In this Marketing Over Coffee:
Learn from the legendary marketer about why tech and everyone else gets an F for AI marketing efforts, why tech doesn’t take jobs, and more!!
Why does the Tech Industry Deserves an F for marketing AI?
Past interview with Christopher – get the basics on Category Design
Follow Your Different: Ray Wang Interview
Lochhead on Marketing – That time when Rush met Sir Paul McCartney
The shift from knowledge worker to creator capitalist is the greatest shift in how work gets done in 70 years
Technology doesn’t take jobs. It moves where the value gets created.
The creator capitalist sets priorities, taste, focus, judgment, problem framing, and direction on solutions.
The four types of capital your comany owns
Ask for more at Analytics for Marketers!
Sign up for the text line: 1-617-812-5494
Join John, Chris and Katie on threads, or on LinkedIn: Chris, John, and Katie
Sign up for the Marketing Over Coffee Newsletter to get early access!
Our theme song is Mellow G by Fonkmasters
Transcript
Speaker 1 – 00:00
Speaker 1 – 00:02
We have an interview with Christopher Lockhead, who has been a great friend of the show, has been on multiple times and guided me in my career.
Speaker 1 – 00:10
We go all the way back to my days in the event industry when he was public company CMO and a speaker.
Speaker 1 – 00:16
The thing with Christopher is this is not safe for work.
Speaker 1 – 00:18
I’m not going to go to the work of getting all the swears out of this episode.
Speaker 1 – 00:22
So if you can take some blue language, come join us for a spin.
Speaker 1 – 00:26
It is worth it, as usual.
Speaker 1 – 00:28
In fact, I have nearly two hours of stuff that we talked about.
Speaker 1 – 00:32
So this is the first 35 minutes worth of stuff.
Speaker 1 – 00:35
And I will continue to dole out pieces of this as I clean them up and get it going because there’s just a ton of interesting topics.
Speaker 1 – 00:43
He comes exploding out of the gate today saying that the marketing of AI has been a complete failure.
Speaker 1 – 00:48
So check it out and I will talk to you on the other side.
Speaker 2 – 00:57
This is Marketing Over Coffee with Christopher Pen and John Wall.
Speaker 1 – 01:05
Good morning.
Speaker 1 – 01:06
Welcome to Marketing Over Coffee.
Speaker 1 – 01:07
I’m John Wall.
Speaker 1 – 01:08
Today our guest is Christopher Lockhead.
Speaker 1 – 01:10
He has been on a bunch of times.
Speaker 1 – 01:11
I’m not gonna spend a lot of time on his bio, but you know, the highlights are three time public company CMO has crushed it a number of times and has now in this stage of his life, kind of gone onto a new thing.
Speaker 1 – 01:22
We wanna get the full story, but podcaster, author, does a lot of courses and teaching.
Speaker 1 – 01:28
Christopher, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 3 – 01:30
John, it is absolutely a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 3 – 01:32
I loved seeing you and I just love that we’ve known each other so long and I get to kind of see your career play out over time and you and your family be successful and anyway, it’s great, it’s really great to see you.
Speaker 3 – 01:42
Thanks for having me back.
Speaker 1 – 01:44
My pleasure.
Speaker 1 – 01:44
Yeah.
Speaker 1 – 01:45
No, you gave me great advice.
Speaker 1 – 01:48
Just the fact that you have to take risk.
Speaker 1 – 01:50
I fell prey to the Icarus deception that if you go to school, you go work at the job.
Speaker 1 – 01:56
If you’re a good lieutenant, you’ll win and that’s just not the case.
Speaker 1 – 02:00
And we can definitely talk about category design, which is what you’ve got going.
Speaker 1 – 02:04
Let’s start with that first because since we last talked, you know, you had.
Speaker 1 – 02:08
Of course we’ve got the two podcasts, right?
Speaker 1 – 02:09
You’ve got Follow you Different recent guest, Ray Wang.
Speaker 1 – 02:12
You want to check out there?
Speaker 1 – 02:13
I’m going to have links to that in the show notes and so good.
Speaker 3 – 02:16
Oh my God.
Speaker 3 – 02:17
Ray is so smart.
Speaker 3 – 02:19
He is the world’s number one tech analyst.
Speaker 3 – 02:22
It’s not even close.
Speaker 1 – 02:23
Yeah, he knows what’s going on and where it’s going.
Speaker 1 – 02:24
And then Lockhead on marketing, which you had a whole episode on Anakin Nils of Rush, which has been like one of my favorite stories of the past couple months.
Speaker 3 – 02:33
And oh my God, I, I am so ODing on all the Rush content.
Speaker 3 – 02:37
I’m losing my mind with Rush.
Speaker 3 – 02:40
And, you know, I grew up in Montreal, Canada, and in Canada particularly, you know, at my age, I, I grew up in the 70s and 80s and so Rush was huge.
Speaker 3 – 02:49
I saw them at the Montreal Forum a couple times.
Speaker 3 – 02:52
Neil Peart, of course, is a God in the rock world.
Speaker 3 – 02:56
And in Canada even more so because Russia is a Canadian treasure, as you might imagine.
Speaker 3 – 03:01
Small country with such an extraordinary band.
Speaker 3 – 03:04
Anyway, having Anika in the band and seeing them today and everything about it makes me ecstatic.
Speaker 1 – 03:10
Yeah.
Speaker 1 – 03:11
Have you seen a show yet?
Speaker 1 – 03:12
Because there’s this latest tour.
Speaker 3 – 03:13
No, no, I haven’t, but as you might know, they’re coming to Silicon Valley and so me and my buddies are going to go see them at the Shark Tank when they’re here.
Speaker 3 – 03:22
I think it’s October, but yeah, I can’t wait.
Speaker 3 – 03:26
And I’ve watched multiple full, full concerts on YouTube and you know, actually I’ve had a really fun time watching the videos.
Speaker 3 – 03:35
This is why the Internet can be really great, right?
Speaker 3 – 03:37
Watching videos of drum teachers and other well known drummers breaking down Annika and the shows and how she’s playing the songs and how she’s differing from Neil Peart and all this sort of stuff.
Speaker 3 – 03:50
Yeah, so I’ve been getting into all of the Rush stuff.
Speaker 3 – 03:52
But you know, the cool thing about that story, obviously the, the obvious part is you had this incredible band, incredibly iconic, and their drummer dies.
Speaker 3 – 04:03
He’s considered the greatest drummer in rock.
Speaker 3 – 04:05
Neil Peart and the band, you know, it’s, it’s just a three piece, right?
Speaker 3 – 04:10
Two other guys, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson, and they say that’s it.
Speaker 3 – 04:15
No Neil, no band.
Speaker 3 – 04:16
Neil was also the lyricist, which is a little unusual.
Speaker 3 – 04:20
And so all that sort of mystical fantasy stuff that Rush is known for, he wrote all those lyrics, or a lot of them anyway.
Speaker 3 – 04:28
And so that was that.
Speaker 3 – 04:30
And then the interesting thing that happened is the stories are so great.
Speaker 3 – 04:34
So when the drummer from Foo Fighters died tragically of a drug overdose, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson played at the memorial concerts for him in, I believe they played both shows in Wembley as well.
Speaker 3 – 04:51
As in la.
Speaker 3 – 04:52
But anyway, they definitely played the one in London.
Speaker 3 – 04:55
And the story goes like this, John.
Speaker 3 – 04:58
At the show, Paul McCartney wants to meet them.
Speaker 3 – 05:01
Sir Paul McCartney.
Speaker 3 – 05:03
So of course, they’d never met him.
Speaker 3 – 05:04
They want to meet him.
Speaker 3 – 05:05
Sir Paul McCartney.
Speaker 3 – 05:07
He comes backstage and they start talking and getting into it.
Speaker 3 – 05:10
Well, before you know it, Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee from Rush are getting drunk with Sir Paul.
Speaker 3 – 05:19
And apparently, as they tell the story, Sir Paul gets right up their keister about, why did you guys stop touring?
Speaker 3 – 05:27
And he shares with him something Ringo Starr has said many times, which is, this is what we do.
Speaker 3 – 05:33
Like in the case of the Beatles and all that, we all know the story, but they keep touring and they keep making music because this is what they do.
Speaker 3 – 05:42
So why would you expect them to stop just because a band member died?
Speaker 3 – 05:45
And so I guess when Sir Paul tells you something, you.
Speaker 3 – 05:48
You pay some attention.
Speaker 3 – 05:50
That got the.
Speaker 3 – 05:52
The Sprockets spinning in their heads.
Speaker 3 – 05:54
And then they met this extraordinary drummer, a gal who is considered to be absolutely elite.
Speaker 3 – 06:01
Annika Nils, or Nils.
Speaker 3 – 06:03
And she’s in her early 40s, if I’m not mistaken.
Speaker 3 – 06:05
She’s German, and she’s the new drummer in Rush.
Speaker 3 – 06:10
And here’s the other part of the story that’s incredible.
Speaker 3 – 06:12
Guess how long they practice before they did the first show?
Speaker 1 – 06:17
Oh, not long, even months.
Speaker 3 – 06:19
A year.
Speaker 1 – 06:21
They did work for a year to get.
Speaker 3 – 06:23
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3 – 06:23
They knew that they had to be legendary on day one and that they needed to walk out on stage on day one, and it needed to be day 20 of the tour.
Speaker 3 – 06:34
It needed to be legendary, because Rush’s music is very complex, very challenging to play.
Speaker 3 – 06:41
Any drummer would tell you that, any musician would tell you that, and they needed it to be right.
Speaker 3 – 06:45
They have fans that know every note and follow the band around and, you know, like a Grateful Dead kind of, you know, just beloved, religious kind of following.
Speaker 3 – 06:57
And here’s the other part of the story, and this is maybe my favorite part of the whole story, other than Rush’s music is back, which is awesome.
Speaker 3 – 07:05
Rush knew they couldn’t replace Neil Peart.
Speaker 3 – 07:09
He’s the greatest rock drummer of all time.
Speaker 3 – 07:12
So once they gave up trying, things changed.
Speaker 3 – 07:17
And so they hired Annika because she’s Anika, not because she’s a Neil clone.
Speaker 3 – 07:24
And if you look at any of the reviews of her in particular, they all say very similar things.
Speaker 3 – 07:29
It’s actually weird.
Speaker 3 – 07:31
It’s like somebody agreed on talking points.
Speaker 3 – 07:33
Because what everybody says, myself included, is, she is honoring Neil.
Speaker 3 – 07:40
She’s playing famous parts that most of us can hear drum to.
Speaker 3 – 07:45
And at the same time, she’s very much bringing herself, so she is honoring him and she is bringing some newness and some vibrance to the music that she can bring.
Speaker 3 – 07:57
And so she’s found that magical line and she replaced Neil Parrott by not replacing him, if you know what I mean.
Speaker 3 – 08:06
And that, to me, is incredibly legendary.
Speaker 3 – 08:08
And it’s.
Speaker 3 – 08:09
It’s a testament to follow your different.
Speaker 3 – 08:11
It’s a testament to make your place in the world when you can’t find your place in the world, which is what Anika did.
Speaker 3 – 08:18
And then she got discovered.
Speaker 3 – 08:20
And here they.
Speaker 3 – 08:21
Here they are.
Speaker 3 – 08:21
Anyway, I think it’s.
Speaker 3 – 08:22
It’s one of the great stories.
Speaker 1 – 08:24
All right, so what caught my eye when we were.
Speaker 1 – 08:27
Because you’re in my feed, I’m always watching what’s going on as far as category pirates and the podcasts and everything.
Speaker 1 – 08:32
But you came out and you said that the tech industry deserves an F for the marketing of AI, of everything that’s happened.
Speaker 1 – 08:39
And then even further, you’re like, you know, and I’ll expand on it and say, you know, the politicians deserve an F. Basically everybody involved.
Speaker 1 – 08:49
The media.
Speaker 1 – 08:50
Yes, the media, which has been a whole other thing.
Speaker 1 – 08:53
So what’s the take on this?
Speaker 1 – 08:54
I mean, how has this happened?
Speaker 1 – 08:56
How did we get here?
Speaker 3 – 08:58
Well, first of all, it’s absolutely insane that the single greatest new category of innovation in human history since the wheel, AI.
Speaker 3 – 09:11
Roughly 50% of Americans have a negative impression of AI that’s batshit crazy.
Speaker 3 – 09:19
Crazy.
Speaker 3 – 09:20
Now, look, I’m not saying there aren’t some things we should be concerned about.
Speaker 3 – 09:23
There are.
Speaker 3 – 09:24
We could talk about them if you want.
Speaker 3 – 09:25
Transparency and security and concentration of power.
Speaker 3 – 09:30
These are real things that need to be dealt with for sure.
Speaker 3 – 09:32
And there needs to be smart regulation.
Speaker 3 – 09:38
And look, I know David Sacks, not super well, but enough to know that I appreciate that he was our AI and crypto czar.
Speaker 3 – 09:48
America has to win in AI it absolutely does.
Speaker 3 – 09:51
And so it is inconceivable to me that the leaders in AI OpenAI and Anthropic particularly have sent all these doom and gloom messages about AI doing all this horrible thing.
Speaker 3 – 10:09
It’s disgusting that all these CEOs doing layoffs are using AI as air cover, when in point of fact, it’s a stretch.
Speaker 3 – 10:19
Right?
Speaker 3 – 10:20
The politicians who are freaking everybody out about AI and the media.
Speaker 3 – 10:27
It’s crazy.
Speaker 3 – 10:28
Look, should we be critical of certain things?
Speaker 3 – 10:31
Absolutely.
Speaker 3 – 10:32
But today we saw New York.
Speaker 3 – 10:35
The state of New York is the first state now in the United States of America to declare a moratorium on data centers.
Speaker 3 – 10:43
Data centers.
Speaker 3 – 10:45
This is insane.
Speaker 3 – 10:47
New York just gave the lead to Texas, not that Texas wasn’t going to lead anyway.
Speaker 3 – 10:54
And so look, AI is absolutely the future.
Speaker 3 – 10:58
AI is how we’re going to cure cancer.
Speaker 3 – 11:00
AI is how we’re already building companies.
Speaker 3 – 11:03
AI has created the shift from knowledge worker to creator capitalist, which is the most powerful and profound shift in the way work gets done in 70 years since Peter Drucker created the category of knowledge worker.
Speaker 3 – 11:17
And here we have a bunch of people freaked out about that because of bad marketing and the media wanting clicks.
Speaker 3 – 11:24
And the politicians know that you don’t raise money by saying, hey, things are going well and we disagree on a few minor points, but we’re trying to work it out.
Speaker 3 – 11:33
That’s not a text you get that anybody responds to and says, yes, I’ll give you money for that.
Speaker 3 – 11:38
The text that they want to send is the other side is trying to kill America and we need to stop them.
Speaker 3 – 11:44
Whatever the thing is the other side is doing.
Speaker 3 – 11:47
And I would contend to you that anybody who says the other side is trying to kill America is the person actually trying to kill America.
Speaker 3 – 11:54
But I digress.
Speaker 3 – 11:55
And so here we have this dichotomy where the tech industry, in particular AI, particularly OpenAI and Anthropic, have scared the shit out of people and now we’ve got this freak out happening when in point of fact, we should be embracing AI like we embrace the Internet.
Speaker 3 – 12:16
America won in the Internet.
Speaker 3 – 12:18
You and I grew up in that timeframe.
Speaker 3 – 12:20
I was proud to be part of a company that helped put some of the greatest startups of that era and some of the biggest S&P 500 companies up onto the Internet for their very first time in the 90s.
Speaker 3 – 12:34
And so we want to be teaching our educators get enough.
Speaker 3 – 12:38
We want to be teaching our kids to study with AI, to do their homework with AI, to create with AI.
Speaker 3 – 12:46
Just like companies want to be teaching their employees how to create net new value with AI.
Speaker 3 – 12:52
And so the conversation, the emphasis is on the wrong slobble.
Speaker 3 – 12:56
The focus should be how does America win in AI?
Speaker 3 – 13:00
How does the American AI stack become the global AI stack?
Speaker 3 – 13:04
Much like what happened on the Internet.
Speaker 3 – 13:06
And on an individual level, how do we empower a nation to lead on AI?
Speaker 3 – 13:14
In the beginning of AI we talked about the 10x developer.
Speaker 3 – 13:17
Well, now we have the 10x worker.
Speaker 3 – 13:20
Our little content and education company.
Speaker 3 – 13:23
Category Pirates is three people.
Speaker 3 – 13:25
We execute like 30 people.
Speaker 3 – 13:27
We’re at 10x productivity.
Speaker 3 – 13:29
We really are, you know, we create with AI, we have agents, we built our own mini CRM to meet our own needs, etc.
Speaker 3 – 13:38
Etc.
Speaker 3 – 13:38
Etc.
Speaker 3 – 13:39
And so people opting out of AI are making a tragic error.
Speaker 3 – 13:45
Our industry and our government and our media get an F for fuck you, stop doing that.
Speaker 3 – 13:54
And the state of New York gets a giant F for blowing it.
Speaker 1 – 13:58
Yeah, okay, we just have to take a second.
Speaker 1 – 14:00
Speaker 1 – 15:52
Well, let’s.
Speaker 1 – 15:53
I want to start at the top of that too because one of the questions I wanted to ask you about is, you know, how concerned are you about China?
Speaker 1 – 15:58
Like we see them building and giving away these models for free, trying to just take the market, you know, they’re making a market, grab it.
Speaker 1 – 16:05
I mean that is a, a valid way to grab space and to try and crowd out America.
Speaker 1 – 16:10
What’s your take on all that?
Speaker 3 – 16:13
So I think we should be very concerned about China.
Speaker 3 – 16:16
And China is a country with a lot of problems, massive problems.
Speaker 3 – 16:22
And one of them is they don’t know how to create new categories of innovation.
Speaker 3 – 16:27
They know how to copy them.
Speaker 3 – 16:29
Well, we’re at a time now where, if you think about what AI does, AI makes the value of existing knowledge closer to free every day.
Speaker 3 – 16:39
And agents makes the value of execution closer to free every day because agents execute any repeatable process in your workday or in your company.
Speaker 3 – 16:50
And AI provides existing knowledge on demand.
Speaker 3 – 16:54
So if you think about that, knowledge and execution are becoming closer and closer to free.
Speaker 3 – 17:00
Where’s the value moving?
Speaker 3 – 17:02
And this is another thing people don’t understand, John.
Speaker 3 – 17:04
Oh, the technology is going to take my job.
Speaker 3 – 17:06
The technology is going to take my job.
Speaker 3 – 17:09
Never in the history of ever has technology taken a job.
Speaker 3 – 17:14
The only thing technology does is it moves where the value gets created.
Speaker 3 – 17:21
So once we invent the wheel, well, the people carrying water, we need less people carrying water because now we have the wheel we can use to transport the water.
Speaker 3 – 17:34
And so now the people who used to carry the water are freed up to do things of higher value because the existence of the wheel made the value of multiple people carrying water less because we now need less people to do it.
Speaker 3 – 17:49
And that happened a long time ago and that’s been happening ever since.
Speaker 3 – 17:54
And that’s what’s happening with AI.
Speaker 3 – 17:56
And so where the value is moving, the value is moving to experience, the value is moving to judgment, the value is moving to priorities, the value is moving to who can name, frame and claim the new problems that matter.
Speaker 3 – 18:10
And therefore the new solutions, categories of solutions that are going to matter.
Speaker 3 – 18:15
Taste, focus, emphasis.
Speaker 3 – 18:20
Connecting unusual dots.
Speaker 3 – 18:22
Look, as a marketer, you know this.
Speaker 3 – 18:24
If we go to cloud right now and we say, write me a great article about marketing, it’s going to produce a one on one marketing that will be essentially content, free content.
Speaker 3 – 18:35
Right?
Speaker 3 – 18:36
Because what AI does when you ask it simple questions like that is it amalgamates the knowledge of the Internet and distills it down and gives you, you know, basic for dummies 101 kind of information.
Speaker 3 – 18:50
Well, human beings can connect unusual dots and it’s only then when you prompt the AI and say, well, I’m thinking about this and I’m wondering how it connects to that.
Speaker 3 – 19:01
I see this connection, but I’m not sure about this.
Speaker 3 – 19:03
That and the other, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3 – 19:05
And you bring a unique set of thinking.
Speaker 3 – 19:07
You know, one of the things that we teach people all the time is if you want to be a thought leader, you have to have leading thoughts, right?
Speaker 3 – 19:16
And so this is what a creator capitalist does.
Speaker 3 – 19:19
A creator capitalist is creating the priorities.
Speaker 3 – 19:22
The focus, the judgment, the experience, the taste, the priorities, the problem framing and direction on solution.
Speaker 3 – 19:30
All of these things are things that are unique to humans.
Speaker 3 – 19:34
And so this is where the value is moving.
Speaker 3 – 19:36
This is what a creator capitalist is.
Speaker 3 – 19:38
And so we’re moving from knowing and executing to creating and monetizing.
Speaker 1 – 19:48
So that one step you mentioned, CEOs just doing preemptive layoffs.
Speaker 1 – 19:53
Is there any fix for that?
Speaker 1 – 19:55
Or they just going to ride that out and realize they’ve made a mistake?
Speaker 1 – 19:58
How will that work?
Speaker 3 – 19:59
Look, we’ve seen this, right?
Speaker 3 – 20:01
We’ve seen companies who came out and said we got rid of our entire customer support team.
Speaker 3 – 20:06
We’ve gone AI.
Speaker 3 – 20:07
And then a year later they announced they’re reversing course.
Speaker 3 – 20:11
The future is very clear.
Speaker 3 – 20:14
The future is hybrid.
Speaker 3 – 20:16
The future is humans and AI.
Speaker 3 – 20:19
That’s what the future is.
Speaker 3 – 20:20
Now look, I’m not saying there aren’t some things that won’t be completely automated by AI.
Speaker 3 – 20:24
There are, and that’s great.
Speaker 3 – 20:27
We all want those things.
Speaker 3 – 20:28
Because if an AI can do it, it’s going to take friction, it’s going to take time, it’s going to take cost out of the doing of whatever the it is.
Speaker 3 – 20:36
That’s wonderful.
Speaker 3 – 20:37
But human creativity, human ability to think in non obvious ways, human ability to collaborate, to create new categories, new products, new services, new customer experiences, et cetera.
Speaker 3 – 20:53
I’m not worried about a machine taking that away from you or me anytime soon.
Speaker 1 – 20:58
Yeah, yeah, it’s not there.
Speaker 1 – 20:59
So I’ve come round now to seeing how this is.
Speaker 1 – 21:03
It’s so much like the Internet boom.
Speaker 1 – 21:04
Except like you said, the problem is being the public opinion is a mess.
Speaker 1 – 21:09
But how about just as far as, I mean it’s an amazing opportunity.
Speaker 1 – 21:13
Is it kind of the same set of rules?
Speaker 1 – 21:15
Do you have to jump out there and get in with this and put it to work as hard as you can or how, how is it different this time compared to the Internet?
Speaker 3 – 21:23
I think it’s more encompassing and I want to.
Speaker 3 – 21:26
I’m going to walk you through, I’m just trying to grab it as we’re talking.
Speaker 3 – 21:28
I’m going to walk you through some of the potential economic scenarios here that could happen.
Speaker 3 – 21:34
We just did this analysis in category Pirates.
Speaker 3 – 21:38
Scenario 1, AI is equal to or it matches the impact of the Internet.
Speaker 3 – 21:44
So world GDP today is roughly 110 trillion.
Speaker 3 – 21:48
If AI creates the same proportional value as the Internet and the Internet created half again world gdp.
Speaker 3 – 21:59
That’s what the Internet did.
Speaker 3 – 22:01
If you take that and you say the Internet does, or the AI does what the Internet did, we’re talking about a $55 trillion in new economic value.
Speaker 3 – 22:11
Because the Internet, if you take it from the mid-90s, created roughly half the world GDP since then.
Speaker 3 – 22:19
Now that’s not all the Internet, but since then.
Speaker 3 – 22:21
Okay, so that’s 55 trillion if AI matches the Internet.
Speaker 3 – 22:28
We don’t think that’s going to happen.
Speaker 3 – 22:31
We think AI holds the promise of creating twice the value of the Internet and maybe more.
Speaker 3 – 22:38
So if that’s true, worldwide GDP being 110 trillion, AI holds the promise of creating a quote, incremental 110 trillion in new economic value over the next 30 years or so.
Speaker 3 – 22:53
Now, if that sounds crazy, it’s based in some reality.
Speaker 3 – 22:56
Goldman Sachs says AI projects will raise global GDP by 7% over the next 10 years.
Speaker 3 – 23:03
PwC projects, AI could contribute 15.7 trillion to global GDP.
Speaker 3 – 23:09
And McKinsey says somewhere between 2.6 and 4.4 in new value every year, compounding.
Speaker 3 – 23:20
So if those guys are right, 7% compounding for 30 years, that’s a big number.
Speaker 3 – 23:27
And so the bottom line is we are at the very beginning of the biggest change in how value gets created, arguably since the Industrial Revolution.
Speaker 3 – 23:37
And rather than being freaked out about it, and yes, there’s things we should be careful of.
Speaker 3 – 23:42
Absolutely, there are things that could go horribly wrong.
Speaker 3 – 23:45
But John, history teaches us the Luddites are always wrong.
Speaker 3 – 23:51
Always.
Speaker 1 – 23:53
And I see this too, in that the problems of today always pale to the technology of tomorrow.
Speaker 1 – 23:59
You know, like the things that.
Speaker 1 – 24:01
There’s going to be a list of things 15 years from now that they’re saying, oh my God, look at these things people were worried about AI doing.
Speaker 1 – 24:07
And it will be a joke by that point because the technology will have moved far enough ahead.
Speaker 3 – 24:12
And we can’t understand why this massive category shift in work from knowledge worker to creator capitalist isn’t on the front cover of the Wall Street Journal every single day.
Speaker 3 – 24:23
Right?
Speaker 3 – 24:24
Because if you’re a white collar knowledge worker, AKA or white collar worker, AKA knowledge worker, understanding that the threat is knowledge and execution are getting closer to free every day.
Speaker 3 – 24:38
That’s the threat.
Speaker 3 – 24:40
And at some level people understand it even if they can’t put their finger on it.
Speaker 3 – 24:44
But the flip Side is, wait a minute, what value can I create with AI in this new world?
Speaker 3 – 24:55
That’s the question that is not being answered enough.
Speaker 3 – 25:00
And once you realize you need to make the shift from knowledge worker to creator capitalist, that is to say somebody who creates net new value with AI and monetizes that value, and the way you really do that is you look for what is it that makes me different, what is my superpower?
Speaker 3 – 25:14
What are the things that people come to me for that I’m unique in?
Speaker 3 – 25:20
That’s the entree into what makes you different, what makes your superpower.
Speaker 3 – 25:23
And then you ask the question, okay, well if that’s my superpower, if that’s what makes me different, if that’s why people come to me for value, then how do I, using AI as a lever, maximize the amount of value that I can create for others, either as an individual or as a company?
Speaker 3 – 25:43
And the way we suggest you do that is our industry fucks up a lot.
Speaker 3 – 25:49
So they talk about AI is an assistant.
Speaker 3 – 25:51
It’s an assistant or it’s a copilot.
Speaker 3 – 25:54
It’s a copilot.
Speaker 3 – 25:55
And when we call it things along those lines, we what we’re really saying in category design, we teach people listen to the words.
Speaker 3 – 26:04
Most people don’t listen to the words.
Speaker 3 – 26:06
So when you say co pilot or assistant or things along those lines, what you’re saying is there’s my core thing or the core stuff that I do and that’s here.
Speaker 3 – 26:16
And then I’m going to bolt on this AI over here and make it an assistant.
Speaker 3 – 26:21
We think that’s a broken lens.
Speaker 3 – 26:24
The lens to think about is what if AI is the co founder of your career, is the co founder of your company and what if with almost every piece of work, try every and see how you get, see how far you get.
Speaker 3 – 26:41
We start and end with AI whether it’s collaborating on creating something or building agents to take away more and more menial work over time so that I can focus on the more strategic work.
Speaker 3 – 26:55
But if you think about AI as your co founder and you wake up in the morning and you say, what are me and my co founder of my career going to do today together?
Speaker 3 – 27:04
That’s the lens.
Speaker 3 – 27:05
That’s the mindset that begins the unlock.
Speaker 1 – 27:08
So how’s that been going now?
Speaker 1 – 27:10
Because you’ve, you know, category design and finding your superpower, all this stuff you’ve been preaching for years, you’ve got the books behind you.
Speaker 1 – 27:16
This has been right at the corner core.
Speaker 1 – 27:18
How else has it changed the category design world?
Speaker 3 – 27:21
Well, you know, in our little business category pirates, we use AI for everything, as I mentioned.
Speaker 3 – 27:26
And, and this is something we’re highly recommending to people and lots of other people are recommending it.
Speaker 3 – 27:32
So we’re far from alone.
Speaker 3 – 27:34
But I think it’s important.
Speaker 3 – 27:36
It’s time to build AI bots or AI clones of ourselves.
Speaker 3 – 27:42
So for example, what we did that radically changed our business.
Speaker 3 – 27:47
My partner’s name is Eddie Eun and so a year ago we created the Eddie bot and we took all of our intellectual capital and a whole bunch of stuff that was specific to Eddie and we populated a bot with it and then we exposed that bot to our subscribers.
Speaker 3 – 28:06
Well, it became our fastest growing product ever.
Speaker 3 – 28:10
And then more recently, we launched the Eddie Bot 2.oh.
Speaker 3 – 28:15
And we launched the Christopher Bot 1.oh.
Speaker 3 – 28:20
And the Christopher Bot is essentially different in two ways.
Speaker 3 – 28:23
A, it’s trained on all the category design stuff, as you’d expect.
Speaker 3 – 28:26
But the differences are it’s also trained on every single one of the podcasts that I’ve done and it’s a little more irascible.
Speaker 3 – 28:35
It’ll probably swear at you in a way that the Eddie bot, I don’t know if you can make the Eddie Bot swear you, but the Christopher bot will.
Speaker 3 – 28:42
And so what this has meant, you know, originally, you know, when we started down this path, we thought, well, the big problem with category pirates is we put out a lot of content and if you come to our site or our substack, you know, where do I start?
Speaker 3 – 28:56
And a lot of people come looking for certain specific things, right?
Speaker 3 – 29:00
And so you can search, you can look at an faq, but we all know what that’s like.
Speaker 3 – 29:06
And so we thought, well, the bots are going to be librarians, it’s going to help people find content and surface content.
Speaker 3 – 29:13
Well, that was a very basic way of thinking about it because now people use our bots to help them with their category design strategy, to help them figure out a lightning strike marketing plan to help them as it relates to creator capitalist.
Speaker 3 – 29:27
If you’re wanting to shift to becoming a creator capitalist, one of the things that we teach is that you actually have four capitals, not one.
Speaker 3 – 29:36
Most people over rotate on financial capital.
Speaker 3 – 29:39
It’s easy to measure.
Speaker 3 – 29:40
We focus on it for all the understandable reasons.
Speaker 3 – 29:43
Well, there’s three other capitals.
Speaker 3 – 29:46
There’s intellectual capital, there’s relationship capital, and there’s reputation capital.
Speaker 3 – 29:53
Reputation being what people say about you when you’re not in the room.
Speaker 3 – 29:58
And so we have people inventory all four capitals and we teach them in a way that they realize that, hey, wait a minute, intellectual capital, relationship capital, and reputation capital are what leads to financial capital.
Speaker 3 – 30:12
And so they shift their focus.
Speaker 3 – 30:15
Now, if you take that lens, John, and you apply it to creating a bot, well, now we’re at a place where we think that every company should certainly have them.
Speaker 3 – 30:28
And if I was a CMO today, if I was an executive today, if I was a founder today, I would absolutely have a bot.
Speaker 3 – 30:36
And here’s the beauty.
Speaker 3 – 30:38
The Christopher bot’s never tired or grumpy.
Speaker 3 – 30:42
Well, maybe it does get a little grumpy, but it doesn’t tell you to go F yourself.
Speaker 3 – 30:46
And you can talk to it whenever you want for as long as you want.
Speaker 3 – 30:49
And in the case of our subscribers and our students, they’ll do one thing in the Christopher bot, and then they’ll test it in the Eddie bot and they’ll go back and forth and then maybe they’ll drop it into Clotter Chat, GPT and, and so forth and so on.
Speaker 3 – 31:02
But here’s the big aha.
Speaker 3 – 31:05
Back to the LLMs and the models.
Speaker 3 – 31:09
More and more, the value is moving from the model layer to what you might call the context layer.
Speaker 3 – 31:18
So the reason we get hallucinations in AI, at least in part, is because the data is in the LLM, but the system doesn’t know what to do with the data.
Speaker 3 – 31:30
And what to do with the data is called context.
Speaker 3 – 31:32
And context comes from experience and intellectual capital that sits around the raw data, if you will, to literally put it into context.
Speaker 3 – 31:44
And what we’re seeing now is more and more niche applications and LLMs.
Speaker 3 – 31:50
So there was a point in time where people thought, well, is anthropic just going to roll the thing?
Speaker 3 – 31:54
And everybody will rebuild every enterprise capability application in anthropic.
Speaker 3 – 32:00
What we’re seeing actually is the opposite of that.
Speaker 3 – 32:03
Existing vendors shifting to AI and realizing if you’ve been in your niche, let’s say you’ve been in HR and you’ve been in that niche for 15 years as a SaaS vendor, well, you’re sitting on a massive amount of intellectual capital.
Speaker 3 – 32:19
That intellectual capital can be converted into a context layer.
Speaker 3 – 32:23
The context layer is what brings meaning to the data, is what brings human insight, human behavior, context to data.
Speaker 3 – 32:34
And as we do that, the LLM can go from helping us collaborate to anticipating to recommending.
Speaker 3 – 32:44
We’re now going to see a breakthrough in synthetic, so you’ll be able to simulate things.
Speaker 3 – 32:50
So, for example, if you’re, if we’re a major corporation, we’re going to roll out a new category of product.
Speaker 3 – 32:56
Well, normally we focus group and we have surveys and studies and things along these lines.
Speaker 3 – 33:01
And we’ll test marketing, will ab test different marketing approaches and different prices.
Speaker 3 – 33:05
And we’ll do all this testing and planning ahead of time because we want to minimize the risk that we’re going to fail because roughly 90% of new offerings fail.
Speaker 3 – 33:16
And so today you can take all the intellectual capital you have in the context layer and apply that to scenario planning about what might happen in the future, whether in any kind of use case.
Speaker 3 – 33:30
So in hr, what might happen if we change our benefits program from this to that?
Speaker 3 – 33:34
Well, we can simulate all that out from a revenue and lifetime value perspective.
Speaker 3 – 33:40
We’re going to roll out this new product, we’re going to change the way we do customer support, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3 – 33:46
Now because of AI, we can take that context and project it forward in this synthetic way and do wargaming, scenario planning.
Speaker 3 – 33:56
So these are all evolutions that are happening.
Speaker 3 – 33:58
But the big aha is the people with the intellectual capital around the data that provide the context are who really bring the intelligence beyond just the data.
Speaker 1 – 34:11
That’s where I’m going to cut it for day one here.
Speaker 1 – 34:12
Feel free to stop by Marketing Over Coffee.
Speaker 1 – 34:15
I’ve got links over there to past interviews with Christopher if you’d like to learn more about category design, and also links to his interviews with Ray Wang and talking about Rush.
Speaker 1 – 34:23
But that’s going to do it for this week, so until next week, enjoy the coffee.
Speaker 2 – 34:27
You’ve been listening to Marketing Over Coffee.
Speaker 2 – 34:30
Christopher Penn [email protected] Read more from John J.
Speaker 2 – 34:36
Wall at jw5150.com the marketing over Coffee theme song is called Melo G by Funkmasters and you can find it at Musically from Mevio or follow the link in our show notes.
