Will AI Replace Us? Mitch Joel on the New Rules of Knowledge Work

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

Mark Evans: AI isn't coming for the future of work. It's already rewriting it. The tools that we once treated as assistants are quickly becoming competitors capable of mimicking our tone, thought process, and creativity with uncanny precision. But what happens when the things that made you valuable, your voice, your ideas, your expertise can be replicated in seconds? On this episode of Marketing Spark, I sit down with Mitch Joel, a visionary thinker who's not just watching the AI wave, he's urging us to prepare for it. Now this isn't a conversation about hype. It's about what leaders, creators, and knowledge workers need to understand right now as the boundaries of human versus machines begin to blur. Mitch is a renowned entrepreneur, author, speaker, and the cofounder of Thinkers One, a new venture built to help companies connect with and learn from brilliant minds in more scalable and modern ways. Mitch is also the former founder of the digital marketing agency Twist Image, which was acquired by WPP and the longtime host of Six Pixels of Separation, one of the first and most influential marketing podcasts. That's a great resume, if I can say so myself. Thanks, Mark. Mitch always has a hand on the pulse of what's next, and lately, he's been raising provocative questions about the accelerating power of artificial intelligence. We often ask, will AI take our jobs? But Mitch flips the script. What are we doing in case it does? He sounded the alarm not with fear, but with urgency because the shift isn't theoretical. It's already happening. In this episode, we explore how AI is evolving beyond automation to full replacement, why knowledge work, once thought as immune, is now under real threat, and why leaders can't just wait and hope that things work out. We also explore Mitch's own entrepreneurial path from building and selling a successful agency to reinventing himself with Thinkers One and what it means to build something human first in an increasingly AI-powered world. Welcome to Marketing Spark. I think your last appearance was probably four years ago.

Mitch Joel: Listen. In the whole bio of things, Mark, my favorite is the fact that when we first met, it was in a room where you were extremely skeptical of these technologies. I always have that feeling of whenever I'm dealing with people who were professionally aligned with me in terms of publishing or journalism, and they were so skeptical at the time. They've become not only great friends, but obviously people have been very successful by using the exact tools that I get lucky. Every time, everything was worked out for me in that sense, that once... and what is this, the saying, 'a broken clock is right twice'?

Mark Evans: Just for context, Mitch and I met probably in around 2006 when

Mitch Joel: Twenty years ago.

Mark Evans: When I and several other entrepreneurs started the MESH conference in Toronto. Was it before MESH?

Mitch Joel: Here's where we met. We were on a panel for an event, and you were doing your journalism thing for a big national newspaper. And I was the pro-social media blogging, and you were the, 'no, these are not going to be serious people.' No. We met before then. When you came to the dark side, then we became really good.

Mark Evans: It's hard to think about at one point in time, the hype around the Internet was, really, 'is this really going to take over the world?' You and I lived in a world of paper and newspapers and old-school media, and I look back and go, 'wow!' I was either ignorant or naive or just didn't envision what was possible, but here we are. I mean, we're both digital animals right now.

Mitch Joel: This is the exact moment we're in with AI, actually. And this is why, like, whenever we have these conversations, it's always the what is, was the Beastie Boys, 'You Gotta Check Yourself.' I felt it back then and I feel it in the exact same moment. And again, as you get older, you get more attuned to these things. I call it stasis, which is this idea that everything we think about in the moment is based off of everything we know historically or in the moment without having the ability to really imagine what if. And you just go through the many things that were. It was a person like me in 2000 who was saying, 'I think Internet media is going to be bigger than television media.' You were in that infrastructure. There was so much power within the traditional media you couldn't even imagine. By the way, this is the problem we have as a society, not that we just sit in the stasis mode, which is, 'I'm just thinking about the present and/or what happened historically,' but it is the real problem of words we toss around. I know you're a wordsmith like me, we talk about paradigm shift. I can think that we are in a paradigm shift. We won't know it until we're beyond it because a real paradigm shift is something you could never have imagined or understood until after it happened. And that really is part of these provocations that you were bringing out in the intro, which is, if we can't actually understand that we're in the paradigm shift, which I don't think we can, what we can do is ask questions that push our thinking into that mindset. And that's where we were in the early 2000s and we definitely are right now.

Mark Evans: It's interesting that you and I haven't connected in a few years. And I rediscovered your current way of thinking when I was looking through my LinkedIn feed. And I have to be transparent, as a couple months ago, I took a full-time job, and I've backed off LinkedIn simply because I've been busy. And when I look at LinkedIn now, there's a lot of self-promotion, and not a lot of stuff breaks through to me. But you wrote a post recently in which you said that we're asking the wrong question, 'Will AI take our jobs?' And instead we should ask, 'What are we doing just in case it does?' The question I have to ask you is, what led you to that reframing?

Mitch Joel: If we go back, again, we have that history together. I know that it felt so real to me that the shift was going to happen, that first shift of social. When that came in, it was very clear to me. It felt like I was very much in what I would call the convincing business. I literally sat in meetings with large clients, big brands, having them say to me things like, 'Are you sure we need an Internet site? Do we really need social media?' 'Do we really need mobile? E-commerce? Are people going to really put their credit card in the...?' Part of that thinking has just evolved to where we are today. When people say to me things like, 'Why are you thinking like this?' I make the argument that back then I felt like I was probably 10 steps ahead of everybody else in terms of what was happening. It was very abundantly clear to me where the economy was going, where the technology evolution was going, the culture, the behavior, totally. AI comes out, ChatGPT comes out, and I start playing with it, obviously, very early days. I've been following AI and just a dream of it. I jokingly told a story on LinkedIn the other day where 12 years ago I had a brand agency review and they were asking us about our competencies in developing AI-driven content for their brand, and I was like, back then, there wasn't... we didn't talk about LLMs back then, let alone now. We have this breakthrough ChatGPT, OpenAI, and it comes through, and what I felt at the time was, 'oh, like, now I'm only two steps ahead of everyone else.' This stuff is really advancing in this crazy way. But the catalyst for the question really came, I would say, a week before I wrote that. I have a lot of my peers saying to me things like, 'hey, I'm noticing Claude isn't delivering great results for us anymore.' I think hallucinations are people who lose it and make mistakes. What I find is it does a lot more as it drifts. It knows what you wanted for a bit and then it drifts away and you can't really get it back. Like, how do I start this over? Do I reprompt? What do I do? And on ChatGPT, especially. Now this was really strange to me because I was only seeing better and better iterations and improvements. I was thinking strategically perhaps it's because I'm doing more reinforcement training on it. Whatever output it gives me, I'll then put it in and say, 'actually, this is now my final version of all that stuff.' What I think happened and led me to it is two things. One is I feel the reasoning models really did shift how the output of a lot of the LLMs were happening. The bigger one is I started realizing, 'oh no, I'm not two steps; I'm actually 10 steps ahead again.' Why? Because in particular, OpenAI, clearly, it has all of my content. So, what is my content? It's 20-plus years of writing almost every day, of appearing on podcasts, of doing this longest-running business podcast, and hours and hours of how my thinking is, how I format, how I do everything. And I was realizing that the more I'm just doing the basics with it and pushing it and then learning and going back and forth, it was just getting better and better. Where did it lead me to? It led me to the point where I was getting people giving me feedback on my content, in particular on LinkedIn, and they would quote lines, and my comment back was, 'how do you know I wrote that, or if the AI wrote it, or if we did it together?' And so I would even say that you, like Mark, you like that article. It led to this. Who was that? Was that the AI that wrote most of it? Was it me that wrote most of it? Or was it us working together? The answer doesn't matter.

Mark Evans: Right.

Mitch Joel: What matters is that at my advanced stage I'm able to recognize that it's getting very close to not necessarily replacing me. There is still the human-in-the-loop concept, which we can talk about, but at a grander scale, if it's doing that much at that level of skill, impressing me. It's something that backs up, whether it's strategically, whether it's content-wise, whatever, that I'm looking at with my experience, going, 'That's as good, if not better, than how I would think of it or frame it.' What does that mean? And so that became the catalyst against all the work I'm doing with clients and seeing the work that we're predominantly doing and the work and how we are. Eighty percent of an executive's work is looking for things, searching. It's like going through the spreadsheet, going through... When you start removing that, then you start saying, 'What is the skill set?' This is like a whole other paradigm, which we can talk about later, in terms of what is the work we do and how good the current tools are at replicating.

Mark Evans: One thread that I do want to focus on is the 'does it matter' question. I wrote something recently. I use ChatGPT the same way that you do. I have lots of content that it can suck up. The content that it produces right now is so good. The question is, does the audience care whether content was written by a robot or handcrafted by a human as long as it delivers insight, perspective, guidance; delivers the value that people want from content. Because you think about it, content for the sake of content is useless. But content that builds trust and credibility and gets people to think about you or your company in a new, better, or different way is super valuable. At the end of the day, is the consumer really going to care whether I did some really great prompts or whether I spent hours crafting the article? It's a whole new world, and I don't think it really matters anymore.

Mitch Joel: So this is the exact chasm that we have crossed in society that nobody wants to admit we crossed because it creates a cataclysmic outpouring of problems, which is exact. But you are exactly correct, which is the fact that I can ask this question, and even someone like you who is skilled in wordsmith and understanding, probably couldn't cogently figure it out, means that one, it is human-in-the-loop for sure, obviously, that there's a certain thing happening there. But ultimately, that the content resonated with you without knowing the answer is what's powerful. And I think what's like most telling about this, and this is why I think we've crossed that chasm, is every single comment you see when somebody posts something that is AI-generated, which is, the person consumes the content, and they're trying in the comments to look smart, telling you what they see is, 'oh, it's an em dash,' is the favorite thing with ChatGPT. 'That's the signal,' or 'the hand had six fingers,' the running joke around that. And it's a wrong thing. I actually commented on someone's post who was writing about this the other day. That's the wrong thing because what should be happening is, did you, if I didn't tell you it was AI, you would probably just consume it versus consuming it with a filter of trying to catch it. Knowing that we're both in that phase of trying to catch it and discern what it is, whether you're a teacher or your employer or whatever, while at the same time, me also knowing that the output is undetectable when done well, puts us in this very precarious situation. Like, it's super precarious because you're absolutely right. Music business is something else that I had another lifetime in, and you'd say, 'It's a drum machine. It's not a real drummer playing. Does that make it... yes?' Like some of the biggest hits in the world don't have a human being playing on it. Did that make it not resonate with you? The people who are complaining are the same people who go to an EDM concert and say it was life-changing. Like, just think about it. So why? Now this is the bigger thing. Why? It's because we don't want to sit here and admit that potentially what we have defined as the thing that makes us human, this creative force, this thing no computer could ever do, actually could, did it very quickly, and is fooling everybody when we don't say it's AI. I'll give you a very quick example. On Thinkers One, each thinker has to provide like a little demo video of like them just presenting their ideas. Look, we have people who aren't necessarily great at video and adept at it, so I curate for that. They'll keep their notes off to the side and you can see they're looking to the side. So we had a demo that came in, demo for the profile, and I took it and I dumped it into one of the AI tools that I use called Descript, which I use for transferring and editing and all this stuff, and it has an eye contact feature, which is, you click the button and it just basically puts in like a little fake pupil almost so that you're... it looks like you're constantly looking dead at the screen. I send it to my business partner who knows all these tricks and I said, 'here's the video.' 'Wow, it's really good.' And then I sent him the old version before and he was like, 'oh my God, wow!' And then he started getting concerned. 'Okay, but now that I know that, like, it looks fake. Right? Hold on.'

Mark Evans: You didn't know that.

Mitch Joel: You didn't think it looked fake when I didn't tell you about it. That to me is a high level of creativity, Mark. It's the ability that something moves you without you caring whether the baseline was played on a keyboard digitally or it was one of the greatest bass players in the world. This is that moment.

Mark Evans: Is it not unlike the transformation of manual tasks into automated tasks? No. So, think about... no, no. I think about all the people doing all these manual tasks and all the manual inputting of data and playing with data, now it's all automated. And now, in a sense, content is being automated. But you don't see the... you don't see parallels?

Mitch Joel: I don't see the parallel only because that's very binary to me. You could have the greatest mathematician in the world and a two-year-old type in two plus two equals four and that is the answer. Some people might even argue that in this society, but let's assume that we're there. This is different to me at least because of the nuance of what it outputs based off of the input, based off of what it knows, based off of... there are so many other mitigating factors that make it like hyper-different as an end result that I feel personally like it doesn't have the same thing. And again, I actually would argue that it's probably the biggest challenge I've had from an intellectual standpoint as someone who's trying to think deeply about this of, 'What do we call that? What do we call it when the actual end result is the same as us all doing two plus two equals four, but it's a very, actually, very actually different because you and I could have the exact same prompt?' Let's talk in terms of text here, and the output's going to be so different. And then what the final product is going to be is going to be so different. You're right that it can do that, but in theory it's not. What I think it's the bigger thing is that if you think about your work as a bunch of tasks that you do for one person or department and then another department, that type of repetition is what AI eats for breakfast. That to me is the bigger problem. The stuff that we had defined as knowledge work, white-collar, stuff that required an advanced post-secondary degree that in order to receive a certain amount or sum you had to have many years to be able to look at something and go, 'this is that,' and then, 'I can do this is that for a whole bunch of different people and generate a lot of money,' because that's the... that's gone. And that to me is a real affront to how we think about society and work because we always perch that at the highest level of, 'this is what you want everybody to do.' This was the goal. This was the quote-unquote American dream of modern times. You get an advanced degree, you sit behind the desk, you dress well, you make a ton of money and people come to you as if you're some type of Oracle. Again, and there was an article I think was in Psychology Magazine or Psychology Today. The title was 'the end of I don't know.' This is a very big shift. Like for me, Aubrey, my business partner, will have debates over products, ideas. And instead of debating this, now we literally have built a bot that understands the business, understands business strategy, takes inputs from some of the people we respect. I could call on Roger Martin as a business strategist to think about my business and it's the end of like, 'we don't know.' We literally use it as a third partner. People would say it could hallucinate. It can, but if you take what it says and then tell it to steel-man the argument and then to straw-man the argument and to put in the framework of Roger. If you are smart and you have skill, which is what I think we both have, you can tell when it's drifting or hallucinating or it doesn't know when it's making stuff up. So again, the human-in-the-loop is still there, but it's why I don't think it's the same model as this kind of binary output. I just don't think it's there. It's very different.

Mark Evans: In that LinkedIn post, you quoted Anthropic's Dario Amodei about AI potentially eliminating half of entry-level, white-collar jobs. How real do you think that risk is, and what does it mean for business leaders today?

Mitch Joel: I have no insight into the work you're doing, but let's just say you were still in the marketing consulting business and you had to hire somebody to do the work. Would you hire entry-level at this point? No. Exactly. So this is the whole thing. This is the whole enchilada right there. What it's doing when it starts is it's like the Web 2.0. It's like, why were we all blogging? We were all blogging because you couldn't really do pictures, couldn't do video, you couldn't do audio at the time. Then audio came in, that was the next one, then images after, and then video. It's the same logic. If it's able to perform at that level and some are arguing it's at the Ph.D. level, and I would argue it's probably pretty close to that as well, who are we hiring? Why would I take and hire that person when I can use the system to do those tasks and then hire perhaps parallel, or higher, or more senior? So that seems to make sense in stasis. It doesn't make any sense in terms of what we do in five years. What do we do with all these current people who are studying and need to be employed, but even just ongoing? Where do then people get experience? Where do they...? And the answer might be that we are in a world where everybody was studying mathematics before the calculator and now they have a calculator. So now it has to go beyond what the calculator does, and that's a really challenging place for us to be societally, and I think that's the bigger warning that these leaders are putting out to us, is we're going to be able to build a billion-dollar company without many very junior entry, maybe even mid-level people. Just historically, know, Facebook, Google built these multi-trillion-dollar businesses with way less people than it took in decades before. And that's the scale of which we have to be concerned. We have to be concerned because we know that society fragments and breaks apart as unemployment rises. It's a very problematic thing.

Mark Evans: I've got three kids between the ages of 25 and 18. What should I tell them about this AI world in which they're trying to establish careers, trying to get an education? It sounds very doom and gloom. It sounds like those entry-level positions that you and I had where we worked hard and we networked and made relationships was important. It mattered. It got us into the corporate world. But are you saying there'll be fewer of those opportunities, or are you saying that the people who are going to have entry-level jobs will have a completely different skill set? It's not enough for them to gain experience on the job. They've got to come in with specific skills to help them establish a foothold.

Mitch Joel: So meta-thought that I have is driven to the place of education, and then I can get to like skills that I think people need to think about, not just your kids, but all of us. One is education. So my first meta-thought would be we need to take and bring down the prestige that we've assigned to certain vocations that we do post-secondary. I'm looking particularly as I think about this at place like engineering, legal, and medicine. My thought is we make all of those the same material value as a trade. And then what you do is you elevate the trades up. Plumbing, mechanical, all that. So what you're doing is essentially saying, 'look, we are in a world, if you take medicine as an example, where you have nurse practitioners, pharmacists, people who can now get vaccines and doing that.' We all know this: you go see a doctor, the smart doctors will say, 'Put all of your stuff at the ChatGPT and have it do some outputs for you.' It's going to do way better than I can. This is a professional saying that. So one is we need a very big shift in how we think about the value of education. I think one thing that has to happen, and I don't see how that happens. When it comes to people, I've put out this what I call the PACE framework, and it's really simple. P is for palate, which is taste. So when I asked you earlier, 'did you know, Mark, if it was me who wrote it, if it was MitchBot, or was it a combined work?' What I'm trying to get to is that it doesn't really matter because what happened is for someone to hit publish, in this case it was me, I have to have a certain taste about it, a palette about it. Now, that is something that I don't think is intrinsically human. I think this AI is getting better and better understanding my palette, my taste. So that again, all of this is how long a time frame, event horizon, I don't know. That's one. Two is agency. We as humans need to really define both personally, like, what is our agency, but as a group, too. We don't have to do this, and that's the other big thought, right? Like, we don't have to constantly develop technology that's going to replace us. We don't have to do that. We could look at this and say we wanted to do certain things and not other things because we want what again is this idea of human-in-the-loop, that there's always a person there to do things. The variance on that is really important. I don't think we want to be in that place that you see in the movie 1984 and/or in the big corporation of the Imperial Death Star where we're basically verifiers like the AIs and computers are doing all the work and then there's just a human-in-the-loop is at the end going check or X because we don't want that. So I don't think anybody is going to feel like they're growing and that they're important if they're just validating what the machines do. So again, that's the agency of what we have to decide as human beings. The C is the bigger one, which I think also speaks to your kids in particular and mine as well, is commune. No matter what happens, whether it was the global pandemic of 6-plus years ago or AI, people have a deep desire to connect. The truth is you could have sent me the questions. I could have pumped it into my GPT. It would have sounded great. It's not the same as you and I spending time together. And we both know that this would only be better if we had done it in person. Yes. So we know this because you could watch a concert streaming on YouTube, but it's not the same as going to a concert, and I do think that is part of what is intrinsically human. So what does that mean? There's lots of opportunity economically in the space of commune, whether it's building events, doing events, getting people to come together, just creating spaces for people to commune and build community. And then the last one is, it's cheesy, but it's E, and it's 'Elevate,' and it's this idea that we have to raise the bar always. We had to raise the bar when social media came out. We had to raise the bar when mobile came out. I think it was Seth Godin who said, 'you have to decide in life either you're going to raise your own bar or someone's going to do it to you.' Kind of like that. This is the type of lessons I'm trying to teach. The problem is, I find in particular with my kids, is that they're still in a system that isn't moving like that. And this is going to be problematic because direction and the momentum of this technology is unlike anything I've ever seen, and I've been looking at this stuff again since I was very young.

Mark Evans: I want to ask you one more question about the labor market and then get into what you're doing with Thinkers One. I read stories about companies like OpenText and Shopify in which they say that they are eliminating hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs and that they're going to be AI-first. Somebody like a Tobi Lütke will say, 'it's all about automation. It's all about taking manual tasks and using AI to drive efficiencies and productivity.' And if you're the CEO of a publicly traded company and the bottom line is the bottom line in terms of rewarding shareholders properly, which is your mandate as the CEO of a publicly traded company, then that's something that you would lean into. But I think from a societal basis, in terms of the greater good, is that that kind of commentary scares me because it questions the role of corporations in terms of employing lots and lots of people and making society a better place because everybody has something valuable and useful to do. Do those announcements scare you, or is it a sign of the times, or is it part of this AI hype machine that we're in where every CEO has to be seen as embracing AI?

Mitch Joel: When it comes to the hype of AI, my general sentiment to audiences, I do my keynote presentations, is, I think, it's currently underhyped short-term and underhyped long-term because of what I consider to be this idea of stasis. So that would be my general sentiment. Part of the provocation of that article was, 'these are the questions we actually don't want to talk about. These are the things we will avoid.' If in an organization, there's two of us. There's you and there's me. You're not using AI. I'm using it really well. And the executives are monitoring, and what they quickly learn is that, 'wow, Mitch is phenomenal! Just look at how much output he's in, look how much better the output is, look how much time he's doing.' I just noticed when I looked in the back end of Mitch's work that the AI is getting increasingly good at actually doing it and even knowing what he wants to do next, is it's getting there. At what point do they look at that and think, 'now we don't need them?' Is it when I get to 20% of human-in-the-loop? Is it 5%? I'm not saying you survive. I don't think you survive because I'm just more efficient and having a better output. It's this weirder idea, which is more important than what you're asking: what happens when I'm literally training it and getting it to the point where it doesn't need me. And the analytics on the back end of the employment structure is such that it's just looking at this across everybody. They're just helping us essentially make it better and better to the point we have all. And by the way, it's not one output. It's the Mitch output. It's the Mark output. It's got these different sentiments and feelings. So, when we say, 'Is it AI hype?' Maybe there is more of this vision of like where we actually go with this and look what actually happens in this moment. I'm not sure. Secondarily, it's not a question to me of shareholder value and then creating this so that the markets applaud them for that. I don't think that's the case. I think the bigger thing in this is every single technology has promised us two things mostly, productivity and time back. Are you working less, Mark? No. Not at all. So this is what happens as we start using it and realize that, 'oh, I can actually do more for more people.' But at what point does that not become the metric? And I believe that's what they're thinking about if they are really having the thought experiment versus just a platitude to the markets. So I'm more focused on that. I'm actually not working less. We work more and more. I find that the output and my ability to be my best has increased significantly. Meaning the work that is somewhat menial or tedious, I really have outputted to the machine, and it gives me more time whether I'm using the machine or not to really explore my thinking. I don't know if it's me inflating my own tires. I don't think it is, but I feel since I've started really deep diving with these tools that I've never been smarter in the sense of I can see my confirmation bias now; it's changing my opinion, it's giving me a new perspective, it's giving me someone else's. And so whatever final result I get to, I'm finding personally that I'm a much better person for it. Now the problem is if I'm doing that as an employee and not as my own business, what happens?

Mark Evans: One final question about AI before we move on. Curious about how you personally use AI in your own work. And where do you draw the line between augmentation and replacement?

Mitch Joel: Augmentation and replacement, I don't necessarily think apply to me. Because in my case, I would love to get it to the point where it can replace me and the output is everyone who is exposed to my work feels as connected to it. That would be actually like a very interesting place for me to be where I'm at professionally, where I'm at in my timeline. I don't think it's good for everybody, but for me. What I find interesting about the question of, like, where I use it? My answer is, one, almost in everything. But the bigger thing that I would tell you is, and I don't know about you, but I'm as much as I talk about change, I don't like change. Like, I'm pretty set in my ways, especially when it comes to tools and software. Like, the last thing I think I have time to do is to learn a whole new software or figure things out. I would argue that in the past two years, my stack of tools that I used to both create, edit, think has been a 180. Like the tools that I used before are gone and the tools that I use now are completely different. And that says something. That was a huge signal to me to really start rethinking how I think about it, how I communicated about it, and even how I talk about it. So what does it look like? It's literally everything. I don't think there is anything from basic note-taking to massive editing my podcast where it's not either doing the work or a significant part of it.

Mark Evans: I think what's really interesting is people use these tools, and they're wonderful, and they love them. And then Descript, for example, which I also use. You forget the fact that it's AI-powered.

Mitch Joel: We're recording on Riverside. My greatest example of the simplicity of it is with that question, I'll answer with a live example of this. So now you're recording, but usually it's inverted. I'm the host and I'm interviewing people. And then when I would do my show, the biggest problem I had was, to be honest, like, show notes. It was a nightmare. It was, 'oh, I've got to go in now and listen to everything and then timestamp everything and create a title for each thing. I need a summary of the show. I'm going to have some key takeaways,' and so I never did it. My show notes were the worst, which I think impeded the growth of Six Pixels of Separation 100%. I start using Riverside, and again, I'm being just Mitch-dumb. I don't buy the software and then study everything. I just start using it. And then I see a thing, when I'm like, 'Show notes? What's that?' I hit the button and it literally generates the timeline, the timestamp, the takeaways, a summary, and I'm like, 'Oh!' So I look at that and I go, 'Does the audience care if I generated that or not?' No one cares. And I'd argue that the summary is better than what I did before, which was I'd hop over to your website, copy and paste your bio, and take it out of first-person to third-person, maybe take out some adjectives. That's all I was doing. This is work that if I gave to somebody, it would have taken days to do and cost me thousands of dollars for no real menial return, that it's just show notes in the podcast. So that's more when you talk about, like, these everyday things. It's striking to me. But what does that mean? It doesn't mean that I would take the recording of this, have it do notes, then send you our three takeaways. People just caught... I literally had a friend of mine tell me the other day, they were in the... he's an executive, and they were in a meeting, and he went to one of the management people and said, 'Hey!' 'Can you just send around the follow-up?' And the person goes, 'Oh, I haven't had a chance to copy and paste the notes from the AI.' And they were like, 'No, like, I needed you to look through that stuff and come up with the three takeaways, but to them it was just copy-paste. It's going to give me the three takeaways.' So that's the difference. But the usage is it's like literally that it's a 100% replacement. Show notes. I never... I was never even doing it. Two, oh, like, the actual everything is so much better now because the stuff that I'm focused on—the questions, how I want to formulate them, which, by the way, I use these tools for on top of that. It just makes the show so much better. Okay. It's a very tough moment.

Mark Evans: Let's shift gears and talk about Thinkers One. Before we get into what this new venture does and why you launched it, curious about your entrepreneurial journey. A lot of people are entrepreneurs from the get-go. My son, for example, is 18 and desperately wants to be an entrepreneur. I was a reporter for 20 years and stumbled into being an entrepreneur. It wasn't anything that I thought I would do. And I look at entrepreneurship, and it's very sexy. Everyone talks about being your own boss and being the master or mistress of your own domain. Being a solo entrepreneur is super exciting, but the reality is it's not for everybody. Entrepreneurship is hard as it is. It's a 24/7 proposition. It has ups and downs even though you like the ups and you don't like the downs. But it is something that I think a lot of people want to embrace. And I'd like to know whether you thought when you were a younger man whether this was your path, whether entrepreneurship was the thing that you saw yourself doing, or whether it was just part of your personal growth, your personal journey. You had an opportunity at the right place at the right time, and then you went for it. Once you caught the bug, you recognized that this is something that you wanted to do. This is something that you could do. You could start a business from scratch, and it's underpinned your professional career over the last 30, 40 years.

Mitch Joel: So in Control, Alt, Delete, my second book, I talk about squiggly as this life path, where it's not like top-left, top, like, that's the arc of your career. It's all over the place. You go back, you forward, you fail. I remember a couple of things when I was really young. I came from a lower-middle-class family in a somewhat affluent area. And I remember having sleepover playdates with friends and stuff and looking at the parents at a very young age and thinking, 'they have a lot more than we have,' and 'this person doesn't think that I'm much smarter than my dad.' It's like a very illuminating thought that was a young person. And I realized, not that it's dumb people make, it's not that. It was more like, 'oh, you don't need any superior level of anything to actually be successful.' And so that was one part. One was that. Part two was I wanted things when I was that age. When I was young, my friend gets a car at 16 or a moped or all this fun stuff, and I'm like, 'I can't afford a bike,' so I was definitely driven for, like, the things that I wanted to do, so I started working at a very young age. What I realized then is being the metalhead rock kid that I was, too, is that I didn't do great with the authority part of it. I knew that these menial jobs and I could do that. I didn't need someone beating me up over it. It just didn't feel great. So it was just interesting that the way my career started was in music journalism. It was through networking and friends, and I was very fortuitous in that path, and at the same time, tangentially had parents that were supportive of bringing technology into the home like early Atari 800 computers, and I was like printing up book reports on a dot-matrix computer and getting a zero on it because the teacher didn't believe that I wrote it, right, because it's my handwriting. So there was all of this thing happening at the same time. But what really happened is I got after running music magazines and running my own business, I burnt out and thought, 'I'll go into the corporate world.' I did that for a while, and I really enjoyed it. But I also realized that being in the corporate world just gave me this feeling in the pit of my stomach that it was almost like allowance. My parents said, 'I did my... I made my bed and I did my thing. Can I have my money?' And it was this weird like I just had this weird thing. And so I had a bad experience in one workplace and I thought, 'I'm just done.' And so it was the allowance mindset. It was, 'look, I can work for people and make a lot of money that I would have to ask for, or I could start something, which I hadn't implemented, I wasn't inclined to do, and at the same time, realize that if you do this, it's almost unlimited.' Your potential becomes unlimited to a certain degree. There was that, but the bigger thing that happened to me, which I think is where you were going, is I loved... it's the Michael Gerber story. 'I love baking pies.' 'Your pies are the best! You should sell your pies!' 'I sell my pies.' 'You're doing so well! It's great!' 'I'm working so hard. I should probably open a store.' 'You open the store and the store goes bankrupt.' And what happens in the entrepreneur's myth and Michael Gerber, it's so true, is that person didn't realize that they are no longer baking pies. They're actually in the business of selling pies. It's a very different place. That to me was also the big paradigm shift where I realized I need to pursue things I'm interested in, but at the same time, I'm okay not doing it so much as running the business to be successful to be able to do it. That has guided me very well. Allowance mindset and then that world. And again, being fortunate enough to, I think you know the story, I was introduced to Harley Finkelstein from Shopify. He wasn't even doing Shopify, he was doing Smoofer at the time. He was following my stuff. We got to meet him. So watching that has been extraordinary, but watching it has also given me this place where 95% of businesses are going to fail. We know that. But the bar to start a business is very low, and that's also like an interesting part of the story, too. It's like the ability to start a business in this day and age from not the lawyers and geography and all of these things, it's astounding, and so I feel like it's very... that is where I get extremely opportunistic because if you can use and think about these tools in that way and look, ultimately, what are we talking about? We're talking about the market has a need. I can fulfill that need. Those are the bigger ideas that I'm constantly thinking about. And that's the journey.

Mark Evans: On a side note, let's hope that your early interactions with Harley led you to be an early investor in...

Mitch Joel: countless mistakes that Harley likes to remind me about along the way. Look, I was head down doing what I was doing for sure. Did I benefit when they went public and I bought stocks like everyone else? I absolutely did, but it was nothing more than me really believing in the business, having spoken to many wealth managers and them thinking there was this crazy multiple there and me realizing there is a crazy multiple there at the time, but the difference is most businesses will fail. But after five years, the ones that succeed are gonna start spitting out money. They're gonna require more capital, more tools, and Shopify is providing it. And to me, it just felt like a great model.

Mark Evans: Given the economic times in which we are currently living in, the volatility, the uncertainty, and at the same time, the impact of AI, what's been your biggest surprise or challenge in building Thinkers One that you didn't anticipate? Maybe we should take a step back and explain what Thinkers One does. Sure. And why you decided to launch it.

Mitch Joel: It's basically a marketplace where companies can buy personalized 15-minute video experiences from some of the best thinkers in the world. So one product is you can think of it as almost like a custom TED Talk where you go on the site, they have topics with thought leaders, you choose their topic, you personalize it in a form, you put on your credit card within four to five business days, you get a link to a customized talk that you can present to your team for your event, whatever you want. 15-minute experiences. So again, simple. The other product is a live Q&A, which is the ability to go live with the thought leader and ask them anything. You're almost like the podcast host for 15 minutes or have someone in your business do it and it's a way to pick a very smart person's brain about whatever topic is relevant to you. Why did we come to this? One, we had COVID and the world collapsed and I realized right then that I was getting a lot of inquiries for, hey, can you pop into our Zoom, or hey, can you record this for 15-minute thing on where AI is going or whatever it might be. The problem with those mandates from the thought leader side is it requires the same amount of work as their consulting and their speaking. It's a lot of back and forth. It's contracts, it's payments, it's billing. So we essentially Shopify-ed the process. We made it very easy and accessible for everybody. The other side is we wanted to take and bring these people that you see on stages and on YouTube podcasts and make them accessible to everyday businesses not just the annual general meeting or the big event that you go to. So that was the other thought. And then on the client side and the customer side, look, we live in a hybrid world and if you asked team members across the board small, medium, large, B2B, B2C, hey. Do you feel like you're moving fast enough? Like, they don't wanna move faster. Nobody thinks that they're not moving fast enough. Also, they're begging for professional development in a world where we're not connecting to see the communal part. This gives leaders a great chance, I think, to inject that into their meetings so that you're not forcing them to go and watch this or go look, take this online course. Can actually say, 'Look, our hour meeting is 45 minutes plus this cool little thing.' It's professional development and that's an element of surprise in the light of intelligence of having a third party that you can speak to. So that was the idea of it. We are trying. It's a very, it's always challenging because you're doing new category. Like, I don't think this would be as tough as a product to sell if it was like, no one thinks to look for a 15-minute experience. Right. So that's the challenge in category creation. But look, once people try it, they love it. Like, they're going nuts for it. So it's been a fun and interesting thing.

Mark Evans: Thanks, Mitch, for sharing your insights, challenging our assumptions, and giving us so much more to think about when it comes to the future of work, AI, and what it really means to be irreplaceable. If you found this episode valuable, I'd love it if you could leave a review or share with a colleague, especially someone wrestling with the same questions that Mitch and I explored today. Marketing Spark is all about helping B2B SaaS founders, marketing leaders, and entrepreneurs uncover what's working, what's changing, and what's next in the world of growth and storytelling. If you're a B2B SaaS marketer or founder with a unique story or a fresh take on marketing growth or leadership, I'd love to hear from you. Reach out to me on LinkedIn, and let's talk about getting you on the show. Until next time. Thanks again for listening to Marketing Spark.