rinker (10:55.114)
Yeah, there's a huge long list of the possible there. And then there's the practical. As advanced as we are, there's still obviously a lot of limitations, not only in the technology side, but also on the ethical use, privacy concerns, security concerns. So there's a lot that's outside of my wheelhouse. I'm an expert on the engagement side, so that's what I focus on. So if you think about spending a career with customer experience and now shifting that to a patient experience focus,
Those things you're thinking about, they don't have to be, you know, as, you know, ooh, blew my mind. This is awesome. They can be simple things like when my wife and I were going through our struggles, there was information overload on the internet. There's trying to get enough time from your healthcare providers when we're sitting around trying to figure out what are our cancer treatments? What do we expect? What's going to happen? What am I supposed to do? Who do I talk to? When do I need to be aware? There's just informational overload and it becomes a big burden on the healthcare.
professionals themselves. They can't just be that one-to-one patient advocate. And then on the patient side, not only are we getting that and trying to get more and more time from the professionals, but we're also trying to remember all this in our head. What medications we're doing, where do I get my scans, to be kind of a little overly dramatic, but not put yourself in that situation. Am I even going to be here in three years? Those kind of questions are running through your head. So I'm spending...
I'm up at nights at four or five o'clock in the morning trying to find clinical trials, researching the SEER database online, why is the ADA information seven years outdated, things like that, and just trying to figure out what's going on. So when we started going to some of these facilities, like I still go, matter of fact, I'm going to MD Anderson tomorrow for hopefully another knock on wood clean bill of health for a cancer follow-up there. That's a tremendously large facility. Where do I go? How do I get there?
You know, there's eight stories tall and I got to be there at two 15 and I got preforms to find out. So simple things like way finding a hospital, how to get where you want to go. And that's one of the early products we're pushing right now and making available to healthcare facilities and hospitals, which says, okay, now I know where I go. I get there quicker. I can speak in English. I don't have to sit there and pull technology and download apps. I walk into the hospital and go, Hey, I got a two o'clock appointment with a doctor interline.
Chuck Rinker (13:17.57)
Where's that at? Oh, okay, you're supposed to be in room 305. Or, hey, I'm here, I need to fill my prescription. Well, you need the pharmacy, go here. So simple questions like that, how much is parking? And we were lucky enough as we started this healthcare push, even way back before I had cancer, we were even working with like Disney and stuff because Disney's obviously the world leader in customer experience. And their hospital had already forethought about how to make their customer experience better. So we did some early work with
the Disney hospitals as well and then started applying this now directly. Um, we're doing some work with the UK right now with one of the, um, trusts outside of London, uh, because they have a bigger language barrier than we have here in the U S. Um, we've, how do you, how do you make patients feel welcomed? How do you make them feel empathetic? How do you make them feel, um, represented? So our characters, as we take this wonderful technology, that's now inundating us, you know, our characters can speak and understand.
over 140 languages. We have two members of the deaf community that help us out. We sign language. So if you have a deaf patient and people don't realize we have 30 million people in the US alone that use sign language as a primary form of communication. That's 30 million patients that get put into a healthcare system that's primarily hearing and English speaking. How do they get support and advocacy? So the sky's the limit.
But what I encourage everybody to do is do what we're trying to do, which is let's not try to eat the whole elephant. What's that old saying, how to eat an elephant, you know, one bite at a time. Let's find those bites that are going to make a difference in impact. And let's just move that needle just a little bit at a time. And I think people will get more adopted to it. And overall, our goal is really just to kind of redefine what that patient experience is and do it while we're removing.
Kyle (14:52.256)
Thank you.
Chuck Rinker (15:10.418)
a lot of the burden and overload that we're putting on our healthcare system right now.
Kyle (15:16.2)
I think that that's really great. And you touched on one of the first parts of that experience, or at least one of the initial ones, when you arrive somewhere, and need to find where you're going. And I know I've had that experience at some of these large hospitals. I can remember very distinctly, we have one located here that's split across multiple buildings because it's up.
Chuck Rinker (15:28.973)
No.
Thanks for watching!
Kyle (15:45.588)
on a mountain. And so it's across multiple buildings, multiple different places, and then it's all like interlinked with bridges and stuff like this. It's a maze and it's so difficult to find your way through. So talk us through like the practical application of this. So, you know, what is the, you know, the technology or, I guess, the experience, you know, when you arrive in a hospital or in any place, you know, what is it that you're doing to kind of make
Chuck Rinker (16:01.794)
Mm-hmm.
Kyle (16:14.932)
this experience better? Like what is personas and how does it function in order to facilitate in this case, the need to get somewhere and to do it in a way that is more of a human experience as opposed to a technology experience.
Chuck Rinker (16:31.136)
Mm-hmm.
Sure, and that sounds like a gorgeous facility, by the way. If it's that big, and of course, I love the mountains and whenever you can go across sky bridges and stuff. But in any sense, down to the experience question, it's another thing that we really bring together, not only our proprietary technology, but big, big partners like Microsoft and Mapped In does a lot of the mapping piece and Meridian does a lot of our hardware. So there's a lot of piece puzzles here. So I don't want you to think I'm taking credit for everybody in this ecosystem. However,
Kyle (16:37.775)
Yeah
Chuck Rinker (17:03.658)
What we've done is put together that user experience layer. What is that experience for the patient? So the patient would come into whatever of those buildings that there's a kiosk or a piece of hardware there. You don't have to download apps. You don't have to go preview stuff. And you walk in and it will ask you to, you know, greet the character and you can pick, depending on what languages we choose, like, you know, I think right at PAH, we have five right now, cause not everybody needs 150 languages. So you pick your languages.
And you'll go there and they'll say, you know, welcome to community hospital. I'll just pick a random name. So I'm not calling anybody out. I'm not supposed to welcome to the hospital. What can I help you with? Hey, I'm just looking for a cup of coffee. And that's exactly how you correspond the same way you would do it. If a person was greeting you, if you, if we had the ability to staff a hospital with the one-to-one, Hey Kyle, what can I get a cup of coffee? Oh, you know what? The cafe is down the left. Here, go here.
So they would see that they would ask verbally, they can use a standard touchscreen as well. We're not voice only, we're not AI avatar only, but that character will greet you, will look at you in a very culturally sympathetic way or I'll call it represented way based on the demographic of your patient demographic. And then she would deliver that information. She would show you the map.
She'd even say, here's a QR code. Go ahead and scan it on your phone. So in your instance, if there were five, five buildings across the campus, not only would she be able to greet you, ask you what you wanted to say, Hey, you can get a cup of coffee, but it's in building 14 and here's how you get there. Then you would take those directions and it would automatically be pulled down on your phone and then it would, we call it blue, blue dot. It would follow you along. And then when you walk into the other building, if there was another kiosk there,
You could even speak again to that kiosk or just follow your place to the coffee. Um, you can do things like, um, not just wayfinding from a traditional, Hey, I'm here and I need to get there. But things like, well, wait, how much is parking or wait a second. Um, um, the patient could go up and say things like, um, my son was just checked into a hospital, the hospital and he's got an overnight state. I need to find a local hotel. Where are the local hotels?
Chuck Rinker (19:26.922)
and she would be able to give you that information. So it's really more like an AI concierge service, not just a wayfinder, but the fact that it's all conversational. And I'm gonna steal a little bit more time because there's a real important thing that this does that no other technology out there, I'm sorry, it looks like someone's texting me. Let me turn that phone off for a second. The insights, the patient insights you get, when you ask a poster on a wall and you see a map,
Kyle (19:46.879)
Yes.
Chuck Rinker (19:57.706)
Yeah, I'll admit that's probably a less expensive option than putting one of our units in. But it's not gonna tell you anything except for make someone sit there and figure out a map and go, okay, where am I, where I'm gonna go. Even those mobile apps, you have to download the app, you have to make them available. You have to learn how to use it. Where do I put the text in? What's the name of that word? I gotta type here, I gotta type here. And it doesn't have that ability to know if you walk in and say, hey, I need to fill a prescription. I'm here to get my blood done, my blood work done. That...
App doesn't know that you need to find the phlebotomy lab that's in building 14. You're just saying, Hey, I need blood work done. I'm here for blood work. This system has that AI, that artificial intelligence that can do that. However, if you up to it, and this is where I'm stealing a little bit more time and you say something like, um, Hey, um, how long has the hospital been opened? Or is there a local steakhouse around? I'm looking for a state good steak. That's information.
that even if the patient experience or the hospital didn't know about, if you, when you and I are having a conversation, you can ask me whatever you want. If I don't know the answer, I'm going to say, I don't know the answer, but I'll find out. That type of correspondence can happen with this conversational AI. So then we can go back to the patient experience team or the facilities management team or the C-suite and say, you know what, you've got a lot of patients that are asking for a good place to get dinner.
and you're not providing that service to your patients. So based on us listening to what your patients want, we're able to provide that insight, those data analytics and that insight into what are you not servicing your patients with? What are you not providing them that they want? And I think that's key to creating a system that's gonna be in a constant improvement mode and start really learning what patients are needing and to be able to service those individuals.
patience.
Kyle (21:56.216)
Right. Yeah. And that's, I think we've touched on like one of the key benefits of being able to garner many more insights than simply putting information out there and having people kind of use that however they might need to or might see fit. But being able to take feedback much more
not only better information, but continually improve as you understand what people really need and are able to facilitate that much more easily and much better over time. I'm interested, we've talked a lot about the healthcare space, which to me makes a lot of sense because you have a lot of people who are not necessarily employees or tied to that.
specific place who need to be having lots of interactions all throughout the day and as they come and go. What other industries are you seeing this type of technology have significant benefit in? Obviously, there are lots of places that we need to do both wayfinding and visitor management and this type of greeting and helping.
where are some other areas that you're working in or you've seen some adoption or other usage?
Chuck Rinker (23:25.742)
Mm-mm.
Chuck Rinker (23:29.354)
Yeah, that's a great question. And we've actually shipped several hundred of these. And what we're finding is that when it was, since it's so new and innovative, people make up their own reasons to use it. But the pieces that have been repeatable, and I'll say come to the top as far as frequent use, is just because it is so unique and novel. It gets attention as well. You know, there is a wow factor to it. It's kind of cool to talk to a...
an avatar, especially when there's a huge, huge difference. And we use conversational AI. I don't want to diss on Siri or Cortana or, you know, Alexa, but, um, there's a big difference and there's even some interesting clinical trials that talk about trust, empathy, and relatability when your, um, conversation is not verbal only. There's a believability factor and a trust factor to having a face behind it. But we're going to get into a.
little bit of philosophy here. There's this term to call uncanny valley. If it's too human, if I'm trying to recreate a human, it becomes creepy. So if you look at our characters, we're one of the few companies, we honestly don't even call ourselves digital humans. We call ourselves AI avatars because digital humans have this connotation of, oh, you know, too many people have been watching, you know, iRobot and AI is going to take over the world and all the fear mongering around that and the creepiness of trying to recreate humans. We're not trying to do that. We're not trying to replicate humans.
We're trying to communicate with humans. So we take the, you know, the Nintendo, my gaming background, and we use more like gaming characters that are a little more professional than gaming characters, but they're not digital human. So some of those use cases that you're talking about is as we create this now approachable entity, the sky becomes a limit. People have used these for like trade shows. We've done dozens and dozens of trade shows, um, retail marketing. We actually recreated an eight foot tall.
projected hologram of the Mariner Moose and had them in Seattle Stadium for the Pepsi brand and you know Almost 50,000 people engaged with it in one season. It was a pretty amazing Idea now those things are like these big one-off custom pieces We're really trying to scale this and industries where it has an impact So the focus on the health care not only outside the wayfinding solution. We've done probably seven or eight clinical trials So you say okay, where can that same appeal where can that trust?
Chuck Rinker (25:52.93)
be applied? Where can that cultural diversity be applied? We have female characters, male characters, non-binary, black characters, Hispanic characters, whatever character you want, we can create that demographic. So when you go out in the clinical trial world, we've used them for recruitment. How do you target a demographic and get them signed up? People don't realize that the majority of clinical trials are middle-aged white guys.
Hell, matter of fact, until 1972, women weren't allowed to be in clinical trials, which is really shocking. So how do you reach those audiences? And underserved communities and minority communities are grossly underrepresented. Deaf members, members of the deaf community, and this is Deaf Awareness Month, by the way, members of the deaf community almost don't even exist in clinical trials. We just can't service them. It's not an intentional...
discrimination, but it's a practical discrimination of how do you support that? So we're really trying to break down those areas for like clinical recruitment, clinical consent, patient experience, and we've seen a lot in the retail and marketing. A lot of people just want it for the novelty, so a lot of marketing pieces. Disney did an early piece back when we actually put an animated bear in their imaging lab, so the pediatric imaging lab they were greeted by a bear.
and we tell them what the kids were going to go through and such like that. So there's a ton of use cases where it can be applied, where it has the biggest impact with the most practical implementation is kind of where we're trying to focus. I shouldn't say kind of, it's exactly where we're trying to focus our efforts now. As people become more and more familiar with this and it becomes more and more mainstream, I think I did a talk in...
Spain for the MITRE Corporation on, oh, okay, all this sounds great and wonderful, but how do you scale something like that? People put millions of dollars invested in this, but what we've done is spent 10 years with our gaming background and created what we call a personality platform. So what does that mean? So outside of those, how do you apply it to all these use cases you were asking about without going to a client and going, okay, you got a spare million dollars lying around, you can...
Chuck Rinker (28:08.878)
throw at me? No, that's not the way it is. What we do is build a personality platform and say, okay, what does it mean to be Kyle? What do you look like? What knowledge do you have up in your gray matter? What kind of languages you speak? What are your demeanor? What gestures? What are your mannerisms? The way we're shaking heads now, everything is very communicative in gesture relations, language speech. So what does it mean to be that personality? And we've coupled all that together. All those IoT technologies, natural language parsing,
3D rendering, avatar, skinning, rigging, skeletals, animation systems, mocap systems, all this technology that I've learned for 40 years being military simulation and gaming and applied it and put it in a little bundle and said, this is what a digital personality looks like. And then we have an API. So we go to partners like on the wayfinding solution, for instance, I'm not gonna sit here and pat myself on the back and claim we've created the world's best wayfinder. No, we coupled up with Mapped In who is one of the world's best wayfinding companies.
And we said, we're going to put a user experience on top of your enterprise solution. We're going to go to another leader in the industry, a best in class Meridian hardware guys, we're not out there trying to take our screwdrivers and sidearm. So we partner up with Meridian. So we're that user engagement, that personality engagement platform. So our goal in life is to take those use cases you just asked me about and define those partners and to find those ecosystems where we are the personality experts.
Those guys are the business use case experts. So we really want to be out of the use case business is what it boils down to.
Kyle (29:43.196)
Yeah. Well, that definitely makes sense. I'm interested because you kind of touched on this. How do you go about building trust in the systems and kind of the personalities that you're creating? You mentioned the uncanny valley of being too realistic and that causes people to have just an inherent distrust. If it's too realistic.
not realistic and not perfect. You get this, it's too realistic, but just not quite there enough. And it kind of has this put off to people. And then obviously, you know, all the technology that you're putting in and the effort you're putting in, in order to create, you know, the right traits and the right nuances. You know, what are some of the things that you've found help?
build trust and bridge the gap between people both understanding the technology and then wanting to use it and then being able to really engage in a way that they feel comfortable with doing so.
Chuck Rinker (30:52.854)
Yeah, that's a, uh, an amazing question and probably an entire topic in and of itself, because people probably don't realize where I think I like to claim stake unless someone can hear this and count me wrong. I think we're probably one of the first companies to really be considered a digital human. We started this venture back in 2013. So we've been doing digital AI avatars since then, and actually prior to then. So to answer your question directly, some of those things we learned them. Um, I think you've heard the term the school of hard knocks.
A lot of it we've just done from Hard Knocks. We started out semi-photorealistic, believing, oh, this was cool. This is the best in technology. We want our characters to look photorealistic and all. And quite honestly, the first person to smack me down and say, well, that sounds cool, but be careful what you ask for. And that was a gentleman named John Snoddy. He's actually, he was one of the senior VPs of Disney Imagineering. And I was lucky enough to be able to fly out to Anaheim and sit down with him for probably an early afternoon.
and show them what we were doing. And he said, well, we're Disney. We're not gonna buy your stuff for one thing. We're Disney, come on, let's be honest. But let me give you a word of advice. Your characters are a little creepy. Back them off, back them off. Nobody's scared of Mickey Mouse. I mean, I know that's a little cliche and jokingly, but the reality is it hit home that that's actually that Skull of Hard Knock stuff is going something we've known in the game business for 30 years. Your imagination's incredible.
incredibly powerful. And here's the example I use. We're trying to build something that's believable. In the game world, we call it suspension of disbelief. I think film business might use that, but I'm not in the film business. Way back, my very, very first video game was way back in the early 1980s. And it was this little, people have probably seen it, maybe not. I'll show my age, Mattel football game. And it had three red LEDs and one LED in the back.
And in your brain, that was a quarterback and blockers that quarterback turned into a running back and it had blockers going down the field and defenders. So in your head, you believed that you were playing a football game. So the point is that trusted and inherent, um, approachability and what this is has less to do with trying to make it look, act, feel, and be exactly.
Chuck Rinker (33:16.99)
It's what are those actions that are relatable to you? Um, there's a really couple of really cool clinical trials that talk about, and I'll have to admit, um, that females overwhelmingly or less intimidating to males, even to other females and even to males. Um, so a lot of our characters are female based. So a lot of it's based on psychology. Um, the verbal doesn't make quite as much difference as the cosmetics.
but the gestures, when animation's not perfect and there's little subtlety differences, your brain also forgives the imperfections when they believe it's animated. Trust is an interesting topic, and I'll save that one for last because that's the one that really just blew my mind when I first really started digging into the clinical research and studies and just anecdotal stuff, quite honestly as well, on the differences.
with the trust factor, because what we found is that the information that's delivered to an avatar is often more accurate than the information you give to another human. And we were speculating on that, so I started doing some more research. I do a lot of clinical trial research and kind of justifying our position and such, and found out that there are studies out there that show that.
that, especially in the healthcare profession. And they suspect and they propose that is because humans don't like to be judged. So when you're talking to an AI avatar and you make a mistake or you're not really sure what you're trying to ask, you're trying to get something there or you need to divulge information that might be a little more sensitive to you personally or a little more personal, I don't necessarily want to divulge that especially and I'm going to pick on myself.
If we're doing a clinical trial with RTI, it's a clinical research organization up here, that's looking at the effects of opioid addicted mothers on the unborn babies and what they're like through the progress of the baby. Now you'll notice there's a lot of stigma around opioid addiction. There's a lot of participants that are in underrepresented communities.
Chuck Rinker (35:43.002)
16 year old girl with a baby born out of wedlock that's had trouble with substance abuse wants to do is sit next to this 57 year old gray haired white guy and divulge her personal habits. She's not going to do it. So the use of these avatars for addressing that community for like digital consent, getting permission to do the trial and what they're going to get out of it and what the benefits and the risk of it are is something we're already using that for. And I think that's an amazing use case.
that I love to put out and talks to that point about trust and use cases. So it's finding those particular use cases that's going to have the most impact that play to the advantages of the AI avatar. We're not trying to take over the world despite what people in Hollywood think. We're not trying to take over the world. We're trying to just break down that human technology gap.
Kyle (36:36.452)
I think that's really, really fascinating because like you said, there are places where we don't even have to really necessarily build up that trust because it's already there in that we are ready to divulge more information in certain circumstances to non-humans because we know we're not going to be judged. And so there's already...
that application of it where we don't, like you said, you don't necessarily have to even build it up because we're kind of ready to do that. And then, other areas where, it's probably more of a familiarity thing and just becoming familiar with the technology and the experience and then being able to interact in a way that becomes similar to what you would do. And so,
as we see more and more of this, I expect we'll probably have more of kind of the experiences like you're talking about where it becomes much more fluid and much more easy. And even like you said, you're willing to talk about more things because you know you're not going to be judged. I know that even in a low-stakes scenario, I'm envisioning things now of like, I should, even if it's just like a parking question, like, I should know.
Chuck Rinker (37:52.283)
Yeah.
Kyle (38:02.844)
if I should park here or not, and so I'm going to be embarrassed if I have to ask a question of, like, hey, can I park here or not? That becomes a question that you could ask an avatar, for example, without fear of judgment because this avatar isn't going to judge me for not knowing if I can park in this parking lot that's outside. As opposed to a human who...
Chuck Rinker (38:10.338)
Yeah.
Kyle (38:29.)
you may be like, no, there's a no parking sign there. Of course you can't park there. And so that's the kind of thing that low stakes, but also starts to garner good information that you may not have otherwise gotten. So I'm just, I'm starting to, it's exciting to see these areas where we can start to not only bridge the gap, but also get more information and hopefully utilize these things in a way that can help people.
build more trust, but also have that type of experience where you can interact in a way that maybe even you weren't willing to do before and have interactions and experiences that are beyond some of the things that you might have had before.
Chuck Rinker (39:15.574)
Absolutely. I know you're, you're obviously a phrasing it, um, a lot more succinctly than I was. So, so I appreciate that. Um, but no, you're, you're nailing it exactly. As a matter of fact, the last sentence you put in there brought up an interesting thought that, that we really haven't even bridged. And I'll, I'll make it quick cause I know we're taking up a lot of your listeners time today. Um, but the concept of, um, having those repeatable mundane
Kyle (39:22.837)
Thanks for watching!
Chuck Rinker (39:45.262)
questions, not judged, pulling that burden off. You really got to think about that from what is the impact even outside the individual. So let's say you're a hospital, we'll pick on the hospitals because we're there a hospital and you've hired, um, uh, patient experience managers or patient experience representatives to be at the front and help patients. If you've got a large hospital, we have several million patients coming through a year. And every time someone goes,
Where's the restroom? Where's the restroom? Where's the restroom? Where's the restroom? Where's the cafeteria? Where's the restroom? Where's the cafeteria? How much burden am I putting on that resource staff? We as humans have an inherent ability to innovate and create and answer those complexities that AI, regardless of how sophisticated we think generative AI is and such right now in AI and in general, natural language, parsing and all that good stuff.
Um, all these large, large language models, it's, it's still not a perfect thing. We can't automate people. We're not trying to automate people, but if I said I could take that same person and you know what, with all these patients coming through those 500 locations and those 30 or 40 frequently asked questions or where's the steakhouse, how much is parking, uh, um, you know, how, when are you open? What are your hours? Um, you know, what, where's, where's the closest airport, things like that.
And you say, okay, now I'm going to give back 20 to 30% of your staff time. Now that staff now has the inherent productivity improvement and the ability to spend their time addressing things like, um, maybe a, uh, a blind patient that needs physical access to the elevators or a, um, uh, a, a paralyzed patient whose caregiver couldn't always attend or something like that. My point is.
they're able to now answer and spend time with the human factor. So automating humans is not dehumanizing the patient journey. It's actually empowering more human interaction and creating a more human digital patient journey, because now your technology correspondences, repeatable, scalable, mundane tasks are more human because you're talking to a trusting, relatable AI character.
Chuck Rinker (42:11.746)
but you're also freeing up those high value one-to-one human engagements that we have too. So we're not dehumanizing healthcare with AI, we're humanizing healthcare using AI.
Kyle (42:28.328)
Yeah, I think that is such an important point too, because one, who among us wouldn't want another 20%? Like I hear that from me and I'm like, I need 20% more of time in everything. So like that's 100%. But then also there is just, I think I look across everything that both I'm doing and that across like different teams.
And it's like, there are always those tasks that are kind of like you said, the mundane repeatable things that really don't necessarily need somebody constantly like doing them or looking over them. And those are the types of things like when we can automate those and then focus on some of these higher valuable, higher value tasks, especially in healthcare situations where
it's there's so much value in the human interaction that like you said, somebody who needs that extra help that you can't automate, whether that's getting to the right place and or having the human with them for part of that journey, like those are the types of things that it's so much more important. And so being able to have that through some of these different
automated pieces where you have that extra time is, it's so incredible. And healthcare is one space, but there's so many other applications of it. I'm sure we could just start listing them off, being able to free up time in each of these areas and find so much more value in being able to dedicate that to the things that only people can do. And there is so much of that I think is so much more valuable.
when we can focus on it and then have our technology doing the things that technology is really good at, which is like repeatable tasks that we can say, do these things, and then it can repeatedly do them at scale constantly. And those are great things to have technology do for us.
Chuck Rinker (44:46.723)
So we'll get your digital Kyle in the works for you. Ha ha ha.
Kyle (44:50.344)
Yeah, my wife asked me that just the other day, she's like, don't you have a digital version of yourself that you can put to work on some of these things? I was like, I don't yet, but I need to, because that would just be huge for me. So you've seen AI change, like you mentioned, 2013 and even before that, being in this space. And a lot of us who have been working with AI technology
Chuck Rinker (44:57.447)
the
Chuck Rinker (45:04.178)
Yeah.
Chuck Rinker (45:13.018)
Mm-hmm.
Kyle (45:20.484)
a long time have seen it evolving and changing, and especially rapidly over the past year or so. What have you seen changing in the space? And then what do you expect to see changing going forward with the technology and with AI specifically?
Chuck Rinker (45:43.662)
That's an interesting question because the list is too long to even start quantifying. But as a summary, what I've really seen is the pace of adoption and the pace of technology advancement. That's not just in the AI space, but it becomes very visible within this concept of digital humans. We talked about your typewriter. What did it do?
When I was young and doing my first programming job, I was literally using ticker tapes and these little punch cards, paper punch cards. And then we went to magnetic reels and what we call CRTs that were literally as you type, you didn't have a computer screen. It would type on a manual typewriter and then it would type stuff out. And then we went to the magnetic disk and then the personal computers finally came out and blah, blah. And then we got all the way up to where I was.
I mean, in 1980, where I first started dealing with real what I would call AI as far as trying to recreate human decision making with some of these military simulations, government obviously had a lot of money in early research. I was lucky enough to be exposed to some of the earliest uses of AI and all under that umbrella. But the point I'm trying to make is all that happened over my life and I was born back in the 60s, 1960s.
It was a 30, 40 year curve to go from me having a Mattel video game with four LEDs to having something that we could play a game of Madden football on. And that was 30, 40 years. Now from 2013 when we first started this, when it was mostly keyword identification, asked me a question and if I heard the word bathroom, I would automatically...
pull up a response there to where we're at with generative AI and chat GPT and the amount of sophistication that our characters can speak and synthesize 150 languages with proper onboarding of course and that we can answer up to 36,000 questions if they're onboarded and to do it in an instant and to do it with the brain in the cloud and all that. That's all happened just in the last, you know.
Chuck Rinker (47:57.918)
Less than a decade, five years really, and it's really just accelerating here. So the point is, is the curves getting here. So even me, as much as I claim to be an AI expert and I claim to be on the leading edge, I'm, um, every, every week or so, when I start reading on my little tech journals, I I'm just going, just shaking my head going, I'm blown away and I'm, I'm not even sure what's really, uh, coming around there.
But I don't want people to get scared of that and lose sight that at the end of the day, it's really a productivity tool. It gets you quicker. It's, it's, it's even, even when you're looking at the generative stuff where we're creating, okay, Ooh, you're, you're having me, you know, write kids' papers at school or, you know, I'm a marketing manager, I'm a marketing, a writer and it's writing half month. No, it's not. It's, it might be writing your blog. It's just getting you there faster. At the end of the day, you're still going to proofread it. You're still going to key in on pieces that it couldn't get right.
or the phraseology it used is wrong or it missed a key point. And the AI is only as good as the data you feed it. And it's only as good as that, um, first pass. So it's just getting you there quicker. So if you take that mentality of a productivity increase, I really want people to keep embracing and pushing it because the power it has to do good. Is outweighs the power to do bad. My point is.
And you've seen it. It doesn't matter what the technology is, a baseball bat. I can use it to play a game of baseball or don't mean to get so dark on it, but you can use it to do a breaking and entering into a restaurant, you know, it's the, it's the tool, not the, uh, in product. So embrace it, use it. I think it has a power to embed our personal lives. It has a power to be a productivity tool beyond compare. And, um, just don't, uh, um, don't turn it away. Just focus on.
ethical use, AI, security, compliance, privacy, all those kind of things that would deter its misuse, but don't let that deter the positivity that it can bring to people.
Kyle (50:02.092)
I absolutely love that and could not agree more. I'm interested in what advice, as you look back at the things that you've done, your career, what advice would you give to somebody who is either early in their career, starting out, maybe founding a company, getting into technology, any of those things? What advice would you have for someone?
Chuck Rinker (50:22.99)
Um, that one I really wasn't prepared for, but, um, really, I guess, I guess the only advice I can really, uh, give is, um, don't, don't try to make it perfect the first time, you know, that what's, what's the frame they use, you know, um, when they say fail, fail fast and fail often, um, and kind of is kind of the reality because this is such a innovative, innovative
technology that has yet to really find its fit in all aspects. We do a lot of work with Gardner as well and Gardner had an interesting article that said startups who succeed are those that shift their strategy at least 75% of the time. Reinvent yourself. Don't be afraid to try something new. Do something if it's not working. Don't be afraid to go,
made a mistake, let's try something else. Let's try something else. That's when you really come and find, oh, well we tried, wow, that actually worked. That's pretty cool. You know, when you hit that wow moment like that, that really not makes it worthwhile from a financial, but makes it worthwhile as you know what, we've really done something different. And the term I used to use back in the gaming space is we call it pride of product. You know, I really am proud of what my team's done. And
We threw out some challenges and some gauntlets and there's been lots of late nights and lots of, uh, back and forth and a few random four letter words flown back and forth. But at the end of the day, I think, um, for a small company in North Carolina who has created what I consider every bit as good, if not better than those companies that are, are funded to the 10 X from what we've done, I really go. That wouldn't happened if we didn't have this.
mindset of the problem solvers and the gamers. My CTO actually was a friend of mine who was a Madden programmer as well. And my CIO has art degrees as well as technology degrees. I've got engineering degrees and creativity degrees. So we've got this incredible team. Hell, my chief technology officer has a 3D animation degree. I mean, it's just amazing. So you get these people that really aren't afraid about thinking outside the box and thinking creatively and
Chuck Rinker (52:47.73)
not afraid to make a mistake and just doing what it takes to do something nobody else has done. I'll leave it with my final quote from my personal hero, which is Walt Disney himself. And it's sitting right on the front of my desk. If I move my camera around, it says, you know, it's kind of fun to do the impossible. And that's kind of what people should kind of take away.
Kyle (53:09.436)
I love that. Well, that is, that's absolutely perfect. Well, Chuck, this has been an amazing conversation and I do have two questions that we'd like to kind of wrap up with and ask people at the end here. But before we do that, is there anything that we talked about or didn't get a chance to talk about that you'd like to add?
Chuck Rinker (53:30.026)
No, to be honest, I apologize. I'm, I'm not afraid to talk as you've noticed, and I get a little long winded. So, um, I welcome followups. Uh, but no, I think, um, I appreciate the, uh, um, conversation and the ability to kind of tell that story and let people know what we're up to. So I think I've, uh, probably taken enough of your audience's good time.
Kyle (53:50.452)
Well, this has been an absolutely great conversation. I've thoroughly enjoyed it. But for kind of our wrap up questions, these can be technology and business related, but they don't have to be. So kind of open the door here. But have you read or watched or listened to anything recently that you found particularly interesting?
Chuck Rinker (54:12.046)
Yeah, that's... Wow, that one pulled me out from left field because I read constantly, but I don't typically read for entertainment. So when I read, it's things like that I find interesting. It has nothing to do with personas, but it has a lot to do with this whole advancement and innovation. I don't know if you've been watching some of the amazing byproduct of the James Webb telescope,
put up there and some of the stuff it's telling us is really doing exactly what I said you know we can only act on what we know and unless you try something new goes back to that theory of try something you haven't done you realize that not only is this just I'm sending sharper images back for those that you who don't really watch it it's not that it's now you know we're questioning our perspective on the universe oh wait all these theories we took us
rock solid truth for so long and now all be coming in question because now we have more information we have better visibility into our universe and that's kind of what I mean you don't know what you don't know until you know it and so that kind of plays back into that so that's always fascinating for me to watch that kind of stuff you know so kind of I feel like we're get back in the old flat earth days where everybody thought the earth was flat and then once we were able to get um beyond that now we're at the point where well we know what the universe is because the Hubble told us what it was and now we're
we're being exposed to new information. So we change our perspectives. And I think that's exactly the point I was trying to make earlier, you know, don't be afraid to try something new because once you get that, you're gonna have a different perspective. Oh, I didn't even know I didn't know that. And so try that.
Kyle (55:54.196)
Yeah.
Yep, absolutely. Some fascinating stuff there. And then final question, have you used any products, either digital or physical, that you've found useful or interesting or have been enjoying recently?
Chuck Rinker (56:12.634)
Um, all of the above. Um, actually I'm a big fan of open AI. Um, uh, quite honestly, I know that's a hot topic and a little cliche being the AI guy and yeah, we, you know, we use it for some marketing messages, I use it to speed up and enhance my LinkedIn profile, quite honestly, you know, give me some creative, give me some colorful words to throw in there and such, but being the, uh, going back to your musician ties, it's amazing. I've had fun creating album covers with Dolly, you know, that the AI generative
Dolly's trying to do animated clips now, and then trying to create imagery based on words of songs. That's all fun. Have you ever, have you watched War Dogs yet? War Dogs, oh, they took the lyrics of War Dogs and used generative AI to create a video sequence that went along with the soundtrack, and it's amazing. So it's that bridgement between the creative and the absolute forefront of creativity and the forefront of AI. And the end product is not an AI product, it's a derivative.
Kyle (56:52.352)
haven't.
Kyle (57:00.436)
Wow.
Chuck Rinker (57:10.474)
And that has advanced stuff so much. So, so those types of tools are really fascinating to me. Real cliche based on our conversation, but it is very inspirational that you can get that much out of those tools. And it's just, it's just elevated everything.
Kyle (57:25.488)
It is, yeah. It's hard. I was thinking about that recently, just how far we have come so quickly that what we were doing before without some of these tools and then what we're doing now, just how fast you can generate so much information and content, whether that's videos or images or text, just like the generative capabilities is, it's mind boggling now.
Chuck Rinker (57:54.858)
It is.
Kyle (57:55.592)
And that wasn't the case a year ago. We didn't have that capability to have so many generative tools. And now it's almost just, it's all around us. You can have generative content in just about anything. And it's incredible.
Chuck Rinker (58:10.782)
It is. It's very overwhelming. I'll admit being an old guy who probably doesn't multitask as well as you young guys, I get overwhelmed pretty easy. But, um, just going back full circle to my story about being a cattle farmer now living on a farm, I need to unwind from that sometimes even being this thought leader and AI and trying to claim that I know all this stuff about James Web and I'll really is a little bit of a facade. Um, but the reality is at the end of the day, my favorite thing to do is I've got a little sawmill out back in my farm.
I pulled the tractor up, put a log grapple on it, throw a log up on the sawmill, and mill up some posts and all, and just getting away from it and not having anything that requires electricity and working with your hands a little and just kind of getting back to the basics is kind of what clears my mind too. So don't get absorbed by it is what I mean. It's fascinating, it's productive, it's amazing, but don't let it take over your life.
Kyle (59:07.548)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, Chuck, this has been an amazing conversation again, like I said, really appreciate your time and insights, the experience and stories that you shared. I think this has been absolutely a great, a number of great topics and a great conversation.
Chuck Rinker (59:25.446)
enjoyed it myself as well. I'll always enjoy talking through these art of the possible type conversations.
Kyle (59:33.32)
Yeah. Well, before we leave, can you tell us where people can find out more about you, about personas, about anything that you're working on?
Chuck Rinker (59:40.918)
Sure. I'm one of these LinkedIn guys. I love corresponding to LinkedIn. I feel it's a very professional network and I ask people to look me up there. But I, I half jokingly, but fully seriously put my hands together. And please don't take my exposure here and request for LinkedIn connections to try to sell me something or sell me a service. If you have a genuine interest in the topic and you want to talk about them, thought conversations around it or, uh,
opportunities to use this for other use cases I don't think about because at the end of the day, I know full well that the real benefit of this is going to be done by somebody else, not me. So I like going on LinkedIn. Just look me up as Charles. I show up as Chuck Rinker on LinkedIn. I think Charles Rinker, Chuck Rinker. Other than that, to learn about the Personas product and how we've created this personality package.
That's obviously on our website, Personas, which is spelt a little different, P-R-S-O-N-A-S.com, P-R-S-O-N-A-S.com. And if you are a healthcare, I do have a big passion for healthcare, especially now. With a product line that we're creating digital personalities for healthcare is called iHealth Assist. The letter I, health, is A-S-S-S-T. And that's where you can learn about the clinical trial work and the clinical recruitment.
and the hospital wayfinders and AI concierge type products that are specifically for healthcare. And I think we need a big change. I know the UK needs a change to their health. It's something we have a personal passion for, for relieving some of the tensions on our healthcare system right now.
Kyle (01:01:20.18)
Okay, well we will put all those links in the show notes as well so you can check that out. Alright, well again Chuck, thank you. It has been an absolute pleasure.
Chuck Rinker (01:01:29.336)
My pleasure. I appreciate the time, Kyle.
Kyle (01:01:32.66)
All right, and thank you everyone for listening.