SHOWNOTES
If you have been following the buzz around Matt Shumer's viral article "Something Big Is Happening," you have probably noticed it sparked a massive debate. Some people are panicking. Others are rolling their eyes. In this episode, instead of picking a side, I break down all of the major counter-arguments, and share the surprising common ground where everyone actually agrees.
What emerged is more useful than any single hot take. Whether you lean toward the "sky is falling" camp or the "it's all hype" crowd, the real gold lives in the middle. And that is exactly what this episode is about.
In this episode, I cover:
The four points of agreement across Shumer, Gary Marcus, Ben Bentzin, Jeremy Kahn, and other experts
Why even the harshest critics are not telling you to ignore AI
How to use the "one hour a day" rule as a practical professional development strategy
What a week of daily AI experimentation actually looks like for a business owner
Why AI's emerging "taste and judgment" capability should get your attention
The Gen X advantage when it comes to working with AI tools
I also share my own experience with AI demonstrating something that felt like genuine insight, not just pattern matching, and why I am no longer sure that "nuance jobs" are as safe as we think.
This episode is designed to cut through the noise and give you a clear, practical path forward, no matter where you fall in the AI debate.
Try the one hour a day challenge for just one week and come tell me what you discover. DM me on Instagram at @jen_lehner I genuinely want to hear about it.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01.820] Hey, guys. It’s Gary Vaynerchuk. You’re listening to the Front Row Entrepreneur podcast with our girl, Jen
[00:00:10.400] Hey everybody, nice to see you. Thanks for joining me today. So unless you have been completely unplugged from the internet for the past couple of weeks, you have probably seen the buzz around a viral article by a guy named Matt Shuhamer. Humor.
Read more...
[00:00:29.000] And the name of the article is called something big is happening. I highly recommend that you read it. It's been viewed at this point at the time of this recording over 80 million times on X. You can't turn on the TV without seeing him doing the circuit of all the morning shows and Sunday shows talking about it. Fortune magazine indicated it, it has absolutely stirred the pot.
[00:01:01.120] So if you haven't read it, here's the short version. Schumer is the CEO of an AI company called Other side AI, and he compares this moment in AI to February 2020, right before COVID hit, when most people had no idea what was about to happen. And he says that AI can now do his entire job autonomously better than he can. And he warns that this is coming for everybody else's jobs too. Law, finance, medicine, marketing, you name it.
[00:01:35.940] And he says he thinks it's going to happen within one to five years. So it is a bold article for sure, and it has generated a ton of responses. So On the one side, you have people who read it and they're basically running for the hills. And on the other side, you have some really smart, very credible people who are pushing back hard. Gary Marcus, who is an AI researcher and a well-known AI skeptic, called it weaponized hype.
[00:02:07.790] And Ben Benson, spelled B-E-N-T-Z-I-N, who teaches executives how to use AI, said, that the facts are solid, but the conclusions are a leap. And Jeremy Cahn, who is the AI editor at Fortune, and literally wrote a book about AI transforming work, said that Schumer is directionally right, but his tone is fear mongering based on flawed assumptions. So where do I land on all of this? Honestly, I guess I'm somewhere in the middle, maybe a little tilted towards Schumer's perspective. But I think the middle is where obviously, and most things, the most practical strategy lives for people like us, business owners, entrepreneurs, professionals who are trying to figure out what to actually do with all of this.
[00:03:02.230] So today, I don't want to spend our time trying to prove one side right and the other side wrong. Instead, I want to do something that I think is way more valuable. Find where all of these articles, Schumer's original piece, and then all of the counterarguments, I went to find like the most powerful counterarguments I could find, and then see where do they intersect. What does everybody actually agree on? Because I think that's the real goal.
[00:03:32.170] That's the central in all of this noise, right? And I have three big takeaways that I want to share with you. If you're looking for a quick way to get up to speed on AI without the confusion, consider taking Jen Lehner's $47 AI masterclass at frontrowaimasterclass.com Now back to the show. Okay, so I went down the rabbit hole for you. I read everything and when you put all these articles side by side, something really interesting emerges.
[00:04:03.080] Despite all the disagreement, there are four things that everybody seems to agree on. Number one, AI is genuinely powerful and it is getting more powerful at a shocking speed. Even the biggest critics are not saying these tools are useless. I mean, nobody could say they're useless, right? Gary Marcus, who is probably the most vocal AI skeptic out there, actually admitted in his critique that something has changed recently.
[00:04:30.030] He said you can, you really can let things rip more in these most recent systems. And Ben Benson, who wrote one of the best counterarguments, says flat out, these tools are genuinely powerful and getting stronger. Jeremy Khan literally wrote an entire book predicting AI would massively transform knowledge work. So the debate isn't whether AI is powerful. Everybody knows that it is and agrees that it is.
[00:04:59.450] The debate is about how fast and how far the disruption will go. Number two, everybody agrees that dismissing AI as a fad is a huge mistake. Schumer obviously believes this, but so do the people pushing back on him. Benson says to avoid both panic and dismissal, and even Marcus, who calls the essay hype, is not telling people to ignore AI. He's telling them to be skeptical of the hype, which is different.
[00:05:29.070] So the consensus is clear here, sticking your head in the sand is not a strategy, period. All right, number three, everybody agrees you need to start engaging with these tools now. Schumer says, spend an hour a day. Benson says, and I'm quoting him directly here, anyone in a knowledge work profession who hasn't spent serious time with the current generation of AI tools is falling behind. He also says, and I agree, that the $20 a month subscription to Claude or ChatGPT is the best professional development investment available right now.
[00:06:07.430] The people pushing back on Schumer are not telling you to wait. They're telling you to learn without panicking. There's a difference. And what are we on? Number four, significant transformation is coming.
[00:06:21.270] The real debate is about speed and messiness. Schumer says one to five years, massive disruption. The critics say it will be slower, more gradual, more uneven. They point to historical examples. ATMs didn't eliminate bank tellers.
[00:06:38.190] Spreadsheets didn't make accountants obsolete. Self-driving cars were supposed to be everywhere by now, but they're still mostly in testing. And those are fair points. Real-world adoption is messy. There's regulation, we hope.
[00:06:54.400] Liability, compliance, institutional inertia, all of that slows stuff down. But here's how I think about it. Whether it is a tidal wave or a rising tide, the water level is going up. And I would rather be the person who learned to swim early than the person who waited to see how high it would get. Okay, so with that common ground established, let me share my three big takeaways, the things that I think really matter for you.
[00:07:26.600] My first takeaway is this, thank God for the wake up call. Honestly, I'm really so happy that Matt Schumer wrote this article because there's people in my life who are finally paying attention. Even with all of the, like in my personal life, right? Like beyond, obviously professionally, I talk about this all the time. And then in my personal life, people ask me, what I think.
[00:07:51.300] And if I told them what I really think, I'm afraid I would sound insane. And kind of that's how Schumer opens up the article. He says, like, look, people ask me and I don't want to freak them out, so I just say, yeah, yeah, AI is not going to take your job. But now I think it's time to really be honest. So I just think his article was Hypey or not, it was a wake up call that I think a lot of people really needed.
[00:08:20.790] I have seen so many smart, successful people in my own circles who were basically treating AI like it was a cute fat, something for tech bros and teenagers not relevant to their coaching business or their consulting practice or their manufacturing business or their therapy practice or their local store. They're just being so dismissive. And the other thing that the article talks about, which is so true, is that a lot of people tried out chat GPT in 2023, 2024, and they thought it was stupid and, you know, they saw it hallucinate and then they walked away. But I'm saying, and he said in his article, that if you haven't, I would say in the last month engaged with the major AI platforms, you really have no idea where we are right now. And this article, because it was so provocative, because it compared AI to that moment in COVID, it broke through that wall of dismissiveness.
[00:09:21.420] It got people thinking and paying attention. And what I mean by comparing it to COVID, as I said earlier, it's like when COVID first came and we heard, we saw on the news that there was some stuff going down, in Asia in February. We just didn't take it that seriously. And then the next thing you know, everything shut down just that quickly in March. And I thought it kind of feels that way to me, too.
[00:09:49.960] So I've had more conversations in these last two weeks with friends and colleagues who were previously ignoring AI than I literally have had in the last two years. I bet 10 different people have texted me the article, Schumer's article, in, like, when it got, like, within two days, I had 10 different people text it to me, and suddenly they're engaged. So I think that is definitely a win. Look, the worst outcome here isn't that some people got a little scared by an article. Okay.
[00:10:22.440] The, the worst outcome is that people keep sleepwalking through the biggest technological shift. Since the internet. And if Schumer's article shook even a fraction of those people awake, then it did its job and I'm personally grateful for it. Takeaway number two is that one hour a day rule that he talked about. I think that's absolute gold.
[00:10:44.280] It's something I have always, not always, I mean, since I've been talking about and teaching AI, it's something I also recommend. It's practical and I just think it's a powerful piece of advice, because here's the thing. The critics aren't arguing against this. Nobody's saying, no, don't bother learning AI. Everybody agrees this is the move.
[00:11:05.780] And I think about it as professional development, not Panic preparation, not doomsday prepping, professional development. The same way you might spend time reading industry news. Or listening to a podcast that you love or taking a course, you should be spending time getting your hands dirty, really dirty with AI. Like I tell all my students, push all the buttons, click on all the places. You can't really mess it up.
[00:11:35.310] Just go in there and ask all the questions. So what does an hour a day actually look like? Well, let me help make it practical for you. And this is obviously just a template just to get your your juices flowing. Monday, take a report or an analysis that you normally spend hours on and spend an hour trying to get Claude or ChatGPT to do it.
[00:11:59.370] See what happens. Just plug that bad boy in there and start talking with the content.
[00:12:06.010] On Tuesday, give it some messy data and ask it to turn it into a spreadsheet, or better yet, take an existing spreadsheet that's been a mess for forever that you keep dumping things into, and ask the AI to clean it up for you. Wednesday, use it to brainstorm a month's worth of content ideas for your business. On Thursday, give it your website copy and ask how it could be clearer and more compelling. On Friday, try a brand new AI tool that you've never touched before just to explore. Go check out Manus, go check out Genspark.
[00:12:42.720] Click on the templates that they have. Almost all of these platforms know that people sometimes have a hard time just getting started, knowing what to ask, knowing what to do, and they have like sort of preloaded buttons for you to click on. Start there. And this brings me to takeaway number three. This one is a little more fuzzy, but I think it might be the most important.
[00:13:09.220] Or it feels important to me. So Schumer talked about AI starting to demonstrate something like taste and judgment. And I have to be honest with you, I know what he's talking about. Here's what he said. He described the latest AI models making decisions that feel like judgment.
[00:13:26.580] That was a quote. He said they show, quote, something that looked like taste, an intuitive sense of what the right call was. Not just the technically correct one. He gave this example of AI building an app, then opening it, testing it, clicking through the buttons, and deciding on its own that it didn't like how something looked or felt, so it went back and changed it without being told to. Now, a lot of people jumped on this as being ridiculous.
[00:13:57.920] The pushback was basically, oh, he's just a coder. Coding is all logic. Of course AI can do that, but my job requires nuance. My job requires human understanding. My job requires taste.
[00:14:12.090] And I get that instinct. I really do. I used to say the same thing, like up to just maybe a month ago, but I'm not so sure about that anymore. I was working with Claude on a piece of content for my business, and I gave it some context about my audience and my brand voice, and it came back with a suggestion that was so It was so surprisingly on point, so nuanced in how it understood the emotional tone that I was going for that I actually sat back and I just said, huh, it wasn't just correct, it was insightful. It felt like working with a really, really sharp collaborator who just got it, who got me.
[00:14:58.640] And today, actually, before recording, I was working on a report for a client and I told Manus, M-A-N-U-S, it's one of my very favorite AI platforms lately. I told it to delete the first part of a sentence and it replied and said, well, actually, if I do that, it sort of messes up the rest of your paragraph. So let me try this instead. And it did its thing. And what it did was so much better than what I was thinking.
[00:15:28.190] So it just sort of took the lead. It was like, yeah, okay, I know you want me to delete that part, but you know what? If I delete that, the rest of your paragraph is gonna sound weird. So hold on just a second. I'm just gonna try this one little thing for a second real quick right here.
[00:15:41.390] And honestly, it really was. It was so much better. And if this is where we are now, even however imperfectly, Even if this is just a glimmer, what's it gonna look like in a year? In two years? Heck, two months!
[00:15:57.640] Because in the last two months so much has happened that I still don't really feel like I have a grip on it all. How could anybody have a grip on it? I'm struggling just to keep up. So this is not about saying AI is sentient feeling. It's not about saying it has a soul.
[00:16:15.120] It's about acknowledging that there's an emergent capability showing up that is really hard to define, but it's really hard to ignore. And I think the people who are dismissing it, the people who are saying, well, my job is safe because it requires human touch, I think they might be making the same mistake that people made when they dismissed the internet. I mean, I remember when the internet came, or no, let's talk about Amazon. Amazon came and I was like, that is the stupidest thing. No one is ever going to buy books on the internet.
[00:16:49.880] And by the way, here's something that I think about a lot. We, I mean, those of us who are Gen Xers, and most of my listeners are Gen Xers, we're seasoned communicators. We actually have an edge here. These AI systems are all about natural language. The better you are at articulating what you want at communicating clearly, at providing context, the more you can draw out these capabilities.
[00:17:17.070] That's really our superpower. We've been communicating professionally for decades now, and that experience matters more now than ever.
[00:17:27.710] So where does all of this leave us? Well, here's the bottom line, I think. Don't panic, but please don't be complacent. The future is not going to be AI versus humans. I mean, what do I know?
[00:17:42.730] I think the future is not going to be AI versus humans. It's going to be humans with AI. And the most valuable person in any room, in any business, in any industry, is going to be the one who knows how to leverage these tools to be smarter, faster, and more creative. Forget the debate about whether Matt Schumer is a prophet or a hype man. That's not your problem to solve.
[00:18:07.850] Focus on what everybody agrees on. This is a big deal. It's happening now and you need to get in the game. So here's my challenge to you. Try the one hour a day experiment just for one week.
[00:18:22.810] That's all I'm asking. Five hours total. See what you discover and then come tell me about it. I genuinely want to hear. You've got this.
[00:18:33.450] I'll see you next week.
