Rob 

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mental Wealth podcast. Today we are going to be talking about the adoption of AI technology. The technology is accelerating and a lot of people are nervous about their paychecks. It’s a tectonic shift in the economy. It changes how work gets done. it’s no wonder that many people are feeling displaced, nervous, anxious about the future. Today, I’m so happy to be joined by Pam Mandel, the host of the Canned podcast, where they have unapologetic conversations about getting fired. Pam, I know this is a big conversation to have, and I’m sure A lot of your guests on the CAN podcast are experiencing this constant pressure of AI. Thank you for joining us again, talking about this important topic. 

Pam 

Thanks so much for having me back. I really appreciate it. 

Rob 

So from a psychological perspective, I’m just wondering what you’re hearing from guests about that looming idea of, let’s say, human obsolescence. The AI systems are taking over a lot of jobs. What is the theme you’re getting from a lot of guests? 

Pam 

Before I answer anything, I want to issue a massive disclaimer, which is that I’m not an economist, I’m not a business reporter, I’m not a therapist, I don’t work in HR. I’m just a person who’s talked to a lot of people who have lost their jobs, right? And so… All of my data, everything that I’m going to tell you today is anecdotal from one-on-one conversations with just people who are living this in the world, right? I got no credentials and I don’t want to pretend that I do, but I have talked to a lot of people, not just on canned, because when they come to me, they typically have a very specific story they’re going to tell me. But because they know this is what I do, I have this conversation. It feels like almost daily with somebody about looming threat of AI and what it’s doing to us and the load it’s putting on our brains. It’s tough. People are worried. They’re struggling. And one of the things that I’m struck by is that we’re It seems like the people who are really getting hit hard by this are right in the middle, right? This is not a top end thing. And service jobs, people who make our coffee and clean our houses and drive our buses, those jobs are not going away. So we’re really taking a swing at the middle with AI. I was talking actually with my financial planner. This is maybe a month ago. And I was like, what happens when the middle gets hollowed out like that? And he says civil unrest. So, yeah, I think there is a looming sense of dread and everybody’s carrying it around. I’m not sure I’ve answered your question. I feel like I’ve sort of taken a long walk through it, but there’s so much there. Right. 

Rob 

so much to that particular bone that this is white collar work that is being taken away. It’s the middle class economic threat. It’s not affecting the plumbers, the electricians, yet at least. Do you think it’s taken less seriously because it’s not affecting people that have those sort of tactile manual jobs? 

Pam 

That’s a good question. It probably depends on who you ask. If I ask my plumber, what do you think about AI? And he might be like, oh, I’m totally using it to manage my calendar, it’s working great. And I have a friend who has a manufacturing job, and we were chatting about AI recently, and he was like, I’m using it to sort of refine product descriptions for stuff for my website. It’s fine. They don’t need to be perfect. It’s fine. But that’s not his bread and butter work. His bread and butter work is making things. And so he doesn’t feel personally threatened by it. But I had coffee with a farmer guest on Canned. guy who was a design manager for a tech company, he’s been out of work for 18 months. And he’s just like, I don’t know what to do. Like, maybe I’m getting out of this part of the market altogether. Maybe I’m not going back into tech. So he’s taking it dead seriously and is talking about trying to see about taking some money out of his 401 . He’s in his 50s. It’s early. 

Rob 

It’s not just necessarily the jobs themselves. It’s resumes and things like that that are being analyzed by AI. So a lot of people are able to submit their resumes to tons of jobs at once, and HR professionals are looking at thousands and thousands of resumes. So it’s almost like a double-edged sword of job loss and trying to find another job because they’re being inundated with these applications because of the fact that AI is making this so simple. 

Pam 

I interviewed somebody, this is maybe a month ago, and she was telling me about the gymnastics that she’s going through to refine her resume for every single job description, for every, like every single job. She’s been at it for eight months. She’s applied for hundreds of jobs. Every time she uses tools to make sure that her resume matches everything, she’s doing customization. She’s getting no responses, none, right? So eight months, she has some skills. She’s very much a sort of upper middle class, very skilled management, communication sort of person. A lot of people I talked to were in sort of communications related fields and she’s getting no bites. And then just last week I had coffee with a friend who was in HR and she was telling me that they get hundreds of fake applicants? They’re not even real applicants. So not only are you hurling yourself upstream against this obstacle of trying to get past the AI filters, like if it doesn’t match completely, they’ll never see your resume. They’re not interested in investing. It seems like employers are not investing in expanding your skills. They’re looking for somebody who knows, I’m going to make something up, C++. And if you don’t have C++ on your resume, regardless of how many years of programming you have, you’re not going to get it to the next level. In addition to that, there’s your resume. It’s lacking C++, even though you have 15 years of programming experience. You’re up against people who have made fake resumes that match the job description perfectly. How do you get past that? 

Rob 

It’s almost as if the actual application process has to be turned on its head a little bit. I know people of an older generation will sort of say like, why don’t you just call up the offices and ask to speak to the manager? And it’s like, well, wait a second. If I do that, they’re going to just issue a restraining order. They’re not going to be like, I’m going to hire that guy immediately. He’s got moxie. No, that’s not. So just to respond in terms of the conversations, it’s almost as if there are two halves of the conversation, as you said about the plumber. The plumber’s going, Great, I have this tool that is going to make my life a lot easier. I can schedule jobs. I can create assignments for my team a lot easier than I could without the technology. Where people in the creative industries are saying, This technology is basically creating clones of our work. It’s a plagiarism machine. takes your work and quote unquote recreates it in a way in your voice. Do you think people outside of this bubble in communications truly understand that idea of the impact? 

Pam 

No, I don’t think they do. And you just articulated a very important distinction, which is there’s automation. Let’s make these repeated processes easier and more efficient, right? And that seems like a really great use of AI. And even in creative tasks like content jobs, sometimes you need to repackage a piece of content for a bunch of different formats. I write a case study, I say to AI, hey, can you distill this down to these six key points which I have identified and give me a LinkedIn post and a Facebook post and a whatever post, right? Like give me my social media assets as a result of the research and defined work that I did upfront, right? So you can do that. And then the other way to use AI is to have it do the entire generation of the content itself, right? And it writes the case study and it digests and spits out some stuff. The thing is it doesn’t do interviews. It doesn’t talk to people. It doesn’t ask questions. It doesn’t say, is there a better way to say that? It doesn’t ask if, like one of the things that I fall back to because my occupation as a technical writer makes me want to ask this question. Does the customer know what that means? AI is never going to ask that question ever. It’s just not going to. And so I think that from the outside, if you’re not in one of these occupations that’s at risk from the plagiarism machine, Gen AI, you only see it as an automation and efficiency tool. And I think that that is making people maybe hardened to AI resistance. They’re like, why wouldn’t you want these efficiencies? 

Rob 

Conversations I have with my friends and my family, I feel like the crazy person, quote unquote, talking about the danger of AI and what’s actually happening. I feel like I’m that person yelling at a bus stop, just sort of- Right, right, right. It’s very confusing when the reaction I get is, what are you talking about? Like, this is amazing. Don’t get me wrong, the technology is absolutely amazing. The way it’s being used has to be refined, but the technology itself is amazing. You talked about the identity issue, like the idea of people defining themselves by their work. That must come up quite a lot in your conversation. 

Pam 

Oh yeah, we talk about that all the time. Yeah, almost every single episode. And one of the things that people take so much to heart when they lose their jobs They’re like, that’s what I did with all my time. That’s who I was. Their identity is fused to how they spend their days. And their days are spent 40 hours a week doing project management on a technology project or writing creative copy or working as a creative director or a video producer or whatever those jobs are. And I think for creatives specifically, it’s even harder. You lose that job and you’re like, well, what am I without that work? 

Rob 

You see people that are the head of these companies are saying, well, you just have to have new ways of thinking about your job. As if it’s so simple to displace that idea of my connection to my work. Do you think there’s a disconnect there between how people handle that? feeling of what’s next? Like I’ve lost my job, what’s next? Is there an overriding fear of the next thing now because of AI? 

Pam 

I think there’s some additional fear of what the next thing will be because of AI, for sure. People lose their jobs. They see that their job has been replaced or diminished by AI. Or one of the other things that I see as I’m looking for work myself is that there’s a lot of jobs teaching AI to do what I know how to do, right? So I can train the instrument of my destruction if I am so inclined and be paid to do that for a couple months. I wish I could remember where I read it. There was some really excruciating piece somewhere, maybe it was in Variety about screenwriters. who would take these six-month gigs training AI to write for the screen, and then they would be let go. And so not only had they been fired from their screenwriting jobs or eliminated from their screenwriting jobs, they had trained the machine that was going to replace them, and then they were let go again, right? So you become redundant twice after you have given your knowledge to the machine that’s going to replace you. It’s super weird. I also think that your anxiety level around what’s next is based in something as basic as like, what’s your safety net look like? Do you have a spouse with a job? Do you have a partner who’s helping pay the bills? Do you live in Canada where you have health insurance or are you on the side of the border that I’m on where we have to get it through the exchange when we don’t have an employer that provides it for us? Do we have kids who have special needs and require educational benefits that are not covered? by the schools. Like there’s a million other things, but it can basically be distilled down to like, how long can my existence last if I don’t get right back into the workplace, right? So there’s that too. There’s just the economic pressure of capitalism forcing people back to work. And then imagine you’re in an occupation that’s just disappearing. Like, yeah, people are terrified. 

Rob 

Yeah, and it’s obviously such a human idea of I have to make money to live in this economy. I need this thing. I don’t necessarily love this job, but I need this thing to survive. And then there’s people that are, you know, I love this job, I love what I do, and now I can no longer do it because of A, B, and C. Do you see the difference between the way older people are dealing with job loss compared with younger people? 

Pam 

I’m seeing a very aggressive blowback against AI from younger workers. Those graduating classes that are booing the speakers when they mention AI, I think this is more prevalent than we’re seeing. I think they’re like, no, I’m not touching that stuff. And I talk to people who have kids who are 18, 19, 20, just going out of college, and they are shameless about calling that stuff slop. They use the word slop A lot. I have a neighbor, he’s in his early 20s, and he has a job that involves a lot of writing. And I asked him, I was like, what’s your take on AI? And he’s like, won’t touch it. Won’t touch it. Not using it, won’t touch it. Uh-uh. I need to get it right. And yeah, I got to follow this format. He’s a science writer. He works for a wetlands organization. And so they do all this field research and then write up their findings. And he follows this very specific format. We have to put the reports in this very specific format, but I won’t touch it because I don’t trust that it’s not going to mess with my data. So I think we’re seeing some backlash. And again, I’m one person who all my stuff’s anecdotal. And also, I want this to be true. I want the kids to be like, no way, man. Put that stuff down. We’re not going anywhere near it. We’re not touching it. Put it away. But there’s an obvious follow-up question that is not happening with those commencement speakers where they’re like, AI is your future. And we all know that it’s eating their job. And there’s no pipeline. AI is replacing the intern. It’s replacing the lower level person. I have a friend who’s like, how are we going to get senior programmers if the junior programming is being done by AI? their vision for those graduating kids? Are they digging ditches? Are they harvesting tomatoes? What jobs are they going into? You know, they’ve invested in computer science education and where are they going to work when everybody’s laying off 8, 10, 12, 15% of their workforce and talking about how all of their white collar jobs are going to be replaced as though that’s a good thing. And then they stand in front of a crowd of graduating students and are like, isn’t this great? That we’re setting your future on fire. What are you doing, man? 

Rob 

Yeah. It’s almost as if they’re used to speaking in front of a boardroom of shareholders rather than speaking in front of actual humans. They have to keep selling this scalable process, right? 

Pam 

It’s very detached from the worker as a human. This is great for our bottom line. And you’re in front of, say, a graduating class of 1600 kids who are like, You’re sending me into the worst job market of my lifetime, my parents are unemployed, my uncle’s unemployed, my best friend’s parents, you know, like everybody’s getting the axe and you’re telling me this is good. What are we doing? 

Rob 

Is the idea of AI leading to an economy where everyone is able to do their own thing. Everyone’s going to have their own company. The AI founders talked about the idea that it’s not long before we see the first 10 person billion dollar company where It’s so much easier now for people to scale their ideas. If you have a great idea, you can build a business with AI and you’re going to be able to make tons of money. Do you think there’s any credence to that? Is that just absolute shareholder nonsense? 

Pam 

You know, I don’t know. It’s really hard for me to say. That sort of implies that we haven’t already had that without AI. Like there’s a long history of tiny tech startups exploding and then becoming big things, right? Maybe they won’t explode into, you know, 5000 employee empires. Maybe they’ll only explode into 250 because the machines will be doing a bunch of the labor. But the notion of the startup is not a new idea. Right? So maybe there’s some acceleration. Very recently I talked to a guy in his twenties who was fired from his ice cream scooping job, right? Like he was an ice cream guy. There’s a real disdain from the leaders for jobs like that guy had. Like that’s not a real job. And We haven’t shifted the thinking about other kinds of jobs because not everybody can be a tech CEO. Not everybody should be a tech CEO. Not every idea is worth investing in. I recently had a really odd coffee meet with a VC guy, venture capital dude. And we were sitting in this coffee place. And he said to me, like, you want to work for other people? And as though that was a bad thing to be doing. It was very like, why would you want to do that? And I looked over my shoulder at the gal who had made my coffee and I was like, somebody has to. I’m sort of grappling with this notion that somehow AI is going to liberate us from corporate structures, but I don’t, I’m not seeing it. I’m just not seeing it. And not every clown with a bad idea should come to fruition. 

Rob 

To think there’s also the idea of like, well, I’m kind of glad that people that work from home now are struggling a little bit because I’ve been struggling in my in-person job for all this time. 

Pam 

I haven’t seen that kind of hostility. I can’t say that it doesn’t exist. I can just say that I haven’t experienced it personally. You know, I talk all the time about how AI ate my job and pretty much universally the response is, yeah, I can see how that happens. really sucks. What I want to be happening is that rather than there being a disdain towards white collar workers coming from service workers, that there is a growing solidarity from white collar workers with service workers. And they’re like, oh, this is why unions matter. Oh, this is why workers’ rights matter. I am hoping that the lights are going on in those other sectors around the validity of collective bargaining and things like that for these workers who are now really being automated, right? I think about Detroit in the 70s, right? Like those guys were factory workers and then they brought in the robots and all those jobs went away and that was bad for them. And that’s what’s happening now with white collar tech workers is all the robots were brought in, those jobs are going away and it’s bad for us. And a lot of the response there was unionization. I want to issue a massive disclaimer. I’m not a union historian. These are like my observations through talking for people. Please don’t send me hate mail if my history is not 100% correct. Also, there’s an amazing book by an author named Kim Kelly called Fight Like Hell. She’s the expert on this stuff. With that in mind, like what I What I’m hoping is that white collar tech workers, they’ve sort of poo-pooed unions for some time now. And I’m hoping that instead of your blue collar workers looking at white collar workers going like, yeah, sucks to be you, I told you this was coming, that white collar workers are aligning with union values. 

Rob 

Yeah, when people feel that anxiety, it makes you reconnect with other people a little bit and their own experience. As you said with Detroit, it was obviously bad for the workers in Detroit, but it’s also bad for the of Detroit, right? It just became a sort of a compounding effect on the entire city’s economy when the autoworkers lost a lot of their rights and then NAFTA and all the other political things that happened after that. 

Pam 

Yeah, I think about the implications of that because when sort of your middle upper class workers are getting laid off by the thousands, who’s buying the fancy TVs, right? Like who’s getting a new Lexus? Who’s going to these fancy farm-to-table dinners? Who’s doing this stuff? Who’s buying the espresso that gal was paid to make when the people who used to hang out in that coffee shop don’t have jobs? 

Rob 

It’s going to have an impact. and people are going to feel it on the economy at large, whether they know it now or not. There’s going to be that knock-on effect of in-person businesses because white collar workers can no longer afford their Lexuses or fancy clothes or $100 a plate restaurants or whatever it is. 

Pam 

Right. You talk about COVID, you mentioned COVID and you think about the hollowing out of the restaurant business around all those tech campuses, all those business campuses during COVID where they were just boarded up, right? Because people were not buying falafel or whatever. 

Rob 

There is something bigger than the individual happening here that goes beyond like it was with COVID. It goes beyond, oh, I’ve lost my job. What do I do in this situation? It applies to so many people that, you know, some of the themes we’ve been discussing on the podcast of anxiety, of fear, this is sort of now becoming a larger question of what does the political environment look like? What are the solutions that have to happen from above? Do you see an increase in that collective organization, sort of the protest movement, for example, as we talked about unions, do you see that increasing? 

Pam 

Yeah, I guess it depends on where you live, for starters. Like I live in Seattle. We just elected a socialist mayor. You know, you look at what’s happening in New York. They also have a socialist mayor. But most of what we’re seeing now isn’t about workers. And when you talk about AI, we’re talking about the impact on workers. There’s a big call for a general strike here, and I didn’t see any real evidence of it happening on May Day. There were definitely protest marches and stuff. And I had a volunteer shift that day. I do a volunteer gig and I went through downtown Seattle that day and it was pretty quiet. And I was like, I hope that it is this quiet because everybody has stayed home. But I didn’t see a lot of, like, street activism around May Day. So I don’t know what it’s going to take. I do think that, in the U.S., because so much of our health care is tied to our jobs, that we are reluctant to act. We are driven by fear of losing our health care. 

Mukund 

The question is, what are we protesting against? Is it against AI as a technology or is it companies that promote AI? Because it’s two different conversations. I work with a lot of companies in the financial sector. The way AI is used, they are realizing that it might be a little premature to celebrate because the cost of running an AI system is much more than an equivalent human element. So I think the past couple of years has been more on the hype part of it than the actuality part of it. It’s unfortunate that the kids graduating this year, last year, or maybe even next year are going to come into an economy that is AI hype driven. But I feel personally that it is temporary, temporary meaning it lasts a few years before it normalizes and equalizes, right? The new equilibrium after the Industrial Revolution, for example. An equilibrium will be set, the extent of which nobody knows. When we are protesting, what are we protesting? What do you want the politicians to do? Tell the companies not to AI? Remove AI from the vocabulary? There needs to be some sort of quantifiable action. But it’s not that AI is not in our lives, it’s already there. It all depends on what we target in AI is what people are having trouble with. 

Pam 

Right. I think that AI is sort of a stand-in sort of bogeyman for an assault on workers’ rights. We have a lot of anti-AI sentiment, right? And I think that the anti-AI sentiment from creatives, from having their work plagiarized without being paid, you think about the anthropic lawsuit where all of those authors had their books stolen by Claude, like that is protest-worthy and Claude has to pay out for that. Claude also, I have not heard that they have to rebuild their LLM base, right? Why don’t they have to blow it up and start over given that it’s all built on stolen goods, right? What is going on with that? So that’s a specific action that sort of class action against an AI entity that I can sort of get my head around. But the mass job elimination is, I think, the real problem. I think you’re right. We’ve had AI for a long time. We’ve had machine learning. We have automation. I think specifically creatives object to Gen. AI. Right? Like it’s a very specific flavor of AI, LLMs. They also, I think one of the things that people want are protections, right? Like maybe stop telling kids how to shoot up a school. Maybe stop telling kids how to commit suicide. Maybe stop encouraging that. Maybe we could get in front of that. Don’t tell me it’s not possible. I don’t want to hear that. And then also, I think that the environmental impact we have all heard about the water usage, like, what are we doing? I don’t think that the negative response to it is coming from like, no, we’re not doing new tech. I’m a luddite. I think we’re talking about the impact and people don’t seem to be wanting to mitigate the impact. Like, what are we using it for? Who’s getting hurt? What are we doing for the people that are getting hurt? If Texas loses all its water because it’s covered with Is that a good idea? I don’t think it’s a good idea. 

Rob 

So when we talk about protest-worthy issues with AI and technology, I think a lot more people are going to realize that this technology is being integrated in a way that we’re not first of all, capable of understanding, but we’re not even having the tangible impact it would actually have immediately. It’s going to have a long-term effect. The people individually are not going to see that straight away. They’re going to see like, oh, this is cool. I can create. my own movie, like Disney’s gonna sign a thing with Netflix. And then further down the line, you get, well, wait a second, what does that mean? Does that mean that I’m gonna see a different movie than you are, that we’re not gonna see the same film anymore? There’s all these societal questions that I have with AI that I think not many people are having and we don’t even have the language to discuss it. So we’ve talked a little bit about the impact of AI on employees. I’d love to get into the idea of how do managers communicate about AI? How can they best alleviate the anxiety around this artificial intelligence technology? What do you think about the idea of managers have to better communicate what the decisions that they make and why they make them? What do you think about that idea, Pam? 

Pam 

Yeah, well, I think management is never transparent enough to start with, right? They’re just not, right? These decisions come down and you’re like, oh, I guess we’re doing that now. Okay, right? This is like classic corporate America. I talked with Anil Dash for Canned a couple of months ago, and one of the things that he mentioned, when your boss comes around telling you that we’re rolling out AI, that it’s legitimate to be like, am I required to use this tool? Like, is it necessary? Do I have to use this? I think that in a lot of cases, they don’t know why they’re doing it. The things that Anel mentioned when we talked was like they’re required by somebody even further upline to roll out AI because they have to report that they use 10% AI this year and 15% AI for the next year and like all these things and they don’t even know why. And so I think it would be really good for managers to know Why? Why are we doing this? What does this mean? And I think it’s really good for workers to say, how does my job benefit from this? Is this going to make my job easier or better? I sit firmly with the worker. And so it’s really hard for me to imagine what it would be like– say I’m managing a team of creatives and my boss says, hey, we’re going to roll out some content Gen. tool and I want your team to use it 20% of the time, my question would be like, is this part of a worker elimination program right away? I’d be like, are we trying to get rid of our workers? I love my team. I want them to have jobs. How can I protect my workers? How can I assuage their anxieties in this? Can I give them a four-day work week since this is going to do 20% of our work? I want to flip the script, but I’m not the man. What I would want for managers is for them to be empathetic with the worker, that when this thing is rolled out, they’re gonna be like, uh-oh, this is a bad sign. And my manager, as somebody on the receiving end of this, should be able to say, no, this is not a bad sign. This is gonna be a great benefit for you, and let me tell you why. Most of the time, the stories that I hear, they don’t include that. right? From the top down, all the stuff that we’re consuming around AI, we have heads of, meta, head of Facebook, head of Google, head of Microsoft saying, like, by the end of next year, we predict this will replace 90% of our. white collar jobs. Like how am I supposed to feel when my boss comes to tell me that? 

Rob 

The PR people that are dealing with these AI companies have to do a better job because a lot of the interviews that I hear are just about the negative thing that’s going to happen because of this amazing technology. I know it’s the headlines but the actual people themselves are sort of saying Yeah, like a bunch of white collar workers are going to get fired because of this. Isn’t that great? Yeah, they’re saying as if it’s this new amazing thing and it’s going to be great for the world. It’s almost outside of the human idea of connection and what that means because they don’t really care that the words they’re saying are not meant for the workers themselves. They’re meant for like, let’s sell the benefits of this technology. 

Pam 

Right. Meanwhile, it’s on the splash page that yet another CEO has said that he’s super psyched about how 60% of his workforce is going to be eliminated this year because they’ve rolled out some particular AI. And so just the sheer lack of empathy around how that news is going to land with your team. Right. Can you imagine that like you would so you’re at Amazon and your boss does some major press tour talking about how all these mid-level marketing jobs are going to be eliminated. And then you go to work the next day and everybody’s just like, I wonder if it’s me. 

Rob 

And for some reason, their performance goes down because they’re less motivated to get the job done. 

Pam 

Yeah, the general thing that that management is lacking in all of this is any kind of empathy with the worker. What does this look like when you’re– it looks great if you’re a shareholder. You’re like, woohoo, our profits are going through this ceiling on this. It looks great if you’re sitting in the C-suite. You’re like, I got to manage 75% fewer people. I’m going to have longer lunches. I’m going to have fewer meetings. That one guy that I’ve always had those awkward one-on-ones with, he’s top of the list. Let’s figure out how I can do his job. It’s not like, how’s my team going to respond to this news. 

Rob 

Yeah, I love the idea of, as you mentioned previously, like changing the language about how you speak to your employees about this thing. And also giving the language to the employee and empowering them to sort of question, well, wait a second, how does this benefit me in this situation? Because after all, the reason you’re paying them is they’re having a positive net impact on your company. They should also have some sort of voice about how the technology is used. And they’re the ones that see their job every day. They do it every day. They know what the features and the performances of that job. And so they’re the best to sort of implement the technology in the most effective way to get the most output from that position. 

Pam 

Yeah, the notion of engaging institutional knowledge into your processes, is that happening? I don’t know the answer to that. I know that they are using people to train AI with the goal of eliminating the role. But I don’t hear a lot of stories about people being like, we’re going to roll this tool out for you. We would like you to work with it. And we want to reassure you this is not here to eat your job. We want to take some of the tedious tasks off your plate and see what you can automate so that we can use your brain for the things it’s good at. That seems like a really great use case. 

Rob 

A hundred percent. And that’s exactly, it lays out exactly what the process should be in terms of how you get the best results from the technology. It should come from the expert who’s dealing with the actual process rather than built from the boardroom down. 

Pam 

Right. And then I’m psyched because I’m engaged in the process and I’m sold on the benefits of it and it doesn’t feel like a risk to me, right? Like it’s not something, I’m not looking at it and being like, If I don’t learn how to use this thing, I’m going to lose my job. If I learn how to use this thing, I’m going to lose my job. There’s got to be a third option, which is I’m going to learn how to use this thing. I’m going to be better at my job, and I’m going to get the four-day work week, right? Which is like, my fantasy is for everyone to have the four-day work week. So far, we’re benefiting shareholders and executives, and we’re not benefiting workers. So if we flip the script to talking about when we roll out an AI thing at our corporate entity, how does this benefit me? 

Rob 

I think that’s a great way to put a pin in the AI conversation. I’m sure these are going to be ongoing conversations about the technology as a new feature, a new system comes and we have to deal with that. But I think a lot of people are really going to benefit from how do I frame this topic in my own mind and in the conversation I have with my friends and family. 

Pam 

I want to add When you lose your job, it’s really hard to not personalize it and to make it think that it’s about your own faults. And I ask everybody I talk to if they were good at their job and almost universally they’re like, oh yeah, I was great at it. What are you kidding? I was fantastic at it. My people liked working with me. I’ve heard people say I made some of the best work of my career. They loved their jobs. I think that AI is another thing that is systemic outside of ourselves that is making this hard. It’s making it hard for workers, but it’s really important to not make it be about your personal value in the world. It’s not you. We are all trying to get by in a system that has these obstacles and sometimes we get spit out. And it has nothing to do with your competency or your personality or that you weren’t dressed right for the job. It’s a much bigger thing. And not internalizing it is essential to surviving it. 

Rob 

I love that. Thank you so much. 

Pam 

Thank you for having me back again. I really appreciate it. 

Rob 

I really encourage everyone out there to check out the Canned podcast. Everyone has this human experience of being fired and I think a lot of you will benefit from the lessons that are taught on those podcasts and you will hear something that resonates with you. Thank you again to Pam and thank you everyone for listening.