(upbeat music) - You're listening to Let's Talk Jobs, where we give you practical insights into jobs and careers. I'm Tim Chen, and today we're joined by Jesse Ratner. He's a marketing consultant for copywriting, content strategy, and so much more. Jesse, how are you doing? - I'm great, Tim, thanks for having me.

- Now today's podcast episode's gonna be very interesting 'cause we're gonna be talking about artificial intelligence, and then we're gonna go into authenticity and humanity, and then we're gonna somehow end on personal growth and just freedom from our addictions. So hang tight, 'cause this is gonna be a fun ride.

Jesse, before we get started, can you just tell me a little bit about what you're doing today? - Yeah, I'd love to. So today, as of April 5th, 2024, I'm doing a couple of things. My main engagement is with a laser manufacturer called Coherent, where I'm the lead content strategist, and I'm doing team management and digital strategy and a whole bunch of other things, and I've been doing that for about four years.

In addition, I'm a copywriter for Kalibra, which is a data intelligence company that's been pivoting into the AI space more recently, and I write blogs and eBooks and things like that for them. I'm doing some work for MongoDB, writing SEO pages, mainly about AI topics like what is prompt engineering, what are embedded vectors, and then I'm also doing a little bit of work for another agency, Outliant, where I'm helping them with some brand repositioning and hopefully some other things.

So I'm busy. I like the variety, I've always liked that. I like to work different parts of my brain, so my main role at Coherent, I'm a strategist, I'm managing the writers, I'm working with the stakeholders. Coherent has a very broad portfolio. They offer products for the life sciences space and the networking space, which means they're selling transceivers to hyperscalers and they're selling lasers, for example, to the EV markets, so EV manufacturers that are doing very advanced production lines and need very fast, high power lasers to help do the welding and all sorts of stuff.

So that's a fascinating job. And my role is mostly strategic and planning, and the other roles are more, I'm executing on briefs, I'm writing blogs and eBooks and webpages and things like that. And other things come up now and again. I keep myself pretty busy and it's been that way for quite a while.

I've been a consultant for nearly seven years now. - No, it's been fascinating just watching your career trajectory, 'cause when you and I met back at Logitech, you were writing copy for .com and I was managing the website of stuff, and I've always known you to be a very creative, hilarious, and just a fun guy to be around.

And just kind of seeing you broaden your skillset and applying to different things, it's just really, really cool. And recently, you and I have been going back and forth online just talking about AI, right? And how does that affect our various lines of work or just addressing the fear of possibly AI displacing jobs and whatnot.

So I'm just kind of curious, just jump right into that. What's top of mind for you and how do you see it impacting your field? - In a big way, I think it's already changing how creatives, copywriters, designers, SEO folks, strategists, creative directors, it's changing how I think fundamentally, not only how we go about our work, because I would say the majority of creators are using it.

And if you're not using it, there's probably some resistance that's rooted in a real sort of animosity toward the technology. But I feel like I use it. I use the heck out of it. I have a subscription to ChatGPT Pro, to Gemini Pro, and to Cloud3 Opus. Because I wanna try them out and see which one's the best.

Frankly, I find Cloud3 quite good and a lot better in a lot of ways than ChatGPT, even though that one gets most of the attention. So for now, in the moment today, April, 2024, it's affecting, I think everybody, to the extent that everyone's trying to use it and figure out how to use it well.

If you wanna write a blog about embedded vectors, which I did recently, I'll use ChatGPT because it'll not only source the information for me, I'm not an expert in, I'm not a computer scientist, I'm not a data scientist, I'm not an AI engineer, but I know how to use the prompts to get me a draft.

Now, there are lots of ticks, like there's certain linguistic patterns that, for example, ChatGPT often repeats, people will be familiar with this if they use it, the phrase in the realm of, like everything seems to start with that. And if you don't, if I were to be the kind of writer that just got a draft out of ChatGPT, said, "Oh, that's good enough, it makes sense, "the sentences are complete, "there's a subject and a verb and it's all, "it sounds right," and handed that over to my client, I would be surprised if they didn't throw it back at me and say, "What are you doing?" So any copywriter, I think, with his song is gonna know, okay, I really need to heavily edit it.

Not only do I edit it, I need to work with the tool, the chatbot, to prompt it to iterate and improve. And so there's lots of things I think, whether it's executing on a blog or creating content strategy or thinking about brand strategy or coming up with a creative brief.

I worked for a stint for Snapchat. And when I was at Snapchat, I was asked to develop some digital ad campaigns. And in order to get a quick look at some ideas, I worked with ChatGPT, I used Chat, I mean, I worked with ChatGPT, I used it as an assistant to help generate some ideas, but not only was it helpful in generating some ideas, some of which were really bad, like used to race, some of which were okay, needed refinement, but it gave me like a structure for a creative brief that was instantaneous.

So although maybe only 50% of it was useful from beginning to end, and I had to do a lot of work to get it into a good spot, it's a productivity accelerator. I think none of us can deny that. And that's just for today. I think, so for today, I think we're trying to make sense of it.

There's a lot of folks that are scared about it. Recently, Jon Stewart did this hilarious piece where he has snapshots of like Sam Altman saying, "I hate to be the awful tech bro, "but this stuff is gonna solve cancer. "It's like a no brainer." And then, this isn't exactly what he said verbatim.

And then Sundar from Google says, "AI is more profound than fire or electricity." And then Jon Stewart like stops the tape and he says, I don't know if I can curse on this podcast. I guess I can, right? And he says, "Suck my beep, fire." Like, yeah, suck. So he's like, and I think Jon Stewart was just highlighting how optimistic I think some people are about it.

It's gonna save cancer, cure cancer and solve climate change and overpopulation. And so I think you have very respected leaders in the tech industry saying, it's more profound than fire, which on the face of it sounds totally ridiculous. So when Jon Stewart satirizes that, I think we all just laugh 'cause, oh yeah, no way.

But I don't know if he's wrong. I mean, honestly, and the reason is, so I'm talking about the things I'm using it for now, it's chat GPT-4. Well, what about, think back into like 2010 when the iPhone three or four was out and it was kind of smallish and boxy.

There was a lot of things that it didn't do that it can do today. The quality has improved tremendously. What are we on iOS 18? And so imagine chat GPT-18 or 10. So I think it's ability to accelerate productivity, to help creatives get to places that they need to go faster is transformative, but we're all scared.

I'm scared that, okay, chat GPT-6 or 7 or 8 maybe does my work better than I do and faster. - Yeah, I know it's interesting. In the hands of the right person who knows how to utilize it, that individual will probably be the one that displaces an individual who does not use it, right?

'Cause I think you're right. Like the ability for it to help refine your ideas or help you expand your brainstorming is just unparalleled. Right, like the way in my own applications when I'm writing content or headlines or even for website, as long as I am topically aligned to where I wanna go and feed it as much conditions or input as possible, it really helps refine ideas or exposes other things I haven't thought about.

To your point, yeah, for me, it's even lower than that. Like only 30% of the stuff I'd probably even be comfortable using out of the box, but it's the constant iterations and refinement of ideas. That's where I think it's really cool right now. And I'm kind of curious about your take on this, which is, you know, my company included, and I know many companies have a lot of hesitancy or straight out ban chat GPT from internal use because they don't wanna put private information to be made publicly available, right?

And so have you found, like, has that been a requirement imposed upon you where they want to limit your use of the tools for maybe certain topics or whatnot? Like, do you have to use discretion? - Companies have different policies around this. So right now, Coherent has issued licenses for all employees to use chat GPT 4 Pro.

So they're encouraging us to use it as much as possible. Same thing with Mongo. Mongo, I worked on a sort of a playbook for them to help introduce AI and prompt engineering to their staff. They want folks to use it as much as possible. I mean, it's kind of core to their business.

They're developing versions of their databases that are optimized for AI and for folks that wanna build AI applications. For Collibra, it's not as clear, and I don't generally use it for anything related to it. I certainly don't put anything that's, you know, not public or IP. I don't have really access to that stuff anyway.

So, but I think it's a grab bag there. But just to go back to what you were saying about its usefulness and how much of it we can use. The challenge here is, and I do see Cloud3 as quite a bit better than chat GPT in terms of reasoning skills, not just communication capability, but more of a natural conversational communication ability.

Speed, it has a much larger, what they call context window, which means it can like hold more information at one time in one thread in its compute. So it's just, I think a lot better at this point for whatever reason. But I think the difference is, here's the thing.

I think a lot of professionals, a lot of marketers, especially those that have budget responsibilities are gonna say to themselves, well, you know, chat GPT or cloud or Gemini or whatever is getting, or copilot, is getting useful headlines. Like they're not, I don't think, I don't think chat GPT or any of their cousins can at this point really write a super headline.

Like recently I was blogging about, I posted on LinkedIn about my first, my very first, like actually my second, my first client as a copywriter, I was working on this movie, "Private Parts" by, that was a Howard Stern biopic. And I described like my process of getting to the line that made it.

And if you know, many people probably recognize this poster. It's this giant Howard Stern. He's naked and he's standing in the New York City skyline. He's taller than the Empire State Building, which is sort of coming up between him, his legs and in front of his chest. And he's got this incredible Photoshop body.

And so the movie is "Private Parts" and the title and the tagline is, never before has a man done so much with so little. I don't think chat GPT could come up with that line or a lot of other lines that other copywriters have written. But it could come up with a line that's serviceable for sure.

And I think the challenge is gonna be, if you have P&L responsibilities or you're a founder, sometimes it's good enough, you know? - Yeah. - And sometimes I think, especially founders, what I've found working with startups, if it's a technical founder, they often don't know the difference with any kind of nuance.

So I think creatives are in a position where we have to do a lot more to prove our value, to be nuanced about our choices with language, to, you know, resurrect cliches, but in an interesting way, to take a line and kind of fit it so it works a little bit harder.

And I think that's something that AI can't do right now. It can't, AI is not, at least at this point, you're never gonna have an E.E. Cummings AI or a Toni Morrison AI or a T.S. Eliot AI or a Jordan Peele AI. I don't see that happening because AI can't make that intuitive leap that goes back to who we are as humans.

We exist on this. I mean, a lot of times we're unconscious of it, but deep down, what is, who are we? What is in our souls? And what is that deep well of memory and relationships and childhood experiences and ancestors and all that stuff? AI just has data. - Yeah, you know, that reminds me of something, the inability for it to replicate human emotion or empathy or compassion, or even like cliches, right?

There's a project I'm working on specifically right now where I'm sensing the limitation. And this could actually be a area for technology breakthrough, quite frankly, where I'm working on this project on globalization and localization, right? Your traditional workflow is you have a tool, you put a copy, you translate it, humans review it, and you upload it to a website, right?

I'm trying to figure out how do I use machine learning, machine training, and AI/ML to hopefully reduce budget over time by using like machine language, right? And the limitation I'm discovering is, and this is why I asked you earlier about like closed versus open systems for AI. Like the way you talk about a brand, your tone, the way you talk about a product, specific phrases you use that are unique to you as a company, like those are not, those are purely internal, right?

And so if I'm gonna train an engine to translate something in a way that I would speak as a human, it can't pull that data set from outside the company 'cause you don't want to pull in, you wanna be informed by whatever your competitors are saying, right? So it's very much internal.

And that the limiting fact I'm realizing is that requires then a human piece of it where you have to train the engine. And the way you train the engine is it outputs a translation. As a human, you need to post edit it. And then you need to take that and retrain the engine.

You have to do it at scale and my high quantity in order for the algorithm to be trained. And I'm realizing that this takes a lot of human resource and capital, and it takes a lot of money, right? And I think the area where I think technology breakthrough is gonna happen, I do know of one company which will not be named, but they're working on this, is they're using internally trained and built gen AI internally, and using that to train the translation engine.

So the area where the humans doing the post editing, now the gen AI is talking to AI together to kind of figure it out. And then of course, there's still a human like a conductor piece of that, but that's what's fascinating to me. Like how do you take what's internal and then build that scale, especially sort of for smaller companies who may not have the budget to do something like that, right?

It definitely takes an investment. But the thing I'm definitely realizing as I'm going through all this is, you're right, like it cannot replicate human tone and just the nuances of speech. And that's where I still have a little bit of hope, you know, like humanity will still thrive 'cause it has to, right?

And there's a piece of that just can't be replicated. I'm just kind of curious, like what are your thoughts? Is something you've experienced as well? You know, like earlier you're talking about humanity and emotion drawing from your history, and obviously it's a crowded space right now in social media.

I'm just kind of curious your thoughts on all that. - Are you saying if companies have sufficient technology, sufficient AI capabilities that they can build their own internal AI applications to leverage their brand voice requirements, et cetera, then they should be able to replicate what a human can do?

Or is that? - No, it's more maybe even beyond that, which is maybe it's a different way of looking at this conversation and possibly a tangent, which is like, we're so focused right now with AI and how it's impacting social media and all the algorithms where I feel like the topic of transparency and authenticity it's starting to become blurred, right?

Where you have all this information, you don't know where it's being sourced from, you don't know how genuine it is. And I feel like it's so much more important now to somehow cut through the clutter and be more genuine, right? 'Cause that's how I feel like the voices started becoming differentiated and heard.

Is that something that you, can you relate to that? Or am I alone in that point of view? - I think it's always been a problem. In my experience, I have quite a number of years of experience working in tech. The challenge for tech companies is because they're technical when they go to market, their brand voice ought to be more human just to counteract the over technical language, especially if they're trying to reach decision makers and may not be engineers.

So that's always been a challenge. And if you read, excuse me, if you look at one tech company's website and another and another and another, they all kind of sound the same. They're trying to be clear. They're trying to be concise. They're trying to be conversational. It's very rare that you find a brand voice that's very distinct.

Like Apple is quite distinct. They're unabashedly boastful about their technology. So, and the difference between them and say Google is Google is gonna, okay. Let's say Google and Apple are both releasing new phones. Apple will say something more clever than this, but it would say the world's best phone just got better.

But Google will say now 17.5 gillion gigabytes on our photos. Well, it used to, it would be more about the speeds and feeds and less about sort of the approach Apple often takes, which is more sort of boastful. So, but that's rare. And I think, and they have lots of marketers to help them get to that point, lots of creatives too.

So, and it just, I think goes to show you that those brands that have those resources, and we know those two companies have lots of resources. That's what it takes, I think, to get to a really distinctive brand. And if you're not being distinctive on brand voice, you're really just distinguishing yourself on message.

So, company is better at, I don't know, database speed. And another company is better at database flexibility. And another company is better at database scale or capabilities in some kind of way. So, it's not so much that the brand voice is distinctive. I think, especially when you see above the line marketing, when you look at commercials, that's where it often comes into play that I don't see right now AI being able to do the thing you're describing, because in order to really, let's think about some of the most memorable commercials over the years, like Apple's Think Different, or Wendy's Where's the Beef, or Budweiser's What's Was That, right?

That one, or the Old Spice. I'm the man your man wishes he was, that kind of thing. Those ideas came out of, I think, not just an existing brand voice book, that the creators looked at and said, "Oh, okay, this is the idea, and here's how we're gonna say it." They came out of sparks of creativity.

They came out of understanding the culture. They came out of leaps and intuition. And while that doesn't need to get worked into every line of copy, it doesn't always need to be in a lot of the copy, I think for brands that really wanna distinguish themselves, they're still gonna need to invest in creatives, humans that are creatives to help chart that path.

And I think that's a real challenge when you look at it above the line, I think it's gonna be really hard to replace. But then again, OpenAI just released, is it Sona, which is the text-to-video, Sora, the text-to-video technology, and they had recently released some videos that they gave the technologies to some creative agencies, and they asked them to come up with something.

And they just published this last month, and they are creative ideas. There's one called Airhead, which is basically the experience of this person with a yellow balloon as a head. And it's funny, and it's evocative, and they use this technology. Now, it was heavily directed by the people in the agency, but it was a beautiful piece of video.

It didn't have some of the things we're seeing right now in fake videos where hands are weird and things like that. So, I mean, the truth is below the line stuff, like fact sheets for widgets and even web pages, like imagine product pages for, excuse me, like product page, imagine if you're at Logitech and you need a product page for a new mouse at $9, and there's like 42 other mice that they're selling for $9.

Well, what better way to differentiate maybe and get those out quickly, but then to use T to produce it and just have a writer check it? - Yeah, you said something earlier that kind of reminded me of something, and maybe we can shift away from AI for a moment, which is you mentioned around speeds and feeds.

And I'll use LinkedIn as an example in this case, where I remember at the very beginning, like everyone's used to Facebook, right? And then when LinkedIn came out, they weren't sure like, what do I post on here? Do I go personal? Do I go professional? Wherever it is, right?

And clearly it's a professional network. And so people don't share as many personal stuff. And I feel like recently I've seen a big shift towards more of a speeds and feeds. And I don't know if part of it is like building your own cloud and your brand on LinkedIn as a professional, but I see it's starting to all kind of look the same.

And your recent posts have been a little different where you kind of cut the clutter and there is some like truth and some pretty provocative thoughts in the things you're posting. I'm kind of curious, like what's driving you to do that? Like where's it coming from? And what are you passionate about that's changing the way you present yourself on social media?

- Unprocessed emotions. I mean, that's some of it, right? I think in some ways, some of the things I've posted have been an effort to express some things that I've bottled up inside for a long time. And I felt they needed to be said. And for a long time, maybe I was worried.

I was scared of the repercussions. I was scared of, would there be a backlash? Would I get fired from any of my current jobs? Because I'm saying stuff that maybe suggests that some of the places I've worked for have been a bit toxic. It's tough, yeah. - Were there a few posts in particular that really made you wonder if you should put out or not?

Would you believe they'd be controversial? - Yeah, so I recently posted something about my experience getting pushed out of a big agency on the Google account. And I went into some detail about the way it happened. And I guess I had gotten to a point where, A, the company had been sold.

I was less worried that they would sort of come back and it would hurt me, although it might. And I took a risk in posting this. You know, I was struck by something you said maybe, you had a podcast that you put out there about your own personal growth and about being in some tough situations where managers were not necessarily professional to you.

And I was struck by, you said, one person came back to you and reached out and apologized. - Yeah. - And that really touched me. And that was after I had posted this thing about getting pushed out. That hasn't happened to me. And I'm grateful that maybe I've had the experiences I've had because when I got pushed out of the agency, it pushed me into being a consultant.

And quickly after that, I started a small boutique agency and then that didn't work out. And I started another one and that didn't work out. But all those experiences gave me a lot of confidence and not just my skillset, 'cause I felt like I was already a capable copywriter and I could get jobs and hold them and advance and move up and manage other writers and other creatives.

But I didn't know my worth in terms of the value of marketing as it relates to creative. As creatives, we're marketers and we have a lot of value to businesses. In fact, businesses only really have two jobs. That's to create a product or service and tell people about it.

And, excuse me. And I wanted to start being... You're right in saying a lot of what I've seen also on Facebook, LinkedIn, it's a bit formulaic. It's like, I just reached a hundred million. Well, not a hundred million, but I just reached 10,000 followers. Thank you, which is great.

Or here's three steps you need to make a million dollars in three days. Oh, that's not gonna work. Or here's all you need to do to be successful on LinkedIn, just post every day. Or any number of other kind of sort of really vapid stuff that I understand it's brand awareness, right?

I mean, that's what folks are doing on LinkedIn. You're not getting leads right away. I mean, maybe some people are, but if you're looking for leads, I suppose to post regularly, put your name out there and you're creating brand awareness. Not that I like the term personal brand at all, but I think, so it has value, right?

But you could be hurting your brand too. You can be putting stuff out there that undercuts your value, that says some things about you that maybe is not gonna help advance your business. So I've posted more, I think frankly, and I've always tried to do that. I think I don't see it as a place just to kind of post vapid stuff.

Like I'm working on this post right now that I'm really worried about posting. It's a post about content marketing. It's called "Why Donald Trump is a Great Content Marketer." And I focus on his mugshot, which he sells as a coffee cup, or at least somebody does. So why is his mugshot coffee cup great content marketing?

I break it down, like why it's helpful, 'cause it gives you a lot of information about him. It makes some great promises, and I add in some more colorful language, but oh man, I'm scared. If I post that, what's gonna, I mean, what kind of, I don't know. So it's kind of on the same level when I posted that thing about getting pushed out of the agency.

It was scary. I thought a lot about it. I showed it to a couple of people, gave me some help. And I had people reach out to me immediately that I didn't know, strangers, and said thank you. I went through the same thing. And that's very gratifying. - Yeah, I totally agree.

I've had several people reach out to me saying, hey, we looked at your YouTube channel, and here's things you can do to monetize it. And I'm like, you know what? I don't care about monetization. The whole reason for me to do this podcast was I'm just trying to help people, right?

Like there's people who are struggling, and if there's any insight or knowledge or even one piece of advice that would allow them to approach and interview differently or to do a job search differently or just amplify their own work differently, like that's the whole point of it, especially with this economy with so much uncertainty around AI.

Like that's why I'm doing it. And that's why your post really just kind of stood out to me because it's freaking refreshing, man. The lesson that someone should take from this is like, obviously you haven't posted your thing yet, right? What will be interesting is a discourse around like why you did it.

'Cause if you go in front of, let's say a, let's say somebody, you're interviewing for a job, and you've done something that might've been controversial, but the thought process that allowed you to take that risk, that is something that's worth inspecting into. It's like, what outcome were you trying to get for your audience?

What were, what's your point of view? And what was your methodology in getting to that point? That skillset and, or courage, or even the thought process to go through that, you can't replicate that. You can't teach that. And for someone who's willing to do something like that versus just doing the safe thing, like I don't think right now is the right time to be safe because the market is tough.

Companies have to stand out. And if you're just doing the same old thing, like it's just not gonna work. Like I'm proactively getting budgets cut because they are the same. And I'm being challenged to do more with less. And what does that mean? I gotta find a way to like innovate, right?

And sometimes the innovating way you think and approach something is totally it. And again, it's really refreshing for me to see that. And I tend to gravitate a lot towards YouTube channels, you know, whether they're for work or just for fun, right? Like, and it's not even a political thing.

Both aisles, if I see a truly authentic point of view, I wanna watch that. I don't wanna see the safe thing and something that clearly has an ulterior motive. So I just wanna kind of give you kudos on that, man. Like I hope you, whatever the reaction is, that it can turn into a different conversation 'cause I think the world needs it.

- Thank you, I appreciate that. I think it is important. There's great pressure in corporate culture, whether you're in-house or not, to conform. - Yeah. - And often for good reason, because we all have to row sort of in the same direction to make progress. But can you row faster if you have some folks that maybe can help you build a bigger oar?

I think, or a bigger sale. And I think maybe we could have more sales and less rowers, we get a little further down the line. It's very hard when you're trying to conform to be honest. And you touched on this, I think, in your podcast about personal growth, where you start then doubting yourself.

Okay, why if I'm conforming, but I'm in a toxic culture, let's say, that's not validating my value, my skills and everything I'm clearly doing, you start to doubt yourself. And I think, I had another post that I posted. It was about racism. And I had this experience that I read something that took some lyrics from a Tupac song that changes lyrics, which is a song about the persistence of racism.

And this person was, this person was an exec who was promoting a salesperson who in their sales pitch had leveraged these lyrics, but changed them from what they were to say something like, my website's broken, it really sucks, I need a new solution, I'm gonna get this new solution, which happened to be Webflow.

And then all these people were jumping on her saying 100, but the emoji 100 and fire. And I was so offended, like righteously offended, unfortunately. And so I posted on it, don't you think this is appropriation and isn't that wrong? And the person, the original poster posted back, this isn't appropriation, this is respect, we loved blah, blah, blah.

So I said, I think this is a parody. And she said, no. And I posted a definition of the parody, of what a parody is. And she deleted it. And then she DMs me on the side. And we had this long back and forth. It was my first Twitter war on LinkedIn.

And anyway, so like a year went by. Well, no, that night I was so incensed. I wrote this like awful screed. I was gonna post about terrible this person was. I waited a whole year, I didn't post it. I posted it a couple of weeks ago. And for whatever reason, crickets, and I got really depressed and I deleted it.

I should post it again. This person recently got promoted to a very senior position at a very prominent social media tool solution. Yeah. We disagreed. She had a great fondness, I guess, for Tupac. And she felt like she wasn't misappropriating or culturally appropriating his work. I thought she was.

And I thought, it was more than just that she posted it. It was also the reaction. Like the hundreds of people that liked it. It was disgusting to me. I mean, so there's that. So some things I post, and then if I don't get a reaction, like I'm self-conscious about not getting a reaction.

When I feel so invested in it, then I delete it. 'Cause I don't want it hanging out there and reminding me that no one really seems to care. Even though it's not about reactions. In reality, it's about, I mean, if you wanna think about performance per se on LinkedIn, it's about impressions.

So, because you don't really know if someone's gonna react or not. If they saw it, then that means you reached somebody. - Yeah. So, you know, I've never had conversations with you like this before, you know? And it's pretty cool. And I see a lot of growth, you know?

And you've clearly overcome a lot of things, whether it's self-inflicted or not. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey? You know, 'cause you and I have talked about whether it's addiction or could be whatever, right? And you and I have our own versions of whatever that looks like to us.

But can you tell us about like your little journey and what you went through and where you are today? - Sure. You want the short version or the semi-short version? - Let's do semi-short. - Okay. When I was a youngster, I went to college in Oberlin, my first college.

I ended up in Ohio. I was a California kid. I grew up in LA. And I ended up going to Oberlin, loved it. But also the summer before I left, my parents got divorced. There was a lot of kind of chaos in the few years leading up to that.

I had been quite a good student. Like I was a scholar athlete, but I'd also gotten into using and drinking. And when I ended up at Oberlin, I was pretty isolated. I started smoking pot on my own a lot. Couple of years go by and I had this bad experience with mescaline and I lost it.

I had a mental breakdown. So I dropped out of school and I ended up like going through a lot of stuff. Like eventually I ended up back at UCLA somehow. And I graduated from UCLA with an English degree and about the time I started that job writing copy for Howard Stern.

But at the time, it's in 1993, my folks did an intervention and they said, 'cause I was living at my dad's house in Santa Monica and riding the big blue bus to UCLA. And he said, "You can't stay here anymore and keep using." I was getting high smoking pot.

And it probably doesn't sound like a big thing, but I was stealing money from him to buy it. It was just not so hot. And so I ended up at a recovery house and I lived at a recovery house for 15 months while I went to UCLA. So imagine I was in a room with like six other recovery addicts and a house full of 25.

It was a very intense experience. They had, I don't know if anyone's familiar with Synanon, but it's a cult out of Santa Monica that was eventually, the leader was like charged with federal crimes for like all sorts of awful stuff. Anyway, the guy that ran the house had an experience like that.

He was very hardcore. We had groups where it was like ego smashing. You sat in the middle of the room and people just hurled insults at you for like hours. But it was supposedly, it was recovery. At the same time, I got involved with some other people that had a much more loving response.

And so I stayed sober for a long time, moved up to the Bay Area in 2001. And I had done some work as a writer for taglines. And then eventually I got a job. I went back to school. I got an MFA in creative writing. I wrote a novel and I was teaching freshman composition.

I got paid $400 a class. I had two classes per month, $400 per month. And I got a call from eBay to get a job as a writer and they were gonna pay $400 a day. So I took that and I've been a writer ever since. And then along the way, I guess, I was mainly sober, but until about, I guess, 2000, really about the time I had that push out, I have experience at the agency and I had a pretty rough time with this agency.

I started where I had recruited a couple of people from the Google account and we just didn't work out together as partners. And I started using again off and on and then more intensely. And then in the last couple of years, quite a bit. And so I was sneaking it and I wasn't smoking so much.

I would use other things like edibles or tinctures and I was really stoned all the time. I was functional, highly functional. I was earning a lot more than I'd ever learned, three, four times as much as I did as in-house corporate person. So that on the face of it, I was doing okay.

Bought a house in San Francisco, have two cars, an Audi and a BMW, like we're doing fine. But emotionally I was dead in a way. And I was really dead to my wife and daughter. And at some point my wife said to me, "I know what you're doing, your daughter does too." She's like, "You have to stop." And so I did for a while and then I started again.

And then more recently she said the same thing and I stopped again. And like immediately I had this intense explosion of energy and all that stuff I had bottled up, I was masking, was unmasked. And I'm still very close to that. I'm still working through it. I'm getting some therapy and a lot of therapy.

And yeah, so I think all those things make up who I am today and I think I have a lot of respect for all the people that have been through things like this in other ways, but understand that we really only have today. - Yeah, I'm really proud of you, dude.

When you have roots deep in anger or fear or pain and life adds to it and you cover it, when things bubble up, it's always really, really intense. And I can understand how you could fall back into it. I think for people listening to this, the part that's encouraging for me is you're able to find ways to get out.

I think the key is obviously figuring out how to notice the indicators that pull you back in. But I'm excited that this time you described a burst of energy 'cause that's the first time you used that word at the exit of an addiction that you didn't use before. And I'm hoping this new life that you're discovering and re-energizing, reinvigorating, that you're channeling it into something else where those previous triggers that used to pull you in are now displaced by something new.

And there is no need to go back 'cause now you found a new thing that gives you, that kind of hopefully covers over or makes up for some of the deficiencies you've had where you had to go and lean towards a substance to kind of take over. And so I'm happy for you, man.

- Thank you. I appreciate that. And I don't think it's one thing. It's family, it's friends, it's really relationships. Some of it is what I think hopefully this podcast enables which is to help somebody else. Just one person would be a lot. And to know that we can go through hard times and still keep going that...

I went to this concert in 2001 right after 9/11 when Marsalis was playing at the Hollywood Bowl. And he played this 12 part symphony. And we mean he had the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and then the LA Philharmonic and then the choir. And I think the symphony is named "All Rise." But at the end of it, they did the whole thing.

It was like a two hour performance. And he gives this speech about how this horrible thing had happened in New York City, like the previous week. And he said, "You know what? We're gonna get up and keep going 'cause what else can we do?" Man, and then they did an encore.

Like the LA Phil does not do encores. And it was cool. I lived in Hollywood at the time. I was like skipping all the way home. I was so happy. Yeah, I think music, for me, music is certainly inspiring. Writing, I've been writing a lot more. More personal stuff, too.

I wanna really write more about more fiction, longer form stuff. I got an editor and I've been working on that. Exercise. Yeah, there's a bunch of things. I don't think it's any one thing, but I appreciate what you said. And I really do hope this reaches somebody and lets them know.

I wanna say something about AI, but also something about just being human. AI feels really scary, I think, to creatives and maybe a lot of other people right now, because it feels like it's coming for our jobs. But AI doesn't really know right. I can say definitively, AI does not know right from wrong, but you do.

AI doesn't have a soul, but you do. And I think that's really important to remember. - Yeah, I love that, man. I'm kind of in awe of just everything you said and quote, "What can't we do?" And I think maybe the advice I would give to people who are younger in their careers is look at me and you.

We're old hats. I've got a white, my beard is white. I just cut it down. And I think that-- - I'm white on my beard, I guess I do. It's salt and pepper. I think the thing that you and I are realizing is as we're kind of in this season of our career in our lives, we've done a lot of that, right?

And we've, for the most part, we know who we are, or in some cases, maybe rediscovering. But there isn't this need or feeling like we need to go out and put ourselves in a way that we did when we were younger. And I think there is a need now to develop more genuine relationships or having more authenticity.

Just coming back to the true center of who you are. And I think for someone who's young in their career, I would encourage you to discover that earlier. You know, 'cause I remember when I was early on my career, I was so focused on making a name for myself or creating a version of myself that I thought would be more marketable for employers.

And along the way, it kept taking me away from my true north, my true center, right? And if I had just someone who just grabbed me and be like, "Dude, this is who you are. "Be who you are, be authentic. "Don't be afraid to be transparent." I think that would have caused me to make different decisions in my career.

I think it would have made me approach conversations and relationships differently. It definitely would have made me approach interviews differently as well, in a way that probably would have felt refreshing to the interviewer, 'cause now they're getting something real and not some canned thing that was prepared. So yeah, and I love the reminder at the end of the day, it's like AI is there, but it's not gonna displace us as humans.

And there's a role in it where we're invaluable, right? - There's a great poem by this Polish writer, Adam Zagajewski, I think he recently passed away. He has a poem entitled, "Do Not Let the Luminous Moment Dissolve." It's this amazing poem about the luminous moment, but he has a line in there, "We have yet to rise to the level of ourselves." That always struck me, like, okay, if I have to, what am I gonna do today?

I don't know. I mean, maybe I have a plan, I have a list or whatever, but where can I really land at the end of the day? And then when I get to the end of the day, and I look back, where am I going tomorrow? I mean, in some ways it's a mystery.

That's kind of the beauty of our lives, is if we can open ourselves up to the mystery and take a little bit of risk, even when we don't fully fill those shoes. I think I'm often surprised where I end up. I didn't expect to be doing this with you a year ago.

I think you saw one of my posts and you reached out. - Yep. - So, yeah. - Yeah. Well, man, I wanna thank you for being on the show. I think there's so much goodness of what you kind of walk through in your stories, and I'm hoping that you'll join me again for a future episode.

We're gonna talk about anything else, but Jesse Ratner, just wanna thank you for being on the show, man. - You're absolutely welcome, Tim. Thank you so much. - Take care. - All right, bye. (gentle music)