Build a Business AI Can’t Replace

0:00John Jantsch:What if the biggest threat from AI isn't that it replaces your job, it's that it exposes the parts of you that were never fully developed in the first place. Sound interesting? Stay tuned. You know, most small businesses don't have a marketing problem. They have a strategy problem underneath the marketing. I wrote a new workbook called Seven Steps to Small Business Marketing Success that walks through exactly how to fix it. from getting clear as a founder all the way to running marketing like an operating system. 20 years of working with small businesses condensed into a framework you can actually use.

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0:56John Jantsch:Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jansen. My guest today is Derek Reddahl. He's a two-time bestselling author and transformational leader who has spent over 25 years helping people unlock what he calls their emergent potential. The idea that everything you need to become is already inside you, waiting for the right conditions. We're going to talk about his new book, A Whole New Human. 10 Ways We Must Evolve to Survive in the AI Age. There we go. Got it right. Derek, welcome to the show. Thank you, John. It's an honor and pleasure to be here. So something tells me we're not going to talk about prompt engineering, at least not right off the bat, are we?

1:36Maybe we have to prompt the AI within us more than the AI outside of us, yes.

1:43John Jantsch:So for 25 years, your teaching has started with this idea of emergence. There's a lot of people on here that maybe that's the first time they've heard that word applied particularly to self-development or self-improvement. You want to give us kind of what you mean by that? Sure. I mean, obviously in science, there's an understanding of the emergent property of things. And, you know, that something emerges that is more than or different than the sum of the initial parts, etc. You know, oxygen and what is it? Hydrogen that comes together to make water. So you get water as an emergent property. And so that's one way to think about emergence.

2:20And what I speak of it, it's more about an experience I actually had after a near-death experience where I saw this and I began to see that in every living thing, it begins with a seed. there's a pattern there's a pattern behind everything that is alive and whether it's the acorn the oak is already there in the acorn and even from a quantum physics standpoint or a platonic form standpoint the oak the idea of the oak is a pattern in the field as a part of the superposition so we can get scientific about it or not but the bottom line is the oak tree is already there and it's there in potential, it's there in a pattern and the mechanics of its fulfillment are there.

3:08It's simply waiting for the right conditions. When the conditions are a match to the pattern within anything, that potential emerges naturally. And when I saw that, not just theoretically, but experienced it and began to consider there was a pattern in me. There was a seed pattern planted in the soil of my soul or whatever, and began to ask what that was. And this really brings us back to the Oracle of Delphi and the OG success self-help guru when she said, know thyself. Or Socrates said, an unexamined life is not worth living. The fundamental pattern of knowing what I'm really made of and made for and learning what are the right questions to ask.

4:00And then to say, okay, this is what I am, like a gardener with a seed going, what are therefore the right conditions for that seed to thrive? And I began to cultivate the inner and outer conditions that were a match to the pattern that I was discovering within me. And I went from broke, broken, literally suicidal in a one-room apartment living on macaroni and cheese, no kidding, to got very good at mac and cheese, though. I could make it in a lot of ways to within about within the first 12 months, I ended up launching my life's work, growing my business into six and then multiple six figures, falling in love, like my whole life began to emerge or unfold.

4:43And what I saw was that before that I'd been a self-help person trying to improve myself, you know, for years and years and years. And I found that most of our efforts to fix, change, heal, and improve ourselves is a form of resistance against what is naturally trying to emerge. We end up creating conditions that are oppositional to what was really in us.

5:09John Jantsch:So that's in a nutshell or in an acorn shell, basically, where the idea of emergence. I read a book on it called Emergence, by the way. So we're all just waiting around for the right squirrel to bury us in the dirt? Exactly. The farmers of the forest, right? And they luckily don't have good memory because they forget about 80 % of where they buried it or something. And then we get oak trees as a result. So I've had a lot of guests on here. Obviously, AI is a topic of certainly the last 18 months or so. And it's typically about tools and tactics. What's the different argument you are making when it comes to AI?

5:43Yeah, obviously, I think it's an important thing. We should learn AI. You should master the tools. You should know how to use them, just like you can use internet and use a phone. because you won't be replaced immediately by AI. You'll be replaced by somebody who's really good at it. But you are going to be replaced one way or the other. So you want to make sure you replace yourself with AI rather than being replaced by. But basically the approach is I've spent 25 years. I started off in tech. I was a computer nerd. I built programs. I watched war games. I thought it was a great idea to build a program to hack into the government and start global thermonuclear war.

6:18Don't ask me why. And then I got into the brain, was going to be a neuroscientist. And then I had this opening spiritually, whatever you want to call it, near death. And I became more interested in consciousness and the deeper dimensions of us. But what I saw is that I've been practicing the inner technologies. And that we have to understand that AI is an expression and a prosthetic of our capacity for intelligence. and from the Tower of Babel to Chachi PT, we're still just building these outer tools and that's okay. But with every new technology, we outsource a little bit of ourselves. And so on the one level, the very real danger, and it's already happening, MIT has studies about this, that we're outsourcing the thing that makes us us, the ability to think, to think for ourselves, to think deeply, the ability to create to communicate to connect etc and as you outsource something if you study the technology history you atrophy that capacity can't remember my phone number exactly exactly i don't even remember where i am right now it's only two minutes no and so i don't have my gps to see where i'm going and so so i'm like gps our spatial cognition our mapping capacity all these things.

7:41And it's important to understand that cognition is not just linear. It's layered. And so as one cognitive ability starts to collapse or atrophy, there's a cascading effect. And so we see this over, and I talk about this in my book, kind of the history of industrial revolutions and the unfoldment of technology and the outsourcing. And where we're heading on a trajectory is to become like the characters in the movie WALL-E that are basically these slabs on a conveyor belt staring at screens with no more agency and no more even concern with what's happening outside in the world. That's not science fiction.

8:20There's already a lot of people sitting in their basement just like those characters. And it's especially dangerous with men who need to have utility and usefulness. And if they don't, they become self-destructive or destructive in the world. And that's also happening now. And the second big piece is it will do everything a human can do better, faster, cheaper. And so the big existential question of our times has to be, if that's the case, what's a human for? And there is an answer to that. Nando will talk about it.

8:58John Jantsch:You know, I've spent over 20 years watching good businesses waste money on marketing that doesn't add up. And usually the problem isn't the tactics. It's the missing foundation underneath them all. So I put the whole system in a new workbook called Seven Steps to Small Business Marketing Success. Seven steps, the right order with everything you need to build that actually compounds. You can pick it up right now for five bucks at dtm.world slash seven steps. That's dtm.world slash seven steps. You do lay out some ways that we need to evolve or that you suggest we need to evolve. So for the person that's like, yeah, well, my job is my boss tells me I got to go in and get this work done.

9:45John Jantsch:Here's the tools I use. It's an occupational hazard, right? That I'm doing this. So what are some of the ways that you teach people to counteract that? Yeah. When you say counteract that you mean use the ai tools yeah just the fact that i'm the fact that i'm there on the front of that computer screen all day long using these tools because that's my job that you're becoming like a wally character yeah yeah well yeah you know just using the tools the danger again yes we're using these tools and the danger with ai first and foremost is you have to make sure you use the tool to become a better version of yourself.

10:25Not like when we started to use power tool, you know, like the plow and all these different things or the automobile, they got us somewhere faster. They made us more productive, but we didn't have to walk anymore. We didn't have to use our muscles anymore. And you can study the increase of disease by the fact that we don't have to move anymore. and so so you we had to build other industries like gyms and exercise and running clubs to do the things and that's okay but as we start to outsource our cognition of these things we just have to make sure first of all we are doing hard and challenging things on a regular daily basis because you were evolved and adapted to be chased by tigers and and to chase woolly mammoths and if you're not chasing and being chased a little bit every day, you're going to get fat and sick and cognitively decline much faster.

11:19But the great news is you can use AI to strengthen you. And I talk about that with each evolution. I mean, the first evolution is AI is going to think for you, think for yourself. So we have to deepen our ability. Right now, this is already happening with kids, happening with students. They're hitting a button, they're producing an essay, And over a semester, their cognition is falling off a cliff. And already kids cannot read handwriting. They're losing that cognitive ability, let alone do it. So we have to make sure, and you can, and I show people how, to use it to know yourself better, to use it to become a better writer, a better communicator, a better creator, a better and a deeper thinker.

12:04And again, thinking is what got us out of the trees on the savannah and up into the stars. And if we keep giving it to AI, there will come a day not too far in the future, we literally won't have the ability and we will be forced to bow before our AI overlord. That's not a science fiction trope. So we have to use it to think deeply. You know, if you're writing a paper or doing research, do the first amount yourself. Write the first draft. Make your head hurt a little bit every day thinking. As an example, there's other examples because it's also showing up in communication. Write that first draft of the email.

12:49Really try to communicate with that person. Have a real conversation with a human being every day. these are skills that aren't just nice to have you know they call them soft skills but they're really very hard but these kinds of skills also will make you more human more creative more intuitive more alive and it will make you irreplaceable right because your lived wisdom your lived experience, your internal technology, that's the one thing AI can't do. AI will do everything else. But if you can embed that in your work, your words, your world, now you become valuable. The moat of the future is an authentic human being.

13:37Everything else will be commoditized.

13:40John Jantsch:I believe that, and I've kind of made the case for saying, I think the people that are thriving in this right now are people that came from more liberal arts backgrounds instead of like a technical training to do a thing. Because taste and discernment, I think, are going to be what's left. Bingo, bingo, bingo. Yeah, taste and discernment. And everybody has it. They just haven't necessarily developed it. Yeah, yeah. And you have a lived experience. Your greatest wisdom will come from your greatest wounds. Your deepest purpose will come from all the pain and the problems you've worked through. And it builds a story and it builds a perspective that only you have, which creates taste, which creates real embodied wisdom.

14:21And that is the new Prada and the new Gucci of the brave new world. Because again, AI will do everything that we're going to see more businesses started than ever before in history until business loses all meaning. We're going to see more books published, more songs produced, more websites, more apps until it's a tsunami that makes everybody want to tune out and look away and become apathetic. But then there'll be those individuals who get to know themselves, know their excavate and harvest the wisdom of their life, have real taste, real point of view, real wisdom, and then use AI to scale wisdom, to scale authentic taste, to scale a singular perspective, to actually scale and magnify an algorithm only they have.

15:17And those are the individuals that are going to become a signal in the noise.

15:21John Jantsch:So let's talk a little bit. So the emergence model says the answer is already in you, or maybe is. How does a business owner who's listening to this and maybe stuck at a revenue plateau, how do they apply that idea? Yeah, there's different reasons why you're stuck at a revenue plateau. some you are the biggest bottleneck usually but sometimes depending on the business there's there's just different things what got us to where we are isn't going to at a certain point isn't going to get us to the next level what got you to a hundred thousand won't get you to a million won't get you to five won't get you to 10 or 15 etc etc depending and that's the same thing even in not just business but i know this is business but you know you all have relationships too sure what got you to the first year in your relationship is not going to get you to year five, et cetera.

16:08It's something about you that has to change a new model, a new paradigm, somewhere where you have to either delegate or outsource or dig deeper. And, you know, the biggest challenge with, with businesses, and it's going to be that now is, you know, it's the Kodak experience, the Blockbuster experience, the businesses that were in denial, that were holding onto an old model because it worked and it was still working up to the moment it wasn't. And so we have to be willing to do creative destruction on ourselves, but not just on our business, but really, you know, this is what could be one of the, it's the biggest existential crisis we're going to face, but it's also, I think, one of the greatest opportunities to become the people we're meant to be and to have a whole new renaissance.

16:52So you have to, again, understand that there's a guy that just launched, just started, just built a billion dollar business. He didn't know anything about the business he built. He used AI and he built a team of agents, but he had a perspective and he tapped into a current zeitgeist. So he had a bit of wisdom and intelligence to identify that, which is what a great entrepreneurial creative mind does. And then he was able to scale it and build a billion dollar business. I think he just hired his brother because he was getting lonely. So you're going to see a lot of the potential for that. But that required somebody to have a couple things that were human, which is a perspective, a bit of intuition, a lot of courage, some grit, the willingness to work hard.

17:40And the problem is once you build something, especially nowadays, again, that's going to be completely competed away, that particular margin. The worst thing you ever did was have a New York Times article told about him because everybody's now aiming their arrows at him.

18:00John Jantsch:Is that the company called Eleven Labs? No, Eleven Labs is something else. I think that's about more than one person. This was all about Ozempic and stuff. He just sold Ozempic, but he's not a doctor. He just was a middleman, built a billion dollar business. I think he did it in like a year. So there's a lot of opportunity if you're creative and entrepreneurial and you're willing to trust your taste, your intuition and perspective. And of course, AI can help you there. but when you understand just follow the logic that everything is going to be commodified because ai is just units of cognition and intelligence and it can do everything a human can do and with embodied humanoids it'll include the physical you just have to keep going down the stack or up the stack or whatever and ask well what's left and you want to go where the puck's going not where it already is and and like i said you're gonna you're gonna unless you have the chips or the capex the money or the energy the only thing that's left is the humanity of it all and if you're a company or a person you the most authentic unique bold willingness to be and and be creative and intuitive and and also be very flexible like all of those things that are Our natural state as children and as people until we calcify around something or a business, if it has a founder energy, it keeps evolving and then it loses that and then it calcifies.

19:33So we have to get back to that. And that will become, again, the new moat is to be that flexible.

19:40John Jantsch:So for a lot of folks, business owners, particularly who feel like, geez, I'm running as fast as I can to keep up with the AI race. Which is the wrong race. Right? So what's the first kind of inner shift that you'd encourage them to make instead? Yeah, again, I understand you want to learn the tools. You want to try to become as AI native as you possibly can as fast as you can, because if you don't, you will be competed out of existence. And you may have a moat for now. And some things, the moats will last longer because of regulations and different things like that. And just, you might have a really good brand.

20:12And so you'll have loyalty up to a point until they can get the same thing for half the cost or less. So you have some time, but again, you got to think about community, real humanity, real authenticity. Yes, people want stuff cheaper and faster and better. There's no doubt about it. Amazon built Amazon over that. but ultimately we have, you have to ask, what is it about me or the thing I do that is truly irreplaceable? And you, and you have to start to really be looking at, and what's interesting is you'll find the way you built your business in the beginning often had a lot more for most, for a lot, a lot more of that humanity in it, a lot more of that touch and we're going to have to, it's like what I call a handcrafted humanity.

21:07We have to return to that. What people, what's going to be a differentiator. It's why like on YouTube, the people that are the most successful now are the live streamers because it's live, because it's in debt, because people feel like they can trust you. They know you versus all of the AI slop and the highly polished and produced stuff. So something that feels real and authentic and raw and live is going to win above all the polished stuff over and over and over again. So this is the kind of thing we have to start thinking about. Again, if you look back to your roots, a lot of the ways you lived and the things you valued and the things you did, what made you successful?

21:54Then you started building a machine and it became all about scaling the machine instead of scaling the original core and heart of why you were doing it in the first place. Get back to the story. Get back to the humanity. Get back to the community. Get back to real connection. That's going to be most fundamental.

22:14John Jantsch:Awesome. Well, Derek, I appreciate you taking a few moments to drop by the DuckDate Marketing Podcast. Where would you invite people to connect with you and find out more about your work? Yeah, I mean, they can certainly get my book, obviously, on Amazon or wherever books are sold or any of the books, Whole New Human. They can also go to Derek Rydell, Legendary Life on YouTube, lots and lots of videos, or my website, Derek Rydell, D-E-R-E-K-R-Y-D-A-L-L. And there's lots of free trainings and support. And then there's my podcast, Emergence, millions of downloads there. Awesome. And there's more of this deep dive conversation for sure.

22:48Awesome. Great.

22:49John Jantsch:Again, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road. Likewise, John. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.