Things Roger Says on Podcasts

You know, it's evergreen because it has to do with human thinking. And so I'm not worried about it being like, oh my God, I get this out because it's about AI. It's about our evolution with it. And it's a futurist point of view. So I'm not like under some sort of pressure deadline. I would like to see the book done. And here's the thing: compared to my last book, which I wrote literally every word by myself, like without help, I am actually going to use AI to prove the point that you can work with AI in a really impactful way. So I do expect it to be written faster because of that. And I'm starting to see the advantages of that just because of the way I've trained. The agent, the way I'm writing, it's still my stories, my ideas, speaking into a computer and having it help me organize. So I would love to have it finished by the end of this year. And then if it comes out by the end of next year, it's probably just the publishing world just takes a long time to get through all that stuff. So I would definitely like it to come out next year sometime.

So expensive sameness reference that you've used, I think Will talked about earlier. Expensive sameness. Are you talking about the fact that everybody will be producing stuff using the same tools? So everything will be vanilla. So all the same, but you've paid a lot of money to do it. Is that the point you're making with that?

And I suppose those people would always, those curious people that ask the right questions that are driven, irrespective of when they practiced in their profession, pre-AI, post-AI, they're always going to rise to the top, aren't they? You know, whatever technology they've got at their means, you know, that's going to get them far, isn't it? That has to.

Yeah. But I mean, you don't want someone who just mindlessly pumps out a press before AI. You wouldn't want someone who mindlessly pumps out a press release, crosses the T's dot line, hands it in without critical thinking behind it. It's just AI has just removed those social barriers, that social friction, and the ethics, quite frankly, to accelerate bad behavior.

It's a tricky, I mean, back to this transitionary period we're in. It's tricky, isn't it? Because at the moment, there is a clear advantage of people that use AI, irrespective of how critical they're thinking. So it gives them an immediate kind of leg up, doesn't it? Just by virtue of using it. But obviously, that, you know, sooner or later, it's going to be a level playing field again.

it. Well, let me answer your last question first, and then I'll address how that went about. I would probably say to that person, we're probably not the right agency for you. Look, there's always going to be bad actors. There's always going to people who are looking for shortcuts. And you're going to have that person who's a solopreneur, one person real estate agent who's just going to use a claud, crank out an ad, crank out a press release, send it, and they don't care. It's just content that's going out in the world. That does not mean there's depth of thinking. That does not mean they're looking at unrealized opportunities or looking for gaps. That doesn't mean they're not trying to expand their thinking. Companies that are more sophisticated, that want to truly have market share and set themselves up with points of differentiation, aren't going to rely on the first answer out of ChatGTP. So they're just never going to be a client. I just won't take them. And in terms of a philosophy document, because you're talking about some specifics, our philosophy document doesn't say we do this with it or we do that with it. Like it says, this is how we work with AI. We use it to expand those options. We do not let it replace judgment. We use it to find gaps. We'll use it to comb through mountains of research that it would take way too long and be made cost prohibitive for us to do by hand so that we can synthesize those answers in a way that we can apply our own judgment to it and look for additional opportunities. So a philosophy document, again, I think lean hard on the word philosophy. It is not specificity, right? We're not saying, oh, we use it to create an ad at this stage, right? Or we use it to create the writing of a press release or even a draft of a press release. We never talk about that. We may, we may not. It's the context around how we use AI that's the philosophy document.

This kind of unscrutinized, uncritiqued use of AI. I don't know about you, but I'm seeing quite a lot of that. And we're seeing briefs come in. Half of the new briefs we get in from companies that should know better are purely written with AI. You can tell they've not been scrutinized at all. We've identified AI copy on one of the major ad magazines in the UK come through on an email. And I think it's pretty widespread at the moment. Is this, I know there's a term you use, expensive sameness. Is this what we're talking about here?

How long have we got to go then? How much more pain have we got to get through before we get to that point?

If I had that answer, I would be a gazillionaire. I

think. Yeah, it's a few more months here, I reckon.