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Chris Norton 0:00

This week we're joined by the brilliant Roger Hurni, founder of Off Madison Avenue in Arizona, an agency he's been running for nearly 27 years, which impressed me. Roger's background sits at the crossroads of creative, behavioural science, and behavioural economics, which he blends into something he calls behavioural marketing. He is the author of Outthink, Outperform, and he's just come off the TEDx stage in Kuala Lumpur. And then of course we get into the mistakes. Roger shares that one toxic hire that almost cost him his agency staff and new business and the expensive lesson he learned trying to build his own enterprise AI when he should have just been renting one. It's a cracking conversation about thinking better rather than faster. So let's get into it. Enjoy.

Roger Hurni 1:00

Thank you very much, Chris. And well, pleasure to be here.

Will Ockenden 1:03

Yeah, good to have you.

Chris Norton 1:04

I mean,

What Behavioural Marketing Really Means

Chris Norton 1:05

a bit unusual to have you on the show. I mean, we've we've met you, we've probably known you just over a year now. Uh you're the read the way that we met is through WorldCom, which and you've got an agency in the US, right? So do you want to and I I didn't realize this till I till I did a bit of research, but you've had that you've been running that agency for more than 27 years. I I I'm sat here going, I'm running a PR agency in the UK for like I mean, I've grown I mean, look at Will Will and me and our our hair is all going grey. 16 years. It's a shocker. So 27 years, that's impressive.

Roger Hurni 1:40

Well, technically 27 years this October, so we're under 27. Okay. And I started the agency when I was 12, so do the math, you know.

Chris Norton 1:51

And so you specialize in behavioral science. Is that what your agency does, or is that just what you do, or does the two shall meet?

Roger Hurni 1:59

No, those two are very intertwined. So I have a background not just in creative, but behavioral science and behavioral economics. And the combination of those two things creates a category called behavioral marketing that is the foundation for off Madison Ave and the work that we do here, where we look at which audiences in through very specific behavioral archetypes have the greatest degree of motivation to shift and change behavior in our clients' favor, and then how do we uh shift that behavior through tapping into that motivation?

Will Ockenden 2:39

So

Why The US Lags In Behaviour Modelling

Will Ockenden 2:40

one thing I'm interested to know, we as Chris said, we we we discussed um behavioral science and and and so on on the podcast um a fair bit, um, but largely from a UK perspective. And and one of the things we've kind of noticed is um the level of kind of market understanding varies when it comes to behavioral science. You know, some clients are very, very sophisticated when it comes to this stuff. What's the landscape like in the US? You know, is it is it more of a mature discipline to clients get it when you speak to them about this stuff?

Roger Hurni 3:13

Um it's not a mature discipline. Uh what I often find is a lot of people give lip service to, yeah, we change your customers' behavior. Um and I guess in theory, we all do that, we've always done that. It's instinctive as part of the business with how we actually work. But people who actually have a discipline in behavior modeling to make that happen are very few and far between. And so I I I it's an accepted practice, particularly when you weave behavioral economics into it, but I've not seen a lot of people with real depth of experience in it. Like I can think of a half a dozen to a dozen agencies that I would go, like, oh yeah, they know what they're doing. Um and and so I I have found that because I do a lot of international keynote speaking, I've seen that sort of around the world that people will talk about it, and to a certain degree, it's true that they do change customer behavior. I just haven't seen people with the real science behind those actions.

Chris Norton 4:18

So

Motivation Beats Manipulation In Practice

Chris Norton 4:19

what what frightens me with with behavioral science is like the fact that you can the framework that we've got, I mean, they're used for propaganda and things like that. I mean propaganda in the worst case scenario. But now that we've got the you know, mythos and these AI tools that could be used for you know AI hacking, but could equally be used for human hacking and behavioral science, you would think. It would be a way around to convince people to do things. Is that is that fair?

Roger Hurni 4:49

Uh I actually I actually don't think it's all that fair, Chris, because yeah, the AI can provide disinformation and misinformation to an abundant degree. But the thing about human behavior is that well, look, there's a couple of maxims that I learned from my mentor, Dr. BJ Fogg. The first one is you cannot manipulate people. I I I can't make anybody through behavioral science and economics do anything they do not want to do. You know, if if you like I ride bikes and I love cycling, and a hundred kilometer ride on a Saturday for me is not a big deal. But if you, you know, even you wanted to work for me, if you had some level of motivation, like, oh, maybe I should go ride with Roger. If you don't like riding bikes, I can never get you to go ride a bike, particularly 100 kilometers. It's just never going to happen. So you can't manipulate people into doing something they don't have any inclination or any level of motivation to do. Now, if disinformation or misinformation is persuading someone in certain to take a certain action, that means there's an existing motivation there. But pure manipulation, that's not true. The other thing about behavioral science is it helps people do what they already want to do. Oftentimes people are motivated to do something, but they lack the ability to do that. There's some barrier in the way. There's these ability blocker chain where it might cost too much money, take too much mental effort or physical effort, or it's not in their routine, right? And what we'll do is how do we come overcome those blockers and increase someone's ability? So AI really can't do that. It can help me communicate more effectively, particularly when AI has context to it. But AI is just putting out content, and content is what happens, not why something is happening. And context is everything. So tap into the context, and then you shift behavior.

Chris Norton 6:56

No, it's interesting it's interesting. I've spoken to a lot of behavioral science scientists like Will said, but I've spoken to a couple in America that Will hasn't met, and they were they were talking about like the you've got the various different uh elements of behavioral science like scarcity and then abundance. So you and um uh there's a there's numerous different traits that you can push on to make to like you say though, it's more to encourage someone to do something rather than someone who doesn't want to do something.

Roger Hurni 7:24

Sure, but like those are more behavioral economic stuff. So if if someone has enough motivation uh or motivational range to do something, and we've to identify them as an audience, now how do I increase their behavior? How do I increase the propensity for them to change behavior by making anything easier, increasing their ability? That could be, hey, on the website, there shouldn't be five fields, there should be two, right? That can be an inducement for trial. That can be um, let's do some behavior sequencing and have them perform four or five behaviors before we ask them to sign on for a subscription. There's a lot of things that you can do. Once you underidentify those things, now behavioral economics kicks in, and you're like, okay, do I use messaging from the rule of scarcity? Like, this is going to be going away at the end of the month, you know, or there's only a limited number of packages. For some people, that will spur that motivation into action. For other people, it could be reciprocity or, you know, just that whole fear of missing out. Um, uh, you know, or we'll use things like middle-tier pricing to show people the value of something by using an anchor price. So the behavioral economic theory overlaps that behavioral science, and it gives you a way to message your audience on something they already want to do that can make it easier for them to take action. But if they don't want to do that, I can't make anybody do that. Like I can't make you, Chris, go ride a hundred kilometer bike ride with me.

Chris Norton 8:50

No,

Pricing Psychology That Actually Works

Chris Norton 8:51

true. And one of the things I really like, like what one of the hacks that I heard was like, if you if you were doing pricing, right? So um we spoke to Phill Agnew and he's uh he he runs a podcast in the UK called Nudge, and he said that if you do pricing and you've got six say your fee is six thousand pounds, instead of doing six thousand pounds, do six K. And even though it's exactly the same amount, your mind says that six thousand is more than the six K. Or be specific was another one on the number, and clients are more likely to pay a particular amount. If it's a specific number, it feels like it's been more thought through. So rather than being 6,000 pounds, 5,333 is much more convincing.

Roger Hurni 9:38

There are all kinds of pricing strategies. That's why a lot of things here are like $9.99, because even though it's $10 in the US, it still comes across as $9. So we have a tendency to round down. We have the tendency to give people credit. One of the pricing strategies is premium pricing. So in premium pricing and behavioral economics, what you want to do is actually have a round number. You want to charge 6,000 pounds for something because it sounds like, yeah, we're expensive, but we're worth it, right? There's a value to it. If you want to do something that feels uh like, you know, there's a lot of specificity to this number because it was really thoughtful, yeah, then you're gonna end in actually an odd number. Yeah. If you ever get a chance, I would recommend looking at Costco's pricing strategy because the price reflects the logistics of their operations. And so amazing things. And I can't remember what the pricing things were, but I'm gonna make this up to make a point. But if something's like 67, yeah, it ends in 67, they only have a few left and they're just trying to get rid of it. If it ends in 99, it's new product. If it ends in 88, it's something else. So they they have a whole pricing structure around how they handle inventory management. Um, but there are a lot of ways to price things. It's not just make it 5,999 pounds and it's the same as 6,000 or 6k versus you know 6,000 pounds. Those are strategies, but they're just not the only ones.

Turning Blogs Into A Business Book

Will Ockenden 11:04

So you've you've you're obviously a published author. We love having authors on the show. And I want to I want to dive into that a little bit. So you you wrote a book on all of this stuff, didn't you? Was it 2024 when when when you

Roger Hurni 11:15

Yeah, it came out in June of 2024 and working on the second book now. But yeah, it's called Outthink, Outperform.

Will Ockenden 11:21

Yeah, so it's talk to us about the focus of that, and then I'd love to dive into what the new book's gonna be about because that's gonna that that that kind of touches on on AI, doesn't it? Which is obviously AI in in in your field. But yeah, tell us a little bit about outthink outperform.

Roger Hurni 11:34

Well, I I don't recommend anyone going out and writing a book. And I didn't do that either. I wrote some blogs, and then I wrote some articles for Forbes as a guest contributor, and then I got a collection of those and went, huh, there's a lot of material here. There's like 20,000 words, uh, which is like half a book, you know, or two or one third of a book. And it was along that time period that had enough friends saying, you know, I can't, you know, I don't have the budgets to go to an agency like Off Madison Ave. There's a lot of small business owners that are just starting out. Is there an application of how you can apply this stuff yourself? Can you teach what some of the behavioral science, behavioral economic theories are in a digestible, you know, sort of very understandable way? And and enough of my friends over about a two or three year period said said that to me to where I started then organizing this. Uh, I got actually a writing coach, not to actually help me with the writing, but to help me with the book organization. How do you outline, how do you, you know, uh make sure it flows logically. And even then, I decided I wasn't going to write a book. I decided I was going to write a chapter. And after one chapter, I and it it wasn't literally like I didn't write chapter one, then chapter two, and then chapter three. I think the first chapter I wrote was like the third or fourth chapter. And then I wrote chapter one. Yeah, I wrote chapter, yeah, exactly. It's like a Star Wars thing. I wrote chapter one, like really late in the process. Uh and I didn't write the last sentence of the book until like the day before I left for vacation. I was literally like that's when I named the book. It was literally in the last sentence when I wrote the book. I had a different working title for nine, ten months. And when I wrote the last sentence in the book, I was like, oh shit, yeah, that's the title. Like, we should make that the title. Um, so but it again, if we talk about behavioral science, and I talked about behavioral sequencing earlier, when it comes to the book writing process, it's the same thing. If you look at writing a book, that's a large behavior. That's something that a lot of people can't tackle because it's just too difficult. It just feels too overwhelming. But if you break it down into a series or sequencing of behaviors, like, you know what? I'm just gonna write a blog. I'm gonna write two blogs, I'm gonna write 500 words today, or 50 words today. It doesn't really matter. Pretty soon those behaviors add up to where you're looking at a manuscript of 30,000, 40,000 words. And you're like, okay, now I need to fill in the blanks. And if you can hit between 40 and 50,000 words, that's typically a business book. You know, I know some publishers are like, I want 75,000 words. Anything under 40 feels a little thin, like you maybe not have the same level of expertise unless you're trying to do a like, here's a like a 50-page manual on how to do these 10 things. Um, but yeah, that's the process I went through. And

The Hidden Work Of Publishing

Roger Hurni 14:33

if someone does want to write a book, I would argue, don't write a book, go start writing some of these other things and build on it. And then at some point you might feel like, oh my god, there's a book here.

Chris Norton 14:42

Or start a podcast about people's mistakes.

Will Ockenden 14:44

Well, we should I was just thinking, Chris, we should we write a book based on all on the interviews and the insights we've got.

Chris Norton 14:50

Yeah, I'd I've thought I've thought about it, Alan. Because the amount of words that we've got about S is ridiculous.

Will Ockenden 14:56

What was it like releasing it into the wild, Roger? You know, you you you obviously you named it, you went on vacation. Was there an was were you exhausted? Was there an enormous sense of satisfaction?

Roger Hurni 15:06

Um, there was a there was a moment where I got really there was a moment in between before it got released, I was exhausted. Because I here's the thing about writing a book. When I got done, literally, I wrote the last sentence the day before I went on this uh Mediterranean cruise with some friends. And I was like, done. Right, just done. I'm done. Like this weight's off my shoulders, it's awesome. And I get back to from the content editor, who's a really talented journalist at one point, you know, he's a very talented journalist, but also now does content editing, uh, a guy by the name of Dan Good. He had sent me an email because I knew he was doing the first pass at content editing. And it took me two days to open up the email because I was so bloody nervous about like what this person was gonna do and how it was gonna rip rip apart my book. And the first sentence was Roger, you have an excellent book that's clearly written for the reader. And I was like, oh my God, like this is amazing! Like I was almost in tears. What I was not prepared for at that moment was the shift into the publishing world, content edit. Then it was like a uh citation edit. There was like two different edits of Chicago style, which I didn't even know there was a Chicago style of editing. Um, I knew of AP. Uh it took the same amount of time to get the book into the wild as it did to write the book. No, and I was not prepared for that. And I've had a lot of people ask me this question like, what should you do? Like, what's one thing you need to tell people as advice? Have a spreadsheet. Because there's so many little things that you have to do in the process beyond writing, in terms of how do I get who's gonna write the forward? How do I have like a book army of people who can endorse the book and see an advanced copy? You know, you know, how do I get it into the Library of Congress in the United States? How do I get into all the public libraries? How do I make sure I have the copyright? Like there's all these things and all this paperwork that you have to do that it's just that was as much work as writing the book. But when it did come out well to your answer, to your question, yeah, I was elated. I couldn't believe it. I was like all giggles and ears. And but you don't write a book to sell it, in all honesty, a business book at least. You know, it wasn't about like how many sales can I get. It for me, it was it's a proof point for my companies.

Will Ockenden 17:30

Yeah, yeah.

Roger Hurni 17:31

Uh, how I use this behavioral science and and validate. And honestly, then with speaking opportunities. And two or three weeks after the book came out, I was very fortunate to get an email from uh a marketing director very high up at Tata uh in Mumbai. And honestly, when I got the email, I it kind of read to me like Nigerian Prince needs help because I was like, I never heard of this company, like I never heard of this person. I looked him up on LinkedIn. And so I reached out and I said, Yeah, sure, I'd be interested. And he he said, Let's get on a Zoom call. So he gets on a Zoom call and says, Yeah, we're having a summit of our CMOs. We work in like 150 countries, we have operations in a hundred of them, we're across like nine sectors. Like it taught us a four trillion billion dollar company, you know. You know, it's it's massive. And I didn't realize it at the time. But the moment for me that was the most proud, uh, because this has to do really do with releasing the book. I'm just, you know, this guy in Arizona. And when I asked um Pucket, uh, who's the gentleman I was speaking with, you know, how'd you get a hold of me? And he said, Well, uh, my boss has a background in behavioral economics from Wharton, and he read your book, and then he held it up. And I was like, Oh wow, like that's pretty like that was my proud, incredible moment. And then it just snowballed into a whole bunch of other speaking gigs because of because are we allowed to talk about a big one that's coming up? Um, yeah, you can. I

TEDx Lessons On Humans And AI

Roger Hurni 19:04

have a working title, and I don't mind throwing that out there.

Will Ockenden 19:06

So I uh so that's uh that's TEDx, isn't it?

Roger Hurni 19:10

Yeah, so yes, I I I literally came back uh a few days ago from doing uh a TEDx in um Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. And uh I I think I could give away the title because it's not that big of a deal. It is stop following the blue line. And it has to do with how human behavior works with AI and how we need to work with it in a way that just doesn't provide answers, but expands our thinking, expands our options, and then we apply judgment to those answers and let AI accelerate that distance. And that the TEDx didn't actually didn't start, and then the book. I had this idea from just writing an AI philosophy for my company. So it was just like my employees, like, you can have an AI policy, and sure, that's all the Lee Lee's stuff. But I wrote an AI policy, I wrote an AI philosophy that explained to my staff here's how you need to work with AI. You know, you can experiment all you want, but here's here's what doesn't replace the human thinking, here's what doesn't replace judgment, here's how you accelerate the quality of our work with AI. That document I ran by the person who helped me write the first book with my writing coach, Isabella Talbot. And she goes, you know, this is a book. And I'm like, really? I go, why don't we just start off with a blog? And then why don't we do another blog, right? And then I got approached um by someone to to be to set out an application for a TEDx about it. And then they said that, oh yeah, when you do these things, it's gonna take six, seven months. It took six weeks. And I got I accepted that invitation, and then I wrote that TEDx script, and then it was really at that point, it's like, oh my God, we're in the middle of it. So now I'm in the middle of writing that book. I only have a couple of chapters done. I've got the outline done. I'm working on it a little bit in my spare time. It's gonna be called, I think it's going to be called how to compete on that same theme about think, outperform, uh, how to compete with AI. But it's not competing against it, it's competing with it as a double entendre. And it's gonna be beyond business, it's going to have parenting advice. It's going to be for anybody using AI, not just people in marketing and public relations or in business in general.

Will Ockenden 22:42

So just diving back to your AI philosophy, I really like the sound of that. And I've I've not heard of that before. You know, because everyone turns out their AI policies, don't they? And that's a long list of very formal, structured ways to work with AI and declare its usage. So what what what does an AI you know? Give us a few pointers, I mean, without giving it away necessarily, but you know, what what what are some of the things you included in your AI philosophy? And what's what's The kind of the reason for having an AI philosophy.

Roger Hurni 23:11

So well, a couple of reasons for having AI philosophy. One is to teach my staff how I want them to use AI, because I don't want anyone who works for me to simply say, okay, here's the research, throw it into ChatGTP or Claude or whatever you have, and here's the report it spits out, take it verbatim without judgment, without query, without expanding options, without looking for unrealized opportunities, and just give it to a client. That would be disingenuous. That would be terrible for us. It'd be terrible for the client. The second part of that is you probably have come across this too. And I still have uh companies and WorldCom partners even talk about this. We have a client has there's no AI. I'm like,

AI Philosophy Versus AI Policy

Roger Hurni 23:56

okay. You know, you're living with your head in the sand like an ostrich here. There's there's you have to use AI. There's no, you're in a world now where you cannot not use it. Now, you may not want to use it for output, but that does not mean you can't use it for input. You can't use it to look for gaps, right? Or streamline the process for something. That doesn't mean that that makes it into what gets output to a journalist in terms of a press release or creative. I get that part of it, but to have a blanket like we don't allow AI in our work is you're gonna be outmaneuvered and courted by your competitors in a very, very short order. So the philosophy was you never look for AI for an answer. I want you to look for AI to expand your options. So don't say, give me, you know, you might ask it a question like, um, look through all of this research and tell me the results. If I were to go and choose this action, what are possible outcomes? Right? You're asking questions that provide content to the context that you have in your head, or you're helping provide context to that AI, and then you're never allowing it to replace your judgment. So it can give you all the possibilities, but ultimately at the end of the day, you have to choose the red pill or the blue pill. Sorry, matrix reference.

Chris Norton 25:29

I mean, that's that's interesting, but I'm gonna throw a complete curveball here because every client has got a different take. So we're seeing in the UK um that we've got at prohibition, we've probably got 30, 40 clients, something like that. And it every client is completely sectors are different. Everybody so some clients are, yeah, you can't use AI. Some clients are like, we've got clients that are gonna be like, hey, can you use AI for this just to speed this up? And then we had a we had uh one of our account directors not three months ago, two or two months ago, uh, before I went at the AI conference and PR in London, I was at um a few weeks ago. I shared this. Um one of my account directors rang me whilst we were in Paris, actually. Whilst we were in Paris with you, Roger. Um I got a phone call and um they said Um, I've just been asked by a uh a marketing director. The marketing director has sat me down and gone, we've started using Claude and it's really good. Um why don't we just use Claude to create all the output at our end, and then we'll just send you the stuff we we've got and you just send it out to your contacts, to which we were obviously my you can imagine what my account

Dealing With Clients Who Want AI Output

Chris Norton 26:43

director said, and she was like, um, and then she obviously and I saw what I did at this conference was I threw that out to the panel and said, What would you say to that when a client says, Oh, I'll just I'll just outsource all the output to I'll get which is exactly the opposite of what you've just said, which is interesting. My point is that you get different people with different views on it, very different views on it.

Roger Hurni 27:06

Well, let me answer them first. Let me answer your last question first, and then I'll address the how that went about. Uh, I would probably say to that person, we're probably not the right agency for you. Look, there's always going to be bad actors. There's always going to be people who are looking for shortcuts. And they're going to have that person who's a solopreneur, one person real estate agent who's just going to use a Claude, crank out an ad, crank out a press release, send it, and they don't care. Just it's just content that's going out in the world. That does not mean there's depth of thinking. That does not mean they're looking at unrealized opportunities or looking for gaps. That doesn't mean they're not trying to expand their thinking. Companies that are more sophisticated, that want to truly have market share and set themselves up with points of differentiation, aren't going to rely on the first answer out of Chat GTP. So they're just never going to be a client. I just I just won't take that. And in terms of a philosophy document, because you're talking about some specifics, our philosophy document doesn't say we do this with it or we do that with it. Like it says this is how we work with AI. We use it to expand those options. We do not let it replace judgment. We use it to find gaps. We'll use it to comb through mountains of research that it would take way too long and be made cost prohibitive for us to do by hand so that we can synthesize those answers in a way that we can apply our own judgment to it and look for additional opportunities. So a philosophy document is again, I think lean hard on the word philosophy. It is not specificity, right? We're not saying, oh, we use it to create an ad at this stage, right? Or we use it to create the writing of a press release or even a draft of a press release. We never talk about that. We may, we may not. It's the it's the context around how we use AI that's the philosophy document.

Will Ockenden 29:08

This um this kind of unscrutin, unscrutinized, uncritiqued use of AI. I don't know about you, but I'm I'm seeing quite a lot of that. And I'm seeing we've seen briefs come in. Half of the new briefs we get in from companies that should know better are purely written with AI. You can tell they've not been scrutinized at all. Um we've we've identified AI copy on one of the major um ad magazines in the UK come through on an email. And I think it's pretty widespread at the moment. Is is this I know there's a term you use, expensive sameness. Is this what we're talking about here?

Roger Hurni 29:45

Yeah, but any new technology does that, Will. I mean, any new technology that does disruptor, it usually runs through two industries first, pornography and music. And once it gets past that, it goes into people that try to do take shortcuts or do nefarious stuff with it. And once you get past that group of people, and we're still in that group of people right now, you're gonna have people who understand this technology, can be incredibly powerful and use it in ways that we never thought of. I mean, the desktop computer was like that. IBM's like, why do we need why do people, why do people need a computer on their desk? Right? They just didn't they didn't

Expensive Sameness And Better Questions

Roger Hurni 30:23

understand that the future is, you know, for our in our in our time frame that we're in right now, the the future doesn't belong to people who use AI the fastest. It belongs to people who use it the deepest, right? The ones who question more, the ones who don't have it replace their judgment. There's a place in the world for AI, just like there's a place in the world for calculators and computers, and they replace the side rule and the abacus and all those other things. We're adopting a new technology and we're going through the growing pains of adopting that new technology. But at the end of that, if everybody has the same tool, who's the better person? It's the person who thinks better with it and not the person who just looks for output.

Will Ockenden 31:10

How long have we got to go then? How much more pain have we got to get through before we get to that point?

Roger Hurni 31:14

If I had that answer, I would be a gazillionaire, I think.

Will Ockenden 31:20

Yeah, it's a little a few more months here, I I reckon.

Roger Hurni 31:24

But that's a that you know, yeah, I don't think there's an answer there because the technology is developing so rapidly, it's it's hard to keep up, you know. Yeah.

Chris Norton 31:34

I was just saying there's a there's a there's a whole PR campaign going on at the moment that where it's swapped from doomism to to positivity again because of all the negativity, all the negative sentiment around these data centers popping up everywhere, springing up, and um Sam Altman and all the owners that they're all they're all now going, oh actually the jobs market, it might not be that bad, it might be fine. Like going, really? If self self-automating, self-improving tools. So when that when that happens, that's the that's the game changer. As soon as it starts self-modifying itself, that's when okay, everything will change, but we're not there yet, so we're not at the singularity.

Roger Hurni 32:15

Yeah, I mean when that singularity happens, who knows? You know, I mean, maybe then we'll be in a world of Star Trek where you know we can just improve our lives and have technology handle everything. You know, it's I I have hope for this reason. Like right now, AI does not like being trained by AI. So if you're looking at GEO or AEO research and how the LLMs are handling search right now, um, yeah, you know what? You can identify the prompts that are happening, you can use AI to dive all that research down. You can even use AI to draft, hey, here are the gaps in order for us to improve uh for our client where they're going to show up and either answers andor citation. But at some point, you as a human has to write the press release because AI does not want the press release written by AI, it doesn't want to be trained by AI. And maybe that's just the powers that be inside all those LLM companies, like anthropic, putting guardrails on stuff, you know, who knows. But I I am a believer in human thought and understanding the human condition. And at the end of the day, you know, what there was this quote by Joanna, and I cannot remember her last name. It's gonna be in my book. I I don't want AI to do my painting and writing, I want it to do my dishes and laundry so that I can do my painting and writing. And I'm hoping that that becomes the future.

Chris Norton 33:54

Yeah, I've seen that. I've seen I've seen that. Yeah. Oh, because yeah, the writing is the creative side that people enjoy.

Will Ockenden 34:03

When when are you hoping um this uh second book's gonna be published, Roger?

Roger Hurni 34:09

Uh you know, it's evergreen because it has to do with human thinking. And so I'm not worried about it being like, oh my god, I get this out because it's about AI. It's about our evolution with it, and it's a futurist point of view. Uh, so I'm not like under some sort of pressure deadline. I would like to see the book done. And here's the thing compared to my last book, which I wrote literally every word by myself, like without help. Um, I am actually going to use AI to prove the point that you can work with AI in a really impactful way. So I do expect it to be written faster because of that. Uh, and I'm starting to see the advantages of that. Uh, just because of the way I've trained the agent, the way I'm writing it's still my stories, my ideas, speaking into a computer and having it help me organize. So I I would love to have it finished by the end of this year. And then if it comes out by the end of next year, it's probably the just the publishing world just takes a long time to get through all that stuff. So I would definitely like it to come out next year sometime.

Chris Norton 35:14

So expensive sameness reference that you've used, that I think we'll talked about earlier. Um, expensive sameness. Are you talking about the fact that everybody will be producing stuff using the same tools? So everything will be vanilla, so all the same, but you've you've paid a lot of money to do it. Is that the point you're making with that?

Roger Hurni 35:34

No, what I'm saying is that if EAI is an equalizer for people who are smart and for people who are stupid, then you know, you need to have some other element that makes someone better than the other person. Uh, you guys have employees, right? Someone comes in to your organization, or you've got two employees, both with the same number of years' experience, basically the same background, based, you know, and they have the same access to AI tools. Who's the better person? Yeah, it's gonna be the one who asks the better questions. Because the person who just, you know, throws everything into Chat GTP and then puts out this very confident, polished report, even if it's wrong, you know, is not the valuable person. It's the person who comes back with that messier document, the handwritten notes and the margins, the person who's like, hey, I didn't like these couple of answers, so I dug deeper and I went back to the research and I found this that it didn't flag. And that's the person who's going to be the critical thinker. And that's the person you want to invest in. And in in a few years, those two groups of people, they're not going to be the same place in any organization. Yeah, one's just getting answers. But the other one, again, is expanding their expanding the thinking, expanding the options and applying judgment.

Will Ockenden 36:53

And I suppose those those people would always, those curious people that ask the right questions driven, they, irrespective of when they practiced in their profession, pre-AI, post-AI, they're always going to rise to the top, aren't they? You know, whatever technology they've got at their means, you know, that that's going to get them far, isn't it? That attitude.

Roger Hurni 37:13

Yeah. But I mean, you don't want someone who just mindlessly pumps out a press. Before AI, you wouldn't want someone who mindlessly pumps out a press release, crosses the T's dot nine, hands it in without critical thinking behind it. It's just AI has just removed those social barriers, that social friction, and the ethics, quite frankly, to you know, accelerate bad behavior.

Will Ockenden 37:40

It's it's a tricky, but I mean, back to this transitionary period we're in, it's it's tricky, isn't it? Because at the moment, there is a there is a clear advantage of people that use AI, irrespective of how critical they're thinking. So it gives them an immediate kind of leg up, doesn't it? Just by just by virtue of using it. But obviously that, you know, sooner or later it's going to be a level playing field again.

Roger Hurni 38:01

Yeah, it will. I mean, we're we're definitely in a danger zone. There was some research by Stephen Shaw and Gideon Nave of the Wharton School earlier this year. I think it came out in like January or February, and they were building on Daniel Kahneman's work on system one and system two thinking, and they were talking about system three, and and there's components to it, right? You know, there's cognitive offloading, which is like, I don't want to go through all this research, just go through it and give me what it says so that I can make some judgments. That's fine. Or there's this other element called cognitive surrender that they identified where you know you just you just default to have it think for you because you don't do it anymore. And, you know, my point uh in in another podcast interview was that's always been around. AI didn't create that, right? Plagiarism is real. People took credit for someone else's idea all the time. You either copied work and put your name on it, or a manager took credit for your work, or you know, even when a child says, you know, how do you spell X, or right, or what's the answer to this, and the parent just freely gives them that answer, that kid is not critical thinking. That kid is not trying to figure out for themselves, they're just cognitively surrendering. Like, I don't want to deal with that. And again, fine, it's a useful

Cognitive Surrender And The New Risk

Roger Hurni 39:18

element if you're trying to figure out who won the 1994 World Cup. I think it was Brazil. But and you're in a pub with somebody and you know you just need that, that's perfectly good. Not good in business, not good for thinking. So in their research, they said, look, this isn't that whole cognitive surrender isn't just you know common today. It's actually the dominant force shaping how people use AI. That's like my fear is that because it's a new tool, people are just accepting the answers that come out of it, even if they're wrong. True. And they're reporting higher degrees of confidence. Like that's a danger zone that we as business owners, as leaders in our industry, have to make sure that people are actually applying real critical thinking skills to their use of AI. And I think that's our responsibility to teach that because they're not getting it growing up the way we did.

Chris Norton 40:12

Yeah, but I've I I mean I'm in the LinkedIn dichotomy right now. So LinkedIn has um it was the is the center of all B2B communication, social media, brilliant. And about three or four years ago when Microsoft bought it, it seemed to go in, it seemed to really find a way of its own. Then AI ChatGPT's come out and they've integrated AI into the paid side of it. So you can now use, you have been able to use it for the last couple of years, where if you're writing a post, you're a premium user, you can use AI to help improve your post or write your post. And then, was it last week or the week before, they've launched a button now to does this, does this look like um does this look like AI? Or or this is AI slop. There's a new button to report AI slop. Well, the dichotomy here is you want people to create posts with AI, but then you're saying it's AI slop. I would argue, I think about 90% of LinkedIn is now AI bullshit. Don't you think so?

Roger Hurni 41:15

I I I do think there's a tremendous amount of AI BS in LinkedIn. I also think that there's an evolution in LinkedIn's thinking or Microsoft's thinking is that, hey, AI is a thing,

LinkedIn AI Slop And A Writing Test

Roger Hurni 41:27

we're gonna make it easier for you, and now there's a backlash. Now that we've made it easier for you, and AI doesn't want to be trained by AI, now we need you to help us police the fact that we made a mistake. Again, I think we're turning a corner there. Quality thinking is quality thinking. Like, here's a test I give my employees, and I said it in when we were in Paris together at that conference, but for your listeners, I'll have an employee come in and I'll ask them to write something with AI. And then I'll ask them write something, have AI write something for you. But the third one is trickier. I want you to write a page on something AI cannot possibly write. There's no way in the world AI could write this for you. And it teaches, it shows me, yeah, can you actually write? Like, can you write in active voice versus passive voice and do all the grammar stuff? It teaches me how you think. Can you track an idea through? And I've had people be like, AI can write anything. I'm like, no, AI cannot write anything. AI cannot write about when you were eight years old making chocolate chip cookies with your grandmother in the kitchen and the feelings and emotions that you had. It doesn't know that story. It's not been trained on that. Therefore, AI can't write it unless you tell it that story. So if you don't tell it that story, you can easily pick up a pen and paper and write it yourself.

Chris Norton 42:55

Oh my god, I've just got a horrible thought that Elon Musk's gonna use that brain chip to download your memories into AI and train it. That's gonna be the next thing, isn't it?

Roger Hurni 43:07

Well, at that point, at that point we're all F Chris, and we just call it a day. You know, at that point I'm just gonna go on my bike and stop working.

Chris Norton 43:14

You know I can't remember what it's called. He's like a chip in the brain, isn't it? He's wired some.

Roger Hurni 43:19

I know he was trying to do something like that. I you know, I I know that science fiction can eventually become science fact, but I'm gonna just go on I'm gonna go on a limb here and say that I will be long gone if that were ever to come to pass.

Chris Norton 43:32

Well, my final prediction is that well, and the final prediction on the LinkedIn thing, I predict that that LinkedIn AI slot reporting button is gonna last less than two months because everything on LinkedIn is pretty much AI now. So it'll be interesting to watch that because I've I've seen people going back the other way to your point, Roger, writing themselves now because it's just like that's now to go back to your sameness point. I think that's the point of difference because everything's AI slop, and if you write yourself, it actually you can see it now. So I think I think the AI slop button's gonna be dead in the walls.

Roger Hurni 44:06

I think one of the things that's interesting that AI I'm not saying AI can't do this. When you can relate the quality of the content to something personal, it's either harder to spot or it's not AI, or it's a it's done with AI in a respectful, correct way. And I was just I was just writing an article, and when I was doing it with my writing assistant, um, not AI, real per real person, I explained that you had to do this audience evaluation thing, um, like you're scuba diving. And she goes, What do you mean? I'm like, well, when I was trained to scuba dive in in my first open water certification, um, if you go down as you're descending, your pressure builds up in your ears, and you have to with you have to equalize, you have to basically hold your nose and blow out your nose, or you know, to make sure that you know, you also like get air in your masks, right? You had to pressurize so that your eardrums don't burst. And if you go down a little too much pain, you gotta come up. A little bit, equalize, wait, and then start to descend again. So I said the phrase they drill into your head is early and often. And I said, So when it comes to the audiences that you have, they may shift because of external pressures, geopolitics, um you know, the economy,

Early And Often Audience Evaluation

Roger Hurni 45:28

and they can shift underneath your feet. And that means you might have to offer different services or expand the audience head or do something. And a lot of times people wait until that spreadsheet shows the line going down a little too far. Oh my god, we're 20% under quarter over quarter. What's happening? If you go early and often to evaluate those audiences, you know, you can might mitigate that. But the thing is, like in writing the article, I don't know if AI would have on its own made that correlation of scuba diving to audience evaluation. That took human thought. That took human judgment.

Will Ockenden 46:07

It will do now that we've discussed it and it's uh Yeah, yeah, it will now.

Roger Hurni 46:12

Yeah, this will get uploaded and it'll be like, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm gonna see I'm gonna see a LinkedIn article, Chris, next week that says, you know, you should handle whatever early and often, you know.

Chris Norton 46:24

Yeah, exactly that. Exactly that. Um obviously this show is about mistakes, Roger, and that everybody on the listens to this show wants to hear where people have screwed up and what they've learned from it. So what's what's a what's a mistake that you've made that you are willing to share on the show um to be, you know, honest? That's what we're here for.

Roger Hurni 46:44

I'm willing to share a lot of them because I'd made so many. Um, I'm trying to figure out which one might give you the best lesson for your listeners. You know, it's funny, I've had a lot of people say to me over the years, because you mentioned like my company's been around for 27 years now. Um it's like, wow, you do it, must do everything right. Like, although say some version of that. I'm like, no, no, I I get a lot of things wrong. Uh I get a lot of things wrong. I do get things more right than wrong. And if you can do that 10% better, like if you can get things 10% right more than wrong, you're a success. Like, so it doesn't take a lot. Um, I'll give you one story that that happened recently. I I started to discuss this a little bit in Paris at WorldCom, but I uh we as a company made a massive mistake hiring somebody who was just toxic to the culture. And it it ended up being a case where we weren't getting business because of this person. We had some good people like punch out, uh, some of them without notice. And it it just took a lot of growing pains to realize that this was a mistake and to get everybody on page to see that it was a mistake and and start to take corrective action. So the lesson I I learned here is that, and again, every company is different. My father had this saying that's what's good for one marriage is poison for another. What I realized for my company, and I think for a lot of companies this makes a lot of sense when you're looking to grow and change, I don't know if I would bring in somebody new, particularly somebody who really doesn't understand the culture. I would rather groom people who've been with me for years, understand who we are and why we work the way we do, and find ways to get them into leadership positions to grow the company.

Mistake One A Toxic Hire

Roger Hurni 48:41

So I will not make that mistake again.

Chris Norton 48:44

I think everybody's recruited, any business owner has recruited a toxic member or two before. It's that's yeah, it's how you learn. I mean, I you just said there that you you've made more mistakes, you've made more, you you do 10% uh more success than than mistakes. And actually, that's what that's what life is in business. That's what life is. Yeah marketing itself, email anything you do in me in marketing is do something, fail, do something, fail, iteratively improve it, do something, fail. They call it A-B testing now, but basically it's A B fucking up. That's what it is, isn't it? It is it is that version Z and it's doing okay.

Roger Hurni 49:23

Yeah, the culture thing is really important, Chris, and and we may do make those mistakes. And and honestly, my advice for the listeners would be it doesn't have to be a leadership person, it could be literally the lowest person on the rung inside your organization. That kid that comes out of college. One bad apple ruins the cart or something like that, I think the saying is. Yeah, it can happen. One person who's toxic can really change the organization. And I would rather have someone who's a less a bit of a less of a lesser of a performer, but fits in culturally, than a high performing person who's toxic.

Chris Norton 50:00

Well, luckily Will's changed a bit now. He's not as toxic as he was when he started, so oh my god.

Will Ockenden 50:09

I mean, that's so true. You know, you I I remember I read a uh I used to subscribe to Seth Godin's daily daily wisdom, which was just um absolute gold. And he he addressed that once that you you should never compromise on culture ever because you'll pay for it every single time. It's absolutely true, isn't it? And I don't think Oh, absolutely.

Roger Hurni 50:27

Yeah, was it Jim? Was it Jim Collins, I think, in good to great? I think his I think it was that book where he wrote that culture eats strategy for lunch or something like that.

Will Ockenden 50:36

Yeah. But yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Um, I think we've got time for one more mistake, Roger, without wish wishing to uh push you too far if you've got anything else you have to share. You you shared a few of them in the pre pre-shaped. You know, okay.

Roger Hurni 50:49

I'll I'll I'll give you an I'll give you an AI one. Uh good. Because like two or three years ago, like AI really wasn't a thing. Although I had started an AI company that was machine-based learning and eventually went to ontology-based learning after Chat GTP. Um people think of just the LLMs as like, oh, we've got Claude, we've got you know Chat GTP and uh I can't remember Microsoft's co-pilot, right? There's Gemini, there's perplexity. People think there's a handful of these things. There's not. There's tens and tens and tens of thousands of AIs out there. Everyone thinks they've got a better mousetrap. And we made the mistake of trying to build a kind of an enterprise AI for our company when all this was happening the last couple of years. And I'm not saying companies shouldn't do that. This is not the lesson. What I'm saying is that you need to evaluate if it's cheaper to rent than buy. That's not our core competency, right? After it failed, we found something else that was off the shelf that we can customize for the way we work, far cheaper than trying to build something, maintain something. And again, if

Mistake Two Building The Wrong AI

Roger Hurni 52:04

that works for your company, that's great. But I don't I think that's the exception. Like I know that you guys have a software for your thing, and that works great. Now, whether or not you want to sell that and try to create something else, that's a different story. And I think a lot of people have these grandiose ideas that, you know, I'm going to build the next AI. It's a gold rush for AI. And so I'm just going to quote Mark Twain. In a gold rush, it better be the guy who sells picks and shovels. So let everyone have the gold rush trying to build stuff. I'm going to be the guy with the picks and shovels using what's already there and finding ways to leverage it in in ways that no one else is doing.

Chris Norton 52:42

Unfortunately, that guy is NVIDIA. Isn't it? Guys that are making all the bloody chips that everybody, yeah, every single cut, every single AI company needs the bloody chip. That's why Apple's going up, PlayStations are going up, NVIDIA are just raking it in. They're like that with the dollar bills. Come on, keep keeping up.

Will Ockenden 53:01

Who's the um there's the guy from Harrogate, isn't there, which is your hometown who's just become a chip, an AI chip billionaire. Is it's like a high school dropout. He's like 25 years old, isn't it?

Roger Hurni 53:13

Yeah, to that point, some people have given uh Apple criticism for like not investing in building out their own LLM the way, you know. I'm thinking like, well, I actually think that's pretty smart. Apple's gonna sit back, let all of you people spell trillions of dollars trying to duke this out. I don't need five LLMs in my life, just like I don't need five web browsers. I need like two, maybe three at the top. So they're gonna sit back, they're gonna wait, and when the dust settles, they're gonna come and say, we're gonna include your AI into our system, and here's how we're gonna make money on it, and they're never going to invest the trillions of dollars at everyone else's. I actually think that's a pretty smart strategy, and I think that's a lesson a lot of us can learn in business.

Chris Norton 53:57

It's the it's the classic Betamax VHS war that we've they're in right now, and you're right. And a few of them are gonna back out, I think, because the the Chinese, the Chinese models and the Indians and a couple of Indian models, uh, they're much, much cheaper, they cost much, much less, and they're they're getting quite close to the frontier models. That's why I just find this chasing to be quickest, fastest. And actually, we're gonna get to a point where good is you know the the exceptional is very exceptional, but also really expensive. And good is good enough for 90% of people, it will do all the scheduled tasks, agentic stuff that everybody wants. And so you're right. Uh, and it's it's one of the reasons why Microsoft is is diversifying in Copilot. It's it was all in with ChatGPT and uh Open AI, and now it's moved it's brought Claude in and it's bringing in it's gonna bring in the others, and what Copilot is gonna try and become is like the overhanging fruit that then picks which model. So if Claude goes down, how many businesses are fucked if Claude goes down today for 24 hours? A lot. Do you know what I mean? There's gonna be a lot of people going so Microsoft. That's that's if someone can find that panacea, like what you've just said there, the Apple, where they they can have they could have 17 different models, and it just selects

Renting Versus Buying In The AI Gold Rush

Chris Norton 55:11

the the bit in between selects whichever model is best at writing or brainstorming, or and you don't have to use one, but you you're right, at the end it will come down to like one or two. And also, on the final note, on the

Roger Hurni 55:23

Well, one or two for the LLMs, one or two for the LLMs, but that doesn't mean there won't be 10,000 AIs. Oh, yeah, because there's gonna be specialty AIs that just do this very specific thing. I don't think that's going away. I just in terms of search, I don't need five or six of them.

Chris Norton 55:40

I know it's it's a bit annoying because you I've got about four, and I'm still just testing you're just constantly testing to see. Then one gets better than the other one, and it's just like a it's like a space race. Right.

Roger Hurni 55:51

Well unless someone does something unethical, and I won't name which AI I think has done something unethical. And so I'm all done something unethical. I canceled, I canceled the account, and I'm like, all right, you know what, this is a line in the sand for me. I don't need to use this AI anymore because what I'm using is I think far superior.

Will Ockenden 56:11

Well, you did well to um to can that project, Roger, before you spent a trillion dollars on developing your own AI. Often it's knowing it's knowing when to quit, isn't it? Rather than just which is another that's another theme actually that came across has come across time and again on this pod is people having the the courage and confidence to know when to quit. And that's not a failure, it's just rather than throwing good money off, you know, um bad money after good, or whatever the phrase is. Yeah. Because you never got to wait.

Roger Hurni 56:38

But you know, Jensen Huang, he's he's selling the picks and shovels. He's not developing the AI. This is like he's perfectly aligned with Mark Twain. You know, everyone's fighting for trying to build a model. He's like, let me sell you the picks and shovels to get you there. That's all the video is.

Chris Norton 56:54

But that's why they're the most expensive company in the world all of a sudden, for like literally came from nowhere. Well, not literally from nowhere, but one minute you've not heard of them, and next minute they're like, whoo, they're right at the top of the stock market and the world's biggest company. And because they're still in picks.

Roger Hurni 57:07

But that doesn't mean there's not room for AMD or you know, Taiwan Semi. You know, it there's gonna be other chip companies, they'll they'll eventually catch up and do some things. Um, but like right now, it's a it's a gold rush, and they have the picks and shovels, and everyone else is trying to mine. I just don't need to mine. I'll just, you know, rent them.

Chris Norton 57:28

Well, Roger, you've been on the show now. You've you have experienced the the questioning and the storytelling. Um, but we always have one question for our guests, um, and that is um now that you've been on the show, if you were us, who would you have on the show next and why? Well, Jensen Huang. That's Aileen High. It was on Joe Rogan three months ago, but I'll try.

Roger Hurni 57:52

So um, here's the person I would have on the show. Uh, she's an American citizen, she's got dual citizenship. Um, her name is Qizhai McCarthy. It's like Q I Z-H A I McCarthy. She uh is a psychologist, and she also did a TED X talk with me in Kuala Lumpur. She lives in Singapore, and what she spoke about was even in the world of AI, the human-to-human relationships are really what are critical for success. And I found her talk to be fascinating and incredibly insightful. And I and I think she expresses an element of being human that is easily overridden by our pursuit

Who To Invite Next And How To Connect

Roger Hurni 58:42

of AI.

Will Ockenden 58:43

Fantastic. Amazing.

Chris Norton 58:45

That's exactly what uh Will and I talk about is that that talk our philosophy at our agency is I think the future is human relationships and one-on-one, and actually being in the room with your own creative thoughts and ideas and using the up using the AI stuff to do the boring admin shit that none of us want to do, and you making sure that we build the relationships and and strengthen our relationship. That's where it's that's where the future is, and it always was sitting around a campfire and making jokes and drinking beer together.

Roger Hurni 59:15

Um be happy to make an emo introduction to she.

Chris Norton 59:19

Yeah, that'd be true if you could. That'd be great. We'd love to get her on the show. Um, also, if people want to get hold of you to use your behavioral science skills, where can they find you other than googling your book name?

Roger Hurni 59:32

Or googling my name. Uh, which does Googling still a thing now with AI? I'm I'm not quite certain. Um and I would argue differently. Yeah. Uh you know what? The easiest way to get a hold of me, because I do so many things, is just to go to uh RogerHurni.com, R-O-G-E-R, H U R N I dot com. It's I'm easily found that way, or you can look up Roger Hurni on LinkedIn and connect.