Yeah, absolutely. Although using AI to prepare for that conversation, that’s probably okay.
John Corcoran: 09:13
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, we’re going to be using AI more on the periphery of those conversations. So that actual conversation itself. Yeah, I mean, so I’ll give you an example.
I went to an event yesterday where the people who were on stage had not used AI, I believe, to prepare for the interview because their questions were really boring and uninteresting. And just like a cursory background research, if they’d, you know, run the person through the AI and come up with those questions, they probably could have come up with better questions. Instead, I’m sitting in the audience. There’s a couple hundred people in the audience, and they were asking these really basic, boring questions that had, you know, that were asked for kind of platitudes. And it was kind of interesting because a couple of times the answer was, well, I can’t really I can’t speak to that or you’re asking, you know, for my opinion of this and I can’t really give an opinion on that instead of asking for their story.
And so I’m a big believer in that. So yeah. Absolutely I totally agree. Use a to accelerate your learning so that you can ask better questions so that when you are meeting face to face with someone, if you’re interviewing them like we are right now over a zoom call, you ask better questions. And increasingly you can use AI in the back end to share that and to, you know, share pieces of it in a way that’s really consumable across all the different platforms that exist today.
Chad Franzen: 10:39
The final question is kind of a unique question for this episode. What is a common mistake that you’ve been helping your clients overcome?
John Corcoran: 10:49
Yeah. So this is one that I’ve been seeing a lot is, is oftentimes people think when they get started doing a podcast, that the podcast itself is going to lead to fame and riches and cause the phone to ring off the hook, that like, all of a sudden people are gonna be listening to it and they’re just going to reach out spontaneously in this busy world, and they’re going to reach out to that person, and their phone’s gonna be ringing like crazy. And what I found over 15 years of doing a podcast is that that’s not oftentimes the way that it works. One, I would do the podcast even if no one was listening. Whether five people are listening or 50 or 50 million people are listening, it is valuable for me just to have that conversation.
So that’s really important. But secondly, it’s a tool to get to the relationships that lead to the big results. So use a simple example. You know, I’ve used the podcast for years to get into conversation. I’ve had, you know, done like webinar presentations for Tony Robbins, you know, subgroups for his groups.
I’ve done presentations for different large groups. I had one group where, you know, a podcast interview led to an online presentation. We had 3000 people that opted in to receive more information from us in our email newsletter. As a result of that. Now, it is that came because the podcast interview led to the online training that I did, which led to people raising their hand, expressing interest, and opting into our email list.
So it’s one step removed. So a lot of times the podcast leads to that. So there’s so many times that I’ve done an interview with someone. Jason Swenk is another person who comes to mind who’s a big referral partner of ours, a big advocate. I interviewed him on a podcast after the interview was over.
We had a great conversation about ways in which we can collaborate, and that has led to dozens and dozens of ways that we’ve collaborated. It wasn’t like millions of people listened to that one download, that one podcast episode, and all of a sudden started, you know, calling in our phone was ringing off the hook, you know, that has become, you know, that kind of direct result has become more and more challenging. And as larger companies, media companies like the ESPN of the world or CBS or all these big companies have discovered the, you know, the beauty of podcasting, they poured a lot of money, and there’s only so much, you know, competition at the top ends of those charts. So if you’re trying to compete up there, it’s more and more difficult. If you’re being smart and using a bit of jujitsu here and you’re using the podcast to open up relationships and doors that lead to further collaborations, maybe speaking on stage, maybe some kind of, you know, joint venture partnership of some sort.
I’ve even seen people that have acquired other people’s businesses that came out of, you know, podcasts. Those are kind of like After Effects, the secondary collaborations that come after the initial collaboration of the podcast and not necessarily from millions of downloads.
Chad Franzen: 13:50
Do you think that, let’s say somebody Googles, Googles you, and they come across your website, and they click on your website and they see that this business has a podcast that kind of makes you look like a big deal.
John Corcoran: 14:02
I think there is some of that for sure. Yeah, I think that one, it’s an easy way for people to check you out and engage with you. That doesn’t take any of your time. So I hear that a lot of the time, if I was talking to someone this morning, he was talking about a big lead that he had where that person had gone and checked out his podcast and listened to it before he talked to him. So anytime someone has listened to my podcast before hopping on a call with me, I find that they are that much further along.
You know, they know more about me, they know more about my background. They know a little bit more about how I think. And there’s more of a trust and more of a comfort level when people have done that. But I do believe that it does give you some credibility. I mean, now it’s like you see people that go into mainstream media, whether it’s on The Tonight Show or on CNN or The Today Show or anything like that, and they introduce people and how they introduce them.
It’s not the PhD that they got. It’s not the book that they wrote. It’s the podcast that they have, you know, and it’s really crazy to me, you know, like, this is the host of the such and such podcast. And that’s the thing that they have that gives them credibility.
Chad Franzen: 15:07
Yeah, absolutely. Well, that is it for this episode. John one one question about the AI-driven leader. So let’s say the let’s say, you know, that your company has really adopted AI moving forward. Everybody’s getting pretty adept at using AI. And now all of a sudden everybody can do their job in an hour instead of eight hours. How do you think a leader should react to that?
John Corcoran: 15:33
Right. You know, I think the simplest equation is like spell check or grammar check. You know, we adopted these tools. We didn’t have them. What was it ten, 15 years ago or something?
So if we sat down and we wrote a letter and it took us an hour to write that letter, and then another ten 15 minutes to edit it, check the spelling, check the grammar, all that kind of stuff. You know, it’s not that we don’t do that any differently, it’s just that it becomes this kind of tool that allows us to get the job done faster. And I think that’s what’s going to happen going ahead. Yes, there’s certainly going to be some, you know, jobs that people are going to need, some reskilling, some retraining. You know, that has happened every time there has been a new tool, a new technology that comes along.
But as you know, I’m mostly a pretty optimistic person. And so, you know, if you look at like the the.com wave of the late 90s and the 2000, when the internet came along, you know, people were a lot of people were really fearful at that time that there was going to be a lot of change and a lot of job loss, but it actually unlocked a lot of presentations. Actually, just yesterday, my friend Mike Ghaffary, Burst Capital is his company. He’s a venture capitalist. He was speaking at this event that I was at yesterday and the topic was job creation through AI.
And he was talking about some of these areas where AI can unlock new jobs and new opportunities that a lot of people aren’t thinking about. You know, a lot of focus right now is fear-based, focused on job losses, but like, you know, like, you know, there’s data. What’s it called? Data centers that are, that are exploding. They’re going to build lots of these electricity like electricians.
There’s a lot of areas where there aren’t enough people employed in certain areas. And AI is going to help to unlock some of those opportunities. Maybe it’s by, you know, shifting those to people that manage AI. So one person is going to be able to get a lot of work done, but there will be a lot of job creation. Yes, there will be a lot of job losses, but there will be a lot of job creations also.
Okay. Yeah. And I think that’s an exciting opportunity in front of us. You know, we just have to be open to that, you know? You know, like, we don’t want to go back to a period where we had elevator operators, you know, at one point it was considered unsafe to ride in an elevator unless you had an elevator operator.
Now, you’d never get into an elevator and think that some guy should be some poor schmuck who should be stuck in this thing all day long going up and down, you know, pressing the buttons or something like that, you know? And yet there were a lot of job losses through that. I also saw an image someone showed the other recently that was a picture of, like, New York City. I think it was like in 1903, like a busy street. And it was all horses and buggies, all horses and buggies.
And then like, it was like ten years later and it was all cars. There were no horses left. And it was a little crazy because it was like, where did all the horses go? Where did all the buggy whip manufacturers go? Where did all the people that made the wagons that were pulled behind the horses go?
You know, and there were jobs around that, like someone who’s like, is an artisan who made made like these whips that were whipping horses like that was their job, their vocation. They probably had to get reskilled into creating new things. Maybe they took those same skills and leather making and turned it to creating seats that went into the vehicles, you know. So there’s a required change. But, you know, I think overall, you know, setting aside the issues with climate change that those vehicles did are still having lasting impacts on us. You know, there were definitely a lot of positives from that. For one, we’re not stepping in manure every time we step out of an office. But I think that’s a good thing.
Chad Franzen: 19:24
Yeah. Of course.
John Corcoran: 19:25
Yeah.
Chad Franzen: 19:27
Okay. Well, hey great stuff, John. Very interesting. Thanks so much for having me today. And I’ll look forward to the next episode. Like this.
John: 19:33
Thanks so much, Chad.
Outro: 19:34
So long everybody. Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.