Get Your Freak On!
Blair has been thinking about how, as AI continues to streamline more administrative tasks over time, we will be left to focus on the things we humans are good at – interacting with other humans. Because of this, the interesting people will win in selling their services and expertise.
Links
“The Interesting People Will Win” by Blair Enns for winwithoutpitching.com
“The Fertility Crash Will Make the World a Small Town” by Tyler Cowen for The Free Press
Jesse Ratner’s March 27 LinkedIn Post about AI
Transcript
David C. Baker: Today's episode title, I think, is Get Your Freak On. I actually don't want to know more about that. [chuckles]
Blair Enns: You don't know that line, get your freak on? I don't know where it's from.
David: Oh, I do. I just don't want to know what you mean by that. We're just going to leave that. [chuckles]
Blair: Okay.
David: We've made this pledge publicly many times: we're not ready to do an AI episode, and then we're freaking talking about AI every episode. What is going on? Should we just admit we're doing an AI episode?
Blair: [sighs] Well, it's like a fish trying to avoid water, I guess, is your point. We're swimming in it, right?
David: Yes.
Blair: How did this happen? I guess the inspirational trigger was Tyler Cowen's article in the Free Press titled The Fertility Crash Will Make the World a Small Town. In that article, he talks about-- The global population is still growing. I just looked this up. It's still growing, but the pace of growth is slowing. It's going to peak in the year 2080 at about 10.3 million, then it's going to start a gradual decline from there. Hans Rosling, when he was alive, he was a physician and a statistician, and he did some work for the UN on population growth and other things, and his gift was he was an excellent communicator. He did some talks-- including, I think, a TED Talk, on how the global population is going to peak at about 10.5 million.
David: Billion.
Blair: Oh, billion. Sorry. Then we're going to have problems because I remember Ed Kless talking about this on his podcast with Ron Baker, The Soul of Enterprise. He said, "We don't have an economic system that has been tested in a world of declining population." If you think how fundamental growth is to the economy, when the population starts to decline, there may be some challenges to the economy. Now, that's a bit of a ramble. The population is going to decline. AI is going to take some jobs, and we don't have to go down the rabbit hole of how many jobs, how quickly. Can we both agree that AI will take some jobs?
David: I would be comfortable agreeing with some. I just don't think it's going to be a large number.
Blair: Do you think not many get taken, or that the jobs that get taken will be replaced by other new jobs that we can't conceive of now?
David: I think both. I think AI is primarily going to contribute to greater productivity, not job loss.
Blair: Yes. I agree with you. I don't remember if we talked about this in a previous episode, but I was writing a post recently, and the slant I was taking was that the history of these predictions of the impact of new technology is all littered with these overly excited claims, none of which ever came true. When I looked at the data, almost all of these predictions came true about what would happen when people started watching more television.
Through the history of the introduction of new media and new technology, they almost all came true, just a lot slower over a longer period of time. These concerns that we're hearing today about rampant job loss, if I just take history as a guide, there will be job loss because of AI, but it's going to be farther out into the future, and it's going to be a lot more gradual than we imagine, even though the pace of this technology is faster than all of the previous ones.
In a declining population, so there's fewer people, and there's fewer people required to do the jobs because there are now billions of these smart agents out there that are doing at least some of the work. Cowen's point was that the humans will be left with the work that only humans can do, and that is some form of human interactions. He said, "Therefore, the most interesting humans will win." I wrote a post on this called The Interesting People Will Win.
David: [chuckles]
Blair: He didn't use that term exactly, but I extrapolated that to the current market. Listeners to this podcast are in some creative business. They are the expert; this language that you and I use, talking about The Business of Expertise, the name of your book, and this idea that I often talk about: the fact that you can either be seen as the expert or a vendor. I think in the not-too-distant future, the most interesting experts will be the people who win, and I think you can also extrapolate that to the expert's second job of selling their expertise.
If you think of the best sales experiences you've had, there was some component about that human, that individual, that you found interesting, fascinating even. I think the most interesting sales people-- typically when the most interesting experts might have some edge, but I think as time goes on, the edge that accrues to interesting individuals will do nothing but increase.
David: Let me unpack that just a little bit. AI is clearly not interesting on its own. AI will replace a little bit of the expertise that is demanded of experts, or at least it will enhance the expertise that they bring to the table. Why is it that being interesting is more important in an AI driven world, than it was before an AI-driven world?
Blair: I think in an AI-driven world-- and I'm already starting to see this, and we've talked about it or alluded to it a little bit, we start to value the more human things. We start to value human connection. I think of a child who's a software developer and I toured him through a friend of mine, his business, years ago. The person who is [unintelligible 00:06:10] 1,000 people in this business, quite developer heavy. It was a technology consulting company.
The person giving the tour, she was touring my son and his friend. She made the point that you can't just be a good coder. We will not hire a coder, or a developer who wants to sit there, and just develop, and doesn't write code, and does not want to interact with other people. You have to be a social, interesting, outgoing person. You have to have interpersonal skills, because it's not enough to just be a coder. I thought, "Oh, that's really interesting. I hope these boys are taking this on board."
Jump forward a few years in time, AI can do a lot of these kind of more roach jobs. One of the jobs that's being prophesized that's going to go away almost entirely is driving, and I wrote about this in this post of mine. I was in Miami recently. I'd been there twice in the last six months, seven, eight months, I guess. There's Waymo in Miami, so I choose Waymo over Uber. I want to know how you feel about this. I would prefer to not have to deal with a driver, than to have to deal with a driver, but there are exceptions and the exceptions are the really interesting drivers.
There's one time I couldn't get a Waymo, so I called an Uber. Had an Uber Black. This guy who looked like a hip-hop star pulls up in this pimped out Escalade. He had the attitude, he had the dress, he had the music going. I thought, "Yes, I would pay extra for this." I don't want to ride with the average person in the average experience. I'm willing to pay more for the interesting experience with the interesting person. Does that resonate with you? Your preference for Waymo versus Uber, but still room for an interesting Uber driver?
David: Yes, it does.
Blair: Or you just hate all people equally?
David: No. I'm just really uneven about it. There are times when it irritates me when I'm trying to have an interesting conversation with a driver, and the driver doesn't want one. Then the opposite also happens, where they are trying to foist a conversation on me and I might just be exhausted, having struggled on the mat with a client or something, and it's like, "I just don't have the patience for it." One of the biggest skills, I think, an interesting driver has, is to very quickly determine whether the person that's in the back seat wants to have a conversation or not. Then they follow that lead based on what the passenger wants.
If we take this to LinkedIn just for a minute, I don't know if you saw this or not. One of the best AI writing detectors is called Pangram. It's pretty much undisputed as the best at the moment. There are some false negatives. Not too many false positives. There may be other tools that get better at it than Pangram, but at the moment, that's the one. They just finished this big study and they discovered that, of the long-form content on LinkedIn, 41% is AI generated. 41%. That's the most on any platform. Just below that would be Medium, and then Twitter, and then Reddit and then Substack.
Which even Substack has 10% of AI generated content, which is higher than I would've guessed. They're starting to put some gates in Substack just to detect that, so that you aren't subscribing to something that AI wrote. Anyway, that as the background. Yesterday, this person, they were philosophizing about their use of AI when they write posts for LinkedIn and she said, "Well, why wouldn't I be my best self on LinkedIn? Why wouldn't I use all the tools that are available to me to put my best foot forward? That's what AI does for me."
Blair: Because that's not you.
David: Well, that's the way I responded. My first comment is, "What's going to happen when I'm in a conversation with you, in a sales conversation with you, and you show up not looking anything at all like the way you presented yourself with AI?" Like going to a date with somebody and it's, "Wait, this is not the person that I got to know on some platform."
Let me just say one other thing about LinkedIn. If your premise is true that the most interesting people are going to win, that is an argument for being interesting on LinkedIn and not turning it into your personal Facebook, but to at least talk about interesting things related to your life so that you register, so that people don't just see what you've written and move right past it because it looks like everything else everybody else has written.
Blair: I found this guy on LinkedIn from you yesterday, his name is Jesse Ratner. He's a non-fiction writer. I'm going to try to read this really long post here, and I'd like the listener to bear with us. This is so prescient because we were convening today to talk about the importance of being interesting.
I reposted it with a note that said, "Anybody who tells you that they have trained AI to write just like themselves see in that statement an admission basically of their blandness, of the fact that if you can train AI to write like you, then you don't have a voice. You have not developed your own unique voice." I say that from the advantage of being a writer, and you are a writer too. You and I are of a certain age, and so we have decades of experience of writing and writing publicly, so we have honed our voices. When somebody makes the comment, "Oh, yes, I trained AI to write like me," I think, "You know what? Write without AI for another decade, find out who you really are, and then see if you can get AI to replicate it, because I can't get AI to replicate my writing."
A bunch of my clients have said, "Hey, Blair, I've trained an AI to write just like you and give answers just like you," and I look at all these things and they're all garbage. I mean, they're not without value, they're not without opinions like me, but I think that's not me, content-wise, tone-wise, it's not me at all. I will read Jesse's post in a minute here. Do you think I'm overreacting to that? Do you think AI will at some point get good enough that it can write for people?
David: Yes, it will be able to for decent writers, not for amazing writers. Because AI is essentially a confident consensus machine. That's how I think of it. It has read everything out there in the world, but it hasn't experienced anything, nor does it have any judgment about what style of writing to bring. It'll be like an amazing assistant who has learned everything about you, who could probably pass off as your writing, but nothing magic will happen. This could just be me trying to preserve my life in this world.
Blair: I worry about that too. Here's Jesse Ratner's post. "Sam Altman can build a cathedral of wires and call down GPT-7 like a chrome angel from the bloodless heavens, but it still won't know the smell of your father's rage in the kitchen, the particular religion of your loneliness at 2:13 AM, the wet salt of your own body after grief, the cracked neon prayers, the motel lusts, the bus stop humiliations, the beautiful garbage fire of your obsessions, the one joke you tell when you're dying inside, the weird little wound you turned into a worldview, the heartbreaks that tattoo your syntax, the years you spent dragging your voice through broken glass just to make one true sentence sing.
Because art is not a prediction machine. It is a possession, a haunting, a feral weather system of memory, nerve, shame, and desire. AI, for all its speed, shimmer, and statistical sorcery, is still just a brilliant amnesiac in a rented face, still untouched by mortality, still unbitten by love, still too clean, too obedient, too unscarred to make the kind of language that crawls out of a life actually lived.
Give the machine your patterns if you want, feed it your footprints, your fever, and your wreckage, but do not forget that the holiest data is the weirdness you survived, the trembling singularity of being exactly yourself. That is why the future belongs not to the smooth or the synthetic, but to the freaks, the poets, the liars trying to become honest. The men and women with wildfire in their rib cages. The people whose souls still arrive on the page with dirt on their shoes." Fuck me, can AI do that?
David: [chuckles] I actually think AI could probably write that kind of stuff, but it will be meaningless because it's not written by a real human. I listen to this, and I'm picturing the person who wrote this desperately wanting to ask them questions about the specific phrases. Like, "What made you come up with that phrase?" I want to interrogate. I want to go deeper. There's a hunger, there's a lack of fullness with something like this because this just points to deeper meaning, and I want to know more about that deeper meaning. I don't want to get to know an AI engine.
Blair: Yes. It points to pain and a lot of really human stuff. This is only the second post of his I read. You sent me another one of his, and then I clicked through to Amazon to look at his book, and I read the description of his book. You can tell from the three things I've read that he has had a traumatic childhood. He references his father's rage quite a bit, even in the novel that he's written. It's surprising that he's posting this on LinkedIn. I love that he is, but honestly, on LinkedIn, most of what we're reading is marketing, right?
David: Right.
Blair: I think AI can do a pretty good job at writing marketing language, and I've said before, there's certain marketing things that I use AI to write. I mentioned I think I'm writing a personal book. I'm almost finished it, and I'm just absolutely loving this book. It is so deeply meaningful and personal to me. The thought of letting AI anywhere near this fucking thing, it just sends shivers down my spine. I would not let it near this. I would not have it change a word.
I'll let a human editor make some recommendations on changing some words, but no, this is me. I'm pouring me into this thing. I don't want the machine near it. I don't want anybody accusing me of letting the machines near it, and I hope when people read it, they'll get that sense. I'm not as eloquent with words as Jesse Ratner is. I can't write what I just read of his. I read language like that, and to your point, it speaks to this inner life. It speaks to human experience. This is art.
The art comes from the suffering and the experiences of the individual. Anytime we're doing anything personal, we want to communicate some of these elements of ourselves, and even when we're doing things professionally, we want to let some of that come through.
David: We want to be different. We want to have a perspective, a point of view. If I could tie something in here that I talked about in The Business of Expertise, and that's how your personal life needs to be a little bit different than your business life, and the ramifications of that. Because the world is so much more complex now, you simply can't be an expert at as many things as you used to be. You have to be very narrow in that expertise, and to get really good at that, you're going to have to spend a lot of time in there. It's almost like you have your head down; you're ignoring the rest of the world.
How do you balance that perspective and not lose your mind? Because you aren't looking up and around you all the time. That's where I feel like you have to have such an interesting personal life to balance that weirdness that you have because you're so focused as an expert. I don't think that was as important in the past as it is now. If you're going to be an interesting person, and if you also want to be an expert that gets paid a lot of money and people listen to you, you have to have a very, very interesting personal life that feeds some of the stuff that you talk about. It helps you shape perspectives and sharpen your curiosity.
It also, if I could just add one last thing about that, it puts pressure on your business so that if you put a boundary around your business, it should yield enough extra time to have that interesting life, and it should give you the money to have that interesting life, although I think time is more important than money in having an interesting life. I just wanted to make that point, that our world is so complex now that to be interesting people, we need to be really interesting outside of work too.
Blair: Yes. I've heard you say that for years, and I know you wrote it in the book, but you've also been saying it from stages for years too. I heard you say your personal life should be so deep, rich, interesting, and rewarding that you don't want work to intrude into it.
I think that's a powerful idea. Today, this morning, Colette said to me, "Hey, did you see that New York Times article about the two different perspectives on time?" I hadn't read it, so she explained it to me. She said, "Basically, there's monochronos, and there's polychronos, and there's monochronic people and polychronic people." She said, "Monochronic are people who do one thing. They get into a task, and they finish it to completion. They ignore everything else." Then she said, "Polychronic people are people who do different things at the same time. They multitask." I go to the store for milk or sugar-- I don't drink milk, but whatever the basic ingredient is that we're missing. I come back two hours later because I ran into all these people and stopped and had conversations. She goes and comes back and does it. She's purposeful in everything that she does, and I wander more in work, too. She made the observation that in your job, especially at a certain age-- because I think earlier on this doesn't really apply, but in your job, you should be monochronic. You should be singular-minded and focused, but in your personal life, you should be polychronic.
I would translate that to say in your business life, you're focused, and in your personal life, if you want to be interesting, yes, you have to have some depth view, but probably more importantly, you have to have breadth. That means being polychronic. I'm probably misusing the term, but that means getting distracted, going off and doing interesting things, having interesting hobbies, having varied experiences, having traveled and experienced different cultures.
I guess what we're trying to do is get at the root of the question of, well, if the future belongs to the interesting people, how do you become interesting? I think it's this combination of breadth and depth. A lot of breadth, a lot of different things, you tried a bunch of things, you had a bunch of mistakes, a bunch of failures, and then you went deep into a small number of things. Does that resonate with you?
David: Yes. Some people like to master something, not really master, sort of master with a low M, not a big M. Then, what's next? They want to achieve a certain level of competence so that they can say, I've learned 90% of that, I'm ready for the next challenge. Then other people pick something and they never leave that. The depth never ends; they can keep going deeper and deeper.
Did I ever tell you the story when our youngest, Nathan, was looking for a way to make money? His older brother was mowing lawns, and Nate decided that he would charge people to have dinner with him. [chuckles] It was $100. Now, this guy is 14, 15, 16. Somebody did it. I don't know who it was. I don't remember, but maybe it was out of pity. That got me to thinking when I was going over some of this stuff in my mind before we started recording today. Would anybody pay to have dinner with you?
Blair: No.
David: That's a good test. Would anybody pay to have dinner with you? No agenda. We reverse this and we say, if you could have dinner with anybody in the world, who would it be? Somebody picks Abraham Lincoln or whoever it is, Martin Luther King. Would somebody pay to have dinner with you? I just love that question. I don't want to test it, but I do love the question.
[laughter]
Blair: Well, I don't know if we solved any business problems, but this has been an enjoyable conversation.
David: What do we want people to take away from this?
Blair: I have no idea.
[laughter]
David: God Almighty, I need another partner.
Blair: None whatsoever. I don't know. Be more human, permission to be more human. Not only permission, there was a guy that you and I reposted Jesse Ratner's post with my own little diatribe attached to it, there was a guy that you and I both know, and he replied, in all sincerity, I think. He said, " You can tell this is AI because of the use of the phrase shimmer and statistical sorcery." Then he named the model that would come up with those words.
First I thought, "Are you an idiot?" Then I thought, "I know him a little bit, he's clearly not." There is this issue of it's easier for some people than others to be human. I sometimes have to remind myself of that. When we do our spoof episodes, and people are offended by what is so obviously tongue-in-cheek, not everybody picks up on tongue-in-cheek. Not everybody picks up on the emotion, and the pain, and the life experience behind the words.
I think if that's you, you're probably at a disadvantage, but if you can perceive these things, try to imbue your life with more of that. Try to be more interesting, and try to bring your freaky self-- it's not like the Google or whoever had this idea of bringing your whole self to work, and then after a decade, it's like, all right, enough of the whole selves, just bring your professional self and leave your political issues.
David: Leave some of yourself at home, please.
Blair: It's not that. Some people make the mistake of going too far.
David: Yes, performatively interesting.
Blair: Yes, like influencer, YOLO, bullshit, too far. Just let a little bit of your freaky self shine through. I would say if you're younger, and you think, "Now is the time to focus, like deep focus in the business," yes, sure, probably, maybe you're a little bit early, and we've talked about this before, don't focus too early, and certainly don't focus your personal interests. Don't go all in on one endeavor personally. You want to be interesting to others and to yourself, have a broad variety of interests, live a life where you experiment and fail a lot, and you have some wonderful stories to share about those failures.
David: Yes, you want to be more interesting than just to the nine people in your Facebook group.
[laughter]
Blair: Or your podcast partner.
David: Or your podcast partner, yes. All right, Blair, thank you.
Blair: Thanks, David.