What Should You Automate With AI, and What Should Stay Human?

John Jantsch (00:01.276)

So AI can write your emails, run your ads, clone the sound of your voice, even. But at least for now, it cannot fake a hug, a hand-tied knot, or the crack in your voice on a hard sales call. The entrepreneurs with the biggest edge over the next decade are the ones who find what technology can’t touch and build their whole business around it. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Ryan Levesque. He is a seven-time

Inc. 500 CEO who’s built and exited two companies worth more than $100 million combined. He’s the number one national best-selling author of Ask, named Inc.’s marketing book of the year and founder of the Ask Method. His new book we’re going to talk about today, Return to Real, the last human advantage in an age of artificial everything, argues the same thing your body and spirit are starving for is exactly what your market will pay a premium for. So, Ryan, welcome to the show.

Ryan Levesque (00:59.832)

John, it’s great to be here and it’s great to reconnect.

John Jantsch (01:02.896)

Yeah, so I would suggest that this is a different book than Ask. however, I I’ve gotta believe that there’s a thread of your work in Ask and the work you did with the company that sort of informs this book, but I’ll let you speak to that if that’s accurate at all.

Ryan Levesque (01:22.018)

Yeah, you know, great questions. My first book Ask was all about figuring out what your market wants and giving it to them. And and I think it I remain proud of that work to this day. It’s a methodology to listen to the voice of your customer and use that to inform your messaging, your marketing and your products and services, so on and so forth. But what that book failed to explain and explore is how to listen to the most important voice of them all.

Which is what I describe as the voice inside or the contrarian voice of your heart. And I think the age that we live in here today is one where, and there’s tremendous evidence to suggest this, we are drowning in artificial everything, from the food we eat to the content we consume. And Adam Maseri of Instagram, I think said it best when he said, We spent the last decade trying to figure out what makes something perfect. We’re gonna spend the next decade figuring out what makes something real.

John Jantsch (02:20.08)

Yeah. So yeah, you know, I I think the entrepreneurial world though is sort of naturally I I don’t want to say it’s against that, but it’s you can eat it’s easy to see why people get pulled in directions. It’s like, there’s an opportunity over here. I you know, AI is a great example. you know, I can make my agency an AI agency so that I can go in and like take advantage of what’s there, even if it’s not in your heart. I mean, how do you guard against that?

Ryan Levesque (02:20.908)

And I that’s what the world is craving is real.

Ryan Levesque (02:47.32)

Well, what I would say is this, look, I am not like I’m not one of these AI, anti-AI you know, apostles. I use AI on a daily basis. We use AI in my company. I I think the the truth is in the tension, the devil’s in the details. And I’ll give you a few examples. So I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make with AI is they use AI to abdicate parts of their business that touch the customer.

John Jantsch (02:52.241)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (03:12.07)

Yeah.

Ryan Levesque (03:12.896)

Instead, what we should be doing is thinking about the proverbial back office of our business, the parts that are furthest away from what touches the customer, and use AI to automate those pieces of the business. Not to automate the email sequence that we send to our customers or to write the social media posts that’s the first point of contact with our brand, or to use AI to replicate your voice and create some sort of AI avatar that you’re trying to pass off as you, but the reality is it’s just a machine.

And when someone figures that out, they feel foolish for having been humiliated and they associate that with your brand forevermore. So I think it’s not about being anti AI or being pro AI, it’s about finding the right places to put AI into your business.

John Jantsch (03:57.201)

Yeah, it’s funny. I th I think you know, a lot of people are starting to say, you know, the businesses are gonna win are the ones that are more human or that put that human element out there. And I think that there’s a double-edged sword on that, in that I think some people are saying, okay, I’ll put my human avatar out there. And I think you actually get whacked twice for that. It’s like you were trying to be human and you were actually less human, you know, for doing that. Yeah.

Ryan Levesque (04:19.626)

It’s the hypocrisy of humanization. It’s a hypocrisy of humanization. It’s people are giving lip service to it, but they’re not willing to do the things that it really means. Like when you first came into the business world, you probably remember an era where having a website was a new and novel thing. Like it was a competitive advantage to be on the internet. That was a big deal. Now everybody’s on the internet. The pendulum is swung in the opposite direction. Now it’s actually a big deal. When you pick up the phone and call customer service,

John Jantsch (04:26.343)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:35.909)

yeah.

John Jantsch (04:39.548)

Yeah. Yep.

Ryan Levesque (04:48.652)

And you actually get an English speaking human being who picks up the phone on the other side and you say, my gosh, like are you, are you AI? Are you a robot? Are you an automated message? No, I’m a real human being. That is where the zig has become the zag.

John Jantsch (05:04.668)

So you I I think I read it with the figure was seventy million dollars, a deal to sell your company fell apart. not long after that, you moved to where I assume you are sitting today on the two hundred year old farm in Vermont. w w are those two connected? Like did you have a moment where you said, I gotta get out of here, I gotta point at something different.

Ryan Levesque (05:11.086)

Sure. Yep.

Ryan Levesque (05:27.916)

Very much connected. So spent the a better part of a decade building and scaling a company. literally started it, you know, with a laptop and an internet connection, kitchen table story. Seven timing 5000, fastest growing company, and had this moment where I I looked at this photograph of my two boys, and at the time they were three and five years old, my sons, they were wearing rain boots, holding hands and a path ahead of me. The boots were way too big for them. And I just remembered to take a photo of that moment. And

Fast forward seven years later, and I had a similar experience where my two boys were walking down the path. They’re much further ahead of me now. They were not holding hands. and they were teenagers at the time. And it was like a heartbeat between those two moments. And I recognized that I had maybe just a few years left with my two boys at home before they grew up and they were gone. And I kind of asked myself, after we’d tried to sell the company twice, took the company to market, had a deal.

John Jantsch (06:05.138)

Yes.

Ryan Levesque (06:27.306)

Ended at the 11th hour, took the company to market again, had a $70 million offer, collapsed at the last minute. do I want to spend another decade or even half decade in this mode? Or do I want to maybe reoptimize my life for something else? And and the answer was very clear. I want to suck the marrow out of this season of life while my boys are at home. And and on that journey, when my boys were away at summer camp one summer, I decided to do something that was pulling at my heart. And I decided to.

take take some time to live and and work on a farm in the Mad River Valley of Vermont, literally living in a tent, bathing in a pond, learning how to raise and grow food with my own hands. And John, it was on that farm that I had this awakening that I just felt like in this next chapter of life, this is where I was meant to be. And then that sparked a whole grand adventure that led to me exiting the company and starting this farm and moving my family and

Crazy, crazy family adventure.

John Jantsch (07:27.539)

So I’m getting a throw vibe all of a sudden.

Ryan Levesque (07:31.662)

Throw is is referenced in the book. Throw is one of my heroes as a young man and and as a as a much older man today.

John Jantsch (07:40.455)

Yeah. So one of the things you write about is contrarian shifts. And the first thing is that the best things in life don’t scale. That sort of runs counter to like traditional business advice. I think a lot of people get that. I don’t think many people would actually argue, but like the whole deal is to scale, right? I mean, so how do you balance that?

Ryan Levesque (07:57.987)

Yeah. Well, look, I I think it’s again, truth is in the tension. I think there’s a modern exception exception with scale. Whenever I bring up the ideas behind return to to real, the inevitable objection that comes up is but does it scale? How do you scale that? And the the argument that I make is look, the best things in life don’t scale. You know, a hug with your kid, a sunset with your sweetheart, these things don’t scale. but we somehow think that the rules in business are immune to that universal truth.

John Jantsch (08:02.641)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:13.799)

This is

Ryan Levesque (08:27.746)

So the question isn’t do I create a business that doesn’t scale? It’s what are the parts of my business do I do in spite of the fact that they don’t scale? Because what doesn’t scale for you also will not scale for your competitor. And therein lies the competitive advantage. Doing the things that your competitor will not be willing to do. It’s sending a personal voice memo to every new customer, yourself.

Not using some AI, 11 lab software or an assistant that’s doing it for you. It’s you. It’s it’s handwriting a welcome note to everyone who becomes a client. It’s not doing all the things, but it’s picking and choosing these moments that demonstrate to your market, to your customers, to your clients that wow, you really care. You really, really care about who it is that you’re serving.

John Jantsch (09:24.006)

So if there’s a listener out there that’s saying, look, I I’m I’ve got this business and I’m feeling the tension and I want to make some change, but I’m kind of shackled with a few things, right. I can’t just like, you know, take off tomorrow and and ch blow up everything. So what’s a small real version of, you know, returning to real that somebody could make?

Ryan Levesque (09:32.59)

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Levesque (09:45.987)

Yeah, so I’ll give a personal one and then I’ll give a a business one. So on a on a personal level, there’s a practice that I learned to adopt from a colleague of mine. And it’s the simplest thing in the world, and it’s something that I would encourage you to try yourself. The idea is this when you wake up in the morning, first thing, touch earth before touching a screen.

So instead of doing what you normally do, where you check your phone, you check your messages, you check your email, whatever, put your device far away from you, walk outside your front door, find the first piece of actual bare earth, not pavement, not concrete, but grass or dirt or something in front of you. Take your shoes off, your socks off. And whatever time you wake up, I don’t care how cold it is, I do this in the winter in Vermont, you step outside, bare feet, you touch the ground just for a moment, take the deepest breath that you can, and just remind yourself that you are.

A biophysical being in a biophysical world. And before you get sucked into dashboards and dopamine loops and all the demands of the day, that you are human and you’re deeply connected to the natural world. It’s a super small thing, like it’ll only take you 30 seconds to do this. But what it does is it sets the tone for the rest of the day. Like you become calmer, you become kinder, you take all the fires that show up in your business in stride, you put things in perspective in a way that’s sort of unlike anything else.

so that’s a super simple personal move. Professionally.

John Jantsch (11:08.658)

Well, and that that that could actually be enough for some people. Yeah.

Ryan Levesque (11:12.122)

And that absolutely can be enough. That can be the bite-sized version of Return to Real to just before I get sucked into the digital vortex of the day and social media scrolling and all the things. It’s like I’ve got this moment and it’s 30 seconds. I do it at at sunrise. Or I stare off into the sunrise in the mountains in the distance on our farm. And I just take this moment. And for me, it’s like it just sets the tone for the whole day. so that’s the personal side. Professional side, I would combine that.

With a principle that I describe in the book as create before you consume. There is a tendency, first thing in the morning, that we get into consumption mode. We open up our emails and we consume the emails that are sent our way. Or we go on social media and we read the headlines. We actually are consuming what’s showing up in our world. I would challenge you to use that moment in the day when the chalkboard in your brain is clean. There’s nothing on it. It’s just a clean slate. You use those precious moments to create.

For me, I use that time to write email. I will write an email to my audience with a clear head based on what it is that I’m thinking, what’s showing up in my heart, the ideas that I’m thinking about, how it relates to my market, but I do it with a clear mind. And when you combine those two simple practices, touch earth before you touch screen, and create before you consume, it’ll shift your day, which will shift your week, which will shift your month, which will shift your year.

John Jantsch (12:38.546)

Okay, this is a perfect segue to a questi or a a a a thing that you have talked about. you told your own list that team of writers had ghostwritten your content under your name for seven na years.

What did it feel like to send that confession emailed to your list?

Ryan Levesque (12:57.15)

Yeah.

it was not easy. because I felt like in some ways, even though this is standard practice in the industry, you have a team of writers. If you’re the CEO of your company, it’s not uncommon that you’ve got a team of writers that are writing content in your name, they’re ghostwriting that content, and they’re signing that content with your name. And for me, it became this sort of this death by a thousand paper cuts, where at first I was reviewing every email that went out with by my name.

And then of course there’s a time where things get a little too busy and you’re like, all right, it’s probably fine. And then you get into the habit of you don’t even review anything. And then one day I remember waking up and I opened up my laptop and I read an email that we sent out that was in it was in it was we positioned it as it was something that I wrote and it came from me. And I was so disgusted with what we put up, I slammed the laptop shut. And I think for me that was the breaking point where I said, no more, this is not happening.

and so on a whim, I wrote this email. I titled it The Embarrassing Confession and basically said what you described. I have an embarrassing confession to make. this may come as a shock, but every single email that you have read with my name signed to it has not actually been written by me, but it’s been written by a team of writers and more recently written by AI. and this has been true for the last seven years. I’m not proud of this fact, but it’s the truth. And I basically said, what I’ve realized is that

What the world is craving is what I describe as the freshly squeezed version of orange juice that you get at Sunday brunch in a world where everybody else is serving the watered-down stuff that comes in a can. Can you feel the difference between what’s real and what’s not? Can you feel that this was written by a real human being with a real beating heart? Can you feel it? And when I sent that email out, I had no idea what was gonna happen, John. I got

Ryan Levesque (14:51.38)

More response from that email than anything that I’d sent in probably months, as long as I can remember. And it was the full range. Some people applauded it. Good for you. That’s amazing. I want to do this. some people used it as a way to blackmail me, you know. Hey, well, if that’s the case, then I want a refund for everything that I’ve ever bought, you know, years and years into the past, like crazy things like that. People said some things that I’m not gonna repeat out loud.

You know, but way the way I describe it is people will confuse vulnerability with weakness and they will weaponize shame and guilt to coerce you to crumble. They will try to get you to fold. Oftentimes because it’s because it’s something that they’re dealing with internally themselves.

John Jantsch (15:37.658)

I was gonna I was gonna say my mom used to always say, Well, that’s probably more their problem than yours.

Ryan Levesque (15:42.683)

It’s very perceptive. When you’re in that moment, though, it is still hard when you’re people are telling you to crawl in a hole and die for what it is that you’re doing. but I’ll tell you, it was the mo the most liberating thing that I’ve done. And this was all almost two and a half years ago. And every single week since then, without missing a single week, I’ve personally written by hand myself an email, often two to four thousand words, deeply researched, very transparent, that’s come directly from me.

And I’ve had more opportunity come from doing just that one thing than anything else I’ve done in my business in the last 20 years.

John Jantsch (16:19.899)

So back back to the book. the book’s core claim is that the market will pay a premium for real. but I can hear a lot of business owners say, Okay, that’s great. What’s the mechanism? Like, you know, real’s a word that everybody banters around, but like what’s the mechanism? You know, is it trust? Is it scarcity? Is it something else?

Ryan Levesque (16:39.202)

Yeah, there are a few different dimensions at play. And we’ve got look, we’ve got a short amount of time, and I want to try to unpack this as much as I can. I’ll give you one thing to really anchor around. It’s a concept that I describe in the book as the provenance premium. So provenance is a fancy word that comes from the art world. It basically is a way to trace back a piece of work to the creator of that work. And there’s a story I tell in the book about a painting called Salvador Mundi, which was purchased at an estate sale by a consortium of art dealers for something like $10,000.

They did a bunch of research on the piece of art and found out that it was actually created by Leonardo da Vinci. And a few years later, they brought it to auction at Christie’s. And the same piece of art that they bought for $10,000 from an anonymous artist, once it was attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, sold for $450 million. And I that’s an extreme example, but it illustrates the point and hopefully is a memorable story that you’ll remember after this conversation.

That when you can attribute the work that you’re doing to a real life that’s actually been lived and work that’s gone into it, it elevates the value of that work. It’s in part the reason why Steinway pianos sell for the what they sell for. Because Steinway has done a fantastic job, not only creating a great product, but documenting. There’s a whole documentary that Steinway put out where you can see what goes into making the piano. And you think, well, gosh, it’s, it’s, it’s, of course it’s worth that.

It’s why people will pay a premium for food that’s raised by actual farmers down the road as opposed to buying it at the grocery store. Because they know the farmers, they know the farm, they know the story behind it. So the practical move here for all of us, no matter what type of work you’re in, if you’re in a white-collar profession, a blue collar profession, if you do work with your hands, if you do work with your mind, is to build in public, to document your process, to document your thinking about what you’re actually thinking about. Because people care not just about the what that it is that you’re selling.

They care about the how in terms of how it’s made and the who. Who is the person behind that? And by telling the right story and sharing this, divulging this, taking people behind the scenes, people will pay a premium for that thing. In my book, I’ll give you one last example. I decided to hand illustrate every illustration inside the book. And I know that some people were gonna doubt that I actually hand illustrated the book. And here’s just a like a page inside the book with some of the quotes.

John Jantsch (19:01.527)

Mm. Beautiful.

Ryan Levesque (19:02.732)

And so what I did is I put a camera over my desk and I did a time-lapse video of drawing every illustration by hand. When people see that, it just is a proxy, an indicator that care and love and attention went into the making of this thing. And just that data point alone, doesn’t it make you believe that wow, a lot of effort went into creating this? And people value that.

John Jantsch (19:10.854)

Yes.

Ryan Levesque (19:29.518)

So when people see the provenance where something comes from, they will pay a premium for that product. So ask yourself, how can you document your process? How can you take people behind the scenes what it is that you do? How can you show the parts that nobody else, no other competitor of yours, shows how the sausage is made, so to speak? So people see the value in what it is that they’re actually getting.

John Jantsch (19:51.826)

All right, I’ve got one final question. This one’s more of a personal interest question. And this doesn’t really show up in your book, but I suspect you have an opinion on this. How important do you believe it is, particularly for entrepreneurs that might spend eight, nine hours a day just on a computer, you know, in the digital world, you know, doing all the stuff that we do today in businesses? How important do you think it is for them to have an analog outlet to do something with their hands to

you know, build furniture to whatever, play the guitar, whatever it is that that that is is more analog thought.

Ryan Levesque (20:27.596)

Yeah, it’s Rabbi Heschel has this line that if you work with your mind, Sabbath with your hands.

John Jantsch (20:38.363)

Yeah.

Ryan Levesque (20:39.852)

And I think for those of us who are knowledge workers, for those of us who spend time in front of a computer, we have to find an outlet that reconnects us to our body, that reconnects us to the analog, that reconnects us to the physical world, because that’s exactly what we’re losing. as I write in the book, there are trillion dollar technology companies that will not stop until every moment of human attention has been consumed and monetized, including yours.

John Jantsch (21:04.517)

Yeah. Yeah, I I I marvel at the aggressiveness of Facebook to try to get me to come back to the platform. I mean it’s unbelievable. and it’s yeah, I’m glad they’re I’m glad they’re facing some some blowback. we’ll see we’ll see if it, you know, does anything or if they’ll find another way around that.

Well, Ryan, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. is there any place you’d invite people to connect you to connect with you or to certainly to find out more about Return to Real?

Ryan Levesque (21:37.154)

Yeah, the the best place to learn more about the book, Return to Real, is return to RealBook.com. when you go there, you’ll see all the different formats and cool bonuses that you get access to. And I’m excited to share this with the world. I think it’s an incredibly practical book for anybody who’s sort of been in this tension of how much of my business do I abdicate to AI? What do I keep real? How does this affect my personal life? How does this affect my kids?

And how does this affect my business and the work that I’m putting out into the world?

John Jantsch (22:12.721)

Well we I look forward to depending upon when you’re listening to this, the book will be out and available everywhere. We we have ordered copies ourselves to give give to my team. Awesome. Well I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Ryan Levesque (22:28.151)

Awesome. Thanks, Sean.