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Season 1 Wrapped and a Casual Conversation
388 Plays2 years ago
Meredith sits back down with Kelli Corney for a wide ranging chat to close out our first season of the show. For a behind the scenes look at launching the show and Season 1, check out Meredith's post at https://meredithfarley.substack.com/p/how-to-start-a-podcast-in-4000-words
Subscribe to the Content People newsletter at https://meredithfarley.substack.com/
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Transcript
Opening Reflections and Unexpected Insights
00:00:00
Speaker
This is a tangent, but at one point the interviewer asked him, they're like, is there anything you wish you didn't know? And he says, yeah, who killed Kennedy?
Season Finale Announcement and Format
00:00:19
Speaker
Hey gang, welcome to episode 18 of Content People in the last episode of season one. Today's episode's a little bit different because it's the last episode of the season. I wanted it to be more casual and laid back. I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do, but my friend Kelly Corny, who is our resident brand expert slash friend of the pod, you might remember her from episode 15.
00:00:41
Speaker
Kelly was like, you haven't actually talked all that much. You're usually just asking questions. Why don't I interview you? So here's our episode where Kelly interviews me.
Casual Listening and Episode Structure
00:00:51
Speaker
Kelly, thank you so much for doing this.
00:00:53
Speaker
It is long, it's like an hour and 40 minutes. If you finish it, you deserve a medal. This might be more of a friendly chatter on in the background style episode, which fair, you're still doing God's work and helping your numbers, I get it. What did we even talk about? That's a great question.
Intuition, Creativity, and Memorable Interviews
00:01:10
Speaker
I was on like three hours of sleep, so I kind of blacked it out, but then upon editing, I discovered that we covered some interesting things like intuition and creativity at work and in business.
00:01:21
Speaker
why some of the coolest projects seem to spring forth when folks feel like they've got nothing to lose, how it can feel like a risk to try something new and practice in public, my favorite Quincy Jones interview, and other things. I mean, it's long. We had time. We wandered. We say, Guede. We talked about AI. Kelly finally cut me off when I brought up aliens. Thanks, Kelly.
00:01:44
Speaker
As I mentioned, this is our last episode of Season 1, but we'll be back on June 15th with Season 2, a very important announcement.
Season 2 Announcements and Listener Engagement
00:01:54
Speaker
Season 2 will not be distributed by Brafton, so if you want to stay posted, make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can also sign up for our newsletter, Content People, which is linked in the show notes. If you have any feedback, dream guests, or ideas for future episodes, I would really love to hear from you.
00:02:11
Speaker
You can follow me on LinkedIn and connect with me there, or you can email us at contentpeoplepod at gmail.com.
Podcast Creation Insights and Feedback
00:02:19
Speaker
One last thing. Across Season 1, I started to get a lot of questions about how to start a podcast. There are obviously a lot of folks more expert than me, but I have learned a lot over Season 1 from the technical side of things to how to get new guests. I did a write-up in my sub-stack and will link it in the show notes. Check it out if you're interested.
00:02:37
Speaker
And okay, great review, subscribe, and thank you. Here's our episode. Thanks for listening. Am I talking first or you? I think I need to be our opening.
Creative Process and Career Journey
00:02:51
Speaker
Let's see. I'll just say, folks, you guys already know Kelly, Fractional CMO, branding expert, official friend of the pod, I would say, because this is your second app. Will you take that honor, Kelly? Will you accept it? I'm really accepting that title.
00:03:05
Speaker
Thank you. So Kelly and I are going to have a different type of combo today. This is the last episode of season one. And I was trying to figure out what should I do for it? Should it just be a regular one? I think there's some stuff that I probably like ideas that have been brewing over the season, stuff I haven't expressed. And Kelly had this idea. She's, why don't I interview you? Because actually, folks haven't really heard from you that much, which I thought was a great idea and really
00:03:35
Speaker
kind and generous of you to do, Kelly. So thank you. Very honored. No, I'm really looking forward to this too. I think it's going to be so much fun. And I know that you mentioned this last time when I was on, but Meredith and I are friends. We've been friends for a couple of years now. So some of this stuff I think are things that we just talk about when we talk to each other. But yeah, I just thought it would be interesting for everyone to get to know you a little bit better because I know how brilliant you are and I really value your advice. And I think everyone listening would value it as well.
00:04:05
Speaker
I think it's unusual for somebody to, maybe not unusual, but it's certainly not the most common thing for somebody to work basically the majority of their career in one company and to grow with that company to become one of the executive team, one of the main leaders.
00:04:26
Speaker
an entry level employee and then ending with Brafton as part of the C-suite. So I think that's a pretty interesting thing. And people, I don't know if people always know, understand like, how do you progress in a role? Like when you're in a place, how do you go from being that entry level person to working your way up? What things did you do or how did you navigate that?
Intuition in Leadership and Economic Resilience
00:04:50
Speaker
I can try and answer it.
00:04:53
Speaker
But I will say that I think a lot of it, and I feel like we'll talk about this later and you and I talk on this a bit, but some of it is intuitive and it's hard to express in an actual way that's useful advice to other folks. I think because I started when the economy was so bad.
00:05:09
Speaker
I felt like I didn't have a lot of career options. And so starting out as a writer, it was actually like really fun. I had a lot of other like really young colleagues who'd also just graduated. And I feel like when you're just graduating from school, the real world is intense and scary. And having like a cohort of other folks who are in the trenches with you is it's a powerful community. So from a social side, I felt very connected to the business in that way. And the hours were really long because there were
00:05:39
Speaker
insane quotas and that kind of focused me in a way because I couldn't lose the job. I needed the money. Um, and because a lot of my social circle was like other folks doing that job, I had a bit of tunnel vision in the beginning, which in hindsight, I don't know if it was a good thing or a bad thing. I remember applying for other jobs because the hours were really crazy. The money was not good when I first started, but things were not available.
00:06:08
Speaker
So I just had to figure out, OK, how do I survive in this environment? How do I keep my job? So I almost felt like I had no choice but to get good at it because the other option was not perform well, lose my job, and move back home because I didn't have any money. And then over time, I think things like organization, communication, working with others, it's funny because I don't think that as an undergraduate or before work
00:06:37
Speaker
I thought of those as skill sets of mine, but when I needed them, they really came out. And I don't know if this would be true for other people if it was just true for me and the time, but it was a startup. It was like a Wild West. And if you worked hard and you had ideas and you were able to solve some of the really big problems we were having around things like
00:07:01
Speaker
production quality delivery process organization structure. It was an environment where the skills that I had and I was learning that I had were really needed. So it was slightly symbiotic in that way. And I think I just got interested in it and I got passionate about it, about a lot of aspects of it, both the creative work
00:07:24
Speaker
and the people side management and organization and also just the space of digital marketing. It can be very fun and interesting. So your point from, I went from entry level to COO in 10 years.
00:07:40
Speaker
I feel like I want to make the point, and what am I trying to say here, that sometimes it's just luck. I do think I am talented and I have a specific skill set and abilities that were useful. Should I have stayed as long as I did? I don't know. Maybe. It was good. I made a lot of money, saved up, bought a house so financially it was fine.
00:08:03
Speaker
But there's opportunity costs there too. And there's also like a specific niche of business where that's possible. And it's like owner operated startups. If I had been in like Deloitte or even a bigger marketing or like maybe Arnold or something like that would not really have been a path that was available to me.
00:08:22
Speaker
I'm not to say who knows if it was good or bad. I'm grateful for my life now, so I'm not going to go time travel and tinker with things, but I don't know why I feel compelled to make that point for anyone listening. It's uncommon, but there's also special circumstances that led to it. Yeah, no, that's so interesting. I think that really connects to something that I think about a lot in my own life, but
00:08:47
Speaker
I know you and I have had lots of conversations about this in the past, but something I've always noticed in you and admired is
00:08:59
Speaker
You're so good at just intuitively knowing the right questions to ask. And I remember the first time we met and talked, by the end of our phone call, we met on Zoom, I think, by the end of our call, I remember being like, wow, I feel like she was just interviewing me. But in a way, that was really fun. It's sort of like you were able to dig out things, ask the right questions, and unlock
00:09:22
Speaker
Something for me, maybe like things that I had been thinking about in my head, but hadn't quite externalized yet, which I think are all qualities that obviously make you a excellent podcast host. So I've been interested in talking to you about the role that intuition plays in work. And you mentioned that a little bit when you were just describing your journey through Brafton, but how do you think about intuition and what role does it play in how you navigate your work?
00:09:52
Speaker
That's nice of you to say. I remember our first conversation just for listeners. Like someone we knew mutually was just like, I think you and Kelly would really like each other. And so we got intro'd and I was like, Oh my God, that was an electric conversation. She's amazing. But I don't, I think I'm really curious, but I don't always necessarily.
00:10:12
Speaker
I'm not like, damn, I really nailed that intuitively. You do what you do and it's hard to say what's effective or not effective or right or wrong in the moment. I feel like you and I have had good conversations about this. And it's something I've only thought of consciously more in the last couple years about the role that intuition can play at work. And I do think I have a really strong intuition.
00:10:38
Speaker
But the way I experienced it more was just a general sense of what we should do. And I always had a really strong, like, all right, guys, here's the problem. Put some thoughts together. Here's the plan. Here's how we'll execute. Let's go. And that's actually not masculine in the sense of manly, but masculine in the sense of a structured masculine energy in some ways. But what was often guiding it for me was like feelings, like bodily feelings of this pinged a solution in me, or I believe this is the way forward.
00:11:09
Speaker
I think probably learning to trust my perception of things and my intuition is something that I've gotten much, much better at over time consciously. And I think it's been really helpful to me. I feel like you're a pretty intuitive person as well too. I think for longer, you've been more consciously aware of it and better able to knowingly harness it. Would you say that's true? Yeah, I think it's something I've always known about myself, whether or not I had the words to put to it.
00:11:38
Speaker
But as you were talking, I was just thinking about how I actually think it's one of my biggest strengths as a leader. And maybe you'll identify with this as well, where I think one of the most important things you can do as a leader is have an internal compass and trust it because
00:11:56
Speaker
I think often there are many right answers to a question. I think for anyone who isn't in a leadership position, it can feel really intimidating when you look at the people making decisions and you're like, oh my gosh, how do they always know the right decision? It's not that there's one right decision. There's multiple right decisions, but you have to know yourself enough and trust your gut and have a strong internal compass
00:12:19
Speaker
that you can really pay attention to where that feeling is telling you to go and then lead from that. That's how I interpret it anyway when I think about this for myself in work. And as I look back at the things that I've done or my successes, being able to have that, I'll say the phrase again, strong internal compass and trust it, really has been the thing that's made or break, would make or break things in any certain situation.
00:12:50
Speaker
So that's a little bit of a more logical understanding of it. I think sometimes when you talk about intuition, it can sound very like woo woo and people are afraid of going in that direction with it. And part of the reason I ask this question is because I think it taps into something really interesting that's happening in like a bigger cultural sense where we are all trying to collectively grapple with
00:13:19
Speaker
the nature of truth and these things that we perceive as opposites, like science versus religion or facts versus intuition. And when you start talking about this kind of stuff, I think you probably get strong reactions from people. Either a lot of nodding along, yes, intuition is super important, and then a lot of people who immediately feel like that's a red flag, we need to have more objective things
00:13:48
Speaker
to think about with this and not lean into this woo woo stuff and what is intuition anyway. I know that Daniel Kahneman, am I saying his name right? His book, Thinking Fast and Slow, he talks a lot about intuition in ways that I both agree and don't agree with. I don't know. Maybe I'm overtalking this, but I just think it's saying it. It's something that feels very real to me. I think even as I look at how you've
00:14:12
Speaker
put together this podcast and conversations we've had about it. One thing I really admire in the way that you've done it is it feels very natural. It has a very easy flow to it. And yeah, I credit your sort of sense of intuition and ability to follow what feels right to you.
00:14:30
Speaker
With that yeah i've got so many thoughts on that and i was taking some quick notes as you talked because. And actually i think maybe i got this from thinking fast and slow i read it a long time ago but i think that there's some science around what intuition is probably like a difficult to define term.
00:14:48
Speaker
But in some instances, it's probably just info that we have very quickly but accurately processed unconsciously. And we are now aware of and working off of this foundational fact, but we're not aware that we put pieces like ABCD, etc. together. We're just like, oh, I have a knowing about this, which makes me think we're going to need to do XYZ.
00:15:13
Speaker
So on one hand, it can be great. It just means you're a fast, unconscious processor, and that's helpful when you're trying to quickly put together plans. But I also think one thing that can be tricky, and I'm curious if you've ever encountered this, is that sometimes when you're managing people, especially when you're managing managers, and you're not wholly on the same page, and you give it space, you try and get there, but ultimately you're like, okay,
00:15:41
Speaker
we're gonna go with my call on this one. And it's truly just my feeling. Like my opinion is not better or worse than your opinion, but we're gonna go with my gut on this. It can be a kind of weird feeling to ask leaders beneath you to follow your gut. There's a lot of weird things happening there because it's not their intuition. They might not wanna follow your gut.
00:16:01
Speaker
I've had leaders, managers say to me, like, it's just an instinct I have on this. And I've thought, yeah, I don't trust your instinct on that. But also I've had instances where I was like, you know what?
00:16:15
Speaker
I am this person's manager, but they're the person that's going to have to manage this person. I don't want them to hire. So all right, go for it. We're having a difference of opinion. I'm going to let you go with your person and like multiple times it then crashed and burned. And I had, I think it actually shifted some things for me. Like I had to learn the lesson a few times that I am willing to exert my opinions and intuition on the teams that I manage in certain instances.
00:16:42
Speaker
even with no facts around it. And that's always like a tricky dynamic for a manager, but it was something I had to learn over time because at first I didn't feel comfortable doing that. And then I think maybe something you're hinting at a little bit too is intuition, sometimes just a bias. We have to always be careful. And on one hand, like if you're trying to learn to trust your instincts, it can then be counterintuitive to question or unpack them and sometimes useful, sometimes not useful, but
00:17:08
Speaker
There's just a lot of complexity there, but we're animals operating mostly on unconscious thought and instinct. So if you got good instincts, it's going to serve you well in life and in
Podcast Inspirations and Personal Growth
00:17:18
Speaker
work. And there's no reason to ignore them. Another thing that I wanted to ask you about is just this podcast and sorry.
00:17:29
Speaker
It's harder to make these transitions than it looks. Okay. I'm loving that you're feeling my pain right now. I feel like there's like a friendly version of schadenford. Maybe it's just, I'm just feeling like comforted and validated. So thank you. Okay. Good. I'm glad that my awkwardness is making you feel comfortable. So it's nine, no, it's 10 AM now for me. It is what time is it for you? Four PM. You're in London. Three, three, three, three.
00:17:53
Speaker
And so I woke up at three and I was thinking about this episode and I could not sleep. I was excited. But you know, when you wake up at three and you're full of energy and thoughts and I almost texted you to be like, are you awake? Should we just do this earlier? Cause Kelly, I'm like so ready for it. And then obviously I was like, no, that's a psycho move. So I couldn't sleep. I've been up since then. I've had a lot of coffee.
00:18:16
Speaker
I hope it serves this conversation well, but we'll see. And then I fell really deep down. Are you familiar with the call her daddy podcast at all? No, I've never heard it. Okay. I hadn't either, but I knew it was a podcast. It's the most, it's like the number two podcast on Spotify, like super popular.
00:18:33
Speaker
And i suddenly was like i should look into this just to see like what is the second most popular podcast in the world do i got so deep into it and i have really strong opinions i watch like five hours worth of content with some of the host if anyone listening listen to that i'm team alex and i don't know why i got into this cali there's a point there's a point.
00:18:55
Speaker
Oh, it actually helps with my segue, which is I wanted to ask you why you started this podcast in the first place. And talking about other podcasts. Yeah, a little easier to bring it up. Okay, so you did you asked me like a version of this question last week. And at first I was like, I don't know. And then I thought back and I wrote a blog post ahead of the first episode.
00:19:20
Speaker
And what I said in that post is mostly true, which is I am really curious about how other content creators and successful leaders and folks like in the content or artistic or leadership like world, what makes them tick, how they found success, what advice they might have for other people. And that is basically true. But after our conversation, it pulled out for me like,
00:19:49
Speaker
maybe the deeper drives behind it, which is something that we talked on a bit then, but the idea, okay, this is literally the third time I'm referencing this play, Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, and I feel like that has to be it. But I realized how deeply impactful some of the ideas in that play are and like have continued to be for me.
00:20:13
Speaker
And one of them is this concept of fractals. I think I talked with Chris Cantwell on this, and he was on the episode that was released this week. And it's this idea that it's a mathematical concept, fractals, and it's like cells, like the smallest brick in the wall is the exact same shape as the wall itself. And for me, what it has meant is that it is worth
00:20:41
Speaker
engaging like thoughtfully and carefully and closely with the things that are like right in front of us in our life because that is the entry point through which though the themes and problems and challenges you will encounter there are the same as the themes challenges and ideas that you'll encounter at a much higher, more abstract level of thinking or human experience. And so
00:21:09
Speaker
things like work, like for 13 years that I was like a leader in a creative environment and figuring out how to manage people, evolving as a manager, figuring out the business on the operation side of things or things I was engaging with every day and like making an effort to mine them for meaning and to figure things out is within like a really meaningful way for me to evolve as a person. I think if you're really,
00:21:39
Speaker
trying to be a very mindful, thoughtful manager, you will have to confront things in yourself, which has been helpful for me. And I think this same thing with this podcast and with the newsletter is like taking the time to, I don't know, it's not deliberate. It's not like I was like, I think that by mining these things for deeper meaning and being really curious about them, I'm going to learn more about life. It wasn't conscious, but I think that's what I'm doing through it. Sometimes it can feel myopic, like,
00:22:09
Speaker
All right, enough with content. Like the world is vast. There's a lot of shit out there to get interested in, but it's also a way to, for me, it's been a meaningful way to just figure out people, talk about life. And I would say too, like one thing that's been really fun about the podcast is when you, if you have a deep thoughtful conversation with somebody, you can't help but then feel a bit of a connection and kinship with them. And I've got to talk to some really cool people who I now are to be
00:22:37
Speaker
part of my network and folks I could reach out to or folks I could ask their opinion about things around. And so that's not necessarily the reason to start a podcast, but the personal connection side of it has been an unexpected but really cool piece of it for me.
00:22:54
Speaker
I love what you were saying about this idea of the Arcadia thing and thinking about how you have to do the smaller thing in front of you and that ends up teaching you about the bigger things. And I find this is somewhere that I tend to get tripped up.
00:23:11
Speaker
in work, in life, whatever, is I have such big ideas about what I want to do. And I have big ambitions. And I'm always thinking about those things. And it can feel really difficult to navigate into them. So somewhere inside of me, it's like, I believe and feel that I am the person who does these things. But I don't always know which direction to step into.
00:23:35
Speaker
And I find that to be a really helpful way of thinking about both how to move forward in work and pick a direction. And also as work has changed so much over the past couple of years and how we both increasingly want our personal lives and work lives to be separate, but they've become more
00:24:00
Speaker
together and work for some people has become more, just the complexities around it have been intense and this need to have a separate, what am I trying to say here? Some separation.
00:24:14
Speaker
between that and what is really important to me. Is work just the thing I'm doing to make a paycheck? What's important to me and how do I move towards that? And I think this idea of yours or this idea that you're talking about helps me to feel better about what I spend my time on every day in my work and how that is actually doing bigger things in the world, both for myself and other people. That's not just the thing in front of me, if that makes sense.
00:24:42
Speaker
Yes, totally. I do understand what you're saying. And I feel like to go back to what you were talking about, what you mentioned at the start of that, where you're talking about how I think what you're saying is that you have a lot of ideas around what you want to execute, but sometimes figuring out it's almost like the way that by making a choice in one direction, you're not choosing all of the other options. Is that, is that kind of in line with what you're saying there?
00:25:10
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. I think that because I'm someone who always has so many ideas that pull me in different directions, it stops me from ever really moving forward in a big way in one direction. Yes. And I think that it's a good thing because it makes my life exciting and it means I'm a curious person and I'm always learning new things. But I've come to see it as a roadblock because I know we've talked about this before as well, but I've been trying to really get over the idea recently
00:25:40
Speaker
that sharing my ideas by posting online, making quote unquote content, or sharing my ideas with others on a bigger stage can feel cringe. And I've always been so comfortable doing this for companies, like anybody outside of myself, but stepping out and doing it just for me feels extra intimidating.
00:26:05
Speaker
And I'm sure a lot of your listeners and just creative people in general wrestle with this same thing.
Vulnerability and Authentic Creative Expression
00:26:12
Speaker
So like you've started the newsletter, you have a podcast, like you're already doing it. So can you talk a bit about how you navigate this dynamic for yourself and what fears or roadblocks did you have going into it and how did you overcome them?
00:26:30
Speaker
Yes. Okay. Love. Thank you so much for asking this. I have so many thoughts on it. So I think that's first of all, I was talking to a woman I used to work with yesterday, Jess, and she mentioned a few books about, I'll send you the link. I think one's called like the Renaissance person. And it actually made me think about you. And it's for people who are just like multi hyphenate, very creative, but sometimes are almost like, there's so much I want to do. I don't know what to do.
00:26:54
Speaker
So I'd say if you're a listener to like, we'll throw it in the show notes because it's relevant if this conversation is resonating with you. I haven't read it, but I'm going to definitely describing me by the way. And I think that I actually think that the reason I never thought of myself too much as a perfectionist, but
00:27:19
Speaker
Doing all of these things has made me realize that I am and that it was a bit of a block for me previously because I wanted I talked about starting a podcast for years, a newsletter for years, and I didn't do it and I didn't do it because
00:27:34
Speaker
I felt like I think I thought I had to have the perfect angle, the perfect ideas before I could start. And that is not true. I certainly, I've loved doing this podcast and I'm excited to do season two and I hope that I get better and better at it. I certainly don't think it's perfect. I battled so much cringe early on.
00:27:59
Speaker
I think it's like the idea, it's like you go through peaks and valleys where like the idea of doing it is really fun. Then you're actually doing it. Like you're lining up guests interviewing people. And then for me, at least the first couple of times I had to listen to my voice and listen to myself kind of working my way through my first couple interviews and how to do it while interviewing other people who do podcasts all the time. And it was really easy for them. The comparison for me, I was like, just like someone like my head off. This is killing, but if you're going to do stuff.
00:28:29
Speaker
You have to be vulnerable and be imperfect and know that it's gonna get better or I hope it does get better. And I think there's actually a lot of material out there around this. I think you maybe, I don't know if we talked about this Kelly, but there's a really great ira glass video where he's talking about.
00:28:45
Speaker
Creative work, if you're drawn to it and let's, if you have good taste, so I'm not going to self assign good taste, but let's presume I have pretty good taste for the purpose of this com fit. When you first start out the first couple of years, you're doing something. What he says is you know that you're not as good as you want to be and you're disappointing yourself. And that is where a lot of people stop and get stuck. And he's like, have to push through it and figure out the craft.
00:29:13
Speaker
and like you will get there. And that to me has been really comforting. And I think it's totally true. And it's, I think there's an element too of like, when you're 22, I feel like there's more, people are more comfortable experimenting because you don't have as much to lose. Like in a lot of ways, like it's, but once you have some type of like professional reputation, taking a risk and putting something out there that
00:29:41
Speaker
you might fuck up a few times or you might just feel like, oh, I'm not really representing myself as like polished and authoritative as I'd like to in that dynamic. You do have a little bit to lose. And so there's, there's even bigger fear and that inhibits people from doing things they're interested in trying because there's a bigger audience where you could maybe fall on your face. But actually like some combos I've had in this podcast, I think,
00:30:08
Speaker
have slightly informed some of this stuff. I noticed that with Liv, who is the creator and host of the podcast, Let's Talk About Myths Baby, which gets 10 million downloads a year. It's an incredibly successful podcast. I was like, why'd you start it? She was like, I was super depressed. I hated the job I was working, and I was literally writing the scripts for the podcast on the Notes app on my phone.
00:30:38
Speaker
while pretending to work that terrible job. So she was at a moment where she felt like rock bottom seems really extreme. That's not rock bottom. But she was not feeling great about a lot of facets of her life. So she felt like she didn't have that much to lose, I don't think. And so this creative project was a lifeline. And also with Caroline Winkler, who is super successful on YouTube. She has close to 500,000 followers. And she said something similar.
00:31:08
Speaker
She had an acting career that wasn't working out the way she wanted. She decided to step back. She was in Ohio, had just gone through a breakup. It was COVID. She was totally alone. And I literally had nothing to lose. And it's so interesting that I think sometimes these creative projects for folks that end up really working out
00:31:29
Speaker
start when they feel like they've got nothing to lose because nothing to lose also means you've got less fear. And actually, as I say that, I think everything behind all this is just fear and also maybe like confronting just like being a learner in public is uncomfortable sometimes.
00:31:48
Speaker
and all there is to it, but if you want to do something that you haven't done before, you just have to accept that and get over it. That sounds trite and I'm not being like, Kelly, accept it and get over it. I understand what you're saying. No, I think that's so interesting and a really helpful perspective to bring to it. I think in particular for me, and I've heard a lot of other people say similar things. It's one thing to be, to feel,
00:32:16
Speaker
afraid to put a play you wrote out into the world or a painting that you painted. It's another thing to be afraid of. I'm going to create business content and put it on LinkedIn or things like which I think tends to feel way more cringe because it feels I don't know what it's because there's a lot of other people doing it. It feels like there's weird motivation behind like everyone's trying to make money off of each other or something. But at the end of the day,
00:32:41
Speaker
When you know that you have valuable stuff to share like in real life, I'm I work with my clients or as you do and people find a lot of value in what we say to them or help them with it's worth sharing those ideas. And I think the one thing that does give me comfort in this is.
00:33:02
Speaker
Just this really simple idea that like, yeah, there are a lot of people talking about things already and putting ideas out into the world, but what people connect with is you and your authentic energy and your point of view. So even if what you're saying isn't that radically different from other people, the way you share it will connect with other people that see the world the same way you do, maybe. And that makes me feel comforted because I think
00:33:32
Speaker
that makes it feel more worthwhile to do. I really like that because it's also, it's talking about creating from a point of just having alignment with good intentions. And I think you and I have talked on this in different ways, but to your point, like putting a play out in the world, if you're a person with a professional brand of any kind, like that's maybe less stressful than putting out a piece of sales content on LinkedIn.
00:34:01
Speaker
But why? Because I actually think that work, and this maybe ties back to your earlier questions around intuition, but good work is actually very akin to an artistic process in a way that we don't really talk about. When I say that, I'm thinking about
00:34:24
Speaker
Kind of the idea of the muse, and I'd say some really meaningful or informative books for me have been The Artist's Way, Big Magic, Stephen King on writing, Writing Down the Bones, and right now I'm reading Rick Rubin's The Creative Act, A Way of Being, which is an incredible book. And all of them have these basic themes of trusting your intuition and what energizes you as an artist or a creative person.
00:34:54
Speaker
giving yourself time to unconsciously unpack ideas without a lot of pressure, nurturing the seeds of ideas, and also just showing up really consistently for that energy or that muse in the artist's way. You have to, every morning, write three longhand pages.
00:35:16
Speaker
And your unconscious mind or the muse or whatever you attribute creativity to will come through. And in Writing Down the Bones, it's a great book. I'm forgetting the author's name. She is all about you schedule your time, you write, you focus on quantity, and you let the universe focus on quality. And Stephen King is really very regimented about you have to, if you want to be a writer, for example, you wake up, you sit down at your desk for this many hours and you just work at it.
00:35:44
Speaker
And all of them, there's this idea that similar to what we were talking on earlier, the first draft or the first pass or your first version of things are like almost never good. It's a shitty first draft of something, but you have to keep at it and keep polishing it. And I think that same ethos with work, just to try to pull it back around to that, the idea of allowing for them use, allowing for there to be intuition. You show up consistently, but you're almost like riding the waves of
00:36:11
Speaker
what's happening that day or where you're at an energetic level and your thoughts around what's happening and decisions that need to be made. But I don't know, I'm rambling a bit here and I'm sure afterwards, I wish I said this more articulately, but I think my point is that we give ourselves zero grace around professional endeavors.
00:36:34
Speaker
that are actually artistic creative acts. You're creating a business, you're creating something complex, you're giving life to an energetic being out in the universe that is that organization that's gonna touch different people, impact different people in different ways.
00:36:49
Speaker
But if you were to pitch a VC and be like, Hey, I'm going to start this business and I do have a business plan, but I also really want to talk about my ethos as like a creative entrepreneur and have my process and I follow my intuition to your point. I think like that's a red flag for them, right? They're going to be like, yeah, cool. We just need, we need to look at the business plan and we'll get back to you. And I don't know, like it's, it makes, on one hand it makes sense, but I think that we disregard and denigrate the more
00:37:19
Speaker
Intuitive creative side of business a lot or people can do it, but they do it in secret they might have their Approaches that involve tuning in more energetically to what they're trying to create, but they're not going to talk about it They're going to talk about the business plan the marketing plan the data But like I don't know why why why do you think that is just because there's because there's money on the line do you think?
00:37:44
Speaker
I don't know. I really love this connection that you're making. I think it's really interesting and powerful. And yeah, it does feel that way to me. So I think it's a really nice way of bringing all of those ideas together. And I think so we've talked a bit about why you started this podcast, which a lot of the ideas we just covered were things that you're personally interested in and how you've navigated through conversations and just some more core beliefs around
00:38:14
Speaker
why make a podcast about content in the first place and about creative people and creative acts.
00:38:21
Speaker
And because this is a last of the season kind of wrap up episode, I think it's also interesting to ask you a little bit about, and I know you've already brought up some previous episodes and people that you've talked to, but maybe just what are some key points or key things that you've learned from doing that? Whether that's ideas or people that you talk to, it'd be great to just get a little round up of that.
00:38:46
Speaker
Yes. Okay. It's a great question. I think I actually might do a roundup in my sub stack about like for each person, I feel like there's one to two gems that have stuck with me. I think the overall feeling I've had is stuff we've been talking on, like that everyone who has been successful in creating something has felt
00:39:16
Speaker
It's not always just like the smoothest process of you don't feel great about it 100% of the time. And it's not just a hockey stick, like up, up.
00:39:27
Speaker
experience graph, whether it's like starting a business or creating a podcast or a YouTube channel or writing a book that if you're interested in doing something creative, you're going to confront some self-doubt along the way and you got to work through it and keep going. I'd say, I don't know, it's really, it's interesting to think about. I mean, I've definitely learned some technical things too. I'm learning like how to edit a podcast, how
00:39:55
Speaker
podcast chart works, things like that that have been interesting and fun, like some strategy on the back end of how to make it appealing for guests and to grow the listenership
Audience Growth Strategies
00:40:05
Speaker
a little bit. And I feel like personally, selfishly, I'm so interested in asking you a lot of detailed questions about just how to make a podcast. It's not because I want to make a podcast, but I just think there's so many interesting things that happen along the way and things you have to navigate that are so applicable to anyone who's making content.
00:40:23
Speaker
in the world so i don't know if we can talk about that now or maybe for another day but i think that it's that in itself is a pretty interesting conversation yes i think so i've actually gotten a lot of questions about it lately to the point where i think i want to do a whole episode where it may be just a solo episode
00:40:39
Speaker
with me where i just walk through okay from inception and assets that you need in the type of like programs that you need which are not that expensive so yes i hear you on that and i think maybe i'll save it for like a whole podcast or a piece of content i'll just meant all the details that i can.
00:40:56
Speaker
Yeah, even just one thing I think about a lot, because I have another friend who started a podcast not that long ago and asked me for advice on this. So I was so curious to ask you as well that you've gotten a lot of really high quality guests on your show. And when you're starting anything for the first time out of the blue, how do you get people to say yes to that? How do you get them to engage with you? Were they people you already had connections with or were you cold emailing people? I was mostly cold emailing people.
00:41:25
Speaker
But so I started it when I was at Brafton and Brafton was distributing it. So we, and I guess they still will, this will be the last episode they distribute. So what I did was I connected with the marketing team and I was like, look, I think that I'm going to need to tell guests that we will do a blog post about each episode, do a reference in the newsletter to each episode and then social posts for each episode.
00:41:56
Speaker
And then so when connecting with guests, I'd lay out basically Brafton's distribution numbers, which was like a pretty big newsletter list and a pretty decent monthly number of site visitors.
00:42:08
Speaker
So I think that at first those numbers helped me get a few bigger name guests. And then once I had the bigger name guests, those guests helped other prominent guests feel comfortable that, okay, this is a place that other well-known people have gone and done an episode and kind of they felt like they were in good company. So it's interesting because I've been thinking in what would be my advice to people who
00:42:37
Speaker
do not have that foundational big kind of chip to trade when asking people to come on the show. And I think that it could be something like starting if someone's, I want to do a podcast in the newsletter, I might be like, do the newsletter for six months and do everything you can to grow it so that you've got an email list that you can like email out to when you start the podcast.
00:43:02
Speaker
Or you could be like, you could email out and try and get 100, 200, 300, 400 of like your most personal engaged like work contacts and be like, Hey, are you guys willing to be on a distribution list for me? Where every time I like.
00:43:16
Speaker
publish a new episode, I will send an email that has the links to the social posts promoting this episode. If you can just click them and like them or share them, it'll help me a lot. That's one thing someone can do. I was actually talking to a friend last night who's trying to start his own podcast and he's not gonna have guests and he doesn't have a huge list right now. So what we were doing was brainstorming more like marketing collaboration opportunities
00:43:43
Speaker
that he could be referencing certain things in the podcast with local businesses that would give them incentive to be like promoting it on social and building up a bit of a list for himself and like a few other tactics. So I think that one could just start and just be promoting it solely on their own social channels and like publishing and I think plenty of
00:44:07
Speaker
really good podcasts eventually pick up steam in in through that but it is helpful to have a bit of a foundation to start with if you can figure out a way to do that whether it's your volume of social followers or
00:44:22
Speaker
if you get 300 people to agree to promote it every episode by liking or something on social or anything like that. Another thing I've learned is that you really have to find different pools to fish in. For example, with the Brafton newsletter, definitely it helped in the first few episodes develop a bit of a subscriber base or folks who are going to keep listening. But by the sixth or seventh episode, the people on that email list knew whether or not they liked the podcast.
00:44:50
Speaker
And so beyond those few, it didn't go up or down very much from that initial base. And what actually started to then really help me was guest promotion. And when the guests would post on their own, especially if they had robust social channels, that would then bring in a whole new slew of potential subscribers and listeners. And it's a really good
00:45:12
Speaker
Compounding effect like for example caroline has a very active engaged subscribers on her youtube channel and at the very end of. Her video the week that her episode came out she did a really quick little hey guys i was on this podcast is linked in the notes check it out they interviewed me. And that got like a huge spike of thousand listeners.
00:45:33
Speaker
And it, but it wasn't just, okay. That was like, there's definitely a big spike in the listenership there. But then for like subsequent episodes, there is like increased number of listeners because a certain number of the folks resonated with and stuck with it. If you can.
00:45:50
Speaker
I, it's tricky because I did have some, I have had some people start to reach out that are like publicists or particularly like people's podcast agents who are like, Hey, we'd love for you to have this person on the show. And I check out their pages or their one page or their website. And I'm sure they're polished guests and they're interesting, but they're not people that I would have intuitively been like, I really want to talk to this person necessarily.
00:46:17
Speaker
And so thus far I've made the decision not to which feels right but I can see it being tempting to be like I just wanna grab some of that listenership and I say that just because I think early on in the podcast if you're trying to build up listenership and you're paying close attention to the social following and promotion ability of your guests, you might, I don't know, I guess you have to make decisions. There might be some people where you're like, I don't know if I really wanna talk to this person but
00:46:46
Speaker
I'd love to grab some of their audience. And I haven't done that yet, but I can see why it's tempting. I think people can really, there's like a famous phrase about this. Oh God, I'm going to completely get it wrong right now. But it's basically trust your reader. Like when you're writing something, like to make your writing feel more real, you have to trust the reader. You can't over explain things to them.
00:47:08
Speaker
And I guess I'm saying that to say, I think people deserve more credit than we often give them, especially when we put our business hat on. I think people can really feel the intention behind what you're doing. So I love that you're saying this because basically what you're saying is I'm creating this thing, but I'm doing it in a way that I know feels right to me and I'm following what actually interests me versus
00:47:37
Speaker
what might be a better business decision because it might create more listeners for you. And I think you can definitely play that game and still get far. But I think when you stay true to what truly interests you, it makes something really good and people feel that. So
00:48:01
Speaker
you'll end up having listener, more loyal audiences, people who truly engage with what you do and find it really interesting. So I love that. Yeah, I guess it's...
00:48:15
Speaker
I feel like in Rick Rubin's book, he's said some things about really approaching whatever creative project you're working with on with just as much integrity as you can muster and like you're solely in the service of the project. And also there's this other, I feel like it's related to what you're saying, but
00:48:33
Speaker
There's this really crazy Quincy Jones interview from a few years ago where he said some like wild stuff. I think it was the most entertaining interview I've ever read. Did you ever read it? I'm trying to remember me. It was like vanity. Oh my God. It's amazing. It's wild. It's hilarious.
00:48:50
Speaker
And this is a tangent, but at one point the interviewer asked him, they're like, is there anything you'd wish you didn't know? And he says, yeah, who killed Kennedy? It's hilarious. But he says some really cool stuff too. And one thing he says is like, when it comes to music, as soon as you start thinking about money, God leaves the room. And I feel like Rick Rubin has said some similar things where it's because you're starting to overly get into the strategy when you're actually
00:49:16
Speaker
working through the creative, the energy is gonna fall away. It's not gonna go well. And I don't mean to make a podcast an overly like holy object, but just something about creative projects in general that I think is helpful. And in some ways, maybe why the back to what we were talking on earlier, why when it comes to
00:49:38
Speaker
like personal, professional content or LinkedIn posts. It's a tricky line to walk because what you're doing does have commercial purpose and attention. Like money is very much in the room for the most part. And it can kind of inhibit sometimes the message or make it more complicated to figure out what you're trying to do or say.
00:50:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think this is a really interesting conversation we're having because it's very different, I think, than the way most people usually talk about work, which is a lot more...
00:50:11
Speaker
left brain, talking a lot about intuition and creative acts and how to maintain integrity behind what you do, which maybe is not what people are always looking for in a business podcast. But I think it's a really interesting conversation to have about it because they're often the things we don't talk about, but it is very real. And I think a lot of us think about this for ourselves, whether or not we are actually discussing it in a conference room or whatever, or with our bosses.
00:50:38
Speaker
Yeah, I'm just like gonna move into the next room because I'm running out of battery and there's no outlet but I think that it's funny sometimes because I think me up till maybe three or four years ago.
00:50:54
Speaker
I didn't really think about this stuff at all. And I think a lot of the people who work with me and worked with me in the past, especially, would probably be pretty surprised to hear me talking about these things because I think I had a reputation, especially earlier on in my career, of being like really
00:51:14
Speaker
probably more focused on what we think of as left brain, more structured masculine energy type things. It was like, what's the process? What's the quota? What are the numbers for the day? What's the data on the deliverables? That was what I was really good at a time that the business that I was working at needed it. So it helped me advance and move up. And I think it's only been
00:51:34
Speaker
a little bit later in my career that I've really thought more deeply about these things and allowed myself a little more space for the more, as you said, like woo woo side of things. Yeah, totally. I'm going to take this in a slightly different direction now. Okay. So you've, you've talked to a lot of people in this first season of the podcast.
00:51:56
Speaker
about content, like it's the name of the podcast. We all know that's what we're here to talk about. But I loved your conversation with Chris Cantwell, who wrote Halt and Catch Fire about the nature of content. And he really defined it in a way that I think I had been thinking about but never really put words to. And how content is a term now used as a measurement unit.
00:52:26
Speaker
rather than something that speaks to the creative act behind it. So it's how many pieces of content can you create for this or it's become devalued in a way because that's how we use that term or we put the term content on a lot of things that maybe we used to think of as more generative creative acts. So that's already happening and just the fact that it's become such a prominent way of marketing
00:52:56
Speaker
And that there is so much content everywhere to consume all the time that we're in this like strange era with content, but all of that's already happening. And then AI happens, right? So we have chat and GPT for already. I think five is supposed to be here before the end of the year. It's moving quickly. And.
00:53:22
Speaker
AI's ability to transform how we think about content and its value is going to be even more radical than the transformation we just talked about that's been happening for the past several years. So I know this is a really big question and there are a lot of unknowns and we can speculate a bit, but what do you think the future of content is knowing all of this?
00:53:47
Speaker
I know there's a lot of people scared about AI and what it will do to their jobs or otherwise. And then there's a lot of people really excited about the possibility. So I'm so interested to hear your thoughts about this. I oscillate between the two depending on the day where I feel terrified by AI and then also feel really excited about where it's taking us.
00:54:11
Speaker
And just being at a point where technology is increasing in this exponential leap. So the question is, what do you think the future of content is?
AI's Impact on Content Creation
00:54:22
Speaker
There's so much to unpack there. The term content has become ubiquitous, and it has become such a commodity. And anytime something becomes a commodity, then there is worldwide business interest in how do we
00:54:41
Speaker
produce that commodity faster, cheaper, better. So creative work became commoditized and now portions or versions of it will be effectively outsourced to AI. AI will have such a huge impact on workers and the world that how it impacts the content industry will be interesting, but it'll be a drop in the bucket insofar as the way that it's disruptive to
00:55:10
Speaker
humans, Jared Myers, who was on the podcast a couple weeks ago, he and I had a conversation yesterday. And like, he saw a stat that seemed really viable to him to the effect of something like 50% of our jobs in 10 years will be completely outsourced to AI. And like, no longer those positions will no longer exist. Now with the current version of chat DPT, I think that there are ways for companies who want to outsource
00:55:39
Speaker
portions of the content creation process to easily do. I don't think it means that all content jobs will be immediately cut at all, but I think it means that you'll need fewer people to do the same amount of work. So essentially, it just reduces the headcount that the content industry, which different people define differently, can support. You could have a team of five people doing the work that previously you'd need, seven or 10 people,
00:56:07
Speaker
maybe even more to do. And maybe this is, this could be a bit my op-ed because this is exactly the environment that I managed in for a while. So it's really easy for me to see exactly how AI could plug in and very easily grab a big chunk of the jobs is if you're in a big content team or an agency and you are fairly siloed and you're producing content via very prescriptive processes. You are going to be easier to outsource in that type of environment.
00:56:35
Speaker
If you're a part of a lean team of generalists where you're also doing strategy, you're also doing some client relations work, I think that then you're in a position for AI to help you out and make the content creation part of your job a little more efficient, but you're not currently someone that's going to be like immediately replaced. So I'd say finding jobs where there's some softer skills or more strategic work in addition to content creation is a helpful
00:57:05
Speaker
step to take, though who's to say in five years that or less that those jobs won't also potentially be outsourced. We can't know. We don't know. And then I also think SEO in general and Google is a little bit in trouble. So I wrote about this and I think it was my very first sub stack. But there are many factors that are problematic for Google right now. And for folks who follow this, like Google has had some red flags about their general like financial health. A lot of their business seems to be
00:57:36
Speaker
a bit less profitable and for them, their biggest money maker was search and is search. So you type things into the Google search bar. They quickly return their search engine engine results pages or SERPs for people who are in SEO and then they serve you ads. And that's how they make their money off of the fact that they just performed a search for you through Google ads.
00:58:00
Speaker
AI obviously reduces their ability to do that. If you're in chat GPT asking, how do I upload a podcast to Zencaster and you get a step by step process, you have no reason to Google it. So then there's Google Bard, which is Google's AI version, but AI searches are very expensive to run chat GPT. This is like a few months old, this stat now, but they were estimated to be like a hundred K a day just to run chat GPT.
00:58:31
Speaker
So Google is less able to, like their bread and butter for profitable world domination is very easily impacted by AI. So content and SEO are not the same thing, but there's such significant overlap that the spot on the Venn diagram where those two live together is in a very precarious place right now. If you have a job creating
00:58:59
Speaker
very productized content for SEO purposes.
00:59:03
Speaker
It's likely that in the next 18 months or so, it'll just be like a less relevant portion of the market. But it's really hard and content too. I think I was thinking more about the Chris conversation after we recorded and we called content different things 50 years ago, but it's always been a newspapers like journalism was content. Charles Dickens was paid by the word like and newspapers, their revenue is advertising. So in the same way that for.
00:59:32
Speaker
many websites who are run on an ad revenue model, like they'll call their content now before it was maybe called stories, but it was the same thing. And it's, it's all, it's hard to, it's hard to distinguish. And we talked to you about like even the CEO of HBO calls premium programming content. So I think it's also just become certain
00:59:57
Speaker
Like it's become a more cross industry term where we all know what you're talking about, which means the creative product that you trade for some other type of results, whether it's like clicks views, like influencing user intent, but those things have always existed. We just didn't have such a universal term for it.
01:00:16
Speaker
And obviously like internet has created like an abundance of opportunities for that content. So I don't know. What do you think about it? What's, I just talked for a long time, what do you think? I think what you said was very interesting. I have been, I have a lot of thoughts, but one way that I've been thinking about it is in a much more zoomed out way and trying to think of like the evolution of what comes next.
01:00:40
Speaker
And I've spent a lot of my career working for big media outlets. And I think a lot about the future of media is content, right? It's the same thing. And it's media is not linear anymore. Like legacy outlets are fading into the noise and communities have become these like screens in front of us through which we engage with all these different platforms and everything becomes a bit diffracted.
01:01:09
Speaker
So I think we're moving from this Web 2.0 attention economy, which the attention economy is fed by content, following influencers, reading articles, everything that's out there, Netflix becoming so prominent, watching so much TV in the way that what media we consume and how we consume it has changed. And we're moving towards this Web 3.0, which I think is still a bit mysterious
01:01:39
Speaker
to many people that's more about collectives of media of which the attention economy will be part of it, but it's more kind of going to be about like how we form into ecosystems and collectives that then have these bits of content and attention to them. I know that sounds really vague and it's in a big picture way.
01:02:03
Speaker
I think communities and ecosystems are what we're moving to and content will become a part of that because it's how we communicate and relate to each other through them. And it'll also impact how content is shared. I think the AI question is, it's a big one. And I think I spent a couple of weeks panicking a bit and there are a lot of ways to blow this out into a sci-fi nightmare of what's gonna happen. And I do think some of those things are certainly possible.
01:02:32
Speaker
But I've been feeling a lot calmer lately by just trying to think about it as an innovation that's happening that's going to just change what our value is. And maybe even the motivations behind creating content and consuming content. That's really interesting. When you say communities and ecosystems, do you mean like you feel like an omni,
01:03:02
Speaker
internet and attention economy is hitting its max capacity and we're going to, not splinter necessarily, but naturally siphon off into more closed off spaces where we span our space. We've already seen that happening, right? There's a stat, I wish I could pull up right in front of me and I should have had it on hand for this conversation, but
01:03:27
Speaker
There's already a lot of information about how Gen Z behaves online that's very different from everyone else and really moving away from open social platforms to closed communities online that are more specific to interests that are private, where people feel more comfortable sharing and sharing things that are a bit more authentic, less curated. That's a certain type of content, but I think that trend holds. And we're seeing this reflected in politics too, how algorithms have helped us to
01:03:58
Speaker
exist in echo chambers of our own opinions, how people are becoming increasingly polarized and how they view the world. And that naturally creates the desire or the need for communities where you feel safe or where you understand that people are going to be like you, where you would rather interact versus in the general attention economy. Yeah.
01:04:27
Speaker
That's really interesting. I think, I don't know, like a part of, I think right now people are, it seems so uncomfortable for people to interact with others who have different opinions. People talk a lot about being politically polarized. And one thing that really does, I do struggle with to the point where I feel like I want to just recuse myself from the whole conversation is when I feel like there's a lack of
01:04:54
Speaker
interest or mutual respect for someone else's perspective on things. And the idea of us just self-selecting into our own even more separate echo chambers is stressful to me. And maybe that's not exactly what you're saying. I also understand the idea too of Gen Z finding this happy medium of being online, but in more like self-selecting communities that are positive, supportive, and less performative.
01:05:21
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's it. Obviously, I brought up politics, which immediately brings us into a negative headspace about this. But I do think that it has more to do with, and I'm about to say this as someone who was recently on your podcast positioning themselves as a brand new group. I think increasingly all people, but especially Gen Z, I hate when we talk in generational groups too much. Yeah.
01:05:48
Speaker
even more so Gen Z, they don't trust brands because it's become so over commodified, right? And I'm talking about brands now, brands are often the ones creating the content or paying for the content or sponsoring the content that we're interacting with online, right? So it all ties together. And because there is some distrust there,
01:06:15
Speaker
People want to be in closed anonymous communities because what they're really seeking is authenticity, like genuine human connection, passion, excitement, all of these things. And I think that this shift is taking place where I don't believe that any of these things are going to become irrelevant. I think it's just going to become an even more important part of how businesses run and think about
01:06:46
Speaker
their position in a market, their own brand, things like that because it's going to be increasingly more difficult to have cultural cache or influence unless you really are being authentic.
01:07:00
Speaker
staying true to your word, aligning values with actions as a company. I know I'm going in a bit of a different direction, but these things are all, I think they're all working together to build a picture of what the content landscape is going to look like. That's really interesting. I also want to touch on something you said earlier, the effect of you think AI will change the way in which humans bring value to things.
01:07:29
Speaker
And the way I interpreted that is maybe like, we're not executing large quantities of content. We're not like tilling the soil of content creation, but we're maybe a little more strategic. Is that right? Or what exactly did you mean by that? It was really interesting. Yeah. So I was thinking about this earlier today, actually. I was writing an email, and my grammarly was popping up and correcting some things for me.
01:07:58
Speaker
And I thought to myself like, man, I used to take such pride in my ability to be someone who could craft a well-written, interesting email. And what a valued skill that was because lots of people didn't know how to do that in the business world. They're either boring or they have
01:08:16
Speaker
mistakes or whatever. And now with Grammarly, literally everyone's emails will sound good without much effort, right? Obviously, you still have to have good logical thinking and stuff and put things in an order that makes sense. But maybe AI will be doing that for us quite soon. So these things that we once valued as skills, as a knowledge economy, as knowledge workers, we get back to the Industrial Revolution and be like, OK, people used to, I don't know, what's a skill? We used to make things with our hands.
01:08:45
Speaker
And now we don't do that anymore. But no one really misses it. No one really thinks about it. But it's a very interesting thing to have the same kind of replacement of value happening in the knowledge economy, especially because we've all been raised by the idea that being intelligent, being logical, being able to put facts and evidence together is what you need to be able to go into university. These are the things you need to do.
01:09:12
Speaker
to be a good knowledge worker. When AI is going to come along and supplement a lot of what we're doing in knowledge work, that fundamentally starts to shift what our value is in that process. Because now with AI as it is today, who knows what it'll be even a year from now, it's able to do a lot of that lower level thinking for us to a pretty high standard. And I also think a lot about
01:09:40
Speaker
the fundamental changing definition of what even is creativity? What is a creative act when AI can do it? And how do we value creativity moving forward? I don't have answers for these questions, but I think they're interesting questions to ask. Yeah, I think creativity and innovation are different than generation. But it's funny because there's often a lot of overlap. And when we come back to the word content,
01:10:09
Speaker
It has been a lot of people who probably got into creative marketing or content marketing or something adjacent to that because they're creative and they ended up with jobs where they were generative, which is not the same. Yes, that's such a good point. I think so many people will connect with you saying that.
01:10:31
Speaker
All right. You've seen Avatar, I presume. I promise this is relevant, Kelly. I actually love sci-fi, but weirdly have somehow an Avatar movie. Are you kidding me? Okay. All right. You have to watch it. So I'm going to presume you're in the minority and people listening have watched it, but I'll explain. Most people have watched it. Yeah. I think I'm in the minority for sure. There's this like thing in it. I'm going to forget the name of it. It's basically like a tree of life type of thing.
01:11:01
Speaker
and these avatar creatures, or sorry, they're not avatar, but I'm going to forget the name of the type of creature that they are. And they have this thing on them with like a tail that's it hooks into this magic tree. And basically, it's them connecting with their ancestors with what I think is essentially their collective unconscious or like the source for them.
01:11:26
Speaker
With AI, if you type in, write me a fairy tale or write me a script about blank, it is going to spit something out that hits the beats of a hero's journey or like scraping the internet for all human fairy tales and synthesizing into something that matches your prompt.
01:11:45
Speaker
And in some ways I feel like AI is intentionally and maybe it's an unconscious drive within humans where we're like, we need better access to our collective unconscious. We need to be able to type a question in and get all of humanity's knowledge
01:12:02
Speaker
back to answer to us. And I feel like there's something to this. I don't know. When I first was like playing around with chat GPT, I was thinking about avatar and I was like, there's a slightly less sinister, more positive read on this, which is AI allows us to just tap into what humanity knows, but individual humans do not know.
01:12:24
Speaker
I don't think it's there yet, but I feel like it could be pursuant of that. And then, okay, actually, this brings me around to something else, which is so Avatar directed by James Cameron. I feel like something else we were talking on earlier that I just found out recently is, I won't remember the name of his production company, but it's something like Electrikey and then Structure, like Lightning House or something like that. Oh, I know that too. Hold on. Storm something. Sorry, keep going.
01:12:54
Speaker
Someone who knows it is like shouting at us right now. They're like, it's light bulb shed. So it's something he said about how he came up with it is the idea that creativity is the mix of structure and chaos. And I feel like that kind of circles back to what we were talking on earlier in the business world.
01:13:14
Speaker
We're very comfortable talking about structure, but we're not so comfortable talking about the chaos that is necessary to truly create something or to truly have a bit of an electric moment in companies formation or an idea or a product.
01:13:33
Speaker
And so just a little bit roundabout there, but I don't know what you want to do about Kelly as the interviewer. And now we're just having one of our phone calls with each other. Oh my God, what you're saying is sparking so many things in me. Like I have so many thoughts about what you said and I don't think I'm going to remember them all.
01:13:56
Speaker
I'm debating whether or not to say this because these things I haven't really externalized or thought through. They're just ideas floating around in my head. So I reserve the right to completely change my mind about what I'm about to say. I'm going to say a couple things that sound disconnected, but they do connect. Again, zooming out to like our sort of cultural context and politics and everything that's happening is there is this fundamental tension between like truth and intuition, science,
01:14:25
Speaker
spirituality. And I'm not a history expert, so I'm not going to say this in a way that's probably academically correct. But basically, the history of knowledge up until this point, which I said before, it was all about logic facts. I studied philosophy in college. It was about logical thinking. We're moving. And this is part of what's creating so much discomfort from people, why they want to go back to an age that felt better.
01:14:55
Speaker
why we're trying to make the past be the present because everything's moving forward so quickly. It's really uncomfortable. It's really uncomfortable to keep pace with this change that's happening and the exponential change of technology. Sorry, I know I'm saying a lot of things at once. Oh, it's following the thread and I'm liking it. So keep going. How it connects is that I think what you were saying is
01:15:25
Speaker
Oh my God. Okay. Hold on. I just want to pause it. That is like Joe Rogan. Were you right now? He would not give a shit. No, because it's like, it's, I have it there, but it's like, I'm trying to connect so many ideas in my head at the same time that I'm losing my train of thought a little bit. If that makes sense. If I was writing, I would be much happier. But the thing I'm trying to get to and that I was giving background information to is
01:15:51
Speaker
I think that what our value will really be are things that we don't value right now or feel really woo-woo and weird. AI is the structure, the masculine side. We are the chaos, feminine intuition. It's the logic. Right? Because we're not really needed for that anymore. We're going to have something that can do it faster and better than us. And the value that we bring, and I have so many conflicting feelings about this,
01:16:21
Speaker
I really, I think that the sort of religious extremism that's happening in the world is going to like only increase. And I think there's going to be some grain of truth in it, which is the idea that like the world is not just about facts and logic. It is about our ability to tap into these more ephemeral things and
01:16:50
Speaker
I'm not being very articulate about how I'm explaining this. No, I think you are. I get it. Yeah. I do think that this shift is happening. It's really confusing and unsettling for everyone on a cultural level, on a political level, and on a business level, which is why it constantly feels like everything is in flux. And understandably, people are trying to reach for the comfort of their past. I do this in stupid way. I self-soothe with the past by like,
01:17:20
Speaker
watching rom coms from the 90s that I love that I watched growing up. There are ways in which I'm just like, Oh my God, I really miss my simpler past when things felt easier. And at the same time, I'm very much a futurist and I love, I get very, I love technology and all of these things that are moving forward. I'm so engaged with it, but it is really unmooring. And I do think
01:17:45
Speaker
This is also why things like astrology and all of these very like woo woo things, there's a big end to the spectrum, why they're appearing in culture. And I think we're all trying to grapple with and figure out what gives us meaning and where we have value as technology increases and replaces things that we've done or saw value in ourselves in the past. Yeah.
01:18:17
Speaker
I love everything you just said. I think you're totally right. Since the pandemic, since remote work and now the advent of AI, I do feel a bit like sometimes I feel this way and I don't know if you do, but some people listening might like a brain in a box sometimes where I think the biggest challenge
01:18:45
Speaker
One of the biggest challenges that we have is that we're so disembodied and we spend a lot more time in our intellectual head space than we do in our physical, like being very aware of our physical environments and being very in our bodies and embodied. And I think that's something for me that can be a problem sometimes.
01:19:07
Speaker
I've learned that if I let myself spin off into these conceptual ideas or even just a long stretch of digital meetings and problem solving, and I separate too far from my emotions and my body, my body lets me know in intense ways. And I think that when you're talking a little bit too about, okay, what kind of value do we bring
01:19:36
Speaker
in the age of AI, a part of me feels like, fuck, do we have to keep bringing more and more value to have a job or to exist in the world? Like in some ways it's, I talked earlier about how difficult my first job was of content writer, super high volume, just like banging on the keyboard 10 hours a day.
01:19:59
Speaker
Sometimes there's a part of me that could romanticize that because it was so simple. It was like, just execute this work. And if you were to take it back even further, I don't think people miss doing manual labor, but we're increasingly outsourcing like the simple, present, tangible elements of our lives in a lot of ways that I think is actually not good for us as like human creatures.
01:20:27
Speaker
And I don't know about you, but sometimes when I do find I'm like really leveraging like intuition, energy, strategic thinking, really leveraging any tool I've got to understand a situation, figure out a solution or put something forth. I am like physically, mentally and energetically drained by it. And I think that if AI continues to suck up the more like almost like pleasant mindless execution tasks.
01:20:57
Speaker
then our days or work might increasingly fill up with the hardest most draining bits of the day now or like the whole day in the future.
01:21:08
Speaker
And that seems depressing to me. I think everything you're saying is super interesting, this whole idea of being embodied. And I guess the positive angle on what you just said was perhaps we'll in the future, we'll work less hours.
Future Work Environments and Predictions
01:21:21
Speaker
We'll do higher level tasks, but we won't need to work an eight hour day because we won't need to work five days a week. We're already toying with that, which is something we inherited from the industrial revolution. So we're facing a different kind of.
01:21:34
Speaker
Industrial Revolution now, not industrial, but like in terms of work and. But I think it's just, if it goes in that direction, great. But historically it hasn't. There's, there's some stat, which I won't remember, but it talks about like the advent of things like the washing machine and the dishwasher and the vacuum and how there was this thought back in the day that like, this will save women who do housework so much time and they will have
01:22:04
Speaker
this many more hours in the week because it's been made so much more efficient, but that didn't happen. Just like expectations for what housekeeping was increased. And so in an unquantifiable way, it is necessary for us to be
01:22:23
Speaker
expending more and more of our highest potential output and thinking every day. It will be interesting to see, okay, I think there are some companies that could be like, man, with these AI tools, we actually only need people to work on average of five to six hours a day. That's going to help us retain talent. That's going to help us retain really good employees for the long-term. This is viable for us. Let's do it.
01:22:47
Speaker
But then I think there'll also be other companies and industries that are like, this is amazing. Now when people work 10 hours a day, as is our unstated requirement, they're actually doing 14 hours worth of previous output. And so it'll be interesting to see how it manifests in that way. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think is your vision that you're like, I think actually it will be like shorter work days, shorter work weeks.
01:23:10
Speaker
I have no idea. I think what's fun about this conversation is just it's just a thought experiment. We're just like talking about possibilities. I don't know. I'm an eternal like idealist and optimist. So I always want to believe that the best possible outcome is possible. Yeah, but obviously that doesn't always happen. But it's interesting to just play around with these ideas and think about
01:23:36
Speaker
What's to come? There were a couple things I kept thinking about when you were talking back to when you were talking about like this idea of being embodied. It what a movie that I love is her. Yes, I saw that. Yeah. And it's obvious. It's very much what we're talking about. It's like a very advanced AI that becomes increasingly advanced throughout the course of the movie.
01:23:59
Speaker
And I think this is a theme that runs through all good sci-fi about this topic is like the thing that the AI always wishes it could have, but it doesn't is humanity being embodied. I think I know they have a conversation at one point about what does it feel like to be in a body and how jealous the AI was that it didn't know that. And the optimist in me believes that there is there's really something to that and
01:24:29
Speaker
I don't know. I have faith that that our humanity is going to continue to be really valuable and will be this sort of like magical thing that will always be really special about what we create and how we see the world. The other thing I was thinking about when you were talking is I took this course in in university. I keep saying university because I live in the UK, but college for Americans. I had this amazing professor, Tom Chiarella, who
01:24:57
Speaker
I would literally just take any class he taught because they were so interesting. My favorite class of my whole time in school was a sci-fi writing class by him called Encyclopedia of the Future.
01:25:12
Speaker
And when I first took it, I was like, I don't even like sci-fi. I don't know what I'm going to write in this class. And it taught me that I really did love it. But why I'm talking about it now and why I have been thinking about that class a lot lately, one of the exercises we did was we created an actual encyclopedia. So by the end of the course, we wrote a lot of different things. We wrote language of the future. We wrote a timeline of what we thought would happen. Some people were really interested in, sorry, it was a writing class. I should have said that, a creative writing class.
01:25:42
Speaker
Some people wanted to write about aliens and spaceships. Other people wanted to write about very near future things. So it gave us a scope of understanding. We pieced it all together based on our stories. So it wasn't like.
01:25:53
Speaker
that intellectual of a pursuit to make the timeline, but it was more based on what points in history we wanted to write about, the worlds we created, and then connecting them together. But I often think back to that and think about what we plotted on the timeline and what we thought the future would be, and now, embarrassed to say how many years out from university I am, but a good 10, 15 years out, now I look back and I look at what's happened.
01:26:19
Speaker
I ask myself this question, if I were to write the timeline of the future, the encyclopedia of the future today, what would I write? And I see how different what actually happened was to what we predicted. And it's really interesting to me to have this just to think about how
01:26:34
Speaker
how hard it is for us to see the future, how hard it is for us to, we're so myopic. There's so many things we could tie this back to even like our conversation about brands. It's so hard to write stuff for yourself because you can't see yourself clearly. It's hard. I don't know. I don't know really what I'm getting to this with this other than that. I just find these thought experiments really interesting both to talk about and play with, but then also in retrospect to see how far off we were. Yeah.
01:27:01
Speaker
I like these conversations with you so much about it because I don't know. There's just, okay, AI is such a huge trending topic. And then everyone, so many people have these really hot takes on it. And it's like the hot takes serves them in the moment. But to your point, like, how do we know historically we've not been very good at predicting what will happen as a species? Like, I don't think, and so.
01:27:28
Speaker
I don't know, there's a freedom in that. Yeah, maybe the robots will take our jobs or maybe they'll be our servants. Who knows? Maybe both. Or maybe aliens will come tomorrow and we'll have a whole new problem to worry about. On that note, I feel like we've, once aliens enter the chat, it's time to end the conversation, baby. No, I have really appreciated talking to you about all of this. Bringing things back down to earth a little bit. Tell us what's next for content people.
01:27:58
Speaker
First of all, great segue back down to Earth Kelly. I needed to warm up a little bit down there. So thank you for asking. Thank you for doing this conversation. I love that this gets to be the wrap up for this season. And so for season two, season two launched
Season 2 Preview and Listener Connection
01:28:13
Speaker
in June. I already have some really cool guests lined up like Jess Cook, who is famous on LinkedIn. I'm going to pick her brain about how to build a brand on LinkedIn and what her process has been.
01:28:25
Speaker
and Ben Goody, who runs an SEO case study company, and a few other folks. It's not going to be distributed by Brafton. So if you are interested, make sure you subscribe via however you get your podcasts. And I'd also encourage you to really sign up for my newsletter, which is called Content People. And it will be linked in the show notes. And that's where you can stay tuned or you can connect with or follow me on LinkedIn. And I think one other thing that Liv said
01:28:55
Speaker
when I interviewed her for this season, the podcaster, she was like, you have to do 20, 20 episodes before you even know what the fuck you're trying to do. And this is episode 18. So I feel like I'm getting close. My hope for season two is got a little more experience under my belt. I'm a little more focused on having really actionable, useful conversations. And I'm also still letting this whole thing evolve. So.
01:29:23
Speaker
If you're still with us at almost two hours, thank you. And if you stuck with this season so far, I'm super grateful and I'm really looking forward to keeping it going and just super grateful that folks have been listening and I've had the opportunity to do this. And Kelly, thank you so much for how supportive you've been of this whole process. It's been really nice.
01:29:46
Speaker
Yeah, thank you. And thank you for inviting me to be a part of it. It's been so much fun to have these conversations with you in a more formal setting. And yeah, I hope there's more to come. All right. So if folks want to follow you again, just remind them where they can find you. If you want to. Sure. So you can follow me on LinkedIn. It's kelly corny. K E L I C O R N E Y.
01:30:10
Speaker
A little bit of a tricky one. And then I also teach a course on maven.com called Brand Strategy for Innovation. So you can just go onto Maven and Google the name of the course, or you can just Google Maven my name. You'll be able to get to it. All right. Thank you guys for listening, Kelly. Thank you. I'm going to hit stop recording.
01:30:35
Speaker
Hey gang, are you guys still here? You listened to this whole thing? That's like getting to the end of the internet or something. Thank you. Season one has been so much fun. I'm really looking forward to season two, which starts on June 15th. I mentioned this at the top, but season two will not be distributed by Brafton. If you want to stay posted, make sure to subscribe where you get your podcasts.
01:30:57
Speaker
You could sign up for our newsletter, Content People, which is linked in the show notes. And if you have feedback, ideas, or dream guests, I'd love to hear from you. Follow me on LinkedIn and connect with me there, or email us at contentpeoplepod at gmail.com. Have a great May. Talk to you soon. Thank you so much.