Higher Ed in the Age of AI: Rethinking Relevance & Results

Higher Ed in the Age of AI: Rethinking Relevance & Results

with Dr. Michael Hageloh & Dr. Bruce Fraser (Indian River State College)

Episode Summary

This week, Myles Biggs and Patrick Patterson sit down with two innovators who are shaping the future of higher education: Dr. Michael Hageloh and Dr. Bruce Fraser of Indian River State College in Florida.

Together, they discuss how AI is disrupting higher ed, not as a technology problem, but as a change management challenge. From Steve Jobs’ lessons at Apple to democratizing knowledge in the classroom, Michael and Bruce share their experiences leading transformation at scale.

They make the case that students are customers first, that knowledge is no longer scarce, and that AI, used wisely, can help colleges unlock creativity, adaptability, and epic wins for the next generation of learners.

If you care about innovation, the future of education, or how to lead through massive change, this conversation is packed with insights.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• How Apple’s product philosophy shaped Michael’s approach to education leadership
• Why “customers don’t know what they want” still applies to students in 2025
• The death of the click economy and what it means for marketers & schools
• How IRSC is using AI to move students from curiosity → enrollment → success
• The role of fidelity (taste, judgment, human refinement) in an AI-driven world
• Why higher education must shift from “knowledge scarcity” to AI-abundant, collaborative learning
• Predictions for the future: apprenticeships, stackable credentials, and billion-dollar one-person companies

Featured Guests

Dr. Michael Hageloh – VP of Marketing at Indian River State College, former Apple executive, author, and change leader.

Dr. Bruce Fraser – Faculty leader at IRSC with a background in psychology, epistemology, and AI research, specializing in organizational change and faculty development.

Learn more:

• Indian River State College - https://www.irsc.edu/
  
  
• IRSC AI Thought Leadership Article: The Death of the Click Economy - https://medium.com/@michaelhageloh/the-death-of-the-click-economy-how-ai-is-altering-human-agency-and-commerce-533e9ac6aeb4

Takeaways for Operators & Leaders

• AI adoption is a change management problem, not a tech problem. Leaders need to prepare their organizations for cultural and structural adaptation, not just tool rollouts.
• Democratization changes the business model. Just as iTunes democratized music, generative AI democratizes knowledge; leaders must rethink what unique value their institutions or companies add.
• Customers (and students) don’t always know what they want. Leaders must guide people through a journey, painting the vision before delivering the product.
• Entry-level work is evolving. Education and employers must fill the gap with apprenticeships and practical, AI-augmented learning to prepare talent for higher-value roles faster.

Connect With the Show

• Level Agency - https://www.level.agency/
• Patrick Patterson’s LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/pattersonwork/
• Myles Biggs’ LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mylesjbiggs/

How to Support the Show

• Subscribe so you never miss an episode.
• Share this episode with someone wrestling with GenAI adoption.
• Rate & review if it brings value, helps us reach more listeners!

Transcript

Patrick Patterson 0:00

aI can get us to the 80th percentile, but then humans need to take us from 80 to a hundred, and then that's where the real value is going to be. Right.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 0:06

Agree.

Myles Biggs 0:07

Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. My name is Miles Bigs and I'm here once again with my co-host Patrick Patterson. Since you're listening to this podcast, you need to know that we are driven by truth. Sometimes the hard truth. We believe it's imperative to be relentless for results because if you're not your competitor is we're obsessed with how to be better every day because that's what our customers deserve. And if you can set aside your ego, if you can truly be no ego, then we are the show to help you go all in because good enough isn't. Our guests today are at the forefront of AI and innovation within higher education, Dr. Michael Halo and Dr. Bruce Fraser, both from Indian River State College in Florida. Gentlemen, thanks for being here.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 0:49

Hey, thanks for having us.

Myles Biggs 0:51

So we're here to talk about Good Enough Isn't as the name of the podcast suggests, but before we get into all of that, I'd love to take a minute and just get to know both of you a little bit personally, your background. Obviously good enough isn't applies to, to all of our progressions in our career. Otherwise we would never leave our first job, right? Help walk us to the path that, walk us back to the path that led you where you're today. Bruce, we can start with you.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:15

Sure. Actually I'll go way back. Because something that came up before we started recording is interesting to me. I also have a background in psychology and it was when I was doing my honors thesis on the psychology of creativity that I got interested in the way matrix algebra intersects with, some of the work I was doing on creativity and that connects to large language models and to foundation models. I've been interested in the way we model and represent knowledge. My background through graduate school was really focused on the philosophy of language and the nature of knowledge. so my interest has really been in the physical substrate of knowledge, how the brain represents information. my focus has been on the development and use of artificial neural networks specifically around language production. So there are some commonalities to some of the background that was shared earlier. In the last few years, I've really focused on. Organizational change management because I've been in a role where I've been responsible for professional development for our faculty and staff as well, but primarily faculty. And with the rise of artificial intelligence, generative AI in particular, there's been an urgent need to get people upskilled, but also to really reorient them psychologically so that they're more receptive to what is a fundamentally disruptive technology, very powerful technology, but also culturally disruptive. So my background's in psychology, philosophy of language, an area called epistemology, which is the theory of knowledge, and that's intersected with some AI research over the years. And now I get to put that into practice here in my new role.

Patrick Patterson 3:02

That's super exciting. I am a firm believer that this isn't a technology problem. This is a change management problem,

Dr. Bruce Fraser 3:08

indeed.

Patrick Patterson 3:08

technology is creating a ta change management problem because it is moving so fast. And that's really exciting, but also maybe just a little bit terrifying as we try to organize groups of folks to get work done right. I'm very excited to jump into that with you.

Myles Biggs 3:23

Michael, how about you?

Dr. Michael Hageloh 3:26

So I've come to higher education late in career. I spent 22 years with Apple and I was there during the I Revolution. Actually sat next to an individual who said, why do we wanna keep 2000 songs in our pocket with this thing called an iPod? And the rest is history, if you will. Monumental change has been on my docket since I started working. And it's interesting, along with this, Bruce said where he came from and through I was gonna be a professional musician. I am a musician. I'm a drummer. The only thing that held me back from being a professional were the auditions, but I don't talk about that. the fact is that in my bestselling book, talking about rhythm and the rhythm of marketing and sales. Apple was a music company and understood its rhythm. This thing we call AI is a hyperscaler to that rhythm, to anyone's rhythm. Now everyone can be in this pool of what we call, say music, and that is my frame of reference. So I come to Indian River State College as not a change leader, but as somebody that looks at education differently. And the very first thing I told my team here is are customers before they become students. if we do not deal with them as customers in a traditional funnel, you name it, as we would as marketers and salespeople, everybody can buy education today. It is ubiquitous across the, you could be a student at Purdue and never been to Indiana. They are customers before they become students. And Bruce on the team is my eyes and ears of applying AI to bringing those customers through the full sales cycle to become students.

Patrick Patterson 5:25

love that. And in your background and in your history, Michael you worked for someone that kind of embodied good enough isn't right?

Dr. Michael Hageloh 5:31

For Steve,

Patrick Patterson 5:32

and so how did that ignite that fire under you and have you, it sounds like you have brought that experience through your whole career where you haven't settled, so what did you learn during that period of time?

Dr. Michael Hageloh 5:44

I would've settled to be a great musician. I thought I was, but that's again, a different story. For me, one of the salient comments that the late Steve Jobs told us inside was, customers don't know what they want. You have to take them on a mental journey. at the end of the journey, conveniently were our products. So this is the same view that I take in higher education, especially to an 18-year-old, especially an 18-year-old that has the world in front of them on a device, whether Android or hopefully iPhone, that they can see the world, but they don't know necessarily what they want. So some of the greatest applications that Bruce is working on in the team is this ability to coalesce one's what they want to do to set them on an academic direction, to open up their God-given talents. Stephen never settled. Never settled and that produced the products that are the most successful products in the consumer line today. Ever

Patrick Patterson 7:01

It's amazing. You were there during a very exciting time for sure.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 7:04

Challenging. I'll tell you what's challenging.

Patrick Patterson 7:06

That's where value is created in the hard work.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 7:08

I give you just a, just one snippet of challenge. I'll never forget. There were 40 products in the product line the late Mr. Jobs told us in a large group meeting, marketing, product managers, all the team that we're gonna do four products, two professional, two consumer, and someone decided to ask a question. Now, I'll tell you right now to ask rock stars questions. It's gonna piss off the rock star. It'll piss you off. But they did anyway. says. Jobs. What are gonna do with the other 40? How are you gonna reuse those resources? He suggested you get your resume ready.

Patrick Patterson 7:46

Wow. Straight to the point. Straight to the point. That's great. So Bruce and Michael, I've been in the education industry for 20 years. I've talked to hundreds of and universities. And I can say, any university would be lucky to have one of you on staff, let alone both of you. So I'm really excited to, to come in and talk about how you guys are bringing that be, before we do that. Michael, I'm gonna keep digging in on Apple because I think it's really interesting. I think it's a really interesting time to look back and post hoc rationalize and and say, what did we learn during those moments and how can we take those lessons that we learned during that time? But was there a specific moment at Apple where, fundamentally changed how you are doing your work today and how you are showing up every day with the university that you're working at.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 8:43

There, a compendium of that, but I can think of one or two times. One, I just spoke of this change from the customer doesn't know what they want,

Patrick Patterson 8:56

how does that show up for you?

Dr. Michael Hageloh 8:58

well, clearly, because we are having to take. Individuals that again, have this myriad of exposure to everything in the world through their devices, but sit back and go, okay, what do I want to do? They don't know they're a customer. They don't know what they want. They wanna buy into education. They want to become a student. But

Patrick Patterson 9:17

what, so tell me I am one of those. I don't know what I want, obviously. Just ask my wife, but what is the thing today that, they don't know that they want, but that they need, when it comes from an educational institute.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 9:30

I'm gonna let Bruce pick up on this because I think he has much more insight into that mind filtering. But from, again, my point of view as leading the marketing organization for 26,000 student institution couple hundred million dollars worth of revenue,$180 million foundation, and a president who says, education is business and business is education. For me, it is all about the funnel. I think that particularly ai, the one reason that Bruce is on the team is now let us take this this unique tool and help people understand their likes are and where they want to go. Bruce, I know you have some ideas here.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 10:18

Yeah I think that's a really important point. Customers don't know what they want because it's not just customers, it's people. We are beings that live by story, right? So the popular term is narrative. What's the narrative? If you're in marketing, you understand that the power of the story is going to shape lives, right? I think that we need to, in higher education, we definitely need to keep this in mind because historically we have lived by a fairly stable. Narrative about what education is, how it serves society, how it serves industry. And that story has served us well to the extent that life was fairly slow and predictable. we are not in an environment where life is slow and predictable. I think the emerging stories around AI are going to have to incorporate adaptability. Human agency, right? It's not that we want one story for everyone, such as you're going to get your degree and then you're going to become an attorney, or whatever it is, right? We want to empower people to discover their own stories, but we want to direct them in a responsible way, whether that's driving a story about what someone's ultimate job goal is, or what their academic program will be after they finish at our college, this type of thing. So human agency, encouraging people's creativity and their innovation helping them recognize that in conjunction with these new tool sets, these generative AI tool sets, they have more capacity than they've ever had before, but guiding them to see how to use this technology in a way that's effective, ethical and safe, right? In their own professional or academic interests.

Patrick Patterson 12:10

I love that. I'd love for you expand on that a little bit, but where do you view the university, the college's responsibility to the student to teach that or

Dr. Bruce Fraser 12:20

right.

Patrick Patterson 12:20

to them?

Dr. Michael Hageloh 12:21

Bruce, before you jump in there I've gotta say that is a seminal question and not just for us. I think across all industries, that is a very just important thing that one has to answer internally with a view of external. So just it is on, that is on my mind all the time in a

Patrick Patterson 12:40

It needs to.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 12:42

right? It has to be. So Bruce.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 12:44

Yeah, agreed. And I think where the question of responsibility is concerned, I'm of the opinion that higher education generally, and this is probably true of every business, needs to radically rethink what our responsibility is to our customers or to our students what services we are providing. This is an oversimplification, but I can give a glimpse into this. Higher education as a knowledge industry is built around the assumption that knowledge is scarce. That expertise is scarce. That knowledge is produced by individual human minds standing on the shoulders of giants, right? And the people who produce ideas own those ideas. This is an archaic vision of knowledge, right? It goes back to the enlightenment, right? It made sense then. But really.

Patrick Patterson 13:36

a stage, right?

Dr. Bruce Fraser 13:37

Ex e. Exactly. So now where are we? There is more information produced in any given day than the human mind could process in an entire lifetime. There is no way for us to build out on the frontier of knowledge, whether it's in physics or it's in psychology without assistance. The wonderful thing about generative AI in particular is the way it compacts information. It distills information as it allows us to bring different fields together and then build new knowledge on those structures in a way that we could never do before. The other thing is that. Generative ai makes expertise abundant. So what happens to institutions whose entire structure is built around this idea that there's a small group of experts? We defer to them. They have this commodity we call knowledge, and it's economically scarce and therefore. Valuable. All of that's blown apart. And to the question of what our responsibility is to our students, I think we need to rethink our industry around this idea that knowledge from here forward is always gonna be collab, collaborative, ai, augmented. It's always going to be abundant. What that means for our employees, our faculty, is that they need to think about what the human value is, that they contribute on top of that. And that's really around coaching and life skills. And that the interpersonal skills that are essential for helping our customers, our students, shape their own narrative in a responsible way does that.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 15:22

we lived a real life. This we lived this at Apple. In my tenure there, and it was real simple and it's a music analogy. You used to go to Walmart, maybe not you're younger, but purchase a cd and there was one song on the 12 that was decent. The rest of'em were throwaways that was counted, marketed and controlled by a label. The day after iTunes launched and the iPod launched, music became democratized immediately. There were many upstarts earlier, Napster, other things that didn't quite get there. But when you rap music in a product that was accessible, understandable, and had a real human interface, the rest is history. So to Bruce's point of democratization of knowledge, music, be. Music is now created by anyone, anywhere, anytime, and delivered anywhere, anytime. So if you think you have a song in you, don't have to have an a and r person with a cigarette decide, yeah, I like you. I don't like you.

Patrick Patterson 16:42

And

Dr. Michael Hageloh 16:42

to a and r.

Patrick Patterson 16:44

no, and I think that's a really valuable point, right? I think you combine two things together. The to a large audience through social media. And, that's really democratized distribution. And then access to tools that can really help you as a human, get your creativity expressed, generative ai. And you combine those two things together and all of a sudden what I believe is we're gonna enter a golden age, a renaissance of creativity. And, it's the opposite of what the doomsayers are saying, right? Everything's gonna get shut down. Stop being a graphic designer, it's gonna go away. Stop. Sunu is doing Sunu 4.5 is amazing. You can't be a music producer anymore. There's literally AI albums getting released that are topping the charts, right? And I don't personally care an AI made it or you made it, Michael, I'm sure you're a great drummer and that's phenomenal, but

Dr. Michael Hageloh 17:44

again, if I was, I wouldn't be here,

Patrick Patterson 17:46

If it sounds great to me, I'm excited about it. And I think we're gonna have more and more people that figure that out. Bruce, you said something, that kind of the human in all of this, right?

Dr. Bruce Fraser 17:59

Yeah.

Patrick Patterson 17:59

really focusing on, not the negative of what's going away, but the positive of okay, so how can I really lean into the human element? And I'd be interested to hear your opinion. There's an article a few weeks ago, people quitting Harvard and UPenn and and quitting school and saying AI is just gonna take my job, so why am I even paying to go to school anymore? What do you say to someone like that when they come to you?

Dr. Bruce Fraser 18:25

I'd say that they haven't used ai. They haven't used generative ai. One of the.

Patrick Patterson 18:30

headlines, on social media.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 18:33

I don't see us shifting away from human expertise. It's the value proposition around human expertise that is shifting what's the role of my expertise in my area, given the AI augmented world that's emerging. and so what I would say first to that person is. I think if you use, you learn to use the technology effectively in the context of your area of interest, you will discover that there is a really important role for human beings to play in deciding what questions are relevant to ask what application seems most pertinent to further your vision or your narrative to evaluate the output. At this point, this seems a little bit pedestrian to those of us who have been using these technologies for a while. We always check the output and we apply our expertise in that context to determine what's working, what isn't, and so on. I think, this does get to a question around change management that is important as well. And that is, I think a lot of people who might say things such as, I should just drop out of Harvard because AI is gonna take my job. not only have they not. Explored that tool in actual practice. Bear with me. I lost my train of thought there. I was gonna go down a different a different road. It'll come back to me.

Patrick Patterson 19:56

beat.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 19:57

But I think that change management piece I wanted to get to was this, we have a very pervasive view of our relationship to technology computing technology. And that is that it's deterministic. The numbers you punch into the calculator, you get the same output for the functions you use for the same input. Two plus two is always gonna equal four, right? And so we approach technology as if it's going to mechanize. And ai, generative AI is not that type of technology, right? So if I, as a student think, artificial intelligence, generative AI is going to be like a very smart calculator, and it's going to replace the, my job I will have one attitude toward it. However, if I recognize that generative AI is actually much more like working with a human intelligence, it's probabilistic it's going to be creative, it's going to have tremendous strengths, it's going to have unexpected, weak spots and blind spots. My role as a human being is especially important as I relate to

Patrick Patterson 21:05

hundred percent

Dr. Bruce Fraser 21:06

So that's a huge cultural shift that I think needs to take place, not just in higher education, but virtually every industry.

Patrick Patterson 21:15

And I think, we're moving from the subject matter expert to the subject matter editor with expertise.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 21:20

That.

Patrick Patterson 21:21

It's a really interesting thing. And I heard this quote and I love it, right? In talking about marketing specifically he was saying, I think there's a lot of marketers because of the past 15 years that are really good at data analysis. And that's great there. We have an abundance of marketers that are good at data analysis. What we are lacking is marketers with good taste.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 21:43

There you go.

Patrick Patterson 21:45

and I think, extrapolate that across every single information, knowledge job. And you think about the subject matter it's the human in the loop that's adding the value, right? So maybe instead of actually hiring someone who's good at Photoshop, I'm gonna hire an art history major,

Dr. Bruce Fraser 22:08

That's an interesting point, and I have heard it said that we're going to see a revival of the humanities of English literature history, for that reason, that taste and vision become more important in this context, Michael.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 22:24

This is I never thought about this, but having lived something that is absolutely tangential to this I can remember at Ample Steve's return, and the first thing he did was he killed all the spec sheet. Oh my God, how am I gonna sell without a spec sheet? Someone actually asked that and his response was, if you're selling bits, bytes, and megahertz, you're not selling emotion and people buy on emotion.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 22:54

Yeah.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 22:54

And we literally eliminated spec sheets and what did we build? What did we hire? We hired an unboxing specialist so that the dev and to this day, apple is the reigning king of unboxing

Patrick Patterson 23:08

Every video, they'll open something up oh, this is like opening up an Apple product. Like it's literally set the standard, right?

Dr. Michael Hageloh 23:14

to does not parallel exactly what you

Patrick Patterson 23:16

Yeah.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 23:16

We're, so the college is a member of the Association of National Advertisers and A. one of the few colleges there. We go to all the events. Jenna, matter of fact, who she came from your firm and she now works for us.

Patrick Patterson 23:29

Very sad to lose Jenna, by the way,

Myles Biggs 23:31

Yes.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 23:31

we're very happy to have hired her. So there,

Patrick Patterson 23:34

amazing.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 23:35

Amazing individual.

Patrick Patterson 23:37

at for the rest of this.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 23:38

Go ahead, be mad at you. And I'm sure, we'll, you will edit this in post, so I look bad. But anyway the point about this is that at the, in association of National Advertisers, you can really see companies and corporations and entities in marketing that are always in the data breakouts. How is this going to solve my marketing problem with numerics very few in the i with philosophical, softer side of, so quick example, there was a, there's a lady there that runs a she's executive vice president of very large medical. A products company and her talk about AI was amazing in that they're built a an in-house model that takes all their PhD research and information and converts it to words people understand that are gonna make a buying decision. Someone asks, what are the metrics on that? She says, I don't care what the metrics are. What I care is that we can actually viable technical data sheets that make sense to people.

Patrick Patterson 24:54

Yeah.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 24:55

there you are,

Patrick Patterson 24:56

And the ability to do some of these things right. To, and I'll take it back to, something everyone can recognize. You not, you might not be able to produce music, good music versus bad music when you hear it.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 25:08

Drummer shows up or the bass player shows up. So I would've been a bass guitar player, but I'm just not that weird.

Patrick Patterson 25:15

I was best friends with a basis for a while so I know exactly what you're talking about. And the, I think, having the ability to know good from bad and then knowing enough about that topic to say, this is how I could make it better, right? Knowing that it's not quite good enough yet, and this is what I can do, this is the human element I can put on top of this to make it great, I think is really exciting. And it, I think, Bruce in general, like. How do you, with that knowledge that you have about that, how do you redesign what has what the Socratic method, right?

Dr. Bruce Fraser 25:54

Yeah.

Patrick Patterson 25:55

literally has been around for thousands of years.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 25:58

Small lift, Bruce, small lift.

Patrick Patterson 25:59

yeah, just how do you do that and how do you start doing that and how do you go through the change management

Dr. Bruce Fraser 26:04

so I don't think we start at this level, right? It's one thing for us to say, taste, judgment, aesthetic judgment, narrative structure. This is where the human element comes in. That's not empowering for people who are facing anxiety and a lack of. about generative ai, right? And so I think it's natural to start where people are, which is, okay, I wanna do something with this tool. I know everybody's talking about it. How do I use it? it's good to start at, in that organic way where you have people think about their current workflows they go through the process of identifying what's important. I'd say that the first part of the change management piece is a valuation of their own value hierarchies, their own structure. What are your values and how are they expressed in what you do at work every day? Then going through a process of really making the tasks that, or implicit knowledge that they used every day, explicit by developing, an SOP, just a flow chart of what their job is, what piece of their job they. with ai, that's a good concrete place to start. What's important to you and what do you do? And then engage them around the tools that knowledge front of mind, right? Because it encourages a kind of agency around AI adoption that makes sense at that level. You want to push people or encourage people to get to that point where they really understand, look, my own creative and aesthetic judgements are really what's important in this context. But you have to empower them a bit at a time, familiarize them with the tools, encourage innovation, encourage groups of people, working units to be more innovative by incentivizing. Playful engagement with the technology, reduce the risk of making a mistake. This is important in education, right? Because so many of our customers who become students are phobic about not getting it right. We really have to encourage this idea that this is a playful context. We're all in this together. We're exploring how these tools are gonna reshape what we do, small, and then build to that broader

Patrick Patterson 28:29

I love you.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 28:30

perspective.

Patrick Patterson 28:30

I love that in general, right? This is John Kotter in a nutshell in Step change management process, right? Which I'm a huge fan of, but you starting with the wfam, the what's in it for me,

Dr. Bruce Fraser 28:41

Yeah.

Patrick Patterson 28:42

And you gotta create that urgency, and that's what you're talking about right at the But then it's also and as I've done this through, I do master classes and talks with executive teams and universities and things like that. It's really about also like, how do we generate some short-term wins, right?

Dr. Bruce Fraser 28:58

Exactly.

Patrick Patterson 28:59

and

Dr. Bruce Fraser 28:59

Yes.

Patrick Patterson 28:59

that's really important. As soon as people get a taste, like you can have the mind blowing moment where it's oh my God, I didn't know this existed and this is phenomenal. And that should help create some urgency. then you have so that your mind is blown, but then it's okay, that's great. That's hype though, right? Then it has to be translated into real results. For you.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 29:21

Yes.

Patrick Patterson 29:21

I've actually found, starting on a personal task starting on a business task actually can help with some of that, right? Taking a picture of your food and saying, gimme the macro nutrient breakdown of this. Or doing, helping you with recipes over the weekend I did a entire hibachi dinner at my house, right? And I had it research all of the top recipes, and then I had it break down based on what I had. I told her, these are the ingredients I have, and this is the equipment I have, and this is who I'm doing it for. And it created me a timeline of when I needed to do stuff. I just literally just walked through that timeline. Imagine trying to

Dr. Bruce Fraser 29:57

Yes.

Patrick Patterson 29:58

It's figuring out what those short term, those small wins are that. can latch onto be excited about,'cause that's gonna build that momentum, right? That's gonna

Dr. Bruce Fraser 30:08

Yes.

Patrick Patterson 30:09

that momentum, which is gonna help you institute that change at a larger level.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 30:12

Which is why this is such a sensitive period in terms of change management, because if you don't have those small victories, you can kill people's interest and optimism about AI just like that.

Patrick Patterson 30:27

A hundred percent.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 30:28

Yeah.

Patrick Patterson 30:29

think about two and a half years ago, ChatGPT PT rolls out the three, five or whatever it was, right? It was terrible, right? It was bad. Now I'm looking at it, I'd been playing with it for a year and a half in the playground earlier, and I knew what it was good at and what it was bad at. But someone who just went into it and expecting it to be Google, right?

Dr. Bruce Fraser 30:47

Right.

Patrick Patterson 30:47

And it took, it was literally nine to 12 months after that, I was having conversations with folks like, yeah, I tried that chat GPT thing. It wasn't very good.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 30:58

Yeah.

Patrick Patterson 30:58

that one moment, it was one thing in Chachi pt they're like, AI is a fad for the next 12 months. It's wild.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 31:06

It is.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 31:07

there are always folks like that. Who is the one that said, the iPhone wouldn't make it? I won't mention his name. He's a fairly famous late Harvard professor now, but there are always people like that.

Patrick Patterson 31:17

And I think

Dr. Michael Hageloh 31:18

is more

Patrick Patterson 31:20

it is. And I think it also, you've talked a few times about a change in mindset. Like this is another moment in time where you can't afford to think like that, right?

Dr. Bruce Fraser 31:32

Right.

Patrick Patterson 31:32

be against something for 12 months. We have a pretty standard rule. If you have a good idea and you went and tried it and it didn't work, try it again in three months because it will probably work with the new

Dr. Bruce Fraser 31:43

Yeah.

Patrick Patterson 31:43

right? And just that, that mindset is different.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 31:46

Adaptability.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 31:47

go.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 31:48

I was just gonna say, adaptability is such a crucial skill, right? If we can call it a skill because, we're also used to change management as being this transitional period from one stable state through disruption to another stable state. missing here is that second stable state with the rise of generative ai and its ubiquity. The rate of change is constantly increasing. And so I think people have to become much more accepting of change. They have to adjust their threshold for chaos, right? This is the way it's going to be and that's what we call cognitive flexibility, and we can cultivate that, but that's what we need to be cultivating in our employees, in our students, and so forth.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 32:36

So I'm gonna put on my non working at a college hat and go back to my corporate America hat. And colleges have, the universities have an interesting group of things called faculty. And here at the college faculty pushed back, and Bruce was very much involved in this. This is how he and I got together, pushed back on the use of a single product called Grammarly.

Patrick Patterson 33:00

I use Grammarly.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 33:01

And what we had to do was a frame shift.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 33:07

Yeah.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 33:07

So Grammarly went from their cheating with it, and there will always be somebody it's a 24 hour, seven day a week coach. We are one of the very few institutions across America that Grammarly is available to every faculty, student, staff

Patrick Patterson 33:24

Oh, I love that. That would get me to sign up. Just knowing that would be enough. We need to get that on your website somewhere.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 33:29

It's that we are also the adobe shop, a wolf from shop and some others. But to that end I think that frame shift and bringing people along, I don't know. Bruce, you're much closer to the faculty. Are, is there that pushback now?

Dr. Bruce Fraser 33:45

I think there's a growing realization of the inevitability of AI in every aspect of our lives. I it's very hard to tell because of that growing realization. How many faculty harbor a kind of quiet resistance or resentment to.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 34:02

disdain?

Dr. Bruce Fraser 34:02

But there that's okay. That's to be expected and we'll find that in other industries as well, I'm sure. The key is to make sure that the surrounding social infrastructure is such that people are empowered. They can discover ways to use tools like Grammarly for the benefit of their students or their customers, and they will come around to a much more constructive orientation.

Patrick Patterson 34:27

The argument I make, and, I have been watching this happen across corporate and universities for the past three years, like the calculator was invented. Everyone's using the abacus. And we're like, sorry, you're To use the calculator.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 34:41

Right.

Patrick Patterson 34:42

And it I'm like, what? What's going on? Saying that out loud? You're like that's ridiculous. I can't believe anyone would think like that. They're literally corporations still today, it's 2025, right? There's corporations still today that say you can't use generative AI to do your job. And you know what people are doing? Turn off wifi, go on their cell phone, use it on their cell phone, and they're using it anyway. Now that gap is that used to be a huge gap. It used to be, 85% of the people used it and only 30% were allowed. Now it's 60 70% are allowed, and now 90% use it. So the gap is getting smaller. But like what a crazy thing. To have to even have that argument Hey, we should be using the calculator guys. We should throw out these abacuses, right?

Dr. Michael Hageloh 35:26

And I think to your audience, that's a super important point. At a leadership level, you've got to be able to see around the corner. Because, and we'll use this example, Bruce knows this here at the institution, we're a fully site licensed wolf from Shop Mathematica is available to every student, faculty and staff at no cost. And you go Michael Mathematica is for Princeton engineering students. Wrong Mathematica does the eight times three to the cosign of four. Whatever it does. The mechanics, what are we teaching? How to set the problem up, how to understand the critical thinking necessary. The work of the product isn't calculation, the critical thinking path.

Patrick Patterson 36:19

Hundred percent.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 36:20

Our students are ones that are, the welding department we teach we have workforce. Part of our program here. We have associates and we have a limited number of baccalaureates. We do no graduate work at the institution, the welders are using it for simulation. Because by the time you get down to the point of using the actual devices, it's for, so it is expensive. The welding time takes up. You can only have so many. So it is that I just wanna say one thing about something you said earlier, and I don't want to forget this point. And Bruce and I authored an article on this. You talked about Google and the relationship to chat and such. It is our contention that the click economy is dead because, and we wrote an article, it's on it's it's out there everywhere.

Patrick Patterson 37:11

It's why you're on the podcast.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 37:12

Oh, okay. I hopefully you believe what we say is that I no longer, and I think you'll see this with Apple intelligence too, as it's part of the new devices coming out, that no longer am I querying Google about something and then Google is collecting data on me to sell to marketers to then for fortunately or unfortunately try to sell to me. My agent, my AI agent is out there collecting for me. You don't know who this is as a marketer, the click economy is I have tool on my phone to go and find out what I need to find out, assemble it, summarize it, and give it to me and be done. That was done in some form of anonymity and I think that's a just. mentioned, learning or Google versus chat GPT to the folks that say that ChatGPT doesn't matter, then they've not critically thought about how to use this tool in the real world.

Patrick Patterson 38:10

Oh, a hundred. Yeah, no, a hundred percent, I can tell you today I will open up a browser. I'll go to Google. I'm like, wait, why am I going to Google for this? I'll switch over to Gemini or to ChatGPT or to Claude and figure it out, right?

Dr. Michael Hageloh 38:26

Am I worried about the tense of a verb in a sentence? Help me understand so that I get it right the first time.

Patrick Patterson 38:32

And what we're seeing, and I think Michael, this is a really important point, especially for any marketer listening, right? It's the way that you're found is now different,

Dr. Michael Hageloh 38:41

Much

Patrick Patterson 38:42

And I don't, the click economy is dying. I, it little sensational to say it's dead, but I agree that you can stick a fork in it, right? And the way that it's, it is changing and it's different today, the way that I'm going to find what college to go to. Is different today, right? I'm gonna go onto an LLM, I'm gonna ask it, do the research for me. It's going to go, and we do a lot of generative ai, SEO, right? So how are you found not just through Google, but how are you found through ChatGPT? And what we're also finding is the queries that are happening inside of those are different, right? Where you might search for Best College near me in chat pt, you're saying, Hey, give me the top five colleges that have a good sports team, that do X, that do y that allow me to use Grammarly, and I actually wanna be two hours away from my parents, which is just close enough to come home and get laundry done, but just far away that I'm not gonna get a pop in, right? And there's that, that's how they're structuring their query. Like how are you found for that? Like it's absolutely bonkers and you gotta be everywhere. You gotta be on Reddit, you gotta be on Quora, you gotta have a great Wikipedia page, you gotta do all of these things. And so like the way that people are finding information is different. I think it's better, but it's different and you need to be able to adapt to that. I think it's a really important point.

Myles Biggs 40:10

It makes me think of a quote you said about businesses, Patrick, where you said there's three types of companies. There's the companies making the AI products, companies using them, and then obsolete companies. I think the same is true for everything y'all have been saying about your university for schools, right? There's companies that are gonna be, so universities gonna be using AI and promoting it, and those that aren't, and those that aren't, are gonna be obsolete because they're not gonna have it all out there to even be found by the tools themselves.'cause they're not leveraging them. And I feel like we might end up with this culture of call it haves or haves, nots, where it's like you're either getting taught how to use it in school or you're not. And then the implications that has once you leave school is just gonna be profound.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 40:50

Agreed. I think that if you talk about irrelevant companies, we have to talk about irrelevant degrees and irrelevant skill sets. If you're coming out of any program now without some level of AI fluency, you are the huge disadvantage.

Myles Biggs 41:08

Yeah.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 41:08

Because those of us who work with these tools regularly, we see the amount that our workflow improves, it's a multiplier, right? AI is a multiplier in terms of our workflow. One of the things that I find really useful in this context and graduates should know how to use these tools in this way is information compression. We're used to 400 years. It information being siloed, right? We divide biology from psychology, from physics, so forth. And part of that is just the result of human cognitive load capacity. You cannot study every subject in detail and see the interconnections between the various disciplines. But generative AI is breaking that down, you can draw on biology and psychology and mathematics without being experts in these areas by using AI responsibly to retrieve and process that information and make it relevant to your workflow. And we compress massive amounts of information using these tools responsibly. And as I said earlier, you then are at a different platform on which to build new knowledge. And I think that needs to be something that we think about in terms of knowledge work in every industry, and responsible AI use.

Patrick Patterson 42:26

I think a really interesting you talk about the different careers and degrees. That may go away because of the advancement, which by the way, has happened since careers and degrees existed when new technology advancements happen, right? This isn't anything new. But one of the things that we're seeing almost in real time, there was speculation around or not level jobs would be, would go away or not, right? So there's this idea that because of generated ai, a lot of entry level positions are gonna go away. There was also that speculation around outsourcing, right? So we're gonna outsource all of our entry level jobs that didn't I don't I run an organization with a lot of employees. We still have a lot of entry level jobs. And one of the things that I think it was an article that was just released maybe in the past week or so. Were now for the first time seen an entry level job decline. Two and a half years later. After everyone predicted that entry level jobs are going away, we're now seeing them slightly decline. and so this is an interesting note for educators, I think, right? Because and I'll just, I'll tell a story and then I'll, and I'll shut up a little bit here, but we've been doing this for 15 years, I can tell you no university taught digital advertising 15 years ago the way that they needed to, no university. Zero, right? And so we would hire people and literally we would pay them and then train them, right? And like that was the first. Two years of your career where we are gonna give you a PhD in social media or paid search or whatever, conversion rate optimization, because no other school was doing it. So we had, as a employer, we had to do it. And you fast forward and now folks are doing that and folks are learning that in school and that's great. But now we're seeing a decline in entry level jobs. So like, how are you gonna go from, I graduated to the first job I can get at a company like ours. As a manager level, it's a difficult problem to solve, right? And so the education needs to fill the gap, but also companies need to fill the gap. What we're doing is we're building and gonna be launching an apprenticeship program. Going back to all the way learning from the blacksmiths about how they did it. An apprenticeship program where you're side by side with someone who's doing the work for a period of time, and then you're launching directly into a higher level and higher paid job. And so but how can education bridge that gap as well as it starts to happen?

Dr. Bruce Fraser 45:04

So you bring up a really interesting point, and it's something that I worry about, because we've seen what you're describing happening for the last 25 years, right? Which is increasing encroachment on the traditional arena of higher education by companies that are providing their own professional development and training, because they're not the graduates are not getting that in college. It's not a difficult jump to see that. If colleges and universities don't really step up in the AI space, the AI itself becomes the platform that companies can use to provide whatever education they need for their employees. Why would you need a college? If I can leverage generative AI to provide a general education, critical thinking curriculum to people that I'm gonna funnel into my company, you could see. education, losing market share to a degree that it collapses. Okay. Which goes to this other part of your question, which is, okay, so what does higher education do? This is something Michael and I have talked quite a bit about. I really think we need to shift our focus to what I would call systems theoretic knowledge rather than specific curricula related to biology. This is also important, but need to be acclimated to thinking about problems and knowledge in a very different way. Understanding how problems are problems within a context, and those contexts when shifted, eliminate certain kinds of problems, make new value propositions, shift the architecture intellectually in such a way that they need to be very adaptable. Open enrollment traditionally focus on the first two years of college. For example, because we're talking about a very high level of thinking. We're talking about the level of thinking you are referring to when you talk about mid-management or senior managers being the positions you really want to fill. You don't have these low level jobs anymore. So that's our challenge and I'm not gonna tell you that I have an answer to that, but I think that part of an answer is that our faculty really need to be encouraged to radically rethink what they do and how, and everything needs to be AI augmented in the instructional context.

Patrick Patterson 47:29

If anyone can figure it out, I believe that you can. So I'm excited

Dr. Bruce Fraser 47:31

I have some ideas, but.

Myles Biggs 47:34

Michael, it almost feels like this becomes a sales and marketing problem. Going back to the story you told about Steve Jobs saying throw away the spec sheets, it's kinda what we're talking about here, right? You throw away the spec sheets for the university and you have to then sell on the emotion side of it and paint this picture of what's gonna be possible while in the background we're figuring out the rest. Are you encountering that from your seat?

Dr. Michael Hageloh 47:57

I'm, it's funny you're this discussion of entry level and I'm gonna harken back again. And between my time here in academia and my Apple time, there were two startups in the middle. One failed miserably, one did not. I've kept around this hiring modality, this marketing and sales was a critical part of it.'Cause without that, we were going nowhere. And our investors were always asking about that. Growth. That was the only thing that anybody cared about. A metric that they did watch. But I go back to this entry level, then go back to Apple. hired a semi washed up drummer. Who had a technical background be a systems engineer to support a sales team in 1988, that was me. Why? And I've asked this question and I've got a pretty solid answer because I understood how to assimilate into a band. And I think that when I hire I skills are skills. If I need a plumber, okay, you've gotta have a license in the state of Florida to do that work. I get that. But in the hire out of your team, into my team, which just happened recently, we looked at assimilation. I can polish you up to where I need you to be if you have core, and I think to Bruce's point, fundamental critical thinking and other supportive skills, and you can assimilate into a band, the bands I was ever in, who do we always bring in? Somebody who could play better than us. They may not have known it, but they could play better than us. And that's how assimilation into that unified direction. That for me was most critical entry level there. There isn't a thing called entry level anymore. There isn't. There's a level called accountant one, but that person, I want to have the same junior skillset as accountant four. So this concept of assimilation is how, again, a washed up musician who had technical knowledge ended up at then Apple Computer and managed through 20, 22 years. There.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 50:14

It, it's interesting to me because one of the things that I think is happening is the AI informed business and education space, business space in particular is pulling away from our traditional academic system. We're saying, okay, so entry level jobs, we're not gonna need the kinds of skills that you're graduating people with to fill those positions. We need these higher order skills, these innovative skills, right? And so what we're seeing is a lag in higher ed. I think I'm very optimistic about human adaptability. I think that if we move away from the old educational model and really encourage AI informed instruction, that helps people understand the way. Value is created the way problems emerge in certain kinds of contexts and so on. We can actually recalibrate our graduates to the needs of companies that are deeply integrating ai. challenge is, higher education in particular has not been architected in such a way that it really promotes quick innovation. That's Michael's and my challenge, right? That's our president's charge is we need this yesterday. We need to radically rethink and restructure what we do here, and we're talking about an institution that has hundreds of years of history, not our particular institution, but higher education, right? That's the challenge and that's what Michael and I are committed to here.

Patrick Patterson 51:48

I.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 51:48

Will Oxford change in England? Will Oxford change the original university? I don't know. They have pretty successful AI programs,

Patrick Patterson 51:55

Yeah.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 51:56

but do too, do they need to?

Patrick Patterson 52:00

It they will change. It's just a matter of when I think, I look at this very similar to the car manufacturing industry. You look at new technology as it comes out and you look at how manufacturers of cars built their cars. It would take five to six years for new technology to get put into a car that you're gonna see as a consumer, and then all of a sudden. Elon Musk, you can like him, you can not like him. It doesn't matter to me. Elon Musk comes in and builds Tesla and gives you over the air updates on your car, right? And gives you features. And we got rid of model yours, right? It doesn't matter what model year you have anymore, you just get all the features right. And that completely changed the way I think about cars as a consumer as a Tesla owner for the past seven years. And I think it, is very similar in traditional education. You have this bureaucracy that can exist. I'm not saying it exists at all universities, a bureaucracy that exists

Dr. Michael Hageloh 52:55

It

Patrick Patterson 52:56

And it can slow down the adoption of technology like this to the point where you're not getting into the hands of your students for 2, 3, 4 years versus 2, 3, 4 weeks,

Dr. Bruce Fraser 53:08

right.

Patrick Patterson 53:09

and that's the change, right?

Dr. Bruce Fraser 53:13

Yeah, absolutely. That's a really helpful analogy. That's where we are. and and don't just the challenge by bolting on this new technology to existing structures. You have to look at your policy framework. You have to look at your legal framework, right? You have to look at your culture, you have to look at your remuneration practices. We have something called continuing contract, which allows people to work the way they wanna work for their entire career. There's no incentive there to change unless you appeal to, some other narrative structure that is compelling for them, right? So we're talking about changing everything and I love that, and it's terribly frightening for a lot of people.

Patrick Patterson 54:00

Yeah. If you're not. Ridiculously and ridiculously terrified at the same time. Right now, you're not paying attention.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 54:07

You know this overlays the industry too. It overlays to every marketing department in America. It overlays to every corporate. This is not this. This thing of ai, of whatever this is. This is systemic and cultural and big and different, but it affects everybody. If you weren't in the music industry, you didn't care necessarily about the iPod unless you were a consumer of music, right? But it touched every single piece on the consumer side to that. And marketers have to be as savvy to use of it so it doesn't end up, I heard someone just the other day with something we generated who said, oh, that's so AI generated. There are no people behind that for us in the people business. That's a scary thought. this is. This is definitely, we're early, but it is a it's fascinating. One of Bruce, I love when Bruce, talks about this all the time, how we have democratized knowledge and how one can build a paper on X and understand and have knowledge without truly having been there in a biology class. Now, I don't necessarily want a doctor who's just only been AI taught, but that's really just a personal preference.

Patrick Patterson 55:26

It's an interesting thought. There are studies around, and I'm gonna take us into virtual reality versus AI taught because that's the analog that we have what you just said. There are some studies where, it's about the repetitions in the practice. It's not about whether you were physically there or not. The folks that have logged 20,000 hours on a flight sim. In virtual reality, actually know how to fly a plane better than someone who spent 5,000 hours flying a real plane. There's this interesting idea of, could AI be that next tutor, that next coach, that next thing that allows us to hone our skills and sharpen our skills in ways that we just, don't have access to at a school with a person, with a boss, right? And so one of the things I'm playing around with is, how do I create a 24 7 version of myself that can offer advice and help? Just, you think about all have value, I think, to the world. And if we can distill and figure out what that value is through the distribution channels and through the technology that exists today, we can now scale that. And that's super exciting. That's something we couldn't do before,

Dr. Bruce Fraser 56:33

That's right.

Patrick Patterson 56:34

Or that very few could do before, maybe is the better answer to

Dr. Bruce Fraser 56:36

And I've heard some skeptics say we've heard all this about the democratization of knowledge before when the internet emerged and, that didn't radically change industries like education. So why do we need to worry about this? And I think that to your point, people overlook the fact that AI has a kind of agency. That search engines, the traditional search engines did not. And this goes back to the click economy conversation too, because now I can use AI as my representative, that is tuned to my particular interests and needs to go out and search for something that is very specific to me. Now I can knowledge in information in that's relevant to my particular workflow without just having the deluge of information that comes from a Google search where I have to manually go through all that. So it gives us the needle in the haystack, and that changes. What it means to say knowledge is democratized here, this kind of information compression, this kind of filtering of information in terms of my own judgements about relevance, aesthetics, good and bad. It means that generative AI is an entirely different form of democratization than what we saw with the rise of the internet.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 57:57

Yeah, copy and paste from chat GPT is pretty predictable, but taking it through a journey. It's not a human, but taking this inanimate thing through a journey in your mind to get to answers deeper that you may want is at least for me personally, is the way I use it all the time.

Patrick Patterson 58:16

So one of the things, one of the things that we do internally are, we're trying to do better with so I don't know if anyone has this experience at their job or in their world, but when deep research came out, I started getting 17 page papers about everything. And it would be, I did one prompt, got a 17 page paper, put it in a Google Doc, and then sent it off to someone. What would I do, right? I would take that 17 page doc, I would put it into ChatGPT and I'd distill it down to probably the prompt that you put in to generate it, right? And we could have saved a whole bunch of time if you just sent me your prompt'cause no one's reading the 17 pages. But then on top of that, Michael, what you're saying is like the journey, sometimes people will spend four or five hours. Reprompt and giving it new information and giving it feedback. And then you'll get a 17 page document outta deeper research that is actually really good, right? Almost impossible to know the difference right now of, I spent zero time with it and I spent four hours with it. So what we've done, and this is a tip for anyone running an organization, I've actually asked for the ChatGPT link, right? So you're gonna send this to me. Great. Show me the ChatGPT link. Show me the conversation you had, show me the process you went through, which is almost more important than the output, right? And then I'll know, Hey, did you, is this something? And or just be honest, Hey, like this is a shitty first draft of an idea that I had and it needs completely beat up. Let's go beat it up together, right? That's an okay thing. a lot of mistakes in this. Let's go figure it out. Just don't try topol pass it off as polished, complete, done. I spent five hours on it when that's not the case. So it's about the more about today, the process that gets the output and less about the

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:00:08

And

Patrick Patterson 1:00:08

as I'm reviewing work that's coming across my desk.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:00:11

that.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:00:11

in the music industry you call that fidelity

Patrick Patterson 1:00:14

I love that. That's a great analogy. Yeah.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:00:16

That is what Bruce, I believe what we are as a team, Bruce, leading, trying to bring to our students to understand how to produce fidelity. point about chat GPT and going through the prompting, that is nothing different than sitting on stage and go in a rehearsal hall wherever and going through, dammit. Play that again. Play that again. Play. No. A, an octave up, no a beat, a 32nd difference. That is fidelity. And if we can graduate students who can understand the products they produce with these tools and add human fidelity to it, are there. We are not there yet, but that, I believe is, that's the difference of an apple to anybody else in the world. Nothing left, today leaves, today a little different under Tim, but that's my opinion. I'm entitled to that. Nothing left without Fidelity, human fidelity.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:01:21

I completely agree. And I think it brings us back to the reference to the Socratic method. And I find this historically amusing and a little ironic because Socrates of course, was worried about the shift from the oral engagement of question and answer to the written word, because the written word would kill memory and it would be misunderstood. And in the context of question and answer, you can clarify. You can challenge, right? You can explore in these interesting ways. Our most effective engagements with these AI tools is this kind of iterative, Socratic back and forth. Why is it important? It's because there's too much information out there, right? The 17 page papers. I can upload 15, 17 page papers to GPT or Claude, and then I can ask. Questions and I can refine my own knowledge and it's this Socratic back and forth that I think will give rise to something. I'm just gonna throw out a term here. Techno orality, right? That we're moving. Strangely to a space where their traditional commitment to question and answer and interpersonal engagement, that model is now grafted onto our AI engagement, and what we're gonna see is the production of fidelity. In a way that only echoes the kind of knowledge and information acquisition that we're used to or in higher ed and elsewhere. So I find this really important, and I think to bring this down to earth a little bit, teaching our students to engage these systems and their instructors in this kind of Socratic way where they're coached by the human professional and they can own the output of that process. that's really where education needs to go. And we may see something, to get back to an earlier question, we may see something like stackable credentials rather than extended degree programs where faculty or coaches that, that, and mentors that help people through that process. But I think central to that is the concept of fidelity and the concept of iterative engagement or questioning.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:03:39

Your employee. Your employee questions about entry level. I come back to, okay, you can play your instrument, their 60-year-old drummer is still getting work because they're a 16th of a second ahead.'cause they understand the fidelity of what they're playing and I don't see any tech replacing. an augment the great, we can play it back. We can fix it in post. As I've said before, there, there's so many tools around that. What it does is it just speeds up to a greater product faster. And as a marketer, that's what you're up against with your competition. Are they doing that better? Are they messaging? Is your competition talking to its audience when it wants to be received with the message it wants And pure data will not deliver that connection

Patrick Patterson 1:04:35

Yep. No, and it's

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:04:36

me for that.

Patrick Patterson 1:04:37

no, but no what? I don't think they should. I think it's a combination of both. I don't think it's the right message to say data, the CEO story you told, whereas I don't care about the data. I don't, I think that's a half truth where she might not care about the data. I think it's very important to have it and to look at it, and it's very important. have the you not value what we measure. And

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:04:59

yeah, that's a great way of saying it.

Patrick Patterson 1:05:02

but I think, that, that's not enough. Now that's table stakes today, right? And so that's not enough being able to know the difference between are you ahead or behind and you get the symbol thrown at your head or whatever, right? And being able to know the difference between that. I watched that movie, I'm sure everyone did, and like he was playing the drums and I was like, I have no idea whether he is head or behind. I'm not a drummer, but you may be watched it. And we're like, yeah he's ahead. And so knowing the difference that's taste, right? That's what I'm calling taste. And that's what you're calling Fidelity. What you're saying is the difference between the 98th percentile and the 99th percentile, right? Because we raised the floor of what's acceptable to now aI can get us to the 80th percentile, but then humans need to take us from 80 to a hundred, and then that's where the real value is going to be.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:05:51

Agree.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:05:51

raised the floor for everyone,

Patrick Patterson 1:05:53

Everybody?

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:05:53

whether they know it or not. The who moved my cheese. And we've raised the floor for everyone and everyone on this call, and everyone who's listening, look, we're all in sales. You may not be selling a product, but Bruce in the classroom is selling ideas to students, right? There's not a monetary transaction, but it's connecting that conceptually to you, right? It is. You are. You're buying into something you're either selling or buying. That's the, unfortunately, it's the world we live in whether you like it or not, that's the way it goes. And it is something that I have seen enough young marketers who focus on some of the things you talk about, but who have that just, you can see that ability to step up. And they've learned that somewhere. And I hope they learn it in higher education. I hope they learn it from us. I hope they learn it from their institution, that they've got the pieces and just need to bring that band together in their mind. And step four, sorry about all the music analogies, but I really do look at

Patrick Patterson 1:06:57

No.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:06:57

the world through

Myles Biggs 1:06:58

That's good.

Patrick Patterson 1:06:59

And guys, I could talk about this for the next 12 hours'cause this is super exciting and super good stuff. But like I think Michael bringing up the music reference, right? I actually think that's a superpower and that's a part of. Really, you talk about a general education degree, a liberal arts degree, or whatever it may be you're learning all these different disciplines and you're able to make connections that people aren't able to make because you have this background and you have this experience in a specific order that leads you to make that conclusion today. I went down a, I do crazy things every single year. And one of my things was I wanted to read a nonfiction book a week and I ended up reading 65 nonfiction books that year. It was super fun. And a buddy really a philosophy major the, watch those guys.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:07:58

Yeah.

Patrick Patterson 1:07:59

And he called me up, he's man, that's super exciting. You're gonna get like 27, 28 books into it and you're gonna start making connections between the books that no one has made before.'cause you're gonna read them in a specific order that's going to be super valuable. And spot on it was probably like book 18 or 19. I'm connecting, the marketing books to the stoicism books that I'm reading to the whatever. And I'm bringing it all together. And man, that's the value, isn't it?

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:08:28

It.

Patrick Patterson 1:08:28

that's exciting.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:08:29

It is. And that's where I think ai can be such a leveraging of that natural human creative tendency. The challenge is to go back to the expertise idea is in, in my industry, in Michael's industry now, you don't want people, don't feel comfortable, rather innovating. If you say to an instructor, your job is to go into the classroom and improvise. I should use improvise rather than innovate. Improvise That freaks people out because they're used to having a lesson plan. They're used to having a roadmap. They're used to that old story, right? But what generative AI does used in the right sorts of ways is it allows everybody. you have to correct me if this is not the right term. But to riff right. To, to, just, to experiment, to explore a variety of narratives that they couldn't have explored before they were stuck in a particular institutional groove.

Patrick Patterson 1:09:33

and cost of being wrong has gone to zero.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:09:37

Yeah.

Patrick Patterson 1:09:38

there used to be a cost to being wrong guys. Like I come up with so many bad ideas every single day. If I try to implement those bad ideas inside the organization there's a cost to that, right? There's calories that are being consumed

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:09:50

yeah,

Patrick Patterson 1:09:50

There's real money being spent to implement those bad ideas. Now, I can take that bad idea. I can go into something like a chat, GVT, I can beat it up and I can get the answers like, no, that was a really bad idea. Quicker and faster.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:10:03

That's right.

Patrick Patterson 1:10:03

it's super.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:10:05

look at how that applies in what they do. To your point, Bruce, if you riff, at a$1,500 an hour or studio time, they didn't like you doing that. But today do it at home and you send your em. I've never met one of my producers. He is in Dubuque Isle or some, somewhere. He is at the other end of an of an internet connection and the and experimenting. You send him 40 versions here, knock yourself out, enjoy. At 1500 bucks a an hour or more in, in a big city. Crazy more. You didn't get a chance to do that. You better lay it down. And all you got was the expert because in your, you got the professor of X, that's all you got because you didn't have time to redo it, you couldn't afford it. And incidentally, if anybody's looking for a washed up disco drummer, I'm still available.

Patrick Patterson 1:11:05

We'll put his reel down in the show notes for sure.

Myles Biggs 1:11:08

you go.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:11:10

That's not

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:11:11

all of which is to say I think we're headed for a real renaissance

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:11:15

are.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:11:15

And that the fears around job loss are we will see job change for sure. We will see new required skills emerge and hopefully be inculcated through education if it's to remain relevant. This is a time for optimism and creativity, not one for pessimism and resistance.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:11:39

Yeah let your freak fly. Maybe not. Maybe that's the, maybe that's not the cool thing to say anymore. Hey, I'm gonna tell you this real simple statement. I never forget. I had a university professor tell me in my old job, my old life, we were talking about robots were, I was they were encouraging a robot automation programming program product. And it happened to run on the Mac platform and this, that, and the other. Long story short everybody said what robots are gonna take over all the jobs? You are not gonna need anybody. And he, of all the things for a university professor looked over at the group and said, there will be a job left. And everyone's what? He said, the people selling robots. to your sales and marketing team out there they shouldn't worry, but they should get better at their craft because there may be some job shrinkage. But in the robot analogy, if everything goes to robots, the person selling robots still have a job.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:12:36

Yeah.

Myles Biggs 1:12:36

Yeah, so let's follow this thread. You mentioned the term renaissance, Bruce, and this example of the jobs that'll still be available. What are some predictions you have? Even the drumming example, right? It would've been crazy to think of never seeing your producer, but now it's commonplace. What's something that's not possible today that you think is going to be true in the next few years because of everything that we've talked about today?

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:12:56

This isn't my idea, but I have heard it said. I think this is informative that, we are headed for the one employee billion dollar company. I think that speaks to the innovative capacity that these technologies open up now. So the more general point is I think that we will see an opportunity for people to really explore their own creative interests. They will be encouraged to channel those interests into revenue producing outlets, what those look like now. I'm not in a position to say because I am a believer that this technology in changing our fundamental orientation toward knowledge and innovation and value is going to open up opportunities that at least I'm just not able to see, right? But I think as a multiplier of human creativity, we're going to see a period of great social creativity. Eventually it will settle into patterns that are more stable revenue generating sources of work. what those look like at the moment, I would just say the billion dollar single employee companies is a good way to capture that kind of innovation,

Patrick Patterson 1:14:14

And I think and I don't know if like what's better than a one person,$1 billion company, a two person,$2 billion company.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:14:20

Right.

Patrick Patterson 1:14:21

And so I think the real correlation there is value per person,

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:14:26

There you go.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:14:27

Right.

Patrick Patterson 1:14:28

and so what we have found, and I've, we've tracked this over three or four years. I have the data revenue per employee has gone up, cost per employee has gone up, right? And I think that is happening actually at a faster rate. Now, today, the past year, past six months in our organization, I can't speak for every organization in our organization. And so what I think what you're gonna start seeing is what one person is able to bring in value is going to dramatically increase. And therefore, what I'm willing to pay to have that person employed is going to dramatically increase. So if you can figure out how to be that one person that's bringing a billion dollars worth of value, you're gonna get paid a lot of money, right? Go look at what Zuck just offered all of the AI folks to come Right? Because he realizes this exact thing. It is, there is outsized return for the people that are at the top of this, right? And both for the company that hires them and for the individual themselves, right? And I'm excited to see how you guys are. Extending that into education, preparing folks to be the next person that's bringing a billion dollars worth of value. Just in and of themselves. I think the mistake people could make hearing that is thinking that they it's, do you guys all have friends?'cause if you that, that are billionaire drop shippers, do all of you all of

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:16:00

Oh yeah.

Patrick Patterson 1:16:00

based on how popular it was five or six years ago and how everyone was millionaires. We should all know three or four millionaire drop shippers. And it doesn't exist.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:16:12

I did in the seventies during the cocaine business in Florida.

Patrick Patterson 1:16:15

Different supply chain, right? But the, so I think there's a fallacy right now in that I don't need other people. I can do all this myself. I don't need education. I can just drop outta school. I can just do all of this stuff and I'm just going to be a billionaire, right? Because it's this nice dream. It's this get quick, get rich quick scheme that we've all wanted since the history of money was invented. The hard work is what brings the value, the hard work on top of ai, the hard work on top of automation. The hard work is what brings the value, right?

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:16:50

Yeah,

Patrick Patterson 1:16:51

the easy work, not the, I did a chat with chat GPT and it spit out 17 pages that I didn't read, and I sent to my boss. That is not value. That is not where you're gonna get paid.

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:17:00

That's right. And that's what I was getting at and saying that not that human expertise is going to go away, but it's value proposition and the overall system is going to shift. And we're not gonna leverage these tools without a great deal of human ingenuity and hard work.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:17:17

I'm gonna bring my comments in line with this and say something that Steve Jobs said. The journey is the reward. Take your time in higher ed to learn who you are. I've got a 16-year-old nephew and he's just dying to get outta high school and I said, take that time, find out who you are. Go inside, stay inside, look around in you, figure out who you are. Because once you understand that. Then that journey you will come to a much greater reward. I'm not the philosopher on here. I am not. I'm, again, I'm not that deep, but it being around musicians who are phenomenal musicians, multi-platinum hit type people, they know who they are and higher ed helps you get there.'cause not everybody can do that on their own.

Patrick Patterson 1:18:04

I think that is such an important lesson. I get to talk to folks that are, maybe just about to graduate or graduating a lot, maybe, the sons and daughters of CEOs I know. Or through my network and I get

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:18:16

dollar shippers.

Patrick Patterson 1:18:17

Yeah. I wish, now everyone's gonna be an influencer, right? Everyone's gonna be a billion dollar influencer, and create a brand like Mr. Beast. That's the next thing. And I can't wait for five years from now. We're all gonna know all of these amazing influencers. They're gonna be our personal friends. No, but such a, in such a rush pick the right major, I have to, I need to know what I'm gonna do for the rest of my life so that I pick the right major and I go to school for the right thing so I can get the job right outta school. And hope people hear I just wanna shake them a little bit. I'm like, you have no idea between 20 and 30. That's, go make so many mistakes. Go learn everything you don't want to be don't worry about it. There is never a time in your life. We all wish, all of us right now, I bet all wish we could go back to our twenties, 20 and 30 and relive that time when we just got to, when we had nothing tying us down. No real responsibility.

Myles Biggs 1:19:12

Yeah.

Patrick Patterson 1:19:14

We were close enough from our parents that they would still, lend on Olive branch if we needed it, right? And it's there is this period of time where you can really explore. And that is the exciting opportunity of like, when you go to college and explore different majors. And I switched majors a few times, psychology to compsci, added on math. And I thought I was gonna actually gonna go to school for musical theater. Now that's a deep cut. I think that,

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:19:36

people on this call will not have a clue what a deep cut even means, just so you know. So use ai, get on ChatGPT

Patrick Patterson 1:19:43

go.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:19:43

what a deep cut

Patrick Patterson 1:19:44

But I think it's, I think it's a really important point, Michael explore. Figure it out. Use that time to both learn what you like and what you don't like. And then again, we talk about the responsibility of a school or an education system. Give those opportunities to folks, and let them figure it out. And this is my take. I think we put a lot of pressure on kids today. same pressure. We didn't have that same pressure 25 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, 10 years ago, I don't even think. To get in a school now you gotta, but you gotta volunteer at 17 places, you had to work full time. You had to intern at 12, 12 companies. You had to be straight a's, you had to be the quarterback of your football team. And then you're put on the bottom of the pile to 150 people that are better than you. And you're like, how the heck am I

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:20:34

Right.

Patrick Patterson 1:20:34

supposed to get in here? I get that same feedback. For entry level jobs. It's I just graduated and you're asking for three years of experience for my entry level job, how am I supposed, like, how am I supposed to get there? Continue to give that opportunity, continue being the awesome innovators that you guys are being, because that's what the education system needs. And again, any system would be lucky to have one of you super exciting to have both of you guys working together to make the education system a better place.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:21:00

Let AI relax some of the mundane outta your life so you can focus on what's important

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:21:05

yeah, that's true. I wonder.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:21:08

This was quite a call. We got to deep cuts. We got to, so retic method this is I don't know. I may, I'm gonna go outside and have a cigarette. I don't smoke.

Patrick Patterson 1:21:19

Yeah. Bruce and I will talk binary search trees and we'll get into some,

Dr. Bruce Fraser 1:21:22

There we go.

Patrick Patterson 1:21:23

get into

Myles Biggs 1:21:23

is interesting, how we,

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:21:24

for you, Mr. CEO. Why do drummers sit in the back?

Patrick Patterson 1:21:29

do drummers sit in the back? I could wager a guess, but I would like, I would love to be educated.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:21:36

Be educated?

Patrick Patterson 1:21:36

love to be,

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:21:37

I can't speak for all, but I'll speak for myself just in case the cops come in.

Patrick Patterson 1:21:43

You don't need to be the fastest, you just need to outrun the basis.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:21:46

Just said, drop off the back and go. He's got a lot to carry.

Patrick Patterson 1:21:50

That's right.

Dr. Michael Hageloh 1:21:51

carry.

Patrick Patterson 1:21:51

That's right. If you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to follow the show so you don't miss upcoming episodes. And if you found value in today's discussion, share it with a colleague or friend who's navigating the same AI driven world. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.