What Should You Automate With AI, and What Should Stay Human?

0:00John Jantsch:So AI can write your emails, run your ads, clone the sound of your voice even. But at least for now, it cannot fake a hug, a hand-tied knot, or the crack in your voice on a hard sales call. The entrepreneurs with the biggest edge over the next decade are the ones who find what technology can't touch and build their whole business around it.

0:31John Jantsch:Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jans. My guest today is Ryan Levesque. He is a seven-time Inc. 500 CEO who's built and exited two companies worth more than$100 million combined. He's the number one national bestselling author of Ask, named Inc.'s Marketing Book of the Year and founder of the Ask Method. His new book we're going to talk about today, Return to Real, The Last Human Advantage in an Age of Artificial Everything, argues the same thing your body and spirit are starving for is exactly what your market will pay a premium for. So, Ryan, welcome to the show.

1:07John, it's great to be here and it's great to reconnect.

1:10John Jantsch:Yeah, so I would suggest that this is a different book than Ask. However, I've got to believe that there's a thread of your work in Ask and the work you did with the company that sort of informs this book. but I'll let you speak to that if that's accurate or not. Yeah, you know, great questions. My first book, Ask, was all about figuring out what your market wants and giving it to them. And I think it, I remain proud of that work to this day. It's a methodology to listen to the voice of your customer and use that to inform your messaging, your marketing, and your products and services, so on and so forth.

1:48But what that book failed to explain and explore is how to listen to the most important voice of them all, which is what I describe as the voice inside or the contrarian voice of your heart. And I think the age that we live in here today is one where, and there's tremendous evidence to suggest this, we are drowning in artificial everything. The food we eat, the content we consume. And Adam Masseri of Instagram, I think said it best when he said, we spent the last decade trying to figure out what makes something perfect. We're going to spend the next decade figuring out what makes something real.

2:24Yeah. And I think that's what the world is craving is real. Yeah.

2:27John Jantsch:You know, I think the entrepreneurial world, though, is sort of naturally, I don't want to say it's against that, but it's easy to see why people get pulled in directions. It's like, oh, there's an opportunity over here. AI is a great example. I can make my agency an AI agency so that I can go in and take advantage of what's there, even if it's not in your heart. I mean, how do you guard against that? Well, what I would say is this. look, I'm not one of these anti-AI apostles. I use AI on a daily basis. We use AI in my company. I think the truth is in the tension, the devil's in the details. And I'll give you a few examples.

3:04So I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make with AI is they use AI to abdicate parts of their business that touch the customer. Instead, what we should be doing is thinking about the proverbial back office of our business, the parts that are furthest away from what touches the customer and use AI to automate those pieces of the business. Not to automate the email sequence that we send to our customers or to write the social media posts that's the first point of contact with our brand. Or to use AI to replicate your voice and create some sort of AI avatar that you're trying to pass off as you.

3:39But the reality is it's just a machine. And when someone figures that out, they feel foolish for having been humiliated and they associate that with your brand forevermore. So I think it's not about being anti-AI or being pro-AI. It's about finding the right places to put AI into your business.

3:57John Jantsch:Yeah, it's funny. I think a lot of people are starting to say, oh, the businesses are going to win or the ones that are more human or that put that human element out there. And I think that there's a double-edged sword on that in that I think some people are saying, oh, okay, I'll put my human avatar out there. And I think you actually get whacked twice for that. It's like you were trying to be human and you were actually less human. It's the hypocrisy of humanization. It's a hypocrisy of humanization. People are giving lip service to it, but they're not willing to do the things that it really means.

4:28When you first came into the business world, you probably remember an era where having a website was a new and novel thing. It was a competitive advantage to be on the internet. That was a big deal. Now, everybody's on the internet. The pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. Now, it's actually a big deal. When you pick up the phone and call customer service, And you actually get an English-speaking human being who picks up the phone on the other side and you say, oh my gosh, are you AI? Are you a robot? Are you an automated message? No, I'm a real human being. That is where the zig has become the zag.

5:03John Jantsch:So you, I think I read the figure was$70 million, a deal to sell your company fell apart. Sure. Yep. Not long after that, you moved to where I assume you are sitting today on the 200-year-old farm in Vermont. are those two connected like did you have a moment where you said i gotta get out of here i gotta point at something different very much connected so spent the better part of a decade building and scaling a company literally started it you know with a laptop and an internet connection kitchen table story seven-timing 5000 fastest growing company and had this moment where i looked at this photograph of my two boys and at the time they were three and five years old my sons.

5:44They were wearing rain boots, holding hands in a path ahead of me. The boots were way too big for them. And I just remembered to take a photo of that moment. And fast forward seven years later, and I had a similar experience. My two boys were walking down the path. They're much further ahead of me now. They were not holding hands and they were teenagers at the time. And it was like a heartbeat between those two moments. And I recognized that I had maybe just a few years left with my two boys at home before they grew up and they were gone. And I kind of asked myself, after we tried to sell the company twice, took the company to market, had a deal, ended at the 11th hour, took the company to market again, had a$70 million offer, collapsed at the last minute.

6:26Do I want to spend another decade or even half decade in this mode? Or do I want to maybe re-optimize my life for something else? And the answer was very clear. I want to suck the marrow out of this season of life while my boys are at home. And on that journey, when my boys were away at summer camp one summer, I decided to do something that was pulling at my heart. And I decided to take some time to live and work on a farm in the Mad River Valley of Vermont, literally living in a tent, bathing in a pond, learning how to raise and grow food with my own hands. And John, it was on that farm that I had this awakening that I just felt like in this next chapter of life, this is where I was meant to be.

7:04And then that sparked a whole grand adventure that led to me exiting the company and starting this farm and moving my family and crazy, crazy family adventure.

7:16John Jantsch:So I'm getting a Thoreau vibe all of a sudden. Thoreau is referenced in the book. Thoreau is one of my heroes as a young man and as a much older man today. Yeah. So one of the things you write about is contrarian shifts. And the the first thing is that the best things in life don't scale. That sort of runs counter to like traditional business advice. I think a lot of people get that. I don't think many people would actually argue, but like the whole deal is to scale, right? So how do you balance that? Well, look, I think it's, again, truth is in the tension. I think there's a modern exception with scale.

7:50Whenever I bring up the ideas behind Return to Real, the inevitable objection that comes up is, but does it scale?

7:57John Jantsch:How do you scale that? And the argument that I make is, look, the best things in life don't scale. A hug with your kid, a sunset with your sweetheart, these things don't scale. But we somehow think that the rules in business are immune to that universal truth. So the question isn't, do I create a business that doesn't scale? It's, what are the parts of my business do I do in spite of the fact that they don't scale? Because what doesn't scale for you also will not scale for your competitor. And therein lies the competitive advantage. Doing the things that your competitor will not be willing to do.

8:33It's sending a personal voice memo to every new customer, yourself, not using some AI, 11 lab software, or an assistant that's doing it for you. It's you. It's handwriting a welcome note to everyone who becomes a client. It's not doing all the things, but it's picking and choosing these moments that demonstrate to your markets, your customers, to your clients that, wow, you really care. You really care about who it is that you're serving.

9:04John Jantsch:So if there's a listener out there that's saying, look, I've got this business and I'm feeling the tension and I want to make some change, but I'm kind of shackled with a few things, right? I can't just like, you know, take off tomorrow and blow up everything. So what's a small real version of, you know, returning to real that somebody could make? Yeah. So I'll give a personal one and then I'll give a business one. So on a personal level, there's a practice that I learned to adopt from a colleague of mine. And it's the simplest thing in the world. And it's something that I would encourage you to try yourself.

9:39The idea is this, when you wake up in the morning, first thing, touch earth before touching a screen. So instead of doing what you normally do, you check your phone, you check your messages, you check your email, whatever, put your device far away from you, walk outside your front door, find the first piece of actual bare earth, not pavement, not concrete, but grass or dirt or something in front of you. Take your shoes off, your socks off. Whatever time you wake up, I don't care how cold it is. I do this in the winter in Vermont. You step outside, bare feet, touch the ground just for a moment.

10:11Take the deepest breath that you can and just remind yourself that you are a biophysical being in a biophysical world. before you get sucked into dashboards and dopamine loops and all the demands of the day, that you are human and you're deeply connected to the natural world. It's a super small thing. Like it'll only take you 30 seconds to do this. What it does is it sets the tone for the rest of the day. Like you become calmer, you become kinder, you take all the fires that show up in your business in stride. You put things in perspective in a way that's sort of unlike anything else. So that's a super simple personal move.

10:46that could actually be enough for some people and that absolutely can be enough that can be the bite-sized version of return to real to just before i get sucked into the digital vortex of the day and social media scrolling and all the things it's like i've got this moment and it's 30 seconds i do it at sunrise i stare off into the sunrise in the mountains in the distance on our farm and i just take this moment and for me it's like it just sets the tone for the whole day So that's the personal side. Professional side, I would combine that with a principle that I describe in the book as create before you consume.

11:21There is a tendency first thing in the morning that we get into consumption mode. We open up our emails and we consume the emails that are sent our way. Or we go on social media and we read the headlines. We actually are consuming what's showing up in our world. I would challenge you to use that moment in the day when the chalkboard in your brain is clean. There's nothing on it. It's just a clean slate. You use those precious moments to create. For me, I use that time to write email. I will write an email to my audience with a clear head based on what it is that I'm thinking, what's showing up in my heart, the ideas that I'm thinking about, how it relates to my market, but I do it with a clear mind.

12:01And when you combine those two simple practices, touch earth before you touch a screen and create before you consume, it'll shift your day, which will shift your week, which will shift your month, which will shift your year.

12:15John Jantsch:Okay, this is a perfect segue to a question or a thing that you have talked about. You told your own list that a team of writers had ghostwritten your content under your name for seven years. What did it feel like to send that confession emailed to your list? It was not easy because I felt like in some ways, even though this is standard practice in the industry. You have a team of writers. If you're the CEO of your company, it's not uncommon that you've got a team of writers that are writing content in your name. They're ghostwriting that content and they're signing that content with your name.

12:51And for me, it became this death by a thousand paper cuts, where at first I was reviewing every email that went out by my name. And then of course, there's a time where things get a little too busy and you're like, it's probably fine. And then you get into the habit of you don't even review anything. And then one day I remember waking up and I opened up my laptop and I read an email that we sent out that was, it was, it was, we positioned it as it was something that I wrote and it came from me. And I was so disgusted with what we put up. I slammed the laptop shut. And I think for me, that was the breaking point where I said, no more, this is not happening.

13:26And so on a whim, I wrote this email, I titled it the embarrassing confession and basically said what you described. I have an embarrassing confession to make. This may come as a shock, but every single email that you have read with my name signed to it has not actually been written by me, but it's been written by a team of writers and more recently written by AI. And this has been true for the last seven years. I'm not proud of this fact, but it's the truth. And I basically said, what I've realized is that what the world is craving is what I describe as the freshly squeezed version of orange juice that you get at Sunday brunch in a world where everybody else is serving the watered down stuff that comes in a can?

14:04Can you feel the difference between what's real and what's not? Can you feel that this was written by a real human being with a real beating heart? Can you feel it? And when I sent that email out, I had no idea what was going to happen, John. I got more response from that email than anything that I'd sent in probably months, as long as I can remember. And it was the full range. Some people applauded it. Good for you. That's amazing. I want to do this. some people used it as a way to blackmail me. You know, hey, well, if that's the case, then I want a refund for everything that I've ever bought, you know, years and years into the past, like crazy things like that.

14:42People said some things that I'm not going to repeat out loud. You know, but the way I describe it is people will confuse vulnerability with weakness and they will weaponize shame and guilt to coerce you to crumble. They will try to get you to fold. oftentimes because it's because it's something that they're dealing with internally.

15:02John Jantsch:I was going to say, my mom used to always say, well, that's probably more their problem than yours. Very perceptive. When you're in that moment though, it is still hard when people are telling you to crawl in a hole and die for what it is that you're doing. But I'll tell you, it was the most liberating thing that I've done. And this was almost two and a half years ago. And every single week since then, without missing a single week, I've personally written by hand, myself an email, often two to 4 ,000 words, deeply researched, very transparent. That's come directly from me. And I've had more opportunity come from doing just that one thing than anything else I've done in my business in the last 20 years.

15:41John Jantsch:Back to the book. The book's core claim is that the market will pay a premium for real, but I can hear a lot of business owners say, okay, that's great. What's the mechanism? Like, you know, real's a word that everybody banters around, but like, what's the mechanism? You know, is it trust? Is it scarcity? Is it something else? Yeah, there are a few different dimensions at play. And we've got, look, we've got a short amount of time and I want to try to unpack this as much as I can. I'll give you one thing to really anchor around. It's a concept that I describe in the book as the provenance premium.

16:11So provenance is a fancy word that comes from the art world. It basically is a way to trace back a piece of work to the creator of that work. And there's a story I tell in the book about a painting called Salvador Mundi, which was purchased at an estate sale by a consortium of art dealers for something like$10 ,000. They did a bunch of research on the piece of art and found out that it was actually created by Leonardo da Vinci. And a few years later, they brought it to auction at Christie's and the same piece of art that they bought for$10 ,000 from an anonymous artist, once it was attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, sold for$450 million.

16:49And that's an extreme example, but it illustrates the point and hopefully is a memorable story that you'll remember after this conversation, that when you can attribute the work that you're doing to a real life that's actually been lived and work that's gone into it, it elevates the value of that work. It's in part the reason why Steinway Pianos sell for what they sell for. Because Steinway has done a fantastic job not only creating great products, but documenting. There's a whole documentary that Steinway put out where you can see what goes into making the piano. And you think, well, gosh, of course it's worth that.

17:24It's why people will pay a premium for food that's raised by actual farmers down the road as opposed to buying it at the grocery store. Because they know the farmers. They know the farm. They know the story behind it. So the practical move here for all of us, no matter what type of work you're in, if you're in a white-collar profession, a blue-collar profession, if you do work with your hands, if you do work with your mind, is to build in public, to document your process, to document your thinking about what you're actually thinking about. Because people care not just about the what that it is that you're selling, they care about the how in terms of how it's made and the who, who is the person behind that.

17:59And by telling the right story and sharing this, divulging this, taking people behind the scenes, people pay a premium for that thing. In my book, I'll give you one last example. I decided to hand illustrate every illustration inside the book. And I know that some people were gonna doubt that I actually hand illustrated the book. And here's just like a page inside the book with some of the quotes. And so what I did is I put a camera over my desk and I did a time-lapse video of drawing every illustration by hand. When people see that, it just is a proxy, an indicator that care and love and attention went into the making of this thing.

18:38And just that data point alone, doesn't it make you believe that, wow, a lot of effort went into creating this? and people value that. So when people see the provenance, where something comes from, they will pay a premium for that product. So ask yourself, how can you document your process? How can you take people behind the scenes what it is that you do? How can you show the parts that nobody else, no other competitor of yours, shows how the sausage is made, so to speak? So people see the value in what it is that they're actually getting.

19:10John Jantsch:All right, I've got one final question. This one's more of a personal interest question. And this doesn't really show up in your book, but I suspect you have an opinion on this. How important do you believe it is, particularly for entrepreneurs that might spend eight, nine hours a day just on a computer, you know, in the digital world, you know, doing all the stuff that we do today in businesses? How important do you think it is for them to have an analog outlet to do something with their hands to, you know, build furniture to whatever, play the guitar, whatever it is that is more analog thought?

19:45Yeah, it's Rabbi Heschel has this line that if you work with your mind, Sabbath with your hands. I think for those of us who are knowledge workers, for those of us who spend time in front of a computer, we have to find an outlet that reconnects us to our body, that reconnects us to the analog, that reconnects us to the physical world, because that's exactly what we're losing. As I write in the book, there are trillion dollar technology companies that will not stop until every moment of human attention has been consumed and monetized, including yours.

20:20John Jantsch:I marvel at the aggressiveness of Facebook to try to get me to come back to the platform. It's unbelievable. And it's, yeah, I'm glad they're facing some blowback. We'll see if it, you know, does anything or if they'll find another way around that. Well, Ryan, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there any place you'd invite people to connect with you or to certainly to find out more about Return to Real? Yeah, the best place to learn more about the book, Return to Real, is returntorealbook.com. When you go there, you'll see all the different formats and cool bonuses that you get access to.