November 1, 2024 • 55 mins
In this episode of 'The Wayfinder Show,' host Luis Hernandez interviews Mark Hirschberg, author of 'The Career Toolkit' and creator of the BrainBump app. The conversation delves into the dual nature of AI, addressing societal implications such as job displacement and misinformation. Hirschberg emphasizes the importance of retraining workers and building 'chains of trust' for reliable information. The discussion highlights corporate culture assessment, effective networking, and interviewing strategies. Hirschberg introduces the BrainBump app, designed for just-in-time access to key ideas from various sources to enhance retention and application of knowledge. The segment covers the evolution of AI, podcast industry trends, and personal productivity hacks. Emphasizing the value of soft skills and continuous education, Hirschberg shares resources like free articles and career planning tools available on his websites.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Is a knife good or bad?
Well, if you put the knife intothe hands of a criminal it's bad
He's going to use it to hurtpeople to steal from people to
threaten people If you put thatsame knife in the hands of a
surgeon, he's going to savelives Yeah, and so it's not
about the knife itself But abouthow we choose to use it and this
(00:20):
is true of any technology It hasgood and bad applications think
nuclear power So AI is in thesame boat and what we choose to
do with it.
(00:41):
Welcome to The Wayfinder Showwith Luis Hernandez, where
guests discuss the why and howof making changes that led them
down a more authentic path orallow them to level up in some
area of their life.
Our goal is to dig deep andprovide not only knowledge, but
actionable advice to help youget from where you are to where
you want to be.
(01:02):
Come join us and find the way toyour dream life.
Welcome back to the Wayfindershow.
I'm your host, Louis Hernandez.
And today I'm here with MarkHirschberg.
Mark is the author of The CareerToolkit, Essential Skills for
(01:23):
Success That No One Taught You.
And he's also the creator of theBrainBump app.
From tracking criminals andterrorists on the dark web to
creating marketplaces and newauthentication systems, Mark has
spent his career launching anddeveloping new ventures at
startups and fortune 500companies in academia with, and
(01:44):
he has over a dozen patents tohis name.
He helped to start theundergraduate practice.
opportunities program dubbedMIT's career success
accelerator, where he teachesannually.
And he's also been at theHarvard business school where he
helped create a platform used toteach finance at prominent
business schools.
(02:05):
He also works with manynonprofits currently serving on
the board of plant a millioncorals.
And he's, he was one of the topranked ballroom dancers in the
country and now lives in NewYork city where he is known for
social gatherings, including hisannual Halloween party, as well
as his diverse.
cufflink collection.
(02:25):
That's quite a bit.
Mark, welcome to the wayfindershow.
Thank you for having me on.
It's my pleasure to be here.
Yeah.
Thank you.
As I was preparing for this, Iactually was, it actually, you,
you have quite a bit moresuccess from a very early time
in life.
And, I found myself having tofigure out how to condense this
quite a bit, but I understandyou've also been a chess
(02:45):
champion and quite a few otherthings.
So, you strike me as somebodywho, Has just always figured out
how to become very successful atwhatever you do very quickly.
I tend to be, I'm very type A.
So when I get into something, Iget very focused and really dive
into it.
I think that helps me lead tosuccess.
That's not to say I don't havehobbies that are less serious,
(03:08):
but I usually get very intosomething.
Yeah, interesting.
You know, before, I want to divedeeper into that, but I am
curious, I want to ask you abroad question because I know
you do a lot of work in the AIspace as well, and that's
probably the hottest space inthe world right now, so I'm
curious what your take is.
I'm going to ask you thisquestion in a very broad way.
(03:28):
You can answer it how you'dlike.
Um, is AI good or bad?
Now, we're recording this in thesummer of 2024, and I mentioned
that because, of course,anything we get into specifics
of may be very out of date withAI even six months from now, but
to your question, I'm going torephrase it as.
(03:50):
Is a knife good or bad?
Well, if you put the knife intothe hands of a criminal, it's
bad.
He's going to use it to hurtpeople, to steal from people, to
threaten people.
If you put that same knife inthe hands of a surgeon, he's
going to save lives.
And so it's not about the knifeitself, but about how we choose
to use it.
And this is true of anytechnology.
(04:13):
It has good and badapplications.
Think nuclear power.
So AI is in the same boat aswhat we choose to do with it.
Do you think that the good thatcould come out of it is going to
outweigh the dangers?
In the long run, probably.
(04:33):
But let's be very specific aboutwhat those dangers are.
And I've talked extensivelyabout this and consult with
companies as they try to thinkthrough this.
It is more a societal problemthan anything else.
Now, when people are talkingabout AI here in 2024, they're
usually talking about largelanguage models, LLMs,
generative AI.
(04:54):
AI itself is, of course, muchbroader.
It includes machine learning,machine vision, natural language
processing.
A whole bunch of other certaintypes of areas of A.
I.
That's all very useful.
Much has been around fordecades.
Of course, A.
I.
Itself we've been doing sincethe 19 fifties.
But when we look at generativeA.
I.
(05:15):
It is a game changer in thefollowing sense.
It allows people to generatecontent at a scale that's been
unprecedented.
Now a somewhat minor example ofthis, I know of a science
fiction magazine, and they wouldget lots of submissions every
month from budding writers whowant to get their story
(05:36):
published.
When generative AI became verycommon, I think there was
sometime around February, Marchof 2023, when chat GPT was
really kind of in the news,everyone started using it, they,
I think they got 5 to 10 timestheir normal submissions and
overwhelmed them.
And they said, we have to stop.
We can't handle this volume now.
(05:59):
In this case, all you had werepeople who were generating some
stories.
Oh, I have an idea for a story.
Let me have chat.
GPT right?
2000 words for me or punch up mystory.
And so that was not horrible.
Wasn't great for that particularmagazine.
Not horrible in the scale of badthings that can happen, but
(06:21):
let's think about what's goingto happen in a broader sense in
other areas.
There are, to take a verysimplistic model, and this is
oversimplifying but illustrates,there are good people and bad
people.
Good people say, I want to havecorrect, accurate information,
and bad people who aren'tworried about the correctness of
(06:41):
the information, they feel theirpoint is valid, and they might
feel they're right for doingthis, but they will put out
conspiracy theories and lies andmisinformation because Or
whatever their goal is, even ifthey believe their goal is
noble.
So if we're taking the premisethat correct information is
preferential for society, whathappens?
(07:02):
The people who say, I want tomake sure my information is fact
checked, accurate, correct, theywill spend the time, let me go
research this, let me make sure,let me proofread it.
The people who say, I just needconspiracy theories, they're
going to generate it and notbother checking for correctness.
And they can now generate.
(07:22):
A hundredfold what they could afew years ago.
What was me sitting therewriting up an article for two
hours Well now I can write ahundred articles in two hours.
And so we're going to see thistsunami of misinformation
overwhelm society Yeah, andneither human decision making
nor the algorithmic systems wehave in place today are ready
(07:45):
for that type of wave ofmisinformation.
So we're going to have a lot ofearly bumps as we try to deal
with this new normal.
The other area where we're goingto see a big societal disruption
is job change.
Now, I don't think AI is quitethe, or LLM specifically is
quite the, Oh my God, we're allgoing to lose our jobs in the
(08:06):
next few years.
It's not going to take away amassive amount of jobs.
Some people, if you're acopywriter, yeah, there's a lot
of competition for you.
But we're going to see jobsstart to erode, and we will see
job change.
Faster than ever before.
That's faster is key.
Because if you think back, we'velost milkmen.
(08:28):
We've lost most travel agents.
We've lost tollbooth collectors.
Most farm workers of the 19thcentury.
Those jobs don't exist anymore.
And we're all okay with thisbecause we said, let's replace
those jobs.
Let's automate them away.
And now we can host podcasts anddo social media and do a whole
bunch of other things that wecouldn't do back then.
(08:49):
So we're good.
With job changes, what's bad iswhen they happen so rapidly and
society isn't yet ready to takeall those displaced people,
retrain them and put them intonew jobs.
And then we have a largeworkforce that's displaced and
unable to find work and that's asocietal problem.
So those are the two main areasthat we have to worry about in
(09:12):
the short term.
of AI causing problems in thelong term, I do think once we
get through this, which might benot just years, but even
decades, we will get to a pointwhere it is beneficial, assuming
we can limit the harmful use ofit.
Yeah.
You know, I'm curious about thefirst point there with the, uh,
(09:33):
information that's beinggenerated and in particular
misinformation.
I do believe we're in a timewhere it's clearly rampant,
right?
and I think, it's creating afurther mistrust, in our
society, In our leadership, andin our media, I'm curious to
know how you think that thiswill evolve, will there be laws
(09:53):
that require fact checking orsuch?
I think laws get tricky becausewe have a very strong First
Amendment belief, whichgenerally I think is good for
us, right?
Unless you are intentionallysaying very harmful information,
it's very hard to go aftersomeone for it because of
(10:15):
Section 2 30.
This is one of the rules in theInternet's early days.
Where you had companies backthen like AOL saying, wait a
second.
What if someone posts somethingbad on our chat forums?
And now of course on socialmedia and so section 230 said,
you know what?
We're not going to hold youresponsible just like if someone
picks up the phone call someoneelse and Provides misinformation
(10:38):
or does harmful things, makesthreats, whatever we said.
Well, we're not gonna hold thetelephone company responsible
for that.
If you send a bad telegramthrough Western Union, we don't
hold Western Union responsiblefor the content of that.
And so we gave the same rightsto a lot of media companies
online.
We said you're not responsiblefor the millions of users, and
(11:00):
there's arguably some good tothat, but we're It's a problem.
No one holds them responsible.
And yes, in theory, if youspread lies about me, I can take
you to court.
Don't hold your breath that thecourt system is going to really
find justice or that can handlethe type of volume given the
massive amounts of content thatare put out.
We do teach people how to, todeal with this.
(11:24):
If you remember back, probablyto middle school, when you went
into the library, and thelibrarians taught you about
research, and fact checking, andlooking at primary sources, and
why primary sources are betterthan secondary sources.
We were all taught this, butmost people forgot it, and they
don't apply it.
And now here we are saying,well, I don't have time to
check.
I just trust what I see.
(11:46):
And you got this quotes like,you know, Abraham Lincoln once
said 87 percent of what you seeon the worldwide web is false.
What we need are tools that canhelp us create chains of trust
where we can say, okay, thispiece of information, where did
it come from?
Did it come from the New YorkTimes?
(12:06):
Okay, I will generally trusttheir fact checkers.
They're not 100 percent perfect.
No one is, but I know they stepup and do a good job.
Do I trust a particularorganization?
Maybe some nonprofit group.
If, for example, AARP orConsumer Reports says something.
I generally trust those groupsto be on top of their game and
(12:29):
make sure they're not puttingout false things.
Some random guy in a basement,do I trust him?
Probably not.
And so if we can start to say,let's trace the origin of this
and have tools to say, here'sthe origin of this information.
Here's where it started.
Here's the source.
And here's your level of trust.
Either you directly or I look atwho people I trust, how much
(12:50):
they trust that person, thesechains of trust, then it's going
to be a lot easier because Idon't have to sit there and say,
now I have to research, did AbeLincoln really say that about
the World Wide Web?
I can just rely on this to say,is this a trustworthy channel or
not?
Yeah.
Interesting.
So let, let's talk a little bitmore about your.
(13:13):
career, actually, even beforeyour career, I, or no, I
actually want to look into, Iwant to learn how to hack like
you do.
So, you know, you at a youngage, you're a chess champion.
You've, you've gotten into,teach at the best institutions
in the world and worked forcompanies like that.
(13:34):
How I'm curious as to let's takeany problem, anything you want
to, you decide you want to do.
How do you decide to get intoit?
When I find somethinginteresting and sometimes I fall
into it, sometimes it's things Idirect myself towards, I then
work to learn about it.
(13:55):
I'll give you an example.
My book was not something I everintended to write.
It fell into me because Istarted teaching at MIT for a
couple of decades now.
And then I thought, well, let mewrite up some notes for the
class.
Because this is a class that'shands on, it's interactive.
People tend to do, and they'renot saying they're taking notes.
(14:16):
So I know they forget a lot ofthis.
I thought, you know what, Ishould write up notes for
students.
I've been asking for years thatwe do this.
No one's done it.
I thought I was writing 10, 20pages of notes, but 20 pages
turned into 40 into 80.
And once it passed a hundred, Isaid, you know what?
I think I'm doing a book.
Okay.
So now I'm doing a book.
(14:36):
What now?
I went out, I read about 1, 500articles on every aspect of
publishing I could find tounderstand the industry.
I reached out to friends of minewho were in the industry.
Some were authors themselves.
Some were professionals you goto when you're trying to create
a book.
Others were just people who, aliterary agent for example, just
(14:58):
people I knew in the industry.
I sat down with them, I askedthem for advice, I asked them
for input.
And that helped guide me.
So I don't just go intosomething cold.
When I start and go down a path,I say, let me learn about it.
Even if this doesn't seemrelevant, I want to learn just
these tangential parts becausesomehow down the road that might
come back and be relevant to me.
Yeah.
(15:19):
All right.
That's quite a bit there.
So 1, 500 articles.
what, how did that search forthose articles begin?
how did you identify which 1,500 you were going to read?
Is, you know, things like that.
It wasn't all 1, 500 good ones.
It was a search and then we'dgo, I'd read it.
That's not good.
Read it.
Okay.
(15:39):
I've seen that written there.
Or, hey, this is interesting,this is helpful.
And I just saved it off.
I put it into a spreadsheet thatI just maintained.
So, knowing I'm going to go backto Slator.
I wasn't at doing a launch partyyet, for example.
If I said, well, at some point Iwill be, let me save this
article on a book launch party.
Let me save this article onmarketing.
(16:01):
Or let me save this article onthings like, what goes on your
back cover?
Still writing the book, but oneday I will get there.
once you have something foryourself, it's very easy to
share with others.
So at that point, I just startedsending it when people, they
knew I had written a book andsometimes her friend would say,
Hey, I've got this other frienddoing a book.
Can you talk to her?
(16:22):
Yeah, sure.
And now I could send her thatlist and be helpful to her.
That list now it's public on oneof my websites.
And so it's not 1500 articles.
It's the 200 some most usefularticles organized by category.
But I did for myself and then Icould just easily share with
others.
Excellent.
So along the way, when you'reorganizing all of these thoughts
(16:44):
to share with others, that alsohelps you further understand it.
you learn and then you teachkind of thing.
And that helps it all cometogether.
Richard Feynman once said thebest way to make sure you
understand something is to teachit to someone else.
Yeah.
Yeah, brilliant.
Good.
And then the people, you saidsome of them you knew, some of
them you aren't, so how wouldyou, the folks you didn't know,
(17:06):
would you just do a coldoutreach or, hey, I'm, Mark, I'm
writing a book.
These were all people I knew.
Oh, all of them were.
Okay.
I've built up an extensivenetwork.
Too many people in this world,when I think about their
network, they say, Well, I workin this industry.
I only need to know people inthis industry.
In fact, I've had people wherethey're looking for a job.
(17:27):
I say, Oh, well, tell me whatyou're looking for.
Maybe I can help.
Oh, you don't work in myindustry.
That is a true statement, but Imay know people who work in your
industry.
I don't look at people as, canyou help me here?
And now, right.
You seem like a good person.
Let's build that relationship.
And then it turns out yearslater, these people I had met,
(17:48):
Oh, now I'm Crossing a certainspace of your Venn diagrams are
overlapping.
Good thing I've gotten to knowyou over the years.
Now I can talk to you.
Now I can get help.
Yeah.
Yeah, that, that's a good point.
I believe in your book you talkabout how to access a corporate
culture, and that kind of goesalong those lines I would
imagine, right?
So, how would you access acorporate culture?
(18:12):
Under, there's two parts tothis.
There's before you join thecompany, trying to understand,
making sure the culture is goingto align, and then once you're
in the company, trying to reallylearn and, Adapt to the
company's culture ahead of time.
Certainly you can do it byreaching out, using your
network, asking people eitherwho are first degree connections
(18:34):
or maybe get connected to seconddegree connections to learn
about the company.
Obviously you can read aboutonline.
You can go to sites like lastdoor dot com, see what people
are saying.
You can look at their media andcontent.
What type of voice do they have?
What's their brand image?
Even just looking at.
Pictures they post online ofcorporate events, is everyone
there in a suit and tie, orpeople in Hawaiian shirts,
(18:57):
starts to tell you a littlesomething about the culture.
Now, there's also questions, bythe way, that you can ask during
an interview.
And on my website, that we'llgive you at the end, There's a
list of questions because somany people say I don't know how
to ask about culture and so thisis a list of questions that you
can have with you to say I wantto during the interview process
(19:18):
i'm assessing you the company aswell as you're assessing me
Here's how I am going to assessyou and even how you broach this
topic how you can bring it up Soit doesn't feel awkward, but
then once you're in the companyIt's really understanding those
unwritten rules about what'shappening in the company And
here's the thing about corporateculture.
Corporate culture is not thefive to 10 values that are
(19:42):
posted on the company's websiteabout focusing on the customer
or delivering value or whateverplatitudes they have.
Those are nice.
Some companies follow them, somecompanies don't.
But the true culture, the realculture, is day to day how
things operate, the unwrittenrules.
(20:02):
Is it that everyone shows up tomeetings on time?
Or is it that people areperpetually running late?
Is it a culture where peoplesend lots of emails?
Or you should be having face toface meetings?
Can you deliver bad news to yourboss?
Or does your boss not take itwell?
That is your culture.
Those are the rules that youwork around every day, even
(20:22):
though they're not posted on thecompany's website.
And those are very subtle.
And that's what's going to makeor break Your happiness at a job
and really the effectiveness ofa given team and that culture,
by the way, it might be companywide companies might say, Oh,
here, everyone shows up on time.
That's our company culture, notwritten on the website, not one
of the seven values, but it'show we act or it could be well,
(20:47):
this manager is just the type ofguy operates his employees.
This manager over here.
She's very supportive.
And so you will have differentcultures within those teams
again, completely unwritten andprobably never talked about.
Yeah.
Now, that, that's a reallyinteresting, perspective, I
never really thought about that.
I know you're going to give awaythe questions you mentioned, I'm
(21:10):
curious if you can share onewith us now to help uncover
that.
These are many of the questionsthat you yourself probably get
asked.
It's reversing it.
Okay.
So for example, Give me threewords that describe the culture
of this particular team, andthen tell me why you've selected
those three words, or give meexamples of each one, because of
(21:33):
course, anytime you answer aquestion as a candidate, or
you're asking the other side toanswer, you want to show, not
tell, you want to give concreteexamples.
So you can ask questions.
What's your management style?
How would you describe yourstyle?
What do you think makes someonework well in your management
style?
Questions like that.
(21:55):
Got it.
Okay.
Well, along the lines of askingquestions, you also talk about
how to just be a betterinterviewer or interviewee.
I'm asking as an interviewer ina podcast show, but I'm assuming
you were talking about it with ajob, right?
Yes.
For a job because here you'represumably not assessing whether
you're going to hire me or not,but as a job, we really do want
(22:18):
to assess the capability to makea very important and expensive
decision.
Yeah.
So what are those?
I think you've hinted on somealready.
Like, oftentimes we go in forjobs and we think, okay, I just
got to say what it takes to getthe job.
Right.
and that's a, but I think is abackwards way of doing it.
We really should be deciding,Hey, do we belong here first?
(22:39):
Right.
But what are some other, tipsfor both the interviewer and the
interviewee?
Now these questions, by the way,they're also available for free
on my website and they're in theapp as well that we're going to
talk about, the Brain Bump app.
But the questions really comedown to assessing what's
important.
(23:00):
so many interviewers, make amistake.
We fall for the street lampeffect.
if you're not familiar with it,the street lamp effect, is this
old joke about a drunk manstaggering around the street.
A police officer sees him andsays, Are you okay, sir?
what's going on?
He says, Oh, I've lost my housekeys.
Officer says, Okay, I'm going tohelp you look for them.
(23:21):
They spend half an hour going upand down the street, looking in
every spot.
After half an hour, the officersays, We've looked everywhere.
We're just, we're not findingyour keys.
Are you sure this is where youlost them?
And Drunk says, No, no, no,officer.
I lost him over there in thepark.
She says, Well, if you lost himin the park, why are we here on
Maple Street going up and downthe street for the last half
(23:43):
hour?
And Drunk says, Well, it's darkout and there aren't any street
lamps over in the park.
Yeah, you're looking on thestreet because it's easy to look
on the street, even if it's nothelpful.
And so we tend to assess what'seasy.
Do you have X years ofexperience with this particular
tool or product or industry?
(24:03):
Very easy to assess.
Let's talk about your priorjobs.
Do you know this model youlearned in your MBA classes?
Yes or no, I can assess that.
Figuring out if you're a goodleader, how the heck do you do
that?
That's much harder.
We haven't taught people how todo that.
So many people struggle tofigure out how they can be a
(24:24):
good leader, let alone how torecognize leadership in someone
else.
But leadership might be reallyimportant for this role.
You probably see on jobdescriptions, especially if
you're getting into your midcareer, senior career, strong
leadership and communicationskills.
I see this list on so many jobposts and to be fair, years ago
(24:45):
I used to put it on mine.
Now, we all want this.
Do they know how to actuallyassess it?
Have they thought through, whena candidate comes in, how do we
assess?
Someone's leadership skills,some communication skills.
What do we even mean by that?
We say strong communicators.
Does that mean you need someonewho can get up and do a TED
(25:07):
talk?
Do you need someone comfortablestanding in front of 10, 000
people?
Because those are some greatcommunicators, but probably not
what you need unless maybeyou're an executive and you will
be standing on big stages.
Do you mean people can writesuccinct emails?
That might be what you'relooking for, even if the same
person gets stage fright.
That's a different type ofcommunication.
(25:27):
And.
People have not thought about,this is what we need, and now
how do we assess it?
So that's what we have to do asinterviewers.
tell us about the app.
Well, I understand it was madefor the book.
So maybe why don't we startthere first.
Tell us more about the book.
When I wrote the book, Irecognized there was a problem
(25:48):
with books.
and blogs and podcasts, classes,talks.
There is a disconnect that whereyou read information isn't where
you need information.
We talked about questions thatyou can use in your interview.
Where did you hear about that?
Probably as you're out for ajog, driving to the office,
wherever you're listening to apodcast.
(26:10):
Where do you need thosequestions?
Six months later, when you'reactually interviewing for a new
job.
The odds that you will stillremember it by then are pretty
slim.
Maybe you've bookmarked thewebsite.
Eh, probably not.
Networking tips.
Where do you read them?
At home.
Where do you need them?
At the conference.
Leadership.
You might know where you needit, but not when.
(26:32):
And so we get this disconnect intime and space from when we
learn something to when we applyit, and we're going to forget
it.
So I created the app.
Brain Bump.
This is a completely free app.
Brain Bump is on the Apple andAndroid stores.
100 percent free.
You don't even need an accountto log in.
No credit card.
We don't take data.
We don't sell data.
We don't have ads.
(26:53):
All completely free.
This takes the key ideas frombooks, blogs, podcasts, classes,
talks.
They all go into the app.
So in my book, it's like youwent through my book with a
highlighter.
Oh, this is a key point.
Oh, that's the interviewquestion.
Remember?
Oh, here's the networking tip.
They're all in the app.
the content creator, the author,the podcaster, whoever puts all
(27:18):
of those in there for free.
I don't say, Oh, prove that youbought the book.
You can go download all thesetips for free.
They're all in the app for you.
So they're in your pocket.
And then you use it one of twoways.
If you have that interview latertoday, you open up the app.
You go to the tips andeverything is tagged by topic.
So you might look forinterviewing or interview
(27:40):
questions or whatever theappropriate tag is.
If you're at the conference, asyou're in the lobby, you tap
networking.
And there's all those networkingtips right when and where you
need it.
So you can get that just in timeaccess.
Or other things that you'retrying to learn, we know spaced
repetition works.
You have to see something overand over.
It's why we use flashcards tostudy for the SATs or our
(28:03):
finals.
Thanks.
But there's no test for us asadults.
For the most part, you don'tread a book like mine and say,
Oh, I bear cram for the test.
So you forget you listen to thispodcast and you have great
advice and all your episodes,but no one's trying to study
them.
Right?
So we take the tips again, thosekind of quotes, those nuggets,
those takeaways are in the appand you set up what's like a
(28:23):
daily affirmation.
So you know what I want to get aleadership tip.
9 a.
m., Monday through Friday, rightas I walk in the office.
Oh, and then I'm a new parent.
I want to get a parenting tip at5.
55 p.
m., right before I walk in thedoor when I'm at home.
And here's the key.
When we follow people on socialmedia, we get this fire hose of
(28:46):
content that may or may not berelevant.
Yeah.
Okay, fine.
That's a good leadership tip.
I'm not worried about myleadership at this moment when I
saw your tip.
So it's not relevant.
My brain says, get out of here.
I'm focused on strategy.
I'm focused on parenting whatthe app does.
And I think this is going to bea change in media in general.
(29:07):
Brain bump is just one of whathopefully will be many apps and
services.
It creates a type of wholemedia.
Where you can basically say, Ineed this content at this time,
and it gets delivered to you, soyou always get relevance for
when and where you are.
And for the user, you get thatspaced repetition that's always
(29:28):
relevant, it's going to help youremember it, or pull it up just
in time.
And for the content creator, theauthor, the podcaster, whoever,
their brand is always shownalong with the tip.
So they get that brandawareness, that brand trust.
And it's hyperlinked back totheir content.
So for a podcast or a blog, theysee, of course, the source and
(29:49):
they see the cover image.
They can click through to hearthe episode, to read that
article.
And so it helps take theevergreen content.
That's going to be because ifyou're doing leadership advice
that was valid five years agowill be valid five years from
now It doesn't change that muchWhen people are missing what you
posted five years ago thisbrings it to people when it's
(30:10):
relevant for them So the contentitself you're providing already
or is this something I wouldgrab as i'm going around reading
articles You know the 1500articles It's both the app right
now Think of it almost like aKindle.
There's a whole bunch of sets oftips.
It's preloaded with some.
(30:31):
we're adding new content everymonth.
Got it.
So we're, we're gonna justalways have more and more and
you can say I want these orthose or whatever's relevant to
you.
If we don't have what you want,because at the end of the day
there are literally millions ofbooks and podcasts and we're
never gonna have them all.
You yourself can add your owntips or ideas on the app.
(30:53):
You do have to create an accountfor that.
Or currently at the time wherewe're speaking, which is summer
of 2024, you can upload it.
If you've got a Kindle book andyou've done highlights in the
Kindle book, you can export thathighlight file from your Kindle
and import into the app.
And then you've got all yourtips right there in your pocket.
(31:13):
We're going to look for other.
Integrations down the road.
Okay.
and the book came from this.
Is that, is that how you teachpeople to, I mean, it went that
way first.
You came up with the book andthen an app for the book?
Is that how, and It began with aclass at MIT.
So we had gotten feedback fromcompanies saying, look, you're
(31:35):
Your students were obviouslysmart people.
There are skills we're lookingfor.
Leadership, networking,communication, team building,
negotiation.
We need these skills and peoplewe hire and we can't find it.
Not just in your students, notjust in engineers or college
students.
Universally, we want theseskills and candidates don't have
them.
(31:56):
MIT said, well, okay, we'retrying to make people you want
to hire.
We need to introduce theseskills.
And they start a program to doit.
I got involved in getting thatprogram off the ground.
I've been teaching there eversince.
That led to, I should write upnotes for this class.
Turned into the book, althoughthe book is not written for
undergraduate engineeringstudents, it's the same
(32:17):
concepts, but written for a moregeneral audience.
So regardless of your age,experience level, your industry,
this book was written for you.
And then I said, well, peoplewill forget what's in the book.
So I first created an app justfor my book and other authors
liked the idea.
I said, well, let me make this ageneral app.
So it's not just my content.
(32:39):
We can put in content fromanyone.
And that's what led to the BrainBump app.
Yeah.
Wow.
That's That sounds, that soundsexcellent.
Yeah, I think, I thinkoftentimes we go to school to
kind of learn the technicalaspect that we need for a job,
but ultimately the way we riseis through some of those
executive skills, right?
Like leadership andcommunications and whatnot.
(33:00):
And our schools haven't done agood job of teaching that.
So it sounds like you're, you'retaking this right on.
So kudos to you there.
They're a little out of date interms of curriculum and there
are historical reasons for that.
I expect it's going to takeprobably another 20 to 30 years
before we finally really startto change that and get the right
skills in there.
(33:20):
I'm not saying we have to getrid of existing skills.
We need what we're teaching.
But the world is getting morecomplicated and there's more to
learn.
You know, I wonder as, takingthis back to AI and as our
machines learn and are able todo some of those technical jobs,
that we traditionally might'vegotten hired out of MIT for, do
(33:43):
you think that there'll be moreand more of an emphasis that
maybe will expedite those 20 or30 years on those executive
functioning skills?
This is a very common question.
Does AI take away the rotemechanics?
And the people skills becomemore important.
I think not as much as othersmight push that narrative, which
(34:06):
surprises many because I am botha technologist.
I've got patents related toartificial intelligence and
other technologies.
And of course I teach theseskills.
I think AI is somewhatoverhyped.
Yes, it is fantastic.
What we've seen when we look at,I'll just pick it because it's
most common, we saw a chat GPT 2to 3 was a game changer and 3 to
(34:30):
4 got even better.
I don't think chat GPT 7 to 8 isgoing to look as significant.
Maybe chat GPT 5 is still a bigstep, but we're gonna plateau
sooner rather than later.
That's my prediction.
I could be wrong.
And so we'll get to a level of,wow, we do have all this
automation, just like we'veautomated other things.
(34:53):
And we do need these skills.
I'd say even before AI, wereally have needed these skills
and just haven't taught them.
So I don't think it's necessary,necessarily going to say, well,
all the kind of mechanicalthinking is gone, but it will
say, I think creativity.
is definitely something thatwill be more emphasized.
(35:14):
I'm not talking promptengineering.
That, by the way, I have one ofmy top articles, prompt
engineering jobs are a mirage.
Everyone kept talking aboutprompt engineering jobs of the
future and it was utter BS.
And of course, by 2024, we'veseen that play out.
No one's getting hired for thosejobs.
Those jobs do not exist andnever will.
But I will say this, one of myfavorite books, it's a book
(35:37):
called Peopleware.
It's the best book on softwareI've ever read.
It's not really about software,it's about management.
And the thesis of Peopleware isthat many software projects
fail, they do, not because oftechnological reasons, but
sociological.
It's not that, oh, we need tohave a Ph.
(35:57):
D.
to figure this out.
Most companies out there, mosttech companies even, you don't
really need Ph.
D.
s.
You can get by a 15 year oldcould understand your flow, how
things work in the business.
You need people to build it as acoordination of those people.
It is choosing the rightdirection, getting everyone
(36:19):
coordinated, communicating welland getting everything to just
work together.
The trains to run on time on theright tracks.
That's the hard part.
And that's a lot of peopleskills.
And that's been true for thepast few decades.
Lack of those skills has causedproblems in the workplace.
So we've absolutely needed theskills.
I don't think AI is the biggestchanger of the importance of
(36:41):
those skills.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
You know, I was just at aconference all week for
podcasting, actually, thepodcast movement conference and
AI is like the hottest thing, AIand video are the hottest things
in podcasting right now is thebig thing I learned.
But you know, there were maybe,I don't know, 10 or so hosting
platforms that were there.
(37:03):
We all know that and it'sinteresting because they're
pretty much all the same thingnow and they brag about they
have this ai feature and all theother ones got this one in that
but at the end of the day theyended up All being about the
same thing.
and it costs about the same.
There's no real differentiator.
And I was talking to a gentlemanwho's coming up with a new
program and he's taking adifferent approach on it.
(37:26):
And I was like, well, he he'sbuilt a few software companies
now had a few successful exits.
And I was like, why do you wantto take this one on?
That's already got a lot ofplayers and it's highly
fragmented and, and, You know,it's not much loyalty and such
that they they turn over a lotand it's a well known problem
And it turns out like in thepodcasting arena, we're still
(37:48):
pretty early on According to himand we actually hold on We we
have a lower turnover rate thanmany of the other arenas
industries Apparently whenpeople try a software they'll
try it for a few months and thenyou know, they'll go try a
different one According to himin podcasting, it's, it's a
little longer, but what reallyshocked me was it was six
(38:09):
months.
So he's going into this becauseour software in this particular
area is only six, you know, theretention rate is only six
months and that he considers tobe a long time and it just kind
of blew my mind.
I don't know what your thoughtsare there on that.
When you look at an industrylike this, when we talk about
(38:32):
retention in general, for reallyany industry, the factors you
look at, what's the cost ofacquisition of a customer?
How much time, effort, moneydoes it take to get a customer?
Then what's that customer'slifetime value?
How long can you keep them?
Right.
How much work is it to move themup from the free model or the
(38:54):
low end model into the paidmodel?
And as long as you can get alifetime value greater than your
customer acquisition cost, ofcourse, you're going to be
profitable.
But then if you look and say,why is there turnover?
What can we do to reduce thatturnover?
Then I think there'sopportunity.
(39:15):
I would guess now, It is acompetitive market, as you
noted, and it's a space whereyou do have a lot of Burger
King, McDonald's to effectivelyequivalent products, but it's
also pretty nascent.
And a lot of these companies,some have been around a decade
or more, but if he sees theopportunity, if he sees demand,
(39:36):
if he sees podcasters likeyourself, who say, you know,
there's just a couple buttonshere, there's a couple of
features we need, and no one'sbeen building it.
If he can roll out into market.
Get those in there and acquirethe customers.
Then they're not going to switchas long as he can deliver the
core value.
Plus these extra features, evenwhen others come in and say,
(39:58):
well, we have these featurestoo.
He can probably retain thecustomers because people won't
want to switch.
You make it very easy to stay orvery hard to switch.
If you're going to say, do Ireally want to go down the
street for McDonald's when I'malready at Burger King, right?
You gotta be compelling.
Maybe I'd go to Morton's.
I'd leave Burger King forMorton's because that's a step
up, but it's just McDonald's.
(40:19):
Yeah, I might as well stay herebecause I can get the same type
of burger and my guess is that'swhat he's looking at but it
comes down to these differentlevers of Acquisition lifetime
value and how you can retain andkeep your customers.
Yeah, right I just see I guessgoing back to I think AI is
creating this, like this notionthat, you know, if we add that
(40:40):
in, that everybody's going toflock to us, but everybody's
doing it and is flocking to it.
And it's not making necessarilya better, more reliable product.
Right?
So, Yeah, you know, we're onZoom right now.
I've tried the different onesthat everybody says are so much
better.
and maybe they are in certainways, but at the end of the day,
I went back to Zoom because it'ssuper easy to use and it's very
(41:01):
reliable, you know?
So, and I think people losefocus of that for all the fancy
bells and whistles, which Ithink AI represents right now.
Zoom is actually a good examplebecause Zoom is certainly not
the first.
No service like this we've hadfor years, Microsoft teams, and
we've had Skype and we've hadother tools, but at the right
(41:23):
moment in time, as everyone saidback in 2020, Oh, we need to get
on video.
Zoom said, here's us.
And we are easy, easy to getstarted.
We're much easier than thoseother tools, much easier to use.
And so people went on and theyjust.
Captured the market and then youcan switch to Skype.
(41:46):
You can switch to MicrosoftTeams.
You can switch to something elsebut Why are you going to walk
across the street to McDonald'swhen you're already at Burger
King and you know the menu, andit's easy.
And so we can, we do see this inother industries.
If you capture people at theright time, as long as you're
meeting a sufficient level ofservice, such that the energy it
(42:09):
takes to switch is greater thanthe marginal value they would
get from switching, why would Iswitch?
That's right.
Yeah.
Well, this is an interestingconversation in the societal
conversation, which is actuallymy, my favorite type of things
to talk about, but we aregetting to about that time when
we talk about our, way worldfamous wayfinder four.
(42:30):
So Mark, are you ready?
Ready for them?
All right.
This one's right up your alley.
Give us a hack that you useevery day to just kind of cheat
life with.
I use brain bump.
I read a lot.
I try to learn a lot, and veryoften it goes in one ear and out
another.
(42:50):
Think about it.
From the last book you read fora few months ago, how much do
you remember?
Hopefully you're a regularlistener, listener to this
podcast.
What do you remember from anepisode?
Three months ago, even threeweeks ago.
Yeah.
But when you use brain bump, youget those reminders.
And once you see it two, threetimes you, Oh yeah.
Okay.
Right.
Yeah.
I'm remembering this now.
(43:11):
And so for all the time youinvest in learning all of a
sudden you're getting a muchbetter ROI.
Yeah, good one.
So what about a favorite?
Could be a book, can't usePeopleWear, or a show, or what
have you.
I already listed PeopleWear onmy website that we'll give you
shortly.
I actually list probably about30 books that I either reference
(43:35):
or recommend.
But I'm going to just pick oneoff that list.
My friend Olivia Fox Caban wrotea wonderful book called The
Charisma Myth.
And in the Charisma Myth, shetalks about charisma is a skill
you can learn.
Yes, some people are born withit, just like some people are
(43:58):
natural soccer players andothers have to learn and be
trained.
You might be natural, naturallycharismatic, but if you're not,
you can still learn it.
And that's true for all theskills in my book.
There are natural leaders,natural networkers, natural
negotiators, but there are manymore people who can grow and be
trained.
And by the way, the people whostep up and regularly train,
(44:20):
they're the ones who usually dobetter.
That's right people who arenaturals just go.
Well, i'm good enough I don'thave to do the work and then
people put in work keep puttingit in and keep getting better.
Yeah, I mean my favorite exampleof this is tom brady is you
know, he was actually nowherenear as gifted as many other
quarterbacks of any You know,his generations that he played
(44:40):
in football, but he just keptworking harder and harder
consistently over a long periodof time and became the best of
all time, right?
Exactly.
Hard work pays off.
Yeah.
How about advice?
A piece of advice for youryounger self?
Invest in what we refer to assoft skills.
(45:02):
Here's a great example I use inthe book.
This came from my friend,Charles Leiserson, who's a
professor at MIT.
He gives this example of arectangle.
Imagine you have a rectanglethat's 4 by 10.
You want to increase one of thesides by 2 units to maximize the
area.
Which side do you increase?
Feel free to pause the podcastif you need to.
(45:23):
The answer, of course, is theshort side.
We go from 4 to 6, we get 60.
The other way, guess what's 48?
Conceptually, what's happening?
What we're doing by puttingthose two units on the short
side, we're amplifying them bythat whole long side.
Now, all of us have long sidesand short sides.
(45:43):
More than two in fact, but we'lljust keep it to two.
We often focus on our long side.
Oh, I'm in technology.
I need to keep Up withtechnology, I need to get
better.
And certainly if I don't, Ibecome a dinosaur.
If you're an accountant, there'snew tax laws.
If you're a sales person, you'realways trying to get better at
selling.
Keep working on those longsides.
You kind of have to for yourcareer.
(46:05):
But if all you do is work on thelong side, you get this long,
skinny rectangle.
And what's the overall area?
It's not that big.
When you put a little work intothat short side, all of a sudden
for the per Unit effort, the twoextra units on that short side,
increase your total area, yourtotal capability, much more than
the two units on the long side.
(46:26):
And this comes down to workingon our other skills.
We've probably all met someonewho is brilliant within his or
her domain.
But, doesn't communicate well,or doesn't lead well, or has
some other limitation.
We all know, wow, this guy orgirl is really an expert, but
it's just hard to follow.
if that person works on his orher short side, just gets a
(46:49):
little better.
Not world class, gets a littlebetter.
They're so much more effectivewith that long side skill.
So, all of us need to work onour short sides.
Wow, that's quite a contrariantake, you know, but it makes a
whole lot of sense and Iappreciate you saying that
because it's something I'vealways believed, never been able
to, put it so succinctly as thatexample, but, you know, the
(47:10):
book, uh, what, what comes tomind is the book Strength
Finders, which Got a lot ofmanagers to start thinking, Hey,
let's identify people'sstrengths and work off of their
strengths.
And some, rather than helpingthem work on areas for
improvement, right.
Opportunities for improvement,which possibly could get us to
bigger breakthroughs, right.
That's what you're saying.
And I'm not saying everyone hasto be a perfect square.
(47:33):
Don't have to be equally good ineverything.
Right.
We want to have.
a few long sides that are ourfriends, but we want to make
sure the short sides are at acertain sufficient competency.
And for many people, they'rebelow that minimum competency
and that's where we want to getthem up because that's where
we'll start to see some biggestreturns.
Yeah.
(47:53):
Oh, that's brilliant.
Thank you.
I'll let you pick from this lastone, either a limiting belief,
Or a big opportunity.
We talked about limiting beliefsearlier that some people are
naturally charismatic or leadersor whatever.
That doesn't mean you can'tlearn.
So all of these are learnableskills.
We covered that before.
(48:13):
So let's do so.
Big opportunity.
You're asking, what do I see asa big opportunity?
Well, I think we talked aboutsome of this as well.
I think there's bigopportunities.
How we consume content is reallygoing to change.
Just in what we talked aboutwith brain bump that we get more
of this pull media, but alsoneeds to change that there's
(48:35):
going to be so much morecontent.
I talked about the risks of badcontent, even non malicious
content, whether it's mediocrecontent.
Or even good content.
We're just going to overwhelmthe amount of content out there
and ways where we can betterfilter and get what is relevant
(48:56):
to us, whether it's using thatbrain bump type of pull approach
or other tools.
I think this is going to be abig change.
The other big change, and wementioned this as well,
education needs to change toemphasize these skills because
we haven't been doing enough ofa good job of that so far.
Yeah.
this is something we think abouta lot In household, my, my
(49:19):
oldest daughter in high school,she, joined an online, after
COVID, everybody had to goonline for COVID, then the world
opened back up.
She went back to school, wascompletely overwhelmed and
didn't enjoy the experience,went back online and graduated a
year early.
And now my youngest daughter,she's going into 10th grade and
she's looking at the same.
(49:40):
And what I'm finding is, manyother families with teenage kids
are starting to do that.
have their kids go online andjust finish early because we're
all kind of seeing the currenteducational model, the high
school model, just not be goodfor our kids anymore.
A school was designed for a 19thcentury, 20th century economy,
(50:05):
where we just go off and work inthe factories and all you needed
was just some basic mechanicalskills, right?
In fact, the education system isnot just changing content.
We need to change the nature ofeducation because it's no longer
I graduate high school or tradeschool or college.
At 22 to, okay, well, now I'mset.
(50:25):
Now I'm a marketer.
Now I'm a salesperson.
We know people are going tochange industries.
We know there's a massive amountto learn.
And so we need to move from thismodel of we've trained you with
everything you need to know, andnow you go use it for 40 years.
Rather, I think we need to moveto more of a continual
educational model that might bea certain amount of.
(50:47):
Continuing education credits,and we see models like this in
medicine in accounting wherethey have to continually keep
up, but then also even periodsof more intensive training where
people might say, and this mightbe normal in our jobs in
society, people will go back forthree or six months or even a
year of more intensive trainingevery 10 or 15 years or so to
(51:11):
really kind of build somefoundational skills for the next
phase of their career.
Yeah.
Well, Mark, this has been agreat conversation.
I love, for you to share moreabout, where people can find you
online, maybe, your app, yourbook, yourself, so they can work
with you.
I'll give you a couple differentwebsites.
(51:32):
If you're interested in thebook, you can go to
thecareertoolkitbook.
com and you can see more aboutthe book.
I put out articles every week.
On the resources page, there arethe questions that you can ask
as a candidate.
There are questions for you toask as an interviewer.
All that, it's completely free.
I don't even ask for your emailbecause I'm not trying to sell
you anything.
(51:53):
So all the information is on thewebsite.
You can also click through tosee where to sign, where to find
the book.
And if you want, you can followme on social media.
You can reach out to me on thatwebsite if you're interested in
topics related to the book or inmy day job work as a fractional
CTO, a fractional chieftechnology officer, I also do
fractional chief product officerwork, so you can reach me there
(52:16):
or go to LinkedIn and reach methere as well.
My other website for the freeBrain Bump app.
Now, that app you can find,Brain Bump, in both the Apple
and Android stores, but you cango to brainbumpapp.
com and at that website there'sa 90 second video that shows
what the app does so you'llunderstand it.
(52:36):
Full faq on the website andthere are links to take you to
the stores So those two websitesthe career toolkit book.
com And brain bump app.
com Excellent.
Well, thank you very much mark.
This has been a really greatconversation Very insightful.
I think a lot of people shouldgo check out your book, check
(52:56):
out the app.
especially if you're looking, todevelop a career plan and, and
we didn't even talk enough aboutthat really, but I understand
you cover quite a bit of that inyour book.
That's chapter one, how tocreate and execute your career
plan, whatever stage you're at.
If there's another rung you wantto get to, don't just sit there
and cross your fingers.
Here is how you create a plan toensure that you get there.
(53:18):
Well, thank you, Mark.
Hopefully you'll listen as we'llgo in and check that out.
Thanks for having me on theshow.
We hope you've enjoyed TheWayfinder Show.
If you got value from thisepisode, please take a few
seconds to leave us a 5 starrating and review.
This will allow us to help morepeople find their way to live
(53:40):
more authentic and excitinglives.
We'll catch you on the nextepisode.
Is a knife good or bad?
Well, if you put the knife intothe hands of a criminal it's bad
He's going to use it to hurtpeople to steal from people to
threaten people If you put thatsame knife in the hands of a
surgeon, he's going to savelives Yeah, and so it's not
about the knife itself But abouthow we choose to use it and this
(00:20):
is true of any technology It hasgood and bad applications think
nuclear power So AI is in thesame boat and what we choose to
do with it.
(00:41):
Welcome to The Wayfinder Showwith Luis Hernandez, where
guests discuss the why and howof making changes that led them
down a more authentic path orallow them to level up in some
area of their life.
Our goal is to dig deep andprovide not only knowledge, but
actionable advice to help youget from where you are to where
you want to be.
(01:02):
Come join us and find the way toyour dream life.
Welcome back to the Wayfindershow.
I'm your host, Louis Hernandez.
And today I'm here with MarkHirschberg.
Mark is the author of The CareerToolkit, Essential Skills for
(01:23):
Success That No One Taught You.
And he's also the creator of theBrainBump app.
From tracking criminals andterrorists on the dark web to
creating marketplaces and newauthentication systems, Mark has
spent his career launching anddeveloping new ventures at
startups and fortune 500companies in academia with, and
(01:44):
he has over a dozen patents tohis name.
He helped to start theundergraduate practice.
opportunities program dubbedMIT's career success
accelerator, where he teachesannually.
And he's also been at theHarvard business school where he
helped create a platform used toteach finance at prominent
business schools.
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He also works with manynonprofits currently serving on
the board of plant a millioncorals.
And he's, he was one of the topranked ballroom dancers in the
country and now lives in NewYork city where he is known for
social gatherings, including hisannual Halloween party, as well
as his diverse.
cufflink collection.
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That's quite a bit.
Mark, welcome to the wayfindershow.
Thank you for having me on.
It's my pleasure to be here.
Yeah.
Thank you.
As I was preparing for this, Iactually was, it actually, you,
you have quite a bit moresuccess from a very early time
in life.
And, I found myself having tofigure out how to condense this
quite a bit, but I understandyou've also been a chess
(02:45):
champion and quite a few otherthings.
So, you strike me as somebodywho, Has just always figured out
how to become very successful atwhatever you do very quickly.
I tend to be, I'm very type A.
So when I get into something, Iget very focused and really dive
into it.
I think that helps me lead tosuccess.
That's not to say I don't havehobbies that are less serious,
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but I usually get very intosomething.
Yeah, interesting.
You know, before, I want to divedeeper into that, but I am
curious, I want to ask you abroad question because I know
you do a lot of work in the AIspace as well, and that's
probably the hottest space inthe world right now, so I'm
curious what your take is.
I'm going to ask you thisquestion in a very broad way.
(03:28):
You can answer it how you'dlike.
Um, is AI good or bad?
Now, we're recording this in thesummer of 2024, and I mentioned
that because, of course,anything we get into specifics
of may be very out of date withAI even six months from now, but
to your question, I'm going torephrase it as.
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Is a knife good or bad?
Well, if you put the knife intothe hands of a criminal, it's
bad.
He's going to use it to hurtpeople, to steal from people, to
threaten people.
If you put that same knife inthe hands of a surgeon, he's
going to save lives.
And so it's not about the knifeitself, but about how we choose
to use it.
And this is true of anytechnology.
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It has good and badapplications.
Think nuclear power.
So AI is in the same boat aswhat we choose to do with it.
Do you think that the good thatcould come out of it is going to
outweigh the dangers?
In the long run, probably.
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But let's be very specific aboutwhat those dangers are.
And I've talked extensivelyabout this and consult with
companies as they try to thinkthrough this.
It is more a societal problemthan anything else.
Now, when people are talkingabout AI here in 2024, they're
usually talking about largelanguage models, LLMs,
generative AI.
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AI itself is, of course, muchbroader.
It includes machine learning,machine vision, natural language
processing.
A whole bunch of other certaintypes of areas of A.
I.
That's all very useful.
Much has been around fordecades.
Of course, A.
I.
Itself we've been doing sincethe 19 fifties.
But when we look at generativeA.
I.
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It is a game changer in thefollowing sense.
It allows people to generatecontent at a scale that's been
unprecedented.
Now a somewhat minor example ofthis, I know of a science
fiction magazine, and they wouldget lots of submissions every
month from budding writers whowant to get their story
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published.
When generative AI became verycommon, I think there was
sometime around February, Marchof 2023, when chat GPT was
really kind of in the news,everyone started using it, they,
I think they got 5 to 10 timestheir normal submissions and
overwhelmed them.
And they said, we have to stop.
We can't handle this volume now.
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In this case, all you had werepeople who were generating some
stories.
Oh, I have an idea for a story.
Let me have chat.
GPT right?
2000 words for me or punch up mystory.
And so that was not horrible.
Wasn't great for that particularmagazine.
Not horrible in the scale of badthings that can happen, but
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let's think about what's goingto happen in a broader sense in
other areas.
There are, to take a verysimplistic model, and this is
oversimplifying but illustrates,there are good people and bad
people.
Good people say, I want to havecorrect, accurate information,
and bad people who aren'tworried about the correctness of
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the information, they feel theirpoint is valid, and they might
feel they're right for doingthis, but they will put out
conspiracy theories and lies andmisinformation because Or
whatever their goal is, even ifthey believe their goal is
noble.
So if we're taking the premisethat correct information is
preferential for society, whathappens?
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The people who say, I want tomake sure my information is fact
checked, accurate, correct, theywill spend the time, let me go
research this, let me make sure,let me proofread it.
The people who say, I just needconspiracy theories, they're
going to generate it and notbother checking for correctness.
And they can now generate.
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A hundredfold what they could afew years ago.
What was me sitting therewriting up an article for two
hours Well now I can write ahundred articles in two hours.
And so we're going to see thistsunami of misinformation
overwhelm society Yeah, andneither human decision making
nor the algorithmic systems wehave in place today are ready
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for that type of wave ofmisinformation.
So we're going to have a lot ofearly bumps as we try to deal
with this new normal.
The other area where we're goingto see a big societal disruption
is job change.
Now, I don't think AI is quitethe, or LLM specifically is
quite the, Oh my God, we're allgoing to lose our jobs in the
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next few years.
It's not going to take away amassive amount of jobs.
Some people, if you're acopywriter, yeah, there's a lot
of competition for you.
But we're going to see jobsstart to erode, and we will see
job change.
Faster than ever before.
That's faster is key.
Because if you think back, we'velost milkmen.
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We've lost most travel agents.
We've lost tollbooth collectors.
Most farm workers of the 19thcentury.
Those jobs don't exist anymore.
And we're all okay with thisbecause we said, let's replace
those jobs.
Let's automate them away.
And now we can host podcasts anddo social media and do a whole
bunch of other things that wecouldn't do back then.
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So we're good.
With job changes, what's bad iswhen they happen so rapidly and
society isn't yet ready to takeall those displaced people,
retrain them and put them intonew jobs.
And then we have a largeworkforce that's displaced and
unable to find work and that's asocietal problem.
So those are the two main areasthat we have to worry about in
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the short term.
of AI causing problems in thelong term, I do think once we
get through this, which might benot just years, but even
decades, we will get to a pointwhere it is beneficial, assuming
we can limit the harmful use ofit.
Yeah.
You know, I'm curious about thefirst point there with the, uh,
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information that's beinggenerated and in particular
misinformation.
I do believe we're in a timewhere it's clearly rampant,
right?
and I think, it's creating afurther mistrust, in our
society, In our leadership, andin our media, I'm curious to
know how you think that thiswill evolve, will there be laws
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that require fact checking orsuch?
I think laws get tricky becausewe have a very strong First
Amendment belief, whichgenerally I think is good for
us, right?
Unless you are intentionallysaying very harmful information,
it's very hard to go aftersomeone for it because of
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Section 2 30.
This is one of the rules in theInternet's early days.
Where you had companies backthen like AOL saying, wait a
second.
What if someone posts somethingbad on our chat forums?
And now of course on socialmedia and so section 230 said,
you know what?
We're not going to hold youresponsible just like if someone
picks up the phone call someoneelse and Provides misinformation
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or does harmful things, makesthreats, whatever we said.
Well, we're not gonna hold thetelephone company responsible
for that.
If you send a bad telegramthrough Western Union, we don't
hold Western Union responsiblefor the content of that.
And so we gave the same rightsto a lot of media companies
online.
We said you're not responsiblefor the millions of users, and
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there's arguably some good tothat, but we're It's a problem.
No one holds them responsible.
And yes, in theory, if youspread lies about me, I can take
you to court.
Don't hold your breath that thecourt system is going to really
find justice or that can handlethe type of volume given the
massive amounts of content thatare put out.
We do teach people how to, todeal with this.
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If you remember back, probablyto middle school, when you went
into the library, and thelibrarians taught you about
research, and fact checking, andlooking at primary sources, and
why primary sources are betterthan secondary sources.
We were all taught this, butmost people forgot it, and they
don't apply it.
And now here we are saying,well, I don't have time to
check.
I just trust what I see.
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And you got this quotes like,you know, Abraham Lincoln once
said 87 percent of what you seeon the worldwide web is false.
What we need are tools that canhelp us create chains of trust
where we can say, okay, thispiece of information, where did
it come from?
Did it come from the New YorkTimes?
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Okay, I will generally trusttheir fact checkers.
They're not 100 percent perfect.
No one is, but I know they stepup and do a good job.
Do I trust a particularorganization?
Maybe some nonprofit group.
If, for example, AARP orConsumer Reports says something.
I generally trust those groupsto be on top of their game and
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make sure they're not puttingout false things.
Some random guy in a basement,do I trust him?
Probably not.
And so if we can start to say,let's trace the origin of this
and have tools to say, here'sthe origin of this information.
Here's where it started.
Here's the source.
And here's your level of trust.
Either you directly or I look atwho people I trust, how much
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they trust that person, thesechains of trust, then it's going
to be a lot easier because Idon't have to sit there and say,
now I have to research, did AbeLincoln really say that about
the World Wide Web?
I can just rely on this to say,is this a trustworthy channel or
not?
Yeah.
Interesting.
So let, let's talk a little bitmore about your.
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career, actually, even beforeyour career, I, or no, I
actually want to look into, Iwant to learn how to hack like
you do.
So, you know, you at a youngage, you're a chess champion.
You've, you've gotten into,teach at the best institutions
in the world and worked forcompanies like that.
(13:34):
How I'm curious as to let's takeany problem, anything you want
to, you decide you want to do.
How do you decide to get intoit?
When I find somethinginteresting and sometimes I fall
into it, sometimes it's things Idirect myself towards, I then
work to learn about it.
(13:55):
I'll give you an example.
My book was not something I everintended to write.
It fell into me because Istarted teaching at MIT for a
couple of decades now.
And then I thought, well, let mewrite up some notes for the
class.
Because this is a class that'shands on, it's interactive.
People tend to do, and they'renot saying they're taking notes.
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So I know they forget a lot ofthis.
I thought, you know what, Ishould write up notes for
students.
I've been asking for years thatwe do this.
No one's done it.
I thought I was writing 10, 20pages of notes, but 20 pages
turned into 40 into 80.
And once it passed a hundred, Isaid, you know what?
I think I'm doing a book.
Okay.
So now I'm doing a book.
(14:36):
What now?
I went out, I read about 1, 500articles on every aspect of
publishing I could find tounderstand the industry.
I reached out to friends of minewho were in the industry.
Some were authors themselves.
Some were professionals you goto when you're trying to create
a book.
Others were just people who, aliterary agent for example, just
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people I knew in the industry.
I sat down with them, I askedthem for advice, I asked them
for input.
And that helped guide me.
So I don't just go intosomething cold.
When I start and go down a path,I say, let me learn about it.
Even if this doesn't seemrelevant, I want to learn just
these tangential parts becausesomehow down the road that might
come back and be relevant to me.
Yeah.
(15:19):
All right.
That's quite a bit there.
So 1, 500 articles.
what, how did that search forthose articles begin?
how did you identify which 1,500 you were going to read?
Is, you know, things like that.
It wasn't all 1, 500 good ones.
It was a search and then we'dgo, I'd read it.
That's not good.
Read it.
Okay.
(15:39):
I've seen that written there.
Or, hey, this is interesting,this is helpful.
And I just saved it off.
I put it into a spreadsheet thatI just maintained.
So, knowing I'm going to go backto Slator.
I wasn't at doing a launch partyyet, for example.
If I said, well, at some point Iwill be, let me save this
article on a book launch party.
Let me save this article onmarketing.
(16:01):
Or let me save this article onthings like, what goes on your
back cover?
Still writing the book, but oneday I will get there.
once you have something foryourself, it's very easy to
share with others.
So at that point, I just startedsending it when people, they
knew I had written a book andsometimes her friend would say,
Hey, I've got this other frienddoing a book.
Can you talk to her?
(16:22):
Yeah, sure.
And now I could send her thatlist and be helpful to her.
That list now it's public on oneof my websites.
And so it's not 1500 articles.
It's the 200 some most usefularticles organized by category.
But I did for myself and then Icould just easily share with
others.
Excellent.
So along the way, when you'reorganizing all of these thoughts
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to share with others, that alsohelps you further understand it.
you learn and then you teachkind of thing.
And that helps it all cometogether.
Richard Feynman once said thebest way to make sure you
understand something is to teachit to someone else.
Yeah.
Yeah, brilliant.
Good.
And then the people, you saidsome of them you knew, some of
them you aren't, so how wouldyou, the folks you didn't know,
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would you just do a coldoutreach or, hey, I'm, Mark, I'm
writing a book.
These were all people I knew.
Oh, all of them were.
Okay.
I've built up an extensivenetwork.
Too many people in this world,when I think about their
network, they say, Well, I workin this industry.
I only need to know people inthis industry.
In fact, I've had people wherethey're looking for a job.
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I say, Oh, well, tell me whatyou're looking for.
Maybe I can help.
Oh, you don't work in myindustry.
That is a true statement, but Imay know people who work in your
industry.
I don't look at people as, canyou help me here?
And now, right.
You seem like a good person.
Let's build that relationship.
And then it turns out yearslater, these people I had met,
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Oh, now I'm Crossing a certainspace of your Venn diagrams are
overlapping.
Good thing I've gotten to knowyou over the years.
Now I can talk to you.
Now I can get help.
Yeah.
Yeah, that, that's a good point.
I believe in your book you talkabout how to access a corporate
culture, and that kind of goesalong those lines I would
imagine, right?
So, how would you access acorporate culture?
(18:12):
Under, there's two parts tothis.
There's before you join thecompany, trying to understand,
making sure the culture is goingto align, and then once you're
in the company, trying to reallylearn and, Adapt to the
company's culture ahead of time.
Certainly you can do it byreaching out, using your
network, asking people eitherwho are first degree connections
(18:34):
or maybe get connected to seconddegree connections to learn
about the company.
Obviously you can read aboutonline.
You can go to sites like lastdoor dot com, see what people
are saying.
You can look at their media andcontent.
What type of voice do they have?
What's their brand image?
Even just looking at.
Pictures they post online ofcorporate events, is everyone
there in a suit and tie, orpeople in Hawaiian shirts,
(18:57):
starts to tell you a littlesomething about the culture.
Now, there's also questions, bythe way, that you can ask during
an interview.
And on my website, that we'llgive you at the end, There's a
list of questions because somany people say I don't know how
to ask about culture and so thisis a list of questions that you
can have with you to say I wantto during the interview process
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i'm assessing you the company aswell as you're assessing me
Here's how I am going to assessyou and even how you broach this
topic how you can bring it up Soit doesn't feel awkward, but
then once you're in the companyIt's really understanding those
unwritten rules about what'shappening in the company And
here's the thing about corporateculture.
Corporate culture is not thefive to 10 values that are
(19:42):
posted on the company's websiteabout focusing on the customer
or delivering value or whateverplatitudes they have.
Those are nice.
Some companies follow them, somecompanies don't.
But the true culture, the realculture, is day to day how
things operate, the unwrittenrules.
(20:02):
Is it that everyone shows up tomeetings on time?
Or is it that people areperpetually running late?
Is it a culture where peoplesend lots of emails?
Or you should be having face toface meetings?
Can you deliver bad news to yourboss?
Or does your boss not take itwell?
That is your culture.
Those are the rules that youwork around every day, even
(20:22):
though they're not posted on thecompany's website.
And those are very subtle.
And that's what's going to makeor break Your happiness at a job
and really the effectiveness ofa given team and that culture,
by the way, it might be companywide companies might say, Oh,
here, everyone shows up on time.
That's our company culture, notwritten on the website, not one
of the seven values, but it'show we act or it could be well,
(20:47):
this manager is just the type ofguy operates his employees.
This manager over here.
She's very supportive.
And so you will have differentcultures within those teams
again, completely unwritten andprobably never talked about.
Yeah.
Now, that, that's a reallyinteresting, perspective, I
never really thought about that.
I know you're going to give awaythe questions you mentioned, I'm
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curious if you can share onewith us now to help uncover
that.
These are many of the questionsthat you yourself probably get
asked.
It's reversing it.
Okay.
So for example, Give me threewords that describe the culture
of this particular team, andthen tell me why you've selected
those three words, or give meexamples of each one, because of
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course, anytime you answer aquestion as a candidate, or
you're asking the other side toanswer, you want to show, not
tell, you want to give concreteexamples.
So you can ask questions.
What's your management style?
How would you describe yourstyle?
What do you think makes someonework well in your management
style?
Questions like that.
(21:55):
Got it.
Okay.
Well, along the lines of askingquestions, you also talk about
how to just be a betterinterviewer or interviewee.
I'm asking as an interviewer ina podcast show, but I'm assuming
you were talking about it with ajob, right?
Yes.
For a job because here you'represumably not assessing whether
you're going to hire me or not,but as a job, we really do want
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to assess the capability to makea very important and expensive
decision.
Yeah.
So what are those?
I think you've hinted on somealready.
Like, oftentimes we go in forjobs and we think, okay, I just
got to say what it takes to getthe job.
Right.
and that's a, but I think is abackwards way of doing it.
We really should be deciding,Hey, do we belong here first?
(22:39):
Right.
But what are some other, tipsfor both the interviewer and the
interviewee?
Now these questions, by the way,they're also available for free
on my website and they're in theapp as well that we're going to
talk about, the Brain Bump app.
But the questions really comedown to assessing what's
important.
(23:00):
so many interviewers, make amistake.
We fall for the street lampeffect.
if you're not familiar with it,the street lamp effect, is this
old joke about a drunk manstaggering around the street.
A police officer sees him andsays, Are you okay, sir?
what's going on?
He says, Oh, I've lost my housekeys.
Officer says, Okay, I'm going tohelp you look for them.
(23:21):
They spend half an hour going upand down the street, looking in
every spot.
After half an hour, the officersays, We've looked everywhere.
We're just, we're not findingyour keys.
Are you sure this is where youlost them?
And Drunk says, No, no, no,officer.
I lost him over there in thepark.
She says, Well, if you lost himin the park, why are we here on
Maple Street going up and downthe street for the last half
(23:43):
hour?
And Drunk says, Well, it's darkout and there aren't any street
lamps over in the park.
Yeah, you're looking on thestreet because it's easy to look
on the street, even if it's nothelpful.
And so we tend to assess what'seasy.
Do you have X years ofexperience with this particular
tool or product or industry?
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Very easy to assess.
Let's talk about your priorjobs.
Do you know this model youlearned in your MBA classes?
Yes or no, I can assess that.
Figuring out if you're a goodleader, how the heck do you do
that?
That's much harder.
We haven't taught people how todo that.
So many people struggle tofigure out how they can be a
(24:24):
good leader, let alone how torecognize leadership in someone
else.
But leadership might be reallyimportant for this role.
You probably see on jobdescriptions, especially if
you're getting into your midcareer, senior career, strong
leadership and communicationskills.
I see this list on so many jobposts and to be fair, years ago
(24:45):
I used to put it on mine.
Now, we all want this.
Do they know how to actuallyassess it?
Have they thought through, whena candidate comes in, how do we
assess?
Someone's leadership skills,some communication skills.
What do we even mean by that?
We say strong communicators.
Does that mean you need someonewho can get up and do a TED
(25:07):
talk?
Do you need someone comfortablestanding in front of 10, 000
people?
Because those are some greatcommunicators, but probably not
what you need unless maybeyou're an executive and you will
be standing on big stages.
Do you mean people can writesuccinct emails?
That might be what you'relooking for, even if the same
person gets stage fright.
That's a different type ofcommunication.
(25:27):
And.
People have not thought about,this is what we need, and now
how do we assess it?
So that's what we have to do asinterviewers.
tell us about the app.
Well, I understand it was madefor the book.
So maybe why don't we startthere first.
Tell us more about the book.
When I wrote the book, Irecognized there was a problem
(25:48):
with books.
and blogs and podcasts, classes,talks.
There is a disconnect that whereyou read information isn't where
you need information.
We talked about questions thatyou can use in your interview.
Where did you hear about that?
Probably as you're out for ajog, driving to the office,
wherever you're listening to apodcast.
(26:10):
Where do you need thosequestions?
Six months later, when you'reactually interviewing for a new
job.
The odds that you will stillremember it by then are pretty
slim.
Maybe you've bookmarked thewebsite.
Eh, probably not.
Networking tips.
Where do you read them?
At home.
Where do you need them?
At the conference.
Leadership.
You might know where you needit, but not when.
(26:32):
And so we get this disconnect intime and space from when we
learn something to when we applyit, and we're going to forget
it.
So I created the app.
Brain Bump.
This is a completely free app.
Brain Bump is on the Apple andAndroid stores.
100 percent free.
You don't even need an accountto log in.
No credit card.
We don't take data.
We don't sell data.
We don't have ads.
(26:53):
All completely free.
This takes the key ideas frombooks, blogs, podcasts, classes,
talks.
They all go into the app.
So in my book, it's like youwent through my book with a
highlighter.
Oh, this is a key point.
Oh, that's the interviewquestion.
Remember?
Oh, here's the networking tip.
They're all in the app.
the content creator, the author,the podcaster, whoever puts all
(27:18):
of those in there for free.
I don't say, Oh, prove that youbought the book.
You can go download all thesetips for free.
They're all in the app for you.
So they're in your pocket.
And then you use it one of twoways.
If you have that interview latertoday, you open up the app.
You go to the tips andeverything is tagged by topic.
So you might look forinterviewing or interview
(27:40):
questions or whatever theappropriate tag is.
If you're at the conference, asyou're in the lobby, you tap
networking.
And there's all those networkingtips right when and where you
need it.
So you can get that just in timeaccess.
Or other things that you'retrying to learn, we know spaced
repetition works.
You have to see something overand over.
It's why we use flashcards tostudy for the SATs or our
(28:03):
finals.
Thanks.
But there's no test for us asadults.
For the most part, you don'tread a book like mine and say,
Oh, I bear cram for the test.
So you forget you listen to thispodcast and you have great
advice and all your episodes,but no one's trying to study
them.
Right?
So we take the tips again, thosekind of quotes, those nuggets,
those takeaways are in the appand you set up what's like a
(28:23):
daily affirmation.
So you know what I want to get aleadership tip.
9 a.
m., Monday through Friday, rightas I walk in the office.
Oh, and then I'm a new parent.
I want to get a parenting tip at5.
55 p.
m., right before I walk in thedoor when I'm at home.
And here's the key.
When we follow people on socialmedia, we get this fire hose of
(28:46):
content that may or may not berelevant.
Yeah.
Okay, fine.
That's a good leadership tip.
I'm not worried about myleadership at this moment when I
saw your tip.
So it's not relevant.
My brain says, get out of here.
I'm focused on strategy.
I'm focused on parenting whatthe app does.
And I think this is going to bea change in media in general.
(29:07):
Brain bump is just one of whathopefully will be many apps and
services.
It creates a type of wholemedia.
Where you can basically say, Ineed this content at this time,
and it gets delivered to you, soyou always get relevance for
when and where you are.
And for the user, you get thatspaced repetition that's always
(29:28):
relevant, it's going to help youremember it, or pull it up just
in time.
And for the content creator, theauthor, the podcaster, whoever,
their brand is always shownalong with the tip.
So they get that brandawareness, that brand trust.
And it's hyperlinked back totheir content.
So for a podcast or a blog, theysee, of course, the source and
(29:49):
they see the cover image.
They can click through to hearthe episode, to read that
article.
And so it helps take theevergreen content.
That's going to be because ifyou're doing leadership advice
that was valid five years agowill be valid five years from
now It doesn't change that muchWhen people are missing what you
posted five years ago thisbrings it to people when it's
(30:10):
relevant for them So the contentitself you're providing already
or is this something I wouldgrab as i'm going around reading
articles You know the 1500articles It's both the app right
now Think of it almost like aKindle.
There's a whole bunch of sets oftips.
It's preloaded with some.
(30:31):
we're adding new content everymonth.
Got it.
So we're, we're gonna justalways have more and more and
you can say I want these orthose or whatever's relevant to
you.
If we don't have what you want,because at the end of the day
there are literally millions ofbooks and podcasts and we're
never gonna have them all.
You yourself can add your owntips or ideas on the app.
(30:53):
You do have to create an accountfor that.
Or currently at the time wherewe're speaking, which is summer
of 2024, you can upload it.
If you've got a Kindle book andyou've done highlights in the
Kindle book, you can export thathighlight file from your Kindle
and import into the app.
And then you've got all yourtips right there in your pocket.
(31:13):
We're going to look for other.
Integrations down the road.
Okay.
and the book came from this.
Is that, is that how you teachpeople to, I mean, it went that
way first.
You came up with the book andthen an app for the book?
Is that how, and It began with aclass at MIT.
So we had gotten feedback fromcompanies saying, look, you're
(31:35):
Your students were obviouslysmart people.
There are skills we're lookingfor.
Leadership, networking,communication, team building,
negotiation.
We need these skills and peoplewe hire and we can't find it.
Not just in your students, notjust in engineers or college
students.
Universally, we want theseskills and candidates don't have
them.
(31:56):
MIT said, well, okay, we'retrying to make people you want
to hire.
We need to introduce theseskills.
And they start a program to doit.
I got involved in getting thatprogram off the ground.
I've been teaching there eversince.
That led to, I should write upnotes for this class.
Turned into the book, althoughthe book is not written for
undergraduate engineeringstudents, it's the same
(32:17):
concepts, but written for a moregeneral audience.
So regardless of your age,experience level, your industry,
this book was written for you.
And then I said, well, peoplewill forget what's in the book.
So I first created an app justfor my book and other authors
liked the idea.
I said, well, let me make this ageneral app.
So it's not just my content.
(32:39):
We can put in content fromanyone.
And that's what led to the BrainBump app.
Yeah.
Wow.
That's That sounds, that soundsexcellent.
Yeah, I think, I thinkoftentimes we go to school to
kind of learn the technicalaspect that we need for a job,
but ultimately the way we riseis through some of those
executive skills, right?
Like leadership andcommunications and whatnot.
(33:00):
And our schools haven't done agood job of teaching that.
So it sounds like you're, you'retaking this right on.
So kudos to you there.
They're a little out of date interms of curriculum and there
are historical reasons for that.
I expect it's going to takeprobably another 20 to 30 years
before we finally really startto change that and get the right
skills in there.
(33:20):
I'm not saying we have to getrid of existing skills.
We need what we're teaching.
But the world is getting morecomplicated and there's more to
learn.
You know, I wonder as, takingthis back to AI and as our
machines learn and are able todo some of those technical jobs,
that we traditionally might'vegotten hired out of MIT for, do
(33:43):
you think that there'll be moreand more of an emphasis that
maybe will expedite those 20 or30 years on those executive
functioning skills?
This is a very common question.
Does AI take away the rotemechanics?
And the people skills becomemore important.
I think not as much as othersmight push that narrative, which
(34:06):
surprises many because I am botha technologist.
I've got patents related toartificial intelligence and
other technologies.
And of course I teach theseskills.
I think AI is somewhatoverhyped.
Yes, it is fantastic.
What we've seen when we look at,I'll just pick it because it's
most common, we saw a chat GPT 2to 3 was a game changer and 3 to
(34:30):
4 got even better.
I don't think chat GPT 7 to 8 isgoing to look as significant.
Maybe chat GPT 5 is still a bigstep, but we're gonna plateau
sooner rather than later.
That's my prediction.
I could be wrong.
And so we'll get to a level of,wow, we do have all this
automation, just like we'veautomated other things.
(34:53):
And we do need these skills.
I'd say even before AI, wereally have needed these skills
and just haven't taught them.
So I don't think it's necessary,necessarily going to say, well,
all the kind of mechanicalthinking is gone, but it will
say, I think creativity.
is definitely something thatwill be more emphasized.
(35:14):
I'm not talking promptengineering.
That, by the way, I have one ofmy top articles, prompt
engineering jobs are a mirage.
Everyone kept talking aboutprompt engineering jobs of the
future and it was utter BS.
And of course, by 2024, we'veseen that play out.
No one's getting hired for thosejobs.
Those jobs do not exist andnever will.
But I will say this, one of myfavorite books, it's a book
(35:37):
called Peopleware.
It's the best book on softwareI've ever read.
It's not really about software,it's about management.
And the thesis of Peopleware isthat many software projects
fail, they do, not because oftechnological reasons, but
sociological.
It's not that, oh, we need tohave a Ph.
(35:57):
D.
to figure this out.
Most companies out there, mosttech companies even, you don't
really need Ph.
D.
s.
You can get by a 15 year oldcould understand your flow, how
things work in the business.
You need people to build it as acoordination of those people.
It is choosing the rightdirection, getting everyone
(36:19):
coordinated, communicating welland getting everything to just
work together.
The trains to run on time on theright tracks.
That's the hard part.
And that's a lot of peopleskills.
And that's been true for thepast few decades.
Lack of those skills has causedproblems in the workplace.
So we've absolutely needed theskills.
I don't think AI is the biggestchanger of the importance of
(36:41):
those skills.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
You know, I was just at aconference all week for
podcasting, actually, thepodcast movement conference and
AI is like the hottest thing, AIand video are the hottest things
in podcasting right now is thebig thing I learned.
But you know, there were maybe,I don't know, 10 or so hosting
platforms that were there.
(37:03):
We all know that and it'sinteresting because they're
pretty much all the same thingnow and they brag about they
have this ai feature and all theother ones got this one in that
but at the end of the day theyended up All being about the
same thing.
and it costs about the same.
There's no real differentiator.
And I was talking to a gentlemanwho's coming up with a new
program and he's taking adifferent approach on it.
(37:26):
And I was like, well, he he'sbuilt a few software companies
now had a few successful exits.
And I was like, why do you wantto take this one on?
That's already got a lot ofplayers and it's highly
fragmented and, and, You know,it's not much loyalty and such
that they they turn over a lotand it's a well known problem
And it turns out like in thepodcasting arena, we're still
(37:48):
pretty early on According to himand we actually hold on We we
have a lower turnover rate thanmany of the other arenas
industries Apparently whenpeople try a software they'll
try it for a few months and thenyou know, they'll go try a
different one According to himin podcasting, it's, it's a
little longer, but what reallyshocked me was it was six
(38:09):
months.
So he's going into this becauseour software in this particular
area is only six, you know, theretention rate is only six
months and that he considers tobe a long time and it just kind
of blew my mind.
I don't know what your thoughtsare there on that.
When you look at an industrylike this, when we talk about
(38:32):
retention in general, for reallyany industry, the factors you
look at, what's the cost ofacquisition of a customer?
How much time, effort, moneydoes it take to get a customer?
Then what's that customer'slifetime value?
How long can you keep them?
Right.
How much work is it to move themup from the free model or the
(38:54):
low end model into the paidmodel?
And as long as you can get alifetime value greater than your
customer acquisition cost, ofcourse, you're going to be
profitable.
But then if you look and say,why is there turnover?
What can we do to reduce thatturnover?
Then I think there'sopportunity.
(39:15):
I would guess now, It is acompetitive market, as you
noted, and it's a space whereyou do have a lot of Burger
King, McDonald's to effectivelyequivalent products, but it's
also pretty nascent.
And a lot of these companies,some have been around a decade
or more, but if he sees theopportunity, if he sees demand,
(39:36):
if he sees podcasters likeyourself, who say, you know,
there's just a couple buttonshere, there's a couple of
features we need, and no one'sbeen building it.
If he can roll out into market.
Get those in there and acquirethe customers.
Then they're not going to switchas long as he can deliver the
core value.
Plus these extra features, evenwhen others come in and say,
(39:58):
well, we have these featurestoo.
He can probably retain thecustomers because people won't
want to switch.
You make it very easy to stay orvery hard to switch.
If you're going to say, do Ireally want to go down the
street for McDonald's when I'malready at Burger King, right?
You gotta be compelling.
Maybe I'd go to Morton's.
I'd leave Burger King forMorton's because that's a step
up, but it's just McDonald's.
(40:19):
Yeah, I might as well stay herebecause I can get the same type
of burger and my guess is that'swhat he's looking at but it
comes down to these differentlevers of Acquisition lifetime
value and how you can retain andkeep your customers.
Yeah, right I just see I guessgoing back to I think AI is
creating this, like this notionthat, you know, if we add that
(40:40):
in, that everybody's going toflock to us, but everybody's
doing it and is flocking to it.
And it's not making necessarilya better, more reliable product.
Right?
So, Yeah, you know, we're onZoom right now.
I've tried the different onesthat everybody says are so much
better.
and maybe they are in certainways, but at the end of the day,
I went back to Zoom because it'ssuper easy to use and it's very
(41:01):
reliable, you know?
So, and I think people losefocus of that for all the fancy
bells and whistles, which Ithink AI represents right now.
Zoom is actually a good examplebecause Zoom is certainly not
the first.
No service like this we've hadfor years, Microsoft teams, and
we've had Skype and we've hadother tools, but at the right
(41:23):
moment in time, as everyone saidback in 2020, Oh, we need to get
on video.
Zoom said, here's us.
And we are easy, easy to getstarted.
We're much easier than thoseother tools, much easier to use.
And so people went on and theyjust.
Captured the market and then youcan switch to Skype.
(41:46):
You can switch to MicrosoftTeams.
You can switch to something elsebut Why are you going to walk
across the street to McDonald'swhen you're already at Burger
King and you know the menu, andit's easy.
And so we can, we do see this inother industries.
If you capture people at theright time, as long as you're
meeting a sufficient level ofservice, such that the energy it
(42:09):
takes to switch is greater thanthe marginal value they would
get from switching, why would Iswitch?
That's right.
Yeah.
Well, this is an interestingconversation in the societal
conversation, which is actuallymy, my favorite type of things
to talk about, but we aregetting to about that time when
we talk about our, way worldfamous wayfinder four.
(42:30):
So Mark, are you ready?
Ready for them?
All right.
This one's right up your alley.
Give us a hack that you useevery day to just kind of cheat
life with.
I use brain bump.
I read a lot.
I try to learn a lot, and veryoften it goes in one ear and out
another.
(42:50):
Think about it.
From the last book you read fora few months ago, how much do
you remember?
Hopefully you're a regularlistener, listener to this
podcast.
What do you remember from anepisode?
Three months ago, even threeweeks ago.
Yeah.
But when you use brain bump, youget those reminders.
And once you see it two, threetimes you, Oh yeah.
Okay.
Right.
Yeah.
I'm remembering this now.
(43:11):
And so for all the time youinvest in learning all of a
sudden you're getting a muchbetter ROI.
Yeah, good one.
So what about a favorite?
Could be a book, can't usePeopleWear, or a show, or what
have you.
I already listed PeopleWear onmy website that we'll give you
shortly.
I actually list probably about30 books that I either reference
(43:35):
or recommend.
But I'm going to just pick oneoff that list.
My friend Olivia Fox Caban wrotea wonderful book called The
Charisma Myth.
And in the Charisma Myth, shetalks about charisma is a skill
you can learn.
Yes, some people are born withit, just like some people are
(43:58):
natural soccer players andothers have to learn and be
trained.
You might be natural, naturallycharismatic, but if you're not,
you can still learn it.
And that's true for all theskills in my book.
There are natural leaders,natural networkers, natural
negotiators, but there are manymore people who can grow and be
trained.
And by the way, the people whostep up and regularly train,
(44:20):
they're the ones who usually dobetter.
That's right people who arenaturals just go.
Well, i'm good enough I don'thave to do the work and then
people put in work keep puttingit in and keep getting better.
Yeah, I mean my favorite exampleof this is tom brady is you
know, he was actually nowherenear as gifted as many other
quarterbacks of any You know,his generations that he played
(44:40):
in football, but he just keptworking harder and harder
consistently over a long periodof time and became the best of
all time, right?
Exactly.
Hard work pays off.
Yeah.
How about advice?
A piece of advice for youryounger self?
Invest in what we refer to assoft skills.
(45:02):
Here's a great example I use inthe book.
This came from my friend,Charles Leiserson, who's a
professor at MIT.
He gives this example of arectangle.
Imagine you have a rectanglethat's 4 by 10.
You want to increase one of thesides by 2 units to maximize the
area.
Which side do you increase?
Feel free to pause the podcastif you need to.
(45:23):
The answer, of course, is theshort side.
We go from 4 to 6, we get 60.
The other way, guess what's 48?
Conceptually, what's happening?
What we're doing by puttingthose two units on the short
side, we're amplifying them bythat whole long side.
Now, all of us have long sidesand short sides.
(45:43):
More than two in fact, but we'lljust keep it to two.
We often focus on our long side.
Oh, I'm in technology.
I need to keep Up withtechnology, I need to get
better.
And certainly if I don't, Ibecome a dinosaur.
If you're an accountant, there'snew tax laws.
If you're a sales person, you'realways trying to get better at
selling.
Keep working on those longsides.
You kind of have to for yourcareer.
(46:05):
But if all you do is work on thelong side, you get this long,
skinny rectangle.
And what's the overall area?
It's not that big.
When you put a little work intothat short side, all of a sudden
for the per Unit effort, the twoextra units on that short side,
increase your total area, yourtotal capability, much more than
the two units on the long side.
(46:26):
And this comes down to workingon our other skills.
We've probably all met someonewho is brilliant within his or
her domain.
But, doesn't communicate well,or doesn't lead well, or has
some other limitation.
We all know, wow, this guy orgirl is really an expert, but
it's just hard to follow.
if that person works on his orher short side, just gets a
(46:49):
little better.
Not world class, gets a littlebetter.
They're so much more effectivewith that long side skill.
So, all of us need to work onour short sides.
Wow, that's quite a contrariantake, you know, but it makes a
whole lot of sense and Iappreciate you saying that
because it's something I'vealways believed, never been able
to, put it so succinctly as thatexample, but, you know, the
(47:10):
book, uh, what, what comes tomind is the book Strength
Finders, which Got a lot ofmanagers to start thinking, Hey,
let's identify people'sstrengths and work off of their
strengths.
And some, rather than helpingthem work on areas for
improvement, right.
Opportunities for improvement,which possibly could get us to
bigger breakthroughs, right.
That's what you're saying.
And I'm not saying everyone hasto be a perfect square.
(47:33):
Don't have to be equally good ineverything.
Right.
We want to have.
a few long sides that are ourfriends, but we want to make
sure the short sides are at acertain sufficient competency.
And for many people, they'rebelow that minimum competency
and that's where we want to getthem up because that's where
we'll start to see some biggestreturns.
Yeah.
(47:53):
Oh, that's brilliant.
Thank you.
I'll let you pick from this lastone, either a limiting belief,
Or a big opportunity.
We talked about limiting beliefsearlier that some people are
naturally charismatic or leadersor whatever.
That doesn't mean you can'tlearn.
So all of these are learnableskills.
We covered that before.
(48:13):
So let's do so.
Big opportunity.
You're asking, what do I see asa big opportunity?
Well, I think we talked aboutsome of this as well.
I think there's bigopportunities.
How we consume content is reallygoing to change.
Just in what we talked aboutwith brain bump that we get more
of this pull media, but alsoneeds to change that there's
(48:35):
going to be so much morecontent.
I talked about the risks of badcontent, even non malicious
content, whether it's mediocrecontent.
Or even good content.
We're just going to overwhelmthe amount of content out there
and ways where we can betterfilter and get what is relevant
(48:56):
to us, whether it's using thatbrain bump type of pull approach
or other tools.
I think this is going to be abig change.
The other big change, and wementioned this as well,
education needs to change toemphasize these skills because
we haven't been doing enough ofa good job of that so far.
Yeah.
this is something we think abouta lot In household, my, my
(49:19):
oldest daughter in high school,she, joined an online, after
COVID, everybody had to goonline for COVID, then the world
opened back up.
She went back to school, wascompletely overwhelmed and
didn't enjoy the experience,went back online and graduated a
year early.
And now my youngest daughter,she's going into 10th grade and
she's looking at the same.
(49:40):
And what I'm finding is, manyother families with teenage kids
are starting to do that.
have their kids go online andjust finish early because we're
all kind of seeing the currenteducational model, the high
school model, just not be goodfor our kids anymore.
A school was designed for a 19thcentury, 20th century economy,
(50:05):
where we just go off and work inthe factories and all you needed
was just some basic mechanicalskills, right?
In fact, the education system isnot just changing content.
We need to change the nature ofeducation because it's no longer
I graduate high school or tradeschool or college.
At 22 to, okay, well, now I'mset.
(50:25):
Now I'm a marketer.
Now I'm a salesperson.
We know people are going tochange industries.
We know there's a massive amountto learn.
And so we need to move from thismodel of we've trained you with
everything you need to know, andnow you go use it for 40 years.
Rather, I think we need to moveto more of a continual
educational model that might bea certain amount of.
(50:47):
Continuing education credits,and we see models like this in
medicine in accounting wherethey have to continually keep
up, but then also even periodsof more intensive training where
people might say, and this mightbe normal in our jobs in
society, people will go back forthree or six months or even a
year of more intensive trainingevery 10 or 15 years or so to
(51:11):
really kind of build somefoundational skills for the next
phase of their career.
Yeah.
Well, Mark, this has been agreat conversation.
I love, for you to share moreabout, where people can find you
online, maybe, your app, yourbook, yourself, so they can work
with you.
I'll give you a couple differentwebsites.
(51:32):
If you're interested in thebook, you can go to
thecareertoolkitbook.
com and you can see more aboutthe book.
I put out articles every week.
On the resources page, there arethe questions that you can ask
as a candidate.
There are questions for you toask as an interviewer.
All that, it's completely free.
I don't even ask for your emailbecause I'm not trying to sell
you anything.
(51:53):
So all the information is on thewebsite.
You can also click through tosee where to sign, where to find
the book.
And if you want, you can followme on social media.
You can reach out to me on thatwebsite if you're interested in
topics related to the book or inmy day job work as a fractional
CTO, a fractional chieftechnology officer, I also do
fractional chief product officerwork, so you can reach me there
(52:16):
or go to LinkedIn and reach methere as well.
My other website for the freeBrain Bump app.
Now, that app you can find,Brain Bump, in both the Apple
and Android stores, but you cango to brainbumpapp.
com and at that website there'sa 90 second video that shows
what the app does so you'llunderstand it.
(52:36):
Full faq on the website andthere are links to take you to
the stores So those two websitesthe career toolkit book.
com And brain bump app.
com Excellent.
Well, thank you very much mark.
This has been a really greatconversation Very insightful.
I think a lot of people shouldgo check out your book, check
(52:56):
out the app.
especially if you're looking, todevelop a career plan and, and
we didn't even talk enough aboutthat really, but I understand
you cover quite a bit of that inyour book.
That's chapter one, how tocreate and execute your career
plan, whatever stage you're at.
If there's another rung you wantto get to, don't just sit there
and cross your fingers.
Here is how you create a plan toensure that you get there.
(53:18):
Well, thank you, Mark.
Hopefully you'll listen as we'llgo in and check that out.
Thanks for having me on theshow.
We hope you've enjoyed TheWayfinder Show.
If you got value from thisepisode, please take a few
seconds to leave us a 5 starrating and review.
This will allow us to help morepeople find their way to live
(53:40):
more authentic and excitinglives.
We'll catch you on the nextepisode.
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