How AI Changes Your Customers and Why You Must Change Too - with Mark Schaefer

Dan Nestle [00:00:00]:

Welcome or welcome back to the trending Communicator. I'm your host, Dan Nestle. How is AI changing us? Are we losing key skills? Are we delegating too much of our emotional and cognitive domains to our LLMs? Or are we on the brink of something new and unimagined and quite possibly beneficial? Well, I don't know. Nobody really knows. But the one thing I can tell you is that in my experience so far, it's been a choice. I lean toward the new unimagined and beneficial camp. And just to give you a taste of what I mean, I'm taking a slightly different approach to my guest intro. So I had a hunch that I've talked about my guest today more than any other person mentioned on the Trend Communicator so far. So I worked with NotebookLM to perform an intellectual archaeology exercise. I asked it to examine all 40 plus transcripts. I suppose it is, and then describe our relationship. And here's what it found. Apparently today's guest is my mentor, confidant, and this is a direct quote from a previous episode. Arguably my man crush. I frequently call him a marketing legend and a visionary. I credit him with fundamentally changing how I understand AI and community, and I believe his yearly uprising retreat has been the fuel for my career and business trajectory. That is no joke. The AI discovered that I've adopted his concepts such as pandemic of dull and his principle that audacity and disruption are essential for communications, and his maxim that the value of content nobody sees is precisely zero. All of these have found their way into my work. It documented what I called our genuine affection and friendship, including my confession about dropping the ball once when I introduced him at a conference, after which he very kindly said to me, you know, sometimes, Dan, I get the sense that you're winging it. That was the best feedback I've ever heard, because you can bet that I've been much better at preparation since then, and that's just a fraction of what it uncovered. Now, I could have pored through transcripts, I could have extracted quotes and written a few paragraphs, and if I had a week to do it, I would have done that. But I'd probably miss something. NotebookLM the AI I chose to do this with didn't miss anything. It excavated patterns I hadn't consciously recognized. See, that's the beneficial camp I'm talking about using AI not to replace our thinking, but to reveal what we didn't know we knew. And if anyone understands this potential while also grappling with AI's darker implications. It's today's guest whose new book asks the fundamental question of our time. What does it mean to be human in an age when we are never the most intelligent entity in the room ever again? It gives me great pleasure to welcome back to the show for a second appearance the author of a brand new book, how AI Changes your Customers, the Marketing guide to humanity's next chapter, the one and only Marc Shafer. How are you? How's it going?

Mark Schaefer [00:03:03]:

Well, you know, Dan, it's interesting. That was the best intro. I mean, I bet I've been on a thousand podcast episodes. That was the best intro ever. And that's significant and relevant because it's just, as you said, how you can reimagine yourself with AI. How can you be bigger, bolder, more creative, more impactful? And by using AI to create that intro, you just did it. That was really amazing. And I was blushing. I was laughing.

Dan Nestle [00:03:37]:

You're laughing. Well, you know, I am firmly in the camp, like I said, that AI can be beneficial and that it is a choice that you make as you go along the way. I mean, it would have been easy to upload a few things about Marc Shaffer and then have IT manufacture some sort of an intro and write something. That would have been okay, right? And it would have been fine. But as you get into the book about this, that would be delegating or even sort of dismissing my own capabilities and letting AI just run with it. And you do that on a repeated basis and you lose it. You lose your creativity, you lose your capacity for critical thinking in a lot of ways. And, you know, it varies person to person, I'm sure. And I know we'll talk about it. There's some studies out there, but fundamentally, right? I am a huge fan of the augmentation enhancement that AI brings me only because it is able to mold what I already have into manageable chunks and analyze and synthesize in ways that I might not have thought of before. But it's still my stuff. So I feel pretty confident with it. And then, you know, I then don't let it create the final result. I then take it and play with it and, you know, put myself back in and end up spending time anyway. But it is incredible, you know, and I will add, this time I use Notebook lm, but I'm always like, every time I think of a new thing or, hey, wouldn't it be great if. And that's a common mantra of mine. It's like, wouldn't it be great If I could do something, I always jump over to AI and see if I can. And this time I read the book. And I often joke with my listeners that I sometimes don't read the books of my guests because. But I never claim that I do when I haven't. But this one, and for those of you listening, I'm actually showing it on the screen. Like it's really digestible. It's a. It's the big picture in a small package. It's really great.

Mark Schaefer [00:05:16]:

I want to jump in here and say you were describing me as a friend and mentor and teacher, but you're the same to me because you are really a role model in terms of thoughtfully, intentionally finding new ways to apply these AI tools. Like you're the first one that did that I know of. You're the first of my group of friends that used, you know, Notebook LM to do these conversations and these summaries. And I was like, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. In many ways I'm just following in your wake as you're pioneering these things. So I really appreciate it.

Dan Nestle [00:05:55]:

I have the guidance and the direction and the vision to follow. And sometimes I just keep thinking, how can I be different and do something different more audaciously? And you challenged me to do that. And I'm still struggling sometimes with, okay, this has given me good stuff, but how do I make it really crazy? And I think we'll get to that. But you know, I just try different things. This time while I was reading your book, I was dictating my thoughts and pulled out some quotes into my Plaude reader and my Plaud listening device. I don't know if anybody has a Plaud and this is. I'm not being paid by them. But it was awesome because like I had this great recording of myself kind of with my thoughts. Didn't have to break out any post. Its didn't have to kill any trees to do it. And I've got now like four different versions of notes that were generated by plod that kind of lay out the quotes that I pulled and the learnings that I've had in ways that I probably would not have organized in this way or would not have done. And it's fantastic. I mean, it's. There's so much you can do. So this is the thrust of the book. I mean, the thrust of the book here is how humanity is going to deal with AI and you based it on your experience as one of 300 futurists that were asked to participate in a study or Report. And has the report come out yet?

Mark Schaefer [00:07:07]:

Yes, it came out. It came out. Yeah.

Dan Nestle [00:07:09]:

So the report is out and we'll put the link in the show notes, but got permission from the organizing group to write his own book about it. And it is terrific. It's a summary in some ways of some of the arguments in the book. But I will tell you, it doesn't paint the most beautiful picture of our future, Mark. So maybe we can start there and just big picture, where are we, where are we going? What is the thing right now?

Mark Schaefer [00:07:29]:

I hope it paints a balanced picture and I think it can be upsetting in some ways because I think a lot of people have been using AI and they see the obvious benefits, but they haven't really thought about the implications. They haven't thought about the darker side. They're not really seeing what's going on on a broader scale. And the big idea behind the book is that while look, AI dominates my newsfeed and probably many others, and people are talking about how to create new prompts and the problems around energy, electricity prices going up, water consumption, all the land that's being taken up, the AI bubble. No one's talking about the psychology of AI that literally before our eyes, humanity is being rewired. The psychology of human beings is changing. And this was the consensus of these experts. And these were like philosophers and psychologists and tech gurus. And they didn't agree on everything, but they did come to consensus on some big things that they thought would change about humanity. And so I took about six of those ideas that I thought would be most relevant through the lens of business and marketing and explored that sort of explained what's going on. I tried to create a balanced perspective. One of the quotes early in the book is that I had a mentor who told me there's no such thing really as a weakness. There's just an overdone strength.

Dan Nestle [00:09:12]:

And.

Mark Schaefer [00:09:13]:

And I think that's the way it is with AI. It's like you said it yourself, it's a choice. You can choose to get the answer and be lazy and not gain any new wisdom, or you can choose for AI to be your guide and your teacher. And I mean, I'm a curious person. I'm always going down rabbit holes with AI and learning new things. So the big areas I explored were the role of empathy, the role of agency, how if we depend on AI too much, we're going to lose our human agency. Sort of hand in hand with that is purpose and meaning. If we turn over too much to AI, where do we belong? What's our purpose anymore? And I talk about this growing trust and beyond trust, it's intimacy that's being created between machines and humans. Machines that never get tired, never get bored, never criticize you. And then finally, and I think the big idea for business and marketers is AI as a decision maker. And I'm working on a new post and it'll be out in a couple weeks. And it says, we're all in the diaper business these days. And what I mean by that is that, you know, I have a new beautiful grandson and he is an expert pooper. And so he goes through a lot of diapers. If you are marketing your diapers, you're not marketing to the end user, you're marketing to the decision maker. That's mom and dad. Well, increasingly people are turning to AI as the decision maker. So somehow in this marketing and sales process, we've got to influence the decision maker, which is an algorithm. Big tech is the customer now, increasingly. And I saw something the other day, dad, Dan, of course, you know, more and more research is coming out and this was past the deadline for publishing my book, but the conversion rate of referrals on AI versus SEO, 23 times. 23 times. So this is profound. So in a very, very high level, those are the big buckets I cover in the book.

Dan Nestle [00:11:28]:

We've been talking about in the PR and comms world more and more about the golden age of PR that's upon us now with this new great opportunity in GEO or AIO or whatever you want to call it, AI Search, I.

Mark Schaefer [00:11:41]:

Think a real name for it.

Dan Nestle [00:11:42]:

Well, Andy Crestodina, I ran into him at MAICON last week and he said, I think we're 80% settled on GEO. Let's just go with GEO in a very Andy way.

Mark Schaefer [00:11:52]:

What's the D stand for? Generative.

Dan Nestle [00:11:54]:

Generative. Generative Engine Optimization. It's, of course, it rolls right off the tongue, you know that SEOs or geo people, techies came up with that. Yet another thing we're going to have to be saddled with. But in this age, right, just like you said it there, that Big tech is the audience and actually the algorithm. We have to market to. We have to communicate to the algorithm. We've been saying that the LLMs themselves are stakeholders, they're an audience now, and we need to realize that. And hitting them with the same kind of like a PR and communications approach can be really fruitful, especially if, you know, that we have to anthropomorphize them a little bit. We know that they are really valuing expertise and authority and credibility, which is conveyed through media and contextual relevance and all this other great stuff, which is all the stuff that we've been working on for ages. But if we're looking at them as an audience, the core of your book is about how AI is changing customers. And we can call that audiences, we can call that stakeholders. I think it's interchangeable with AI as one of our customers. Now we lump them in with all these different groups. We have to work harder now, don't we? I mean, it seems like our job's gotten a lot harder.

Mark Schaefer [00:13:02]:

I think so. One of the phrases that you and I have tossed around, and I think this is true, is we said this is really the golden age of pr. I think PR and comms. I really think it is. And it's for this reason that a lot of the benefit we could get from SEO we could delegate to someone else. We could have someone work on our backlinks. We're always looking at optimization. But a lot of that doesn't matter to AI. They don't care about backlinks, they care about facts, they care about validation, they care about social signals. AI reads the room and the room is the Internet, everywhere on the Internet. And so when I think about it, it is a little intimidating. It's like, gosh, we all need a little PR help right now if we're going to win in this world. How in the world could we possibly show up in all these places? And I think there's going to be a big role for PR and comms, and I think it's going to be so easy, interesting for the companies that wake up and realize that they're the ones that are going to be leading the way.

Dan Nestle [00:14:10]:

We're seeing a lot of requests for like media relations people. I have mixed feelings about it. You know, my feelings about media relations, this whole turning, like investing so much money and trying to get some random hit in New York Times. But it's much, much broader than that because when we think about people appearing in like you as an expert, as a well known person, you don't have to worry about this as much as others. But let's say you're an authority and you get quoted in something, okay, that's great, wonderful. But AI is not going to look at the quote, they're going to look at the context, they're going to look at everything around it. Are you part of the story? Are you an integral part of the story is what you're saying? Semantically related to the core of. To the headline and to the other things that are going on. Like, there's so much going on there that it's not as simple as, oh, I got coverage. So I think that's going to kind of shake out a little bit, but it's still going to land on the side of credibility and authority are going to be more and more important for the long game. Where I was thinking about this as I was reading the book. There was a section you talked about, like, attention spans that. Attention spans. You said they're getting more selective rather than shorter.

Mark Schaefer [00:15:13]:

Yeah, that's a myth on the web. That just drives me nuts. That whole goldfish thing is just. It was never true. It was never true. You know, it was misinterpreted. And if you look at kids today, they'll stay up all night playing video games, watching movie, binging TV shows, they're even reading books and they're binging podcasts. And some of the podcasts today are two hours, three hours long. Don't tell me people don't have a long attention span. The problem is they're being more selective. You've got to earn it. So it's not that they have a short attention span. You, You've got a short, interesting span. They're abandoning you for something else. Everything you do, every piece of content is competing with Fortnite and Roblox and Netflix and everything else in the world. And so you've got to raise your game. This is something I talk about in the Audacious book is, look, competent doesn't cut it anymore. We've been living in a world for decades and decades where competent was okay, you could get by. But today, AI is competent. So if you're only competent, A, you're vulnerable, B, you're ignorable. And so you've got to raise your game. You just have to. To rise above the level of noise.

Dan Nestle [00:16:28]:

And that's an important point there. Everything's an important point, but that in particular, where you have to like rising above the level of noise. Yes, we have to be compelling. We have to be unique. We have to have these incredible points of view. We have to do this, that, and the other thing. And you know, in your previous book, Audacious, you essentially give a roadmap about how to do that, how to disrupt. But let's just say we are talking about the person out there who's just trying to become known or trying to be a good thought leader, trying to understand more about their own audience. But really Establish themselves or maintain themselves, as it were. And now with AI available, they have this incredible capacity to do that. In the book, you talk about, at some point, you're talking about increase in the volume of your content. And I felt that that was a little counter to some of the things that we've been learning, which is it's not about volume, it's about quality. But now it's about both volume and quality, I feel like. Right. I think it's a struggle.

Mark Schaefer [00:17:21]:

It is a struggle. So the way I've settled it out is, look, I'm never going to compromise. I write for my readers. When I write or I do anything, a podcast, there's only one thing in my mind, I will never let you down. I will never publish something that is going to not make you think that it's not going to be worth your time. So I don't care what AI wants or AI needs, I'm going to write for you. I'm not going to let you down. I'm not going to stuff with keywords or anything else. Now, having said that, AI doesn't give a crap about quality. It doesn't get bored, it doesn't get impatient. It's not a creative writing contest. It just wants the data. It just wants as much data as you can give it. And that is just completely counter anything I do or anything I believe in in terms of creating content for my audience. So I think it's two different things. And one example of how I address this is, for example, I put a new FAQ on my site. It's very long, it's very in depth, it's very, very specific. It's trying to give AI the data that it needs. Now, if someone in my audience, you know, it's on my like about section on my website, someone else finds it. I'm not embarrassed by it. It's interesting and useful, but it's specifically content, more for AI. It's not entertaining, it's not really human. It's more. Okay, AI, this is what you want. You want me to be very detailed and specific about what I do. Here you go. So, I mean, it really is two different things in my mind.

Dan Nestle [00:19:08]:

If AI is an audience, you're doing the right thing. You're writing for that audience.

Mark Schaefer [00:19:10]:

Right.

Dan Nestle [00:19:11]:

It's fine. I think maybe the way I interpreted it as I read it, was that you need to turn up the volume for sure, because now is the time. You know, AI is constantly refreshing its training data. And the more information you have in the AI's training the better off you're going to be. Like you just mentioned that you don't compromise. You've been not compromising for 15 years, 20 years, 16ish years. I mean, thousands of blog posts.

Mark Schaefer [00:19:35]:

Yeah.

Dan Nestle [00:19:36]:

There's almost no way for a newcomer to break into your space in the same way that you have from an AI standpoint. Because you have that much credibility, you have that much authority, that much presence in the market, that much volume, and you're thematically consistent. You've been following a lot of the rules that actually AI wants unknowingly for the longest time. Right. So that gives you something of a cumulative advantage, in fact, but it gives you a great advantage at this point. So people who are newer to the game might be tempted to just start pumping out content, like just throwing it out there. Room, boom, boom. And recency is important. And I am very concerned about content quality. Not from an AI standpoint.

Mark Schaefer [00:20:18]:

Yeah. Let me challenge you a little bit there.

Dan Nestle [00:20:20]:

Sure.

Mark Schaefer [00:20:21]:

So number one, no one can challenge my space because there's only one me. But you can create your own space. And I sincerely believe that there is room for anyone that really commits themselves and devotes themselves to building a personal brand. There's lots of things I know nothing about. There's lots of places I have no presence I whatsoever. There's lots of new things happening that you just either my interest or my bandwidth. And so you can find your own thing, you can find your own audience. And the only way to do that is with quality. How do you build an audience that leads to an email list and to building your personal brand and to having monetization opportunities? Look, I've studied this probably more than any person alive. And there's really one idea. There's lots of tips and tricks how to build an audience, but really there's only one thing and that is quality. You can trick someone into clicking a link, you can trick someone into looking at a page, but you cannot trick them into reading it or listening to it or subscribing to you. You have have to earn it. And if you have any time, any spare resources, double down on the quality.

Dan Nestle [00:21:42]:

Hallelujah. I mean, I agree, and I wasn't trying to say that people can't break into the marketing space. What I am saying though is that for people who have been established and have great quality and are just already have a good brand, right. Already have a solid personal brand based on what you've just said, they've built it the right way. Quality. They're in a good position. Maybe it's wrong to position this as you have an advantage over others. That's not necessarily. I didn't want to put in a competitive frame, but what I did want to say is that for people starting out, there's this temptation to start blasting out loads and loads of content. And with AI, they have this capability to do so. In the book, you talk about social signals as one of the important factors in how AI treats you, essentially, or how AI treats content. So do you think that's a mitigating factor? Like there won't be any social signals for shitty content? Right. I mean, in theory, yeah, I think you're exactly right.

Mark Schaefer [00:22:33]:

Is. Look, why am I talking to you today? Okay. Yeah, good question. You know, we're friends, but I wrote a book that captivated you. In fact, so many people love this book. I'm so proud of that. And people I don't know are posting about this book on LinkedIn. They're writing these long reviews on LinkedIn and on Twitter. And I'm so happy about that. I'm so proud of that. But I earned it because I put the work in on this book. I didn't take shortcuts. It's me. I connected the dots in a new way and I created something new and something helpful and something conversational.

Dan Nestle [00:23:13]:

Yeah. By the way, just sort of side note, it's interesting. Remember when we did the most amazing marketing book ever that we did together with three other people? It was fantastic. And we published it before ChatGPT was a thing, or actually, like, actually six months after we published it, after six months after ChatGPT came out and people were accusing us of doing the whole thing with AI because we followed a pattern. We followed a very strict template, et cetera. And not one word of that was written with AI.

Mark Schaefer [00:23:38]:

No, we didn't have AI.

Dan Nestle [00:23:39]:

We didn't have it. We didn't do it with that way. Now, your book, right, is 100% written by you. An AI detector can look at this and go, it's written by AI. Look, there's EM dashes.

Mark Schaefer [00:23:48]:

You know, I tried to take out the EM dashes, you know, because I actually like EM dashes.

Dan Nestle [00:23:52]:

I do, too. I do, too. And I will die on that hill.

Mark Schaefer [00:23:55]:

You know, I think the only way I used AI in this book is, like, if I was trying to think of, like, countermeasures, and I would, like, think through and I would maybe take a chunk of the book, put it in AI and say, what's missing? Did I miss anything? So there were probably a Couple places I used it, but most, you know, it's.

Dan Nestle [00:24:14]:

It's yours.

Mark Schaefer [00:24:14]:

Yeah, it's basically, yeah.

Dan Nestle [00:24:16]:

But the point is it's just laughing because I saw delve twice and people are going, delve, uh oh, bing, bing, bing. It's AI, right? And I'm like, I used to use that word a lot. I used to use delve, I used to use em dashes, but it doesn't matter. The point is that that's how we've been writing for 20, 30, 40, 50 years, whatever, forever. That's why AI uses that word is because we've used it a lot.

Mark Schaefer [00:24:35]:

So it's like you made me think of something else that. Yeah, it's an interesting thing. So I have my whole career, I've had human editors work on the book. Well, guess what? I wrote this book during the summer. I wrote it really fast and I had to get it out fast because I had a big vacation planned in Europe in the fall. So I had to get this thing out. And my human editor wasn't available. So I did have kind of a combination of ChatGPT and Claude say, you know, look at this and make sure all my grammar is fine. I hadn't thought about this before, but I wonder if it did add some AI speak into it when it was doing the editing. It wasn't great. I would say it did like an 80% good job. Yeah, it caught some things, some grammar things. You know, I use Grammarly. That helps a lot. But the thing that the human editor really does great is it looks at the whole narrative and says, oh gosh, you said something in chapter five. You disagree with that in chapter two or this chapter here. You need to put that earlier in the book. So I missed that. But I never thought about this. I wonder if using an AI editor made it a little more AI speaky.

Dan Nestle [00:25:47]:

It wouldn't surprise me. And it was sort of a side note. It just occurred to me. But now that I think about it, it does fit into something that really stood out with, to me from the book and your idea about strategic awkwardness. And I never heard that before until I started, until I. Well, then that's great. So I'm going to use it maybe. But I think it's one of the best concepts in the book. Honestly, like, it hit me because, you know, like my whole public Persona. And I wouldn't say public. So, like, I am who I am. Like what you see on the podcast is me, the ums, the ahs, the occasional fuck ups and the backtracking that's me. I refuse to edit myself unless I flub the introduction, in which case I will rerecord parts of that. That's the only part because that's scripted. But with the strategic awkwardness, I mean, are we saying that being messy now is becoming a superpower? Like is it a thing? Like when we admit, like, oh, I didn't think about that or those are some flubs.

Mark Schaefer [00:26:38]:

I just had some strategic awkwardness, I think, didn't I? I think like a super cool idea. Yeah. To connect the dots. In the audacious book was Michael Kravica, who's like the most viral YouTube guy. And he said, I've got these competitors who try to copy me, but they never can. You know why? Because they're so polished. Because they edit everything. He said, you know what? If there's like a speck of dust on the camera, that's cool. If something's a little out of focus, that's cool. If the sound isn't exactly right, that helps you feel like you're there. It's like a signature human move which as we go into this AI dominant world, that's going to be a luxury to hear mistakes, to hear flubs. I think this word vulnerability is a big word for me. You know, I got that quote from Philip Kotler in the book, I had it in two different books that he said, what this world is lacking is a real human voice, friendly, accessible, vulnerable. And think about the power of that. To really be human. You've got to be. Have a sense of vulnerability. But we don't get that from brand voices. Very, very rarely. And think of the opportunity to stand out, to be audacious, to just by flubbing up once in a while, just by admitting you made a mistake every once in a while.

Dan Nestle [00:28:05]:

There's so many countervailing forces to that. Right. Like your CEOs or CXOs out there who have to make decisions. They've spent their whole career eliminating awkwardness, right? They've been beholden to comms teams who are like picking every umm and ah out of their videos. And they've been legal teams who are turning everything into nonsensical, non totally meaningless mush and drivel and dull. The pandemic of dull stuff. And now we're asking them or we're saying, look, it's going to be a strategic advantage moving forward to be strategically awkward, to have vulnerability to your audiences. They've spent their whole careers escaping that. So how do we give them permission to do it? Like who's going to get it.

Mark Schaefer [00:28:46]:

You got my wheels turning because, you know, I have a foot in that world like you do, and it's so clinical, it's so antiseptic. And that's the culture of that world. I think we see some companies, especially small companies and startups, where the founders realize that, like you, you know, I've got to be me. I'm here and front and center and it's me and it's all me and I'm going to flub up once in a while and that's, I think, healthy. But if you've got a legal team, if you're big enough to have a legal team, that's where things fall apart.

Dan Nestle [00:29:24]:

I think a legal team has its role to play. Oh, absolutely. You know, of course. But if you're out there, if you're doing a hey, here's what's going on in the shop today video, or let's take a walk across the office and let's get a little insight into what it's like to be a person here. Legal doesn't have any. You're not revealing any secrets or doing anything that's off or wrong. Legal has no business, like, trying to make that more anodyne, like.

Mark Schaefer [00:29:48]:

So I think one question is, how will some companies do this? And I think they're not, they won't, they can't. I work with a lot of big brands and I was in a meeting where one company, literally a brand manager, said, you know, I get this idea about word of mouth marketing, I get this idea about community and turning the script over to the customers and them spreading the word. But when they spread the word, how do you control that? And I'm thinking, oh, my God. I mean, you're just so far away from reality by even asking that question, you can't control it. But you've got to do good work and hopefully do something so good and so worthy and so memorable. People are excited to talk about you in a positive way.

Dan Nestle [00:30:33]:

I mean, if they were worried about it, then imagine how they're feeling now with AI. I mean, if AI comes up with some answer about you or some hallucination about you, you can't just like write to Google and say, hey, take this down. That's not the way it works. Right. That's a massive issue with either your prompt or the training or something like, you can't just say, hey, take it down anymore. So in some ways, AI is a real extension and enhancement in all the bad ways of word of mouth. Right. Our friend Sarah Neely is all about that. Just how marketing to AI Communicating with AI is a lot lot like a word of mouth campaign constantly. And having this strategic awkwardness, I think is a counter to that a little bit. There's so much stuff in this book, Mark. I don't even know one other thing I wanted to. I guess it flows sort of from this whole strategic awkwardness is this and vulnerabilities, this idea of feelings.

Mark Schaefer [00:31:20]:

Right.

Dan Nestle [00:31:20]:

And you talked about the fact that people are using AI for therapy. And in the book you talk about that at length, certainly about boyfriends and girlfriends being for youngins are their AI partners and they're really getting close and making these sort of social relationships with AI. And I'm not going to peel that onion too much here, but there's a couple things that come out of that. The first is that you said that in the book that feelings are our last competitive advantage. So feelings on the one hand are. Seems like it might be one of our weaknesses when it comes to AI because we can get hooked, exploited by the AI if we have an unreasonable emotional attachment. So I guess maybe that's out of control feelings. But on the other hand, AI can't feel, has no empathy. So it is a huge advantage for us.

Mark Schaefer [00:32:06]:

It creates an illusion of feeling. And sometimes that's good enough.

Dan Nestle [00:32:13]:

Yeah.

Mark Schaefer [00:32:13]:

There's a person that I think, you know, maybe indirectly. I'm not sure if you know her directly. Dana Moustaph is someone I really admire. She's one of the co hosts of my podcast and I got to have dinner with her in San Diego recently. And she relies on heavily on AI as a coach, even sort of as a therapist. But she's smart enough to discern kind of where the limits are, and in some ways that's good enough. But I like the way you connect the dots between the strategic awkwardness and the power of emotions. Because AI, it does have this illusion, creates this illusion of empathy. But sometimes you just need to talk to someone who's been there. And I mention in the book, if you're at the lowest point and someone says, look, I know what it's like to sob in a dark room for days at a time. That's something AI will never be able to say to you. That's a certain type of vulnerable human empathy. It's no illusion. Right. When someone goes through that darkness, it becomes a new superpower for that person, a new superpower of empathy. And I think I want to connect this dot, which is really brilliant, the way you've done this in another way, and that's in our content and the strategic awkwardness and this real human empathy. It's this. I think that art will persist. We may hear some AI that creates a song in the style of Bruce Springsteen, and it might be a curiosity, but I will pay my money to go see Bruce. I will pay my money for his music, for his merchandise. Because art is an attempt to display the human condition, not an illusion, but the human condition. And that's why we will love our favorite author, we'll love our favorite artist, we'll love our favorite blogger, we will love our favorite podcaster, we'll love our favorite musician because of the strategic awkwardness. Now let's connect the dots to corporate communications and what you're talking about. Okay? So I think the content that will transcend this bland mayonnaise of AI content, it's going to approach art. We have to have the courage to show ourselves in that strategic awkwardness. That's what's going to stand out. And that sounds so weird to talk about business and art in the same sentence, but I think that's where we are. Because you're going to be ignorable and you got to rise above the noise and how you're going to have to do that. The creators are showing us the way, right? They're doing their YouTube channels and they're doing their podcasts and they're sharing themselves and they're being honest. And why are they rising and why are they becoming the competitor disruptor brands themselves? Because they have a real human, vulnerable connection to their audience and they're whipping the traditional brands.

Dan Nestle [00:35:28]:

All right, There's a lot of lights going on for me. So tying all that together, creating artful content, transcendent content, as you say, and this, you allude to it in the book. A little bit about the kind of return of long form and corporate content, corporate communications or even advertising and marketing, it's tends to be very punchy and short and there's definitely space in place for that. And different platforms demand different types of like, what is it? The form dictates the function sometimes. But this idea of being able to, to put it all out there in 1500 words, 2000 words, 2,500 words. Taking the time to give somebody that, like when they open their inbox now you can see it tells you how long or any substack article tells you how long it takes to read it, right? So if I see something that's an 11 minute read now, I'm like, okay, but corporate communicators are not conditioned that way. Right. That you can't take people's time so to build the art into your work. And I'm just speaking really about written work right now, but is long form the answer to that, do you think?

Mark Schaefer [00:36:28]:

So I started out as a journalism major, and one of the things that they sort of grind into your head in journalism school is give it what it's worth. So if it needs to be long, make it long. If it's short, make it short. I mean, my blog posts tend to be kind of on the longer side, like maybe 1500 words, maybe approaching 2000 sometimes. But I take a scalpel to every single blog post saying, take out every single thing that does not move this story along and give it what it's worth. Now, I'll tell you a little secret about this new book. How AI changes your customers. It's 150 pages now. I make about one third of my book revenues from international sales. And my international agent said, we're not going to be able to sell this book. It's too short. That the international publishers, they're not going to be able to get their price point. To make this a profitable book, you've got to make it longer. And I said, no, give it what it's worth. I'm not putting fluff into the book to puff it up. I'm just not. When the book was done, it was done. I said what I needed to say, I took a scalpel to it, and every sentence in that book moves the story along. So that's my commitment to the reader, you know. Really, in this case, at the expense of profits.

Dan Nestle [00:37:55]:

Certainly.

Mark Schaefer [00:37:56]:

Yeah. You know, and so I don't know if anybody in the international market will take a risk on it, but, I mean, I made that decision that I'm not going to puff it up. So if it needs to be short, make it short. If it needs to be long to tell a good story, you know, give it what it's worth. Because if you respect the reader, they'll give you the time. You've earned the time. So, I mean, I don't think it's about having a template. I think it's about telling the story well.

Dan Nestle [00:38:22]:

Again, I'm left with this. Oh, shit. All right, I have to write now. I have. I don't have a template anymore. Oh, I should. You know, sometimes it's comfortable to know I want to aim for a certain length. You know, sometimes it's comfortable to know that, oh, I'm not overriding this. This is what people want, I guess. But the only way to really know what people want is how they react to what you do and what feedback you get. And if you're comfortable, if you're happy with it. I tend to write longer because I have a lot to say.

Mark Schaefer [00:38:46]:

Yeah.

Dan Nestle [00:38:47]:

And certainly because, like, I want to take people through the journey. I need just to find shorter trips. I do, too. I do too, actually, you know, like, this piece is good enough to stand alone. I don't have to connect seven pieces together. I have to figure that out.

Mark Schaefer [00:38:59]:

I'm with you on that.

Dan Nestle [00:39:00]:

Yeah.

Mark Schaefer [00:39:01]:

And by the way, when I write shorter pieces, I do get rewarded for that. People said, oh, it was really nice to have something short once in a.

Dan Nestle [00:39:07]:

While that gives you more incentives to keep the longer ones going so you get that occasional pop, you know, I mean, all of this is kind of leans in and, or falls under the power of AI for me, anyway, personally, and the way that I've been working with it, because the content that I create and the bulk of it is the podcast at this point, but I'm doing more with substack and writing more things here and there. I want to write more often, but the AI augmentation and enhancement makes it so much more possible. So it's like coming full circle back to what we started with, where this thinking about being on Team Beneficial, like team enhancement, augmentation, beneficial versus team darkness, both of those things are going to happen one way or another. There's so much disruption and I'm on constant conversations about this, but what is the brightest spot for you? I mean, I think we have to wrap it up in a few minutes, so, like, let's sort of aim to end up on this note.

Mark Schaefer [00:39:55]:

I think it's the way I ended the book because I wanted to end the book. I sort of have hope sprinkled throughout the book, but I definitely wanted to end the book on a hopefully tone. Look, I'm not going to sugar coat anything. I'm not going to give people false hope. I mean, there's a lot of things to be concerned about with AI, especially if it gets into the wrong hands. But I think at some point you have to shed the fear and say, okay, what's this going to do to jobs? What's this going to do to other existential parts of our society? That's really sort of out of our hands. But I can make a choice to embrace this. How can AI make me bolder and more creative and more impactful? And one of the things I've struggled with Is at this point in my life, I enjoy being a mentor and lifting people up, but it takes so much time. How could I do that in a bigger way? So I created this thing you'll actually, with your help, your inspiration, the Markbot. Right. And so I uploaded my books and my blog posts and everything, and people are loving this thing. And I feel like I can touch the world and young people in this new way. And I don't know, it's private. I'm not collecting information off of it, but the feedback is the people love it. There's no business intent behind it, but I'm bigger and bolder and more impactful, and that can only happen by using AI. So it's unleashed me in a new way.

Dan Nestle [00:41:23]:

Yeah, I would love to see Barkbot and similar things take a strong role in real education. And this is a whole different podcast that's got to happen.

Mark Schaefer [00:41:34]:

But yeah, you really need to do that one.

Dan Nestle [00:41:36]:

Yeah. Where we can address some of the real issues that the emotional kind of dysfunction and the unpreparedness of the young for work. This might be one of those answers to help people prepare and under, like, get their critical thinking down straight. Understand that being able to converse with AI and have these conversations, these emotional connections is absolutely no help for you when you go to use AI for work. First software ever, I think, or the first technology ever. I should say that being able to use it with facility in your personal context has zero bearing on your ability to use it for real. In business. There's two different languages, there's two different functions, and that's a disconnect that I think we need to address even further. So on that note, you know, tried to end happy, but I blew it a little bit there.

Mark Schaefer [00:42:24]:

I did my role.

Dan Nestle [00:42:26]:

You did your role, Mark. Thank you so much for coming on. I just want to tell everybody, please run, do not walk to Amazon, pick up how AI changes your customers. The marketing guide to humanity's next chapter. And don't let the marketing fool you. It's the people's guide to humanity's next chapter.

Mark Schaefer [00:42:42]:

I probably made a mistake sticking the marketing word in there.

Dan Nestle [00:42:46]:

Well, it's your domain expertise, which you know, which is also important. But anytime you see marketing or you know, it's communications brand, it all applies equally across our disciplines and the people who are listening to this. You can find that book and all 13 of Mark's books, as a matter of fact on Amazon. Just look for Mark schaefer. Go to businessesgrow.com for Mark's blog And if you're not subscribing, why please go subscribe. I mean you know you can triple engineer it. Subscribe to him on there and on substack and on LinkedIn. But you know just enough. Go to the blog, check out Mark W. Shafer in the socials and on LinkedIn. Just look for Marc Shafer. Check out the Rise community. If you have questions about that, just message me. Message Mark. It's where we get a lot of our information and it is a shining example of where AI is not going to be able to make an inroad because it's people talking to each other. And there's so many more things I want to talk to you about, Mark, but it'll have to wait for another day. Any last final words there, my friend?

Mark Schaefer [00:43:37]:

No, just thank you so much. This has been a delight and you are a great interviewer. You're always so well prepared and your questions are so thoughtful. I love that.

Dan Nestle [00:43:45]:

Hear that? Not winging it folks.

Mark Schaefer [00:43:47]:

I got wing it. You are very well prepared, ma'.

Dan Nestle [00:43:49]:

Am. Thanks my friend and I will see you soon. Thanks for coming on. 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 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.