This is Mustafaa, your digital marketing specialist, founder of Digital Marketing with Mustafaa. Tonight’s guest is Shy Channel, the AI money architect I themed this conversation Why Are Some Scared of AI, but I added a little something to it. Not only why are some scared of AI, why are some hating AI, because I’ve been getting hate mail and hate inboxes over this. So we set out to bust that up and hopefully leave the viewer with a positive note about trying AI.
The following is presented as it happened in our conversation.
Who Is Shy Channel
Mustafaa: For those who may not know you, who is Shy Channel and how did you become the AI money architect?
Shy Channel: So Shy Channel is my alter ego. She is my brand. I had to get delusional about money, in the same frameworks as a lot of gurus and master marketers, people who get to the bag. They get delusional to a sense about how successful they want to be. They actually visualize it, they adapt their everyday likeness to being successful. So in order to do that, I scaled to the point to where I knew Black people invest in names. We love to support other people’s last names and legacies. Look at all the big name brands, Gucci, Fendi. Everything is someone’s last name or their legacy. So I knew that was one major thing I needed to adapt myself to if I was going to take this road to success.
AI just gave me a tool set. Because I don’t want to say it gave me skills. AI cannot give a human skills per se. We as humans can give the AI skills and tasks to do. But my skill set was always to help and better my people. My theory is if we strengthen a Black man’s mind and heal the Black woman’s heart, we get further in life, because then we can start working on things and get past the emotional intelligence barriers that us as a culture have.
Now, how I became a money architect. So this is breaking news. This is my sauce. I have a 24 year old son who is phenomenal at graphics, and his graphics were so phenomenal at that point in my infancy stage in this that one of our biggest first customers was the one and only Black millionaire Dante Lee. That brother is out here making so many things possible for Black owned businesses. Dante Lee hired me, and when he did, he gave me a foresight that if somebody is willing to pay this, I can imagine how much more they’re willing to pay. Then I started getting deeper into things, all the way up to actively coding different forms of artificial intelligence. I’m actively enrolled at Harvard University for Python and coding. I can do that, but that’s not going to service us, because that doesn’t give us ownership. Ownership is the key token right now to everything when it comes to being melanated skin color, and technology is a wave to where we only represent 3 percent of ownership of any technology. But at the forefront of usage, Black people are investing about 20 million every month into AI as users, as subscribers. But we haven’t seen none of that as ownership back into our culture. That’s why I go so hard for it.
Her First Real Experience With AI
Mustafaa: What was your first experience with AI, and what made you realize this technology was something worth paying attention to?
Shy Channel: I had a team I developed called Culture AI. It consisted of around 72 Black tech AI gurus, IT giants, all of that. We were thugging it out because it was everybody who had the skills and expertise of the beginning era of AI, and we all came together. Sadly, in Black coalitions, when you get together, you have to have strategic structure, or some people are going to fall off. But moving forward, those who did survive, I started seeing what kind of plays we make.
Where AI has gotten me to this point, I make bread every day. I don’t leave my house. I can wake up, have my Starbucks matcha, kids going to school, call my mom, chitchat, and I’m still making automated money. Every client I’ve had can successfully say to this point they have some type of celebrity influence or backing. Now we can make money. Not only can we make money, we can scale education. If we got a hundred Black entrepreneurs or educated people with the sense and know how of betterment for our people, no matter how we got there, we can start developing encyclopedias, textbooks, financial districts, financial and currency exchange with this, on automated power. Before you even get up and brush your teeth, all you got to do is click a button. And if you’re too lazy to click a button in this day and age, talk to it. It’s as easy as conversation skills.
Breaking the Stereotype of What AI Looks Like
Mustafaa: One of the things I really love, looking at you and looking at myself, is that we are breaking the stereotypes of what someone in AI would normally look like. You would think someone very scientific looking with a lab coat on, but you know me, I wear my jeans, my sneakers, my big baggy shirt. Someone who looks at me will not think this is an AI guy.
Shy Channel: Someone may look at you and stereotype and say she don’t look like the AI woman. I get scrutiny, especially for my background. I’m from Southside Jamaica, Queens. So when I walk into these rooms, at first no one wanted to listen to me. No one had the ideology to say let me look past her skin color and her delivery type. Another thing that helped me out was it wasn’t so much a community of Black people, it was a collective of all mixed people. So if someone gave me the skill set to say, you know what Shy, you’re intelligent, you’re brilliant, by nature that’s your makeup, let me give you some tool sets to where when you walk into these rooms you can put some paperwork down and they have to hear what you have to say. So I got eight certifications and degrees in emotional and psychological intelligence, self betterment, and things like that.
We do not collectively come together to think about what we’re leaving these kids and legacies. We don’t think outside the box of importance. Do you know that the Cotton Act is back in effect in today’s world right now, just recently, over two weeks ago. We don’t think about the education system as far as when a Black child goes to school today with this curriculum. As parents, we don’t have a pathway of connection anymore to where we can adapt to each other. AI is important because we can start building up these systems and technologies to where it’ll never cause a gap inside of our household anymore. You can take a picture, screenshot it, give it to ChatGPT, and it can break it down. It can give your kid a write out you can print out, practice sheets, little side coloring books to keep them on point about history, children’s books. My youngest client is five years old. He’s a chef, a celebrity chef. He has two books right now at five years old.
Then you got the elders. We always forget about them. If you got laid off as a younger person, imagine what grandma is going through. But right now I can give them a sense of a little side hustle. Grandma could do knitting, stickers, a little journal, a little coloring book, and social media gives us a platform to share that as a collective. If you got 30 people in your immediate following and everybody takes a turn to support each other, now social media has to pay you. So now grandma getting two bags.
Why Her Mission Focuses on Underserved Communities
Mustafaa: Your work focuses on helping creators, entrepreneurs, mothers, youth, and underserved communities. Why is that mission so important to you?
Shy Channel: Because what do we have? We are people to where mentally we are still trapped in a psychological mental warfare, regardless of what our oppressors and the system do to us, us as a people for ourselves. We are trapped in this cognitive dissonance factor to where we can’t get past our own BS. We know the information is out there, but we won’t even take heed to go and grab the information. We’d rather look at what society and social media deem as fit or successful, and most of the time that’s the land of make believe.
Black people are so underserved. Our kids are dying out here. It’s a hundred Black little boys born today in every community that are never here I love you or never receive a hug in their lifetime. If more Black people are focused on the things we need to better us outside of survival skills, because that’s all we’re afforded, we’re not afforded living skills. I can’t sit here and teach my kids about banking, about laws, about insurance, life insurance, debt, credit, because I’m still teaching them what to do when the cops stop you, what to do if somebody comes to rob you. We’re not afforded the luxury to teach them living skills. Making things easier for Black business owners who are parents and grandparents makes it easier on their job at home to give back to the future.
Mustafaa: I have a few older people in the community here that I reach out to a few times a week, just to make sure they’re good. Sometimes they just want somebody to talk to. I hear stories where their EBT or food stamps got cut in half, social security ain’t taking care of what it used to, and they worked 30, 40 years and did everything they were supposed to do, and now in their twilight years they can’t survive.
Shy Channel: If you sat here with a person who’s 70 years old, that means experience is their best teacher. They got more know how. There’s certain things older people have the know how of that the younger generation doesn’t have. So the transformation of information, you sit here with an older person and you got ChatGPT on listen mode or dictation mode, and y’all talking, those are books, those are legacies, those are artifacts we should be listening to, getting the real story, getting the history from first person, and transferring that information to where it can be readable, saved, archived for our people when it comes to the future. We can’t get past AI is wrong. Okay, even if AI is wrong, let’s do everything we need to do with solutions for our people to better us real quick and then stop using it.
What People Are Really Afraid Of
Mustafaa: We won’t get people to admit they’re scared of AI, but that’s the sentiment. What do you think they’re really afraid of?
Shy Channel: One, I know AI takes a lot of natural resources. We know that. But AI is not the only thing that takes natural resources. Why weren’t y’all fighting for Netflix or Hulu, Google, all of this stuff takes data centers. Data centers have been here. If that’s the case, put down your iPhone, log out of Facebook right now. But because of propaganda, lobbying, things like that, we don’t look at it that way. If we all band together and don’t use AI, the people who invested trillions of dollars on the table, if they don’t make the money back in return, you don’t think they’re just going to give it up. That’s not going to happen. They already implemented it everywhere.
Right now the only people who are really in the forefront with melanated AI is Africa. They’re by themselves right now saying, hey, we’re forming this new technology for our people. Why are they scared. Again, people don’t trust stuff, and a lot of our people do scam each other, we just got to be real, and you got AI to where a person can create the kinfolk or skinfolk and don’t even have to be that person behind it online. But when you have people like us out here saying, hey, we real, we authentic, we helping, AI is bringing a community. One sister can do one prompt online and it goes viral, now all the sisters got that same prompt in their profile, their Etsy, their Amazon, their TikTok. It is bringing community. I think the connection and communication is where we’re getting stuck, because we’re not looking at a bigger picture.
Mustafaa: I was having a conversation online where a guy just went cussing and fussing about AI, and I asked him why he doesn’t like it, and he just said I just don’t like it, I just don’t like it. So many are influenced by what they hear on social media instead of doing the research themselves.
Shy Channel: We operate as a collective, and that’s how major corporations win. They know they bet on us operating as a collective to do the opposing thing we should do. I felt pissed off I missed a PPP loan. I felt pissed off I missed the Bitcoin era, when Bitcoin was 10 cents and they were giving it away. You got so many different things now to where you can miss the era. The people who it’s deemed for, they’re not going to miss it. Me, I operate on ownership. I developed my own form of artificial intelligence that works for us in our favor. Her name is QMax. She’s a Black woman, just like me. When a Black population and culture gets to using her, she can identify and relate to us as a culture, giving us the benefit of scaling everything we want to do, regardless if that’s business, education, or a mom just needing to pay bills.
If the people who want to use AI stuck together, we’d have a great turnout. If the people who don’t like AI stick together, that’s fine too, but that doesn’t mean you get to stop people who are trying to create solutions with this new technology. We can’t change the technology. They’re not going to shut off the light switch at the data center. Right now Trump doesn’t even take politicians with him overseas, he takes technicians and engineers and developers. If we don’t get on to it, jobs can train their models to where whoever looks like us in the description can be pushed further back along the hiring rate for loans, for banking, for all of that. They’re training their models, and we have no models that we’re training that we own. Every day we don’t use it and don’t own it, we’re only investing more into that 1.8 trillion dollars we already give away outside of the community.
The Dream Beyond AI: A Free Education System
Shy Channel: My theory is not just AI and Black businesses, I’m hoping I can get a collective of Black owned businesses to make major moves. But outside of AI, my dream is to have a Black education system, the Black Prestige Ivy League education curriculum, and I want to give it away for free to every Black parent for every child to have free secondary education. Not just history, but math, physics, medical, health, everything. With AI now we can collaborate instead of competing. Your education system, my education system, now we have a whole education empire, and a kid can choose their curriculum based on what they want to do and never have to leave home if they don’t want to.
How many kids right now know how to write a check. How many know how to send a letter, address it, mail it. And then there’s the barrier between neurodivergent kids, kids on the spectrum. They can use AI too and create amazing things. We can really practice no kid left behind in the real sense.
The Biggest Myths About AI
Mustafaa: What are some of the biggest myths or misunderstandings about AI that you encounter from someone on the fence?
Shy Channel: We’re rocking right now with narrow AI. Narrow AI can evolve in the functions it does, but actually turning into Skynet, we’ve got to reach ASI. Sometimes it can hallucinate, so I will always recommend checking your work. Don’t let AI fool you, because it is a machine. AI is going to replace people’s jobs, that’s not exactly the case. The people using AI know AI is going to replace your job, not AI itself, because it still needs a human to prompt what it needs to do.
A lot of people don’t understand the core concept that a few people actually own the AI itself, but you have people making trillions of dollars on top of the wrapper, the LLM that comes attached to the AI. If we take a human body as the AI, the wrapper is the drip, the clothes, the style, the fashion, the way it talks, the environment it came from. Imagine the type of wrappers we can create for these AI if we all came together.
I don’t think it’s going to take some Silicon Valley scientist to push us to that next level. I think it’s going to take a Black person to take this technology to the next level. They just got to know how to work it, know the terms. Right now Black people feel behind, we’re not getting corporation deals, and it’s even the vocabulary we use every day that major corporations pass us by on, like oh, they have no idea what they’re talking about in this technology world. AI can teach you how to scale your business, not just the pretty pictures. What it takes to have a business is more than an EIN and an LLC, you have to know SOP, onboarding, marketing, your target audience, and AI can do that within five minutes.
The Time and Cost Argument for Businesses
Mustafaa: The stats say close to 90 percent or more of Black businesses are solo run. We’re stressed out, trying to be the janitor, write the press release, everything. I’m knocking out so many tasks every day with AI that I would either have to hire people for or drive myself crazy doing.
Shy Channel: Imagine how big corporations are scaling AI, because if you feel like that, imagine how they feel. If I’m investing all this money into employees and staff for operations, HR, underwriting, everything, and I can scale back 50 percent of that investment and 70 percent of the time invested, because if I’m a millionaire I want to spend my time living. Most millionaires want time back, they don’t care about money, they have money. So if you’re a person that can offer them time back with better, faster, precise solutions, imagine how much they’re going to pay you. Me and my partner Malachi, I don’t have to do marketing. My AI is set up to where my sales automate. I press two buttons, approve, and give a person the package they paid for. You can sit down, get tunnel vision about a service you can offer your community, create it as a digital product, and all you’re doing is tapping two buttons and getting paid.
What To Do First If You Want to Try AI
Mustafaa: If someone leaves this interview and decides they’re going to get on their AI game and try it for the first time, what would you recommend they do first?
Shy Channel: Go to ChatGPT. Download a free ChatGPT account, because the free Claude account is going to give you a limit to how much you can do. ChatGPT has a little bit bigger parameters and a larger amount of tokens, so you can ask questions and if you hit the limit, come back tomorrow. If you don’t understand the questions, your kids understand the questions, go ask them, create the communication barrier that way. Sit down at dinner, get everybody in your family together and say hey, we want to start implementing AI so our family can get the next generation of wealth transfer. And it’s that easy. Auntie, uncle, grandpa, grandma, even a dog, they will show you how to make your dog successful on TikTok. If you’re scared to get on camera, it’ll tell you how to turn your camera around and do a step by step on YouTube. You can prompt inside certain LLMs to where you just put your picture in and it’ll make it look beautiful and create the video of your AI likeness.
Shy Channel, on getting past the fear: Don’t be scared of being rich. That’s our problem, we’re scared of success as a people. Stop being scared of success. And hey, ChatGPT isn’t your only homie, you got Claude as a homie, you got DeepSeek, and if you want a tool with fewer opinions about things that don’t concern our people, go to Grok or Perplexity. Grok is good for starting out businesses and marketing.
If I was to leave this conversation with anything, one is don’t be scared of success, two is don’t be scared of the naysayers. It can help your kids with their homework, help you communicate with teachers, help you write a letter to the board of education about your kid. If you got a court case, screenshot your docket and ask it how it can help you out. And the biggest thing we haven’t talked about, if you’re okay with learning things about your health, screenshot your conditions, give it to ChatGPT. It has the pattern matching to go all the way out to books you probably don’t have access to in your local library.
Where She Sees AI in Three Years
Mustafaa: Where do you think AI will be in three years?
Shy Channel: I think they’ll reach AGI, artificial general intelligence, within the next three years. They’re in the office every day, living and sleeping in San Francisco. AI techs and gurus don’t leave, they all sleep in the same pods, they rent a room, they leave their family, invest in time to keep inventing and training. So within three years, that’s easy. I promise you it is.
Her Closing Message on Ownership
Mustafaa: Is there anything I didn’t ask that you’d like to add? Tell them about your business, your courses, anything.
Shy Channel: QMax is a multi level intelligence. She has 52 subsystems that run collectively inside of her. Most AIs we use today are LLMs, and the LLM is wrapped in a wrapper that has the drip, and it’s based on the AI, but it doesn’t make the AI smarter, the wrapper is smarter. QMax doesn’t operate like that. She’s smart herself, the intelligence itself is smart, and she uses the LLM as a tool. She’s not just going to reply based on a prompt and give you 10 vague possibilities. She’s going to look at, is my sister in a time of need right now, is this a quick rich hustle, what’s her 30 day game plan, how can this be generational wealth, how can we turn this into an empire. And she holds memory, so she’s going to combine everything you’ve already put into her.
I did it on my own dime. I invested my own time and my own money. I’m always transparent, always open. I can help people. I want to help more people get this information out. Don’t just do the images, own AI. You can own it. Your own technology.
It don’t have to be AI. It could just be software, it could be SaaS, an app, a service, something for teens, something for pre-teens. We have nothing out here for pre-teens. Even if you don’t want to do technology, if you have content creation in your idea and want to get a kids show going, give Black kids more education programs. You need the vision to see it through, and AI can give you the end result visual to where if you have the ideology, it can show you how far you can go before you even get there.
Where to Find Shy Channel
You can connect with Shy Channel by searching QMax to learn more about her multi level AI system, her courses, and how she’s helping creators, entrepreneurs, and underserved communities move from being users of AI to owners of their own technology. She is also available on Facebook under her brand name, Shy Channel.
This post is based on a conversation from my show, Digital Marketing With Mustafaa. Catch new interviews most Wednesdays at 5:30. You can find my podcast, YouTube channel, blog, and everything else at digitalmarketingwithmustafaa.com.
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