you're listening to ted talks daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day i'm your host elise hugh our original series ted intersections features unscripted conversations between speakers and experts taking on subjects at the intersection of their expertise In this final Intersections conversation of the season, work futurist Michelle Weiss sits down with video creator John Ushai to answer the question, how do we navigate the ever -evolving nature of work?
Discussing how they both maneuver the pace of technological change in the workplace, they offer advice on how to make sure your skills stand out and what to keep in mind when entering into the workforce today and in the future.
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and, you know, and retooling and all that.
But I think for the large part, it can be such a compliment and amplifier.
I've always been fascinated by the fact that even our younger boomers today are averaging 12 job changes by the time they retire.
So if you think about for the rest of us, like younger generations who are still immersed in the workforce, we're going to have to navigate more career shifts than we ever dreamed of.
12 job changes? 12!
Oh my god. And if you think about, if you try to calculate, you know, that younger generations average tenure in a role is maybe less than three years, we might be looking at 20 or 30.
Yeah, I was like Gen Z, maybe it's like 50 job changes.
Yeah. And I know you went through your own sort of career shift. You started off at Instagram and YouTube, and now you are a creator yourself.
Can you just sort of walk us through what that felt like to make that really big shift?
Oh, yeah. I mean, there's so many things I learned working at YouTube and Instagram that prepared me for this job, like how to speak to brands, how to speak to sponsors, how to understand, okay, there's somebody who has a marketing budget, what are they looking for like on that return on investment and just how to communicate I think you talk a lot about like soft skills that you could have but they could change in different contexts yeah and I feel like I've taken that to heart in so many ways in terms of like okay well in a corporate environment I'm speaking to people across the table but as
a creator now I'm speaking across the camera but there are a lot of the same skill sets or putting together a deck for a brand to try to get like a sponsorship for our episodes in our show now.
So many things are transferable, even on paper, they look like different roles.
So I'm so fascinated by what you do, because it's just not the way my brain works.
As I started off my career as an academic and have gotten into producing content, but I don't think about it as how to make it go viral and how to get the most impressions possible.
And I just think your brain works so differently from From the way that mine does.
And I was just wondering if you could kind of teach me some tricks of like how to do this better.
I know you have kind of a worldview where you want people to put their content out into the world without worrying about it being perfect.
At the same time, right, I think there's a lot of really terrible content out there too.
So are you just hoping that more great folks put out their better content than the really terrible content?
Well, I think you need two things.
it's like experience and then entertainment and when you have both of those it works really well a lot of people who have experience especially in academia or in the corporate world don't know how to like package it or make it more entertaining so a lot of their content falls flat yep and then there's a lot of people who are entertaining for the sake of entertainment which is fine like we need some of that some escapism like the you know that's always great but then it creates kind of of this spiral of trying to like sustain that and that becomes very hard but if you have both um it could work
really well so even as we're like setting up for this i'm like trying to think about like okay what are the things that we want the viewer to remember from this talk what does our intro look like um and uh just setting that up so that people get as much value as possible from the experience and educational side of what we're talking about yeah i'm just wondering like are you are you also thinking that certain kinds of content just doesn't fit into certain mediums just because I think about how amazing a TikTok could be but the kind of work that you know someone in thought leadership is doing might not always
translate well into these short bite -sized pieces like how do you how do you think about kind of connecting like the actual content to the right medium because it's always shifting too yeah well I think context definitely defines content.
But if you're aware of how a platform works, you could figure that out.
Like, for example, like on a YouTube video, you have a bit more breathing room to talk about what you want to say in the intro versus a TikTok or short or Instagram reels.
Like, we're not even thinking about the intro, we're thinking about what I like to call the first frame, what do you see at like point zero zero seconds?
And can you set as much up in that to set expectation of what people will see so like for example i have this format um on my youtube channel where i go on the streets of hollywood and do a highly scientific study where i ask people who's more popular um you know like mr beast or tom cruise you know like and basically it's a like a commentary on like what's more popular social media or traditional media and there's people on the street like gen z like young people i talk to do not know who tom cruise is do not know who tom cruise don't know who tom's hanks is but they know who mr beast logan paul
is and there's people who like i like you know older generations typically who know who tom crew tom hanks is but don't know who mr beast logan paul is so immediately that you have this interesting generational divide but for that format um i experimented with different intros i was like hey guys i'm right now on the street of hollywood and i'm asking people who's more popular um logan paul or tom hanks so we could see what's going on in terms of social media tradition way too long for a tiktok or youtube too short.
So instead, I was like, how can I set up that first frame, that zero -second experience when you're coming across it to immediately define what you're about to watch?
So I went to the local print shop.
I got a poster with two faces on it, and I held it up, and I had a microphone.
And literally, that zero second is, who are these two people?
And I turned the mic to the person on the street and they're answering and looking at it.
And so, um, stuff like that, where I'm like, the idea was there and it's really just taking a stat and turning it into a story.
Cause there's a lot of statistics about social media versus traditional media.
I want to make it feel visceral.
I want to make it feel emotional and I want to bring it to a human perspective, not just a statistic and do it in a first frame where it could fit the context of, um, that.
So there's like the message can be heard, but it takes a lot of like defining and understanding and studying what works on the platform to get there.
Yeah. One of the things I'm thinking about as we're talking about this really abbreviated but powerful content that's dynamic and vibrant in this way is it feels really compact and it feels like really compressed and it's a lot all at once, right?
And when I think about having to slow down and lengthen our attention span, especially as we see in the world that narcissism rates are going up, And empathy rates are declining.
And I'm wondering like how we better practice empathy.
I'm just curious like what can the media, like what do we think about, like how do you think about sort of empathy in this space that we're in?
because it is it is a strange world in which like the rise of social media and the proliferation of digital platforms makes us sort of think more about ourselves versus how we inhabit sort of the life of someone else you know yeah I don't know if you think about that at all oh all the time I feel like algorithms create echo chambers in many ways um and that's why a interview format as so powerful because you'll opt into following that one person but then if they're talking to somebody else who may not be in like your periphery or your circle then you're getting another perspective and then hopefully
that could create a jumping off point to almost like poke a needle in that yeah bubble um to go even further um or i find that on the street content is so interesting you see like a lot of people doing like man on the street content because it's bringing somebody into your feed by way of who you follow that you wouldn't have normally heard from you know so like uh there's like this really interesting format that somebody takes a walkman or a cassette and shows it to like a gen z is like do you know what this is and they're like what is it like it's just like little things like that put things
in perspective um but it's interesting i'm wondering like for you like you've done so much research on the future Like, how do you think about communicating the message to a generation that needs it most in Gen Z?
Like, they're navigating a totally different career landscape than ever before.
Like, how do you think about all the work and research you've done in terms of making it relevant and understandable to a new generation?
Yeah, it's really hard because I think we go through life believing that there's this sort of arc where we get front loaded with a lot of education on the front end.
And then we get to sort of build and launch a career, build a life and then retire.
And that whole arc has just been completely upended by exponential advancements in technology.
Right. And so it's really going to be this learn, earn, learn, earn cycle, and it's never going to end because with all of this change, we're just going to have to keep continuously learning.
And at the same time, we don't have any of the real infrastructure and architecture out there to facilitate this kind of seamless education throughout life.
Like, we talk about lifelong education, and yes, I'm going to be a lifelong learner, but we don't have those systems set up.
And so we have a ton of people falling through the cracks and not able to access precisely what they need in order to make progress in their lives.
And so the main message, especially to younger generations, is that we have to have a real mindset shift. And it's not a bad thing.
It's not a bad thing to need to grow, right?
And you have these kind of constraints that are forcing you to grow and seek out new information.
information. But unfortunately, also, the onus is on us as people to navigate this because we don't have that infrastructure set up.
My whole work in life is trying to kind of begin to set up those regional, different kinds of better functioning learning ecosystems to facilitate these movements, but it's slow going and it's nascent, right?
And so in the near term, it's on on us, we actually have to figure out how to surface and articulate our skills and translate them into the language of the job market, right.
And so it's unfortunately a lot on us, but we get to do it, we get to actually shape our future.
And I think both of us have made multiple pivots in our lives.
And we were we realize how amazing it is, like once you're on the other side of it, But we also realize how much of it is kind of fortune, luck, you know, your network, all these things kind of coming together in a beautiful way that a lot of people don't have access to.
So how do we make those kinds of social networks, professional networks more available to people to actually bring them along?
So that's the huge kind of lift for all of us is unfortunately it just kind of rests on us more.
That burden is on us, and we have to do this really interesting kind of storytelling and translation about all of the hidden skills we bring to the table and make that understandable to a prospective employer.
Let's say you're somebody who just started a new job or you're entering the workforce for the first time.
What are three things you would tell them?
These are what you should remember, what you should take away in your next year on the job to be well set for the future right now.
For younger workers who are kind of going into their first job that might not be their first choice, one of the things is to just remember that we don't have to sort of search for that higher lofty calling.
Sometimes we can work with purpose, even when our work doesn't feel purposeful.
And at the same time, I know employers tend to kind of fixate on very technical, hard skills that we need to bring to the table, but also realize that as we contend with this longer, more turbulent work life, we're going to have to actually really get sophisticated at our human skills.
When we think about critical thinking, systems thinking, emotional intelligence, that empathy, all of that still requires practice, even though it's innate within us, we're not actually sophisticated at it.
And so one of the ways to think about it is I can almost imagine taking like a tech boot camp for cybersecurity and learning that technical skill in a short amount of time.
It's a lot harder for me to think about how I practice the human skill of empathy as an example.
Yeah, I think the soft skills are so important, especially learning how to empathize and communicate.
But I don't know, I feel like I look back on my time in the corporate world.
I'm like a lot of those hard skills prepare me for what I'm doing right now as a creator.
Like, I'll never forget, like when I was at YouTube, and I had an amazing boss, Ross Warren, who is just so good at marketing and branding, but he also knew Photoshop.
And I remember like our one on one meetings, and I'm just like, Ross, can I can I see how you design this on Photoshop?
Can I just like just watch as you do it and ask a few questions and learn how to design myself.
And now that's helped me like as a YouTuber design our thumbnails or be able to give better direction to our team to be like, hey, add a bit more drop shadow here, increase the saturation there.
And I feel like I wouldn't have that language if I didn't have that technical like know -how.
100%. Or even like on a more like practical level for everyday like presentations.
Like I remember at Instagram, one of my colleagues, Peter Shields, was kind of like a Picasso of PowerPoint.
point you know you just was able to design these beautiful slides and now like i'm able to make slides to pitch our sponsors for brand deals for our show and i feel like a lot of that is in the packaging of the deck and that technical skill that i learned and i just tried to be a sponge with so i don't know i think the technical skills are super important so i don't think it's an either or i think it's a both and like it's both our generalist humanist skills that we need to bring to the table, but we also have to have enough technical skills in order to know when to intervene at the right time.
So like even all the things you're talking about, absolutely, those hard skills have made you, have given you a level of expertise to sort of engage with the material in a different way, right?
But then when you think about something like AI and machine learning and the ways in which we are now able to sort of leapfrog and I can build a website even even though I have zero coding skills, right?
And those, I can build a beautiful deck using these different kinds of AI tools that I've never been able to present in that way before, right?
But I also have to have enough knowledge and understanding to get in there and edit because what's being fed to me, right, isn't quite what I need.
It's not gonna be exactly, I'm not just gonna receive it from the AI and present it to whomever, right?
So it's really, for me, it's not this kind of either or, It's just that we just have to remember that those human skills require some deep practice.
And we don't actually have a lot of mechanisms to practice those skills.
We see a proliferation of different kinds of certificates.
Google's got their own certificates.
Salesforce has their own.
There's different ways of learning these new skills that are more kind of vertical skills.
But those horizontal skills of a T -shaped learner, those are a lot harder to kind of get access to.
Yes, well said. yeah um yeah i think a lot about people who i meet like who are just entering the workforce or they're trying to become a creator entrepreneur i think they can move even faster if they just had one or two years like learning within a team or a system like i i feel like now i know how to run a team and manage folks because i was managed by other people yes and i i i'm like i go into a a meeting and i'm like all right what's the agenda um who's taking notes what are the action items like and that was very much something i learned inside youtube and instagram and just understanding
okay if we're gonna have a meeting we have to have a purpose to it let's keep going and i find a lot of folks like especially in the creator world where it's like okay i'm gonna make content and um we'll see how it feels today i don't know what's the process and if we do something thing more than three times can we create a like doc that almost has a checklist and there's just so many things that i wouldn't have known if i wasn't a part of a team or part of an organization or a lot of people with much more experience taught me that yeah or i was able to absorb it you're like what you're talking
about feels like a confidence building exercise that you were able to kind of access through that experience and i'm wondering where in your career and sort of you look back when when in the shifts did you feel did you ever feel like a sense of imposter syndrome but i definitely felt imposter syndrome but i have a hot take on imposter syndrome but there's that saying like the more you know the less you realize you know and i feel like there's a lot of folks who like learn more about their subject matter and like oh my god like i i didn't realize there's this aspect to it or there's that perspective
and you start unraveling all the the different like nuances and complications of any industry and field so naturally you're like wait I I don't know a lot actually um but then like that's kind of like the like the like the you know midpoint of the journey you keep learning a lot and as you go and like you if the experience is the spectrum and it's like inexperienced and like you know expert um though I argue that journey never ends um as you get closer to expert or have more expertise you develop more imposter or syndrome you realize you know less but you keep going down that path then there's
a moment where you look back at those people who are inexperienced and you realize there's a lot of people who are inexperienced who talk a lot and it's like they're very certain they're very certain I'm like what are you talking about you don't even know what you're talking about you know and I had that experience firsthand where I'm like working on YouTube for five years learning how the platform works working with a lot of careers then going to Instagram learning how that platform works And then I see these people on social media being like, no, this is how it works.
I'm like, that is outdated and wrong.
And seeing that, I don't know what that's called, like reverse imposter syndrome or something.
I'm like, there's just so much misinformation out there that that also gave me confidence to be like, I'm learning.
There's still a ton to learn.
But I got to get out there, you know?
And that was a big motivator to say like, wait, there's not a lot of people on YouTube who have worked at YouTube, let alone another platform like Instagram who can talk about it in the way that I can.
So maybe I should at least try.
Yeah. One of the most powerful things I've heard recently is Malcolm Gladwell talking about sort of having to kind of revise his stance on his past work, right?
The tipping point. And I love what he said is he talks about feeling so sure of himself as a young person 25 years ago and feeling so certain of these things even though he had just moved to New York like three months earlier and didn't really understand the context.
And he said that now what he'd like to say is this is what I believe today now to be true.
Yeah, I love those qualifiers.
Yeah, and I think that's like a great way to think about it.
But yeah, the expertise can definitely, you know, sort of probably make you question how much you know.
And I don't know, I felt imposter syndrome, even when I was like a new professor.
I had gone to six years of grad school to become a professor.
And I realized like, I didn't know how to teach. Like I didn't, I knew my subject area.
And I knew what it looked like to be a good teacher.
I saw my professors do it well, some of them.
But then once I had to do it, I sort of felt like this real disconnect of, oh, my God, I'm in this place of authority.
And it felt like I was wearing a giant suit that I didn't fit in.
And, yeah, it just felt like – it just felt really, really vulnerable.
And it felt like, oh, I'm not doing this well.
Like I'm failing at this.
um and it's really like i don't know if you've ever like had those kinds of moments where you're just like i have no idea what i'm doing definitely i mean as you try to do new things i think like experience that more and more but i think there's two powerful things in what you said that just hit home for me one um i had uh these two amazing youtuber journalists on my show um cleo abram and johnny harris and they said these quotes i'm paraphrasing never um underestimate the viewer's intelligence but never overestimate the amount of context they have when they're coming into watching a video or watching
something and i think that can be um extrapolated across so many different fields you know because i think nowadays people underestimate people's intelligence especially when it comes to viewing a piece of content i i think a lot like people are smart and people want to learn at least i i truly believe that but they don't always have the context.
And so, because to me, I hope to always relate to an introductory creator or somebody.
And if I get away from that, I feel like I'm, I don't, I don't know, getting too far away from the field.
Like I always want to be connected to the beginner.
Yeah. Even if I'm learning and trying to be the expert, because if I can't distill what I'm saying to that, I'm losing touch. Yeah.
How do you see like technology and AI right now affecting what you do?
And are you, do you have any sort of fears or reservations about it i think there's two sides to it as a creator i'm um majority of my feeling about ai is i'm very excited about it because i think that right now if you're creative and you feel like ai is coming for your job i think that says something about your skill set right now honestly like i i think that um you know, good technology will always displace something, but if you, and there's a lot of, like, there's going to be a rough patch, and maybe we're already going through it in terms of, like, jobs and, you know, and retooling and all
that, but I think for the large part, it can be such a compliment and amplifier to getting more rough draft. I like to say, like, there's this rough draft problem where one of the most overwhelming things as a creator, or maybe, like, anybody is looking at a blank screen versus looking at something that's even terrible yes and editing it and having like a launch pad yes yeah yeah and if an ai tool can give you a first draft as crappy as it may be and you can edit it and that first draft is based on a prompt that you give it so it's based on an idea then you can move faster yeah um and so yeah
like i think like uh i remember where I wrote this um post on my LinkedIn I was like it's kind of like the the Chipotle rule I like to call it which is like if you and I are going to dinner and we have like our friends around and maybe you had those moments where it's like hey where do you want to go to dinner where do you want to go to dinner Michelle it's like everyone I don't know I don't know and then somebody's like well how about we go to Chipotle and then everyone's like no we can't go no we're not going to Chipotle let me look up a few restaurants you know all of a sudden you have you
have like a prompt and you have something to like build off of and I love Chipotle like like nothing wrong with it but if we're going out to a nice dinner like we're not we're probably going to have like you know uh burritos so it's like like something like that just triggers more creativity yeah and um there's like amazing tools like uh like uh that you can like get a thumbnail idea concept so yeah i find that um or tools that help clip and like you know repackage like something that you already have and put it into new formats and subtitle it.
So, yeah, I'm very excited about it.
But how do you think about it in terms of your field?
No, it's super interesting because obviously it can generate a lot of writing, right?
But when I look at the content, at first I was amazed, right?
And just sort of kind of trying to understand what I was grappling with.
But when you deal with more and more of the generations, you see the sort of repetition.
you see the kind of lack of tone or the mixtures of tone, and you don't know how to fix it unless you have some understanding of how to edit, right?
So it's that technical skill coming into play.
But I think what's really exciting and what you mentioned, which is, you know, if you're doing a job that you see as becoming obsolete, then there's something missing, right?
And I think what's really exciting about this moment is in the past, whenever we've had automation, nation and you've talked about sort of technology displacing something.
Yes, it's been true, but really only since ATMs have we seen like a full displacement of a role and that actually generating new creative forms of labor.
And so you saw actually banking do a really good job of turning into a services industry because this idea of just giving out money could be automated.
And they did it in a way where they also trained up their workforce to take on those new skills.
And so actually the person who just earned a Nobel Prize in economics, Daron Acemoglu, he actually has called this so -so automation.
Ever since that moment in time, we've only had so -so automation.
So the automation has been poor enough that we always have to keep humans in the loop in like a really terrible way, right?
Like where we're like, that's a hot dog, that's a human body part, right?
Right? Like that's the kind of work we're doing.
And that's not inspiring creative work.
But if AI can actually display some of that work where we actually get to create really new forms of creative labor, to me, that's super exciting.
And it's precisely kind of up your alley where you get to do more with what you're given.
A hundred percent. A hundred percent.
Thanks so much, John.
It's been so much fun getting to know you more.
Yeah, it's been a pleasure, Michelle.
It's been great back and forth, and I'm excited to continue to follow your work.
Me too. That was a conversation between Michelle Weiss and John Ushai for our original series, TED Intersections.
Visit TED .com to watch this conversation and others from the series.
If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED .com slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today's show.
TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsica Sarmar -Nivon.
It was mixed by Christopher Fazey -Bogan.
Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo.
I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
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