Disrupting Yourself Before AI Does - with Steve Rubel

Dan Nestle [00:00:00]: Welcome or welcome back to the trending Communicator. I'm your host, Dan Nestle. One of the things I love about having my own show and complete editorial discretion is that I make the rules. I mean, I don't really have many rules, but if I wanted to, I could. But what I do have is guiding principles. Love my listeners. Conversation over structure. Focus on the future of communications and marketing. Connect the dots in real time, assuming my brain is working properly. Be the real me, take it or leave it. And finally, invite exceptional guests, leaders in our field who I admire, respect and want to hang out with. It works for me, and I'm assuming since you're listening, works for you too. But thinking about today's guest, I found myself reflecting on how and why I landed with this particular set of principles. You have to go back, way back to the early days of social media, content marketing, digital, all that stuff. Talking decades well before LinkedIn reached its first million members, when it was invite only. I somehow managed to wrangle an invite from somewhere and I forget who, and my apologies if you know who you are, but I was invited to the platform and what I saw shaped everything that would follow. Authors, famous bloggers, or at least famous. To me, people who are changing the discipline of marketing in real time were having conversations right there in front of me and I felt like I won the golden ticket. But on the other hand, I felt like I was totally out of place and didn't belong there. Didn't matter. That was imposter syndrome. I coped with that my whole life. But regardless, these people understood that digital media changed everything. Brands could connect with their customers directly. Individuals could wield more influence than ever before. Audience behavior, media consumption, brand interactions could all be measured in unprecedented ways. And now here we are a generation later, and you can replace digital media with AI and say exactly the same thing. We're in another era of disintermediation, individual empowerment, democratization, misinformation, disinformation. It goes on and on. But this time around, we're already digitally connected in uncountable ways. We're digitized, interdependent, and yet we're really hyper fractured. To help figure out what all of that means to us, our profession, our audiences and the media, I'm turning to one of those very people who are on LinkedIn at the dawn of time, defining and shaping digital communications. He's a dynamic media analyst, innovation catalyst, and communication strategist with decades of experience in anticipating trends and shaping actionable insights that help organizations stay ahead in an evolving media landscape, he's provided strategic counsel to hundreds of global corporations and nonprofits, earning consistently high marks from clients, CEOs, CCOs, CMOs, and as well as his colleagues. He's racked up awards and accolades, including PR Week 40 under 40 a while back, Forbes Web Celeb 25 and was named one of the most influential bloggers in the world by Technorati. To those of you who remember that, chances are you've read his work in Ad Age and Forbes, or on any number of social media channels, or you've seen him speak at one of his countless appearances. Or perhaps you worked with him at or through Edelman, where until recently he focused on media insights and strategy and spearheaded the firm's foray into AI and all things new. Please welcome to the show, my friend, and maybe my first social media crush, the legend Steve Rebel.

Steve Rubel [00:03:56]: Oh my God, that's. Is it my funeral?

Dan Nestle [00:04:00]: Well, I, you know, it's funny, I. Have you ever read the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People?

Steve Rubel [00:04:09]: I have. That was an amazing book. I should probably read it a second time.

Dan Nestle [00:04:12]: You know, I read that 20 something years ago. I don't, you know, I can't even tell you. And early in my corporate days, even before I was in comms, like probably I was in HR recruitment at the time and everybody was so hyped up about this book, you know, you got to read the Seven Habits, the Secret to Success. But I don't remember all that much of it. I remember think something about quadrants and I remember sharpening the saw, you know, where you know and where you, you're thinking about improvement. And, and anyway, like I think the book even starts with this whole idea of imagining your funeral and your like, what would be said about you, what would be the obituary? And I know it's very, very dark and terrible thing and sort of, you know, a little morose, but whenever I have, whenever I have great guests and I always have great guests, I don't think in terms of obituary, but I do think in terms of what would I want to say about them, about their incredible lives and how does that fit into what I'm doing. And I guess it does come off a little eulogy esque. Steve, I'm sorry, man.

Steve Rubel [00:05:24]: It's just super nice. You know, anyone who knows me knows that I don't get hung up on that kind of stuff. And I mean it was a lot of that honestly was, was, was years ago just you know, because I, I had a public profile significant in the Industry, you know, from roughly 2004, five through 19 or so. And then. And then really kind of went dark deliberately.

Dan Nestle [00:05:52]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [00:05:53]: To kind of focus on different things. And now I've been recently, now that I'm, I'm out and you know, on what I call hiatus in between opportunities, you know, getting back out there again, hence being on your show.

Dan Nestle [00:06:07]: Yeah, thank you.

Steve Rubel [00:06:08]: I mean, that's, I mean, I'm just, I'm flattered that anybody remembers me.

Dan Nestle [00:06:12]: Oh, are you kidding me? I mean, look, it's the world or the, I think the social media original, the social media OGs. And you know, the people who are like very enthusiastic about especially communications and technology and the future of what we do, and the big thinkers in the room, they must be thrilled that you're kind of a free agent right now and are out there talking.

Steve Rubel [00:06:34]: It's great to get out there. I mean, this has been, you know, I mean, I don't like the circumstances could have been better, but, you know, for all involved. But I would just say that, you know, just being out there is. I've just had a great, you know, a few months just talking to people like yourself and catching up and, and, you know, meeting with different, you know, different leaders in the PR community and, and to a degree, in the marketing community and just learning and just, you know, taking some time to do to, you know, to go to some conferences and to hear what's going on, you know, as I, as I explore what's next.

Dan Nestle [00:07:12]: Well, we're going to want to hear a lot about that, certainly your thoughts about what's going on and, and especially when it comes to AI, of course. But I've been on and on for months at least, but certainly for a long time about my not so hidden feelings about media relations and the whole, let's call it the discipline of media relations as we know it, which is not to besmirch the idea that media relations is important. So let's put that out up front. But yeah, I've been talking about that a lot and what you've been doing with AI and with measuring, you know, or with, with analyzing media plays into that in a big way. And we'll get into that. I just, I just wanted to just address this whole thing about, you know, you, you haven't gone dark and now you're back a little bit and it's like, forgive me, like, I think most people, most people went dark during the pandemic time, you know, like. And, you know, and I started before that.

Steve Rubel [00:08:13]: I kind of made an intentional decision around. I don't remember the exact year. 2018, 1917. So there were a few things. One is I. So I mean, I mean, I was blogging in the beginning for sure, heavily. And I mean, look, that wonderfully helped me find Edelman and help Edelman find me.

Dan Nestle [00:08:35]: So I was micro persuasion, right. That was.

Steve Rubel [00:08:37]: That was the name of the weblog. Yep. And I wrote that from roughly 2004 through 2009. Ish. 10. I forget what exactly when I kind of gave it up. And I, you know, that helped me, you know, help. I mean, it helped me establish a name for myself. And it got, you know, it got Richard Edelman's attention, and he got my attention, and that was just a wonderful collaboration and opportunity, and that led to 19 years in one place. Amazing. So, I mean, that. So that was just. That wouldn't have happened without, with any, without any of that. So. But by the time I got to, you know, late part of last decade, I think I was a little tired of just. I think I'd run out of things to say, to be honest, at that time. And I. I saw the platforms changing dramatically also. And I just saw that Twitter was not, which it was still Twitter then. It was not what it was five years before. It was. It was the people who were polarizing, controversial, you know, thought. Thought provoking, yes, but more so and noisy were the ones who were continuing to build influence and grow and be relevant. And that's. That's not me. I thought provoking, I can do, but controversial, no, that's not me. And also, at the time, I'm working in a big organization with 6,000 people and, you know, Lord knows how many clients, and it just, you know, wasn't anything that happened. It just, it just was like, I saw that it had diminishing returns. And then also, I think the nature of my role also was changing too, where it had diminishing returns. And so I said, okay, you know what? I think I'm. If I stop doing this, you know, at least in this format, and I want to start to do the next. What's next in my career here? And so I really turned my attention to, you know, really kind of doing client work and figuring out how I could do that more so than I was doing before.

Dan Nestle [00:10:52]: Sure.

Steve Rubel [00:10:52]: And then after that, the pandemic hit, and that changed a lot. And so at that point, you know, so. But I just saw it was a very. During the. And also it was a. During the first Trump administration, no matter which side you were on, it was such a noisy environment politically, and I had no interest in being part of that discourse.

Dan Nestle [00:11:09]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [00:11:09]: So just. Just not me, you know, So I really said, okay, you know what? I think that this. This chapter has closed and look those years away, now that I'm kind of back, and I'm doing it more, although I really should be doing it more intentionally than I'm doing it now, and I'm doing it on LinkedIn. And that changed a lot. I mean, that platform has gone through tremendous changes. Positive. And, you know, I see that, you know, that I still got it, I guess.

Dan Nestle [00:11:38]: Of course you do.

Steve Rubel [00:11:40]: You know, I don't take any of this for granted. I mean, it's, you know, six, seven years, whatever it was, is a long time.

Dan Nestle [00:11:46]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [00:11:47]: New people come along, you know, new formats are along. You know, people retire. And so I never took it for granted, but, you know, it's still there. And I see that when I do something relevant, it can work well. And actually, when I left, I just was blown away by the response, people reaching out to me. My phone didn't stop ringing for three weeks, Dan. I didn't expect that. I'll be honest. I really expected nothing.

Dan Nestle [00:12:12]: Well, it speaks to the. Well, I mean, it speaks to what I said at the upfront, that you're just humble and kind to people, and you always have been. But it's, you know, it's also. I think part of that is if you went dark for four or five years and you're sort of with, you know, withdrew a little bit, it's like jumping back in. You don't. You're not seeing that increment, the incremental changes. You're not keeping those incremental fires going, et cetera, et cetera. So must. It's a much bigger shock to the system. You know, it's like. It's like you swim in swimming, cold water, you come out, you dry off and go back in, and you're shocked again. But if you're just like, keep swimming, you know that the water is just as cold.

Steve Rubel [00:12:51]: Yeah. And I have no goal here other than to just learn and to explore what's next.

Dan Nestle [00:13:02]: And, you know, you've always been like that person exploring what's next. And I get the sense that you've always been a lifelong learner as well as a teacher in your own way. There's a lot that's coming next or that's. Or maybe we're in next right now. It's hard to tell. It's very. It's crazy.

Steve Rubel [00:13:22]: The most Transformative time I've seen. And I, and I say that with each shift, but this one's really bigger than anything I've seen.

Dan Nestle [00:13:29]: And, and you've seen it. I mean, you were part of that first one. The first. Well, it's not the first one, but the first one of our.

Steve Rubel [00:13:36]: Yeah, yeah, I was, I mean, I certainly was, you know, starting my career when the Internet was just getting going. Yeah, Commercially.

Dan Nestle [00:13:45]: Yeah, I mean, I was, I was at the same time. I mean, I started my career around the same time. I just went more traditional routes and not like sometimes I, I just want to smack my head into the wall because I'm like, oh, I wish I should. I wish I was blogging in 2002. You know, I mean, that it's the kind of thing where, where, you know, you can look back and say the things that you like that you should have been doing. Like, oh, I should have started my podcast in 2007 when people were. And it was just when there was nothing but, you know, that's like, people. It's easy to say that, hindsight. But, you know, in your case, though, you know, it's funny, I was, I did follow you. I had known of you since 2003, at least. I mean, or maybe at the, at the earliest, like, that's when. Because we were comparing notes, like last time we chatted, where we both joined LinkedIn, like within months of one another. Because you could find that information on LinkedIn if you look. So, you know, back in the dawn of time, like I said, so sort of self deprecating there as well. But I was, you know, I was an eager and avid follower of what Steve Rebel is going to say next. And then when I joined Edelman 10 years later, I remember, I remember I, you know, I was already in my 40s or early 40s, whatever, and I was just like, you know, okay. I finally made it to Edelman after a winding career, and I'm supposed to be this digital guy and have my finger on the pulse for my clients and so on, working with great people. And then my boss, David Rosen, wonderful man, says to me, hey, let's go up and see Rebel. I want to talk to him about something. I'm like, wait, what? Who? He's like, yeah, let's go talk to Rebel. I'm like, steve Rebel? Yeah, he's here. He's upstairs. We could talk. And I was floored that you could just walk in and talk to Steve Rebel. You know, I had never met you, so, you know, walk into your Office.

Steve Rubel [00:15:44]: No errors whatsoever.

Dan Nestle [00:15:45]: Oh, nothing.

Steve Rubel [00:15:45]: I just don't. I don't do that. Yeah.

Dan Nestle [00:15:47]: Oh, no, not at all.

Steve Rubel [00:15:49]: Not any criticism. Those who do. I mean, that works for them.

Dan Nestle [00:15:52]: But that's all. I'm, you know, that's all on me. My point is like, I'm like, sitting here, like, gushing, and I'm like, oh, he's a dude. He's a regular guy. I respect and admire the hell out of everything he's done.

Steve Rubel [00:16:03]: Thank you.

Dan Nestle [00:16:03]: But just a guy like me and, you know, it was awesome. I'd see you on the elevator every now and then. It was fine, you know, not like running into Richard or something where. Where I'm like, petrified and standing in the corner. But with you, it was like. It was perfectly fine.

Steve Rubel [00:16:16]: I was rising. The elevator with Richard are fun.

Dan Nestle [00:16:19]: Oh, my goodness. But anyway, getting. Getting to this whole idea of this is the most transformational time that you've ever seen. And that's. That's a bold statement. I agree. But it is a bold statement. Well, let's get into that. I mean, what do you think? And we can start banding around the AI stuff. But how do you think this time is different? What is specifically. What is it specifically about? With relation to comms and marketing especially, what is it that is more transformational this time? And what's got your eye?

Steve Rubel [00:16:54]: Well, I think it is AI and. But it's AI coupled with dramatic social, political and geopolitical changes. And I think that's, you know, environmental. And so it's. Which had been brewing for, you know, many years now. And so it's that mixed together that really is, I think, you know, without making any kind of, you know, political statement of any kind. But, but it's, It's. It's that together, I think that really is going to be one is that comms people are going to be, you know, are dealing with incredible disruption, change, instability, whatever you want to call it, you know, through what's through it through, you know, those kind of societal and geopolitical environmental shifts. And then. And then now you have AI just coming in and just totally positively and negatively impacting the profession. And quickly.

Dan Nestle [00:17:58]: Oh, the speed is.

Steve Rubel [00:18:00]: I mean, social media. I remember, you know, back, you know, when I first started writing about it in 2004, it really. And I was going to say. And I was saying how transformational it was. It really didn't start to hit and be truly transformational until about five, six years later, until it reached. Well, I think when Facebook got to be a billion Users or something like that.

Dan Nestle [00:18:19]: That's.

Steve Rubel [00:18:19]: Yeah, that's about when it was really like, okay, you know, you, I. But I remember going into corporations and they were, they didn't want to go on social media. They were afraid of it. They didn't want to, you know. Yeah, well, they were. Or legally they couldn't do it and they were just concerned, you know, about. They were in regulated industries and they couldn't, they couldn't be out there. You know, by the time you got to the beginning of the last decade or so, the middle part of the last decade, that was gone. Yeah, it was just, it had worked its way. So it took. This is different. This is coming way. AI is coming way too fast and too furious and there's going to be the people that are leaning into it, the, you know, quote unquote, the right way versus the ones who are not. It's going to separate those folks fast.

Dan Nestle [00:19:05]: That. Exactly. That's exactly.

Steve Rubel [00:19:07]: Well, you said it. I would argue that. And I would argue that every technological change to date, at least for the ones I've been alive for, has been a net positive for communications professionals. So what do I mean by that? Well, go back to the 90s and when you look at the Internet and email at that time and a little bit later, web search, how that made the job of communications professionals easier, faster and better. We were able to engage journalists much more easily. We were able to stand up websites for content and reach audiences directly, even before social. Then think about social media and what a huge driver of business that was to agencies, whether it be standalone social media agencies. Look at, you know, look at Gary Vaynerchuk, right?

Dan Nestle [00:20:09]: Oh, yeah.

Steve Rubel [00:20:09]: I mean, humongous business he built off that or, you know, or just, you know, divisions, social media divisions of, you know, places like Edelman or of, you know, on the advertising side. So it was a value creator. It was not a value. It was not erosive or minimally erosive.

Dan Nestle [00:20:37]: I mean, we did hear a lot of fears during those years. Of course, even when I was at Edelman, it was still in the kind of, let's call it the early adoption or the sort of begrudgingly growing adoption of social media and digital content marketing approaches, et cetera, by regulated industries, especially like some of the other industries had gone, had already gotten ahead a little bit. But we're still in the early days in 2014 or 2015, it took a little while, you know, and, and I remember, you know, one of the wins that we had at Edelman, we were claiming and maybe it was true, but we were claiming that we were the very first, quote, unquote, social media, social media agency of record for the financial industry. A lot of qualifiers in that phrase. But it's true.

Steve Rubel [00:21:34]: I think it's true. I don't remember exactly, but I mean, that would make sense. And so that took time. But it was a value creator. It didn't take away jobs, it created jobs. It didn't really siphon off revenue, it created new revenue streams because these companies all had. They needed help to stand all this stuff up. They didn't necessarily have the expertise or they had some expertise and they needed additional expertise and strategic counsel from agencies that were working on this for dozens or if not hundreds of clients. And so it was a value creator in many ways. AI could be a value creator, but it also has equal power, if not more power, to be a value destructor. And so let's take an example of that. And unfortunately, where that may happen is that may happen at both ends of the experience spectrum. And what I mean by that is it may happen to young people who are entering the profession and it may also happen to veterans in the profession. So let's look at both ends of that.

Dan Nestle [00:23:00]: Sure.

Steve Rubel [00:23:01]: On the junior side of things. So, you know, I've been very impressed with the deep research tools. Oh yeah, I've been using the one for ChatGPT and I think Google's is really coming along strong in the last few weeks with what they've been doing. And I now don't go into a meeting without, oh, I went into this meeting, I shouldn't have done that. But I'm gone. Because I know you, but I mean, but I don't go into a meeting and I've been meeting with people who I don't know without running one of those things, and at times also carefully checking it to make sure I don't like put something out into a meeting that was, that's a hallucination, which would be worse than putting it in the meeting in the first place.

Dan Nestle [00:23:41]: Well, let me just tell you, if you would have done it for me and then if we didn't know each other and you ran a deep research thing on Dan Nestle and tried to figure out who I was, you'd come into this discussion and you'd start asking me about the book on quantum mechanics or quantum computing that I've written and my certificate from MIT and a couple of other things I've authored and speeches I've given, which of course never happened.

Steve Rubel [00:24:13]: Well, it depends on how you do that, I would probably ask about the Daniel then that's all who worked for Mr. Beachy or you know, something like that.

Dan Nestle [00:24:19]: Well, well, the thing is, and I just, I've done this now a few times and I, I think that it's all based on, you know, how much information is out there about the subject of your, oh, 100% search.

Steve Rubel [00:24:34]: Right. So it's only as good as. Right.

Dan Nestle [00:24:36]: It's a little humbling to see that. I don't. There's enough, there's not enough out there. There's so there's so little out there about me that, that this machine has to fill in the blanks with some really fantastical things.

Steve Rubel [00:24:44]: I think it's the prompt too. But anyway, but my point is for that, you know, if you're creating, if a junior person is creating a briefing book for an executive to prepare them for an interview or to prepare a brief on an issue to help a new business team in an agency start to prepare for a pitch that's taking that work, which would be whatever, a day, a day and a half depending on what has to be created. Two days, three days max of somebody's time who is 1, 2, 3, 4 years out of school and taking it down to five minutes with two prompts and a button click.

Dan Nestle [00:25:26]: Yep.

Steve Rubel [00:25:27]: And then a read through and a check and some light editing. So it's, that's a value. So you can look at that two ways. It's a value creator because wow, we had this thing and it's, it's, it's super insightful, there's probably no mistakes. But it's a value destructor because that person's role. Now what is that junior person going to do?

Dan Nestle [00:25:50]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [00:25:51]: Now let's look at the other side of the pendulum in that people with a lot of experience are highly paid and valued because they have a lot of experience, they've worked on a lot of things, they have a lot of knowledge, or I should better say wisdom, that for good reasons makes them highly value. Well, if corporations now or people have that information at their fingertips and an expert on any topic at all that they can ask questions of and engage in real time as they make decisions and as they practice things, does wisdom also become devalued? So is there a deflationary environment for people with experience and wisdom in knowledge industries, amongst knowledge workers? So it's also. Now it could be a value enhancer as well because you can take those people and you know, it can take their work from a 5 or 6 to a, to a 7 or an 8 or 9 or whatever it is. So it could build on that too. And so I think they're. So maybe it's a little less destructive at the senior level than people might think. But again, it's also potentially the psychology of it is that to people who are staffing or whatever or you know, they may not need as many people.

Dan Nestle [00:27:22]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [00:27:23]: And so at both ends and in the middle, obviously there too, because they straddle that. So I think that in communications it could be for the agencies a revenue driver for the corporations improve the quality, the in house teams improve the quality, the efficiency and the efficacy of what they do. But at the same time it can be a highly erosive environment or deflationary environment as well. And if people can't charge for what they used to and so forth or it takes them much less time. And I don't think that social never did that. Social never was a value destructor in the sense of, you know, the way I just described it. Yeah, it's, it's not. It was always more work to be done, requiring more skills, requiring more monitoring, requiring more technology and it was more, more, more, more, more for. And you know, with, with no end in sight. This is not the same thing.

Dan Nestle [00:28:40]: You know, just thinking about social and the way that evolved and the empowerment of individual creators and individual writers and people had a point of view to basically get their point of view known and distributed far further than they ever had before. That was how it started. Really. Certainly that's additive, you know, that's a value add for those people. But for journalists and for media, I think that had, that was incredibly destructive for that industry.

Steve Rubel [00:29:23]: Yeah. Although, I mean it was edited there too. And that they had to do, they had to do all that.

Dan Nestle [00:29:27]: Right. And.

Steve Rubel [00:29:28]: But it also, it was disruptive in that sense in that there are people who were, who were. Yes. I mean it was disruptive one because it siphoned off audiences away. It was disruptive because it was, you know, they killed bare minutes. I mean that was because of traffic flows and what that.

Dan Nestle [00:29:47]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [00:29:47]: You know, and so forth. And how they had to evolve their model.

Dan Nestle [00:29:50]: That's right.

Steve Rubel [00:29:51]: They're that. But they've gone through many, many different ways of that. Right. I mean going back to the dawn of the Internet has been. Yeah, so, so yeah, it's been a, it's been a disruptive force and an additive force there too. But in comms it wasn't that way. It was always a. Those things. The Internet Social later on, search to a degree was all additional work to be done with more people. And the industry grew like mad in revenues and number of people. If you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and I mean all that, it just grew like, I mean graduate school education programs to school. You know, there were no, there was no comps made. I mean there was comms major, there was no PR major at the time. Now I mean there's programs all over the place. Yeah, so this is, you know, AI is. And I think that unfortunately every organization's grappling with it from what I've seen for sure. And no one's got all the answers and no individual has all the answers, despite what people may say. But I mean, I think that the tricky part is that everyone's going to have to figure out themselves how to embrace and use these tools even in very complex settings now I think they'll have help from that. I saw that once people got access to enterprise sanctioned tools, it changed everything. And I think that we forget that there was a period from roughly November of 22 when ChatGPT launched to sometime in 23 or 24 when CoPilot started to really for Microsoft Office shops or Google really didn't get going with that. They were a little late Last Year or ChatGPT Enterprise or you know, Claude Enterprise or you know, whatever it is. A lot of that stuff, you know, didn't really come in until, until very recently mid to, you know, early to mid to late 24. And people were just didn't want to do that because they just were afraid that you know, the stuff was going to be, you know, reused and, and there were people who, you know, had got in trouble for it and so forth. There was so, I think, you know, I mean, you know, online, you know, has been written up. So I think that, you know, now that, that, that you know, at least in medium and large sized companies, I think that's kind of now. Yeah, now they have tools and people feel more empowered. But it's still. Training is great, enablement is great. But I saw that when you really got to sit down team by team by team.

Dan Nestle [00:32:34]: Yes.

Steve Rubel [00:32:35]: And say what do you do? What's your workflow?

Dan Nestle [00:32:38]: Yes.

Steve Rubel [00:32:40]: What would Tim Ferriss friend of mine always says on his show, what would this be like if it was easy or had no friction or something like it making sense? And to ask yourself that question. And I think that's very scary for people because you're telling them to find an easier way to do something using these tools. Which to them says, you're asking me to find a way to make myself less relevant.

Dan Nestle [00:33:11]: And we've been conditioned for however long we've been alive that hard work is good work. If you're looking for the easy way to do something, it has a stigma to it. So there's this whole psychology around this. There's also this idea, I think, that the vast majority of people aren't thinking about what, how they're going to move up the value chain. They're, they're just thinking about doing their job. And many of them are just happy doing what they're told. Many of them, yes, I feel like. And that's fine.

Steve Rubel [00:33:51]: Super. They're not super motivated or right. And that's. Nothing wrong with that.

Dan Nestle [00:33:54]: Nothing wrong with that. But now you're telling these people that, oh yeah, by the way, it's up to you to figure out how to, how to, how to expand your universe here and move up the value chain. Or you know, the phrase that you hear all the time and I'm certainly guilty of using is AI is. AI is like one of the great things about AI is it's going to free you up to do something.

Steve Rubel [00:34:20]: Right.

Dan Nestle [00:34:20]: It's going to free you up to focus on more important things. If you're, if you're first year employee, you don't even know what those important things are. If you are a senior level person and you have, you're kind of setting your ways in a lot of ways, you're like, geez, I thought I was already doing a lot. What am I going to free myself up to do next? Write a book, Do a podcast? I don't know. So there's a.

Steve Rubel [00:34:40]: Great leaders with great leadership. That's where this comes in.

Dan Nestle [00:34:44]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [00:34:44]: Because that, that can be augmented through AI.

Dan Nestle [00:34:49]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [00:34:50]: And that and the emotional side of that is not going to be replicated by AI for sure. I mean it can be, it can be deceptive that it appears to do that, but because at times it does seem so alive. But it's not going to understand human behavior and human and psychology the way that, especially at a granular level, understanding what your team's psychology is, what your team's culture is like, what your corporate culture is like. And so I think it's going to make great leadership more and more important to inspire people in what's possible to surround people by others who can show them what's possible, who are not afraid to encourage experimentation, to encourage innovation. You know, there will be, I mean the billable hour model is going to be disrupted very much. I mean, although I did see, you know, there was a, there was some legal conference I think last week and I think that the head of LexisNexis or something like that was saying that lawyers are going to be able to charge even more than they, you know, good ones or I mean, I don't know how they're going to do that. But you know, so, I mean, but there's models and other professional, you know, PR is, you know, you look at marketing, look at, you know, look at accounting, look at, look at management consulting, look at, look at legal to see what's working there and bring that over.

Dan Nestle [00:36:18]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [00:36:19]: And so I think it's going to be great. Leadership and empowerment is going to be really important because you're going to make your people feel that they can do this.

Dan Nestle [00:36:31]: And to some degree, I mean, I agree and of course, but to some degree I should say, and to some degree.

Steve Rubel [00:36:40]: The.

Dan Nestle [00:36:42]: Nature of the way of work is changing and it's definitely going to change. And you know, we don't even, in some, in some senses or in many senses, we don't even know what the new job description's gonna look like. This whole idea of creating value or changing the role, especially for entry level folks is like you're gonna free them up to do things that they're not doing before. Well, somebody's gonna figure out what those things are. And we have a little bit of abundance happening here I think if you're looking at it from a certain direction. Go on, Steve.

Steve Rubel [00:37:13]: Yeah, so last week I was in Austin, Texas for the association as we're recording this last week for the association of National Advertisers AI Conference. And so the ana, for those who aren't familiar with it, they're the largest trade association representing the, the corporate side marketers. So you know, the, the proctors and Gambles, the Johnson and Johnson's of the world, you know, they, they are members of this organization and they, and they, and their charter is to advance what advertising and marketing professionals, client side do. And I heard Rashad Tabakiwala speak and then I also had breakfast with Rashad who I know for a long time. So for background here for your listeners, Rashad Tabakawala spent about almost 40 years at Publicis and you know, rising, you know, basically I forget the exact where he was in the hierarchy but like second or third in command, you know, within that, within that organization with an innovation focus for years. And he, you know, he started his career at, I forgot the agency that they owned the ad agency. And so he was, you know, he basically had a 40 year career there and then he left full time there about six, six years ago. And he's still a consultant, still an advisor, but now he speaks and he writes and he, you know, he invests and he's a, you know, he's got a foundation and so forth. He wrote an amazing book called, I think it's called Rethinking Work. And if I'm getting the title wrong.

Dan Nestle [00:38:54]: Just I'll throw it in the notes properly.

Steve Rubel [00:38:58]: And you know, he really talks. And you know, when he, when I met with him, because I've been just getting a lot of great advice from people, he said to me that really now in an AI age that people more and more are going to have to focus on becoming a company of one. And that doesn't mean that they go out on their own. That means they have to view themselves as how they're going to invest in their skill set on their own, probably even within the four walls of a large corporation, whether it's, you know, on the agency side, the client side, marketing, advertising, pr, wherever it is, to really up level their skills quickly and to experiment. Another speaker was at the event was Shelly Palmer, who does a lot of speaking and writing about this, you know, and he told everybody in the room that if you're not spending, you know, $20 a month at least on one of the frontier tools and you're using only the free one, you're missing out. You should be in, you know, to. And he said to everybody in the room, and it was all senior marketers. So he was right to say this. You can all afford it, you know, okay, so maybe a junior person can't afford, you know, to spend $20 a month on, you know, on, on ChatGPT, you know, plus. Understood. So I think they might, they may have to find some workarounds through different, different things, you know, or maybe they do the bundle with, you know, Gemini and the other stuff that you offer. So, but, you know, it's, but I think it's going to be on everybody to figure this out themselves. But they're going to have spiritual guidance and tools in many cases and guardrails to follow from their employers. And if those don't exist, they actually could push for that and help lead and drive that it will be a extracurricular activity. Probably.

Dan Nestle [00:41:00]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [00:41:01]: But I'm seeing that everyone from agencies, corporations, nonprofits, they're all, I tell everybody nobody has more than two years of experience doing this. Yes, there are People out there like our former colleagues, Gary Grossman from Edelman, who had been writing and thinking about AI for over a decade. Very few people on comms. There are a few people out there that are like Gary, but for the overwhelming majority, everyone else knowing, November 22nd is when we all started to use this stuff at the earliest. And I tell college kids, you got two years on us, you're coming in. And if you've been using this in your studies, no matter how you've been using it, you're going to have two years of experience that you should be packaging yourself that way, because we don't have that. Because a lot of us waited to get the enterprise tools for good reason. And that didn't really happen at scale until, you know, 23 and 24. So you may have a lead on us. So I think it's going to be everyone is going to have to really grab this themselves and say, how do I use this? It's going to destroy some of the value I create here. I don't care what level you're at, it's going to happen. It's not going to destroy all of it, but it's going to destroy some of it. And so you have to figure out, how do I stay ahead of it so that I turn this into a value acceleration and creation system for me and takes my work from a 4 or 5 or 6 to a 7 or an 8 or 9.

Dan Nestle [00:42:44]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [00:42:45]: And for me to be able to create new value where I work, and that's going to be uncomfortable for a lot of people.

Dan Nestle [00:42:51]: Yeah. I think something you just said, and.

Steve Rubel [00:42:52]: I can tell you how I did it also. I mean, I could tell you how I did that, you know, on land.

Dan Nestle [00:42:57]: Yeah. Before you do that, something you said really. Actually one word really hit me, which is system. Right. System thinking and kind of more broader types of thinking in terms of models and frameworks and thinking in terms of critical thinking as a baseline is not something that comes natural to most folks. And if you're going to create value with AI as a single, as a be that one person value creator, you have to think about how to turn yourself into a system, how to create sometimes people say ecosystems or ecospheres or whatever, but you have to think about all the tasks that nobody's going to have the time or the money to teach you to do anymore. And what can I learn quickly and attach to my own system that is going to add value to, whether it's my own thing or to my employer? Which means that you also can't be thinking in terms of, well, my job description is this box, and I'm going to stay within this box because at some point the communicator is going to be like, I don't have to walk over to the accounting team or to the finance team. In fact, you could do that. This, this could be happening right now. But I don't have to walk over the finance team. I can figure out what this means. I can sort of start to vet, you know, is, is this financial report I'm, I'm reading or writing, Is this, is this legit? I can get a really good head start on that and learn quickly how to make that happen with variety of AI tools. I can, I can automate a few things myself. I can create my own job. And until.

Steve Rubel [00:44:47]: That's what Rashad talks about as a company of one.

Dan Nestle [00:44:49]: Oh, yeah. I mean, until, until you get larger. Until you get, till that, till that thinking becomes more commonplace or, or grows at scale. You know, I think there's, I've talked about this before on the show. There, there are so many blockers to this, so many difficulties to, so many challenges to overcome when it comes to, you know, pay systems and, and.

Steve Rubel [00:45:16]: It'S, and plus, you know, corporate culture, it's going to make it very hard. So you have to, you know, if you're a young person coming into this field, you have to think about how you disrupt yourself before somebody else disrupts you.

Dan Nestle [00:45:27]: Yes. Yeah.

Steve Rubel [00:45:28]: And that's hard. I mean, I don't know how I would have done it at 25, 24. I mean, I know how I did it at 54, 53. But I mean, you know, it's. And I did it, but.

Dan Nestle [00:45:39]: Well, you know, let's talk about that. Let's talk. You were just about saying I did.

Steve Rubel [00:45:42]: It, but, you know, if I really.

Dan Nestle [00:45:43]: Interrupted you, like, how did, how did you go about doing this for yourself? And then let's work that into, into the, the kind of, the inventions or the innovations that you've discovered along the way, especially when it comes to media and analysis, because I don't think one could have happened without the other.

Steve Rubel [00:46:01]: Sure. So I was really, for many years, my work was qualitative research. And I would, you know, in the beginning of this, when I was hired by Edelman, after the social media days, you know, my job was to understand the changes in social media and what that was going to mean for communicators and also what that was going to mean for journalism. And so I did a lot of qualitative research. I would go out and, you know, I remember we, we had early meetings with Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone and Evan Williams when they just started Twitter. And we got in early to places because Edelman was a powerhouse and is a powerhouse. So I did all this kind of later on I would go and meet with media CEOs or innovators on the journalism side or academics to hear what was next in journalism or content marketing or so forth. So I was in that kind of role when the pandemic hit. And then I would go and, you know, go talk to as many clients, engage as many clients as I could and help to make, keep Ellen ahead and help to keep the clients ahead and then also, you know, to some degree speak in the industry for a long, you know, be visible in the industry. That was the model. And then by the time we got to, you know, roughly 2020, you know, I think that it was time for me to start to do something different, as I mentioned. And lockdowns hit. And so I wasn't going anywhere anymore. I wasn't going to see, I wasn't going to see clients in person and they had a lot to worry about, as we all did. And I wasn't going to, you know, meet with media CEOs. I mean, I did some of that virtually in the beginning, but so I had to really think how to quickly reinvent my role at that time. As you know, I think I'm a huge sports fan and I have been fascinated by how analytics have come along and revolutionized baseball, football, basketball, hockey, tennis, you name it. Where teams or athletes understand the tendencies of their opponents, statistical tendencies, offenses know what defenses are going to do. Batters are going to know what pitchers are going to do based on data and pattern recognition. And I asked myself, why don't we know the media better than they know themselves? Why don't we have pattern recognition in journalism? Because it is full of patterns and there's got to be a data driven way to attack that. So I went on a spirit, little spirit quest during the lockdowns. I had some time and I sought to investigate different tools and developed a way of thinking to using data to identify and quantify what those patterns are in the news environment and what that means for clients and how they communicate and did that through a mix of tools in Excel. I did not touch Excel for the first 30 years of my career. But during the pandemic, I remember I sat by the pool here during the summer and I read a book on how to do all that Stuff, how to manipulate the data. I didn't know everything by far, but I knew enough to be dangerous. And I knew more than most people in pr. So quants and other people would laugh at me, but certainly I was doing more with Excel than non financial people were doing. And so that was good. And that got me working with a lot of teams to advise them on media strategy in a data driven fashion. Teams were hungry for that information because they were always looking to figure out how to stay ahead of what's going on in news. Then AI hit and I wrote about this, you know, on LinkedIn and I actually didn't sign up for ChatGPT right away because I was, I kind of like didn't like that you had to give a phone number. It was this unknown company. I mean, you know, my, you know, I didn't want to give up my cell phone number. I tried to give it my Google voice number, wouldn't take it. And so I didn't sign up right away. And then I got a text early in 23 one weekend from a co worker who was in church. And he said, hey, have you started thinking about how you built AI into your analytics process? And I said, no, why would I do that? Because I thought it was a search thing. And I was kind of a little asleep at the wheel. But then I was like, you know, this guy's really smart and he understands what I do. He understands AI, he understands comms. I'd be foolish if I don't look into this. I remember it was a freezing cold weekend here in New York. I started to play around and I started to feed different data sets into the AI tools to see what I could get out of it.

Dan Nestle [00:51:20]: Just straight up experimentation, just playing around, total experimentation.

Steve Rubel [00:51:25]: And so I was like, wow, this is really good. And I immediately saw how I could take something that was a four or five to a six or seven or an eight and then just continue to do that. For three years. I just refined, refined, refined, refined, refined, and then trained people how to do that. And as the AI tools got better, figured out how to do how the prompts could be better, but also figure out how the data collection that I would bring into the prompts could be better. So I really, and the questions I could be asking, the things I could be doing. And so by the end I was working on hundreds of clients and teams thoroughly knew exactly what this did. Unfortunately, the financial realities of Edelman were the financial realities development and they had to make a decision to, you know, to, you know, to depart with about 330 employees in December 2024. And I was on the other end of that.

Dan Nestle [00:52:23]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [00:52:24]: So, yeah. After, you know, navigating three prior rounds of layoffs. So it's, you know, so I think. And I, but honestly, I think the one reason why I was able to do that was because I did use, I did have this, you know, I did stay ahead of this.

Dan Nestle [00:52:39]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [00:52:40]: So. And I. This is incredibly powerful for anybody in comp. So nobody told me how to do this. Nobody said, nobody said to me, you should do this. Yeah, no, I could have kept doing what I was doing. And because it was, you know, working, I didn't have to evolve it. I could have just kept going, you know.

Dan Nestle [00:52:58]: Well, this, still, this goes to your, to your earlier point about senior professionals, senior people, how they're going to be affected by job destruction or job or value creation. It's like you can't expect a person with no experience in dealing with the issues that communicators deal with and marketers, I suppose, but to even have those dots to connect in the first place, you know, so there. To even have the incentive to create such a tool or to create that whole, to figure out, oh, I, I want to understand the patterns of, of that exist in news coverage. And I think I can do it this way or maybe this way or this way. It takes a, I don't know, probably decades of understanding and wisdom to kind of get there. I mean, you might, you know.

Steve Rubel [00:53:48]: Well, I saw that it was that in my case, it was. Was. And there were people who did that. And I trained and did great. But I also saw that my 35 years of experience in and around newsrooms as a communicator and the clients I worked on and being part of prior evolutions, or at least being witness to prior evolutions, I think positioned me. And so it was. And again, going back to my sports analogy, so I'm going to use a baseball analogy here.

Dan Nestle [00:54:21]: Please do.

Steve Rubel [00:54:22]: Aaron Judge has to go up and hit a baseball being thrown at him 300 miles an hour, 100 miles an hour. And he has to, if he, you know, in a good season, hit, you know, one out of every three of those @ bats get a hit and ideally, you know, get a, you know, hit, you know, 50, 60 home runs a year. That is skill and talent. But he is informed by film and analytics about what pitchers do in different situations based on statistics. And what teams do doesn't necessarily predict future outcomes. But it's the same thing. How do we. I kept using that as a North Star model to say, how do we do that? So it's not just the data we collect. It's the insights we drive out of that. And I equip people who have that level of talent and expertise to take their work from a 4 or a 5 to a 6 or 7 or an 8. Because if we do that at scale as a team, suddenly our value goes up and we stay ahead of AI. One day, AI may do all this for us. It doesn't. Today I saw that when teams would say, show me the 10 reporters who are writing about X, Y or Z at scale, it would give you an answer, but it wouldn't be right. And the teams would know it. They're like, that's not right. That person's not there anymore. That person left that outlet. That person doesn't even write about that. That's made up. They knew and they got disappointed when they saw that because they're like, oh, it's not this oracle that I thought it was. But when I show them that when you give an information that you already have and you feed it something, it's different.

Dan Nestle [00:56:06]: Yeah. Well, what are the kind of patterns. What are the kind of patterns that you're identifying? You know, we do have a lot of comms people who listen in, and marketers would be kind of. I'm sure that they'd be interested to find out, like, some of the aha moments or discoveries that you made.

Steve Rubel [00:56:20]: So it starts with good data. And so I would, you know, collect a lot of. I had a process for pulling, you know, metadata on thousands of stories and around a particular topic or a. Or out of a particular outlet or out of a group of outlets. And so, you know, so something I would always love to do. And actually, I wrote about this because I did a LinkedIn Live earlier this year with Muckrack, where I do get the data from. And, you know, and I think Muckrack has. There's a lot more to muckrack than meets the eye.

Dan Nestle [00:56:54]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [00:56:55]: And they're a great company. And Greg Galan, who's the CEO, you should have him on your show. He's just a terrific leader. You're that Greg over there.

Dan Nestle [00:57:04]: Next time I reach out to you and they.

Steve Rubel [00:57:08]: So I would pull down a lot of unstructured data out of there. And. And so, for example, you could take. And I, you know, I did this for this on the webinar I just mentioned, or LinkedIn Live, I should say I would take vertical outlets. Let's say you know, four food outlets, five food outlets, you know, six, eight, you know, three HR trades, you know, four marketing trades, all the PR trades, whatever it is, wholesale index, everything that they wrote over a period, three, six, nine months. It's not pulling down the full text, it's pulling down the metadata.

Dan Nestle [00:57:38]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [00:57:40]: So, you know, and then finding out, for example, what are the critical issues that are being covered in this particular data set? Ah, well, that can quantify what the critical issues are in, let's just say higher ed or in human resources and quantify that those are the jobs to be done that the media is writing about. Well, if you have a solution to those jobs to be done and those problems and those critical issues and they're writing about those at scale, you have an entry point and a way of pitching those outlets that you didn't have before.

Dan Nestle [00:58:21]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [00:58:22]: So media relations earned media is a highly inefficient discipline. No, it's highly. And it has remind all of the wonders that email did to it, all of the wonders that later social media brought to it and situational awareness and things like that that weren't possible before. It's, you know, when you read words on pages and that was it. But it's still inefficient. Look, here's where the good news is in the AI story. It's not going to devalue relationships. Relationships are going to be really important. You know, journalists, you take them out for coffee, you talk to them, you meet with them, you, you serve their needs, you read what they're saying. I mean, it could help, yes, it could help with some of that. But those relationships. And same thing in sales relationships. Same thing with, if you're a client leader working in an agency, client relationships or anywhere, customer relationships, that's gonna be critical. It's the human side of that that's gonna be important. That's Aaron Judge hitting a baseball, being thrown at him 300 miles an hour, 30% of the time.

Dan Nestle [00:59:41]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [00:59:43]: But if you bring in the analytics to make that more informed so that you really can know them a little better and you can anticipate where things are going and you understand what kind of critical issues they might be writing about so that you can bring them even better story ideas. Now you're the New York Yankees or any other baseball team with a analytics department that is providing that kind of information.

Dan Nestle [01:00:10]: It's kind of shocking in so many ways that those of us who've been trying to persuade audiences to do certain things at certain times around certain issues for our whole lives Whether you're on the marketing side or whether you're on the comm side, wherever they are in that, in their, either buyer's journey or their, or their influence journey or whatever journey they're on. You know, we want to get in front of people when they need us or when they're most receptive and deliver a message that resonates to get there. The science of studying audience behavior, this, the, the, the sophistication of audience research, you know, you can argue that some things haven't changed very much, but the, but we have definitely gotten more sophisticated on it. Why have we never treated the media as, in the same way, as an audience and as a fractured audience.

Steve Rubel [01:01:07]: Yeah, we did. The people at other one would say we had, you know, within a team I worked in, we would say we had, we would have. We had three clients. We had our internal stakeholder clients. We had our client. Client.

Dan Nestle [01:01:19]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [01:01:20]: And we had the media. And that's. And that dance was hard at times for sure because, you know, the clients had one set of expectations, the media has another set of expectations. That's always been going on since I entered this profession in 1991. And you know, it's, that does, that doesn't go away and the internal client is in the middle of all that. So yeah, it's understanding. But that can take the way that can take your relationships and it could take them from a 4 or 5 or a 6 to a 7 or an 8 because you're giving them better stories, you know them better than they know themselves. You know how to bring in how the client can fit into that. Cause you know the client already and you use AI to know the client even better. And so, you know, to quantify, you know, to analyze news coverage of the industry and so forth. So suddenly that's going to make. It's a superpower. And so it could devalue some of the work that you do, but you find ways to turn that also into a value. So it's not just a value destroyer, it's a value creator. And you find what those. And you find what that is, you know, or let's take another field entirely or another aspect. You're a graphic designer or you're creating social media content. You. And look, the AI is coming in a big way into Adobe's tool set or if you just look at what ChatGPT has been doing with the image creation stuff in the last couple of weeks. So how do you use that? But then it's almost like this Creative Commons model which is also a dated reference here where you take that work that you generate with AI, but then you build on top of it and you make it better. Or maybe you use that to create a library of assets that you bring together in some sort of creative way.

Dan Nestle [01:03:13]: Yes.

Steve Rubel [01:03:15]: And so I think that visually. So a lot of visual artists are very concerned about this stuff because it can just. Same thing as with writing. Yeah, it'll write it for you, but it's not going to be on the mark. It's going to be a starting point. It is going to be. Or it's a point where you've written it and you bring it in and you make it better. And so I think that there's a lot of discussions around, oh my God, it can do our work for us. But if you're constantly thinking about how to use it as a, to grow your superpower. And again, it starts with good leadership. Your leaders have to empower you to do that. They got to give you the tools, they got to give you the guardrails, they have to give you in some cases the time to go do this. They have to be patient with you as you figure this out. Once they find the successes, they're gonna have to champion them and show people the bones of what worked for them and say, this could work for you. Or you need to find inspiring people who have done this, whether they're older like me or they're young. And I think that's, you know, when you're young, that's very, very hard to do. And because you're just, you know, some people just don't want to speak up, they're nervous about it. Others are, you know, are more, they're more, you know, you know, they're, you know, they're more outgoing and ready to do that. So I think that's going to be the tricky part. But the leadership at the top has to enable that, not just through the tools, but really through the culture.

Dan Nestle [01:04:58]: They're going to have to really think about, they have a lot to think about. They have to think about their organizational structure, they have to think about their business model in some cases, how all this is changing it. But it's interesting that everybody has, I think, this capability now to create that system around them or to think much more broadly about what they can contribute, how they're going to create value, how they're going to avoid the destruction of value. And you know, I fundamentally come down on this glass, half full side of things where, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm on team. You know, this is going to be good for us eventually. Team. I mean, I'm not, I'm not.

Steve Rubel [01:05:40]: I think it's going to be good for us, but it's not going to be good for everybody because not everybody has the right career skills to do this.

Dan Nestle [01:05:48]: This, this is undeniably true. And anytime there's a, there's a technological revolution, you always have a displaced group of people and we have to figure out how to.

Steve Rubel [01:05:59]: Yeah, I've seen that in communications, I don't think.

Dan Nestle [01:06:00]: Well, not comms.

Steve Rubel [01:06:02]: Yeah.

Dan Nestle [01:06:02]: Yeah, not yet. Not yet.

Steve Rubel [01:06:04]: But we, you know, advertising. We saw it.

Dan Nestle [01:06:06]: Yes. But, you know, we have to be compassionate and, you know, figure out ways to help those who are displaced in some way. And it's funny, I'm using the word displaced. I got angry with PRSA recently for using the word displaced to refer to people who had lost their jobs, but they didn't lose their jobs because of AI, they lost their jobs because of policy. I think if your job evaporates because of AI, I think it's a little bit of a different situation, but it's.

Steve Rubel [01:06:36]: Going to be hard to discern what's what. But regardless, we need to be, everyone's going to, I mean, and there's going to be a need for people like yourself, Daniel, who are lighting the light.

Dan Nestle [01:06:50]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [01:06:51]: And showing people and bringing on guests who've done this. And I, if you're not doing it already, maybe bring on junior people who have done this. Oh, I'd love to. If you could find them. I mean, that's, you know, they may not be as vocal for, you know.

Dan Nestle [01:07:05]: But you'll definitely find some of those people in the startup world and in the, you know, some of the entrepreneurial types who have just decided that they, they could do what they need to do with AI or with whatever tools they have and they go for it. Now they're going to come run, they're going to run into their own mistakes and they're, they're certainly going to have lack some of the wisdom to, to reach certain clients, but they still have incredible ideas and different perspectives that we should be listening to and learning from. Just like, but if your audience takes.

Steve Rubel [01:07:36]: Away anything, it's, it's, there's, there's going to be a leadership void. So that's not, that's a big opportunity for a lot of people, young and old, and everyone's got to figure this out themselves within the confines and environment that they live in. Yep, that's those, that's Important. It's doable. I did it at 50. Whatever. I was at the time. 53. Yeah, 52. You know, I'm doing it today. I. I'm doing. So Rashad Tamakawala says that you should spend an hour a day learning. And people are like, that's hard. I, you know, I got my kids, I got this, I got that, you know, and. But I think those people, you know, by the way, that AI is a learning tool is tremendous.

Dan Nestle [01:08:28]: It's amazing.

Steve Rubel [01:08:28]: But, you know, but I think it's those people who are learning and, you know, use it in your personal life. You can't. You feel like, oh, my God, I work in a regulated industry. I can't do this. You know, okay, so figure out how to do it in your personal life and then start to ask questions about what you can do.

Dan Nestle [01:08:42]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [01:08:43]: Within your walls.

Dan Nestle [01:08:44]: I always found that I've always been a learner, and, And I've enjoyed learning. I have little patience to sit down and read books these days. But I've always found that AI has been. I mean, you always find it's only been a couple of years. But what I love about the experience of sitting down with it is it just indulges my curiosity and my, like, my kind of fantastical ideas. And I said, well, what if. What if I could do this? Or what if. What if I could try this? Doesn't have to be a PR comms thing usually is. But what if it, you know, what if I could do this? And then just by the process of me, oh, maybe I should try this first, or maybe I should try this for. That is a learning exercise. You know, I may learn that I can't do it, or I may learn that I can't do it yet, or I may learn that my idea sucked. I don't know. There's. There's a lot of learnings that come.

Steve Rubel [01:09:35]: But I can learn that I'll do it right there. Only some of. I mean, no matter how much analytics I have and how much I'm. I'm smart about, I'm never going to be able to hit a baseball being thrown at me. I'm gonna. I'm gonna be 10ft back from that.

Dan Nestle [01:09:48]: Oh, completely.

Steve Rubel [01:09:49]: So, you know, I don't have that. I'm not 6 foot 7 or whatever Aaron judges. I mean, you know, it's so forth.

Dan Nestle [01:09:55]: I don't know. Look, if I can be brought to the point in my career, in my life now at, you know, age 53, I think I am now age 53, where I can say, oh my gosh, that code looks pretty interesting. Like AI just created some app for me and I watched it code and I'm like, I wonder if I can figure out a little bit more about what the little intricacies of this particular part of it is. And oh, now you start to pull on that thread and it's like before you know it, you're thinking, my gosh, maybe I'll learn a little bit of.

Steve Rubel [01:10:36]: Code, which may or may not be you. And I have curiosity and I think that that's. Unfortunately, that's not something you can, can teach. Yeah, that's you. You either have that bug or you. Or in some way. And you know, some have it more than others or you don't.

Dan Nestle [01:10:56]: Yep.

Steve Rubel [01:10:57]: And if you don't, I don't know what to tell those people because it's not their fault.

Dan Nestle [01:11:03]: True.

Steve Rubel [01:11:03]: It's just the way, it's the way they're wired. And I mean, look at some people. I'm sure it's their fault, you know, but. But I suspect that for people who aren't really curious or don't want to push the edge.

Dan Nestle [01:11:14]: But I would think that for comms, for the comms profession specifically, if you're not a curious person, you're in the wrong job.

Steve Rubel [01:11:22]: I think in the agency world, I've seen it, everyone's curious in some shape or form, so it's made that way. I haven't worked in house in many.

Dan Nestle [01:11:33]: Years, but I would imagine fundamentals, everything is asking questions.

Steve Rubel [01:11:36]: How can you journalists are the same way, you know, and two media creators, I think, are similar too. So I think it's, it's, you know, it's disrupting yourself before somebody else does.

Dan Nestle [01:11:47]: Yeah, yeah, there's a. That's just, I mean, I think you have to be disruptive. You have to look out there. Mark Schaefer's new book, Audacious, talks about that just being, you know, going out there and, you know, you gotta do something to disrupt and figure out where you can do that disruption and where.

Steve Rubel [01:12:03]: And there's safe ways to do that, and there are. So in my case, it was. I mean, I was doing this with AI tools before they were like enterprise tools within Edelman. But the reason I was able to do that is I was taking no client information and putting it into LLMs. I was putting basically information that was already in the public domain headlines into AI tools. So it was nothing. But there was a very safe lane for me to do that. And when we got enterprise tools, that's what I used. But so my point is I found a way to. And there are other tricks. There's always a way, there are other tricks to do that. If you're even in regulated industries, there's always a way.

Dan Nestle [01:12:48]: And now, especially with the tools that we have, anybody who's enterprising enough can find plenty of public information and create valuable content on behalf of even the most regulated company using only public information.

Steve Rubel [01:13:09]: Right. And so it's, how do you take that and you build off that with your own creativity, with your own expertise, with your knowledge. They're not going to have knowledge. The AI tools are not going to have knowledge of the client. For example, if you're in an agency the way you do, or internally, your internal stakeholders and psychology and what makes drives them, they're not, the AI tools are not going to know that. I mean, maybe internally focused AI tools that are trained on, on corporate data, Mike, but other than that, you know, and they're analyzing a CEO's writing style and okay, then it knows. But even then, you know that. And so it's how you use that as a, as a superpower to take you from, to take what you do best, from a 4 or 5 or 6 to a 7 or 8. No one's going to get to a 10.

Dan Nestle [01:13:52]: Exactly.

Steve Rubel [01:13:53]: Yeah. You know, even the AI tools.

Dan Nestle [01:13:55]: Well, I mean, I just did this demo the other day for a potential client and you know, financial institution and I just, I just dreamt up a scenario that might happen in a comms team which is, okay, CEO has been invited to speak, has to come up with a 30 minute speech on this particular topic that's related to their industry. So starting with that, you know, it took me, I don't know, 20 minutes tops. I don't know. But because I'm so like fluent in prompting for certain things because I've been doing it now for a couple of years and I have my own things and I have tools that even help me prompt better. With some very, very good and extensive prompts and just a few publicly available resources. I crafted a 30 minute speech, I crafted, Claude crafted a 30 minute speech for this CEO that was beautiful. Me, beautiful. If I, if I had worked, if I had worked inside the company, I would know how beautiful it was. But even as an outsider, as a, as a communications expert, so to speak, I looked at this and I'm like, this is at least 75, 80% there, right?

Steve Rubel [01:15:08]: But here's the, here's the tricky part though, right? If you're going to charge for that in the past. And this was new business, it sounds like. But. But in the past, if you're charging for that. In the past, you would charge on the hour.

Dan Nestle [01:15:20]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [01:15:21]: Say again?

Dan Nestle [01:15:22]: Yeah, you would charge hourly. You can't do that.

Steve Rubel [01:15:24]: Hourly. You can't do that.

Dan Nestle [01:15:25]: No.

Steve Rubel [01:15:25]: You're going to have to. Now that's where there's going to be a huge pain.

Dan Nestle [01:15:29]: That's right.

Steve Rubel [01:15:29]: Because everyone's going to try to charge on the value. But some of these things are very difficult to quantify the value of.

Dan Nestle [01:15:37]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [01:15:38]: And that's why we went to hourly. So if it took you 20 minutes, three hours to do, whereas in the past it would take you 20, 10 hours. Do that.

Dan Nestle [01:15:49]: Exactly. I'm cutting myself short.

Steve Rubel [01:15:51]: Well. Or thinking as an individual consultant. But now multiply that in an agency.

Dan Nestle [01:15:56]: With 4,000 people and I completely get it. So that's why we have to think in terms of what that final product that you present before the client, even if you're using AI or not, the level of quality of that ultimate deliverable has not changed. In fact, I think it's even gotten harder now. So we as, as professionals in our field, and if you're a little more seasoned, you might have advantages in this. But there are people who've been around for 20, 30 years and can't write a sentence. I mean, it's, it's like, you know, it's true, but you have to know where your strengths are. And, you know, I think that that's always going to be an advantage, you know, moving forward, but, you know, it.

Steve Rubel [01:16:42]: Can be a very exciting time.

Dan Nestle [01:16:44]: Yeah. Well, look, maybe for our listeners who did not see this, the technology had its way with us for there for a second and just shut us down. Maybe that's a sign because we have been talking for an hour and 15 minutes or so that we should be kind of winding it down. So let's do that. Steve, I'm telling you, I could just keep talking with you forever. But any last words, final words of wisdom for the, for the listeners out there? I know we've already covered quite a bit, and I think that they're going to walk away with so much. But anything you want to leave them with before we hit the end, I.

Steve Rubel [01:17:20]: Would just say that I'm just very bullish about the communications industry and its prospects going forward, especially given what I talked about at the top about this tremendous societal, geopolitical and environmental changes that are in front of us right now and the need for good, solid counsel all around to advise how to navigate all that. How to navigate not only the changing media landscape, but also new channels and new creators that are out there, some of whom are very highly politicized. The whole notion of that smaller audiences now that are loyal might be more important to us than audiences that have scale or some combination thereof, that we have to figure out the right mix. The need for measurement and insights and data driven thinking is critical.

Dan Nestle [01:18:10]: And.

Steve Rubel [01:18:13]: A lot of schools of thought around that. I just think it's the need for clarity, for people to come in and have a clear voice and a clear gumption on what to do and be ready to adapt and to use AI the right way to further that has never been greater. And so I think the communication. Look, there'll be disruption. We talked about billable hours and all kinds of stuff like that on the agency side, on the corporation side is always disruption. Comms teams are always being disrupted. And so it's this. But I think this has never been a better time. And despite all that, the need for people to come in and be absolutely strong counselors. And if we get this right, we can take our work from a 4 or 5 to 6 to 7 or 8.

Dan Nestle [01:18:55]: You hear that everybody? We are in a good position, especially I think those of us who are already working on, working with AI and have already sort of drunk the Kool Aid. But there's also this, I think, you know, foundational part of communications or people who are drawn to communications. Where we are curious people, we hope, where we are conversationalists, we would hope, and where we know how to ask questions, we think critically. These are all very important things. When you are iterating with AI, even.

Steve Rubel [01:19:25]: Though this can be unlike anything else I've seen, it can be a net destroyer, it can also be a Net creator. So I think you have to. So don't be afraid if it's destroying aspects of your work. There's nothing you can do about that other than figuring out how to also turn it and mirror it into a Net plus for you.

Dan Nestle [01:19:46]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [01:19:47]: That might mean your job is different in three months than it is today.

Dan Nestle [01:19:52]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [01:19:53]: But you stay ahead of that and you make that happen. Don't let that happen to you, because if it happens to you, it's too late.

Dan Nestle [01:20:01]: Yeah. And at this point, you know, you might be asking yourself out there, listener, like, well, how do I know how my job's going to change and how do I know what's going to. What's going to go away? You know that by listening to people like Steve Rebel.

Steve Rubel [01:20:10]: That's how, you know, I think you try to think ahead. You ask somebody or you look at other industries.

Dan Nestle [01:20:15]: Yeah, true.

Steve Rubel [01:20:16]: Look at, you know, your professional services. You know, look, look at the accounting firms. Look at the, you know, study other industries.

Dan Nestle [01:20:23]: Yeah.

Steve Rubel [01:20:24]: But also use AI to study other. That's right.

Dan Nestle [01:20:27]: It's like you can always be going back to AI or going to AI to understand more about AI. It's very meta.

Steve Rubel [01:20:33]: My job of the following things. Here's what I do in a day. How might this be, this be disrupted by AI And I'll tell you. Mm. Get deep. How do I stay ahead of that? It'll tell you. And that might not be exactly what you do, but it's a launching off point for you to build on top of that, knowing your organization, knowing what you do, knowing your KPIs, et cetera.

Dan Nestle [01:20:54]: And that is the kind of lateral thinking that, that I think we all have to figure out to work into our daily routines. I think it's a great idea. So, Steve, this has been amazing. If anybody wants to find Steve Rebel, find him on LinkedIn. His. His.

Steve Rubel [01:21:10]: LinkedIn, his name. I'm, you know, I'm writing it. Not as much as I would like. I'm. Right. Because I've been, I've been talking to a lot of people. I've also been actively exploring my next opportunity. And so that's taken a lot of my time. In a good way.

Dan Nestle [01:21:23]: Yep.

Steve Rubel [01:21:24]: And so, you know, but I'll, I'm, you know, I'm gonna. If I learned one thing I really learned during, you know, with the layoff and the period since is just how powerful that platform is.

Dan Nestle [01:21:35]: Absolutely.

Steve Rubel [01:21:35]: I took it for granted. And so I'm, I'm not going anywhere.

Dan Nestle [01:21:38]: Yeah. And me, I'm going nowhere fast, too. So that's great. That's a great thing. Come back to the trending communicator again, please. Steve, I would love you to be back on. And we're gonna, we're gonna track your career and when there's an update, we. We'll help you share it. Meantime, again, Steve Rebel on LinkedIn. As you said, as Steve said earlier, he's not on the social on the other socials much, but just go on LinkedIn. You'll find them.

Steve Rubel [01:22:02]: I mean, I might have the castle in other places, but that's my home.

Dan Nestle [01:22:05]: That's where it is. All right, thanks, everybody, and thanks, Steve. Thanks for coming on.

Steve Rubel [01:22:09]: Dan, thank you.

Dan Nestle [01:22:10]: You got it, man.

Steve Rubel [01:22:10]: Thanks a lot.

Dan Nestle [01:22:17]: Thanks for taking the time to listen in on today's conversation. If you enjoyed it, please be sure to subscribe through the podcast player of your choice. Share with your friends and and colleagues and leave me a review. Five stars would be preferred, but it's up to you. Do you have ideas for future guests or you want to be on the show? Let me know@dantrendingcommunicator.com thanks again for listening to the trending Communicator.