The Future Of Work: AI, Innovation, And Staying Relevant With Seth Godin

Speaker A: Welcome to Take the lead radio with

Speaker B: Dr. Diane Hamilton, where she interviews some of the most successful leaders, entrepreneurs, authors,

Speaker A: speakers and other individuals who will inspire

Speaker B: you to take the lead in your

Speaker A: career and personal life.

Speaker B: And now, here is Dr. Diane Hamilton. I am here with Seth Godin, who is the author of 21 bestsellers. He's a member of the Marketing hall of Fame, the founding editor of Carbon Almanac, blogger, entrepreneur, and one of the world's most sought after speakers. It's so nice to have you here, Seth.

Speaker A: Thanks, Diane. It's good to see you.

Speaker B: I was looking forward to this. I was, um, working on something. I teach a lot of marketing classes, so this is fun for that. But I also, uh, had seen that you were going to be speaking at the World Business Forum this week in New York. So I was very curious to know what your topic is because I've seen you change up things quite a bit. Uh, what's your focus this year?

Speaker A: I think it's worth talking about innovation because we don't really understand it and I think in the era of AI, it's urgent that we do so. And, um, AI is the biggest change in our world since electricity. And it is the last step in the capitalist desire to de skill employees. What is deskilling? Deskilling is what Karl Marx talked about and Adam Smith as well, which says if you're going to build any institution, you don't want to rely on highly skilled people because highly skilled people get paid a lot and if they leave, it's very disruptive. What you want is to take the skill from the highly skilled people and put it into the machine or put it into the system. So the number of talented cobblers who work at Nike is very low because Nike built an entire system in machinery so that they can train someone to work on the sneaker assembly line in five minutes. This is repeated industry after industry. You don't have to be a brilliant agronomist to be a farmer anymore. It's all a system. Well, what AI is doing is, it is coming for the people who pride themselves on having skill, for writers, for designers, for inventors, for artists. And, uh, an app like Sora says, type four words, I'll make you a short movie. That doesn't mean you're Darren Aronofsky. It means you typed in four words. And so what's the alternative? And the alternative is upskilling. The alternative is instead of using AI to do our job, to do our projects, we give it every small task we can think of and we Elevate our role to be the innovator, the project manager, the person with a vision. And so, you know, I wrote a book called the Practice years ago. I care a lot about innovation and creativity, and I think we all have a chance to show up and produce it.

Speaker B: Well, you know, you bring up so many interesting points because that was a rant.

Speaker A: Sorry about that.

Speaker B: Not at all. You, uh, you don't know rants. Don't get me going as a curiosity expert, since that's what I write about. I am fascinated by, um, the answers that people have to what's going on with AI right now. And I used to sell computers in the 80s when everybody was freaking out that their jobs were going to be lost. And I mean, it was a tough time because people didn't know. You didn't know that there would be social media managers because you didn't know there'd be social media. But it's, it's a lot different at this time because of the number of jobs that AI can replace and then. And the level. I think it's very hard for people to see the next thing because sometimes it changes by the day. I saw that you. I was watching one of your interviews before this, and you mentioned Claude. I use ChatGPT. I mean, there's so many out there that you could use. What do you tell people who, I mean, you already mentioned, you know, you got to upskill. But there's some people who think that that's for the smarter people or the different people than they are. You know what I mean? They think, I don't want to be at this high level. I like being what I'm doing. What do you tell people who are afraid of that?

Speaker A: Well, I think using the word fear is super important. You know, if, if, if you want to run the New York City Marathon and, uh, you hire a coach, you can't go to the coach and say, teach me to run the marathon without getting tired. It can't be done. The difference between people who finish and people who quit it, mile 24 is the people who finish figure out where to put the tired. That's what you want your coach to do, help you figure out where to put the tire. And if you have been indoctrinated or lulled yourself into a sense of satisfaction by doing tasks that other people assign you all day. I think it's great. It's good to be satisfied. And I hate to tell you, but that's going away. And if you are afraid, that's fine. It's natural to be afraid because we're about to pull the rug out from under 20 or 30 or 40 years of promises that have been made to you. Right? The promises were, show up, do the checklist, do what you're told, and we'll take care of you. And if you do that at Waffle House or you do that at Avis, Rent a Car, or you do that at Morgan Stanley, there's someone you work for who is working as fast as they can to get rid of your job. And that's not going to be happy when it occurs unless you say, great news. I found a way to get this job done without me having to check boxes, because I can do better than check boxes. Let me be the person who draws boxes instead. And I get that's not what you signed up for, but that's what's here, right?

Speaker B: A lot of people have a hard time with things. You mentioned fear and I created an assessment that determines factors that impact curiosity. And fear was one, assumptions wasn't another. The voice in our head, technology over and under utilization of IT and environment, the people with whom we've interacted. So you of course talk, uh, about some of these things. I, a lot of these things. And um, I, you know what was interesting to me in my research, I expected fear to just overwhelm all the other ones, but they were all kind of equal. And uh, there. It's just every day though, things are changing. And I don't know how much you've looked into the uh, the Atlas version of Chat GPT because it's only on Mac, I think, right at this moment. But that's going to be pretty much looking like a Google or one of those. And you're very familiar with Yahoo. You know, you see what happens, right? And what do you think is going to happen when chat can do everything Google can do? And will they still advertise? Uh, what's going to happen to Google?

Speaker A: Google put my company out of business years ago, so I'm not going to shed any tears if Google goes away. But leaving that aside, Google stumbled into a miracle. It is a miracle that has never happened before and will probably never happen again. And that miracle was a perfect match between advertising and users. The users, during its glory 15 year run wanted there to be ads the same way. If you open the classifieds of the newspaper in Phoenix and there were no classifieds, you were disappointed. You wanted there to be classified. So Google built a giant auction engine of classifieds. And a way to understand this is if you're a Class action lawsuit lawyer and a new client, uh, for some horrible disease is worth $1,000 to you. You're bidding for clicks to get people to your site. Well, you're willing to bid up until you've reached the amount where you break even. Because even if you make $10 on that client, you're still willing to bid. But there's another class action lawyer, uh, down the street. They're bidding against you. They're also willing to bid up to $10. So that means if it's worth $1,000 to each of you, one of you is going to bid 990 bucks. Which means that Google gets to keep all the value that your firm creates. Multiply that by every firm in the world. This was spectacular. Right? And everything Google has done has just been window dressing around this simple twist of fate. Well, I hate to tell Sam, you're not going to be able to do that with ChatGPT. And if they start taking ads to build their business, they're going to wreck it because then they have two people they have to serve, the advertiser and the user. You can't serve both. Well, we saw this happen with Twitter, right? Um, if Twitter hadn't had ads, the whole thing wouldn't have gone down the toilet. So Google could be massively disrupted by ChatGPT, but ChatGPT isn't going to get the benefit.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, okay, so now that these, uh, platforms like ChatGPT can get, uh, do everything that a lot of other sites do. I mean, you mentioned what it could do with Google. What about something like LinkedIn? Say you have. I'm interested, I'm speaking to them this week and I, you know, I'm speaking to Disney, I'm speaking to a bunch of groups this week. So I'm very interested in your insight because. Happy to drop your name in these talks. Um, it's, ah, it's an interesting thing because you can pretty much search for anything now on something like Atlas or whatever version of these different sites. How do they differentiate themselves? How do they, you know, you say being safe is risky. So, um, what, what do you do if you're that company with AI taking over, if you can find just about anything that they have?

Speaker A: Okay, well, I love, I'm very curious about business models. So let's break down LinkedIn's business model. My uh, friend Reed started it a whole bunch of years ago, but the algorithm has definitely taken over. There's a social graph which we have at Facebook, which is, we want to see who knows who and who's friends with who. But far more valuable commercially is the professional graph. Who has worked where, what is their reputation? Work and they can contribute. This data is being relentlessly scraped by the AI systems and sometimes scammers are using it. So I'm just, this is my chance to alert all of your listeners to be careful of this. It's not hard at all for a scammer to say, show me all the people who Diane has worked with and all the people they have worked with and then go find their email addresses and then. And it could send a whole bunch of notes that really look like they were written by you, uh, to a whole bunch of people who trust you. And really bad things are going to happen. They already are. So leaving that bad news aside, the work graph becomes even more important as we enter this world of fast moving pieces. So LinkedIn's core competency and business model, which is they sell your data to recruiters, is going to stay. The question is, uh, where is the value going to shift when other entities have the data as well? Right. So that if Perplexity can navigate its way through LinkedIn and discover the three people I should send a note to for the new project I'm working on. I haven't been clicking on LinkedIn to look at that. I think the right answer tends to be adversarial interoperability, the idea that these systems all work with each other and someone figures out what tolls to charge. But we've seen lots of bad things be built on the Internet in the name of making VCs happy. So I'm not sure how it's going to play out, but I don't think LinkedIn's going away anytime soon.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean they offer that interconnected community feel that you're not going to get right now with the AI. And I think, you know, you go with relationships and the things like that. I think people are getting really tired on LinkedIn looking at uh, or not just there, but everywhere of looking at AI generated, uh, content. Yeah, this long thing that nobody wants to read. And it looks, you know, it's perfectly written. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just boring. And then the pictures, you know, they're AI, those are boring. So it's going to be interesting to see when people just kind of go, I've had enough of looking at that. And they go back to, they go back to posting pictures of their families, almost like being on Facebook now people want to see more personal things. And I mean, I spend my time on LinkedIn, because that's where my customers are more than I would on Facebook or someplace else, since that's my focus businesses. But I think it's really interesting to see what people are getting tired of. And, uh, I mean, people always had a short attention span anyway, but now it seems like everybody's posting so much content just because they can. But just because you can, should you?

Speaker A: Well, it's not just because you can. So, um, David Foster Wallace tells the story of old fish. So, swimming along and passing two younger fish. And the old fish says, the younger fish, how's the water? And one younger fish turns the other one and says, what's water? And so you just described what it feels like to be in LinkedIn, but what you didn't mention is the algorithm. So my blog is automatically reposted on LinkedIn. My blog probably has not gotten worse in the last three years. My traffic is down by a factor of 20 on LinkedIn. It's not because my blog has changed by a factor of 20. It's because the algorithm rewards different things. And so the algorithm was set up a few years ago to reward people writing stuff, and not stuff on their blog, but stuff on LinkedIn. And so you got rewarded for that. So you did it more. So it became normal. And then you could use AI to make slopes, and it got rewarded. That's not. That's not going to last. Right, right. AI. LinkedIn doesn't care if Diane is getting tired of it. What LinkedIn cares about is, is this helping us make money tomorrow.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: And as soon as they adjust the algorithm, everyone will say, oh, it's totally normal to do this instead. And they'll start racing to do that, because we are. We're not, uh, we're. We're fish, but we don't see the water. And the water is the algorithm. The algorithm is what pushes people to act the way they act online.

Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, that's a great analogy. And I remember, um, hearing about that when I was researching perception. I think all that is so fascinating. What you. You don't know what you don't know until you get out there. Right? And, uh, you talk about, um, marketing, of course, so much. And you. I want to. First of all, do you still blog every single day? I mean, how do you do that

Speaker A: 10,000 days in a row?

Speaker B: That's amazing. It's crazy. I mean, I do a lot of writing and I, uh, can't even, you know. But you don't always write 500 words. I mean, you have Some days that are light. Right?

Speaker A: If I work very, very hard, I can write a short post. But if you see a long post, it's probably because I was too busy to make it really short.

Speaker B: Before I forget about it, I want to ask you about some, um, marketing questions. Just because so many courses I've taught still teach the four P's and they do the generic marketing thing. Where does that fit? What do you think that, that, um, universities should be teaching and marketing, that they're not? And what are they teaching? They shouldn't be.

Speaker A: So I taught at nyu. I taught at Pace. I built the biggest online marketing course in the world. Uh, I've taught hundreds of thousands of people. I think that universities have done a uniquely horrible job of teaching marketing. And I think, uh, there needs to be three tracks. Track number one is what is it like to be marketed to? There should be a course that almost everyone takes to help them understand the mindset of the person who is manipulating them, propagandizing them, or telling them a story they need to hear. Here that being smart about how that is done is basic citizen knowledge. The second thing is a course on what is it to be a marketer at a big company? Because most big organizations have someone who is ostensibly in charge of marketing, but almost everybody else is a cog in the marketing machine. And so, yeah, you need to learn some marketing, some strategy. But mostly what you need to learn is there's a tool set that people who work in the marketing department know, right? And then there's the course I care about, which is how do humans tell each other effective, true stories that make a change happen? That's what I think marketing is. And the single best way to teach that is to have people do it. And so when I teach that class, I establish groundwork. I help them understand the basic ideas. And then I say, and now go market something. Go figure out how to sell something on ebay for more than it cost. You. Go figure out how to go to the train station and sell, uh, a 20 bill for $10, which is much harder than it sounds. And, um, figure out by doing marketing, how marketing works. Because we don't need more people who are marketing driven. We need people who are market driven. And those are totally different things. And so based on that analysis, now you know why Yale doesn't hire me to teach marketing? Because the institution, uh, doesn't think that way about any topic, right? And. But marketing is a craft. Biology is not a craft. Social studies is not a craft. Marketing is a craft.

Speaker B: It's interesting. You're taking me back to the 80s again. Uh, I, uh, used to work for AstraZeneca for 20 years, and I was a pharmaceutical rep. And one of the teams they put me on was this. I was a sales rep. So I was used to just the sales aspect, not so much the writing of the materials that they would show to the doctor. So they put me on a marketing team and we'd go to doctors and then you'd get to see from the sales perspective what was their reaction to this marketing visuals before they came out. And I like that cross pollination because we don't see a lot of that in the workplace where you're in your silo, you're in your cubicle. And when I studied curiosity, I found some of the best, uh, stories were companies or people that went outside of their, you know, their silos, in their companies, even in their industries. Uh, whether it was going from a hospital that went to a race car team to learn efficiency or with that kind of thing, it was very fascinating to me. And so I loved listening to your stories. Uh, I tend to listen to audiobooks I more than read because I could multitask. And you tell such great stories. And I'm thinking, he had to record all. That's all I'm thinking is how much time it takes to record it. Because I hired people to do my book. Ah. Because it's. That's a lot of work and you have a lot of books. And I'm just curious, um, how do you get your stories? I mean, you did you work with most of the people that you write about or do you research? I mean, how do you get these great stories?

Speaker A: So I took one English class in college. My high, uh, school English teacher wrote in my yearbook, you are the bane of my existence, and you will never amount to anything. And so I didn't show up fresh out of college thinking I'm going to be a writer. I had been indoctrinated to believe that I couldn't be a writer. And when I got my first job at Spinnaker Software, launching computer games with science fiction authors, um, I needed to write copy. I needed to write more than I expected. And what I decided early on was, I'm going to write like I talk. Because if I write like I talk, then I'm not going to get hung up on the writing part. I just have to make my talking better. So the first job was, how do I talk better? And I think most people don't pay any attention to that. They just Talk. And I have worked for 50 years to 40 years to talk better. So I don't. I'll have, I'll have a pause, but I don't put in a lot of likes and ums. Um, and I also try to construct stories that have a point. So when I'm going to write about something, I think about the fact that I've been noticing things my whole life, like most people. But what I do is if I notice something that doesn't make sense, or I notice something that has a point, or I notice something happening in the world that's fascinating, I file it away because one day I'm going to need it. So I read that Western Union had the chance to buy AT&T for a couple million dollars and they didn't. And I remember that when I was at Yahoo, we had the chance to buy Google for $15 million and we didn't. Once you find a couple of these stories that you've put away, you can say, oh, I'm trying to make a point about this. Let me get that story and this story and this story and put them together. So I'm collecting these stories. Everyone can do that. But most people to your life's work aren't curious. And they're not curious because deep down they're afraid. And I think the list you made was powerful, but I could show you how I believe. Anyway, almost everything on that list is about fear.

Speaker B: Well, they all kind of overlap. They come back to fear, some of them. You know what I mean? That's exactly it. And what's interesting to me is when I first started writing about curiosity, uh, when I did my research many years ago, uh, I did like Google, you know, alerts to let me know when people were doing research. And so I'd get notified. And then I kept getting Mars Rover stuff. And I go, minus my Mars Rover. And I got what I really wanted, but nobody was really writing about this. And the weird thing is, for me, I don't know if curiosity is exactly the word that I trying to, uh, imply, because really what I'm looking at is getting out of status quo, thinking to do things differently. And people, that's what I think. The cultures need to change. They're just so used to doing what worked in the past. And we have all the great stories, of course, of the Kodaks and Blockbusters and the old ones. But I'm curious if you have new stories of companies you think either held on to status quo and suffered, or embraced getting out of status quo and succeeded that you want to share?

Speaker A: Um, yeah, I mean, we could tell each other these stories all day long. The question is, how many stories does someone need to hear before they get the joke?

Speaker B: That's a good point.

Speaker A: And so, you know, just go visit, uh, any big box store that is struggling. Go think about the last time you went to Kmart. We can go down the list. Go, go look at the person on your street is driving a Chevy Nova. You know, everything is in this cycle of creative destruction. The difference that is happening now is people of influence felt like they could hang on long enough to retire so they didn't have to worry about it. And like, so, you know, the people at Random House saw Amazon in 1994. Well, how many years ago was that? 30, 40 years ago. So yeah, they made it. Congratulations, you made it all the way to the end. Uh, but now it's not a 40 year cycle. And uh, then it went to a 20 year cycle and now it's a 10 year cycle goal. So is 10 years enough for you to get to the other side, struggling the whole way? If it is, great. If you're 25, no, you need more than 10 years. And so the urgency that we're facing now is not for people like Diane Hamilton and Seth Godin to persuade you to go do this. The urgency is for you to figure out how you can make the tiny choices, to persuade yourself that you are capable of doing this. To innovate at the smallest possible level for the smallest group of people and realize it's not fatal.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: That is the step, uh, not the giant strategic leap, but the simple step of not playing wordle tomorrow. But playing a word game you've never played. Right, right. How bad could that be? And then proceed.

Speaker B: Well, you know, it's interesting because, uh, I wrote my dissertation on emotional intelligence and its impact on sales performance and the people. It's similar with curiosity. The people who need to build, to build their curiosity and their emotional intelligence don't run out to get books on how to do that. Right. So, and I. It was fun interviewing Daniel Dolman on my show because, I mean, his research was so vital to me.

Speaker A: He's the O.G.

Speaker B: yeah, yeah. So he made it very popular. And I really want to get curiosity to be something that, that corporations, um, that they measure, that they, they quantify, you know, and it was so frustrating to me when I was talking to people about here's, here's the value of, of curiosity. Um, and you know, the people who get it don't need to see data but there's some people who don't get it, and they want to see data. So I even did my own research and saw a connection to engagement and all these, you know, productivity.

Speaker A: They don't want to see.

Speaker B: They don't want to hear it. Right.

Speaker A: I don't. Sorry to interrupt you.

Speaker B: Oh, you're right.

Speaker A: They want to see data. So the wizard of Oz.

Speaker B: Some do.

Speaker A: No, they say they do.

Speaker B: What do they want?

Speaker A: Well, the wizard of Oz has lessons for us every day. And one of the lessons is Dorothy goes to see the wizard, and she says, I want to go home. And he says, I will send you home if you bring me the broomstick of the wicked witch. Does he need a broomstick? He does not.

Speaker B: No.

Speaker A: What he needs is Dorothy to go away.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And so he needs to go away. If someone gives you a broomstick project, uh, then we bring Ziggs obligating question to the table. And the obligating question is. So are you saying that if I brought you data, you would change how you measure and hire and fire and promote? Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I just want your data. Okay, well, I'm not going to waste your time then, because you don't really want my data.

Speaker B: You know, that's such a good point. But, you know, I think with a lot of people who I talk to are always like, well, what do we do if our leader doesn't employ. Embrace, uh, this culture of curiosity. Right. And trying to get it from the top down is a lot easier than from the bottom up. And so, you know, it's very hard for these people who don't want to leave their company, and they want to have that kind of culture. But if. If leaders don't buy into it, what do you say to them?

Speaker A: Leaders never buy into it. Because, first of all, most organizations, uh, have managers, not leaders. Uh, managers use power and authority to tell people what to do. That's why Starbucks works. That's why McDonald's works. That's why Microsoft works. There are a few leaders, sometimes they don't even manage people. Leaders are doing something voluntary, which is they're exploring a frontier and waiting for the organization to, top down, give you instructions on how to become curious, and top down, give you instructions on how to go outside the box. You will wait forever. Yeah. The real question is, will you get fired for being curious for 10 minutes today?

Speaker B: That's a good question for sure.

Speaker A: The likelihood of that happening unless you work at Rikers island is zero. You're just afraid to be curious for 10 minutes. It's not that, you know, uh, Satya Nadella is going to find out that you were curious for 15 minutes and send a memo to your boss's boss's boss's boss and have you fired. It doesn't work that way. And so what I say to people is, if it's really as bad as you say, you should quit because you're a cog in a machine and you're undervalued. But you're not going to quit because it's not really as bad as you say. You just found something to point to, to give you an excuse to hide. And, you know, I've worked at some very big companies, felt big to me, and I never got fired for being creative. And the kind of innovation we're looking at is not the selfish innovation of this is good for me. Nor is it the blameless innovation of I don't take any responsibility. It's the generous, responsible innovation of, I did this for you. I, I solved this problem. And it could be something as simple as I solved the way we're going to give out the badges at our next conference. And if it doesn't work, that's on me. Well, that's creative. Yeah. And, you know, like, if you don't want to invite me to any sort of party, uh, where food is served, because if there's a buffet and it's not working properly, and it's super easy to tell when a buffet isn't working properly, you just look at where the line slows down. I'll fix it because, hey, I'm at the party anyway. So, for example, if they're only serving food on one side of the table and you pull the table out from the wall, now you can serve food on both sides of the table, the throughput of the buffet will double. That's a creative act. And I don't do it for myself because I already have access to the food. I'm doing it for the Host and the 200 people who are waiting in line, while the people who work there are just doing their job. Right. And so there are buffet problems everywhere we look. If we begin to solve those and take responsibility for it and then give away credit, very soon there will be a line outside our door, people who want us to do that for them.

Speaker B: And I see that you have this sense of curiosity because you're asking these questions, you're keeping these, uh, stories, you're doing all these things. And a lot of people don't think like that. I mean, you have that Seinfeld esque noticing of the world. Right? And some people just don't. Are there questions that you suggest people should be asking of themselves on a daily basis or some kind of thing you think would make people, um, come out of that sense of fear that they're not addressing?

Speaker A: This is super simple. I mean, here's the deal. I don't have any hair, no matter how hard I try and no matter how hard I wish I'm going to be bald. And that's not the way it works with creativity. Everyone who's listening to this has done something creative at least once in their whole life. I'm sure of it. Maybe when you were seven, you painted something that never been painted. Maybe when you were nine, you told a joke that had never been told before. You have done at least one thing. So if you've done it once. Now we're just talking about a matter of degree. And for me, it's about systems. Do you see the system? And can you ask the question why five times? Why is it like this? Oh, yeah, okay, but why? Okay, okay, why? And when you get to the fifth why, you will be at the core of the situation. Now the question is it a problem or is it a situation? What's the difference? All problems have solutions. That's what makes them problems. You might not like the solution, you might not like the compromise the solution requires, but there's a solution. Situations have no solution. Gravity. Gravity is a situation. It is not a problem. No matter what we do, we can't make gravity go away. No sense whining about gravity. No one whines about gravity because it's a situation. But there are plenty of problems. And you might not like the idea that the only way to solve the problem is to lay off a person, uh, who's, you know, you've trusted and worked with before. But if the problem is important enough, you know the solution, you can go do it. So when we ask why enough times, we can get to the heart of it. Is this a problem? Yes. Then there's a solution. Okay. What is the compromise required for that solution? Can you live with it or not? We can repeat that. We begin on the tiniest, tiniest little problems, and then we work our way up.

Speaker B: You use the word creativity, um, and I use, um. I've had a lot of creativity and curiosity experts on my show. Do you use them as the same word, or do you see that one leads to the other? Which one do you think comes first?

Speaker A: Yeah, curiosity comes first. It identifies the problem. Creativity says this is the least painful solution to the problem. Right. And so a, uh, creative solution that has to. Is called that because it has the least compromise. We were stuck with the problem because we weren't willing to tolerate the compromise we thought the solution had. It would cost too much, it would be too risky, whatever, but your creative solution had less compromise. So we celebrated.

Speaker B: It's interesting because if you look at some of the research on, um, like George Land looking at the kids being super creative when they're young, and then as they get older, it's just tanks, you know, we see this kind of same thing with curiosity. It kind of, it's more inhibited, it doesn't go away. It's just all these things stop you. Which is fascinating to me to look at this. And I remember with George Land's talk, he talked about how you put on the gas and you put on the brake. You think of a great idea, but then you put a brake on at the same time and you don't go anywhere if you put the gas and the brake on. If you over criticize what your ideas are. Um, I'm curious if you think we're getting to be better at being more creative now with all the AI and technology changes or worse, is it having an impact? Are you seeing more creativity, more curiosity? What are you seeing?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think like most things, it's a, um, bimodal distribution. It is easier than ever, at least easier in the last 40 years than ever to be a cog in the machine. Do what you're told, make your world smaller, do your tasks. Uh, there are plenty of people that we work with, for example, remotely, where you give them a task and it comes back literally exactly what you said with no insight.

Speaker B: All right.

Speaker A: On the other hand, someone who wants to do this creative work. So I just launched these three decks of cards. And each deck has, is used as AI. So the QR code on the back of each one and one of them is a fortune telling deck. One of them is a deck of choose your own adventure so you can be the invisible man. And the third one lets you talk to 50 different coaches who have trained on the work of everyone from Pemachodron to Frederick Douglass. I did all the art, I did all the programming, and I did all the design in seven weeks. And I didn't do it because I was trying to build an empire of these cards. I did it to make a point. And I did it because it was a thrilling seven weeks because nothing slowed me down. Yeah, because my partner works 24 hours a day for free or for $20 a month. And, uh, here we go. Let's go. Oh, I did that. It didn't work. I did that. It didn't work. I did that. Oh, that one works. And so if you want to be creative, this is the greatest moment in human history to be creative with scale. But if you want to hide, this is a really good time to hide.

Speaker B: It's interesting. I think back to, um, ah, a talk I gave for Forbes, like, a hundred years ago that it was, what's the future of the workplace with all the generations? And, and all, you know, the boomers were upset with the millennials back then, and then now we've got millennials talking about these young Gen Z's of how much it's just fun to see each generation. Do you see a difference? And, um, is it always the same? Is it just the next generation that finds the next one annoying? Or are you seeing people working together better? What do you see when you get out there?

Speaker A: You know, we've been naming generations since 1900 or so. There's a fantastic book called the Fourth Turning that I strongly Recommend. Uh, every 80 years, four generations go by, and we start over the cycle. This goes back to before the Civil War, and we're having a turning right now. The baby boomers. I'm older than you, but the baby boomers have taken over our culture since 1965. The music, the politics, the food, money, it's all been about my generation. I'm, um, the last of us. We've had presidents in office twice as much as we should based on how many years there were baby boomers. And so the baby boomers are about to create a vacuum. After messing up a whole bunch of things and creating a bunch of things, how can we believe that that's not going to be really disruptive? Because generations do have things in common with their peer group. Uh, I don't think any generation is defective. I think that the gestalt of a generation is that way for a reason. And magic will come. And magic often comes from friction and from change. And that's what we're feeling.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. I was just listening to the book I was driving home from San Diego yesterday. I was listening to 1929 by Sorkin. I don't know if you've read his book yet. It's all about the crash in 1929, of course, the stock market. And it's just what's going to happen again? The same kinds of things keep. And that's what you're reminding me of. Uh, another book I really like, as we're talking about books, was Range. I'm sure I don't know if you've read Epstein's book. It was a really good one. And I think that there's a lot we can learn, um, about so many things. I love that you see marketing and everything. I see sales and marketing. I, I wish everybody had sales training to some extent. You learn so much. You learn, you know, question asking, you have to. Or you're a bad salesperson. You, you learn so many things. And so when, uh, I was super excited to hear, um, that you wanted to have a chat because I, I, you have so many things that you've written that have been so successful, and, uh, you've taught people so many wonderful lessons. And I definitely want to share this in my courses and on my show and in my writing. So it was really fun asking you all these things. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you want to talk about?

Speaker A: You are so good at this. We could talk for ten hours. Uh, I got a lot out of it, and I really appreciate the way you show up and make a difference.

Speaker B: Oh, well, this was so much fun. Thank you for being on the show, Seth. This was wonderful.