Minter Dialogue with Mitch Joel

I had the pleasure of welcoming back Mitch Joel, a long-time friend and guest. We delved into various topics, including the changing landscape of work, the impact of AI, and the evolution of content creation.

Mitch shared his insights on the challenges of our polarized times and how it’s affecting our focus on important issues like AI. We discussed his new venture, ThinkersOne, a platform connecting thought leaders with businesses for short, customized sessions.

We explored the role of AI in content creation, with Mitch explaining how it has transformed his workflow and improved his output. He emphasized the importance of using AI as a tool to enhance human creativity rather than replace it.

The conversation also touched on the challenges of hybrid work environments and the need for better training and adaptation. Mitch reflected on his extensive podcasting experience, approaching 1000 episodes, and how it has shaped his perspective on learning and sharing knowledge.

Overall, it was a thought-provoking discussion that highlighted the ongoing changes in technology, work, and human interaction.

Please send me your questions — as an audio file if you’d like — to nminterdial@gmail.com. Otherwise, below, you’ll find the show notes and, of course, you are invited to comment. If you liked the podcast, please take a moment to rate it here.

To connect with Mitch Joel:

• Check out the ThinkersOne site here
• SixPixels for Mitch’s blog and podcast
• Mitch Joel’s eponymous site is here
• Find/follow Mitch Joel on LinkedIn
• Find/follow Mitch Joel on X (formerly Twitter)

Other mentions/sites:

• Prior podcasts with Mitch on the Minter Dialogue:
  – MDE001 — my very first ever podcast episode in 2010
  – MDE013 — Mitch Joel – An interview on the state of digital marketing
  – MDE398 — Art, Shame and Perspective with Mitch Joel, Investor and Decoder of the Future

Further resources for the Minter Dialogue podcast:

Meanwhile, you can find my other interviews on the Minter Dialogue Show in this podcast tab, on Megaphone or via Apple Podcasts. If you like the show, please go over to rate this podcast via RateThisPodcast! And for the francophones reading this, if you want to get more podcasts, you can also find my radio show en français over at: MinterDial.fr, on Megaphone or in iTunes. Music credit: The jingle at the beginning of the show is courtesy of my friend, Pierre Journel, author of the Guitar Channel. And, the new sign-off music is “A Convinced Man,” a song I co-wrote and recorded with Stephanie Singer back in the late 1980s (please excuse the quality of the sound!).

Transcription courtesy of Flowsend.ai, an AI full-service for podcasters

Minter Dial: Hey, buddy. Mitch. Joel, Back on. Back on. I think this is the fourth time you’ve been on. You were my very first guest back in 2010, and what a journey it’s been. So, let’s start with how the heck are you, Mitch?

Mitch Joel: Oh, how the heck is anybody these days? It’s hard to be living in not only polarized times, but times where it’s an unsuspecting polarization. I think that’s the easiest way to say it, where things are coming at us from all sides, and whether or not the strategy of flooding the Zone, as they like to say, is effective or not, it’s very overwhelming. And from my perspective, it’s been interesting in the sense of. It’s almost muted the importance I think we should all be placing on the power of AI and what’s coming down the pike on that. And so, when people say, how are you doing? I can be very optimistic and very passionate about the things that I love to do, while at the same time recognizing that we are currently facing a lot of very dramatic changes, and those changes are only going to be propagated a lot more as the economy unfolds because of all the things that’s happening in technology and media and innovation. So, I’m optimistic still. I just think my pessimism and sarcasm is creeping in a little bit more than I like to.

Minter Dial: Yeah. So, I mean, you’ve written a number of books and. And I’ve had you on at least to talk about a few of them. Ctrl Alt Del, six pixels of separation. I’m trying to think what other ones there are, but that’s it. I only have two. There you go. Well, both of them, at least in your world. You were telling me just before we started that writing books isn’t. Isn’t what’s necessary or doesn’t fit your channel or your me, your message. Can you elaborate on why you think books are not it anymore for you and maybe for everybody?

Mitch Joel: Well, I think books are it in terms of consumption, in terms of tools, in terms of media channel. I don’t feel that it’s it for me in terms of creating and publishing, which I feel could be maybe a contradiction. And I’m okay living in contradictions, but personally, I just feel like I have always been somebody who likes to write and create on that side for sure. I also have a real passion for audio, and that passion for audio has shifted a little bit into being more interested in video, which I’m not fully down the rabbit hole on. And then when I Think about the assets that I have that I create, which include, you know, if you go to 6pixels.com, I have a weekly article where I do a link Exchange with Hugh McGuire and Alistair Kroll that I really love doing and I focus on. I try to make sure I have the right choice for them. And every time I read the compilation and get to edit it and curate it, I’m always like, this is really fun. I do a weekly radio hit that goes across the iHeartRadio network that I turn into an article and an audio file. I still do my podcast, Six Pixels of Separation, every week, closing in on close to 20 years of doing that every single Sunday, 52 episodes every year, no repeats, no best of just one after the other. And I can look at that and with humility, say it hasn’t grown at the speed others have with those types of media tools. And I feel like my ability to create content, how I’m feeling at my age, in terms of my thinking and my work, I feel like those channels are more aligned than me sitting down and trying to spend that amount of time doing a book. The contradiction is that I just read books non-stop now. I feel like it is the best format for me in terms of consumption, in terms of knowledge, in terms of having the ability to then take that individual and spend time with them on my podcast or meet with them if I can, or speak on the same stages as them, whatever it might be. So, it’s not a function of me saying I don’t like books or I think books aren’t where it’s at. It’s more a function of me feeling like how I’m covering information, how I’m talking about theories and stuff, the output of it through a book doesn’t feel like the right channel. So, I wouldn’t dismiss it permanently. Again, while at the same time knowledge that I love it now with all that the market is speaking. I mean, my general sentiment to my fellow peers who write books is if you think about the past five years, we’ve probably gone through the most dramatic shift in work and business that we have ever seen. Think about post Covid, which is now five, six years. Think about AI, which isn’t just a new technology. Think about geopolitics and just the world. Think about generational, how young people see and perceive work. You would think in that that we would have a garden sprouting tomatoes and grapes and cucumbers of books with the best and best of ideas. But if you actually look at the books that have come out and the ones that are selling, they’re probably older than the pandemic for the most part. And I mean, and no surprise, we have the subtle art of not giving an F by Mark Manson. Still, you have atomic habits still dominating the charts in every way, which way or form. I’m not saying they’re not great. These are great, great books. But the ability for a new idea to break the zeitgeist is increasingly challenged. We see that and then also the provocation that, why haven’t we seen what would be a 10x of, let’s say, a concept like the Tipping Point or Blue Ocean strategy come out in a time where literally, physically work has changed So, much? So, there’s something in the air. And I’m not sure I’m able to necessarily put my finger on it, but I feel like there’s something in the zeitgeist that has pushed nonfiction business books out of the place and culture, where that creates the culture. And I could be wrong on that. It’s just. It’s a weird gut feeling.

Minter Dial: I want to get back to that in a second, but I was just wondering, as a person who’s putting out So, much stuff out there, Mitchell, and as you said, as we get older, to what extent is the idea of legacy and leaving behind something intellectual? Material, content, video, audio, books, any part of your thinking?

Mitch Joel: 00 in the sense of, I don’t create for legacy. Once I’ve created, I want to ensure that there is some type of trail of it, which is, again, if you go to sixpixels.com, even if I appear on a podcast like this, I’ll typically repost it. There are some type of chronological way to look at it, but I don’t see it as legacy So, much as a living, organic resume. Do I think about kids maybe looking back and being able to say, wow, we have 20 years of our dad having these conversations and we can hear his voice, and maybe they can take that and turn it into an AI chatbot and all those things.

Minter Dial: Exactly.

Mitch Joel: Sure interesting to me, but it’s not the reason I create. And in fact, to tie the two concepts together. I’d even say that if I reflect back on the two books I did publish, six pixels of separation control, delete. They happened in the mid to. Yeah, really mid 2000s. So, I haven’t really published the book in over a decade plus. And if I reflect on that, I don’t feel it’s as reflective of my legacy and thinking as it would be if you were subscribed to the Podcast. Not that the concepts weren’t real, but in that world of content, you either create something that’s evergreen. I’m writing a book about sales, and it doesn’t matter which technology you use. The strategies to negotiate or sell are the same in terms of my new theory of it, or it’s of the times. And my books were both very much of the time. So, if you think about when I published it, Twitter was still new, let alone the fact that it became X. You, you know, TV was still dominant. YouTube was something, but not where YouTube is. So, those little nuances remain true in the moment, but not relevant today. What I hope happens in the books is that philosophically the idea is true. So, I could make the argument that the philosophy of what I was bringing forward in those two books remains true if our world changes. Right, because that’s the other thing. I was of the perspective that you’d have a thoUSAnd flowers blossoming in all these individual content creators. And that is true. But it is also true that that happens within the world of what is a very traditional media model of three or four giants that control it all. So, I can be both right and wrong and have a book that’s of the time and has some type of perennial concepts in it. But that’s why I always grapple with it where I feel like the, the way in which we’re doing content today, you can flow in a different way and make things in a different way and go back and change your perspective and have different ideas. And it doesn’t reside this permanent tomb. So, when I think about the legacy, I think about it more in the sense of if someone were to search for my work, am I findable? Is there something relevant there? Did they stay relevant? I don’t suspect anybody hops onto 6pixels.com and goes, oh, look, Mitch published three pieces this week, or three pieces of content. But, but for me, for my personal professional development, it’s very important that I am there and doing that because it keeps me relevant, it keeps me interested, it keeps me engaged, it forces me to look at who’s on the periphery with new concepts and theories and, and practices. And that I think is a huge, A huge bonus to my work.

Minter Dial: I’m reflective of it in a philosophical manner because I lost a friend recently and, and then went to look around for what he, what was left of him, if you will, on the Net. And there were some things that are out of date, and there are some things that were not reflective of him, really nothing. And that was, you Know, very dry or whatever. And, and then obviously I’m thinking about the, this notion of scraping and coming up with a virtual Mitch after death So, that the kids can sort of live on and the spirit lives on. And I just, I just started thinking about, well, you know, especially a lot of this audio content. It’s on a platform where you have to pay to keep it going. And so, especially, you know, there’s like this Ctrl Alt Del of our lives digitally or do we plan for a post death existence? Do we want to be intentional about that or we just want to let it be?

Mitch Joel: One of the things that I’ve been. And just So, everybody knows, I take notes when people write. So, if I’m looking, I’m paying attention. One of the things I think a lot about in terms of how do we progress in terms of our critical thinking, in terms of how we see the world, in terms of what we do. I’ve been thinking a lot about things like nostalgia, which I think are important. Can you be nostalgic for something if it’s still live and present and in the now? So, if it’s virtual Mitch or Voice Mitch or whatever, will those people who want to think about me have a sense of nostalgia or do we lose nostalgia? Because I can ask Mitch anything at any time. He’s essentially done what Ray Kurzweil talked about, but uploaded his consciousness to the cloud. So, that’s, you know, one aspect of it. The other aspect of it would be memory. What happens when we don’t need to refer to our memories because everything can be new or present. We can take the batch of photos from a 75-year life and have AI continually generate them in the present or have that person present in family pictures and things like that, which is very doable like right now with today’s technology. What happens to us as people are empathetic? What happens to us in terms of our emotions if memory doesn’t become something that we need and value and cherish? I think we all cherish right now our memory. The fact that I can think about my father who’s passed and I don’t have to not think like that because I can immediately inject him into my physical life by having some type of screen based connection to him or even pushing that further. We could do 3D modeling and in VR you could strap on your goggles and go for a walk with your father. I mean, imagine what that could be like. And again, today’s technology, you could probably do that. Forget projecting into where we might go and then the last aspect of that which very few people talk about, and it’s somewhat surprising to me because I always found it to be the thing that has stimulated my curiosity and my desire to learn and my ability to think as a critical thinker, which is serendipity. I’m. I’m very cognizant of how much serendipity I have in my life. And I feel that as I continue down the path I have, it’s actually gotten narrower and narrower. So, we have a world where pre Internet, we would talk about newspapers and think about the curation. What I don’t think people recognize, especially those who are digital natives, is you’d open up a page to read an article you were interested in and you were surrounded by things. Some of them were adverts, some of them were just opinion pieces, some of them were other news items that connected the dots. And then when the early days the Internet came on, we had the first web browser. You had platforms like Yahoo or AOL that had basically the homepage as sort of like a newspaper. But the quick derivative of that was you could essentially customize it. So, now I could say, well, music is the first thing, not national headlines. And I want business, but I don’t like sports. No sports. And all of that is great. And personalization is important, customization is important. But we lose things because we start losing our serendipity. And then as we are more and more in our areas, we start developing as we know, echo chambers and problems like that. And it makes me not surprised to see where we are currently in our world. But at the same time, I often wonder, where does one find serendipity? And it does. It’ll come from things like noticing things and walking around and engaging in different conversations. But if you are strategically, without knowing it, just narrowing down where you’re going. So, when I think about this concept, I’m very curious about how we will do this while maintaining the power of memory, nostalgia and serendipity, which I think are critical to making humans staying unique and to be able to have them come up with new and different ideas.

Minter Dial: I was listening to a podcast recently that talked about how in London, the London cabbie has to do the knowledge. And this provides a tremendous scientific experiment for people, scientists, neurologists and such to figure out where memory is in the br. And they observe always that the taxi drivers that learn the knowledge have a enlarged hippocampus, which is where the memory is. And yet in our lives, we’re basically sub, you know, Delegating our need for memory by a little Google thing. And then at a dinner table, we don’t, you know, the ability to hold off from coming out for the Google. What’s the name of the first president of the United States or whatever? No, I don’t remember. And then, And so, the memory piece seems to be, you know, dissipating. And, and we don’t, we don’t, we’re lazy in this regard. And then I was thinking about nostalgia because it’s about pain, nostalgia. And I feel like in our society we’re doing everything we can to, to anesthetize our experiences of pain thanks to an ever-enlarging number of drugs that we can take and, and avoiding anything that hurts because, oh, I’d rather live happily and without pain.

Mitch Joel: Yeah. I mean, if I think about the analogy of the taxi driver, I think of two technologies that make this an interesting conversation. One would be, and I’ve been in that experience where you get into a cab in London, you tell them where you want to go, you’re like, how is that even possible?

Minter Dial: They know zigging and zagging and one-way streets.

Mitch Joel: Yeah. And it’s a great cultural story and trope about some regional uniqueness that I love. But the other side of that, my frustration with that is, can you imagine that skill with Waze where we are in real time monitoring traffic? So, that person may know the way, but they may not know that on that way those three roads are blocked or there’s traffic or things like that. So, I’m always like, what’s the superpower here that we could use to augment that? And of course there’s a dumbing down of this where you could get into your car and hit Waze and go anywhere. And this is my joke when I’m in any foreign territory with my family. And I’ll say, I wouldn’t know how to get to this place if we had to pull over to gas stations and pull out physical. Even if you wrote out the instructions, I wouldn’t have been able to find this. But Waze was magic in that case. And the other side of it is the experience that I have with full self-driving in my electric vehicle, which is the way I’ve landed on it is full self-driving is awesome if you don’t know where you are. And it’s terrible if you do know where you are, because there’s something about your memory and your knowledge of which streets and how to get around it and what to do that’s going to Be way better than the full self-driving car can even mimic. But when you’re in a place you have no idea what you’re doing, it’s really powerful because it gives you the ability to see other things and discover more. So, it’s always this balance where we ultimately want to definitively state that this is good or this is bad. And it just lands me into the same place as I’ve always been, which is it is like any technology, whether that’s fire or the wheel, it has both good and terrible implications. And that’s how we always have to look and judge things. And in particular, it’s going to be a much deeper conversation when it comes to things like artificial intelligence, alignment and regulation. For sure. For sure.

Minter Dial: Well, So, that brings So, the good and the bad and ethics come into play. I just invited Mark Schaefer to come on to talk about Audacious, his great book that sort of breaks the boundaries and some status quo in, in the way we do marketing. But with everything that’s going on, it feels like as a society and all the dissipation and the splintering of ideas and all these millions of people, although we have some great thought leaders, we’re no longer as a society able to come up with what is good or bad.

Mitch Joel: I don’t agree. I think that we are challenged by this notion, mentor, because your version of good is aligned to your culture and who you are, and my version of good is as well. And that’s the greater challenge is when you interconnect systems and models in terms of technology. That is the great conversation of like, well, what is alignment? Do we have alignment as Canadians? No. Do we have alignment culturally between even people of different types of Christianity? We do not. We definitely do not have that in Muslim or the Jewish faith either. So, when we say this of good and bad, of truth, I am always reverting back to what’s your timeline? When does that conversation start? Does it start before there was any discovery made in North America? Does it happen after? Is it like, where are we starting? And then also like, who really are you? So, I can agree to something being good or bad if I understand those things about you. So, if you said to me, you know, in certain instances I think murder is okay, I would have to have a serious conversation with you about like, what is your culture? And if you said, oh, I’m American and I am democratic, but I also served in the army, and you could start then unpacking what you mean by oh, that makes sense versus I might Be somebody who grew up in some type of commune and had parents that were hippies, and I wouldn’t hurt a butterfly. And so, then culturally, I could never prescribe to that, even though we walks amongst each other and are more similar than dissimilar. So, that to me, you know, when we talk about ethics, even the practice of ethics, I would argue, is fundamentally established by the people who want something they want intellectually, they want physically, they want. Historically, we don’t know the history of all the things that were broken and busted and not available underneath it before that individual had the right to say odd. Well, this is what’s right, or this is what is ethical. And what I do think is we’re seeing that now play out in real time this fact that we can probably agree on a lot of things, but ultimately we can’t get to a place where we believe in a form of ethics without truly understanding that person’s background. And also, when I say that, by the way, I don’t mean things that are illicit or illegal or wrong. I use murder as a bad example, perhaps, but I could just even say things like morally, you know, morally you might believe in God, and I might have believe in God too, but a different type of God or not at all. And so, the conversations, I feel, become more and more complex because we don’t have the uniformality, which again, is something nobody apparently wants. Like, nobody wants this uniformality. When we talk about things. You lived here in Montreal, where I live, and as we see the government talk about things like no religious symbols on any form of government employee, So, no kipas no, you know, if you’re Muslim, anything. And somebody could look at that and go, well, that’s like a breach of my freedom of speech. And somebody else might look at it and say, I actually like that. Like, we can celebrate those in our churches and mosques and synagogues, but we shouldn’t have to do that when confronting with the government. The government should be. And so, again, you have these types of conversations that we have where, you know, choose life. I mean, wherever you sit on that conversation, I don’t think anybody is choosing death. It’s like, that’s not the real option anybody wants, nobody wants anybody hurt in that conversation. It’s those nuances that creates that problem. And I think that this has been the challenge when people say things like the ethics of it, because it’s. It’s coming from a place of your own culture and definition that makes it really challenging to the greater populace.

Minter Dial: Usually, well, in pushback mode, when you’re using AI or you’re doing some activity in a company. If I were to identify an area that is a great stimulator of disengagement is to think that your boss or your company’s ethics are crap and we don’t talk about it, in my opinion, sufficiently, where we can agree that this is what we all want to subscribe to and if you don’t like it, then get out. You’re with us or against us. And the idea of pleasing everybody and going to another point which is related in societal manner is how deconstruction of everything means that there’s no absolutes. And while I’m not subscribing to absolutism and totalitarianism, it feels awkward that we can’t as a society agree on what is an ethical approach and which what we as a society agree on. And so, things like the transcendental values of truth, beauty and goodness are no longer shareable because, well, that’s your idea of truth, that’s your idea of beauty. I think everything’s beautiful, I think everybody’s good and there’s a million truths. That doesn’t feel like a good place to land.

Mitch Joel: No. And I think that that’s why you’re seeing the pendulum swing the way it is, because there’s a vast majority of the populace that fully prescribes to that 100%. The work one is So, interesting because again, we haven’t even talked about culture in this. And my favorite story about this, which I don’t talk much about, but it was a little thing I saw on TikTok a long time ago. But it’s still, it’s interesting how especially in the zeitgeist of today, it comes and goes and we kind of forget these things. Probably would have been like five-year case studies for keynote speakers in a world that was just a bit slower and calm. But there was an individual who had posted, I believe it was a manager, and they had posted on TikTok that they had an employee who refused to come to an 8am meeting. And their reason for refUSAl is they had booked a yoga class even though it was an emergency and they needed everybody all hands on deck and what should be done. And so, I would throw it to you. I’m not going to, but maybe your rational brain would say, you know, a whole bunch of things like, well, does this happen often? What are the, you know, what are the circumstances? And whatever. But at the end of the day you would say young person telling their manager, I can’t Come in for your emergency meeting because I have a yoga class. Has some optics to it, I would say. Yeah, that is, it turns out that is actually a generational response. I was shocked in the comments and in actually the individual who had done this created their own TikTok saying, you know, I’m at work and I’m dedicated when I’m there. My start time is 9:00. I booked this yoga class, I paid for it. I couldn’t get my money back. Is there any reason why we can’t meet at 9? Like why can’t we meet later in the day? Why does it have to be at that time? That’s my time. That’s not work time. That’s me setting my boundaries.

Minter Dial: Boundaries.

Mitch Joel: And so, it was fascinating being as I like to self-proclaim myself, male, pale and stale, a middle aged white person with all of my limbs and I speak multiple languages. And I have a tremendous privilege to watch this unfold in a world where my instinct, being candid and honest here was, I mean, if I were the employee, I would have showed up at 7:30. Like, it happens. I’m sure. I want to go, I want to move ahead. I want. And you realize in the conversations when we talk about ethics and crap and work, that we’re getting to this place where work feels to me a little bit like personalized medicine, right? This idea that if I have a headache and you have a headache, the fact that we’re both taking the same dosage of acetaminophen is probably a bit crazy. We both have different biologies and chemistries and whatever it might be. And so, pharma is working towards this place where we can give you the precise dose for you, Mitch, because we understand what it is. And if you take that and twist it into the corporate world and think about an entrepreneur who’s running a business, who is being competitive. Either they’re unique in the industry or they’re just competitive. But they have a vision and they have a way of which they want to conduct their business and their work and they want to have team members that are aligned with that. And maybe part of that alignment is yay. A couple times a month or a year, you’re going to have to pop in at 8am because we got to get this done. Like that’s part of who we are. And so, the question becomes, does the world tilt to a world where, no, we can’t have meetings at eight, or does it tilt to the entrepreneur where they’re a good person, they’re not doing something Ethically immoral. And this becomes the. This becomes to me what I was aiming at. Not the grander things of truth and what’s right and what’s this. It’s in that granularity that we’re picking at constantly, where it become this conversation. And if we then agree that the model is hybrid as a way in which we’re going to work, what does that say? What does that say to an entrepreneur who physically wants to be there with a team? They feel their best when they are communing, when they’re together, when there’s an energy, when there’s people talking. And so, what does that mean? They shouldn’t be in business? Because the way in which the world switches is hybrid, again, conversational. That, to me is. Is the more interesting stuff where at a macro level, we can agree we don’t want absolutism. We don’t want everybody thinking everything is okay and everything is. I agree, but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re in the minutia now of all of this, where people are making professional decisions about their work, not based off of their skills, their trade, where technology is going, but based off of, do I like that or not?

Minter Dial: Their feelings.

Mitch Joel: And I would provoke back that, you know, someone who did a lot of martial arts when I was younger, that some of my real progression happened when somebody was extremely hard on me, and it was physical and it was not comfortable. And I grew more than I ever grew in my life, or being fired. You know, being fired was maybe the greatest thing that ever happened to me. It was humiliating. I was terrified. I had no money at the time. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but it put me on a course and that we, in and of ourselves, even as we age, don’t necessarily know what’s always best for us. And to me, that’s the interesting thing is we’re living in this world where everybody is making an immediate assumption professionally about what is best for them without actually allowing any of this serendipity to come back, where it’s not allowing someone who’s been successful in this milieu to. To. To engage us and to have this conversation. Everyone’s the enemy. These are the things that I’m talking about. Not. Not the greater absolutism. Because of course, we can’t have a society where anything can be anything or nothing or nothing or everything is everything and it’s nothing.

Minter Dial: Exactly. Yeah, right. Good stuff. I’m sure we could riff and rabble on, but do Want to talk to you, Mitch. And the reason why I wanted to get you on outside of thinking, for somehow you had started to write a new book. I did a hallucination. ThinkersOne. So, this is a platform you launched. You sort of moved away from the global marketing agency to ThinkersOne. So, tell us what it is and why you came up with this idea.

Mitch Joel: Yeah. So, a bit of a backstory is in the early 2000s, I started a digital marketing agency today and age where it was not the thing to do. It was very traditional media. But we had a feeling. It turns out the feeling was correct. And on the journey of that, which wound up coming to a culmination about 11 plus years ago when we sold it to a very large public marketing communications network and I left only six years ago, but still a long time was that we could build that business through thought leadership, which we did. We leveraged my skills in journalism and publishing and media and my interest in new media, music, music. To build a blog at the time and then a podcast, which we’ve already talked about, to write two books. All of that led to me speaking all over the world through representation. And I’ve had a very successful business line in that business of thought leadership and how it was monetized. So, when I left the business, I was very fortunate that I was able to go with my speaking bureaus and all my content and march forward. And my initial plan was to march forward with that, maybe do some type of advising. I’m not interested in doing any consulting or coaching and doing some investments and again, sitting on boards and all that fun stuff that I was hoping to do. And in the process, we had this global pandemic. And in the global pandemic, I started realizing something really interesting. My peers who were keynote speakers, professional speakers, were panicking because they weren’t able to go anywhere or travel. I had discovered that there wasn’t a lack of interest in me. There was more interest than ever in having connection to me. And that came in the form of people saying things like, hey, can you just hop into our Zoom and talk to our team about what’s going on in media marketing, innovation, technology, whatever it might be? Or I would get things like, hey, I’m doing a whole thing on content. Can you record a quick little 10 minute video that I can show my team that’s just, you know, for us, a little treat for them as we’re dealing with Zoom. And the answer to this, those requests was it depended who the person was, like if they were a friend I’m happy to do it. If it’s a business, it’s like pay me.

Minter Dial: So, if you.

Mitch Joel: The pay me road, it was actually kind of interesting to realize that. But the way in which I get a keynote, which is like what I would call my core revenue, was the similar for 15 minutes of work. Meaning it was, let’s talk, what are your needs? I write down your needs, we agree, I send you a contract, you sign the contract, I send you an invoice, goes through procurement. I then do this and I have to chase you for my thing. It’s going to be 60 to 90 days and like the whole headache of like that for 15 minutes. And Aubrey, my business partner and I, who was one of our partners at the agency too, were sitting in this little office space we took to manage all the six pixel stuff and the work we were doing. And I said, you know, we should basically shopify e commerce this model, make it So, that somebody, a business can go on, choose a thought leader, decide if they want them to record a video specific to a topic or have them just pop in for a live AMA fill out. This is who we are, this is what we’re looking to do. Here’s what we’re when we need it for, here’s what hit buy, put it on their credit card and either the person pops into their zoom or teams meeting where they get the video in a couple days or whenever the date is for the live. And that was the catalyst for ThinkersOne. And it became this place where we are helping thought leaders get their messages out well beyond ways in which they can. We are helping these thought leaders probably speak to audiences that they could very much serve but could probably not afford them in terms of their keynote fees or consulting fees. And conversely, we’re now giving businesses that typically don’t can’t go and afford the keynote speaker, but access to them for their everyday meetings. You could hold a lunch and learn. You could do it for your monthly gathering. You could even do a small hybrid event or virtual event and have some of this content to just add more spirit and spice to it. So, in a world where you have employees begging for professional development, but the truth of the matter is they don’t want more time added to their calendar. This seems to be a great way to give your team professional development and instead of making your meeting an hour, you can make it 40 minutes now and include one of these. So, it’s surprising. It’s the light. All of them are custom created uniquely for there’s not like a Database where you go in and choose content, the thought leader literally records it or comes in live for you. And that was the spirit of the platform that we have been, you know, very slow in putting out and very slow in growing because it’s just Aubry and I, we have some help, but the idea was let’s test and learn and try to figure out where market fit is and how does this look? And it’s just been a fun project to work on for you because I love the space. I’m in the space and I do, I consider a bit of a social cause where I’m helping my thought leaders monetize more of their work and conversely, I’m making them accessible to, to great organizations, non-profits, charities, whatever.

Minter Dial: Thinkers 1. I was, I was just curious where the, the name came from.

Mitch Joel: We had a bunch of names. We were looking for ones we could have some have it be somewhat ownable and get the domain. So, we had a short list and ThinkersOne just became the one that worked that we had domains. We were able to get some IP on it and we ran with it. So, Aubry designed the great logo and we thought, let’s just go.

Minter Dial: Yeah, you do have to at some point get off the pot.

Mitch Joel: Yeah, we had a lot of great names.

Minter Dial: We did, yeah, yeah, go with it. So, in this new venture, tell us about what, some examples of successes and, and how does someone who’s listening to this, who might say, ah, I’d be cool to have like five minutes with Mitch or whomever.

Mitch Joel: So, the first thing is all the experiences are 15 minutes. So, you get 15 minutes. That’s the spirit of it. The prices vary based off of the thought leader and how much they want to charge. It is a bit of a marketplace in that sense. And it’s really simple. If you go to ThinkersOne, choose what you want, fill out what you want it for and put it on your credit card. The challenge with the business is it’s such a dynamic shift from the way in which we typically do this. I think it’s breaking people’s brains. We often get a whole bunch of emails or even the thought leader will say, can you send me a calendar invite? I’m like, we’re not your agency.

Minter Dial: We just client like, like have us on the platform. Yeah, what, what sort of collaborations can you look at? I mean, you know, if you’re a speaker, you’re a speaker agent and they, they become your conduit, they go out and do the sales, hopefully occasionally bring you in. What’s, what are the other ways for. To spread the word.

Mitch Joel: Yeah, I don’t necessarily even like. I think it’s actually really complimentary to this speaking business because more often than not, If I have 10 inquiries in terms of me speaking, nine of them probably can’t even afford me. So, one is, instead of it being a firm. No, sorry. There’s some way that you can engage with the content, which I do think if you do enough of them, it leads actually back to the keynote. I’ve actually seen the inverse, which is they had no event, no nothing, but they wanted to do some monthly gathering. They booked me and then six months later I got a call, hey, we are going to do a big event. Would you like to come and speak? So, I’ve seen it work that way. I just look at it like there are So, many. What has been interesting in the journey actually is the ways in which I thought it was going to be used are often not. So, one thing we had is we had a very large event that bought four of them based off of the different themes of their multi day event. And they ran them almost like when you go into a movie theater and before the event starts you’ve got the previews. They were running them like that. So, the event would start at 9, but at 8:45 they would run these videos and just as you’re getting into the room and warming up and sitting down, they’re running them at actually a big event. I had another person that was running a small internal event, a marketing department for their full organization and they obviously couldn’t afford big names in Kenos. What they did is they bought again, I think it was four of these to run as the bumper to their panels or their conversations. So, they had the thought leader throwing it to the panel and saying, hey mentor, thanks for having me. And now back to your panel on AI or whatever it might be. So, again, really interesting way to do it. I’ve had organizations that are just really small groups and instead of just doing the whole Mastermind forum thing, they bought two or three to have them interspersed. We had an interesting one is there was a very large tech company that had their whole sales team coming together in one room physically. And what was unique here is that I think about four or five, but it was two recorded and two and two or three live. And the reason they bought the recorded ones was that, you know, they weren’t sure where they were going to drop them in. And so, again you have physically people all in a boardroom hanging out, talking, debating, discussing and then As a kind of way to break things up or to transition topics. They use these as catalysts for conversations or catalysts to help the team grow and learn. The interesting thing about that is each salesperson then wound up using it to book it for their own teams in their own departments, which was lovely. So, it’s funny because when I started it, I thought it was just a way for me as a thought leader to not say no. To be able to make myself accessible and affordable to all different types of organizations. And then you just see really smart people. The other great one is someone bought it as a gift for their client. They knew they were struggling with some type of domain and they bought it and said as a gift, like show this to your team. And just even the way the thought leader introduced it and said, I just want to thank So, And so, for gifting this to you and your team. And I know you’re. It was just, it’s. It’s a thing of beauty to see. So, it’s a. It is, it’s a bit fun. There’s a bit of status in it because it’s really personalized for, for the audience. And I’m just. Every day I’m amazed at the ways in which it can be used.

Minter Dial: Super well. So, everyone listening? Go check out ThinkersOne and let’s just talk about AI for a sec. You were talking at the beginning about how you repurpose things and you can take blog posts and change it into other bite size or other comestible content on other platforms. I was wondering to what extent AI is now introduced into your workflow. What are some of your favorite AIs and yeah, we’re. What encouragement would you have for people to go out and use AI to help them in their, in their daily work in life?

Mitch Joel: Yeah, I mean it’s. It’s my life. It is the stuff I speak about I you as somebody who does the work that I do. I often have the visual of me on a surfboard in the middle of the ocean and you hope that you can catch a wave. And then I think about how lucky I am that I was able to catch the Internet wave, the social media wave, the mobile wave, the E commerce wave, and now many other waves and then this wave too. So, one is. It’s just very validating that I chose a career that has a very long and wide highway to it that allows me to constantly be exposed to this stuff. I would say uniquely in this situation. It’s a bit different being of middle age. Like I am my candid conversation with people is I actually don’t like change that much. As much as I tell people, you know, if you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less. Is, as General Eric Shinseki So, wisely once said years ago, which is true, that I actually don’t like change. The tools I use to create are that they’re tools and that I have made my life very easy So, that I don’t have to learn new things and do new things. Generative AI comes along and suddenly I would say to you that all of the tools I use are different now. Within one year, all of the tools I use to create text, images, audio, video, live, whatever, all of them have either completely changed in terms of the software or tool or it’s a new version and I’m using full on all of this stuff. So, you know, the way I see it is, you know, it’s hours and hours of keynotes that I could give you. But what I would say is, ultimately I would want somebody to go to sixpixels.com and look at anything I’ve written and ask themselves, was that just Mitch? Was that fully AI or was that Mitch and AI? My hope is that you can’t tell, but I know the answer. And what’s happening on the back of that is I believe professionally I have never been better in terms of my ability to think, to communicate, to extrapolate, to share, to curate. I just feel like I’m really professionally at a peak and I believe a lot of it has to do with because I’ve been able to offload the other things I had to do that were attached to the work that I do that I wasn’t great at. I’ll give you a very precise example of what I mean. If Minter were to be on my podcast, six pixels of separation prior to Generative AI, what I would do is go to his website, take his bio, copy and paste it, and very mildly tweak it. And that would be like the summary for the podcast. Minter’s the author of Artificial Empathy. He’s got blah, blah, blah, blah. Now what I do with these tools is one is I’m using them in the creation aspect for it. So, if we were to record here, we’re doing this, I think on Zoom, I actually use a tool called Riverside. When I’m done with Riverside, I can hit a button that says show Notes and it creates a summary with takeaways and timestamps. So, suddenly I have all of the things I need, but I don’t just stop there. What I will do is also because of it, get a full transcript of the conversation. And so, now I’ve built a chatbot that can take the transcript, the summary, the takeaways. It can also take a copy and paste usually a description of your latest book from Amazon into that and create for me a 300-word perfect intro paragraph for the podcast. When you read it, you wouldn’t know it’s not me. And I can tell you that even if you knew it was AI, which is fine, it’s still a billion times better than me copying and pasting your bio before and it being thing that took me a lot of time and energy to do do. The fact that I now have timestamps with titles next to it is something I didn’t do. I could have outsourced that and had an editor and all these things I don’t. And I can go through a litany of ways in which I create content. And I want to be very specific. I’m talking about generative AI, not artificial intelligence, which is a whole other conversation and things that we can talk about. But using that to give me more time to do the work that I’m much better at, that is a superpower. And so, the argument I would say is I’m, you know, if I was four steps ahead in terms of digital and social media and E commerce and all that, the direction of AI and the way in which it’s iterating, I would say I’m maybe two steps ahead now. So, I am worried that it’s going to close the gap 100%. But I also think that at the end of the day, if I was using LinkedIn as an example, if my AI is posting to my LinkedIn and your AI is reading all the LinkedIn posts, including mine, and commenting like, like this isn’t what we want and or will do as humanity. So, there’s something in the middle of purely AI creating it. And purely AI, like there’s this middle part which is us. It’s our desire to create, desire to commune, our desire to think. And using these tools to give us more space for that I think is powerful. And I worry, I worry about things like I don’t need to hire a junior marketer anymore, So, how do we bring the next generation of marketers? I mean, all of those things become the bigger AI problem. But how I use it, it has just made me So, much more interesting. Even if I’m being humble to my own self, like I’m more interested in how I’m thinking now than ever before.

Minter Dial: Well, yeah, it’s like a press where local media used to be the working ground for young journalists to work for them, the big ones. And that doesn’t exist. So, lots of questions out there. I use a thing by the way, Flow send AI which is a podcast specific AI which gives me a whole ton of stuff presumably like Riverside. But it’s. Anyway, it’s been my, it’s my low sample flowsend F L O W S E N D.A I It’s absolutely brilliant. It’s made for podcasting and it gives me a whole suite of stuff automatically once I’ve uploaded the audio. But we’re always learning. Right. So, we’re talking about AI, digital transformation, disruption, all these other things. Hybrid work. You’ve done a ton of work digitally and say hybridly or distributedly. I’m wondering, you know, I get a whole bunch of comments I get these days, Mitch, about how we need to kind of return to some form of greater humanity. And whether it’s Mark talking about his marketing or the way we do meetings and hugging and, and, and being messy humans again.

Mitch Joel: HR approved.

Minter Dial: Ouch. Exactly. And, and, and clean and, and politically correct. Whereas the, the we still, you know, the great thing is using digital and distributed means. But in your all your experience, Mitch, what, what has key lesson to create the most human digital experience or you know, like as you a speaker, you’re behind a screen.

Mitch Joel: Yeah. I mean it’s, it’s been an interesting journey to be in a very different place than I was when I was building this digital business. What I like to reflect on. And again it’s not necessarily stories I’ve had a chance to share So, I can share it here, which is fun is pre Covid, obviously because I sold the business 11 years ago and left. Left, you know, more than six. Like before COVID we had an office in Montreal and then Toronto and what we did was we had set everybody up at the time with webcams and Skype and again pre, pre, pre pandemic. And we even had it set up that a projector was shooting into the offices of both offices. So, if you were walking down the hallway in Montreal, you could see into the hallway of Toronto and we had open spaces and all the things you can imagine from the sort of telephone tech tech world. And the running joke is I would leave the Montreal office and wave to everybody in Toronto, land in Toronto two hours later and wave back to the people in Montreal. Then as we got acquired through that, we aggregated a bunch of agencies to create a new agency that we called Muram, through the WPP network, mostly JWT network, actually. And by the end, we were almost 3,000 people in close to 30 countries. And if I think about it, I mean, we had people who were FTEs, we had contractors, we had freelancers, we had other agency partners, we had different languages, we had different time zones. And while we try to deploy this one office with a really long hallway, which was our kind of thing for Montreal, Toronto, it was really hard to do, obviously, at that scale. And we did. We. We had some success in, in doing some of that. The spirit of this is, when you think about it, it was very much just work. We had different cultures in different places and different time zones, and people worked and came. And then some people worked at home and we’d sort. So, I kind of grew up and built a business in this world of right people, right seat, right bus, to steal a Jim Collins colloquialism. And it worked. And it’s strange to me that in the forced innovation we had because of COVID forcing everybody to go online, my general sentiment, and it still remains the same, is yes, the mandate was you are at home working. That is true. But when that shifts to I’m working from home, it’s a different way to approach it. And I don’t know if we as a society have done a very good job of actually training people what it means to be hybrid, freelance, contract part, whatever it might be. And so, what’s happened is they’re actually doing their tasks, just not in this centralized place. And in fact, what I’m hearing from many people is they’ll come to the office and work at the office as if they’re at home and they’re on zoom meetings and stuff. They’re not doing anything different than. So, they become confused as to what’s the point of even being here. And I think we are missing a bit of that figuring out. Like when I. When I reflect back on the agency, it was. There was something there that made people want to come in, that made them want to have coaching and do things. And there were some things that made people want to leave their headphones on all day and just program people at different jobs, different things they had to accomplish. And I think we’ve lost a bit of the grace of thinking about it this way. It’s become very confrontational, very much around surveillance. The only reason you want me to is because you want to see what I’m doing. And it’s like. I don’t know if that’s always true. I think in some instances it probably is. So, there’s, you know, it’s a great conversation to have, but I don’t think we’ve taken a beat to realize that it was forced and that we didn’t necessarily deploy the right training tools and ongoing optimization to make everybody, if they’re going to work this way, be the most effective they can be.

Minter Dial: Yeah, well, I mean, there’s a whole business school that should be brought up on this whole thing because from each individual having certain contexts at home, having certain abilities, how do you make the office a real place for communing? Because we, we’ve lost our ability to commune and converse. I would argue. I want to finish with the last question, Mitch. You’ve. I don’t know. I. You. You’re must be approaching nearly a thoUSAnd interviews. I don’t know where you are on.

Mitch Joel: Six pixels, but mid, mid or end of September, I will hit episode a thoUSAnd.

Minter Dial: Yeah, there you go. I add that feeling. I mean, I do listen to many of your pods, Mitch. So, that’s a whole. That’s a whole turn.

Mitch Joel: Yeah.

Minter Dial: In all your conversations, do you have some dots you can connect for us as to what has come out of these conversations, whether it’s for you from them?

Mitch Joel: The podcast, from my personal perspective, is the most selfish thing I do, hands down. I see an article, I hear about a theory of management practice. I read a book, I see somebody being interviewed on a podcast on YouTube or whatever it might be, and I think, think I should spend an hour with that person. And by the luck of my ways, I’ve been able to build a show that would enable those people to say yes. What yes means to me is, well, now I can really take the book that I’ve read and taken copious notes on, been thinking about and formulate some conversations of agreement to disagreement, whatever it might be. And over the years, what I’m just discovering is, you know, one is there’s no lack of. Of guests. Not hard to find 52 brilliant people a year, which is a very nice thing to be able to say, but, you know, your interests change and the world changes. And I’d even argue that now I have to do a bit of checking myself because I can easily become a bit more negative or pessimistic. And I’m typically optimistic. And I think people came to my content because I’m optimistic. And so, I start looking at other areas of where I can explore. So, if I think about like recently, what’s really, what would be an example of that? I had Roland Allen on, who’s an author who works in the publishing business, I believe, who wrote a book about notebooks, like physical notebooks, like why do we use notebooks? Why do we love notebooks? Why do we still love notebooks? Digital versus physical writing, all that sort of stuff. And I’m a notebook maniac. I’m now at the point where I doing it all on iPad and writing by hand, but that’s just for convenience. And it was just one of those moments where I realized it was just a beautiful book at the perfect time. It was an incredible conversation for me to be able to have and the head fake of it is I publish it and hopefully other people buy the book and follow this person and are interested in them. But it’s a realization that, you know, is it wrong to be So, selfish in certain aspects of it? And I think I’ve. What I’ve done through the learning of that is I is I try to deploy into everything. So, even now I’m. I’m not as bullish on social media as I was. I don’t like posting anymore. I find everything very self-congratulatory, which we know, we all know. I just, I’m getting more icky about it. As the kids say, it’s the ick. And what I’ve transferred over into it is this idea of but what if it doesn’t have to be. What if I can promote the episode by actually giving somebody who’s reading this a nugget of information that I found insightful about it that maybe might, might stimulate them. And so, all of it, long story short, is my ability to take this and then think about how I can help others with it is really the spirit of it. And I guess underneath it is this idea that you typically write the books that you want to read. And in this instance I think I’m having the conversations I want to hear and that I’m hoping in that practice other people have been looking for that type of conversation as well.

Minter Dial: Well, personally I’m with you in the selfish gene or element of it, but I always say that the success of any episode is that I had fun. I learned something obviously in the prep, but then in the conversation I also really seek that the other person feels like they had an opportunity to say something that they haven’t already said So, that they can get off soapbox number one and just be themselves, learn something, make their brain go take some notes. And the hat tip to Notebook. Lm speaking of notebooks, that was mind blowing the first time I came across that.

Mitch Joel: I just want to add a sprinkle onto what you’re saying, which is the other side too. I don’t, like I said, I am actually taking notes. You’re saying things. These are interesting tools, ideas, thoughts. Even when I’m thinking of answers, I’m like, that might be an interesting thought. And then you’re jamming on it. That’s the other side too, where I actually want to hear at the end that it was a value to the person I’m interviewing. And so, you know, when I come to something like this as the guest, I’m thinking about that in a more three-dimensional way.

Minter Dial: Sure.

Mitch Joel: Normally I think authors will come on to promote their book. I want them to think that that was fun and time well spent. I want them to then think, oh, I’m going to speak in Montreal, three months, we should have coffee. That to me is black belt level success. Right. Kind of what I’m looking. So, it’s the added sprinkle of also trying to ensure that, that the person feels that it was time well spent for them to be with me.

Minter Dial: Yeah. 100. And the thing I try to do also with books, authors is, is not to have the whole book rattled out.

Mitch Joel: No.

Minter Dial: To sort of be in and around that and then let that be the curiosity. Well, well, well, sir, we have come to an end. Sad as I am, how can people go find the optimistic, even sarcastic, sardonic or whatever, where, where can people track you down? Mitch, what’s the best way to connect? And of course find out about Thinkers 1.

Mitch Joel: Yeah. Dark or, or light. Mitch. Commentary can be found sixpixels.com and also ThinkersOne is thinkers1.com and again, always a pleasure. You and I’ve had a, a long journey together long before the digital channels and it’s been amazing for me to watch the ascent. I remember when there wasn’t six books that you could frame around your picture. So, seeing how you have, have changed and how you think is again, I just always say to my family and my kids, I feel like if, God forbid, something happened to me today, you would be able to open my phone and look at my text messages or my content and be like, he was in good company. So, I appreciate you allowing me to be in good company with you, Minter. Thank you.

Minter Dial: It’s a beautiful thing. Mitch, may we continue! Hasta luego, sir. Merci beaucoup.