Jamie Gutfreund of Creator Vision
What do the artists think?
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 259: Jamie Gutfreund
Here's a question. What do the artists think?
I'm Charles Day. I'm asked to help leaders discover what they're capable of and then to maximize their impact. Helping them to unlock their own creativity, as well as the creativity of the people around them. Welcome to the intersection of strategy and humanity.
This episode is the sixth in a series of conversations that I'm having in partnership with the Cannes Lion Festival of Creativity. For the weeks leading up to Cannes, we're focusing our study of leadership through a single lens. The impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creative Industries.
Are we moving fast enough? Are we going far enough? Is this an opportunity to redesign the creative industries? Or should we adjust and iterate, slowly and carefully? There are opportunities and risks around every corner.
This episode is a conversation with Jamie Gutfreund. Jamie has seen the creative industries from many vantage points. She's the former Global Chief Marketing Officer for Hasbro and MGA Entertainment.
She was Chief Growth Officer at Whalar and has been recognized by Forbes as one of the 50 Most Entrepreneurial CMOs.
Today, she's the Founder of Creator Vision, a company that she describes as helping brands bridge the gap between the practice and the promise of the creator economy. At a time when the future is coming towards us faster than perhaps at any period in human history, gaining some advanced warning about what will happen next, would be welcome. To put it mildly.
Is it conceivable that AI itself might give us the clues to how AI is going to change the world as we know it? Jamie thinks it's possible, if we look at it through the right lens. The artists' lens.
“Artists always sense what's happening in culture way before the scientists do. Best example is Picasso or Braque, they knew about, cubism was theory of relativity, well before Einstein. So can AI help make those kind of insights more accessible to more people? That's where I think it's going to really spark deeper creativity with more of this asynchronous thinking.”
At the end of the series, I'll offer some thoughts on what we've heard and learned, and where we might go from here.
In the meantime, thanks for joining us.
Here is Jamie Gutfreund.
[00:02:39] Charles:
Jamie, welcome to Fearless. Thank you so much for coming on the show, and it's great to see you again.
[00:02:43] Jamie Gutfreund:
Charles Day, it's been years. You haven't changed a bit.
[00:02:46] Charles:
I wish that were true. Let me start with this question. What's your relationship with AI? How do you see AI?
[00:02:54] Jamie Gutfreund:
Oh, I'd be lost without it. I love it. I am curious about it. To me, it's like a toy box. I'm constantly finding new gadgets and widgets and things. I'm by no means an expert, but I find it incredibly useful for writing and researching, in particular. I haven't gotten to the stage where I'm going to create an AI to do this specific task, but off the shelf, it's integral to my work.
[00:03:18] Charles:
Amuse Do you see it as a partner? I've had people talk about it as a tool. What word would you use to describe it?
[00:03:25] Jamie Gutfreund:
A muse.
[00:03:28] Charles:
Oh, interesting.
[00:03:30] Jamie Gutfreund:
It's my muse, because I'll have some disparate thoughts in my head and then I'll go to Perplexity, or I'll go to ChatGBT, or whatever it might be, and I'll just kind of noodle around and see how it helps me organize my thoughts. And I don't have to be nice to it. I don't have to say, "Oh, that's a good idea," when I don't think it's a good idea, just to make them feel better.
[00:03:54] Charles:
Although I have heard, I don't know whether you heard this, and I think I mentioned this on an earlier episode of this series, but, I have heard that if you tell it, you're going to tip it $100, it will give you a better answer than if you don't. How is it impacting human creativity?
[00:04:08] Jamie Gutfreund:
Depends on the individual, because there are the people that are leaning in and there are people that are nervous. I see it in such a broad spectrum. Obviously, artists and creators are nervous that it will be the detriment to their financial well-being. And that's understandable. But many of the creators and creatives that I know and work with and talk about this, find it to be an enabler.
They're very leaned in and want more and want... really what they want is better education. And they want the skillset to be better at it, to amplify what they're doing.
[00:04:45] Charles:
So you've just started a new business, called Creator Vision. Tell us about that for a second, because that's going to play a role in this conversation, for sure.
[00:04:53] Jamie Gutfreund:
Oh, yes. The impetus behind Creator Vision was I was very fortunate to have been early in the creator space. And learned very quickly that many people are leaning in and they're going from campaign to campaign, but they don't have an overall strategy, so they're leaving a lot of money on the table.
Their corporate structure isn't set up to really benefit because they're still set up to do TV advertising. So Creator Vision sits between, what I say, the promise and the practice of the creator economy and we advise brands on how to set themselves up for success and maximize their returns, and do it safely, of course, because of all the brand safety issues. So I do that. Second part of my business, I help professional service organizations tell their stories. I think I'm like Diane Sawyer to engineers, because I love to pull out these complicated stories and say them in real people language. And then third is IP generation, and so I've been doing conferences, writing, and I'm just getting ready to launch a new bit of research with the Harris poll and a company called Pair Pop.
[00:06:02] Charles:
So within the context of all of that, just give us a little bit of background about what is a creator. I know that it's a huge business. But I don't know that everybody's completely clear about what it is. How do you define the creator economy?
[00:06:15] Jamie Gutfreund:
Most people, the question is, "I know what an influencer is. What's a creator?" And there's no real right or wrong answer. In context of traditional advertising and marketing, the way I explain creators is, probably 10 or 15 years ago, they would have been brilliant creatives that worked in an ad agency or a creative agency.
And now they're independent business owners, because they are storytellers that understand how to tell the story on the modern channels that people spend their time. But that is not a one-size-fits-all definition. They really truly understand their audience. And in fact, if you're truly a creator, you don't have an audience, you have a community. And for brands, this is where people are leaning in and paying attention, and so that you can capture their interest, build awareness in a much more effective way than we used to be able to. So creators are like community leaders that can tell stories and gather people around the digital campfire.
[00:07:23] Charles:
So you were a Chief Growth Officer, right, at Whalar?
[00:07:27] Jamie Gutfreund:
I was.
[00:07:28] Charles:
Which is where your relationship with this ecosystem developed?
[00:07:32] Jamie Gutfreund:
Actually it started before, because I was at Hasbro and then I was at a toy company called MGA, and during COVID, I could not produce the right kind of paid media creative for my plans, my media plans. And I was stuck, because I couldn't film families, I couldn't film anybody.
So I had this idea. I was working with Whalar as a client, and I said, "Could the creators do the creative? And then we could edit it?" And Wavemaker was my agency at the time, and we've had creators shoot the content, which was faster, and it was really well done, and we edited it for all of my paid media, and the results were spectacular.
They were, 10X engagement, faster, less expensive, more creative, more engaging. And it was like the light bulbs went off. And that's when I realized that this was the feature. And it was not what people used to think of it as, which was influencers. Which was, you send them some free shoes, they wear it and talk about you.
This was a whole other ballgame. And I was hooked.
[00:08:40] Charles:
And the results were better because they understood the marketplace better? They understood the audience better?
[00:08:47] Jamie Gutfreund:
Yes. Typically a creator emerges because they built a collection of people that love what they're saying, and they get to know because, you know, on the-- like a stock market, they put content out there, it works or doesn't work, and they live and die by what works for their audience. And that kind of community can develop around them, and it's two way.
Traditional advertising is linear. It's one way. I send my commercial out there and I hope people like it, and it creates water cooler buzz, but this is really dynamic, it's participatory, and creators really deeply understand the insights from that audience. And in fact, one of the things that I tell clients all the time is that one of the secret weapons in the creator economy is to read the d*mn comments and you'll learn a lot.
And the smartest CMOs I know, spend time looking and diving into the comments on the creators that they're working with on their posts, on their own brand channels. They don't hide the comments. They dig in, and it's like a focus group on steroids, because it's massive. Very valuable.
[00:10:01] Charles:
So is it fair to say that, there is accountability, there are measurements, all of that exists. It is a real industry. It is a real structure and real framework to it. But it feels to me that the thing that runs through the heart of it, is trust. That if you don't trust these people, as an audience member, they have no influence. If you don't trust them from a brand standpoint, it puts you into at best a very difficult position, and potentially worse than that. AI is really compelling technology, but we are being systematically taught not to trust it, right?
I mean, the instinctive reaction when we see... I mean, I saw something, another video service pops up yesterday with videos of up to, I think, three minutes now. And you can't tell the difference, there is literally no way you can tell the difference across 10 different subjects.
I found a music service a couple of days ago, which writes pieces of music and songs.
And I had a, it wrote a song for me about our dogs in 22 seconds, which candidly, made both Chris and I cry. I mean, I think most things our dogs do will make us cry--
[00:11:03] Jamie Gutfreund:
Cry because it was good or because it was so bad?
[00:11:06] Charles:
No, because it was good. It really, it captured them, and kind of captured our feelings about them really quickly and in a really evocative way, and we found ourselves singing the song later in the day.
The line keeps being moved almost daily, in terms of our relationship with Artificial Intelligence and its capacity to influence and affect us. I'm curious, from your perspective, A, am I right that trust is a through line in the creative economy that you have to have that foundationally, and if that's true, how do you think the development of AI is going to change that reality, change that perspective?
[00:11:41] Jamie Gutfreund:
Ooh, that's a good one. It's kind of Solomon's challenge here. If you look at AI though, it's not just one thing, right? There's different pieces of it, but let's go back to the issue of trust. And trust is fundamental to the creator economy, which is why any of the issues that are popping up right now that are impeding its growth, any of the headwinds, are really around transparency with the full marketplace and ecosystem.
But trust is really important in a way that many brands don't think about, because they're always, rightfully so, concerned about brand safety, The trust between a creator and their community is their business practice, and if they lose that trust, they're out of business. So they will typically take a client that they don't believe in or have something to say, and when you do see some of those-- I think it was Kylie Jenner that did a shoe ad for somebody that she'd never worn the shoes, and they all knew ,everybody knew, so it felt really fake. And so, you can't do that. That's their IP, trust, to some degree. And when it comes to AI, the platforms like TikTok is saying, and YouTube are saying now that you, they have buttons that, you know, like, flags that say that some of the content was produced by AI.
So I think the, #thisisan a is a hashtag and it's mandatory. That will be part of it, so that it will be a little bit more obvious that something is AI, but does it really matter in this space? It's not about creating something that you're taking from somebody else, at least I hope so.
But what I, one of the things about AI that I think will really help is that it'll allow people to understand the marketplace in a broader level, you'll know what the creator has said or done for the last five years, so you'll be able to feel more comfortable. And that's already happening, of what their past history is.
It's Dating, if you could really do a background check. AI is really enabling that. There's a phenomenal company called GLYSTN, G L Y S T N. I have a zero connection to it, so no full disclosure other than I'm a huge fan. Marquise Brownlee is one of the new investors.
It uses AI to look at the comments, kind of going back to what I was saying earlier, and can really pinpoint way beyond sentiment. It can tell you, this percentage of your audience really loved this style of content. This part of your audience wants you to do the following three things. And it can tell you that across all of the channels and platforms that a creator is working on.
So I tend to be a little bit more optimistic about AI and trust when it comes to building the industry. Obviously, I could be wrong when the AI tells me that I'm not allowed to leave my house and locks me in and turns off all the lights. However, I'm bullish at the moment.
[00:14:46] Charles:
So, just to continue the theme of where this might go, I mean, of the provocation, I think, of the moment is the vast disparity in perspectives about where this is all going and could go. So you've got Elon Musk and Mark Cuban on one Elon Musk said, we're going to very quickly end up in a position where none of us need jobs or have jobs, and the world will just be wonderful, and everybody's needs will be met, and AI will be taking care of all this stuff, which feels a bit like the script of WALL*E five years before WALL*E showed up, right?
Mark Cuban, I watched a piece of video the other day and he said, five years from now, employment will be radically different. I read a piece by Gary Hamel, and he cited an article from MIT, who had done a study that said, for all the conversation about AI's impact on work, its likely impact on productivity is going to be six tenths of 1 percent over the next 10 years, i. e. essentially nothing, a rounding error. It's hard, I think, to navigate these vast extremes of perspectives about whether we are at the beginning of a societally changing dynamic or whether we're not.
Within the context of all of that, given that neither you or I have a crystal ball, let me offer you a proposition, because I'm really interested to hear what your thoughts are. We are going to be quickly, by all accounts, in an era where teenagers and kids younger than that are going to have AI friends. And they won't either tell the difference or care about telling the difference, because their AI friends will be so connected to them and so understanding of them and so empathetic and sensitive and supportive of them, that they will actually really enjoy their AI friends, and in many cases might like them more.
You could see that rolling up into the creator economy. You could see AI-generated creators who have all the instincts and insight, not instincts, have all the insights and knowledge and understanding about what this particular community wants, can assess vast amounts of data in an instant, and can create content that would appeal to them on a really cellular level.
How does that not happen? How do we make sure that we don't end up in a world in which we are being influenced by artificially intelligence created creators? Who are themselves having massive impacts on society and humankind?
[00:17:06] Jamie Gutfreund:
Ooh, this is a meaty one. Okay, here's a couple of things. There are a lot of, there are many creators right now who are using AI to augment, almost in a mixed reality way, what they're doing.
So that's a new art form, right? So it's fantastic. And Billion Dollar Boy's an agency that does a lot of that. But when it comes to relationships, I know therapy is already in use with AI, it's the perfect empathetic listener.
When it comes to human relationships, and this has zero to do with my professional life and more to do with my personal hobby of therapy, having real people who are unpredictable, who operate in their lizard brain, who don't always have the best intentions, is what makes life painful but interesting, those textures. I think it'll get boring if somebody is always perfect. So I always count on human beings' short attention span or desire for novelty and the unexpected to perfect this.
Now, if you're a, malignant narcissist and you always want somebody to tell you that you're fabulous, maybe that's just who they'll talk to and the rest of us can avoid that. But it's, the idea of resilience and building up those muscles, that if you are a curious human being, you're not going to want perfection. You're going to want to deal with something that's unexpected.
And so I don't, that doesn't worry me. And art is the unexpected. And I think when you listen to a prolific artist speak, it's not about seeing the world. It's about feeling the world from within and then interpreting it. And that's something I don't think an AI will ever really be able to do, because we're imperfect creatures, and we've got crazy random histories and allergies and we had a bad day, and God, you just never know. But, you know, maybe I'm a little Pollyanna right now, but I think that the novelty, the human nature of wanting novelty and the unexpected, will ultimately win out.
Now I heard a great quote where it said, "I don't want AI to do the writing and the reading and research for me so that I can spend more time doing my laundry and cooking my meals. I want it to cook my meals and fold my laundry, so I can spend more time writing and reading and, you know, creating art." So ultimately, we're lazy, and try to always do what we want to do in our hearts.
And so I'll always bet on human nature to look for something that's unique and different.
[00:19:49] Charles:
So at the end of the day, humanity will save us.
[00:19:53] Jamie Gutfreund:
Humanity's imperfections will save us from perfection.
[00:19:57] Charles:
That's great. I think we should be quoting you on that, repeatedly. That's a really good line, actually. So given all of that, so given your belief in the value of it, and also your recognition of where you think its limitations will be, do you think as an industry, we're moving fast enough to utilize it, leverage it, recognize it, prepare for it, structure ourselves around it?
[00:20:23] Jamie Gutfreund:
Some of us are. It's the have and the have nots. There are enormous amounts of really smart, very capable people who can only teach and advise so many other people, and until we train the trainers, I think it will still be the haves and the have nots, to the degree that you can really expand your knowledge of it in a very scaled way.
Now, I'm not in a big company anymore, so I rely on the kindness of my friends who are really smart. I try to read everything I can. I try to take action. But I didn't learn it in school. I dabbled in a few courses, but I think the big companies, what I hear from creators and from younger people, is they want the skill sets, they want some kind of training that doesn't feel like they have to be an engineer.
And so until we train the trainers, and then train more of the trainers, I think it's going to still function in a limited capacity, as well as in use cases, not in theoretical because most of the... I don't know if you, have you taken an AI course?
[00:21:33] Charles:
Not officially. Self administered, I think.
[00:21:36] Jamie Gutfreund:
Yeah, the one I took, and it was brilliant, it shall remain nameless, it was still about how it worked in the theory of it. But what I really wanted was like AI for Dummies and Advertising. Tell me 10 things that I can do. And I get a lot of that on TikTok or I'll find it from friends, and I get it from it people in their early twenties who are a lot smarter than I am.
But there isn't a place that tells me, these are the 10 things that will be life changing, you should really practice here. If I go to the New York Times, I can find the 10 essential recipes that I need, to be a functioning human being, to cook my dinner, and I don't have that. There isn't something like that really, that I know I can rely on for AI.
[00:22:18] Charles:
You are an expert across different generations. You have real expertise in understanding how different generations show up. How does AI show up, or how do you think AI is going to show up? How will different generations connect to AI differently?
[00:22:32] Jamie Gutfreund:
I love that question. If you start with Gen Z, who are no longer the youngest and in charge, they're starting to get annoyed with Alphas And alphas are getting annoyed with Gen Z, much like Gen X was annoyed with Millennials. It's just this pairing. So as you're starting to see Gen Z come into the workplace and they're there now, as they start to rise, they're starting, I'm hearing this anecdotally, but they're highly aware of the fact that Gen Alpha is more naturally trained. It's much more integrated into their lives, that they've grown up with AI at a different level than they have. It's more intuitive for them. So I started to hear from Gen Z thinking, "Oh God, I've got to worry about Alpha." So for Gen Z, it's almost like when we learned the cell phone and smartphones as adults, they're learning it, because it's new, it's just around Alphas.
So it'll be much more natural to Gen Alpha, but there is a contradiction, because Gen Alpha is going opposite of what every generation with its counteractions. And they're seeking privacy at a much faster rate, and being off the grid, than previous generations. So I think AI is a way to speed up what they want to get accomplished, will also speak to their ability to or their desire to be more private and not have people.
So I don't know how that will work, but I know they're going to want it to be much more private.
[00:24:14] Charles:
So as you're working with a brand, are you looking at a creator's generational relationship? Are you looking, who do they belong to? Is that part of the evaluation for whether this is a good fit or not?
[00:24:25] Jamie Gutfreund:
More about their audience, about the community, but it's helpful when you're talking to the creator and understanding what their motivations are, and knowing who they are, and what their values and what their priorities are. Any talented human being if you understand where they're coming from, then you have a much better opportunity to engage them in a way that's going to be more productive for everybody.
I mean, I wouldn't talk to a Millennial creator the same way I talked to a Gen Z creator. Definitely not. There's different perspectives. And it does come into play. And also, who's on the other side with the brand? Is it a Gen X senior person? Is it a Boomer? Or is it a Gen Z who's 25, and they've been in the company for a few years?
It's all very dependent on who you're dealing with at what, and what side of the table.
[00:25:19] Charles:
So it's a matchmaking relationship that you're forging, essentially.
[00:25:22] Jamie Gutfreund:
Translation, I think. I view it as translation, because there's no perfect match. In life or in business, it's really about translation and helping people understand what the other person's saying. That's a big theme for me right now. And I think if AI can help enable that will really scale things faster in the greater economy.
Because I, it's interesting, what a brand says and what a creator hears versus what a creator says and what a brand hears, it's so different. We're all starting to really recognize that there is a language gap, like the Rosetta Stone.
That's what we need. And if AI can play a role, I think that will be really helpful.
[00:26:03] Charles:
That seems, instinctively, that's a very obvious place where it could help.
[00:26:06] Jamie Gutfreund:
A hundred percent. I mean , this isn't new. You've talked to brilliant people. AI helping creators create more content faster, better, all that stuff, you know, that's fine. That'll just be the next, that's just normal, that's not anything unique. I think where it will help is asynchronous thinking, connecting the dots, being able to advise on the best sort of connection to something that existed before that people don't know.
If you look at an artist, artists always sense what's happening in culture way before the scientists do. Best example is Picasso or Braque, like, they knew about, cubism was theory of relativity well before Einstein. So can AI help make those kind of insights more accessible to more people?
That's where I think it's going to really spark deeper creativity with more of this asynchronous thinking.
[00:27:04] Charles:
So the through line, obviously, in all of this is human creativity, and where the line is between that and what AI can help to unlock or can replicate or produce in its own right. Do you think we're at a point where we might be able to redefine fundamentally, at least in the creative service industries, the value of human creativity, distinctly? That this, the idea of totally original thinking is actually worth more than the hour that it took for somebody to come up with it, which is how people tend to get paid for it these days.
[00:27:35] Jamie Gutfreund:
I guess it would be like, do you view farm to table produce different than going to your Gristede's and buying a cucumber that's been on a truck? Some people do, but that's not to say that cucumber doesn't have great value. So I don't think it's a black and white thing.
I've seen a brilliant work, as I was saying, like there's a couple of campaigns where people are using AI to accelerate, augment the creativity, things you couldn't do, and mixed reality. Lueve has a campaign, versace has a campaign using AI. Brilliant, beautiful, fantastic.
But there's no, you can't-- Remember the old joke on the Internet, nobody knows if you're a dog? I don't think it'll make someone who's not an artist or creatively inspired, brilliant and /or creative. I think it, whatever your capability is, naturally, can be augmented and enabled, but I don't think it's ever going to replace at least I hope to God not, Charles, but I just don't see that as being that interesting.
And I do think people will appreciate the idea that, is it organic soil? Is it a grain fed beef, the, where things come from and the sourcing and the sort of the content supply chain, I think that's going to matter more. But there's also a lot of people who are saying, this is an AI free creation, just like it's organic or just like it's, made without plastic. It's another element that we consume that we're going to want to know, what are the elements that go into making this item. I hadn't really thought about it that way. These are real time questions that are forcing my brain to think in a way I hadn't expected. D*mn you, Charles!
[00:29:23] Charles:
It's interesting though, isn't it, that people feel compelled to say, this does not have the influence of AI, because ultimately doesn't the experience that we have of whatever it is that we're exposed to matter most? However that thing came into... for example, the song I mentioned earlier about my dogs, does it matter that AI created it and created an emotional reaction in us?
Didn't matter to us. I didn't care that it wasn't. I mean, in fact, there was no way for me to get a band together, to write a song about my dogs, who would have created that, and certainly I wouldn't have spent the time or the money to have done it, but the seven minutes that it took me on Saturday morning to have this thing created for me were worth it.
[00:30:01] Jamie Gutfreund:
What'd you pay for it?
[00:30:02] Charles:
I think I paid, I paid $10 for the month. And so it took me about 24 credits, which is about 10 percent, maybe about $1.10. But it was worth something to me, and we've talked about it since, and it's made life more interesting. So I think the notion that people feel they have to warn us that AI was involved in it, I wonder whether at the end of the day, what we'll care about is how we experienced it--
[00:30:25] Jamie Gutfreund:
How we feel?
[00:30:25] Charles:
--and what we felt as a result of that thing.
[00:30:28] Jamie Gutfreund:
Oh, let me look at it this way. Okay, so I just watched the New Look and it was all about Christian Dior and couture and World War Two. And it was great. And I was thinking about couture versus fast fashion. Do I feel different if I'm wearing a handmade gown versus something that was made in a factory in God knows where, for God knows how much, that I'm going to throw away the next time? I do.
I do. Do I need other people to know that? No. Again, there is no one rule, one-size-fits-all here. I tend to, and maybe it's just my preference. I wonder if you'll care based on, in some cases it's the experience and how it makes you feel. But if I told you a silly riddle, you might laugh for five minutes.
I don't know if the song about your dog might have lasting influence in your life. Whereas, if you did go through the manpower and the hours of effort to build this orchestra that would write this song, would you be more inclined to share it with people? Would you feel prouder of it? You got a little bit of whimsy from this experience, and it's fun, but are you going to break it out in three months?
Maybe. I don't know.
[00:31:45] Charles:
I think all of these questions are completely right. And I think we're being exposed to so many different stimuli these days, that I think a re-- certainly challenging our own assumptions about what it is that make us happy or make us feel something or where does that have to come from.
I mean, I think everybody I've talked to on this series has expressed a version of, at the end of the day, human beings can generate concepts, ideas, thinking, expressions, sentiments, feelings that are unique, and we will recognize that. And I'd like to think that's true, but I'm not convinced at this point that 10 years from now, we will actually care at all where the thing came from.
We will care about what the experience was that we had receiving at the other end. And we don't know, and we can't know, what it's going to be like. And at the moment, I was going to say it doesn't matter. It probably does matter sooner rather than later because I think this whole industry builds on that premise. That it's going to have to confront one version of the reality of either, human creativity is always going to be distinctly valuable because for all the reasons that you've described, and therefore people will pay for it. Or, we don't care how the thing came to be, we just care about the impact it had on us,
and so if AI gets better at that than human beings do, then we won't worry about it, or we'll pay for it in a different way. That to me is the heart of this entire evolution that we're all living through. And I think, to some extent, we're fortunate to live through it, because it's a fascinating, challenging era in society in lots of different ways.
I mean, society is going to be reformed in some fashion as a result of everything we're dealing with at the moment.
[00:33:22] Jamie Gutfreund:
I hope so. I certainly hope so. But I also am a big believer in the education of our, of the next generation, back and forth. They teach us, we teach them. But putting a value on knowing where your food is grown, knowing where something is made or how it's made, knowing the backstory of an artist, all of those things add to the enjoyment, and I think it's important for people who care about creativity to highlight that when you're sharing something.
I mean, I love knowing how a song was made. I was just, this is like a random story, but I was just in Westchester this weekend for a wedding at this random hotel, and apparently Peter Frampton, walked into this rando bar, saw a musician there, I think he was a guitarist, and thought he was fantastic. And then that guy was part of Peter Frampton's world for the next 10 years. Random.
So when you hear the songs, you're like, wait, that guy was just in a bar in Mount Kisco, New York . We're like, I heard this fantastic story. It was in a 50 Feet From Stardom, about the woman who's the backup singer on Symphony For the Devil with Mick Jagger, and she was pregnant. So great. So she's like, whenever they're filming, I guess, late sixties. And please listeners, I know I don't get the dates right. Just about the story. She was pregnant, it was like 10 o'clock at night, it was pouring rain, and her agent calls and says, there's a car coming to get you, I need you to go, there's this band in town called the Rolling Stones, and this guy, Mick Jagger, needs a backup singer. And she's, I'm pregnant, I've got my hair and curlers, I'm not going anywhere. And he said, the car will be there in five minutes. And she's so frustrated. She goes, and apparently Mick Jagger was not very nice to her.
So she was very frustrated. And then when she's singing that song, she said she was so angry. She put all that she had into it, with her pregnant self. And it's a pretty tough lyric, it's, rape, murder, that whole thing. And then when you listen to that song now, it has a whole different meaning. So that's a very long way of saying, if you understand the origins of something and how it was made and why it was made, it's way more interesting and compelling than, typed in some stuff and the AI spit it out, no offense on your dog song.
I'm sure it's lovely. But if you had told me that you had contracted an orchestra and you and Chris had written these lyrics, that's more lasting.
[00:35:49] Charles:
Yeah, probably more concerning, as well, that's how we would choose to use that type of resource. But nevertheless, no, I think it's a very, I think it's a very powerful point, actually. And to add to that, we were fortunate enough at New Year, actually, to see Lisa Fisher perform live. She's one of the other singers in 50 Feet From Stardom.
[00:36:07] Jamie Gutfreund:
I do.
[00:36:08] Charles: She is the lead female vocalist for The Rolling Stones, or has been for about 20 years. And that performance really... I mean, there's no AI in the world that could ever come close to creating those kinds of sentiments and feelings.
As you look at the future of AI in the creator ecosystem, what are you optimistic for? What are you hopeful for?
[00:36:32] Jamie Gutfreund:
Globalization. Really, this language does not become a limitation. It doesn't matter where you were born, what language you speak. It will give you the ability to reach a global audience. I think that's the, one of the coolest things that I've seen about it. And I think creativity is a God-given right, it's something everybody's born with.
It doesn't matter if you're born rich, poor, in a major U S city or a small city somewhere. Being able to have access to create whatever is in, that you're seeing inside you, and then be able to reach a global audience without a huge amount of infrastructure, I don't know that gives me a lot of optimism.
[00:37:16] Charles:
And last question for you, what are you afraid of, as you look at the future?
[00:37:23] Jamie Gutfreund:
Restrictive thinking. People being afraid of people that think differently from them, and then mandating how you have to think, and being afraid of it. I think fear of losing control is what I think is plaguing us in a lot of ways right now. And people will do anything to not be fearful of what they perceive as a threat.
And that to me is frightening. Because, again, it puts us in our lizard brain, not in our expansive, higher thinking power. It just puts us in our reactive, scary places. And that's not where human beings are at their best.
[00:38:00] Charles:
Jamie, thanks so much for coming on the show. Good luck with Creator Vision. I think you are at the absolute epicenter of creativity in the industry. And I can't think of anybody better to help companies and brands navigate their way into that world and through it. So I wish you nothing but the best with building the company out.
[00:38:18] Jamie Gutfreund:
Oh, Charles, does that mean you'll help me? Will you write me a song, please?
[00:38:23] Charles:
I have a very good service that can do that for you in about three minutes.
[00:38:26] Jamie Gutfreund:
Apparently. I love this. Thank you so much. I learned a lot from you today. Thank you.
—————
If you’d like to know more about the podcast, or about our leadership practice, go to fearlesscreativeleadership.com, where you’ll find the audio and transcript of every episode, and more information about our work with some of the world’s most creative and innovative businesses.
Don’t forget to share Fearless with your friends and colleagues, and to leave a rating and review.
Fearless is produced by Podfly. Frances Harlow is the show’s Executive Producer. Josh Suhy is our Editor. Sarah Pardoe is the show’s Producer.
Thanks for listening.
