David Usher on Creativity, Memory, and Staying Human in the Age of AI

Transcript lightly edited for spelling and punctuation. The conversation is unabridged.

Mark Evans: It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. My guest is David Usher, a multi-platinum musician and five-time Juno Award winner. He sold over 1.4 million albums and topped the charts in three languages. I met David about a decade ago, maybe even more than that, while organizing the MESH Conference in Toronto, which explored the intersection of business, technology, and culture. Needless to say, it was very cool to have a rock star speaking at our event, which at peak attracted more than 600 people and speakers from around the world. While David is still performing after a short hiatus, his passion and creativity have been focused on a new frontier, artificial intelligence. As founder and CEO of Reimagine AI, he's building ventures that explore how technology can extend human creativity, preserve memory, and even support healing. His projects, from Second Echo, a digital legacy platform, to Kids Care and AI, a virtual companion for children facing medical procedures, push at the edges of what it means to be human in the age of machines. And we'll talk about where art and AI intersect, what happens when we outsource thinking to algorithms, and how technology can help us stay more human, not less. Welcome to Marketing Spark, David.

David Usher: Thanks very much.

Mark Evans: It's been a while since we talked. Excited to see you again and talk to you again even though it is digital.

David Usher: It's been a long time.

Mark Evans: You spent much of your life turning emotion into a melody, translating raw feeling into music that connects with millions around the world. Now you're channeling that same creative energy into algorithms. The $64,000 question is, what does creativity look like when it's expressed through code instead of sound? And how do you find the act of building AI products scratches the same creative itch as writing a song?

David Usher: I've been involved with technology for quite a long time, not as long as music, but for quite a long time. But I wrote a book about this, a book about creativity and innovation about twelve years ago. And that book was really an exploration of how creative thinking is a methodology. And if you view creativity as a methodology, then you can really transpose that framework onto any vertical or any genre. So I'm using the same creative process when I'm writing songs with my band, or I'm writing a book, or I'm writing a keynote. I do a lot of keynote speaking, or I'm working with programmers. It's the same creative process, but it's just a different vertical. But for each vertical you're working in, you need to learn the language of that vertical so you understand how to communicate and how to work with the people who are vertical-specific, if you will, in their knowledge base.

Mark Evans: Creativity, whether it's music or writing or arts, some of it is nature, and some of it is obviously nurture, the training, the passion that people have for. How do you equate that into the digital world where we're typing the keyboards and, you know, there's ones and zeros, and sometimes it feels very mechanical as opposed to artistic. How do you bring the art into the world of technology and AI?

David Usher: Certain acts are very mechanical for sure, but you can call those same acts when you're playing an instrument, or you're working with a specific sound in isolation. It is very mechanical, especially in music these days. It's all digital. But it's the way you use those instruments or colors together to create something bigger. That's really the focus. It's the same with code. We're obviously programming, but also, especially in the work that we're doing, we're trying to build a sense of empathy into what we're doing. We're trying to build a sense of just a life to what we're doing that extends beyond the individual parts. And as a whole, it means something more. But I think everyone that's building something is trying to do that. Right? We're all trying to build something that has meaning. And when you bring all these pieces together, whether that's code or instruments or writing, it hopefully makes something that means more than the individual parts.

Mark Evans: You've spoken about your mother's Alzheimer's diagnosis and how that inspires Second Echo. When you look at her life and her memories fade as a result of Alzheimer's, that became the spark for you to build a technology to preserve memories, which is really important in a time when we take a gazillion photos and a lot of them we never look at. How did that experience shape your philosophy about memory, identity, and what it means to leave a legacy in a digital age?

David Usher: I started Reimagine AI about eight years ago, so I've been working in this space for quite a long time. But I started to realize very fast that if anyone's had a parent with Alzheimer's, it's just a tragedy. It's an awful thing to happen right in front of you watching somebody disappear. And I was thinking about the technology they were using, and I've been trying to do it with the technology that existed ten years ago, eight years ago, six years ago. I've been working on this project, trying to build what we're building now and what we're releasing now. But the technology really didn't exist, that you could sustain that memory and those connections over the long term. But if you think about how, you know, your parents, your grandparents record memories, it's 19th-century technology. Right? There's almost nothing. Photos, a few videos maybe, some stories, but the stories all fade. The writing is fragmented. It's in a book somewhere. So it doesn't make sense to me that we would record our memories that way. And if you look at us, as you were saying, we have a million photos on an endless scroll, but no way to really understand them because they have no context. We have social media posts all over the place, but they're not really performative. They're not a representation of us in any way, and they're also not connected. So what we're really building is trying to build a connection platform that connects all these memories over time with an understanding of each other.

Mark Evans: It is interesting when you look at people who are trying to amalgamate their digital presence. For example, I know a consultant who tried to put all his LinkedIn posts into a book, and that was his way of somehow creating an asset or an archive to say, here I was and this is what I thought. There are some pretty rudimentary ways of trying to do that. But, yeah, it feels that we have so many digital assets that we lose control of them and that some of them disappear. Second Echo raises some profound questions about what we keep and what we let go of. When you talk about creating a digital echo of your mind, where did you personally draw that ethical and emotional line between preserving someone's story and replicating their consciousness? Is there a point where preservation becomes an imitation?

David Usher: We think ethics in a pretty simplistic way right now. We think that you have to be 18 and over to do it. You have to have consent, you have to do it yourself. So you're deciding what you wanna preserve and what you don't. Then, your data needs to be your own. So those are the pillars, but it's a person's choice if they choose to experiment with this new way of thinking about their memory of yourself. So the way it works is we have an agentic AI biographer, Chloe, who will just talk you through it and take you through the process of remembering. And it's almost like journaling. Over time, you build up more and more knowledge and stories of who you are, what you are, where you were, all of those kinds of things. And then we create a clone of your voice, and then you can actually talk to your own echo or share that echo with other friends and family.

Mark Evans: What does that look like from a user experience perspective? What is that asset that I'm looking at? What is that asset that I'm gonna leave behind for my children to remember me by?

David Usher: Right now, that asset is just what we call the digital echo of you. So you can talk to yourself or someone can talk to you, and it will speak back to you in your own voice remembering what you have put into the machine, essentially.

Mark Evans: And then you can offer your videos or photos as well? Right now, photos. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Great. Shifting gears, I spent a lot of time recently thinking about the future of writing and how AI is replacing a lot of people's own writing activities. And I wrote a post recently talking about how I believe my writing muscles have atrophied because I don't do enough of my writing anymore. I lean too much into AI. I'm confessing publicly. That's what I'm doing. I recently started a newsletter about sports, not about marketing, simply because I just wanted to have a vehicle to write. It's something I'm passionate about. And you wrote a LinkedIn post recently about AI and writing that struck a nerve: that if we outsource the act of writing, and this is a big one, and this is why I cited it, we may also lose the act of thinking. That's a bold statement, but scary at the same time. And you describe how teachers use AI to create lessons, students use AI to write essays, and then both sides quietly automate the whole intellectual process. So how do we ensure that a generation growing up with these tools still learns to think critically, not just generate output, and as importantly, has real writing skills?

David Usher: I think it's a real challenge because kids are using AI to write, and teachers are using AI, not all, but to generate lessons. And then they're using AI to detect plagiarism, and then they're using AI to mark. In that cycle, for me, what I learned to write, I learned to think. Being able to synthesize ideas on the page really helped me learn that process. As any young person who comes out of school and goes into the marketplace, whatever business they're going into. If you're gonna be a lawyer, you're going to article. You're gonna learn that thinking process, that grind in the trenches where you have to really understand how the basics of the business work. When you outsource that, the fundamentals of the basics of a business or a venture to an AI, how does the younger generation learn that process? And it's also determining what's good and what's bad, what's good and what sucks. You learn that process through the rigor of doing it and finally understanding what's working and what is high-level and what is just subpar. I think it's gonna be really difficult. I very much relate the way that big tech unleashed social media on the world to the way big tech is unleashing AI on the world. And without any government control, without any government regulation, without any thought into what we're really doing to our society and our social fabric. I think there's still no real controls on social media, and I think that's been a terrible experiment on our kids. Not just ourselves. We're all scrolling. Right? And then AI is now doing the same thing in a much more fundamental way, it is changing everything about how we learn, how we live, the fabric of our society, the solidity of our democracy. So this is a big shift.

Mark Evans: Right? It feels like there's a bunch of mad scientists in the lab doing this crazy experiment. They're not even sure where it's gonna go. There doesn't seem to be any oversight in terms of the experiments that they're doing. And it's almost "whatever happens." From a societal point of view, the one thing I worry about is when AI automates to the extent that people, there's not enough work for people to do, and then you've got a real problem.

David Usher: That's coming for sure. We're seeing it already. Where are all these new jobs? Yeah. The high-level jobs that people are gonna graduate to?

Mark Evans: They keep talking about how AI is gonna create a new class of jobs, and I'll believe it when I see it.

David Usher: Yeah. And I guess one

Mark Evans: of the interesting questions is whether we should be pushing back on AI in some respects when you think about the fact that we use these tools as a default now. But maybe the pendulum has to go back. And I'll give you an example. My daughter is in the first year of a master's program in landscape art, and she has a professor who refuses to let the kids use AI. He refuses to let them submit essays digitally. Everything has to be written down. For the students who are these digital natives, they look at that and think this guy is being unfair and unreasonable, and it's just not an efficient way to do it. They have to write. And handwriting these days when you think about it, how many kids are learning how to write in script? But maybe this guy's on the right track. Maybe we have to brute force students and people to go old school. Maybe that's sometimes you have to do this because if we all go AI all the time, then that's just a dangerous road to go down.

David Usher: It is possible. I think that there's probably gonna be a middle road where now cell phones are going out of the classroom. You remember that big push where every kid had to have an iPad, yeah. In the classroom? Now we're going the other way where no one's allowed to have an iPad. No one's allowed to have a cell phone because we see what it's doing to the actual learning. That might be the way it happens with AI. I'm not sure. But I like to use the example of chess as being what I think will be the rise of human spaces in this new world where there is going to be, I think, a backlash where people want this human-to-human connection. If you look at chess as a great example of humans can't beat computers in chess, but nobody wants to play chess with a computer. Chess has never been bigger. Chess is a huge industry now. It's a giant industry. I follow all these chess vloggers. I don't know why, but I do. I'm a terrible chess player, but I find it interesting. Chess has never been bigger because people wanna do things with other humans. And I think that's gonna happen all over the place where we're gonna see there's going to be a big shift in learning as well where people are gonna realize very quickly that something has gotta be done or people are not gonna be able to synthesize ideas the way they used to.

Mark Evans: It's interesting that you talk about human-to-human connections. I was on a webinar yesterday, a B2B marketing webinar, and they looked at the most effective marketing channels for B2B SaaS companies. Guess what was number one on the list by far? I have no idea. Conferences. Oh, really? Think about it. Old school. Fly somewhere for a few days. Network with strangers. Listen to people talk on stage, but it's back. And I think it has a lot to do with people buy from people. People like to connect with people. We like to form relationships. There's the emotional part versus buying something online. And I think that says a lot about humans versus technology, and sometimes humans just wanna be human.

David Usher: I'd also like to say that the genie is not going back in the bottle as well. Right? No. It's not. And I also think that so many amazing things can be created with artificial intelligence. There are so many amazing things that are going to be created. The only challenge is, can we get through the terribleness that's obviously coming to get to the good stuff? I'm not sure. When you have OpenAI suddenly deciding that they should sexualize ChatGPT, you're going down the wrong road. We'll see.

Mark Evans: Wanna shift gears a little bit and focus on creativity and music. In music, we've seen how technology like Auto-Tune sparked debates about authenticity. Today, in this Pandora's Box, AI is raising those same questions for artists, writers, and creators. As someone who's lived through both eras, from recording studios to AI labs, how do you see this tension between creative enhancement and creative replacement?

David Usher: Just six months ago, AI music was shitty. And now AI music, some of it's really good. I would say things. I speak in a lot of conferences. I would say things like AI is great at it. It's the Auto-Tune of everything. It takes the rough edges off everything and makes it mediocre. Now we're finding that they've got the rough edges knob that you can now turn up. You can get the perfect crack in the singer's voice at the perfect place, and you can really generate these incredible songs with artificial intelligence. So it's not that AI won't be able to make all of these amazing songs. It's whether we're gonna wanna listen to them. And in music, we always talk about the idea of scarcity, and everything, actually. Is there any scarcity? Well, there's not gonna be any scarcity in relation to people who can type into a computer with a prompt and come up with a great song. They just won't be because anyone's gonna be able to do it. But where the scarcity is going to live in the human DNA and connection, that there's an actual person behind it. And I don't know how it's gonna wash out. I have no interest personally in writing songs with artificial intelligence just because I like doing it with my friends. It's something I do with my human friends, and I play to human people, and that's where I find joy in music. But I think that the business model's going to change, and we'll have to see how it washes up. But every business model is changing. Yeah. This is not music. The algorithm is the algorithm, and the same algorithm that's coming for music is coming for every other business.

Mark Evans: Music is interesting because if you look at the way that digital impacted music and live performances are now where the experiences happen, the enthusiasm for live music, you see the prices that people pay, which are outrageous. But that's what people want. Yes. You can create great music. I put great in parentheses using AI, but it's actually seeing him performing where you feel connection with the artist, which is a nice segue to your own experiences of being on stage. You mentioned that you took a three-year hiatus from performing. You got back on the concert bandwagon. Now that you've had some time to reflect on where the music industry has evolved, how did you feel getting back on stage performing some of the pictures I saw on LinkedIn? You look like a very happy person performing again.

David Usher: The first show after three years was 20,000 people. It was pretty intense. It's something that I'm very used to. The, like, being with the band, getting on the stage, doing the show. But after three years, it was a bit intense. But, honestly, I love being back on stage. But at the same time, I found with now that the business is rocking, you're trying to balance your brain. There's many things going on in your brain at the same time. I didn't quite realize how much energy it would take to just get the songs and everything back into my body as it were to actually be able to do it, but it was really fun, obviously.

Mark Evans: We were talking earlier about writing muscles atrophying. I presume it's supposed to be the same way. If you haven't done it, you just can't snap your fingers and get back on stage. You've gotta prep. You gotta get the energy to do it properly. It's a lot of work.

David Usher: Yeah. It's a whole thing, but it's really fun. I love it.

Mark Evans: If you're bold enough. Bold. Let's do a rapid-fire round. All right. A few quick questions to end this interrogation that I'm putting you under. What's one song, yours or someone else's, that best captures how you feel about the future? What song?

David Usher: I'll tell you what I've been listening to lately. I've been listening to "Up from the Bottom" by Linkin Park. Okay. The new Linkin Park with the new singer. We're gonna have to really move beyond this weird period we're in. This strange period of conflict that we're in with each other. So "Up from the Bottom," gonna say. Okay.

Mark Evans: What's the last thing AI did that generally surprised or moved you?

David Usher: I spoke at a conference about two weeks ago. And during the conference, I play a video and talk about Lucy AI, which is my friend for thirty years who is an incredible performer, who we created a digital version of her mind. Lucy, about five years ago, told us she has stage four lung and brain cancer. And so we created this digital version of her mind, and now it's a touring exhibit that's been touring all over the world where you can talk to Lucy. It's this light avatar of her, abstract. And then while she's talking, all the walls around you are projected videos from her life about whatever she's talking about, whatever she's thinking about. Just like you're looking into her memory. After the keynote was done, a number of people came up to me and said that they were crying during it. So it was touching to me that creating work that you're not even seeing the work or seeing videos of the work was meaningful to people.

Mark Evans: Final one. If your digital Second Echo could say one thing to future generations, what would you want it to say?

David Usher: It would probably say that in this period, we should be kinder to each other. We should probably remember that's a noble value, a noble trait to have, to be kinder to one another, and maybe, yeah, more thoughtful to one another.

Mark Evans: I would add that people should be kinder to themselves. People are very self-critical. Social media exacerbates that when you look at your image and compare it with others, and that's just an ugly place to be, especially for young people. So I would add that I would add that to your list.

David Usher: Yeah. Thank you. I love it.

Mark Evans: David Usher's work reminds us that technology doesn't have to replace what makes us human. It can help us remember it. To learn more about his projects, visit reimagine.ai and explore Second Echo, the platform that's redefining how memory lives in the digital age. You can also follow David on LinkedIn. He's very prolific, where he shares posts on creativity, AI, and what it means to think in a world where machines write. If you enjoyed this conversation, share the episode, subscribe to Marketing Spark wherever you get your podcast, and leave a quick review. And I'll talk to you next time.