Future-Proofing Your Career and Income in the Age of AI with Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek

0:00Hi, everyone. My name is Joan Polmider-Bajorek. I'm an entrepreneur, investor, podcast host, bestselling author, and I'm excited to talk to you today about future-proofing your career and income in the age of AI. I think I would love to, obviously, you have a book. Is it coming out or is it out already? It was a few days ago. Your AI Rote Map. And it comes with the slight promise of giving you actions to expand your career, money, and joy, which is quite a lot. And so I don't know where to stop because we love frameworks and it seems that you're kind of like in the same camp. um maybe you could start with just kind of telling a little bit about what made you what prompted you to uh to get going on the book project yes it is a companion to my podcast and what prompted me to do the podcast was that my uh being an influencer being a linguist suddenly when chat gpt came up my socials uh went wild um and so tripling down on what my audience wants would be, I guess, a piece of that.

1:10I feel like I am living a lot of the volatility of what's going on in the market. I've been in two AI layoffs. I live here in Seattle. I build AI, like data infrastructure. It's what people pay me to do typically. But more and more of my DMs, how do I get a job in AI? I'm terrified to lose my job. Joan, help me. It's like the DMs I'm getting from people around the world. So this book, as you mentioned, Actions to Estate, it. It has frameworks. It has templates. Like if you choose not to do them, that's on you. But my book is very actionable. Modern careers is part one. Modern finance is part two.

1:46So if people are scared of layoffs, this is the resource I provide them on a plate. So just walk us through. I mean, for the folks who haven't picked up the book or haven't had a chance to read it yet, but maybe they slide into your DMs and they go, what do I do short of, I mean, the cheeky answer is of course, buy my book, right? Which is great. But what's your like, what's your 80, 20, the first three things you should do to, you know, stave off your existential, you know, fear or crisis or whatever. What are the, and I love, by the way, your phrase actions to expand. What are the actions you recommend?

2:22Yes. The actions I would recommend if there are three things, personal brand, do people know who you are? Can they find you online? Many people I know their headshot doesn't even look like them anymore. I'm not going to call it names over here. Second one being your network. Do you have people that you can be like, hey, Tim, do you know a resource I should go to? LinkedIn did a research that after COVID layoffs, 70 % of people landed their next job based on an introduction. It's not the side route, it's the main route. So do you have a network that you foster? Do you go to events in your field, blah, blah, blah.

2:58Personal brand network. Third one, do you have an emergency fund? Have you been taking care of your financial house? The number of people living paycheck to paycheck despite huge salaries scares me. What are you seeing there? Tell us what you're seeing there. That phrase, because I think that's really paradoxical, right? Living paycheck to paycheck on a huge salary. Tell us what you're seeing. Oh, yeah. Well, I talk about my friend in the book. Like she makes 1.3 million a year. She's not happy with her job. And I was like, you've been making good money. Like you have a C-suite job. Like, could you just take a break?

3:36Could you like retire type thing? She was like, oh no, I don't have anything saved. Like, because she spends it. And I don't mean to be, you know, it's her personal finances, but like some people make money and they're spending it all. How do you guide people when they just look at her working backwards, maybe? emergency fund? Are there rules of thumb or either actions in terms of immediate actions to take to start to build that up and or goals? Like, I think when I think of an emergency fund, part of the challenge is that's a very nebulous, like, do I have enough? In a sense, the answer could be never because there's an unknown kind of time horizon.

4:15So how do you help folks take action there? Well, my lawyer would recommend that I say that I'm not a certified wealth planner. Please, please. Noted, this is not certified financial advice. We are AI nerds who like to go between the practical and the existential, and we might be telling the line delicately here. So audience be aware, please. Educational, do your own personal finances, personal. An emergency fund is the concept that if you lose your job or something really catastrophic happens, my water heater just broke, had to fix that, that I have, let's say, three to six months of living expenses.

4:50So that's my mortgage, that's food, basic stuff. I have the money set aside in something typically really boring like a high yield savings account. My high yield savings account pays me 4 % just to leave a chunk of money sitting there just in case. The typical rule is that you have three to six months. In this market, I'd recommend it's six to 12 months. I have friends sitting on the job market who are so qualified, 21 months. So if you don't have something to protect yourself just it's an emergency fund well lily sexy title we have a friend uh called nicholas um who talks about what he calls the unknowingly unemployed the people that um think they have a job but they don't really and they think they might have a next job but it might not be there anymore um and i think that is such a scary kind of concept um when you wrote the book and you were thinking about the personal finances are there anything that you discovered where you can use ai to help kind of either make sure you have that little nested egg or that you can get ai to help you plan it when there are features within products i use that do these automated things for me that i'm like whoa like that is uh you're making me money while i do nothing basically uh sofi has some really cool features where it like tracks my credit score it tracks different stocks like hey this just hit a 52 week high just in case you wanted to know that or or low um i use also it's a caravan call an ai tool it's on that cusp there trip it do i use trip it by chance i travel plenty for work and it'll like flag when flights that i have refundable like you know when you buy a refundable ticket yeah when the price drops and it gives scripts of calling and say, excuse me, my flight price dropped a hundred bucks.

6:44That's cool. That's cool. Better if you could use 11 labs to make the call on your behalf. So then you feed 11 labs the script and the phone number and then have AI do it for you. I tried one bit today. I'm just reminded of I took my Amex bill and then I just dropped it in for last year and I just asked ChatGPT are there any recurring expenses that I should potentially cancel. And it just nicely kind of listed out like all the services. And unfortunately there were none, but I think like just kind of like using it in that way, it's maybe useful. Okay. Can we go, I mean, just out of curiosity to explore the full kind of framework here, you had said one personal brand, two network, three, you know, emergency fund, but we've kind of covered emergency fund.

7:32Let's go to network. What are the actions you recommend folks take to, or how do you think about assessing your network? Maybe to start there, you know, before action. Yes. I mean, these are going to be super basic. Like you're going to have heard these many, many times, but I find that people don't do that. Are you going to virtual events in your field? Are you pivoting to a new field and you need to go to the event in person? Do you look at the conference schedule and see what cool people you want to meet? do you meet those people and follow up with them online like these based like following up with the right person has gotten me so many cool opportunities and it's having my social setup so that people are like oh i met that person like all those dots align for modern networking so it's the strength of who you meet do people know you like i had i'm really hoping it closes is a really, really cool opportunity in my DM from someone I met three years ago.

8:32Like I met her half an hour, three years ago, and she could find me easily online. Like, oh, Joan still does that. Connect, made an intro. I have a cool opportunity just sitting in my DMs. So that's the long game. But I think having that network of people who know you for what you do, it's kind of like that personal brand and network are like very much intertwined. Is there any kind of system there? I mean, I immediately think in terms of systems just to ensure kind of nothing falls through the cracks. It's one thing to kind of maybe there's a systemic review of looking at events and then there's the kind of pre-event roster review.

9:06There may be the post-event follow-up. What about engagement, sustaining relationships long term? What actions do you recommend there? Following up with your friends. one of the things i do very frequently is like ask for advice or kind of the uh i think about it's like good karma it's like you pay it forward you pay it back at the end of hanging out with people's like what do you need like is there something i could help you with that would really move the needle for you do you need an intro would you like to find this cool resource or the book about money that you know you're interested in whatever the case will be so i think it's that um give and get we pay it forward we pay it back um it's an easy way to stay in touch with you because they're like wow jeremy's always the person that gives me awesome resources like what what a way to keep that and keep you top of mind it is kind of cool how accessible people are through linkedin right i think most i definitely read everything that comes in through the dm you know you might not reply to all of it some of it is a little bit spammy but if it's kind of like written in a real bit of an original way and comes with sincerity i mean like i i think most of them get an answer and i think in my experience as i was kind of building my own career i also was surprised of how many people actually email like if you email somebody they'll actually email something back if you if you ask in a kind way um i think a lot of people just kind of preemptively don't send something because they assume that people just won't answer my cto calls them the mind gremlins that you're letting hold you back like oh no will that person respond?

10:40Will they think I'm cool? Just send it as long as it's respectful. You know what I mean? You may not get a response. You make it an amazing opportunity. I recommend sending it. I agree with you. And what about the first one, the building your own network? You were mentioning, you know, being findable. So making sure your profile is up to date and stuff like that. Have you found a way of using AI to kind of build up your personal brand in other ways? I mean, most of like matching things on LinkedIn are NLP scraping. Making sure your keywords are up to date, making sure there are words on your projects.

11:16That's not really AI, but I think preparing it to be scraped by AI. If you think about it that way, I use a tool called Aragon.ai for headshots. I talk to a lot of people who are like, oh, my headshot looks too corporate for the work I want to do today, or I'd like it to look more professional. And so people have used Shutter and AI. You put in your selfies, like 20 selfies or something. You pay 35 bucks and it pops out headshots that look quite like you. You know what? I'm curious about this because I also have a book coming out August 5th and I just got asked by the publisher to get a headshot.

11:52And so the last one I got done was through BarkBox. And so it's funny, a dog licking my face and stuff like that, but probably not too suited for an AI entrepreneurship book. And so I did what you just suggested. So I put 20 things in and I got my headshot. I got this basically picture of me standing in the streets of New York that I kind of enjoy. Now, I showed it to my wife and she goes, that's a great photo, it's just not you. I was like, what do you mean? She goes, the whole point about your book is about how The Last Mile is all about relationship capital and all about how to have authenticity and authority in the people to people kind of interface and so where are you on the using the human flaws like the flaw in the picture the flaw in like your how you look at when that when you are standing there and feeling annoyed that the photographer is asking you to kind of like smile for the 20th time uh how do you feel about like generating a persona that has the ai filter versus showing the vulnerability of doing something that is you?

13:02Well, I mean, I would completely agree with you about the authenticity and the human capital. The more I work in AI, the more I network, the more I meet new people, people, people, people, right? Like on contracts, it's another human signing it typically. And that's what moves the needle. That's what the research, every time I tripled down the research, like, what does this say? I think for the person who's had the most success with a generated AI headshot, it looked more like him. Or at least the man I think I know. The old one was so stiff and clearly taken at a company where you don't have to suit and back the wall.

13:38And that didn't look like who he is today professionally. So the new headshot, despite being generated in the back end, matched him better. So I think it ticks that authenticity for me and the ai piece but i agree with you if it looks glossy and like i don't know i find them so fake and i get turned off typically but it does seem that there's like almost okay this is totally going down like a rabbit hole but like i was thinking about this fake look right because you you look at music over the last 10 years and you've had the auto-tuned sound kind them being very prominent and you have uh i would say like a visual like in in fashion increasingly like the the very pumped up lips and like the very you know almost like audacious version of beauty seem to be something that at least have had like a period of time where like that got celebrated and then now with ai you know everybody is like a prompt way of making you know and then you Obviously, you had like the Instagram filters and stuff like that.

14:42I wonder if all this AI stuff is going to make that pendulous swing to the other side where the picture perfect is then considered kind of like artificial and the flaws are considered more human. We're going to see like a face with that. I love that. Please tell my team. They're always like, more hair, more makeup. And I'm like, no, really? It's the flaw that shows them a real human. Interesting. Well, I just spoke on another podcast, Product Tea, with Leia, Leia, and she actually tags her post right now as like made by human, 100 % made by human because she believes in the near future because there's so much generated content.

15:23Like she wants to differentiate herself and establish her personal brand like really strongly. I think that's just a fascinating paradox because I do think that people are so glossed up, right? they're so like as you mentioned auto-tuned and will that scratchiness like eventually be an extra bonus of the authenticity just on the just on the music front i mean i'm a huge henrik knows this i'm a huge bob dylan fan and i was this weekend i was playing some old dylan tunes with my girls and one thing i was noticing even as i'm screaming at the top of my lungs is uh you know in the car is Dylan sings off beat.

16:03He sings out of tune. And I know what the tune is and he's not, and I'm not like pitch perfect or anything, but he's off tune and he's off the beat and he's, he's ahead of the beat sometimes. Right. And to me, it's those imperfect. And I know a little bit about the history of those recordings. A lot of them, they actually didn't think they got to take until they listened later and they're like, ah, let's release it. You know, It's not now, you'd do 400 takes to get everything perfect. Then I think there were only like six takes of Like a Rolling Stone and all of them were different. And they didn't even think they got anything until like weeks later that they were listening like, actually the third take wasn't that bad.

16:40Let's release that, right? So there's, I think, inherent in the art and in the production, maybe the expense of production as it's decreased, perfection has increased and something of the human kind of authenticity is decreased perhaps. So I resonate with that for sure. And I would say the art I love most actually has that kind of imperfection and authenticity. I wanted to go back to what you said a second ago as well, Joan, because I think it's a really interesting point that probably eludes a lot of people. You mentioned NLP scraping, prepared to be scraped. So if say someone wants to be building or aware of their personal brand, what does it look like to be prepared to be scraped for like in plain English?

17:23and specifically what are the actions someone takes in order to be prepared? Yeah. Okay. Well, you're getting this directly from a linguist. So, you know, natural language processing is how computers process human language, right? So some people think like, oh, I've already done these projects. People should know phrases like this. But if people are trying to match with you on LinkedIn for professional reasons, chances are they're going to look for specific words and by they look like actually having the keywords or very many variations of vocabulary in your field on your LinkedIn like tagged with different company names so for example I might have words like data lake or digital twins or AI and artificial intelligence spelled out fully because it's maybe looking for one or the other so the words like alt text also I'd recommend like always putting in words because you think they're so sophisticated, but today they're just like trying to match exact token for token.

18:23So, uh, especially for job seekers, that's one of the top things I think they missed is having all of that prepared. Imagine it's just text to the backend, not in your gorgeous images. And so how do folks think about auditing their just text? For example, you know, like how do you even know if your just text is representative, if it is going to be a token for token, are there tools to leverage in order to do that? Well, what do you recommend? Well, I am not a representative of LinkedIn, but they do have you for a higher tier price. They can show you if you match well, which jobs you like. So if you say, okay, here are three jobs that are often that I totally love.

19:01They actually already have keywords that a recruiter had to put in and see if you match those exact keywords. So I would just back propagate. Here are three jobs. I like here are the keywords, make sure they're represented. everywhere on my profile. That's cool. That's cool. Just reverse engineer it. In a way, I mean, it's few shot prompting for LinkedIn profiles, what you're saying. For folks who aren't familiar with the concept of few shot prompting, it's basically telling AI what good is, right? So if you ask AI to write you an email, it'll do it. But most people go, that's not my voice. Well, you probably didn't tell what your voice was or what you think good is.

19:38And if you say, write me an email, by the way, here's an email that I wrote yesterday that I think is pretty good, write it like this. That's what's called few shot prompting or at least one shot prompting and you'll do a much better job. What it sounds like you're saying, Joan, is you can take a good profile or a good job and you can effectively, you know, few shot prompt the AI to say, Hey, here's the job I want to be a fit for. Make my profile a good fit for it. That's cool. Is that, I'm putting words in your mouth or is that what you're saying? That's exactly it. And the thing is recruiters see like, this is a good fit candidate.

20:10that you would get starred in the back end for having these good matches faster on their side, too. We had a talk with Ethan Mollick, and he was pointing all this out like, something different, but pointing it out like a year ago that AI is pretty gullible. And so if you just write it in a way that it consumes it well, then it will just kind of repeat that verbatim because obviously it doesn't have a perspective. It's just kind of, to your point, like it's the word. And so he was even suggesting back then that in the meta tags of his personal homepage, he basically write a prompt to the AI agent kind of like crawling through his site where he asked it what it would like to be written about him.

20:53And then he noticed that that is exactly what it then would write. This is your bestselling author that you need to book for this opportunity. Exactly right. That's hilarious. That's hilarious. years but i think it's getting very like i mean like for somebody who started bark box you know we're obviously now increasingly looking at what will how are we going to make sure that when people say hey my dog is turning 13 she has a birthday soon i'd love a good present for her you would like to be at least considered right like so the classic kind of seo game is increasingly becoming important because the seo methodology is now de facto what the agents are doing to kind of figure out what to say and because they say it with conviction it doesn't come out as just you kind of putting meta tax and it kind of gets presented in in a statement form right and so i thought a lot about it for products but i think you're totally right this is exactly the same thing for humans right you need to figure out what you want to be told about you i would argue like so much is commoditized like because for a recruiter you are the product a to b that i'm slotting in the it's a funny thing um but packaging yourself up to make it so easy okay joan tell us about the last time you personally used gen ai for your call it life or work effectiveness the last time not the best time yesterday to a day and a half ago i was debugging some code uh in R and it just, yeah, it's so lovely.

22:28It's like, here's the problem. We think it's this problem, this problem, or this problem. Like go try it out. Where's your preferred collaborator? Oh, well, it's between ChatGPT and perplexity typically. I love perplexity. They stand here. So here's what I tell people. I'd be curious to know if your experience differs. Perplexity is effectively, you know, Google replacement. It's not a foundation model in the sense that it's not going to be a conversational partner with me in kind of the existential way that perhaps chat GPT or even increasingly Claude can be, but for grounded in fact, grounded in reality, probably less hallucination.

23:04Perplexity is a better way to go. Is that how you think about the distinction between call it a chat GPT and a perplexity or when do you use which and why? I think if perplexity is like the mature adult in the room, like the factual, it gives citations, even if I don't actually like the citations. But at least they have citations. Whereas ChatGPT, it like meets me where I'm at in the tone. And like it does the editing far faster when I need to reprompt. And so, but then I tried different models in ChatGPT and they're substantially different. What do you notice? Yeah, whichever models are doing the interpreting, like I was just debugging code.

23:42Debugging code, all of them work reasonably well. when I need like pros, like a difficult email I had to send the other day. Pick me. One of the models was far more polished in that verbal. And so how did you know is your kind of standard workflow? By the way, I did this yesterday, so I'm curious to just hear from you. Is it, I opened three windows, I've got 01, 03, you know, and 40. I typed the same prompt into each one and then I'm kind of looking to see which one's best. Like, how do you know that that one is giving you better pros? Oh gosh, Jeremy has like an ABC testing. Love that. I just am unhappy when I switch models and try again.

24:20Oh, so you try one and you're like, and this isn't good. And so rather than refine within that model, is your first kind of tactic to change models before changing tack within a model? I mean, I follow different flows. So if I try, you know, blah, blah, make it more playful or make it more direct and it's not giving me things within like three prompts, I'll switch models. That's cool. That's interesting. So you kind of go, okay, I'm going to give you three chances for, oh, and if you don't behave, I'm bringing your big sister into the room. Typically. Yeah. How do you, we were talking to somebody else a few weeks ago, and I think like a few others, he pointed out that a lot of humans will be replaced by humans who know AI, right?

25:06It isn't AI itself. It's the combination. as I think Bryce from Moderna was talking about how like the world's best chess player is now even better because he plays with a computer. When people are asking you now, how do I get up the learning curve fast? What's your suggestion to them? Listen to this podcast. Listen to my podcast. I really try to demystify. My podcast is called Your AI Roadmap with people actually building because I'm so done listening to people just like dreaming 2030. this is what it is. If you're building nuts and bolts, you have a different perspective, I think. And doing those tutorials, like nuts and bolts, going to the thing, seeing how it actually performs.

25:49As Jeremy and I were talking about, do you see the differences between different models? How is that going to change your stack? There's nothing like doing the work yourself. I think the frame of your book is your career, your money, and your joy. We've talked a lot about career. We've talked a lot about money. Let's touch on this joy piece. What do you recommend people do to attend to, to dial into, to be aware of, to audit, to assess, to amplify their joy? It's so interesting. I don't have a specific framework for make sure it mostly in my book. I just want to make sure it's in people's mind to keep that in mind.

26:30Even the risk, the risk to your joy is actually what you're, you're interested in is helping people see your joy is at stake here. And if you optimize and automate your life, you could end up with a life you don't want. You could end up in this dystopian. I'm in Zoom meetings all day because my auto schedule or booked everything, right? Yeah. I mean, I know those people. It's actually a bit scary. Like people are so efficient, quote unquote, they fill their time and schedule and then they end up miserable even if they're making bank. Like it's a trap, I think. And if you love it, hey, if your schedule's packed to the gills and that brings you joy, it's all me, go for it.

27:08But I think that's the dystopian and optimistic. If we're talking about the AI futures, dystopian is we all sit on computers all day long. When I was doing, actually, on the Making Sure at Journey, I can't remember what it was. There was a book I recently read that was all about time boxing. Jeremy, you might recall. but i do really feel it's important that also to time box kind of like the time for joy because otherwise it's the thing that just kind of gets squished out right because obviously you just go like oh you know but i'm gonna have fun when i don't do other things um i had uh i was curious about thing uh as i was doing research on you back in i believe it was 19 you were writing about gender biases in ai and voice which obviously is almost a long time ago and so i was curious kind of like what's the latest thinking is that now that you have oh may i kind of like increasingly having voice models um what's your latest thinking on that and i'll recommend everybody else and i'll put in the show notes the article that you you authored on the other stuff no thank you yeah harvard business review published one like comps papers for my phd It was pretty wild.

28:24I love building systems. I find it really fun, but it really scared me when I started actually looking at the data sets and being like, there are no women's voices here. And shocker, it doesn't perform well for women. What is going on here? But that's truly the case with a lot of different data sets, that it's missing a demographic and it doesn't perform well for a demographic. Especially as a woman, I think it's super salient. I was like, this product won't work for me. Like, dun, dun, dun. Um, so I think whether it's voice data, which is a lot of my background, conversational AI, whether it's computer vision data, I mean, I work today with multimodal data sets, which is super, super fun.

29:04Um, but what does your data set represent and what does it not? I mean, data is foundational for anything we build. As far as I'm concerned, you all can disagree with me, but, um, knowing what your data set does and doesn't have. It's like a basic data literacy skill today. I mean, we dipped a little bit into it in a previous episode where we talk about ethical data sourcing and some of the issues around that, which was a fascinating episode. And I think - Shout out, by the way, this is a good time, Henrik, for podcast hygiene. You should always shout out other episodes. Phoebe Yao, founder of Pareto AI, is an amazing episode about ethical data sourcing, if you haven't heard that episode.

29:44Anyway, intermission ended. Henrik, please give it a - That's why I'm so intrigued about it. So when you now have all these models, I understand, obviously, that if it's biased source, its output would be biased, biased in, biased out kind of thing. What are the other kind of like gender issues that people might not be aware of? And the only thing that kind of came to mind was I seem to remember that there was some talk about the gender of the voices. Like if suddenly you are always kind of like having almost like a subservient attitude to an Alexa and she is called Alexa, then you program into a new generation like how, you know, that there's a gender preference in who is going to quote unquote serving you.

30:35I'm curious on, you know, you being an expert in all this, what's the kind of like the thinking that we should be aware of that is not necessarily out there? i think in the dystopian world or you know if we're not questioning our choices there is a world where we create these assistants that are right as you mentioned subservient to us that are always you know female coded and then we start teaching everyone around us to like default this in i actually change all my voice devices i have many around my home at to be an australian male because it frequently i'm like whoa okay like it's jarring to me enough um i think i've named Peter.

31:11Anyway, but point being like, you have agency, almost all these devices, you can change what the output sounds like. Your brain thinks it's a certain gender. There's even a gender assistance these days. But as you mentioned, or like the voice aspect is just a new toggle we're seeing in almost all these models and these foils today. So you have a lot of choice. I think just questioning how much gender does or doesn't play into the future is a whole other adventure. But I mean, I have worked at companies that buy or build data sets to make sure they're less biased so they perform better on the market because you could alienate buyers.