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Will AI Replace Us? Mitch Joel on the New Rules of Knowledge Work
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AI isn’t coming for the future of work—it’s already transforming it. In this episode, Mark Evans sits down with Mitch Joel, entrepreneur, author, and co-founder of Thinkers One, to unpack the seismic shifts AI is driving in knowledge work.
From content creation to strategic decision-making, Mitch explains why the question isn’t if AI will take our jobs, but what we’re doing in case it does.
This conversation explores what it means to stay relevant, creative, and human in a world where machines can mimic expertise in seconds. Y
ou’ll also hear about Mitch’s journey from agency founder to digital futurist, and how Thinkers One is reshaping access to thought leadership.
Recommended
Transcript
AI's Transformative Role in Work
00:00:00
Speaker
AI isn't coming for the future of work. It's already rewriting it. The tools that we once treated as assistants are quickly becoming competitors capable of mimicking our tone, thought process, and creativity with uncanny precision.
00:00:15
Speaker
But what happens when the things that made you valuable, your voice, your ideas, your expertise can be replicated in seconds? On this episode of Marketing Spark, I sit down with Mitch Joel, a visionary thinker who's not just watching the AI wave, he's urging us to prepare for it.
00:00:31
Speaker
Now, this isn't a conversation about hype. It's about what leaders, creators, and knowledge workers need to understand right now as the boundaries of human versus machines begin to blur.
Mitch Joel's Journey and Insights
00:00:43
Speaker
Mitch is a renowned entrepreneur, author, speaker, and the co-founder of Thinkers One, a new venture built to help companies connect with and learn from brilliant minds in more scalable and modern ways.
00:00:55
Speaker
Mitch is also the former founder of the digital marketing agency Twist Image, which was acquired by WPP, and the longtime host of Six Pixels of Separation, one of the first and most influential marketing podcasts. Well, that's a great resume, if I say so myself. Thanks, Mark.
00:01:11
Speaker
Mitch always has a hand on the pulse of what's next. And lately he's been raising provocative questions about the accelerating power of artificial intelligence. We often ask, will AI take our jobs?
00:01:22
Speaker
But Mitch flips the script. What are we doing in case it does? He's sounding the alarm, not with fear, but with urgency because the shift isn't theoretical.
00:01:33
Speaker
It's already happening.
AI from Automation to Knowledge Work Threat
00:01:34
Speaker
In this episode, we explore how AI is evolving beyond automation to full replacement, why knowledge work, once thought as immune, is now under real threat, and why leaders can't just wait and hope that things work out.
00:01:48
Speaker
We also explore Mitch's own entrepreneurial path from building and selling a successful agency to reinventing himself with Thinkers1 and what it means to build something human-first and in an increasingly AI powered world.
00:02:00
Speaker
Welcome to Marketing Spark. I think your last appearance is probably four years ago. Listen, in the whole bio of things, Mark, my favorite is the fact that when we first met, it was in a room where you were extremely skeptical of these technologies. i always have that feeling of whenever I'm dealing with people who were professionally aligned with me in terms of publishing or journalism,
00:02:19
Speaker
And they were so
Society's Perception of AI's Paradigm Shift
00:02:20
Speaker
skeptical at the time. They've become not only great friends, but obviously people who have been very successful by using the exact tools that, again, a lucky time. Everything was worked out for me in that sense.
00:02:30
Speaker
That once in what is this the saying that a broken clock is right twice? Just for context, Mitch and I met probably in around 2006 when I and several other entrepreneurs started the Mesh Conference in Toronto. Was it before Mesh? Here's where we met.
00:02:47
Speaker
We were on a panel for an event and you were doing your journalism thing for a big national newspaper and I was the pro social media blogging and you were the, no, these are not going to be serious people.
00:02:59
Speaker
No, we met before then. When you come to the dark side, then we became really good. It's hard to think about at one point in time, you have the hype around the internet was really, is this really going to take over the world? You and I lived in a world of paper and newspapers and old school media and...
00:03:16
Speaker
I look back and go, wow, I was either ignorant or naive or just didn't envision what was possible. But here we are. we were
AI's Impact on Content Creation
00:03:22
Speaker
both digital animals right now. This is the exact moment we're in with AI, actually. And this is why, like, whenever we have these conversations, it's always the, what is was it? Was the Beastie Boys? You got to check yourself. I felt it back then, and I feel it the exact same moment. And again, as you get older, you get more attuned to these things.
00:03:41
Speaker
I call it stasis, which is this idea that everything we think about in the moment is based off of everything we know historically or in the moment without having the ability to really imagine what if.
00:03:52
Speaker
And you just go through the litany of things that was. It was a person like me in 2000 who was saying, think internet media is going to be bigger than television media. you were in that infrastructure. There was so much power within the traditional media. You couldn't even imagine. By the way, this is the problem we have as a society. Not that we just sit in the stasis mode, which is I'm just thinking about the present and or what happened historically.
00:04:13
Speaker
But it is the real problem of words we toss around. And I know you're wordsmith like me. We talk about paradigm shift. I can think that we are in a paradigm shift. We won't know it until we're beyond it because a real paradigm shift is something you could never have imagined or understood until after it happened. And that that really is part of these provocations that you were bringing out in the intro, which is – If we can't actually understand that we're in the paradigm shift, which I don't think we can, what we can do is ask questions that push our thinking into that mindset.
00:04:44
Speaker
And that's we were in the early 2000s and we're definitely are right now. It's interesting that. You and i haven't connected in a few years. And I rediscovered your current way of thinking when I was looking through my LinkedIn feed. And I have to be transparent. A couple of months ago, I took a full-time job and I've backed off LinkedIn simply because I've been busy.
00:05:10
Speaker
when I look at LinkedIn now, there's a lot of self-promotion and not a lot of stuff breaks through to me. but you wrote a post recently in which you said that we're asking the wrong question, will AI take our jobs? And instead we should ask, what are we doing just in case it does?
00:05:32
Speaker
The question I have to ask you is what led you to that reframing? If we go back, because again, we have that history together, I know that it felt so real to me that the shift was going to happen. That first shift of social when that came in, it was very clear to me.
00:05:47
Speaker
It felt like I was very much in what I would call the convincing business. I literally sat in meetings with large clients, big brands, Having them say to me things like, are you sure we need an internet site? Do we really need social media? Do we really need mobile e-commerce? Are people going to really put their credit card in the computer?
00:06:04
Speaker
Part of that thinking has just evolved to where we are today. When people say to me things like, why are you thinking like this? I make the argument that back then i felt like I was probably 10 steps ahead of everybody else in terms of what was happening. It was very abundantly clear to me where the economy was going, where the technology evolution was going, the culture, the behavior, totally.
00:06:25
Speaker
AI comes out, chat GPT comes out, and I start playing with it. Obviously, very early days, I've been following AI and just a dream of it. I jokingly told a story on LinkedIn the other day where 12 years ago, I had a brand agency review and they were asking us about our competencies in developing AI-driven content for their brand. And I was like, back then, there wasn't, we didn't talk about LLMs back then, let alone now.
00:06:47
Speaker
We have this breakthrough, ChatGPT, OpenAI, and it comes through. And what I felt at the time was, oh, like now I'm only two steps ahead of everyone else. This stuff is really advancing in a crazy way.
00:06:59
Speaker
But the catalyst for the question really came, I would say, a week before I wrote that. I have a lot of my peers... saying to me things like, hey, I'm noticing Claude isn't delivering great results for us anymore. It's people talk about hallucinations.
00:07:12
Speaker
I think hallucinations are people who hallucinate and make mistakes. What I find is it does a lot more as it drifts. It knows what you wanted for a bit and then it drifts away and you can't really get it back. Like, how do I start this over? Do I reprompt it? like What do I do?
00:07:24
Speaker
And on chat GPT, especially now, this was really strange to me because I was only seeing better and better iterations and improvements. I was thinking strategically, perhaps it's because I'm doing more reinforcement training on it, whatever output it gives me, I'll then put it and say, actually, this is now my final version of all that stuff.
AI and the Future of Work Skills
00:07:42
Speaker
What I think happened and led me to that is two things. One is I feel the reasoning models really did shift how the output of a lot of the LLMs was happening. The bigger one is I started realizing, oh, no, I'm not two steps. I'm actually 10 steps ahead again.
00:07:57
Speaker
Why? Because in particular, OpenAI, clearly it has all of my content. So what is my content? It's 20 plus years of writing almost every day, of appearing on podcasts, of doing this longest running business podcast and hours and hours of how my thinking is, how I format, how I do everything.
00:08:14
Speaker
And I was realizing that the more I'm just doing the basics with it and pushing it and then learning and going back and forth, it was just getting better and better. Where did it lead me to? It lead lead me led me to the point where I was getting people giving me feedback on my content, in particular on LinkedIn, and they would quote lines.
00:08:33
Speaker
And my comment back was, how do you know I wrote that, or if the AI wrote it, or if we did it together? And so I would even say to you, like, Mark, you liked that article. It led to this. Who was that? Was that the AI that wrote most of it? Was it me that wrote most of it? Or was it us working together?
00:08:47
Speaker
The answer doesn't matter. right What matters is that At my advanced age, I'm able to recognize that it's getting very close to not necessarily replacing me.
00:09:00
Speaker
There is still the human in the loop concept, which we can talk about, but at a grander scale, if it's doing that much at that level of skill, impressing me.
00:09:10
Speaker
It's sending backs up, whether it's strategically, whether it's content wise, whatever that I'm looking at that with my experience and going, that's as good, if not better than how I would think of it or frame it. What does that mean? And so that became the catalyst against all the work I'm doing with clients and seeing the work that we're predominantly doing and and the work and how we are 80% of an executive's work is looking for things, searching.
00:09:32
Speaker
It's like going through this spreadsheet, going through, When you start removing that, then you start saying, what is the skill set? This is like a whole other paradigm, which we can talk about later ah in terms of what is the work we do and how good of the current tools are great at replicating it.
00:09:49
Speaker
One thread that I do want to focus on is the doesn't matter question. I wrote something recently. I use chat GPT the same way that you do. I have lots of content that it can suck up.
00:10:05
Speaker
The content that it produces right now is so good. The question is, does the audience care whether content was written by ah robot or handcrafted by a human as long as it delivers insight, perspective, guidance,
00:10:25
Speaker
delivers the value that people want from content. Because you think about it, content for the sake of content is useless, but content that builds trust and credibility and gets people to think about you or your company in a new, better or different way is super valuable.
00:10:43
Speaker
At the end of the day, is the consumer really going to care whether i did some really great prompts or whether I spent hours crafting the article? It's a whole new world, and i don't think it really matters anymore.
00:10:56
Speaker
So this is the exact chasm that we have crossed in society that nobody wants to admit we crossed. because it creates a cataclysmic outpouring of problems.
00:11:07
Speaker
but just exactly But you are exactly correct, which is the fact that I can ask this question, and even someone like you who is skilled in wordsmith and understanding probably couldn't cogently figure it out, means that one, it is human in the loop for sure, obviously, that there's a certain thing happening there, but ultimately that the content resonated with you without knowing the answer is what's powerful.
00:11:31
Speaker
And I think what's like most telling about this, and this is why I think we've crossed that chasm, is every single comment you see when somebody posts something that is AI generated, which is the person consumes the content and they're trying in the comments to look smart, telling you what they see is a, oh, it's an M dash is the favorite thing with chat GPT. So that's the signal or the hand had six fingers, the running joke around that.
00:11:55
Speaker
And it's the wrong thing. I actually commented on someone's post who was writing about this the other day. That's the wrong thing because what should be happening is, did you if I didn't tell you it was AI, you would probably just consume it versus consuming it with this filter of trying to catch it.
00:12:11
Speaker
And so ah knowing that we're both in that phase of trying to catch it and discern what it is, whether you're a teacher or you're employer or whatever, while at the same time, me also knowing that the output is undetectable when done well, puts us in this very precarious situation. Like it's super precarious because...
00:12:29
Speaker
You're absolutely right. Music business is something else that I had another lifetime in. And you'd say it's a drum machine. It's not a real drummer playing. Does that make it? It's like some of the biggest hits in the world don't have a human being playing on it. Did that make it not resonate with you?
00:12:42
Speaker
The people who are complaining are the same people who will go to an EDM concert and say it was life changing. like it's think about it. So why? Now, this is the bigger thing. Why is because we don't want to sit here and admit that potentially what we have defined as the thing that makes us human, this creative force, this thing no computer could ever do, actually could, did it very quickly, and is fooling everybody when we don't say it's
AI's Challenge to Traditional Knowledge Work
00:13:08
Speaker
AI. I'll give you a very quick example. On Thinkers 1, each thinker has to provide like a little demo video of like them just presenting their ideas. Look, we have people who aren't
00:13:17
Speaker
necessarily great at video and adept it. So I curate for that. They'll keep their notes off to the side and you can see they're looking to the side. So we had a demo that came in, demo for the profile, and I took it and I dumped it into one of the AI tools that I use called Descript, which I use for transferring and editing and all this stuff.
00:13:34
Speaker
And it has an eye contact feature, which is you click the button and it just basically puts in like a little fake pupil almost so that it looks like you're constantly looking dead at at the screen. I send it to my business partner who knows all these tricks.
00:13:46
Speaker
And I said, here's the video. he goes, wow, it's really good. And then I sent him the old version before. And he was like, oh, my God, wow. And then he started getting concerned. He said, okay, but now that I know that, like it looks fake.
00:13:58
Speaker
Right. hold But hold on. You didn't know that. You didn't think it looked fake when I didn't tell you about it. That to me is high level of creativity, Mark. It's the ability to, that something moves you without you caring whether the baseline was played on a keyboard digitally or it was one of the greatest bass players in the world.
00:14:17
Speaker
This is that moment. Is it not unlike the trends formation of manual tasks into automated tasks? No. So think about, no no, I think about all the people doing all these manual tasks and all the manual inputting of data and playing with data. And now it's all automated. And now in a sense, content is being automated.
00:14:42
Speaker
you But you don't see parallels. I don't see the parallel only because that's very binary to me. You could have the greatest mathematician in the world and a two-year-old type in two plus two equals four, and that is the answer.
00:14:56
Speaker
Some people might even argue that in this society, but let's assume that we're there. This is different, to me at least, because of the nuance of what it outputs based off of the input, based off of what it knows, based off of there are so many other mitigating factors that makes it like hyper different as an end result.
00:15:17
Speaker
that I feel personally like it doesn't have the same thing. And again, I actually would argue that it's probably the biggest challenge I've had from an intellectual standpoint as someone who's trying to think deeply about this of what do we call that?
00:15:31
Speaker
What do we call it when the actual end result is the same as us all doing two plus two equals four, but it's a very, actually very actually different because you and I could have the exact same prompt. Let's talk in terms of text here and the output is going to be so different.
00:15:45
Speaker
And then what the final product is going to be is going to be so different. You're right that it can do that. But in in theory, it's not what I think it's the bigger thing is that if you think about your work as a bunch of tasks that you do for one person or department and then another department,
00:16:04
Speaker
That type of repetition is what AI eats for breakfast. Like that to me is the bigger problem. The stuff that we had defined as knowledge work, white collar, stuff that required an advanced sec post-secondary degree that in order to receive a certain amount of sum, a salary, you had to have many years of to be able to look at something and go, this is that.
00:16:26
Speaker
And then I can do this is that for a whole bunch of different people and generate a lot of money because that's the that's gone. And that to me is a real affront to how we think about society and work because we always perch that at the highest level of this is what you want everybody to. This was the goal. This was the quote unquote American dream of modern times.
00:16:45
Speaker
You get an advanced degree, you sit behind the desk, you dress well, you make a ton of money and people come to you as if you're some type of Oracle. And again, there was an article I think was in Psychology Magazine or sochiat Psychology Today.
00:16:56
Speaker
The title was The End of I Don't Know. This is a very big shift. Like for me, Aubrey, my business partner, and I will have debates over products, ideas. And instead of debating this now, we literally have built.
00:17:09
Speaker
a bot that understands the business, understands business strategy, take inputs from some of the people we respect. I could call on Roger Martin as a business strategist to think about my business. And it's the end of like, we don't know. like we literally use it as a third partner to people would say it could hallucinate. It can, but if you take what it says and then tell it to steel man the argument,
00:17:30
Speaker
and then to straw man the argument, and to put in the framework of Roger. If you are smart and you have skill, which is what I think we both have, you can tell when it's drifting or hallucinating, or it doesn't know when it's making stuff up.
00:17:42
Speaker
So again, the human in the loop is still there, but it's why I don't think it's the same model as this kind of binary output. I just don't think it's there. It's very different. In that LinkedIn post, you quoted anthropic stereo emoti about AI potentially eliminate half of entry level white collar jobs. How real do you think that risk is?
00:18:02
Speaker
And what does it mean for business leaders today? have no insight into the work you're doing, but let's just say you were still in the marketing consulting business and you had to hire somebody to do the work. Would you hire entry level at this point?
00:18:17
Speaker
No. Exactly. So this is the whole thing. This is the whole enchilada right there. What it's doing when it starts is it's like the web too. It's like, why were we all blogging? we were all blogging because you couldn't really do pictures. You couldn't do video.
00:18:29
Speaker
You couldn't do audio at the time. Then audio came in. That was the next one. Then images after and then video. It's the same logic. it's it's If it's able to perform at that level, and some are arguing it's at the PhD level, and I would argue it's probably pretty close to that as well.
00:18:43
Speaker
Who are we hiring? Why would I take and hire that person when I can use the system to do those tasks? and then higher, perhaps parallel or higher or more senior.
00:18:55
Speaker
So that seems to make sense in stasis, right? It doesn't make any sense in terms of what do we do in five years? What do we do with all these current people who are studying and need to be employed, but even just ongoing? Where do then people get experience? Where do they?
00:19:08
Speaker
And the answer might be that we are in a world where everybody was studying mathematics before the calculator, and now they have a calculator. So now it has to go beyond what the calculator does.
00:19:19
Speaker
And that's a really challenging place for us to be societally. And I think that's the bigger warning that these leaders are putting out to us, which is we're going to be able to build a billion dollar company without many very junior entry, maybe even mid-level people. Just historically, we know Facebook, Google will built these multi-trillion dollar businesses with way less people than it took in decades before.
00:19:41
Speaker
And that's the scale of which we have to be concerned. We have to be concerned because we know that society fragments and breaks apart as unemployment rises. It's a very problematic thing.
00:19:52
Speaker
I've got three kids between the ages 25 18.
00:19:56
Speaker
What should I tell them about this AI world in which they're trying to establish careers, trying to get an education? It sounds very doom and gloom.
00:20:07
Speaker
It sounds like those entry-level positions that you and I had where we worked hard and we networked and made relationships was important. It mattered. It got us into the corporate world. But... Are you saying there'll be fewer of those opportunities or are you saying that the people who are going to have entry level jobs will have a completely different skill set?
00:20:26
Speaker
It's not enough for them to gain experience on the job. They've got to come in with specific skills to help them establish a foothold. So meta thought that I have is driven to the place of education and then I can get to like skills that I think people need to think about, not just your kids, but all of us.
00:20:46
Speaker
One is education. So my first meta thought would be we need to take and bring down the prestige that we have assigned to certain vocations that we do post-secondary. I'm looking particularly, as I think about this, at places like engineering, legal, medicine.
00:21:05
Speaker
My thought is we make all of those the same material value as a trade. And then what you do is you elevate the trades up. plumbing, mechanical, all that. So what you're doing is essentially saying, look, we are in a world, if you take medicine as an example, where you have nurse practitioners, pharmacists, people who can now give vaccines and doing that. We all know this. You go to see a doctor, the smart doctors will say, put all of your stuff at the chat GPT and have it do some outputs for you. It's going to do way better than I can. This professional saying that.
00:21:32
Speaker
So one is we need a very big shift in how we think about the value of education. I think one thing that it has to happen, I don't see how that happens. When
Human Agency vs AI in Technological Advancements
00:21:42
Speaker
it comes to people, i I put out this, what I call the PACE framework, and it's really simple. P is for palate, which is taste.
00:21:49
Speaker
So when I asked you earlier, did you know, Mark, if it was me who wrote it, but if it was Mitch bought, or was it a combined work? What I'm trying to get to is that it doesn't really matter because what happened is for someone to hit publish, in this case, it was me.
00:22:03
Speaker
I have to have a certain taste about it, palate about it. Now, that is something that I don't think is intrinsically human. I think this AI is going to get better and better at understanding my palate, my taste. So so that, again, all of this is how long timeframe event horizon, I don't know.
00:22:17
Speaker
That's one. Two is agency. We as humans need to really define both personally, like what is our agency, but as a group too. We don't have to do this. And that's the other big thought, right? Like we don't have to constantly develop technology that's gonna replace us. Like we don't have to do that.
00:22:34
Speaker
We could look at this and say we wanted to do certain things and not other things because we want what, again, is this idea of human in the loop, that there's always a person there to do things. The variance on that is is really important. I don't think we want to be in that place that you see in the movie 1984 and or in the big corporation of the Imperial Death Star where we're basically verifiers, like the AIs and computers are doing all the work and then there's just a human in the loop is at the end going check or X. like We don't want that.
00:22:59
Speaker
so I don't think anybody is going to feel like they're growing and that they're important if they're just validating what the machines do. so Again, that's the agency of what we have to decide as human beings. The C is the bigger one, which I think also speaks to your kids in particular and mine as well, which is commune.
00:23:14
Speaker
and No matter what happens, whether it was the global pandemic of six plus years ago or AI, people have a deep desire to connect. The truth is you could have sent me the questions. I could have pumped it into my GPT. It would have sounded great.
00:23:26
Speaker
It's not the same as you and i spending time together. And we both know that this would only be better if we had done it in person. Yes. So we know this because you could watch a concert streaming on YouTube, but it's not the same as going to a concert. And I do think that is part of what is intrinsically human. So what does that mean?
00:23:44
Speaker
There's lots of opportunity economically in the space of commune. whether it's building events, doing events, getting people to come together, just creating spaces for people to commune and build community.
00:23:56
Speaker
And then the last one is it's cheesy, but it's E and it's elevate. And it's this idea that we have to raise the bar always. We had to raise the bar when social media came out. We had to raise the bar when mobile came out.
00:24:07
Speaker
I think it was Seth Godin who said, you have to decide in life, either you're going to raise your own bar or someone's going to do it to you. Kind of like that. This is the type of lessons I'm trying to teach. The problem is, I find in particular with my kids, is that they're still in a system that isn't moving like that.
00:24:26
Speaker
And this is going to be problematic because the direction and the momentum of this technology is unlike anything I've ever seen. And I've been looking at this stuff again since I was very young. I want to ask you one more question about the labor market and then get into what you're doing with ThinkersOne.
00:24:42
Speaker
I read stories ah about companies like OpenText and Shopify in which they say that they are eliminating hundreds if not thousands of jobs and that they're going to be AI first.
00:24:56
Speaker
Somebody like a Toby Lutti will say it's all about automation. It's all about taking manual tasks and using AI to drive efficiencies and productivity.
00:25:07
Speaker
And if you're the CEO of a publicly traded company and the bottom line is the bottom line.
AI's Role in Efficiency and Societal Implications
00:25:12
Speaker
in terms of rewarding or making sure that shareholders properly, which is your mandate as the CEO of a publicly traded company, then that's something that you would lean into. But I think from a societal basis in terms of the greater good is that that kind of commentary scares me because it's questions the role of corporations in terms of employing lots and lots of people and making society a better place because everybody has something valuable and useful to do.
00:25:43
Speaker
Do those announcements scare you or is it a sign of the times or is it part of this AI hype machine that we're in where every CEO has to be seen as embracing AI?
00:25:55
Speaker
When it comes to the hype of AI, my general sentiment to audiences, do my keynote presentations is I think it's currently under-hyped short-term and under-hyped long-term because of what I consider be this idea of stasis. So that would be my general sentiment.
00:26:09
Speaker
Part of the provocation of that article article was these are the questions we actually don't want to talk about. These are the things we will avoid. If in an organization, there's two of us, there's you and there's me, you're not using AI, I'm using it really well.
00:26:23
Speaker
And the executives are monitoring that. And what they quickly learn is that, wow, Mitch is phenomenal. like Just look at how much output he's in, look how much better the output is, look at how much time he's doing. I just noticed when I looked in the backend of Mitch's work that the AI is just getting increasingly good at actually doing it and even knowing what he wants to do next, which is it's it's getting there.
00:26:44
Speaker
At what point do they look at that and think, now we don't need him? Is it when I get to 20% of human in the loop? Is it 5%? I'm not saying you survive. I don't think you survive because I'm just more efficient and having a better output.
00:26:56
Speaker
It's this weirder idea, which is more important than what you're asking, of what happens when I'm literally training it and getting it to the point where it doesn't need me. And the analytics on the back end of the employment structure is such that it's just looking at this across everybody.
00:27:12
Speaker
They're just helping us essentially make it better and better to the point we have all. And by the way, it's not one output. It's the Mitch output. It's the Mark output. It's got these different sentiments and feelings. So when we say, is it AI hype?
00:27:26
Speaker
Maybe there is more of this vision of like where we actually go with this and look what it actually, what actually happens in this moment. So yeah. I'm not sure. Secondarily, it's not a question to me of shareholder value and them creating this so that the markets applaud them for that. I don't think that's the case. I think the bigger thing in this is every single technology has promised us two things, mostly productivity and time back.
00:27:51
Speaker
Are you working less, Mark? No, not at all. So this is what happens as we start using it and realize that, oh, I can actually do more for more people. But at what point does that not become the metric?
00:28:04
Speaker
Right. I believe that's what they're thinking about. If they are really having the thought experiment versus just a platitude to the markets. So I'm more focused on that. I'm actually not working less. Right.
00:28:16
Speaker
we work more and more. I find that the output and my ability to be my best has increased significantly. Meaning the work that is somewhat menial or tedious, I really have outputted to the machine and it gives me more time whether I'm using the machine or not,
00:28:33
Speaker
to really explore my thinking. again I don't know if it's me inflating my own tires, I don't think it is, but I feel since I've started really deep diving with these tools that I've never been smarter in the sense of I can see my confirmation bias now.
00:28:49
Speaker
It's changing my opinion, it's giving me a new perspective, it's giving me someone else's. And so whatever final result I get to, I'm finding personally that I'm a much better person for it.
AI Tools Transforming Workflows
00:29:01
Speaker
Now, the problem is if I'm doing that as an employee and not as my own business, what happens? One final question about ai before we move on. Curious about how you personally use AI in your own work.
00:29:14
Speaker
And where you draw the line between augmentation and replacement? Augmentation and replacement, I don't necessarily think apply to me because in my case, I would love to get it to the point where it can replace me. And the output is everyone who is exposed to my work feels as connected to it, that would be actually like a very interesting place for me to be where I'm at professionally where I'm at in my time. don't think it's good for everybody.
00:29:39
Speaker
But for me, what I find interesting about the question of like, where I use it, my answer is one, almost in everything. But the bigger thing that I would tell you is and I don't know about you, but I'm as much as I talk about change, I don't like change.
00:29:52
Speaker
Like I'm pretty set in my ways, especially when it comes to tools and software. Like the last thing I think I have time to do is to learn a whole new software or figure things out. I would argue that in the past two years, my stack of tools that I use to both create, edit, think has been a 180. Like the tools that I used before are gone and the tools that I use now are completely different.
00:30:16
Speaker
And that says something that was a huge signal to me to really start rethinking how I think about it, how I communicated about it, and even how I talk about it. So what does it look like? It's literally everything. I don't think there is anything from basic note taking to massive editing my podcast where it's not either doing the work or a significant part of it.
00:30:38
Speaker
I think what's really interesting is people use these tools and they're wonderful and they love them. And then Descript, for example, which I also use, do you forget the fact that it's AI powered. We're recording on Riverside. My greatest example of the simplicity of it is with that question, I'll answer it with a live example of this.
00:30:56
Speaker
So now you're recording, but usually it's inverted. I'm the host and I'm interviewing people. And then when I would do my show, the biggest problem I had was, to be honest, like show notes. It was a nightmare. It was, oh, I got to go in now and listen to everything and then timestamp everything then create a title for each thing.
00:31:12
Speaker
I need a summary of the show. i'm goingnna have some key takeaways. And so I never did it. My show notes were the worst, which I think impeded the growth of six pixels of separation. A hundred percent. I start using Riverside. And again, I'm being just Mitch dumb.
00:31:25
Speaker
I don't buy the software and then study everything. I just start using it. And then I see a thing when they show notes, what's that? I hit the button and it literally generates the timeline, the timestamp, the takeaways, a summary. And I'm like, oh, so I look at that and I go, does the audience care if I generated that or not?
00:31:44
Speaker
No one cares. And I'd even argue that the summary is better than what I did before, which was I'd hop over to your website, copy and paste your bio and take it out of first person to third person, maybe take out some adjectives. so That's all I was doing.
00:31:56
Speaker
This is work that if I gave to somebody, it would have taken days to do and cost me thousands of dollars for no real menial return on that. It's a show notes in the podcast. So that's more when you talk about like these everyday things, it's striking to me. But what does that mean?
00:32:10
Speaker
It doesn't mean that I would take the recording of this habit, do notes, and then send you our three takeaways. Like people just caught, I literally had a friend of mine tell me the other day, they were in, he's an executive and they were in a meeting. And he went to one of the management people and said, hey, can you just send around the follow up?
00:32:25
Speaker
And the person goes, oh, I haven't had a chance to copy and paste the notes from the AI. And they were like, no, like I needed you to look through that stuff and come up with the three takeaways. But to them, it was just copy paste. It's going to give me the three takeaways.
00:32:38
Speaker
So that's the difference. But the usage is it's like literally that it's 100% replacement. Yeah. show notes. I never, it was never even doing it to, Oh, like the actual, everything is so much better now because the stuff that I'm focused on the questions, how I want to formulate them, which by the way, I use these tools for on top of that, it just makes the show so much better.
Mitch's Entrepreneurial Path and Insights
00:32:59
Speaker
Okay. It's a tough, it's a very tough moment. Let's shift gears and talk about thinkers. One, before we get into what this new venture does and why you launched it,
00:33:12
Speaker
Curious about your entrepreneurial journey. a lot of people are entrepreneurs from the get-go. My son, for example, is 18 and desperately wants to be an entrepreneur. i I was a reporter for 20 years and stumbled into being an entrepreneur. It wasn't anything that I thought I would do.
00:33:30
Speaker
And I look at entrepreneurship and it's very sexy. Everyone talks about being your own boss and being the master or mistress of your own domain.
00:33:41
Speaker
And being a solo entrepreneur is super exciting, but the reality is it's not for everybody. Entrepreneurship is hard as it's a 24 seven proposition. it has ups and downs, even though you like the ups you don't like the downs, but It is something that I think a lot of people want to embrace.
00:34:03
Speaker
And I'd like to know whether you thought when you were a younger man, whether this was your path, whether entrepreneurship was the thing that you saw yourself doing, you know or whether it was just sort of part of your personal growth, your personal journey. You had an opportunity.
00:34:19
Speaker
you at the right place at the right time and then you went for it and once you caught the bug you recognized that this is something that you wanted to do this is something that you could do you could start a a businessman scratch and it's under pinned your professional career over the last 30 40 years so in control at delete my second book i talk about squiggly as this life path where it's not like top left top like that's the arc of your career it's all over the place you go back you forward you fail I remember a couple things when I was really young. I came from a lower middle class family in a somewhat affluent area.
00:34:53
Speaker
And I remember having sleepover play dates with friends and stuff and looking at the parents at a very young age and thinking they have a lot more than we have. And this person doesn't seem that i'm much smarter than my dad.
00:35:04
Speaker
It was like a very illuminating thought was a young person. And I realized not that it's dumb people make is not that it was more like, oh, you don't need any superior level of anything to actually be successful.
00:35:19
Speaker
And so that was one part. One was that part two was I wanted things when I was that age. I was young. My friend gets a car at 16 or a moped or all this fun stuff. And I'm like, I can't afford a bike.
00:35:30
Speaker
So I was definitely driven for like the things that I wanted to do. So I started working at a very young age. What I realized then is being the metalhead rock kid that I was, too, is that I didn't do great with the authority part of it.
00:35:43
Speaker
I knew these menial jobs and I could do them. i didn't need someone beating me up over it. It just didn't feel great. So it was just interesting that the way my career started was in music journalism. It was through networking and friends. And I was very fortuitous in that path. And at the same time, tangentially had parents that were supportive of bringing technology into the home, like early Atari 800 computers. And I was like printing up book reports on a dot matrix computer and getting a zero on it because the teacher didn't believe that I wrote it, right, because it's my handwriting.
00:36:14
Speaker
So there was all of this thing happening at the same time. But what really happened is i got – after running music magazines and running my own business, I burnt out and thought I would go into the corporate world. and I did that for a while, and I i really enjoyed it.
00:36:26
Speaker
But I also realized that being in the corporate world just gave me this feeling the pit of my stomach that it was almost like allowance. My parents – I made my bed, and i did my thing. Can I have my money? And it was this weird, like I just had this weird thing. And so I had a bad experience in one workplace and I thought, I'm just done.
00:36:42
Speaker
And so it was the allowance mindset. It was, look, I can work for people and make a lot of money that I would have to ask for, or i could start something, which I had an inclement, I was inclined to do.
00:36:53
Speaker
And at the same time, realize that if you do this, it's almost unlimited. Your potential becomes unlimited and assert to a certain degree. There was that, but the bigger thing that happened to me, which I think is where you were going is I love to, it's the Michael Gerber e-myth story.
00:37:07
Speaker
I love baking pies. Your pies the best. You should sell your pies. I sell my pies. You're doing so well. It's great. I'm working so hard. I should probably open a store. and You open store and the the store goes bankrupt. And what happens in the entrepreneur's myth and Michael Gerber, it's so true is that person didn't realize that they are no longer baking pies. They are actually in the business.
00:37:26
Speaker
of selling pies. It's a very different place. That to me was also the big paradigm shift where I realized I need to pursue things I'm interested in, but at the same time, I'm okay not doing it so much as running the business to be successful, to be able to do it.
Creating a New Product Category with ThinkersOne
00:37:41
Speaker
That has guided me very well, allowance mindset and then that world. And again, being fortunate enough to, I think you know the story, but I was introduced to hardly from Shopify. at a He wasn't even doing Shopify. He was doing smoofer at the time.
00:37:54
Speaker
He was following my stuff. We got to meet him. So watching that has been extraordinary. But watching it has also given me this place where 95% of businesses are going to fail. We know that.
00:38:05
Speaker
But the bar to start a business is very low. And that's also like an interesting part of the story too. It's like the ability to start a business in this day and age from not the lawyers and geography and all of these things. It's astounding. And so I feel like it's very, that is where I get extremely opportunistic because if you can use and think about these tools in that way and look ultimately, what are we talking about? We're talking about the market has a need. I can fulfill that need.
00:38:32
Speaker
Those are the the bigger ideas that I'm constantly thinking about. And that's the journey. On a side note, let's hope that your early interactions with Harley led you to be an early investor in Shopify. There's countless mistakes that Harley likes to remind me about along the way.
00:38:47
Speaker
that have things i Look, I was head down doing what I was doing, for sure. Did I benefit when they went public and I bought stocks like everyone else? I absolutely did. but it And it was nothing more than me really believing in the business, having spoken to many wealth managers and them thinking there was this crazy multiple there, me realizing there is a crazy multiple there at the time, but the difference is most businesses will fail, but after five years, the ones that succeed are gonna start spitting out money. They're gonna require more capital, more tools, and Shopify is providing it. And to me, it just felt like a great model.
00:39:19
Speaker
Given the economic times in which we are currently living in, the volatility, the uncertainty, and at the same time, the impact of AI,
00:39:29
Speaker
What's been your biggest surprise or challenge in building ThinkersOne that you didn't anticipate? and Maybe we should take a step back and explain what ThinkersOne does and why you decided to launch it. It's basically a marketplace where companies can buy personalized 15-minute video experiences from some of the best thinkers in the world.
00:39:49
Speaker
So one product is you can think of it as almost like a custom Ted talk where you go on the site, they have topics, the thought leaders, you choose our topic, you personalize it in a form you put on your credit card within four to five business days.
00:40:01
Speaker
You get a link to a customized talk that you can present to your team for your event, whatever you want to 15 minute experiences. So again, short. Simple. The other product is a live Q and A, which is the ability to go live with the thought leader and ask them anything. You're almost like the podcast host for 15 minutes. We have someone in your business do it.
00:40:18
Speaker
And it's a way to pick a very smart person's brain about whatever topic is relevant to you. Where did, why did we come to this one is we had COVID and the world collapsed. And i realized right then that I was getting a lot of inquiries for, Hey, can you pop into our zoom or, Hey, can you record this for 15 minute thing on where AI is going or whatever it might be.
00:40:36
Speaker
The problem with those mandates from the thought leader side is it requires the same amount of work as their consulting and their speaking. It's a lot of back and forth. It's contracts, it's payments, it's billing. So we essentially Shopify the process. We made it very easy and accessible for everybody.
00:40:51
Speaker
The other side is we wanted to take and bring these people that you see on stages and on YouTube and in podcasts and make them accessible to everyday businesses, not just the annual general meeting or at the big event that you go to. So that was the other thought.
00:41:03
Speaker
And then on the client side, on the customer side, look, we live in a hybrid world. And if you asked team members across the board, small, medium, large, B2B, B2C, hey, do you feel like you're moving fast enough? Like they don't wanna move faster.
00:41:17
Speaker
Nobody thinks that they're not moving fast enough. Also, They're begging for professional development in a world where we're not connecting to see the commune part. This gives leaders a great chance, I think, to inject that into their meetings so that you're not forcing them to go and watch this or go take this online course. or You can actually say, look, our hour meeting is 45 minutes plus this cool little thing.
00:41:40
Speaker
It's professional development. It adds an element of surprise and delight of intelligence, of having a third party that you can speak to. So that was the idea of it. We are trying. It's a very, it's always challenging because you're doing new categories. Like, I don't think this would be as tough as as a product to sell if it was like, no one thinks to look for a 15 minute experience. So that's the challenges in the category creation. But look, once people try it, they love it. Like they're going nuts for it. So it's been a fun and interesting thing.
00:42:09
Speaker
Thanks, Mitch, for sharing your insights, challenging our assumptions and giving us so much more to think about when it comes to the future of work, AI and what it really means to be irreplaceable. If you found this episode valuable, I'd love it if you could leave a review or share it with a colleague, especially someone wrestling with the same questions that Mitch and I explored today.
00:42:27
Speaker
Marketing Spark is all about helping B2B SaaS founders, marketing leaders and entrepreneurs uncover what's working, what's changing and what's next in the world of growth and storytelling. If you're a B2B SaaS marketer or a founder with a unique story or a fresh take on marketing, growth, or leadership, I'd love to hear from you.
00:42:43
Speaker
Reach out to me on LinkedIn, and let's talk about getting you on the show. Until next time, thanks again for listening to Marketing Spark.