Proof of Craft: What It Takes to Stand Out When Everything Looks Good - with Laura Jones, CMO of Instacart

27:41I think it's very dangerous when it's just you and a bot because it's just it's it's complacency. Right. But I think we all as humans have a desire to connect and to please and maybe even a competitive streak in there sometimes or a collaborative vibe. I always feel like my best ideas come from an old school, d-school style jam, you know, ideally in person, ideally with some post-it notes. But even even on a Zoom, just like truly building off of other human ideas and challenging each other, I think, is is probably a path to more originality than that kind of, you know, bot zone. Not to say that like that can't be complimentary.

28:25And I think that that can, again, free up some space or get you to a really good starting place of like, OK, here's some inputs that you may come in prepared with. But I think the best ideas will come from the collaboration of human plus bot plus human. OK, so you're leading me to think about a case study. it might be cool just to unpack your super bowl ad i thought it was so fantastic i mean absolutely i watched it on repeat like watching ben stiller do a back clip into it's just so i can't i'm sure you're on set i'm sure i had to be hysterical but if you could maybe do just like a play-by-play of the development of the idea as i i think it can be interesting as a case study where does ai come in?

29:15Where does where do human weirdness come in? What's serendipitous on set? Is that something that would be cool? Just kind of walk us through a case and take as a given. It's an exceptional piece. If you haven't seen it, you should actually pause and go watch on YouTube real quick and then come back. It's like, let's let's unpack it. Yeah. Go watch the long form two minutes and 30 seconds of Spike Jones's personal faves. But yeah, I think the Super Bowl is such a good example in its complete non-linearity. I mean, every, especially Super Bowl ads where it's such a high investment level, if I think about either last year or this year, totally non-linear journeys.

29:52We could have never predicted where we entered and every decision built on the prior decision, a lot of one-way doors and, you know, a lot of fear along the way that like, ooh, I hope we're on the right path because at some points like the end state isn't completely obvious. And so it's a, you know, requires a bit of belief in the process itself. And yeah, we always say trust the process. You've been hearing that since we were students in 2007. Trust the process. Yeah, I think anytime we're doing something truly creative, you have to because it involves taking risks and involves going somewhere that is not obvious if you're seeking something that's truly novel.

30:31And so I've always felt like if you can kind of already envision how it ends or what it's going to look like, what's the point? You know, it's kind of been all by definition if it's that predictable. So a lot of our work is very different, breaks the mold. And I think it's because we support each other in taking creative risks and we do trust the process. So for people who aren't familiar with non-linear, because you say that and Henrik and I go, sure, sure, sure, next thing. But there are people going, wait, what is a non-linear process like? Can you give us a couple examples of maybe going backwards or sideways rather than forwards?

31:06So many. I mean, the number of different iterations that this idea took would be mind-blowing. I mean, this could have ended in a completely different place with a completely different cast of characters, a completely different concept at its core. The way that we briefed it, the way that the first pitch came in would be completely unrecognizable relative to the end concept. And I think that's just, again, inherently part of the creative process. You know, you think about, OK, maybe it's a story about finding the perfect slice of ham. Oh, no, wait, maybe it's about bananas. Maybe it's about avocados.

31:42Like, I mean, the number of iterations that this thing took was kind of mind boggling. But in the end, as I said, we always ground ourselves in customer insights. And a big unlock for us was our most delivered item is the humble banana. We've delivered over 1.8 billion bananas. and we saw real observed consumer behavior that 32 million of those orders had shopper notes. So people were like typing out, oh, I want my banana with little brown spots and making banana bread in two days or I want it slightly green because that's how I prefer it. So if you think about the time and energy that was going into this, we realized that this was this kind of unmet need of people wanting to know that their banana would be exactly right.

32:24And when we look at the category itself, Well, there is a big barrier around, can someone else get my order exactly right? And this goes to all the things we're talking about, the importance of what you put on the table, what you put in your body. So we had this realization that we could address this barrier of, you know, can someone else pick the perfectly marbled meat? Can they pick my perfect banana and really use the banana as a kind of emblem of our commitment to quality? so we got the product team to partner to build the preference picker which now works for bananas it works for avocado it works for deli meat thickness and more to come but it enables you to express preferences in a much simpler way than having to type out exactly what you want on a tiny little keyboard and and then we thought you know okay let's we have this moment to get in front of the largest audience 125 million americans like let's have the audacity to make a super bowl out about bananas and let's do it in a way that's bananas and then from there musical comedy or ben stiller benson boone spike jones robbie blue you know just get it all in the mix and it ended up being something that i think we can all agree is pretty distinct i'm not sure you've ever seen an ad that looks like that before we shot it on kind of the vintage tube cameras that spike Jones used to shoot his skate videos on and ran it in a 4-3 ratio.

33:49So it didn't even fill up the HDTV and wasn't in HD. And I think we kind of broke the mold and it generated a lot of attention, a lot of conversation and a lot of banana sales. So we're happy.

34:01Laura Jones:How do you, when you have to do something original, you have to take a bit of a chance, right? You have to take a risk because otherwise it is averaged by an almost perfect definition. Where do you find the courage, I guess, to, because your kind of head is on the block. You have to go into a lot of people who I'm sure are going to go like, sure. And often I would imagine, at least that's how it is as an entrepreneur. You have to go, this is going to crush it. But inside you probably go like, I don't know. Where do you find that kind of courage? I think two ways that I've channeled courage. I think one is just working up to it.

34:41We've been at this now for almost five years of doing full funnel marketing and, you know, started with our first television ad, our first brand campaign, the first time we ever worked with a celebrity, the first time we bought premium media in the Olympics two years ago, and each time taking a slightly larger bet, really looking at the metrics, making sure it paid off so that when I had to go two years ago to our CFO and CEO and say, hey, I think we're ready to make a super well. And frankly, I think we have to because our competitions all there. I did feel we had enough reps and enough data and proof points to suggest to show that this was the right choice.

35:14But that's just the cost of entry. That's just getting to yes. And then it's like even scarier staring at a blank canvas, you know, like 30 seconds, a very expensive 30 seconds. And then how do you tell a really compelling story? And I think the way that we get confidence there is just the team and the, you know, my incredible ECD, my incredible VP of Consumer. All of us have worked together now for almost five years. Actually, my VP of Consumer a decade because she and I came from Uber together. So we just have a lot of trust. We have a shared ambition. We're all competitive. We all strive for greatness.

35:51We all want to make work that we're going to be so proud of. And, you know, with Super Bowl, everyone you've ever met in your life pretty much is going to see the work. Your second grade teacher, your uncle, your best friend, anyone you've met for the most part. Again, if you grew up in America, most people watch the Super Bowl. And so everyone's going to see it. Everyone's going to have opinions. And I think all of us just wanting so badly to do our best to put something out there that we all feel wildly proud of that makes us laugh and smile is kind of the driving force and just knowing that we're going to hold each other to account.

36:29And kind of to your point of like the bot not letting you say yes, Like we kind of challenge each other. And there were so many moments throughout where we're like, oh, we could do this slightly safer concept. And it would probably be like a B, B plus. And we say, no, no. And we do this to each other. And we're not going to do that. We're swinging for the fences. And it's funny, my mentor, when I kind of told him about the concept we were working on, he goes, well, you're either going to make the best Super Bowl out of the worst. And I said, you know what, that feels like the right space to be in right now.

37:01Okay. But even that, even mentor, if I go back to Henry's question around summoning courage, sounds like you've got a community of support around you to be able to pull it off. Are there any moments in particular, I'm looking at my very handmade, you know, analog notes. I wrote totally nonlinear and then fear and then belief. Those are, those are five words that you said, right? Was there a particular moment that you felt that sense of during the midst of the non-linearity, that sense of fear? And what did you do in that moment? Yes, I think it's probably an under-discussed part of any creative field is the fear.

37:40And we, especially this year, we were kind of saying, oh, it's our sophomore, it's our sophomore album, right? Like the first year we really struck gold and felt so proud of what we put out there and it just worked so well for the business. And then this year we said, oh, well, if we're going to do it again, we have to top it. I mean, literally, because we're going to comp last year's Super So we actually have to do better both objectively and subjectively. Otherwise, like it's kind of a negative comp for the business. So it was a lot of pressure. And again, I think we all support each other. Everyone has different ways of dealing with that pressure.

38:13And I think, again, you have to assemble the right team that can lift each other up in different moments. And I think I tend to be a bit of the challenger, the pusher, but I also I also live in in the stress of it. And then we have other people in the team that are more of the calm, even keeled folks. And I think it's that chemistry of finding the right mix of people where you are pushing each other, but holding the center. You are striving for greatness, but making sure that, you know, all the details are covered. Like it's it really does come down to having the right mix of folks when you get into the challenge.

38:53So much else of our job, so many other parts of our job are so purely scientific, replicable, predictable, very math based. The rest of the job is almost entirely linear, which is which is great. And then this is the piece that kind of challenges you to break free of that. And, you know, I think I value that this team is capable of both. And I'm super grateful that I have a job that lets me do both. I think if I were in just a purely linear world, the part of me that the D school really connected with would would miss that ability to take risks and to have that extreme payoff that when you've made something great as a team, something greater than you could have made alone and something that hopefully makes people feel something, even if that feeling is some laughter.

39:43and some feelings of, you know, just kind of joy in the moment.

39:48Laura Jones:Can I ask a question on the productization of marketing? So when you were talking about the features that you created for the banana, I couldn't help thinking about another marketeer, Jeff Benjamin, that we had on the podcast from now Tom Priss, but he was at Crispin Porter at the time, where they came up with the pizza tracker. For Domino's. For Domino's. And that became this kind of like, I think, iconic productization of the promise that the brand was trying to deliver. Right. And you're expressing the same thing. Do you think that there is going to be a closer kind of like marriage between product and brand as more of the experience will have to be personalized and more maybe even kind of experienced through other avenues than a website that you can control?

40:38Yes, I think the best brands out there really treat product and brand as two sides of the same coin. I think they view them as one and the same because if you're doing it right, they should both be based off of insight. So the mentor and coach I referenced earlier is Jonathan Mildenhall, who was the CMO of Airbnb at the time when they came up with Belong Anywhere. He's currently the CMO at Rocket and, you know, one of the best marketers in the world. And Airbnb for me has always been this kind of iconic example of when they came up with Belong Anywhere, it wasn't just marketing copy that they put on an ad.

41:16It really, it opened up this idea of experiences and this kind of articulation of what was amazing about Airbnb, which was the ability to integrate into kind of a local neighborhood and to really feel like a local.

41:29Laura Jones:I also remember apparently Ever Little Helps, which is Tesco's in the UK slogan, started as being an internal slogan before it became an external slogan, to your point, right? Yeah, totally. And I think if you look at, you know, the Apple, Airbnb, these great brands, these great enduring companies that have amazing products and a ton of brand love, it's because those teams work in a really inextricable manner. And it's something that I always really look for. I mean, when I joined Uber, I actually sat initially on the team because I was in product marketing and we were hired into the product team.

42:04And then eventually when we got our first CMO, moved over to marketing. But I sat on both the product and marketing leadership teams there. And that was such a big unlock for us because we were able to really shape the product, get surfaces in the product that enabled us to do marketing. We were able to influence what products got built. And same thing at Instacart. you know, I think that the product marketing relationship is the most important one. I mean, CMO, CFO also important, but you know, the, the head of product and the head of marketing, I think if they are sharing the same insights and working together seamlessly, that's how you get really great innovative products.

42:45That's how you get to a brand that is an authentic brand that is manifest through the product. And I think to your point, in a world where functionality can easily be commodified, we're all going to have to be in a bit of an insights arms race and really trying to get out there and figuring out like, how can we create something unique, something that makes our audience feel connected to us using all the tools at our disposal. all. Do you think about, um, or think about the next feature? You've got insights right now, probably in the hopper, similar to the meat marbleization or the deli meat, you know, thinness or whatever, right?

43:27Those are, it sounds like if I understand correctly, those were marketing insights that then get manifested in the product. What are the mechanisms just between you and product that enable that kind of bubbling up of discovery and then the collaboration and brainstorming, how does it actually work operationally or practically? Yeah. Well, I'll say it wasn't a marketing insight per se. It was just an insight. I don't believe in the distinction between a marketing insight and a product insight. I believe it. You know, that one came from literally looking at the product itself and looking at where were we seeing shopper notes, where were we seeing complaints?

44:01I mean, so much when you have a product that's operating at a scale that we're operating at, so much is revealed through the product itself. And you could have an entire roadmap that's literally just based on looking at like support tickets and the way people are using it, the hacks that they're coming up with, the places where you've made something hard for them that could be easier, looking at, you know, the flow and where people are spending time and realizing any place someone's spending time is an opportunity to either reduce friction or delight them more. And then as well, zooming out of the product.

44:35I mean, those are kind of the obvious low hanging fruits. And that's certainly where all of the preference picker ideation came from was observed behavior. But zooming out, you can then, you know, I always love that kind of exercise we used to do in the D school that was kind of like 10X. It was like zooming in 10X and zooming out 10X. Charles and Ray Eames kind of started that. So if you've zoomed in 10X to like, you know, the support tickets, then you might need to zoom out 10X and think about, okay, well, like who are our customers? Where do they live? Who are the people that should be our customers that are not?

45:07What is going on in their lives? What are some of the contextual elements that are, what are the forces that are weighing on them? What role can we play as a product, as a brand? So I think that's the other place that I see insight. So if you zoom in 10x, you can find a bunch of insights inside your own product. If you zoom out 10x, you can find a bunch of insights in the lives of your customer. And then I think our job as product marketing and design team is to talk about those things and to come together and talk about where are there really interesting unmet needs? How could our product evolve?

45:43How do we differentiate from the competition? That's something I think a lot about of like, I don't want to just copy and create something that can be copied. I think there's too much of that in tech. I would like to do something that's really unique to our customer, to our data, to our use case and do something a bit unexpected just in the way that, you know, the creative concept we came up with for Super Bowl is a little bit out of left field. I also strive to do that in partnership with product and design to think about, well, what are things we can do that would be really delightful and are more unique to us?

46:18And then go down that same path of let's try things, let's iterate, let's prototype. And by the way, prototyping has gotten, like this is where AI really gets interesting. I mean, the ability - Say more. ... to test things, to build prototypes, to get feedback, to try it yourself. That I'd say is like of all the things that I can do, that one I'm actually like probably the most excited about because it takes away the barrier of needing to have very advanced coding skills or needing to invest an entire cycle in building a prototype. You can get feedback on ideas a lot faster and it just speeds up the innovation cycle.

46:57And again, it's no substitute for insights. You're kind of multiply around zero analogy. You still need an insight. You still need to have an idea of what you might want to build. But then the ability, the speed to build it, to test it, to get feedback is a lot quicker. And I think in some ways, maybe then you get more shots on goal, maybe you have a few more flops, but hopefully in your bell curve analogy, you also have a few more really great ideas that come out of it as well. Yeah, that's huge. Yeah, we talked to another Stanford alum, John Waldman. I think he was after us at the GSB. He came through the entrepreneurship program at the D School.

47:30And he's the CEO of Homebase, which serves small and medium-sized businesses. And he talked about how their whole product development process has totally shifted from he used to be, you know, it was responsible of him as a CEO to be reading these 20-page PRDs. And every product, you know, roadmap review is a bunch of 20-page PRDs. And he said, now everything's a clickable, lovable prototype. And we're spending way more time in the field with actual business owners with clickable prototypes. It's actually faster to get in the field with a coffee shop owner than to write the PRD before, right? Which is just a total acceleration to your point of ideation.

48:06Then you're seeing the same in marketing is what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. I think we're seeing the ability, just no matter what kind of idea you have, the ability to express it and test it faster. Was there any interesting intersection between AI and the Super Bowl ad? Like at any point, is your team testing, et cetera? Yeah, so exactly what I said. The ability to test an idea faster, so whether it's storyboarding or when we were playing around with the song, which was a whole thing, you know, all of that was made so much faster and easier with AI. But then when it came time to shoot, we shot it all practically.

48:48We, as I said, shot it on vintage cameras on film. So for this specific ad, we used AI only in the concepting and ideation phase. And all the craft was done with the human care that we feel is emblematic of what we put into our orders. And in the future, I think it will be a combination. I think there'll be some assets that make sense to be highly localized, highly personalized. And absolutely, we are already using AI for those kinds of assets where, you know, I want to put the exact right product in front of you, Jeremy. me. So I'm going to use AI to know exactly, you know, how to make that ad the most appealing as possible.

49:30But then there's also going to be moments that are maybe these mass viewing moments or places where storytelling and human craft and care is super important, whether Super Bowl or holiday, we did actually stop motion where we actually handcrafted these little characters and did the whole thing. And in a way, I think those those become they stand out a bit more in a world where there's so much, I'm not going to call it slop, but just high volume generative content. I think those moments of like actually doing craft and then frankly having proof of craft, we also, you know, in both cases, released behind the scenes footage that showed how we made it.

50:05I think there's interest and value to that and that helps you stand out in a world where things are increasingly. Proof of craft is a really interesting phrase. I haven't heard that before. Is that on me though? Can you just give another double click on proof of craft? I don't know if I heard that somewhere. I made that up, but we talk about it a lot internally. Proof of craft is showing that you made it, showing how you made it. So I'll take in the case of our holiday ad. I don't know if you know of the like Rankin Bass is the little, you know, the like old school Rudolph movies, you know, made by Rankin Bass.

50:41And we thought, man, these are so nostalgic and iconic. What if we took some inspiration here and crafted some Instacart specific characters, my favorite of which was the polar bear? And I envisioned a world that occurred within within the Instacart bag, this idea of like you place an order, you crash zoom into the app and have this kind of Santa's workshop of little characters and then kind of come out through the bag with the order perfectly crafted. And so this was like the stories we were envisioning of like what happens in this magical world where these orders are getting crafted. and so we created all these little characters shot it all in stop motion and then we released it behind the scenes showing the people who made the character showing how we shot it and that is proof of craft same thing with super bowl we had spike jones we shot an entire obviously we had the long form then we even longer behind the scenes film which is also really hilarious and it shows everything it shows the spent doubles doing the crashes the flip crashes it shows spike on stage with Ben and Benson and it shows that like this was all made and we shot it in LA and we shot it you know in in a way that respects the craft of this industry and invest back in in that creative craft which we believe it there you know the thought that's coming in my mind right now Henrik and I talk a lot about this idea of conviction and it sounds like there is real value in the handcrafted, in the artisanal product of the final output.

52:13One way to think about the value of AI, perhaps in this case, again, this is stated as a statement, but it's meant to be a question, is it speed to conviction? Yeah, totally. AI can accelerate the conviction with which we get behind the two cameras going, we're pretty sure this is worth devoting these resources in this way. Is that a bare assessment? Totally. It's the same thing, again, whether you're making an ad or building a product. It's about getting, yes, getting that data back faster, knowing this is worth doing and then doing it in whatever way makes most sense. The same, like it might have been that we went through this whole process and we said, we have to make this entire ad with AI.

52:52And that could have been a very valid outcome, which is it wasn't the case in these scenarios. But I agree. I think it's about getting to a place where you feel good about the resource investment. And then I still think there's just huge value in just saying, like, what's the right tool for the job and the right tool for the job might be hand crafting a tiny little figurine or it might be uh unleashing the box but you gotta get to that point where you know what it is

53:15Laura Jones:this is awesome you know like i'm sitting here and feeling like uh i'm having a the d school conversation played out in front of me which is like incredible come on jeremy did you see the super bowl at if you're really being honest a hundred percent honest and i watched it multiple times i love that i love that super bowl it reminded it reminded me of uh zoolander kind of like the zoolander side of vince tiller and it's just like it was so perfect you know like in full disclosure i was part of the the crew that helped build row that also had a super bowl ad and the founder saman wrote this quite cool very very long post about basically the argument of why it makes a thousand percent sense to make these super bowls at specifically now where basically everything is so commoditized this is still one of the only places where you put something out and you're sure hundreds of millions of people go and watch it it's just worth a read yeah maybe we link it in the show notes that'd be cool yeah so what was some of your main takeaways you know i so laura and i've known each other we were in business school together so we've known each other now nearly 20 years and i've had the as as we even talked about i've had the privilege of working with her team a few times.

54:28I think that her emphasis on cultivating the creativity of the team is so important as a differentiator. And to recognize that the safety and the courage and the risk-taking that she enables on her team is what leads to exceptional product. I very much subscribe to that belief that that's that the creative ability of the individuals that you choose to recruit and assemble will be a differentiator or is presently a differentiator. Right. I'm very much a subscriber to that. Do you want to take the opposite of that? Or do you do you also agree? I'm just thinking about your AI advice to us recently to disagree more.

55:13So I'm trying to figure out whether I can poke you into disagreeing.

55:15Laura Jones:I mean, like, I, uh, no, unfortunately I had that one is tough to disagree because I do think that originality is going to be the thing that's going to set us apart of humans, right? If you can say something that is, you know, makes sense, quote on, quote on, like then it's, it's unlikely that the model won't kind of just tell that to you. Right. And so, you know, the, when she was talking about, like, if you, I was asking the question as I'm obsessed about these days, which is what will you do if you got 60 % of your time back? It did resonate a lot with me that trying to get out more and connect with the world.

55:51Laura Jones:And I realized a lot of the world now is online. So getting out of the office might get onto Reddit, but really try to understand what is the undercurrent of culture, I think will be very important for our marketeer. And finding ways of getting input so that you can have more original output is also going to be important. I mean, I think for a lot of us, when we go to a museum or go to a gallery or an art exhibition, we get all these ideas because suddenly somebody is giving us something which is not the standard. And so I'll find something else to vividly disagree with you on, but it's not going to be that one.

56:31Well, here's one that I'd be curious to get your take on. Proof of craft. she mentioned there that they actually they create b-roll to be able to demonstrate or prove that they actually made it do you think that's important in this day i was i was kind of going back and

56:48Laura Jones:forth as i was listening yeah i think for a lot of people there is this very aggressive stand against ai and you know i can see that for brands that i'm involved in when they put something out some of the comments will be, yeah, you know, this is just AI and why is this not really? I will counter that because, for example, at Bark, we did a AI-generated clay animation and it's a beautiful piece of work and it is very original and the characters inside are very thought through. Now, they're all AI-generated, but what obviously is sometimes lost in that discussion is that there was a person sitting there and generating all these ones.

57:31there was a person there's still there's still craft there's still craft it's just a different it's probably less compelling like the proof of craft when you're filming somebody at a keyboard prompting an ai it doesn't feel like it's less craftsman than like the the construction paper

57:45Laura Jones:and the scissors you know and i i'm reminded of this beautiful documentary which i encourage you over to see which is about disney and there is this there it's like six episodes but one of the episodes is about the entry of of cgi and what they were doing at the time was they didn't know if cgi would be kind of advanced enough and so they had these puppeteers and these world kind of amazing puppeteers sitting and working at the same time and this one guy who i can't remember what it's called but appear in documentary was kind of the rebel that did something doing at night to create a little demo of what the cgi could do and then i get goosebumps just thinking about it and then he shows it at the big screen at a screening and i think as i recall also a little bit like was not really allowed to do and the world's best puppeteer the person that was kind of hired to do this job said and i quote and i realized i was the dinosaur now and so there's this moment where even the craftman realized that the CGI, the sort of the technology have eclipsed what they're able to do.

58:57Yeah. Yeah. The challenge is it's maybe, I'm just, I'm riffing with you right now. It's proof to whom, if I go back to this idea of proof of craft, proof to whom. And there are, to your point, there are audience members who have a vested interest in, and I need it to be proven that this was made by hand. And I think to those people, proof of craft is necessary to people who don't need that proof. No proof is necessary. Or to people who would be compelled if they could just see the conversation history with Claude that co-developed the idea that would be sufficient proof, right? Where the human is steering and reacting.

59:36And as you said, not always just saying yes, but I think the question actually is what constitutes proof and what is, what are we trying to prove. And I actually, I saw a really interesting study recently, which showed that in idea generation, a panel of evaluators, when they didn't know where ideas came from, they almost always picked AI generated ideas. When ideas were attributed to AI instead of human, they would undervalue those ideas. And when they were attributed to human, they would overvalue. So there's this weird thing of like proof of craft. The problem it's, the beauty is in the eye of the beholder or the deceit you could say is in the eye of the beholder.

1:00:19And if the human tendency is to by definition undervalue AI generated work, because there's some virtue to the human generated work, then I think it's incumbent upon a marketer to prove to the human, the values human work that no, really humans did this. But I don't know if we're in a transitionary period. Like nobody, you know.

1:00:42Laura Jones:I think part of both, right? I don't need to prove that I thought independent of a computer when I'm working on my newsletter, right? When you hear a song and it hits you and you feel an emotion, you want that emotion. That emotion part is connecting with the artist pain or happiness or whatever it is. And I do think that humans have been taught by many generations to understand and do that. I think, A, that you want to do that. And I think, second, if suddenly that turned out to be hollow, if, so to speak, the emotion was faked because there was not a human on the other side. I think you might feel a little bit cheated or felt, you know, faked because that the emotion that you were getting is it was generated by something that you don't necessarily understand how to have an emotional connection to.

1:01:38Laura Jones:And so I think you're totally right. But I do think for a while people want to have an emotional connection to another person. Or they'll start to entomorphize the computer and then we're kind of like into, you know, completely. Then we're into AGI and all these other things. Yeah, I also, the other thing that resonated in the conversation was her saying only do what you can uniquely do. it's a it's an interesting i think it's a valuable stock taking moment for people i actually wrote about this in my newsletter i wrote probably one of the most personal pieces i've written recently which was basically about what are the things that only i can do like for example parenting my children being a father to my kids i don't want ai to do that and even if my kids preferred it i I would feel an existential responsibility to be a good father.

1:02:33I feel as part of that, one of the very few reasons I can be 100 % confident, I am here to blank. I am here to be a good father. I think it's harder in work, in the work context. I feel it's a little bit more difficult to kind of categorically conclude, I am here to do this.

1:02:51Laura Jones:But I think, you know, maybe the two thoughts, one is there's definitely the question, what do you have that's not in the model? And I think for Instacart, they will obviously talk about all this preference. And so that's like a hot data that is not there. I think the other question is, and that's back to the idea of courage, is who do you want to be? Like, what is it where you are willing to take a leap of faith to be different? And that, you know, I was thinking about the other day, because one of the things we talk a lot about for entrepreneurs is that how the about page is very important. Because as we talked about, users want to emotionally connect to something.

1:03:28Laura Jones:But increasingly, the about page is also important for you to your model because you will need to teach your model what makes you unique. Well, how should it be playing back the originality that you want to express? And so in an ironic way, the about page is about to get important as we use AI to try to become more original ourselves. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Right. There's a, um, the last thing I'll say on that is this, the question about least love tasks and what can only you do uniquely. There's a lot of your work that isn't uniquely you. You're just kind of filling the role, but there is something I think is a personal responsibility.

1:04:14What is the thing that I'm doing that nobody else could plug into or nobody that's uniquely me. And I, I'm just, I'm compelled. That's a question worth asking. I've been asking a little bit, as I said, personally, but I think in the work context, it's worthwhile because then you go, okay, what are all those other things that I don't like doing that I roll my eyes at when I have to do? Can I, how much can I get free of so that I can contribute the thing that I am uniquely capable of contributing?

1:04:43Laura Jones:I'll give you one thing, actually, as you're saying this, one thing that I, I think because I've built a few things that were successful, I noticed that sometimes when people come and pitch an idea and I tell them that I think it's a good one to pursue, that it's almost like I give them permission to like an idea that they have themselves even more. it's almost like the idea has not been blessed right like and it's a quite beautiful gift to have because as an entrepreneur you have all this insecurity and you don't really have that much data to prove that whatever you have in your mind is going to be so the having somebody say you know what i i see it i i think this might happen and it's from somebody who you think might have the ability to predict better than others which i don't know if i do but let's see what i have that's actually a quite cool gift because you give the gift of encouragement, which is tough for GBT to do.

1:05:43As an aside, by the way, encourage literally means to give courage to. Isn't that great?

1:05:50Laura Jones:That is great. When you encourage someone, when you encourage an entrepreneur, you're literally giving them courage. I like that. Maybe on that note, we should end. You know who else could use a little encouragement? your old buddies Henrik and Jeremy could use a little encouragement in the show notes you give us a review you let us know what you think of the show we could use a little strength we also have had a few people who then proved by having a keyword that they listen to this very end and then we send them a book and I think we should continue that I've enjoyed doing that very much the last thing was was it Anthropologist never anyway what's the one today I mean it could be something about Like, how about take heart?

1:06:34Take heart. Take heart.

1:06:36Laura Jones:I'll take heart. And with that, please like, subscribe, send with somebody that you take heart to. Bye. Bye-bye.