we want things that are coming into our minds to be

simple, to be easy, to be fluent.

But when we're in charge of sending, when we're the ones speaking or

writing or presenting, we have a really hard time doing that because

internally we're battling stuff

What if the Secret to standing out in a world

oversaturated with messages was embracing the power of simplicity?

Today on Seek Go Create, we meet Ben Gutman, a marketing entrepreneur,

educator, and author who's made it his life's work to unravel the

complexities of human decision making.

Ben has elevated brands such as Giants like the NFL and others with

the belief that the simplest ideas Resonate the loudest as he releases

his latest insights in a new book.

Simply put, we're here to dive into the philosophy that less is truly more.

Something that we love to discuss here

Ben, welcome to Seek, Go Create.

Thanks for having me, Tim.

Great to be here.

Glad you're here too, Ben.

Let me kick off with my icebreaker question.

Someone asked you what you do, what do you tell them?

that's a harder question than it sounds, right?

for a long time, the answer was that I ran a marketing agency

called Digital Natives Group.

we had a lot of fun.

You mentioned a couple of the clients there and, from the NFL

to I Love New York to Comcast.

And, it was, what a journey.

I started in an old professor's basement, working with the local ice cream shop

and Eventually, punched our way up to these bigger clients, got an office, got

employees, all this, all the trappings.

And then one day we decided to sell the business.

And so that was about a year ago, almost two years ago.

And it was, that was a journey in and of itself, the sale process.

But since then, I've, helped off board that business.

I've done a number of different kind of consulting projects.

I've done some speaking, I've done some teaching.

And what we're talking about a little bit today is I just wrote

my first book, simply put why clear messages win and how to design them.

And I want to talk, I want to do a deep dive into the book later,

but the reason I told you when we started, one of the reasons I was attracted to your

message was the message of simplicity.

And so like the big picture question I want to ask is, has

that always been something that's been important to you, or is that a

recent revelation that Simplicity is important in the world we're in today.

it's been a little bit of both.

in my experience working with clients, oftentimes I would come in.

And they would, I would ask them, okay, so like, what do you, what do you do?

And what are you selling?

What's your product or service or idea?

And they would have the hardest time articulating that things that people

worked all day, every day on, they'd have a hard time and so I would sit there and

I would just, I would be I use this term in the book later on, an enlightened

idiot, which is what do you mean?

Oh, what do you mean by this?

and eventually being able to reframe what they are saying or trying to

say in something that is clear.

And to the point, that often ended up being like one of our,

Like super powers a little bit in some of the work that we did.

And so later on, after I sold the business, you start to think

a little bit, that part of your brain rather, it doesn't turn off.

Like you, you don't have to work for the clients anymore, but the like

problem solving that you did for them is still the kind of is still running

in the back of your head all the time.

And so you're questioning why does some things work and other

things don't, why are some messages heard and understood and.

made use of when others fall flat and that's what led to the research

that ended up leading to the book.

And as it turned out, the answer was simple.

And so that was how we put them together.

So it was a little bit before that was the inkling to this, but

then it was only when I really.

Started interrogating, why does some marketing work?

Why does some, emails are proposals or recent patients?

Why are they effective and other ones aren't?

That's when I began to identify it with a little bit more concreteness around it.

have you always been one that looked at things that may be complicated,

complex, I know in the book, you break down the difference between complexity

and complicating, but have you been one that could look at things that were like.

there's a lot going on here and narrow down the reason why I bring it up is

that I do believe that's one of my superpowers is when I go in and work

with organizations as a coach, I can kind of, I don't even see all the

clutter and things, but I'm trying to narrow down on that one thing that can

have an impact or can make a change.

And it sounds like, have you always been that way?

Oh, in, in many ways, it sounds like we're cut from the same cloth

in terms of that with that, sometimes.

It's like you just, you talk to somebody and they have such

a, they have such a block about something and then you realize,

it's really just X or it's Y or Z.

And it's this one tiny piece that you can see from the outside and that's actually

when I looked at the research, that is one of the ways which people can get simple is

by, by taking that outsider perspective.

But that is definitely something that.

That would always, be present in stuff I did either at work or, volunteer and

community stuff that I've done or stuff in school would always be present of saying,

okay, let's, this is what matters and this is what doesn't and focus on what does.

I think you said you were married.

The only thing I've seen, and I've been married over 35 years, I'm not sure that

works well in marriage relationships.

Any thoughts on that real quick?

Tips before we tell people to all of a sudden go and tell

people, by the way, here's what's really important and what's not.

any thoughts come to mind?

Oh boy.

yeah, I've been, I've married a little bit less than 35 years, but the.

I think you're right.

I think you have any of these things that you look at from a business book.

if you ever try to apply them to a marriage, you're just going

to fail because it's completely different of a, of an arena.

And, you're probably just going to get in trouble for trying to

apply some of those things, in it.

Yeah, I could just picture myself.

Hey, listen, sweetie.

I just want you to know that most of what you just said is not important.

We need to really pair that back and let's get focused on a simple, yeah, no,

I could just see that's not a good thing.

that comes into though, having that EQ of knowing when to use

tools and when not to use tools.

let's, let's go into, what I'd love to know in the research that you've

done, especially in the background with working with huge brands, Obviously

our culture, we have gotten a lot of things that are coming in at us.

That may not be critical in our messaging or communicating or marketing or getting

word out, just all of those things.

How have we come to be where we're at?

What, why do we have such a, is it complicated or complex?

What's the right word we should be using here?

how has it gotten so convoluted?

Maybe that's a word to use too.

Oh, yeah.

so I, I do semantically break down the difference between complexity

and complication, complex is when something has a lot of pieces and

they're interconnected in a lot of intricate ways, and that's often

a benign state of nature, right?

Like things like international diplomacy is complex.

The human eyeball is complex.

But complicated is when something is complex, but really could be simple.

It's something that's artificially created complexity.

complicated is a verb, right?

And so you can complicate something and make it more difficult than it has to be.

So while international diplomacy is complex, like your bad self assembly

furniture instructions, those are.

And so the goal, there's no way we will put up of complexity when it's worth it.

but we will not put up with complicated when something.

it's something that isn't a motivating factor for us.

if we can avoid, if we can pull things towards the simple side, we're going to

match up a lot more with kind of what our, psychology wants in terms of a messaging.

But I'll back up to the other piece you said too, which is

about how did we get here?

it's not particularly insightful to say it's obvious that we are in this

environment that is louder and busier and more distracting than ever, right?

We, the average American spends 13 hours a day consuming some form of media.

it's a crazy amount of messaging.

Both stuff we seek out and stuff that's pushed towards us that is just

bombarding our brains all the time And what happens is our kind of natural?

Defense mechanisms kick in which is to say, okay.

there's lots of bits of stimuli that are out in the world A lot of them are

gonna hit our senses But most of them are going to be thrown away immediately.

we grew up as a species in this environment where a lot

of things wanted to eat us.

And we're looking around and we're saying, Is that rustling of a leaf over

there or that branch that just snapped?

Is that something that's important to us?

if it is, then I start to pay attention to it and I can...

And I can react to it, but if it's not, I quickly dispose of that stimulus

and I move on to, something else.

And so what's happening now is we do the same thing, right?

if I see, if there's an advertisement that pops up on, on a website that

I'm on, there's something known as banner blindness, which has

been documented for decades now, actually, where we don't even see it.

We didn't even say like our eyes just immediately in a subconscious way.

we recognize what looks like an ad and we say, this is not important to us.

And we immediately dispose of that visible stimulus and we move

on to other parts of the page.

And so that's the kind of thing that's happening over.

There's such a huge amount of stimulation, and just noise.

that the window, which we get to communicate with

anybody is incredibly small.

It's a small, and it's a small little like sliver of a window that gets cracked open.

And the more we can, understand that as a communicator, the, and the more

humble we can be as a communicator because of that, the better we're

going to be at making the most of it.

I think one of the things from my perspective, I just

turned 60 years old a couple days ago, so I'm looking back on a pre

digit, thanks, on a pre digital...

World and then moving into, the early internet and I wasn't around,

when they were carving things on stone or anything like that.

I know that some people are probably putting comments

down in the video I, I think.

It's interesting that I still do have a perspective on pre digital, whereas

like my children, younger generation and all that's everything's been

connected in that, you know, we had cookies and we were attached to things.

And so anywhere you went, they knew it digitally, you had this digital, trail.

And I think some of that's changing cause they're trying to break that up.

But I think there was this reward for just more stuff, it's let's just keep.

Creating stuff and the message that I'm getting from you is maybe

there's too much stuff out there.

Is that correct or incorrect?

it's not really even just for me.

if you look at.

the survey data, everybody says that they hate advertisements that

they don't want to see the ones that are the most distracting.

if you look at the usage data of like meditation apps or download data of,

of ad blockers, all these numbers point in the same direction, right?

Even the platforms themselves, even Google and Apple have been, who benefit

the most from us using more of these.

These devices and these technologies, they have been on uh, rolling out

software and features that enable us to restrict our usage on them.

So there is a general societal trend in terms of saying, ah, man, this is like.

this is too much.

This is a lot of notifications.

the average person gets like 160 some odd emails a day.

And that seems actually kind of low for a lot of people.

if, when I asked my students how much time they spend on their phones,

and then I asked them to actually go pull out their phones and show

me that and then yell out the data, the first number is already high.

They think they're using it a lot.

And then when they look at the data, that's even a higher number a lot of times

about how much we're using our stuff.

So it's just, it is a noisy, world.

and this is something, but the, here's the thing we've also, we've

been complaining about the ever, quickening and loudening noise of

the world for centuries, actually.

So this is something you can look back and you can find, writings, from people.

In the 1300s, the 1500s, 1800s that are complaining about, Oh my God,

there's so much, so many books these days and so many, and we can't, we

can't read everything and we have so many newspapers and we can't do it.

Oh my God, there's radio.

Oh my God, there's television.

So it's not particularly unique.

It is accelerating for sure.

We have always, we've always been.

in many ways, just tired of this level of stimulus.

And it goes to show that again, the idea of simplicity, as our

frame of reference for how we can.

interact in that environment as the, our kind of guiding principle for

it, is something that, that will work now and has worked for a long time.

Yeah, I agree with the history of it.

I was actually, I was reading some scriptures.

Yeah, I was reading the book of Acts and there was this comment

about the crowd getting all riled up when it was Paul that was arrested.

I'll get into details there.

And I actually underlined it.

And I said, This is like a social media thing.

This is like the crowd got all fired up because this, guy that was

coming out against their religion.

And then it made a comment and it said, but the crowd was not even sure why they

were there and why they were excited.

I'm going, that sounds like today.

That's exactly today.

so one thing that's interesting, and I'm just talking about this

big topic of just simplicity, and then we'll dive into more some.

Tips and techniques that, that you have in the book.

But one of the things that I've noticed with myself is that I've been on a

simplicity journey with everything in my life, not just messaging

and things like that is, is that.

You, or is this really just in the marketing realm or is this causing

you to spill over into other things?

what's been your journey, especially as you've gotten prepared and

written the book and moved into this and seeing how important it

is for just the marketing world.

Oh, I wouldn't, yeah, that's a good question.

I wouldn't say that I'm necessarily, a lifestyle minimalist.

I don't think that, like the Marie Kondo is the role I do reference,

her a few times because she actually.

I do like her attitude on things, which is, it's spark joy, right?

Like what, every item you own should serve a purpose to spark joy.

And I think that attitude really actually translates when I talk

about the more intangible aspects of simplicity and communication.

In marketing.

does it spark joy?

What's the, what's the translation of that?

does it, is it what, is it everything you need and only what you need, right?

That, that's what we're talking about.

It's not saying that every single word has to be cut in

your email and your presentations would only have three slides.

It's not saying that it's about saying, how do you, how do you create.

A piece of communication that has everything you need, but only what

you need is that you can get rid of the things that are distraction

and focus on the things that are actually conveying the message, the

core meaning of what you want to do.

I um, I've personally, I, even though I'm.

In marketing, I try to minimize the amount of marketing messaging that hits my brain

of the same, in my life, I try to put on ad blockers like all the people I just

quoted before, I try to unsubscribe from emails when I'm not enjoying the list.

So it's been something that, is also personal in addition to

being something that's on the, the business side of things.

The reason I bring it up is I don't think minimalism

is the right term for me.

I've read there's a guy named Josh Becker that writes about that.

And of course the Marie Kondo, does this bring you joy?

I don't necessarily think that way about things and stuff, but,

there's a book called by Greg McKeown called essentialism.

And that word seems to resonate with me a lot is what is essential?

For me to do what I need to do.

and it's fascinating that you bring it up.

I've actually, a couple of months ago took all of my subscription

emails and I rolled them up.

I think it's an app called unroll me.

I don't know much about them.

I'm not necessarily promoting them.

and so I'll wake up in the morning and I really have no emails in my inbox.

Because they're all subscriptions.

Now if, if you had been, if you had sent me an email, before we recorded

here, I would have seen that, but it's amazing how few I get that are personal.

I'm on subscriptions and they roll it up and I get it later in the day and I've

gotten to where I look through them.

And I don't do anything with them anymore.

So I've like freed up almost an hour of my day just by, and I've got no notification,

I've never had notifications on my phone.

I don't like things pinging and buzzing and all that, but I do want to say

here, I want to acknowledge the irony.

That we're talking about simplicity and less while we're recording

a one hour conversation, that's going to be on YouTube and put

all over the socials and podcasts.

And that you wrote a book called simply put this, I think a

200 and something page book.

I do.

Cause someone is going to say what they're talking about simplicity, man.

I've got an hour.

I've got to listen in on.

because it takes effort, right?

This is something that you have to go against the grain to think this way.

Correct.

Oh yeah.

I actually, I think that's like the first paragraph on page one there, which I

say, look, I understand the irony here.

It's a 208 page book about how to say things simply.

It seems like I didn't take my own advice.

And what I always say is if it's enough to hear.

Simple messages are more effective than complicated ones.

Then great.

Like you don't need the rest of the book.

You can, you don't have to buy it.

You don't have to read it.

You don't have to, you could turn off the show.

But if you're interested in the kind of why of that or of

the how behind connecting those pieces, that is surprisingly deep.

And that is something that Will take those other 200 and some

odd pages to, to tell that story.

I joke a little bit, and we were talking about this before, that

this is, certainly a book that used to judge by its cover, right?

it, if the title and the subtitle and the design and the back cover

copy, if that stuff doesn't clearly explain what's in it for you, then.

You know what?

I didn't do my job.

And so you should, and you should put it aside and do something else.

but the goal is uh, to not just give platitudes, but give people the real

understanding about how to put this type of, this type of practice into action.

Yeah, I think that's good.

And I want us to go into that.

More in depth here in just a few minutes, but before we leave your

background and history, and we've got probably, leader types, some people

in the faith world, some people in business world, entrepreneurs

and all that, I think it would be.

Kind of a poor host of me.

If I didn't ask a few other learning points, tips, things that you gained

from your marketing agency, things that you learn, things that you

would never do again, or things that boy, I really learned this

outside of the simplicity message.

We're about to really go into that even more.

working with the NFL.

I love New York.

those are some big ones, you know, local ice cream shops.

Which could be more exciting than those other two, by the way.

Just, I just want to put that out there.

what can you share just that might just be good ideas, good tips

that, that we all need to know.

Well, I'll tell you that, this is a tip and also a riff on that,

which is something like the local ice cream shop can be a harder client than

the national football league, right?

Like it is that's kind of actually a big lesson when I talk to my.

students in particular, a lot of them who are thinking about starting a

business at some point is it is like 90 percent as hard to sell something

for a hundred bucks as it is to sell something for a thousand dollars.

and that applies for a widget.

And that also applies for professional services to the work of making

that connection, convincing somebody that you're legit and

developing kind of a scope of services and then executing on it.

If I'm doing a website for somebody when we first started for a few

thousand dollars as opposed to something that was a 100, 000 plus

dollar project later on as we grew.

they're not super different in terms of the technical work

that goes into the end process.

What is different?

That's an end product.

What is different is the process that gets us there.

It is the discovery and the planning and the reliability that we have and

our expertise and our insight, all that stuff is what people pay for.

And that's the big difference is a lot of people get stuck thinking Well, you know,

I was talking to somebody recently who couldn't believe ever that we charged.

30 or 40, 000 for a relatively that wasn't our biggest project

to do a 30 or 40, 000 website.

they wouldn't believe it couldn't, how do you, how do you justify that in an

age where I can go get, somebody to do it for a couple of grand on fiber.

I was like, go ahead and do with them.

And honestly, if you're really good at your own stuff and you want to

babysit them, like the end product is not going to be 10 times better.

The PR, the people that are hiring us to do 30 or a hundred

thousand dollar projects.

are doing that because they want somebody who is a professional who they can,

they have a process, they can roll, they can call on them to fix things.

they don't have, they have somebody to maintain stuff later on.

They have somebody who asked the right questions.

They know people who can solve this problem.

They're charging for all their, they're paying for all of that.

They're not paying for the end process.

and so that's one of the parts of value on the, other kind of aspect of that

though, is if you are dealing with that ice cream shop and they are going to

pay you 1, 000 for something or 2, 000, that is money that is either going to

you or is like their next vacation.

And if you're dealing with the NFL or I live New York or Comcast

and these are the big brands, the 100, 000 they're paying you.

is just a lie.

It's a budget item.

it's part of their marketing budget.

It's nobody, it's no skin off anybody's back.

It's not somebody's bonus that they didn't get to take.

And so there's a, there's this kind of healthy remove that

allows for investment instead of thinking of it as just an expense.

What, this is a little bit of a trick question and you may not

be able to answer, but looking back, who do you enjoy working with more?

The big, we'll call them big operations where you may not be sitting down

with, the owners, you're with a group and things like that, or say smaller.

the reason I bring that up while you're thinking is that I've worked in large

corporations and I've also worked with some, what we'll call solopreneurs.

And I have found the sweet spot that I like is where I could sit

down with at least the leadership team and interact with them.

the paychecks may be a little bit smaller.

But the impact is different for me.

Looking back, is there one or the other that, you would go, you know, and if I had

to do it again, I think I would work with blank trick question I know, but go ahead.

That's why I'm here to ask these tough questions.

I love it.

I think that it's less so much kind of the scale as it is the individual.

I, there are people we worked with who we like went to their weddings, the people

who years later, I'm still, I still keep in touch with, there are people

who, you know, when people on my team have had kind of family emergencies,

I've called and checked in on them.

and it becomes this really warm kind of intimate relationship with some of the

folks that we worked with and that's who I try to seek out as much as I can.

and to the extent where sometimes I will do something my work now or before when

we had the agency, we will do something.

We have a good person for less money because it was just, it was

worth it for the relationship.

It was because they were almost our, you hesitate to use the word friend because

that implies that, Oh, you're doing it for your friend, but they became friends.

A lot of the people that, that, that's what I sought.

Out more what I would, what I'd recommend anybody seeking out is don't work of

assholes work of good people because if you work with jerks, you become a jerk.

Eventually you spent, you spend a lot of time with the people you

work with, whether that's your colleagues, whether that's your client

or customers or service providers.

You just spend a lot of time with them and if that is time that's draining

you and if they're being mean and they're, trying to use their resources

or powers or whatever for, for lack of a better term, evil, they're trying to

make the world a world, a worst place.

you know what, eventually you can't just say, Hey, it's a paycheck

and I'm getting out of there.

At some point it becomes your responsibility as well.

And so I'm proud mostly.

We were able to say no to when I look back on this after we sold the

business, I was like, I'm proud of a lot of the work that we did, but

I'm really proud of the moments where somebody who we thought was an unsavory

character came knocking on our door.

And even though it's a small business, you can always use the check.

We said, Hey, get out of here.

we don't want to work with this person.

We don't want to work with this brand.

and that is something that.

that I always try to advise people to, to maintain is that kind of like

for the more do work with people and with brands and organizations that you

can feel morally comfortable doing.

I love the moral because it sounds like you're a better guy than I am.

There were, I actually had two situations pop into my head

while you were saying that.

That I know that I added a zero or two on the end of the, proposal because

I knew it was going to be a hassle.

I knew it was going to be tough and my thought was if they

pay me enough it's worth it.

So you're obviously much more virtuous and, did you ever do that?

You never did that, did you?

it's easy to sound like that, but at the time you still think

about it a tiny bit, cause you're like, Hey, payroll's coming up again

and there's other client is late on their paycheck on their check.

And so you, it's a debate, some, sometimes it's so odorous that you immediately.

you can say no, but there's plenty of stuff in the gray area that, that

sometimes you go, Oh man, like we could do it, but like not put it on our

portfolio and think about it for a second.

Then you sleep on it and you're like, no.

It's, it's not something you want to do.

But, yeah, sometimes people would say, I had a couple of partners and

my partners would say, Yeah, everybody goes through these kind of highs

and lows where you have more money coming in and less money coming in.

And somebody can say, what if we added that zero as you're saying, and then we

didn't have to tell anybody about it.

I'm like, I don't want to have to do work.

I don't want to tell anybody about, right?

So ultimately we always came down to the side of saying, let's do the

thing that protects us morally and also selfishly protects our brand.

Is that not being a company that works with those type of characters?

I think something going back to that word I used earlier,

essentialism, something that we all go through is coming to terms with

what's important to us in life.

And it sounds to me just from reading some of your stuff and seeing it sounds to me

like teacher, educator, someone who shares information is Something that's core to

you at what point, and I didn't see this anywhere, so you could share the story.

At what point did you move, back to, I think it was your alma mater and

start teaching and become a professor.

And I don't know if that linked in with when you started writing the book and all

that, but get, give a little bit of that.

Because to me, that's part of what the journey we go through

in life is identifying, you know, what I kind of knew early on, I

was a coach, I was supposed to.

Coach, I avoided it, but then I migrated back to it.

So a professor, come on, that's unique.

I've been doing it for a while now.

I did it for, I started about 10 years ago, nine and nine and a half years ago.

I started, teaching, at Baruch college, which is where I also went to

school and it was on a, like a whim.

I was at, for lack of the abridged version of it, it was, I was at an alumni event.

I saw the department chair at the time and I basically said,

your shit stinks about something.

It was about like, what are their digital marketing things?

Cause it was a new track they just had and they didn't have any

like real good material for it.

cause I guess, but I guess spoke in somebody's class

like the previous semester.

And so I, they basically turn around and say, okay, why don't

you do something about it?

And I said, okay.

And I put together this course and I've been teaching it now for my 19th semester,

my 20th semesters coming up in the spring.

and I love it.

It's like the best thing.

It's so fun.

I go, sometimes I have a very large class.

I have 70 or 80 students.

Sometimes I have 20 students or so depending on kind of what the.

You know what the semester is.

And I like them both.

you get a lot of energy from the big group.

You get really good relationships from the small groups.

I will do it until they kick me out until they stop letting me

be there to talk about things.

it, it's not something I do in a full time basis.

It's not something that I probably would want to do on a full time

basis, but I've enjoyed it as I call it like my favorite hobby because.

it's the city university of new york.

It's a public institution.

you're not really making your money doing it But if you're able to make a positive

impact on somebody's life by being at the right place at the right time and these

students are seniors in college about to make the kind of biggest single change in

their life, which is going from student to Adult basically, it's a weird honor to

be there at that time and to try to nudge them in the right direction and to be

there as a resource and to see them come into them, into their selves at that time.

Because, the analogy I make at that moment for them every

semester and as we're talking.

I think this is my next class I have for them or in two weeks, is I

tell this analogy of the escalator, which is if you're a five year

old, 15 year old, 20 year old, at some point you're on an escalator.

as long as you don't really screw up, you're going from grade

one to two to three and you're going to high school to college.

And unless you jump off or get pushed off for the median person, you're just.

It's going to keep going.

Spring semester, summer, fall semester, spring semester,

summer, and it keeps on going up.

And at some point where these students are right then is that the escalator

stops and you have to figure out you, you get off and it's your

responsibility to figure out what it is that you want to do in your life.

and if that's to make a job, to get a job, to join a cause, whatever it is.

I just try to impress upon them that like this is an important moment and that

there's more opportunity than they think there is because a lot of folks think,

I just have to go continue on the next thing that looks like this escalator,

but in reality, they can go out and they can do a ton of different things.

And that's what I try to connect with.

what that's where I look as like my, like an unstated mission a little

bit in, in the teaching is to talk about the, uh, incredible expanse

of opportunity that's out there.

There's

So one of the things that kind of fascinated me in 10 years, and

I'm thinking back, I know where we are now recording in late 2023, go back

10 years, 2013, something like that.

And I'm thinking about all this happening.

Then have you noticed.

any trends or things that excite you or concern you or bother you

or anything about, I'm guessing most of them are young people.

It's not, if it's a city school, there's some adults older in there or most of them

a handful, but most of them are 20 or 21 years

old that I'm, that I have.

Yeah.

Perfect.

so just a couple, what are you observing?

what's going on with that generation that's coming along?

I think the kids are all right.

And I'll put it that way.

I think that the.

A few things.

A few things.

I'll tell you one broader piece is COVID was a complete, just

earthquake for this age cohort.

the students that I had are seniors, so they're usually in

their last one or two semesters.

The, three, two years that I was basically teaching remote, like one,

and I think it was three semesters or maybe four that I had that were, at least

partially, online, that was really tough.

It was really tough because, the class wasn't built for that.

These students didn't sign up for this.

people just weren't engaged.

I'm, I wasn't teaching at a hundred percent myself because I'm sitting here

at the same computer that I just spent eight hours working on for my agency.

And then.

At night, I have to just go stare at the computer again, looking at 40 gray

boxes because nobody had their camera on because, you can't, you could be

the policy was you couldn't even ask them to turn the camera on, which I

totally understand why it was because it was chaotic times, but it just didn't

lead to a good learning environment.

So I think there was a couple semesters.

There were people really had A hard time absorbing the material and then a

couple of semesters after people came back and it's really, it's only kind of

this semester that it's fully that it feels like we're like 95 percent back.

there just wasn't as much energy and engagement in the classroom.

and this is something I spoke to other people at my school, other

people across, across the country.

would be that they're just, I had to come like highly caffeinated.

I'll put it that way.

I had to come and bring a ton of energy every single night to get the same amount

of response that I would get back on like my bad nights, in previous years, only

now is it beginning to the students that I have now I've had enough like normal

life, since the pandemic has tapered out, that they're beginning to, to,

Act the way they did a few years ago.

So that's all to say, I wonder what's going to happen to this cohort.

As they progressed through their careers, there's going to be a good kind of

three or four or five years worth of students who at different points hit

them in high school or college when they're in that pivotal maturity stage

that I think it'll be, this will be a defining question for the next generation

is what's going to happen to that.

So that's the big piece.

And again, I'm not, again, I'm part time, I'm part time adjunct, so

this is not, this is not something that, you know, I did any sort of

empirical research on the other thing.

I will say I did add a, I did add a, uh, what's it called a focus group

class to my syllabus a couple of years ago, because I was curious.

I would always talk to them informally, but I wanted to

do it in a more formal way.

I was curious about how do they use technology?

How do they use social media?

How do they use their phones, websites, everything else?

and it's definitely changed a lot.

Instagram stays very popular.

Tick tock obviously rose a lot.

Snapchat's gone on this kind of wild ride.

a lot of them have a little bit of anxiety about how much they use their

devices now as I didn't see that same level of concern a few years ago.

and I write up a blog post about this most semesters.

And so I, I have a few of them you can dig through, but it's, it is interesting

now to see this is a generation that has Facebook, but doesn't really use Facebook.

Facebook is a utility to have.

And when I was in college, like Facebook was the coolest

thing on the planet, right?

Like it was brand new at the time.

It's a big, it's a big difference.

in terms of how social media is viewed.

and I think that is a big defining aspect of their technology.

Of their technological lives.

Facebook is where old people like me hang out, I think is the way

they perceive that, which probably pretty darn accurate, if they're pegging that.

One, one bridge question that I want to go from the teaching and

students to back to the simplicity discussion is, I want to bring up AI.

I want to ask in this, I know there's general stuff.

I know it's not necessarily expertise.

So this is observational from you.

What are you seeing the impact being of AI with maybe that generation?

And then we'll start merging into how AI might be impacting this.

Simply put message that you're attempting to get out to the world.

So let's bridge with AI.

How's that for a segue?

Oh, yeah.

So AI is the most, I guess revolutionary seems like a big puffy word, which the,

piece of technology since the iPhone.

And before that it was the internet.

And before that it was the personal computer, right?

it is.

It has every bit of app practical application that the hype around

something like web three or crypto or metaverse, had, but never materialized.

I never was a huge, believer in, in crypto and, and any other kind of metaverse type

stuff, just because, as somebody who works in that space and I would use it and I'd

always be, I would always be trying to figure out how to, stay on these trends.

I realized that a lot of that was hype and very little substance was there.

AI is one of those things where there is a lot of hype, but there is still a very

great deal amount of substance below.

I'll put it this way.

I don't ban the students from using it.

I don't, go out and encourage them to use it for things.

I say, if you want to go use it to augment the stuff that you do, it's great.

But using it to write a paper is not going to really help you, because it's

not going to fully understand things.

It'll make a bunch of fluff.

It'll make things that look like the right answer to something,

but it doesn't actually understand the material behind it.

So it's really good as a tool.

if Grammarly is a great example of this, run your writing through that

and say, okay, how can this improve?

Your grammar, your spelling, your syntax, all these different pieces,

but asking it to completely from whole cloth, write something is often at this

moment, whereas we're recording this in the fall of 2023, is not going to be

the right answer for most applications.

So look at it as the best framing I've heard about this has been look at AI,

not as having an, like a super genius.

At your disposal, but as having an unlimited number of stupid

people, at your disposal.

So I, and I think that's a great way of putting it is it can help you with things.

It can help with I have a paragraph and I need it to be two sentences, put

it in there, ask it to shorten it for you and then, tinker around a little

bit and you have a really good answer.

But if you're asking it to write that paragraph from scratch,

at this moment, that's not the.

Best use of it.

Is it messing with anybody in that education?

I was thinking back to had AI been around When I was, you know starting to write

i'm an engineer by training But so we didn't really have to write anything.

We didn't even have to know verbs But I was thinking about

what if AI had been around?

are you seeing is it messing with their heads at all?

a little bit.

they've used a little bit of the image stuff and some of

their presentations to me.

this, this past semester.

I just saw this study or this, survey.

I think it was a Pew survey that it was like one in five us teens have

used chat GPT for their homework.

And so there are professors, there are teachers at the kind of the

primary and secondary level who are very concerned about, about it.

And I think there's some validity to say, you know what, if, I want

somebody to read, the great Gatsby and write an essay about it.

if some kid comes back and just ask Chachi P to write an

essay about the great Gatsby.

Okay.

you're not really learning at that point.

For me, my, my class is not as theoretical.

it's a practical, it's a marketing class.

It's a lot of applied stuff.

And so I say, if you can figure out how to use for the projects that I'm giving,

if you can figure out how to use AI to, to get there, that's actually going to

replicate a lot of what, what working in marketing is going to be, because every

marketer I know is trying to figure out how do you use AI for their own purposes.

So I don't go out and ban it, but I think that, I think that it is

something that if you rely on it too much, instead of developing your own

understanding of kind of the world and of the subject you're talking about, then

you're going to be at a disadvantage.

So your book is simply put why clear messages,

when and how to design them.

And I want to give a full disclosure here.

I typically write out my introductions to a guest, like I did at the beginning,

when I introduced you, however, Ben, what I did was, is I took what I wrote

out and I put it through chat GPT and I said, I would like to make this simpler.

And more succinct.

now someone's trying to think through what was the intro and

it actually did pretty good.

I adjusted a couple of words and I had to know what to ask it and all that.

But, I guess it is it a tool that's going to help or hurt us with this

simple message that we're attempting to.

Train people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're good.

You're thinking now, wait, what did he say at the beginning?

Well, it's fine.

So, um, I was just, emailing with an old, old client of mine who has habits of a

podcast, and he was saying that what he did was he took the lessons in the book.

He trained a AI, like one of the new GPT, custom ones that you can

build and he trained that on that.

And he asked it to edit his email that he was sending out like his

newsletter and the new, and he ran a test, he ran an AB test.

And the one that his original one, got X OOP click rates and the one

that he ran through the AI trained on the book, got 50 percent more clicks.

And I was like, that's pretty good.

I'm, I love that data.

I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to keep an eye on that

as you're putting it together.

so simply put, so the whole, I've alluded to this a little bit in

some of the stuff we talked about.

The entire thesis here comes down to this idea of fluency.

So fluent.

is a word that you and I know from, normal life, right?

You can be fluent in English or Spanish or Mandarin.

You can be fluent in cooking or chess or whatever it is

that you're passionate about.

You can be fluent.

it's where things are easy.

Things are fluent.

the Latin root is from the word that means flowing, which is what it feels like.

So that's how we understand.

But if you ask a cognitive scientist, About the word fluency.

that describes this whole suite of experiences that loosely translate

to how easy it is to take something from out in the world, stick it

in your head and make sense of it.

and so the things that are easier to see here.

And perceive in general as well as things that are easier to process.

all of those things that take less mental energy, we're more likely to buy them,

to like them, to trust them and all the good things that we want, what we're

informing or persuading or selling.

The inverse is also true, which is that the things that take more

work, things that are harder for us to stick in our heads and make

sense of, we don't like them.

We don't buy them.

We don't trust them.

And that's not where we want to be, obviously.

So there's this divide here where we want to be, we want things that

are coming into our minds to be simple, to be easy, to be fluent.

But when we're in charge of sending, when we're the ones speaking or writing

or presenting, we have a really hard time doing that because internally we're

battling stuff like, an additive bias, which we're more likely to add than

subtract when we're presented with a.

An option to change something as well as externally, we're being pressured

by our bosses, by the systems that we're in, by the media, whatever

it is to have more, more, right?

You get credit for more.

You don't really get credit for less in many arenas.

So there's internal and external kind of that are pulling us

in the opposite direction.

So there's this gap.

We want things one way we want things to be simple, but we are

built to send things another way.

And so how do you bridge that gap?

And that's what I try to answer with these different design

principles that, that kind of make up the second half of the book.

I was just actually just looking through, I actually was not,

I usually am able to preview books prior to conversations, but I figured,

Hey, it's a book on simplicity.

I could, no, I needed to have read this and I recommend people get this.

I'm looking at the, the index right now one of the things I've always

said is a confused mind does nothing.

I don't know if that's actually true, but it seems like it should be true.

Maybe that's the case.

And like we were talking about earlier, we built up this, we just added to attitude.

I was even thinking about some.

training that I went through.

I don't really consider myself a copywriter or a marketing person, but I've

done parts of it for some of my companies.

And I was just thinking about one of the phrases they taught was, and

in addition to that, you know, it's like you're writing all the benefits.

And in addition to that, and in addition to that, and, and I think

I've heard you say that just, and is something That we really can get

into a trap or it can cause issues.

But I guess one thing I'd love for you to tell us now is I know this is

geared towards the marketing person, but to me, this is communications.

this is for leaders and owners and heavens.

It'd be awesome if our politicians would get this a little bit better.

so talk a little bit about the.

audience for the book and the message that you're trying to get across.

this is a book that would live on the marketing shelf

of a bookstore that would sit next to other marketing books.

the library, I think you hit the nail on the head there, which is this is not

something that is strictly limited to if you work in an advertising agency,

this is something that if you're, if your responsibilities in the world

involve informing or persuading, you can be better at both of those.

by being simple, by getting to a message that resonates, that actually is built

for how a receiver wants to understand it.

So that applies to advocates and politicians, leaders, and parents

and teachers and all these other roles uh, just as much, if not

more so than if somebody is a copywriter at an ad agency somewhere.

I think back at people that have been elected, whether you

agree or disagree with what they say, let's take that off the table, they

did have an ability to cut through a lot of noise and say what they wanted

to say in a fairly succinct way.

And I'm thinking about.

American presidents on both sides of the aisle.

Bill Clinton could really get a message across, you know, Obama, Donald Trump.

Hate him or whatever, but he speaks to the people in a simple way.

And, anyway, I'm not saying we can learn from any of that.

That's not my message here, but I think to be able to communicate

in those ways are important.

What are some, one of the things I really loved is that you talk,

not just, this is not just about words, but it's also about design.

And the reason that speaks to me.

Is because I tell my wife all the time that I Read times new roman.

that's my font.

In fact, I joke.

It's tim's new roman And if you start doing a lot of fonts that have a lot

of curly cues and stuff like that I sometimes I literally Can't read it.

So this is not just about words, correct?

This is like the whole Design and messaging.

Yeah.

And there, there's, So the entire, the entire book, I put the word design in

the subtitle very intentionally because even though it's not about visual

design for most of the principles are here, I argue that design is not just

that design is about Arranging things in the world to achieve a goal and

that can be words as part of that.

And so it's about how do you design your messaging with intentionality

because it's design is an art.

It's business.

there's art that infiltrates it and informs it.

it is fundamentally a business function.

It's about arranging things to achieve a goal, to solve a problem.

And that's how I look at the different principles here about,

about how we can bridge that gap.

I talked about before one of them, which is visual design them.

So there's a number of, user experience studies that you can look at for across

the span of decades that show that we.

We don't read on a screen remotely the same in the way that we read

when we're looking at like a book.

We don't start in the top left corner and move down to the bottom right.

that's the dream.

Everybody who's made a website or made a written an email thinks

that's what people are doing.

But in reality, what people do is they start at the headline, they go to the

next headline, they go jump around a little bit, they go to something else,

they go to bullets, they go to boxes, they go to italics, they go to pull quotes.

They go to buttons and they, we do what's known as a layer cake pattern.

It looks like the letter F, right?

We go, when we go up and down and we read the different pieces until we

find what's relevant to us, what we're looking for, and then we go into it.

and we augment that a lot of times also with like a search strategy.

So if we're looking for a phone number or a name or an address,

something that's shaped differently.

we're going to hunt around for that.

And so the lesson there is when you're designing the physical or

the visual layout of your messaging, we'll make use of that understanding.

Use headlines, use bullets, use italics, use bold, use call out boxes,

make it look like a really great magazine more so than a giant essay.

and we would do this.

In our own work and our proposals, our goal of our proposals was to look like

a magazine because we wanted it to be something that was easy to read and

understand and that stood out in a pile of other things that were just top to bottom

Times New Roman instead of using those headlines and everything else that make.

What you're saying more, more easily, understood by our eyes and then more

easily understood by our brains,

I like the example of the magazine.

It's interesting.

It's been so long Since i've seen or held a magazine.

I was going to the airport a while back Went through the little bookstore

and I picked up two magazines and read those on the plane and there

was Such a comfort about it, Ben.

it felt well, it was inviting, the ads are there, the information's there.

It was, I think it was fast company or, some business type thing

that I used to read all the time.

And now I just go grab it digitally.

That, that was nice.

What about, and just, we've got a few minutes left here.

And the thing I'm going to highly recommend is people get the book because

I'm looking at the index and I'm going, this has a lot of great info in it.

And I love just the, I love the fluency of it.

I think we need to be able to speak.

The language of simplicity.

I think that's one of the things I'm hearing you say, but I'd love

for you, and I'm sure there's probably examples in the book.

What are some examples that you can share, either good or bad that

everybody will go, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh yeah, that's good.

any examples pop into your mind that you can share in the last

few minutes that we have here.

Oh yeah, certainly.

So what, if there's any regret I have with the book, by the way, it's, I

leaned a little bit too much into the like taglines and slogans and the

first, bit of the book is that's a quick way to understand it, but this

is so much more valuable for the higher frequency communications like emails and

presentations, those types of things.

That being said, I'll give you a couple of things that, that

have always resonated with me.

So one of the things I talk about is benefits and this is sales, one

on one features versus benefits.

We don't buy features, we buy benefits.

We don't want the thing.

We want what the thing does for us.

So the best example of this is if you go back about 20 years, Apple introduced

the iPod and they didn't go around saying it's got this many gigabytes

of space, this many pixels on the screen, this much processing power.

What they did was they said.

It's a thousand songs in your pocket.

It's a thousand songs.

But immediately you understand the benefit.

I don't care about the four gigabyte hard drive.

I care about there being a thousand songs in my pocket that's the feed.

That's the benefit, not the feature.

Eventually you get down to the details somewhere on their

website or their packaging.

They'll tell you about the features, but it's about investing proportionally.

In what level of benefit is going to resonate in that market.

And so that's a great example of that.

And I'll give you something else that is completely different.

I have, I've had bad luck with my teeth and I, I blame my genetics for it.

And so I'm at the dentist one day and he's digging in there doing

all sorts of terrible things.

And the, he says, you only have to floss the teeth you want to keep.

And I was like, ah, You got me.

you got that is exactly where I need, what I need to hear when I need to hear it.

And exactly in the language, which makes sense to me, it exhibits this

degree of empathy, which is one of the other principles, about,

okay, you're speaking the language, you're meeting me where I am.

and since that day I've lost every single night, right?

Like it's, so it works in a way that saying something like you should floss to

prevent plaque buildup below the gum line.

That's correct.

But that's not what I needed to hear.

What I needed to hear was you only have to floss the teeth you want to keep.

And all of a sudden that connects on a way that dozens of other similar

administrations before have not done so.

Yeah, those are, those good messages, I think,

are good and they stay with us.

sayings and things like that.

The book is simply put, Why Clear Messages Win and how to design them.

Ben, why don't you tell us where they could find it and how to connect with you.

And then I've got one more question before we finish up here.

Oh yeah.

Thank you, Tim.

It's been a blast.

yeah, you can, if you go to benguttmann.Com, two T's and

two ends, you can find all sorts of information about the book.

You can download a free chapter.

you can connect with me.

You can listen to other podcasts and.

If you go to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, wherever books are

sold, you can grab a copy.

if you enjoy it, leave a review, let me know.

I'd love to hear from you.

or shoot me an email, connect on LinkedIn.

I'd love to, if there's something that resonated, if there's something

I could do to help you with a question, I'm all, all ears.

Thanks, Ben.

We'll include links so people can get that.

I love the cover that we've recently added some colors here that are that kind

of like that gold and stuff like that.

It's a really cool, simple, good font, by the way, good design cover.

I really appreciate that.

Ben, we're seek, go create those three words.

Last question.

I'm going to let you pick one of those over the other two.

I'm going to give you one choice.

Seek, go or create.

Which one do you choose and why?

Oh, I have to say create.

I think that, my background is in design, which you probably may have picked up

at some point in this conversation.

and I.

Think that I'm grateful that I have done that in my career, that I've had some

sort of natural aptitude for that because the ability to create something out in

the world, is such a magical experience and it makes you, aware of all the

possibilities that there are when you, you realize the world is more malleable,

that you think everything that's there was made by somebody and with some.

Inspiration and some work and some creativity.

And, and it makes you want to join that grand project of creating things.

So I'm going to go create.

Thanks, Ben.

I appreciate you being a guest here.

The book is simply put why clear messages win and how to design them.

I just recommend you get it, just get the book.

And one of the things I really loved was collect the premise,

which is the fluency of, my words, just the message of being simple.

We're seek, go create here.

Thanks for joining us.

We've got new episodes every Monday until next time, continue being

all that you were created to be.