As a business owner and a CEO, I need a mix of people. So yes, I go out, and this will answer your question directly, I hire people who thrive in social environments. I have people who want to work with people face-to-face, who enjoy coming into our offices, and we're a hybrid business. Welcome to Embracing Digital Transformation, where we explore how people, process, policy, and technology drive effective change. This is Dr. Darren, Chief Enterprise Architect, educator, author, and most importantly, your host. On this episode, the power of relationships in the age of AI, with special guest Joshua Gould, fellow podcaster and CEO of The Big Word. Josh, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Darren. How are you today? You know, I'm hanging in there. I'm hanging in there. Every day is a new day. So it's an exciting, exciting time in tech from my perspective. A lot of change going on, which we're going to talk a little bit about today. But before we do, Josh, everyone that listens to my show knows that I only have superheroes on the show. And every superhero has a background story. So what's your background story, Josh? What makes you unique? yes well i will definitely play this for my wife because i'm not sure she ever sold me as a superhero but uh this is well she she can now right there you go that's why i like doing these podcasts because i can get a word in uh since being at home no my background uh put simply is i was a college dropout after two weeks i sat two weeks yeah probably a record actually but I sat in these lecture theatres and I thought to myself, can I really do three years of this? And is it really what I want to do? And the answer was quite clear to me. But it took me about one and a half weeks, to be honest with myself. So I left and my goal has always been to create, create businesses, find solutions to problems and do something with my life that's meaningful. And I just wanted to get going with it. Now, the best thing that I could do was learn to sell. So that's what I did. I went into selling. It's a great way into business if you don't have a degree or a great formal education. And I've been selling ever since. I'm still doing that today on your podcast, Darren. Okay, wait. All right. What was your first sales job? Actually, I worked for an American company in the UK. It's Coors. I'm sure you have a lot of cause drinkers that tune in, but my job was to sell beer to open houses. And I got great training there. But funnily enough, I realized very early on that relationship building was more important than selling. Selling happened automatically when you had a relationship. So, for example, I would sit on a bar in a pub that was allowed to buy from any brewery. They call them open houses. And I would just order a beer. I would chat with the barmaid, who was quite often someone who owned or was related to the owner. And I would just talk about what I do. And they would be like, well, give us a free keg and we'll put you on one of the taps and see how you do. And I became like the top salesperson in all of cores in the UK at 19 years old. and then I just started to kind of take those learnings and apply it to business and now I'm here where I'm at. That is awesome. I like how you brought up that relationships thing because I think with the run-up of AI and the change in our economy, I think relationship building is going to be in vogue again. Maybe it never went out of vogue but I think it's going to be even more important than it has been in the past. Yeah, I definitely think it went out of vogue. I mean, people have been running businesses, I mean, billion-dollar businesses from a laptop in a converted bedroom. And, you know, I've always been very into flying and meeting and speaking to people. And, you know, I was an irritant to my clients, to my own workforce. because this guy wants to come. I'm going to have to get dressed. I'm going to have to do my hair. I'm going to have to, you know, this is even as bad as turning my camera on. I've got to leave the house. And it was shocking to people. However, AI has now come along. And what is your differentiator? And I think it's the ability to build trust. It's the ability to build human level relationships. Now, AI is really good at faking that, but it can't continuously get better. It can learn you a little bit better and maybe fake it better over time. But I personally believe there is something innate in all humans to need real human relationships. and we sense it. And it's like a sixth sense that we haven't really done much medical research in. And what I find, the stronger the relationships, the easier it is to sell, the easier it is to get along, and the easier it is to conduct business. So, I mean, we're six years since COVID, almost to the month, right? It happened in March of 2020. So we're six years after that. The effects of COVID were pretty profound in this space, right? Because people went from meeting face to face to doing Zoom calls. Have you seen a bounce back from, I mean, because that really affected everything, didn't it? Yeah, I think that there is a segment of society who really find face-to-face difficult. They are socially more challenged than, you know, like, for example, I'm academically challenged. We all have our, to your point, your superhero kind of, every superhero has a special move, right? right mine is the ability to talk and chat and learn about people and get them to open up and i think there are people where this world of being behind a screen and being very methodical works so i think that covid really for the first time ever made it easier to be in business for people who find it harder to socialize i do think though society swung way too far in the direction of that. And now we're finding a middle ground where, you know, you can do. I've done a deal recently that probably pays about five to six million dollars a year. And I've never met the people that pay me. And I find that mind blowing. But that is not the norm. In order to do deals like that, you typically have to build a huge level of trust before they'll give you that much revenue. So do you think the future is kind of a hybrid then? Because there is value that's being produced by people that can't operate in that world where relationships are so important, face-to-face relationships are so important, but they provide real value. So do you see a hybrid world emerging where we do have kind of a balance between the two Or do you think it just going to keep swinging back and forth and back and forth No I think there going to be a balance. I think there absolutely has to be. At the end of the day, knowledge is commoditized now. You can go and ask, catch EBT, anything you want about law, and it's not going to be right 100% at the time, but neither is your attorney. What ChachiBT can't do is build up a relationship where you fully trust it to tell your attorney everything about you, because you don't know where that data is going, how it's going to be treated, who's going to own that data in the future. But there is also something subconscious to say, this is my deepest, darkest secrets. I don't know if I want to go and write them all out into a chatbot and you're not sub so you're not consciously thinking about it so there are going to be some people that can get a job in a big law firm and they can sit behind and apply that knowledge in a smart way but they're not going to be the big earners I think the big earners and I know this is going to upset people are the relationship people they're the ones on the front end they're the ones shaking hands, kissing babies, getting out, going on tour. And I think you see this in the music industry. My wife is a songwriter. And there are all these people that put their stuff out on YouTube and have really, really good followings. But they're not earning tens of millions of dollars. You go, you look at who is earning tens of millions of dollars. They're the people that endlessly on tour. They're the people that are saying yes to pretty much every big gig. When iHeartRadio comes along and says, we do the Jingle Ball here in the US, they're the ones that put their hand up and say, sure, or the Super Bowl. And, you know, so I think you're going to see that in general business. There are rock stars and they can't hide behind screens. So that personal touch, I think, I agree with you. I think it's become even more important as AI creates a whole bunch of what I would call AI fakers. People out there that are, in fact, I talk about that in my book that's coming out. AI fakers are people that may not even are trying to fake things, but they're just, they use AI so much to do their work that there's no foundation. and maybe even know real skills around communication or things like that, that this now becomes, you know, quite a problem, right? It does. And, you know, I give another example. I love watching YouTube and I've got this obsession with watching pilots. I don't know why. I mean, I like flying planes. And I watch all these pilots and a day in the life of a pilot. and I can now regurgitate the lingo. I know quite a lot of the processes and procedures after watching thousands of hours of pilots flying planes. But would you like me to fly your plane? No, I do not. You know, to Honolulu. Wait, do you have a license, Josh, or not? I don't. I don't have a license. Okay, no, I don't want you to fly my plane. Exactly. Why? Because understanding isn't enough. If I told you, Darren, don't worry, I've got Chachi BT in Gemini, I can look up anything and it will give me instructions. You still don't want me to fly the plane. Why? Because I haven't learned to apply the knowledge. I haven't got a true understanding, and therefore I'm not safe to fly a plane. I love boating, same thing. I have been through a fire on a boat at sea, And I've also been where I've had a hosepipe break and the bilges completely got flooded and we were sinking. But because I have trained so much for it and gone through so many procedures and I do have a captain's license for my boat, I was able to, on both occasions, not just survive to tell a story, but save the boat. And I think understanding is really underrated. No, I agree with you here. So let's talk about how this applies to business then. Let's say I do have a business. How do I take these ideas and say, all right, I do need to build up my skill sets, right? I need that foundational knowledge. I also need these soft skills that you're talking about, how to build up relationships. Are those things that, I mean, for you, it was natural. You're a natural, you're natural. But are there things I can do to teach people or do I just need to hire the right people to do that? I mean, help me as a business owner figure this out. Yeah, so let me first speak to the people who are not loving this. okay all right let's do that if i can i have people in i have one person in my finance team who's on the spectrum and she can see numbers like i've never seen a human see numbers she can pick up patterns and you know i could only dream of it and even when you put it through gemini and we use Gemini and we also use Anthropic. It's magical what she can do because she's reading in between the lines, whereas these systems are only reading rules and the lines. I wouldn't though ever put her in front of a client because she'd be a sales loser. You know, she's just not capable of building a rapport and it's not through any fault of her own she has her own superpowers she has a huge use and she's one of the highest paid people in our business however um as a business owner and a ceo i need a mix of people so yes i go out and this will answer your question directly I hire people who thrive in social environments. I have people who want to work with people face-to-face, who enjoy coming into our offices, and we're a hybrid business, so the majority of people don't work from our office. We have 15,000 people in our workforce, and today in our offices, 300 of them are in around the globe. So I look for those people for sales, for senior roles where you're going to have to train people but then it's about exposure so the more you can get exposure the more you can you know can you imagine if i made every single employee do two or three of these podcasts a week even the person who suffers the most would eventually become really good clear communicators because oh yeah yeah you know so i i don't believe that if you're listening to this and thinking what the hell am i gonna do i don't enjoy face-to-face communications i don't enjoy meeting new people i'm very nervous to leave my own home it's not the end of the world you this is like anything else small amounts of exposure over a long period of time and i can tell you that was me. I hated leaving my house. I still hate traveling to this day. And I travel over 100 days a year internationally. So, all right. So this is really interesting because what you, from what I'm hearing is you want to focus on people's strengths. Not everyone has the same strengths their superpowers right And let those superpowers cover some of their weaknesses I hear a little bit of that but also some exposure as well because you have to have And correct me if I'm wrong. You have to have a little bit on your weaknesses side. You have to cover those a little bit. You can't just, you know, be a complete recluse and be a brilliant with numbers and not be able to communicate with anyone at all. because that would be detrimental to your business. Is that, am I hearing you right? Yeah, and you bring up a really good point. You know, no one knew this girl was as good as she was because she never spoke up. And slowly in internal meetings where she was very comfortable with the management team, she would speak up and people would realize, wow, she's a genius. So yes, you're absolutely right. You have to cover off your weakest points. You can't necessarily, like for example, Or if I'm terrible naturally at soccer, it doesn't matter how much I practice. I'm probably not going to make the Premier League, which is, in my opinion, the top level. But I could become a decent semi-pro if that was what I committed my life to. You know, it's like anything. I just had my cousin over. He's a semi-pro skier. He's only 15 and he loves the snow. He was in Miami with me, which is where I'm based out of, and it was 80 degrees. You would have thought it was 120 degrees. He wasn't made for it. But by the end of the week of having him outside and getting used to the heat, he was doing much better. And we did a five-mile kayak tour of the mangroves here. And he was terrified of the sharks and the alligators and the crocodiles and everything he'd read about online. And we didn't see any of them, of course. And but you through exposure and exposure is so key, especially to kids. But I think we talk about the kids a lot. What we don't talk about is the adults and the people that are already in the workplace. So we've got to get this exposure going as quickly as possible. And I think businesses have to formalize a way to do so. So how would I go about doing that? Because right now I what I seen it in a lot of corporations. they'll just say, we'll set an HR program to do that. Exposure to AI, for example, right? Hey, we're going to have an AI skills training. We'll get exposure to AI so people aren't worried about it, so they can see how they can use it in their day-to-day work. Is that I just delegate it to someone else, or is this something more strategic at the executive level? You know where I'm trying to go with that, Josh? Yeah, I understand exactly. I mean, we have, in the big word, a learning and development team run by an absolute superstar, someone who is always on the road, a guy called Chris Whiting. And he puts together really good training programs and workshops. However, I don't think that that creates superstars. I think naturally superstars will go and find the information themselves. They will self-help. so I would recommend to the listeners of your podcast to give yourself that exposure and one great example I had a CFO years ago and he was very timid he was a smart guy very very knowledgeable successful learned a lot of money but he was very timid and he told me one day he says, Josh, I listen to his speeches and I wish I could communicate like that. So I've joined this, I can't remember what it's called, but it's like where you learn to give toasts and things like that. Yeah. Toastmasters. Toastmasters. Yeah. Yeah. And he did it for years. And I went to see a speech and I was blown away by him, you know, and this was a guy that was quite scared of his own shadow so these are the type of people that i look for someone who's gonna go out and grab life by the horns and just say i'm not gonna be a victim i'm not going to be a flag in the wind that's basically going to blow in whichever direction the wind is is coming from i'm gonna take it on my own to go out there and and retain the information and the knowledge and experience and there's so much i mean there's your podcast everyone who's tuned into your podcast has already taken a major step there's many other podcasts but why not if you're listening to this write to Darren and people like Darren and say can I come on your podcast can I get some exposure get some practice and what you'll find if you're not very good at it is you might do a few of these and then they won't actually show them but don't get discouraged because it was just practice you got to keep going i mean that's the whole thing i wasn't a very smooth guy darren when it came to ladies when i was an 18 year old i was very nervous what i was really nervous of was rejection of all of course yeah yeah i think everyone yeah so i used to make it a game go on a night of rejection and a night of rejection i love it so i go to new york with my friends and I would say, okay, whoever gets rejected the most wins. But really, I was speaking to myself, giving myself a free pass to be rejected. And it was a game and we did it on ourselves and we got really good. And I'm a sales guy by trade. So you would think I'd be used to rejection. But being rejected because of a product you're selling is not the same as being rejected because of you. Yes, that's true. Yeah, that's very true. So, yeah. So that's the advice I would give to the listeners. Go out. don't wait for your company do this yourself realize that you can compete with the machines you're not going to be cheaper you're not going to scale faster but you can build relationships i i really like i really like that position that you've put that relationship position is a really important one, which means we've got to get out of our houses. That's what it means. We've got to get out and talk to people face-to-face, even though it might be uncomfortable. Especially for those that have some social anxiety, you can't just hide is what I'm hearing you say. Absolutely. And don't wait for it to happen to you. Make it happen for yourself. I love that advice. I love that advice. All right. So let's talk about AI in general and kind of the future workforce, how you see that future workforce. Um, do you think that you're going to see people that, um, completely reject AI being able to stay in the workforce? Uh, kind of, kind of the gray hairs like myself, like, you know, can't teach me new things. I'm an old guy, right? I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing. Maybe I'm strong in relationships, but I'm going to reject kind of, you know, moving forward with AI. Is there a place for me in the future or, or is that, or is that a good place for me? Or do I need to now buckle down and start learning something new? So the short answer is you will have to adopt and work with AI. It's a bit like when I first started working, emails were a huge thing. You know, I even remember being given the job to roll up all the faxes. And people were talking about internet and how's that going to, and it all sounded the same. well, if you didn't work with internet, you probably weren able to retain a job in time So yeah I think the short answer is yes However I believe that there is a huge gap now where you had all these CEOs and I heard that people say you've got to become a CEO by 35 because no one's a 55 year old CEO. I think it's a terrible way of thinking. I value people at the big word who have got wisdom, who've got the experience and I think we as a society have lost the value of that and it's terrible and it's terrible for businesses it's terrible for society overall so the more complicated answer is yes everyone is going to have to adopt AI but guess who can adopt it the easiest and that's the people who have a way to apply the understanding to the knowledge that's now commoditized and I think that comes naturally with age you can develop it young but with age it comes easier so this is going to be one of those tech revolutions where i think it will come easier to people like you there and then say someone who's coming out of college even my own daughters they're in middle school they're learning to regurgitate stuff from off the top of the head and i'm thinking to myself what a waste of time and money and effort. Yeah, they're not learning problem solving, right? Exactly. Right, because they haven't had to solve real problems yet. Yeah, I tell my kids to cheat all the time. Use AI and figure out how to get away with it. That's the better skill. And my kids, luckily, they have my wife's mentality and they say, daddy, we cannot do it. Josh, I hope your middle school kids' teachers are not listening. But I do kind of agree with you. I talk about, and I mentioned my book before, I talk about this in my book a little bit, where you've got, I call them underleveraged resources, where these are experts. They've spent years building up this problem-solving skill. And they're under leveraged because maybe they can't take advantage of AI because they don't understand AI yet. But I think once they do, they'll truly become AI augmented, which means they're going to have a leg up on everybody else because they're not just regurgitating what AI is spitting out. They're evaluating what it spits out. They're questioning it. They're coming up with better solutions and kind of relegating the mundane and the mineralization part to AI, which AI is good at, that sort of stuff, right? Exactly. And I'll give you another boating analogy. As you can imagine, my mind is in the boating in the marine world. But I was on my boat last week, and I had a few guests, and they took their turns in driving the boat. And it's not a massive yacht, but it's a 20-ton boat. And they all said, well, this is so easy. You just point and you go and there's a lever and he slows it down and speeds it up. And I said, absolutely, 90% of the time it's easy. What we do our training for is in how to anchor and how to dock and what you do in an emergency. And I think of AI as very much like that. AI is going to replace that 90% easy stuff where everything is repetitive. But when the wind is blowing 25 knots and you're getting blown into a three, four, $5 million yacht next to you, and you can do a lot of damage, you know, drifting wind speed and, you know, with 20 tons into another yacht, that's when your experience comes in. And, you know, this isn't just for the boating world imagine you know it's 3 a.m and you hear gushing water coming from your basement and all your lights are out because they've all fused do you go to ai and start looking at how to fix it or do you call a plumber because ai is not going to crawl under your floorboards and crawl space so the reality is is that there are a lot of jobs not just businesses that won't be replaced by ai but all of them will be affected by it because the plumber is going to use AI to market and answer the phone and all the other stuff. Yeah, I love that. I love the analogy that 90 percent. It will free us up as humans to provide more value. But that's going to be uncomfortable for a lot of people that like to do the 90 percent work, right, where they don't have to extend themselves. So I think we're in for a big shakeup. And I think you were right. Those that are, what's the right word, that have grit, that are engaged. Is that the right word? Yeah, no, but yes, I think it is the right word. For the 90%, it's about time. And I have an investor, Susquehanna, and they've invested about $5 billion into mainly subscription-based automation companies. And I always wind them up a bit and I say, how can all you guys spend billions and billions of dollars in automation, yet we have an economy that's one of the least efficient economies since World War II? I mean, if you look at people to GDP, it's the least efficient we've ever been. Yet automation is ripe. And it's because people are, like I say, they're enjoying doing what automation could already do. I don't think you needed an AI revolution for that. You just needed some kind of revolution to kick that off. But we as a society can do a lot better. I can see us using our skill set and our efficiency for free health care, for things that are going to genuinely make it. I mean, I live in the US, but I am British, but make life better for humanity. I totally agree. I think we're on the I think we're on the verge of an incredible time in human history if we do it right. And I think we can. So, hey, Josh, if people want to reach out to your or find out more about kind of what you what you do, how can they reach out to you? How can they find out more? So I have my own podcast. It's called Exec Craft, only available on YouTube or you can hit me up on LinkedIn. Well, you guys know what to do. Search up Josh Gould, the big word. please subscribe to my podcast. Make sure you do the same for Darren as well because it makes our days when we get that. It does. Thanks for the plug, Josh. So, hey, thanks again for coming on the show. This has been wonderful. I enjoyed talking to you and you gave me some great quotes from my book. So I'm going to actually attribute you to those. So thanks again. Oh, thank you, Darren. I will brag to my mom. There you go. You can tell your mom you're famous now. Yeah, there you go. she will be more impressed if I read your book than if I'm famous thanks for listening to embracing digital transformation if you enjoyed today's conversation give us five stars on your favorite podcasting app or on youtube it really helps others discover the show if you want to go deeper join our exclusive community at patreon.com slash embracing digital, where we share bonus content and you can always connect with other change makers like yourself. You can always find more resources at embracingdigital.org. Until next time, keep embracing the digital transformation.
