Will AI Replace Marketers or Make Them More Creative? | Kyle Merrick

And that's where the bit of anarchy came in, because I'm like, whoa, I'm completely re-engineering an entire knowledge base to cater to a different market, to kind of adjust an entire product base. And that was the genesis, because I realized this is total anarchy in my own head.

Welcome to another episode of The Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn Learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. A special shout out to our one listener in Clinton Township, Michigan. I love any city that has township in it. Uh, that's, that's brilliant. Uh, thank you for listening. Joining me today, Kyle Merrick of Anarchy in a Day. Anarchy in a Day? For a Day.

For a Day.

Sorry, I'll say that again. Anarchy for a Day. Kyle, welcome to the show.

Uh, Christian, thank you. Here I am wishing that I was from a respective township. I did go to— my high school was Lyons Township.

There you go.

If that counts for anything. I know it's not a—

well, it seems to be a geographic anomaly. Uh, I don't know of any townships, uh, down this way in Oklahoma, but, uh, you know, Michigan, Illinois. Yeah. Were you from Illinois?

Yeah, originally from the, the general burbs of Chicago.

Yeah, I love it. And you reside in Denver now. How are you in witness relocation? Actually, no, I sometimes—

you wouldn't—

you wouldn't go to Denver if you were in witness relocation.

It would be a rather conspicuous location.

Yeah. No, you go to someplace like Albuquerque.

Yeah. Yeah. I've been out here for about 5 years. I was in Columbus, Ohio, for 7 years in between. Both Chicago and now Denver. And so that 7-year period is typically the response that I render when people say like, oh, why, why are you here in Denver? I say, well, how much time have you spent in Ohio?

None. I've never been to Ohio, which is a shame, I think.

Here's what I'll say: I miss the people, not the place. Some of my best buddies are still out there, you know, old clientele., the place itself in my purview, unremarkable.

Well, it's hard to beat the mountains. Um, I, I'm a big fan of Colorado, uh, just because of the topography. Okay, so, um, you— let's just jump into it. Not Anarchy in a, in a Day, but Anarchy for a Day.

Roughly for a day, somewhere for a day.

Not anymore, you can't stand that. Um, how'd you come up with that name, and what is it exactly you Well, two fabulous questions there.

So one, I will start with what I do. And I apologize, listener, for the sniffles, getting over a cold here. So if you can fight through that, then I encourage you, please stick with us. The day-to-day these days, I'm a marketing coach. That is what Anarchy for a Day is. It is the whole of my knowledge base. That's about a decade spent as a marketing agency owner. Turned into an educational course, one which I refer to as a BA in digital marketing, a bachelor's of anarchy. So that is the occupation. Outside of that, acting and voiceover. So all sort of three of those components work in conjunction with one another. Now, the reason I got to anarchy in 4 days, just to lighten the load, but anarchy itself being the heaviest lift of the entire thing, Um, let's think back to like Thanksgiving 2024, right around there. And all right, so AI has come into the frame and it's automated so much of the marketing world. Mhm. Okay, well, that's one component. So if we're doing like the RFP game, which my partner and I were at the time, we would essentially be going for, you know, the higher ticket RFPs. Now, if AI, you know, companies come into frame, they undercut us so heavily that we can't trim our costs down to make our proposal, our pitch, any bit more attractive. Like, we are just completely out of the running. Reason being, enough companies, individuals, and entities have so little lasting trust with marketers, typically because I'm gonna say we Not that I feel like I'm included in this bunch, but many marketers fail to deliver on what is the expected deliverable, right? Whatever that may be. So because of that depleted trust barrier, okay, well, people will look at these boutique marketing agencies, which we were in that classification because we're small. We keep operations here stateside because we value fantastic customer service. That's one of the most key parts of the marketing world is we got to be able to talk to the customer so that they feel that they are with us and that we are with them. You know, that's something that we valued critically and I still do. But that is, you know, partly what attributed to the higher cost barrier, really. So all these different things are to say, really, if AI came into frame, that was almost always the preference because people don't want to spend that high-ticket dollar amount on something that's likely going to fail because it has in the past. So that's the, you know, connection that I kind of made that said, you know what, this agency model, this ain't the right decision, this ain't the right product for today's market. So I kind of quietly closed the doors. And then for maybe a period of about 6 months or so, I was looking for a job. And, you know, marketing director, creative director, anything like that. Generally, nothing was sticking. I couldn't find a lick of good business. And I figured, okay, well, clearly I'm the problem here as the applicant. So I hire a coach. And in the very first conversation, she's like, you know what, I know that we have to focus on the resume. But hear me out. I can see you. As a coach too, just based on your, your, the knowledge, the way that you operate and think about things. I said, well, that's extremely high compliment, but it would defeat the whole, the whole purpose of looking for a job. I can't start another business right now. So within that same exact week, the Colorado Nonprofit Association, they reach out, they invite myself and a colleague to build out a single-day in-person boot camp for their entire member base. So, okay, within that same week, I have this seedling planted of maybe you should try coaching. And then I'm building out educational course material for the nonprofit association. And so this reality of, well, what happens if I actually, you know, do this kind of coaching thing? You know, the educator lives very strongly in me with the sales component of anything marketing. There's always an educational component sort of in the mix. So, it's not a new concept to me. It was just simply, "All right. Well, how do I take this existing decade's worth of knowledge and how do I flip it into something that's attainable for everybody who's not wired like I am, who doesn't have my same background?" And, that's where the bit of anarchy came in because I'm like, "Whoa, I'm completely re-engineering an entire knowledge base to cater to a different market, to kind of adjust an entire product base. Mm-hmm. And that was the genesis, because I realized this is total anarchy in my own head that I'm going through. But that led to the tremendous realization that we can rethink words regardless of, you know, the kind of reputation that word may have, which I think a lot of people probably put like anarchy is like destroy everything and cause total chaos. Okay, that's fine. But if we're a little bit more strategic about when we apply these moments of anarchy, when if everybody goes left, then you go right. If you're very tactical about when those moments happen, that could be what instead pushes you out of your red ocean into your own blue ocean. Does that make sense?

No, absolutely. Yeah, there's, there's a couple of things there that I want to unpack or tug on the string. So we talk about on this show not being tied to the skills that you have or the experience that you have and looking at the creative business as a problem solver. Because if you look at it through the lens of what you do, you know, marketing copy, videography, whatever, you only see a certain— it's a lens that you see through things through, and you might miss out on other opportunities, other problems that need solved. And so it sounds like what you did was exactly that. Maybe not overtly intentionally, but you ended up there where you're like, oh, I've got this knowledge and skill and I can apply it differently than I did before and/or is being done in the marketplace and create something new. So kind of unpack what that experience was like, like shifting, making that shift.

Well, at first it was awful. I had to mourn it. Well, you know, think about it. The decade of entrepreneurship, the entrepreneur is fiercely dedicated to carving their own path. And then I reached the point where I'm like, I gotta get a corporate fucking job here. That transition, that is not—

that's so easily said, but for the mind of the entrepreneur, no, that's not easy to say.

Yeah, in In recent years, I had one of the biggest arguments with my parents because they hit me with the question of, well, who do you want to work for? And this is, you know, mom was a lawyer, dad worked in advertising, did the whole agency thing, retired working advertising for law firms. That's not exactly how they met. They met back in their college days. But they come from that old school corporate background. Corporation takes care of you if you put your time in. And so they're querying, who do you want to work for? Makes all the sense in the world if you understand the individuals it's coming from. But then if you understand the individual that that question is being delivered to, it doesn't make a lick of sense because you're not talking to somebody who is sprinting to go work for somebody. Right. This is the individual who's been working for himself. Been redefining his own path, been carving out the individual through experience. You know, for the individual shifting from entrepreneurship to the acknowledgement of I have to find a corporate job now, that required a process of mourning. Yeah. I had to mourn the mere fact that I'm no longer going to be working for myself. This is going to be a very different shift in mindset and pace. And I got there, but in part I had to lie to myself consistently to put myself into the brain space that's required to be able to walk into interview environments and convincingly act like I wanted to work with these people.

But fortunately, you did not end up there, but that mind shift was had to happen? Well, I'll ask that as a question. Would you have seen the opportunity or been given the opportunity if you hadn't made that mind shift and you hadn't gone through that? Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy, and if you're not ready to make that full commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now.

There's a distinct possibility that I may never have, no, because I had, I stuck with the marketing agency. It would have just been, you know, continue down the path of iteration and figure out how do we make this this entity work. And to this day, I still believe it's a failing model for the specific environment that we live in if you don't have the big name because the landscape is so wildly different.

So, that's the second thing that I wanted to unpack because I was having a conversation a couple of months ago with one of my clients and friends that Uh, he was— had an agency for 20-plus years, um, and I would say he was boutique. Um, but, you know, here in Oklahoma City, he had picked up, uh, some pretty big entertainment clients, uh, Blake Griffin, uh, Nicki Minaj. So he, he was playing in, in rarefied air, but it was that more that traditional model of doing everything conceptually for a high-paying customer. Mm-hmm. And a couple of months ago, he said that model is completely dead like that. And he may have been saying it more for himself, but it also was an acknowledgment of the industry landscape. Um, where you, you had a creative firm that had in-house photography and videography and editors and writers and website developers.

It was a butt in the chair for each component of—

right, right. But the, the fracture of technology, uh, has really upset the apple cart. But what, what I found fascinating about what you said is the lack of trust was what was driving that. And I hadn't really thought about it that way, but I agree with you because I was just having this conversation with my head of marketing revenue this morning. That old anecdote of, I know that 50% of my marketing efforts are not working, but I can't tell you what 50% It is, um, is, is really kind of true. Um, people, business owners like it to be more predictable, more linear, more analytical. But when you're dealing with humans in marketing, uh, you, you have this chaos that's, that's this anarchy that's built baked into the pie. You can't predict them. And so there were a lot of providers that took advantage of that, and people would just go from one provider to the next because they had this itch that they couldn't get scratched. I've always put that back on the business owner of not really knowing what they need and just buying something without really understanding what what they need. Yeah. Um, but there's also this inherent thing that like, well, the marketer has got experience, the marketer has, uh, intuition based upon that, but ultimately they can't with any certainty predict human behavior. So was that— I guess the question is, where do you see the current landscape for marketing agencies? Like, what is going to come out of this technological disruption?

Well, couple things. Like, I want to address like a few items before I get to the, the actual question, because that's, that's also a good question, is, you know, what's the future of marketing agencies? One thing that I've seen is, you know, for the individuals that don't know what they're doing, the reason I became a marketing coach is to— so like, for the the entrepreneurs, the makers, the business owners out there, they need to know what they're shopping around for. My utopic view is to create a marketplace of educated buyers so that they understand, okay, this is my product or service, and this is the base marketplace that I'm trying to speak to. Mm-hmm. And so if you thoroughly understand those two components, what that means is you need to understand your market well enough that you can be in a one-on-one conversation and never lose their captive attention. That's how well you need to know who you're talking to. If you don't, then when you walk into these marketing conversations with the individuals who are tremendous salespeople, most likely, and they present this new shiny object and say, well, we do this for, you know, Nicki Minaj and all these spectacular individuals and businesses, you know, here's our case studies and all this stuff. Boy, if it works for them, it can work for me. Hell no, it won't. You have a different product, different service, in a different marketplace. That alone is enough to say, uh-uh, it ain't the same anymore. If you are literally the same, they should have bought you up and essentially subsumed you into their operations, if you are that close in operations. Um, so that is to say The educated buyer is the solution to not knowing what they're shopping for. Yes. The impetus to say, well, if I educate and I bring everybody up to speed on essentially my knowledge base, these individuals as they shop around and as they see the marketplace evolve, then they can approach it without falling into the same pitfalls that I did during my own journey.

So let me ask a clarifying question. So who do you coach?

The maker, the individual who is, um, looking to build for themselves and is open, available for feedback. Because if the individual is not able to, you know, take that kind of thing, they're not good.

So entrepreneurs.

Yep, entrepreneurs, owner-operators. Exactly. Yes, smaller teams.

So not, not like a director of marketing in a company.

Oh, I've seen directors of marketing that I can very much serve. But the reality is that these companies are too hesitant to bring on a coach these days, especially when we have so many different AI technologies out there. That what I've seen is there are a lot of marketing directors that are under-equipped, inept, and not ready to actually take on their jobs. But yet here they are. They have the title of director. And that is what is guiding the communication efforts of a lot of these companies, unfortunately. But that's not for me to reflect on. It's just, that's the state of the corporate marketplace.

So, going back to my question, you started to lay some foundation there. What do you see So, so I, first of all, I, I 100% agree with you. I, I've said on this show multiple times, I call it crackhead energy, and the crackhead is the business owner, right? They, they, they want that crack because it gives them that high, and that, that could be, you know, views, clicks, you know, whatever. They don't know. They just want the high. And the— a lot of marketers were crack dealers. Right? And they're like, you know, I know this isn't going to work, and I know you don't really need it, but I'm going to sell it to you because you want it.

And they're paying us, and we are not going to say anything. We're just going to sit back quietly, do our job, and make sure that that check keeps coming in. Sorry, direct deposit. Nobody pays in checks anymore.

No, but that's, that's the problem then, is, you know, technology disruption just makes that cheaper, and more people are going to be buy it, but it doesn't improve the solution.

Yeah. So one, one notion too, that this was sort of the secondary component that I wanted to address before we still get to like, where do we see market or, uh, marketing agencies these days? Um, how is it that we can also build trust in the marketing practice itself? So if you've engaged with a marketer who's saying, well, you should do X, Y, and Z, okay, things, you know, radio, still exists. Think TV, still exists. These are difficult because, you know, we have huge, huge streaming services. You know, we have iHeartRadio that are, you know, moving big, big numbers, and they are, you know, iHeart was the, the main sponsor for what, like the, the one of the Olympics or something recently. So, you know, these are at the forefront, I believe, when people think like radio and TV and the We have Amazon, Netflix, you know, the big streamers. Okay, that's all fine and dandy, but you cannot guarantee that the individual is sat watching the entirety of that commercial. Somebody might flip up their phone, somebody might be distracted. You cannot guarantee that there is actual viewership, even though Amazon, Netflix, all these different streaming platforms, radio included, will suggest, well, we have, you know, however many millions of viewers within this target zone that you're aiming for. Um, it's no guarantee. And so this is largely what we're talking about is the marketing component says we'll get you the viewership. Okay, well, that's the shiny end goal, but how can you quantify that people are actually watching this stuff? Web-based activity— this is where social media comes in. You can tell phones have cameras and we use these cameras to track where the eyeball is on the screen. We can see what is lingering. That's the level that we can actually scrutinize and see, okay, what are people actually looking at? Where are they interacting on screen? How long are they staying here? That is, if you cannot find those data points and money is of the essence, then you should only be embracing things that will get you that level of detail as viewership, where eyeballs are, how long people are hanging out there. Otherwise, it's not going to be a good marketing avenue for you. That's, that is the solution that I say is, I'm not going to point to any specific thing, but that's where social media advertising comes in.

Is it kind of tilting at windmills? I mean, it seems like there's, there's just more and more data around human behavior. To your point, they're tracking where you're looking on a screen, uh, heat maps and the like. Um, but has, has the marketing become, become any better with that information? Or is it just because we can measure it, we do? And, and this idea of direct attribution of I'm going to spend X dollars and get Y results is, is a fool's errand.

You have two different components because one is you have the data and then two You have essentially the quality, which I would attribute to say like storytelling. I don't know if we have to label it something. If you disagree with that, you or listeners label it something else. But the two are disparately related because we would essentially tie data points into the story and figure out which stories are punching where and when. Okay, that's ideal. But just because we're tracking these data points does not mean we're making better stories. What we're accounting for is the fact that we are— I'm gonna say this blatantly publicly— we are retarding ourselves with how little attention span we have. My ADHD brain has only skyrocketed thanks to social media. I hate it, but I hate it. Um, we have media coming in from so many different corners of our just waking day unless we're like, you know, a couple thousand miles away in the forest, then, you know, we have no real way of stepping away from all of the inundation, the, the, you know, the advertising, the marketing, the media everywhere, right? And now we have AI coming in and saying, well, within this, we don't know what's real anymore. That's the cool thing. Um, so the two are not related. Data tracking and technical quality. Because, you know, quality— if you're talking about, you know, Tarantino, Spielberg, you know, the individuals that are, you know, Chris Nolan, the individuals that are true, true story makers— that's quality. But it takes time. You gotta sit through that one. It's tough to develop quality in a matter of seconds. So, you know, quality is oftentimes out the door, but it depends what your, you know, baseline expectation or understanding of quality is. So that one's a hard one to remark on.

Well, and it kind of goes back to what I said is that AI makes it cheaper and it's just more crap. Like, if the story wasn't good and it wasn't compelling, you know, just because you can produce it cheaper and distribute it more widely does not make it any more effective.

Yeah. And so this brings me to your sort of like final question out of this entire sort of conversation, which is, you know, what's the, what's the future of marketing agencies? And okay, so what we've, I think, readily sort of made apparent here is AI, all right, to shoot a commercial, you know, it takes a team, you need writer, you need the client to be able to sign off on all this stuff. But before that even happens, you got to know who you're talking to. This— we're talking only commercial, I'm not talking film or anything like that. Because you're advertising, you know, a product, a service, or perhaps a greater theme or notion, whatever. But to do that, I mean, you need lighting, You need sound, you need camera, you need the director, the producer, you need client, you need all of these people in the same room. And now AI has essentially removed all of those people. We no longer have a need for any of them, actor included. And where I see marketing agencies going based on where this technology is, unless something happens that essentially says like, like unless there's a court case that essentially establishes like clear enough boundaries that makes this an impossibility. Okay, we can do this cheaper. So there's this concept of A/B testing within the marketing world is to say, you know, one audience member will receive different types of messaging within the same general campaign. Right. So that's to figure out what messaging within this general storyline resonates the most with this one individual. That's A/B testing, right? Point being, how is it that we, we get this individual to just turn out their pockets for us? Um, A/B testing maximized, that is where we're going. So essentially, uh, A/B testing costs more money if we're going with like the standard production team because it means that you have to shoot different hooks. The actors have to be saying different lines, and that just means more footage, more time on set, more, more, more, more, more everything, more money. And because AI can do this cheap, fast, efficiently, what this means, the way that I see it at least, is, all right, if you, uh, Christian Brim, are an entrepreneur, a business owner, a CEO, president, Well, whatever your business is, then you're probably going to have, let's just speculate, 150 different like character profiles of the types of individuals that you want to be talking to. That is your customer base. There are 150 different brands of individuals out there living a very specific lifestyle, perhaps in a different space and, you know, geographic space. Those 150-character profiles, those are the people that you want to talk to. Now, what is standard with production teams these days, maybe you can cater to like, I don't know, a percentage of that marketplace, but you're not going to be able to shoot everything specific for each of those 150 different models, really. Now, AI can do that. That's what I'm seeing is that we can essentially build individualized assets for you, for me, based on exactly what our phones are hearing as we have these wonderful podcast discussions. And these data points can be sold so that these companies can essentially know us as well as we know us.

And then mass, mass customization.

That's it. Yeah, because that's what the AI will enable within the marketing field, is remove all the people that you have to deal with, the stingy camera people, and, you know, the audio guy that can't get quite, you know, the boom out of shot. Well, great, you don't have to worry about any of that anymore.

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Okay, I'm gonna pivot now. Um, you said that you created an online course, which I find interesting. I, I was, um, participating in a webinar recently with, uh, Alex Sanfilippo of PodMatch, and one of the guests on there was, uh, I forget his name, but he had sold his company to Mighty Networks and, uh, had stayed on in their employ. And he made this statement that online learning is actually in decline. And I'm like, well, Mighty would know that since that's their business. And he was talking about how that potentially could pivot. What has been your experience with the online learning as a business?

How has that worked out? Well, one, I'll begin with a correction. I don't have an online course. Okay. It's taught by me. Anybody who embraces me, it's— that's— I'm actually cognitively staying away from online because, okay, the business is me. It lives and dies with me. And that's that service, that level of personalized understanding of the individual.

That's all right. We'll forget that I asked that question, but it's still a great question though.

So I, I needed to clarify that from my end. Because there's a lot of people that would suggest, well, when you actually want to start making real money as a coach, what you do is you essentially either use AI to build out videos of each of the different course sections and then you plop everything in an app, which you can use AI to literally build the entire framework of the app just like that. And, then that is your product. You just go simply sell that app and you don't have to talk to a single person anymore, right? So that is— that's the online course making, you know, process that has been advised to me. I saw that, I hear that, and I respectfully decline that given that the human touch is still a requirement, um, in the marketplace. Now the important bit is Catering the material to, um, to the individual listener, you know, that's the key. Because if you go with evergreen material, some of it may not be, uh, terribly relevant because not everybody's going to have that budget to go to like Netflix and say like, all right, I'd like to run commercials while people are watching like Bridgerton or, you know, whatever, I don't know, all that stuff. So, um, you know, so the idea is the appropriate coaching mechanism here is to say, okay, well, within, if I'm taking my project management hat and saying, all right, how much budget do you have? How many people do you have? How many AI systems are you using? And then within those confines, then we build.

So walk me through what a sample engagement with a business owner would look like.

There's really two iterations of that. One is simply one-on-one coaching. And that's where we, you know, just go through and we establish, okay, well, let's build that priority list. What's the most important so that we can build the foundation? And then from there, any structure you aim to build atop that foundation, then you'll, you know, build a solidified structure. Right. The other is if we go with the course, like I said, the BA in digital marketing. So that's where, you know, we have 10 10 different Zoom or like Google Meet sessions, and I'm literally going through a course as it pertains to the individual that I'm speaking with.

That's where I got confused. So that's not work they do independently of you, or is it like pre-work, homework?

You know, there's a bit within there because, you know, out of the discussion there's going to come essentially you know, portions that, okay, now in order to actually put this into motion, I need you to build this, and then we can bring this back, we can look at it, we can critique it, and we can adjust it.

Are most of your clients doing the implementation themselves, or do they have a team that they're working with?

Uh, mostly themselves.

Okay. Yeah. And so, you know, I, I, I know as an entrepreneur, one of the things that a lot of us struggle with is bandwidth. Like, you know, I don't have all the hours to devote to it. Do you have people that, like, sign up and then don't do their part? Like, I come to the coaching session, you tell me what I need to do, and I just don't do it. No. Okay, well, that's good.

Uh, I mean, well, I mean, individuals that sign up for me, they are dedicated to the craft, to understand, like, all right, I need the individual to essentially help me drive this ship and keep it in the right direction, you know. So that kind of a partnership, that takes understanding, and that understanding— laziness is not within that.

Is there a screening process that you do to assure you don't bring on somebody that's misaligned?

The moment I start speaking with somebody, I'm screening them. I have been doing this long enough that I can just kind of smell where somebody is in life. And I wish I had a better answer because I don't have anybody who's like, well, I'm just good at this. Okay. Well, that comes from experience. Right.

Well, you just need to put that in an AI.

Yeah, exactly. There's an AI for that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, no, because I find that in our experience helping people with their money, that there's oftentimes— sometimes, not oftentimes— this attitude of, well, I just need you to fix it for me without understanding that there's some fundamental things, including mindset shift, that have to occur on your end that I can't help you with. Like, if you don't care about this, I can't care about it enough to make it worth anything to you, right?

We— when I'm remarking with my, you know, business partners, this, like, these days, those individuals that have that mindset, that understanding to go with essentially the business practice, whatever it may be, there's always such a mutual alignment through anybody that just makes the entire exchange pleasant. Because it doesn't have to be like we're just yanking teeth out with a plier. No. Why? But some clients, especially the small ones who have been burned, have maybe a couple hundred bucks and they're like, oh, why are we spending money here? Just shut up and let us do our job. It's those individuals, the smaller ones, that actually unfortunately turn out to be the least enjoyable clients.

Because I, I, I think that's exactly who is going to attract the technological tools, right? It's the people that weren't going to spend money on you anyway, right?

They're gonna DIY it, look for alternative $20 a month solutions because just money is Well, that's— that is it. That's the only consideration.

Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna pivot one more time. Uh, you, you are a voice actor. How did that, uh, how's that worked out?

Like, I'm curious. Well, voice actor and actor. I'm actually finding more leverage within the acting. Okay, typically voice acting. Um, well, it's interesting if we're talking— because I can still kind of bring this back to the whole AI conversation. AI has done some incredible strides within the voice acting, you know, voiceover world. We have the ability now to customize it so that, like, commercially we can pretty much achieve whatever we're looking for without having to engage an actual human. So, okay, for the productions that yet again are very cost and budget conscious, if that's the case, then okay, go use AI. I don't see that boding well for the people that aren't well established within the voice acting or voiceover world. So for voice, you better have something that machines and other people don't have. That's what you're going to need to essentially carve a path in today's world if you're kicking up a career in voiceover. That's That's reality that I see.

Well, I am curious about that because Connor Quinn, who's an OG voice actor here in Oklahoma City, older than I am— I don't know how old he is, but he's older than I am— he talks about like voice acting is acting first. It's not— I mean, it's not about the voice. It can be, but You know, you're acting. And the whole idea of creativity being replicated by a machine makes a lot of people uncomfortable. And I guess my question to you, I mean, I'm going to tell you my thought and then you respond to it. I don't think machines anytime soon are going to actually come up with something original. Like, it's iterations on what's already been created. And so for a lot of people in a lot of situations, that's sufficient. You know, I heard an actor or saw an actor, I heard a voice, I saw a commercial, and I want something like that. That is where AI can make it more cost effective to produce. But if I'm trying to create something on— not necessarily on the level, but like Tarantino or Nolan, where I'm coming up with a novel story and novel acting, novel scriptwriting, novel, you know, voice acting, that still is the purview of humans. Um, I think that there's going to be kind of a whiplash against technology where those types of genuine things actually come at more of a premium than they, than they do now. And in other words, if you're just going to go produce another Marvel movie, um, where it's the— it's essentially, you know, the same thing Uh, that, uh, is, is going to be highly leveraged by technology. If you're trying to create, uh, Inglourious Basterds, um, there's no machine that does that.

True creativity moves culture forward. That's my understanding, having studied and having still operated with and I'd argue most of my waking life. That's when I point to Tarantino, that's my general undertone is audacious as some of his films may be. I point to Inglourious Basterds, quite simply the scene where Christoph Waltz is having the glass of milk in the gentleman's farm. Cinematically speaking, I struggle to come up with any greater scene.

It's— it is. I mean, I, I, I, I re— I read about like how he got cast in that role, and like the— it essentially came down to Tarantino, like, if you don't play this role, we're not making this movie. Like, it's that important.

And that's extraordinary that Tarantino saw so much in Christoph as to say that not only are you this guy, but we simply cannot move forward without you. Yeah. And if anybody ever pays such a compliment to me in a production, holy cow, I will do everything I can to bring that life, you know, to the role.

But he— and he was uniquely humorous and creepy at the same time. Like, the, the juxtaposition of those two things is just like, yeah, it's unsettling.

And that's what makes it lively, you know. And so, all right, if I have to distill essentially the last couple paragraphs into like a question is, do we see AI taking over or will there be a sort of a human backlash within the creative world? I think that's a valid question based on essentially what's been posed. Um, like One of the realities is that I see sort of 3 different components here, different tiers of thinking about AI.

Did you do that in homage to Inglourious Basterds?

Not intentionally, but I now see the reference.

You have a German heritage. All right, go ahead.

I do. I am mostly German. I hope you can tell by my accent.

Ja, jawohl.

Oh, so yeah, okay. AI, um, usually turns into a gay German inadvertently. It's neither here nor there. Um, investors are going to invest in AI. Business owners are going to invest in AI, and they're more or less going to relieve most of their workforce in that process, and they'll save gobs and gobs of money. Creatives should be lobbying against AI. And, you know, that's one of the realities. The employee doesn't like AI because they're let go in that process. Their safety and security is gone. Investors, business owners, you know, whatever, in that top tier percentage, they love it. Let them have it. That's fine. But creatives, largely, I don't see AI being a good solution for any of us. I'm a creative. I don't like where AI is putting us because as we've already established here, it's like, I'm going to quote myself again, it's the creative material that is now using your word, novel, that's what moves culture forward. That's what we need more of. And so all of these CEOs, executives, as we've kind of remarked on previously, they see, well, that worked, you know, previously that made money for, you know, X entity. And so if we do that for ourselves, then we should be able to make a lot of money here too. And that's a deeply, deeply problematic thing because what we're seeing is it's the Marvel thing. It's the same iteration, just, you know, tweak a couple different colors, bring some new characters in, same shit, new day. Okay, well, now that's trite. Maybe it's novel story, but we're bored with it. And so this is where a lot of Hollywood is kind of dropping the ball right now, is because we're not looking at new, you know, newly adapted, you know, stories that are taking greater risks because too many people are scared they're going to lose the millions that they need to just build it in the first place.

Well, and, and I, I think that's a universal problem. So I, I go back to like Kodak and the advent of digital photography. And Kodak got into the digital camera business, but they couldn't get out of the photography, uh, the filmmaking, the film manufacturing business, because they made too much money on it. And eventually it collapsed. And the— the— you, you talked about business owners replacing people with, uh, AI or automation of any kind, at the end of the day, yeah, they may in a short term make more money, but it's going to drive down the cost of, of their product. Like, someone's going to come in and say, well, I'll just do it cheaper. I created a whole new stack and I, I don't have any of the legacy bullshit that you do, right?

Well, the reality, what these guys— because I— this is the double-edged sword, and that's the unspoken portion— is I say, you know, business owners, investors, go embrace it. I say that with the cheeky— you know, the reality is there is nothing original by embracing it. You're just automating what's already been done. If it's building off of existing material, then it simply cannot— correct— all that well. And so eventually, if the company implements it at across, you know, such a, like, we'll call it like a cellular level. Inevitably, what this tells me is probably companies are going to begin looking all the same. And at that point, that's when companies get bought up and, you know, consumed by bigger dogs. So I, you know, I use AI. I just hope it doesn't vary.

Well, I think, I think it, I think I can tie this back in very nicely to the beginning statement, is the problems that we face in this country, in business, culturally, societally, whatever, need more creatives, more creativity, more divergent thinking— Yes. —than ever. And we're all dogpiling into the convergent thinking. And it's like the exact opposite of what we should be doing. And so for the entrepreneur that will embrace their creativity, whether their business is a creative product is irrelevant. And I would tell creatives that, you know, they need to be embracing the commercial and enterprise intent around it as well. But people like you are what we need more of. We need you to, like you did, take off what was done before and not be holding to it and not be grinding it out trying to get the marketing agency to work, but take your creativity in a divergent way with the experience that you have and solve new problems.

Thank you. You've heard everything. And that's why I love podcasters, because individuals who've been in this game are great listeners. They're great question askers. Not everybody's wired that way. I mean this very genuinely. This is where anarchy comes in. If we're bringing it back full circle, this— the entire root of what anarchy stands for is that Christian, you are the individual. You embrace your individual. This, you know, podcasting is a wonderful tool and mechanism to do that. You know, whatever your personal brand may be. In the society and the world that we live in largely, but I'm really going to just keep it to the confines of the US. We live in a society that does not quite value the individual. Far from it. I say that very lightly, but I don't believe it does. It says it does, but it doesn't. It just wants to make money on you. And to make money, it needs sheep. It needs people to do the jobs. And so in this sort of society, the individual who can embrace their own individuality unabashedly without shame, openly. Don't hurt anybody, you know, operate within the confines, right? It's reasonable within what is, you know, kind, caring, loving, you know, anything that makes you a good human. But be freaking you. That is the anarchy, is simply being yourself in a society that does not value the self. That's anarchy today, unfortunately. But that's one reality that we live in, and that largely is something that I really try to champion in environments like this is you need to embrace yourself, but then also, you know, use technology to help further that message, but also don't lose your, you know, IP. You know, the actor, the actress that is signing away AI rights, that's a potentially very dangerous spot to be in.

So, Kyle, this has been a fascinating conversation. How do people find out more about Anarchy for a Day and working with you?

I thank you for the question. Anarchyforday.com, and that's F-O-R, not the number 4. If you want to learn more about the marketing coaching practice or, you know, just hop on a call with me and, you know, get a greater understanding what that would look like for you. Otherwise, give me a follow on the socials. That's LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. It's all Kyle Merrick Actor.

Perfect. Listeners will have those links in the show notes. If you liked what you've heard, please rate the podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you've heard, shoot us a message and tell us what you'd like to hear, and I'll get rid of Kyle.

Until next time, I'll get rid of myself too.

Tata for now.