Santiago Tacoronte (00:29)
Chris Singel is on a mission to help people embrace AI without fear. Because when used right, AI isn’t a job killer. It’s a productivity booster. As a TEDx speaker, AI strategist, and improv comedian, Chris blends humor, deep insights, and real world experience to demystify artificial intelligence for professionals.

and business leaders.

With a background in digital marketing, media and improv comedy, Chris has worked with major brands, reviewed millions in digital ad spend, and seen firsthand how AI is transforming the way we work. His TEDx talk, Quit! Give Your Job to AI, challenges people to offload the boring tasks to AI so they can focus on what makes them human, creativity,

connection and strategic thinking.

Santiago Tacoronte (01:30)
Hello Chris and welcome to ProductiviTree.

Chris Singel (01:32)
Hello, thank you for having me. I’m excited.

Santiago Tacoronte (01:36)
Chris, you call yourself an AI optimist. What does that mean? Particularly in a world that sees AI as a job killer.

Chris Singel (01:40)
haha

I think that’s why I call myself that, because I think there’s all these scary stories of Skynet and Terminators and AI is gonna take over the world and what if we didn’t do that? What if we didn’t think that way? What if we said, okay, but how can I as an individual use it to make my life better, to spend more time with people I love, to be more creative? I think we always can make the choice to use the tools in the way that actually helps humans. So let’s put that optimistic spin on it and try, you know? I think…

That is our chance to use the tool in a way that’s meaningful for us before it takes over the world.

Santiago Tacoronte (02:21)
What was the moment when when you realized that AI wasn’t just another hype,

Chris Singel (02:26)
yeah, maybe it is, maybe it is another big hype. And I think a lot of these little AI startups won’t survive this like the dot-com boom. But to give your listeners a little background on my story, I was in the shower in March of 2023 and Google Bard had come out two days earlier. And I thought, can AI write a whole book about AI and publish it on Amazon and see what happens? So.

I got out of the shower, 12 minutes of work later, using a chat bot, I had it write a whole book about AI. Two days after that, it was a number one new release on Amazon, and that became press appearances and a TED Talk and all this consulting I now do. So I think being able to use it for that storytelling of, hey, this is actually capable of producing work for people, and now let’s talk about it and how you can use it is just far more interesting to me than saying, hey, they invented a tool that might increase productivity by 5%.

Having that human element to say, here’s how it can really impact individual lives is when it became tangible to me.

Santiago Tacoronte (03:22)
You often say that let’s AI do the boring stuff. Give us some examples of AI truly boosting productivity because, know, as the particularly the generative AI part, I hear more and more the comment, is it, it is a glorified auto-complete, what do you think it’s really helpful from AI and how can it boost your productivity?

Chris Singel (03:45)
Yeah,

I’ve heard it’s a glorified autocomplete and I’ve heard people say, well, it’s just, you know, a fancy abacus. Anything you want to diminish it, you can say that, but at the end of the day, how are you using it? How are you benefiting from it to be more productive? I mean, one of the most obvious ways is I apply to be on podcasts and I have to craft my message to be relevant to that podcast. So I will always tweak what it generates, but I say, look, here’s what this podcast is about. Here’s everything that the AI already knows about me.

how would I apply to this podcast in a way that’s relevant to them and their listeners, but still highlights the things I have accomplished. And then I can churn out 20 times what I would be normally, and I approve it and read it and everything, but that’s a simple example of writing emails or following up with people. In my TED Talk I mentioned, I was at a corporate event and a guy said he uses it to craft text messages to his wife. Maybe don’t do that, maybe don’t.

Santiago Tacoronte (04:37)
You

Chris Singel (04:37)
Replace your

personal relationships with AI, but if you’re doing something at scale or if you’re writing a rough draft or if you’re doing a TPS report that is an internal audit that nobody’s ever gonna actually read, let the robots do that sort of boring repetitive work so you can focus on the stuff that makes you more human.

Santiago Tacoronte (04:53)
Aren’t we losing our skills Chris by doing that? Writing, maths, problem solving, strategic thinking. Aren’t we relying too much on computers to… It’s our brain becoming lazy.

Chris Singel (05:09)
How are your skills on writing on an easel, chiseling into clay tablets? I mean, the point of technology is to improve our lives and make it more productive to a certain extent. I say use all the tools available to us. I had someone ask me that once while they were wearing glasses. If you don’t like any technology, you wouldn’t be able to see right now, buddy. So we have to use these tools available to us. Does that make us lazy? At a certain sense, there have been studies that show it changes our actual brain structure.

where instead of thinking, I know where my social security number is, you think, I know where I saved it in the Google Cloud. That’s a bad example. You should remember your own security numbers. But I know how I can access data more than I know where the data is right now. And if that goes down, what do I do? Well, then I can fall back on human thinking. And I don’t think it’ll go away, but its ability to expand our mental capacities, our creativity, our…

Santiago Tacoronte (05:44)
Okay.

Chris Singel (06:00)
Productivity, I think, is only good. And the creativity, I say, because people hate on it and say, it generated 10 bad ideas. Fine, but if one of them is the least bad, then have your actual humans improve upon that idea. There’s benefits to arguing with a rubber duck that doesn’t talk back. So using a chat bot that at least generates some ideas is absolutely beneficial.

Santiago Tacoronte (06:21)
Let’s talk about information overload. It’s AI and the content that AI is curating, servicing, making us better at focus or is another distraction, more data.

Chris Singel (06:35)
It’s a balance, right? And I obviously am subject to all the algorithms everyone else is too, but I would say my Instagram feed really feels like it’s trying to distract me. TikTok is so distracting that they are threatening to ban it and unban it in America. I think there’s lots of studies that say social media is bad for teens developing brains. All that being said, my Google algorithm tells me very relevant news articles that are important to my industry or things I’ve shown an interest in. So I think…

You do have to limit how much time you’re spending mindlessly scrolling, but the algorithms, some of them are designed to show you your most relevant, most engaging stuff first, and then you can go back to your real life. I think it’s this balance of, Hey, I can spend five minutes and just catch the highlights. can get an AI summary of all the stuff that’s important to me, or I can mindlessly scroll for 13 hours a day. What are you losing if you shorten that 13 hours to five minutes? I don’t know anymore. I think it’s the algorithms have gotten good enough.

that you can spend far, far, far less time just wasting time.

Santiago Tacoronte (07:34)
This week I read a viral post in LinkedIn about a hiring manager. The hiring manager were posting that he has posted a job, a senior job in data analytics and he has received around 300 CVs which were almost the same content, very clear patterns. He was alluding that most of them has been created with AI.

And he was saying in a negative light, and I can understand why, Chris, when can AI be detrimental? When should we be authentic and write a bunch of lines, even though there will be mistakes, typos, grammar errors, et cetera, et cetera.

Chris Singel (08:16)
Well, part of that then is do these people use AI in the best way? Are you actually telling AI, look, who’s here I am as a person? Here’s what my interests are. Here’s my expertise. Here’s the projects I’ve worked on. Because then it should be able to craft a CV that is unique to you and compelling and relevant to the job you’re applying for. If you’re just saying generate a generic CV, then you’re not providing them what they asked for anyways, and you’re just not using the tool properly. But I’ve had a similar story where my

former employee wanted me to recommend her for a job. So I wrote out to the guy and said, hey, Erica’s great. You should hire her. And then he wrote back what very much sounded like AI generated. Dear sir, we are looking for these qualifications. So I’m like, OK, man, if you want it to sound formal, I dropped everything I know about her into AI. And it chomped out four paragraphs of here’s her expertise in project management and related skills. And it’s like, if you wanted to talk to me, you could pick up the phone and talk to me. If we need to go through these motions so that you have paperwork on file saying you checked these boxes.

Fine, I’m going to have AI work on it if that’s how you’re using AI.

Santiago Tacoronte (09:20)
What is the biggest misconception about AI and what holds people back from embracing it?

Chris Singel (09:26)
I think people are often scared to just try things they want to do. I think you and I were talking before we started recording of just, you can be scared of how things can go wrong. And I think there is a legitimate fear of giving AI too much of your personal data, your company’s data. But at the end of the day, you can think of AI more like a friend whose memory you’re allowed to wipe. If you have an embarrassing conversation, just delete the chat.

I don’t believe that these companies are allowed to hold on to your data, assuming they’re meeting all the GDPR and data holding requirements that they claim they are. So test it out, try it. And if you don’t know what to ask it, ask AI, what should I ask you? What can I talk to you about? And it should be smart enough to say, well, what are you interested in? What do you want to talk about? I’ve used it for everything from personal hobbies to talking about Dungeons and Dragons to a lot of work things, copywriting situations. had

a bunch of C-suite people on a call that said, Chris, after this, are you going to use AI to generate this copy? No, I’ll do it right now. And it took one minute. Just try it. And we all just saved ourselves another hour-long call and the scheduling of the call and the meeting to discuss the copy change if we can do it in the one minute just by testing out if it’s good enough. So I think testing it and having the expectation of it being a friend you’re just chatting with, it’s not going to be perfect. It’s not going to give the best advice all the time.

but then you can help it learn who you are and what you care about where it can grow with you.

Santiago Tacoronte (10:47)
Do you think people fear, again, the question is about AI taking jobs. Do you think that there is unconscious bias or fear from people at the time that they write a prompt that say, if AI is doing this now for me, what is my value here?

Chris Singel (11:04)
I will say I’ve been in corporate positions where you start thinking, hey, if I’m training my staff to do this, what do they need me for? But the point is we have to share our skills and learn and grow so that you can level up to the next jobs, that you can do more. And I think we’re just now a little worried that that’s going to happen to all of society. And the question isn’t will there not be jobs. It is.

Will there be interesting, fulfilling things for humans to do? And I think the answer is yes. We’ll always find ways to entertain ourselves or manage people or have service industries or make human handcrafted art. I think that’s always going to have some value and we will have more time and freedom to do that if we let the robots do the drudgery and boring.

Santiago Tacoronte (11:47)
You want to play predictions?

Chris Singel (11:49)
Sure.

Santiago Tacoronte (11:50)
Today, productivity is defined mostly as output.

What do you think productivity will mean in 10 years?

Chris Singel (11:57)
I think there’s a lot that you’re saying right there that’s implied. I was just reading some great political science books and all this fun stuff that I read because I read way too much. read 52 books last year was a goal of mine that I hit. But I think there’s a lot of these productivity goals where like I can be very productive at work because my wife made lunch for the kids and cleaned the house and did all these little things that go on scene. So my output is benefiting from her output.

Well, now if some of my output is being upped because I’m using AI as well, how are you capturing that value that’s being provided behind the scenes? So I think in total productivity will go up. The question is, is that being implemented by CEOs automating their workforce or is it being implemented like it kind of is today by people using AI in their day jobs to be more productive? And then you look at these studies of things like moving from a five day work week to a four day work week and productivity goes up.

So are we just going to measure the time that people keep their butts in seats or are there more realistic KPIs, more things that we care about that will continue to improve as we improve our tools and how we are using them? I’m hopeful that yes, that’s the answer. The question is, does it benefit everyone or just the rich people who own the AI? I don’t know.

Santiago Tacoronte (13:12)
I was having this conversation with a colleague a few weeks ago. My gut feeling is that if you’re able to use AI to create more output, instead of running three projects at a time, you will be running 10 in the future. And he was saying, well, maybe people will work just three days. But I’m not sure if this is in the interest of the shareholder economy and the stick for profits and growth.

Chris Singel (13:29)
Right, yeah.

So.

Yeah.

Santiago Tacoronte (13:40)
of the corporation.

Chris Singel (13:41)
But one of the things they’ve seen in the four day work week example is then people go shopping on that fifth day. You have more consumer spending if they have more free time. They take up hobbies, they buy more stuff, they go to the movies. I think it helps us to be able to live our lives, even if you’re only looking at the crass sort of bottom line of it. And I had another point there, shoot, I forgot it. But I do think there’s productivity gains that have long been.

unrealized in corporations and it becomes this question of how are humans going to best optimize that? And if they choose to work more part time, do our laws have to change to reflect that? Or are people just willing to say, hey, I know I’m worth 200 grand to you as a company, so only pay me 100 grand and I’ll come in two days a week. Or will more people say, I want to make $400,000, so I’m going to go back to working 80 hours a week. That’s a personal decision, but I do think the value of the work we’re doing will improve.

Santiago Tacoronte (14:36)
For companies that are going all in with AI, what is the one human skill they should never replace?

Chris Singel (14:45)
I think it’s going to be a long time before all management is replaced. I think there are lot of benefits to analytics and this sort of mid-level making sure that everything’s on track. But I think raising up your people to both be smart and to make good decisions and to know how your business works. I think there’s a danger of the AI ossifying or calcifying and saying, hey, this is the way we’ve always done things. So I’m going to set the AI loose and tell it to keep doing things. But we live in a dynamic world. If anything changes,

How flexible is the AI to adapt? Today, not super flexible. So you’ll need people in the process to safeguard and say, hey, that doesn’t make sense anymore in this environment. We need to switch into doing this. Or, hey, that is going to be dangerous or potentially bring us lawsuits. Or even things as simple as, that’s not on brand for us. I don’t want to launch that. I think you need humans to make that final decision when you’re dealing with humans. But we will be able to.

achieve more and faster. was almost pitching almost like a management Tinder where you just say yes or no and the AI continually gives you choices to make. But you need at least that level of involvement to make sure that some human has the final say. There’s a big term AI governance right now of where does the buck stop, who takes ultimate responsibility for the choices and actions the AI does. And that question is only going to grow as we roll out more more AI tools.

Santiago Tacoronte (16:05)
You talk a lot about AI and creativity, which is a hot topic in the realm of AI. Can AI be really creative or is just remixing what already exists?

Chris Singel (16:17)
I’m, this question gets asked a lot of different ways and I like to push back and say, what is human creativity? Like I’m not making up new words or using new letters. I’m also talking to you after I just finished a really good sci-fi book that’s percolating in the top of my mind. So I think everything we do is a remix. So to minimize what AI can do when remixing all of human culture and every book that’s ever been written, if the copyright holds up and how you’re scraping things, every movie, every.

human interaction that they track, I think it gives a more deep, more human experience. think there are downsides to that where you’re not getting individual human experiences and saying, Hey, this is my perspective on life. But I think it allows the AI to be creative and say, Hey, here’s what I can tell you about the whole breadth of. I’ll give you an example. I was writing my own AI book. I’m sorry, my own sci-fi book. And I said, Hey, expand this section. And it was terrible because it didn’t know my style of writing. didn’t have a lot to pull from.

And then I said, here’s an author I like, and here’s a thought I had. Can you implement that thought in the style of writing of that person? And it had dozens of books to work from. So it did a really good job of presenting something that sounded like something that author would write. So it created a new story in a voice that sounded good and it, you know, did it very, very, very fast. So what’s the downside exactly of was Chris ever going to be that good of a writer? No, but am I trying to get better at

my writing today if I can just generate stories that I want to read? I don’t know. I think you do lose that sort of human element of striving and achieving and putting your heart and soul and blood and sweat and tears into things if you give that up. So I think humans need to be cognizant of caring about the things they care about. And it’s really easy not to in the social media age.

Santiago Tacoronte (18:02)
You wrote an AI book in minutes using AI, of course. What does that mean for the creative industry writers do you feel that at some point humans will start…

ignoring or trying to distinguish what is human writing and favoring human writing instead of AI writing.

Chris Singel (18:22)
Yeah, a couple of important questions there where trust but verify because the AI can hallucinate and make stuff up. And unless you have a human fact checker to go in and make sure everything’s accurate, how much do we trust books? I said to my wife right after I wrote the book, from basically today onwards, I will always question every book I pick up wondering how much of this was written by people and how much of it was written by machines.

which is a scary thought. I also had the thought of, I could start a publishing company tomorrow and churn out a new book every 12 minutes. Would they be any good? No. By the way, for your listeners, the book is not very good. Don’t spend the 99 cents on it. And I hope your listeners are smart enough to get their own questions about AI answered directly from AI.

I don’t think you need anymore to go searching for a specific book about a specific topic if you trust the AI. And then once you start getting into the weeds of it or you need legal help or you need a specific exact answer, go back to the classes, the books, the humans you trust and say, hey, here’s what I learned from AI. How do I actually verify that’s true? So yes, there’s going to be a glut of trash, but we need smarter media consumers to be able to say, well, here’s the part I care about. I need to go verify that it’s true.

Santiago Tacoronte (19:33)
Let’s speak a little bit about AI for companies and leaders. What is the biggest mistake companies make when trying to integrate AI into their workflows?

Chris Singel (19:42)
The biggest mistake I’ve seen so far is just being scared of it. I’m sure someone on your team is already using it. So having an internal champion to say, hey, here’s how I think we should and could be using this, and then opening those discussions. Because if your employees are using it in secret, that’s almost more dangerous than having a policy set in place, having your legal team know about it. And I get a little nervous when I hear that disparate parts are using it in disparate ways. I think longer term, there’s this threat of

companies taking on business critical AIs that might go the way of the dot com bust. If you need it to run your business and that AI company goes out of business, that’s going to be a serious problem for you. So in general, I recommend some of the big boys, the Googles, the metas of the world, the open AIs, if you’re trying to implement AI into your company. But if you’re a little hesitant to do it, see who’s already using it on your team and see what knowledge they can bring or hire someone like Santiago or Chris to come in and talk about it.

Santiago Tacoronte (20:38)
If a business wants to use AI but don’t know where to start, what is the first AI tool or strategy they should adopt?

Chris Singel (20:47)
Chat it out. There are so many free chat tools now, whether you like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s chat GPT, and say, look, I run this kind of business. Here’s the issues I’m having. Here’s the questions I want you to ask me. Let’s find out what repetitive tasks I’m doing, what you can do to help. And if the AI itself can’t help, maybe there’s a tool like Zapier where you can connect two different CRMs. And I don’t want to too quickly get too technical for general listeners. But there are a lot of ways to streamline processes that have historically been done.

very very very slowly and a lot of businesses I work with and love to work with are these sort of mom and pop businesses or businesses who are approaching an exit and realize they’ve always always existed from referrals and word of mouth and they don’t do any marketing. Okay so let’s set up some pretty basic Google ads and Facebook ads and remarketing and retargeting and now all of a sudden you have analytics showing month over month growth that’s way more

beautiful as you approach an exit and way easier to pitch people to say hey not only do I have this business that has existed for 30 years but it’s growing and it’s time to move it on to the next owner. I love that stuff and I’d love to take on more of those businesses in the future.

Santiago Tacoronte (21:52)
You mentioned during this interview Bard and Gemini and others, which one is the best or are they all the same?

Chris Singel (21:58)
By the time this interview has published, it will have changed hands 15 different times. So they’re constantly releasing some. And the interesting conversation I was having recently is there’s this sort of hidden secret, public secret, that there might be even better AI tools being used by these companies internally to create the next generation of AI tools already. So what is public facing might not even be the best tools that exist today. And the best tool that exists today will not be the best tool that exists tomorrow.

But I think the question is, what’s the best tool for you? I think right now we’re in the era of DeepSeq, which is a much smaller model built off of the work of OpenAI. And it can run for super cheap and run super fast. So for most good enough use cases, start with something cheap that you are comfortable using. And if you find you need the more powerful, deeper thinking, deeper research tools, figure out exactly what you need first and then try it. I’m just trying to encourage people not to be scared.

Santiago Tacoronte (22:54)
You’ve worked with major media and marketing brands. How has AI changed digital marketing in ways people don’t realize yet?

Chris Singel (23:03)
I think people don’t understand how marketing reaches them and how granular it can get. I often have the conversation of, look, we can reach the one guy who does this amount of bidding, who lives in this one mile area, we can find his home address and send him flyers and we can call him on his personal cell phone if we want to. That’s creepy and that level of marketing shouldn’t be used. But at scale,

Facebook and Google and YouTube and connected TVs are all doing very similar things where they know exactly every product you viewed, every website you visited, how much time you’ve spent there, other ads you’ve clicked on, other things you’ve bought and purchased. There’s a big move now to own your payment history. Visa is in the process of setting up their own marketing platform so that they can actually view your transaction history. The data that we provide to people unknowingly has been feeding effectively AIs.

for decades now. So what is it changing? I think it’s going to be a slow burn until we start seeing really crazy things and the Overton window effectively what we find beyond the scope of we’ll accept as advertising is going to keep moving in this weird direction. There’s rumors that people have already seen their own digital advert, advertisers on Facebook marketing show up in ads directed to them to effectively say, here’s how happy you would be if you already own this product.

that’s good marketing, but I don’t think I like how it makes me feel. I don’t know. I think we as a people have to figure out the ads we’re okay with. And I think the corporations are quickly gonna figure out, look, this worked to sell more product and this got some really negative PR for us, so let’s not do it.

Santiago Tacoronte (24:38)
Let’s talk a little bit about ethics, to just touch upon very sensitive topics about how much information companies… I don’t think it’s solely to AI because the data is there. Where do we draw the line, Chris? When we say, okay, that’s enough, that’s enough of feeding models with personal data and harvesting data from people before we become…

Chris Singel (24:48)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Santiago Tacoronte (25:02)
almost like the big brother and we are observed and scored, like happens in some countries already.

Chris Singel (25:09)
Everything’s a trade-off, right? And I think people like to complain that laws are way too slow when it comes to keeping up with these tech companies. But GDPR and user privacy and terms and conditions required on all websites and all these cookie pop-ups, I think it’s an individual decision today to say, accept all cookies. I think people are pretty mindlessly just clicking that on every website they go to. I know I am, but I’ve also set the line for myself of ask app not to track on my phone because there’s this…

line right of the things I’ll do on my desktop are different than the things I’ll do on my phone and I think as we talk about this weird future of headsets or implantable bionic sort of things I want to keep a separation between what is digital Chris and what’s real human Chris and that’s a fine line that every human has to figure out for themselves I also think

A lot of these companies have made that trade off on your behalf. Google Analytics is an amazing tool that a lot of companies use to track their website visits and their clicks and to know where their users are coming from. Except what that means is Google has analytics on every website that installs this tool. They are willing to give this tool away for free because they have all that data now. Is that worth it to you as an individual? It’s certainly worth it to the companies. So again, where do you draw that line and who is pushing this trade off? You or the corporations?

Santiago Tacoronte (26:24)
There is a privacy trend in general going on.

Do you think that AI is increasing the fear of people about giving away their data? Just give a couple of examples. Accept cookies. More deep into, you know, giving personal details as your zip code or CTE. Because there is so much data out there that you can, your identity can be pinpointed somehow.

Chris Singel (26:36)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Santiago Tacoronte (26:53)
If

you go LinkedIn and then Facebook and then orders and this kind of things, you think people is going to run away from data and AI?

Chris Singel (27:00)
I think it allows some really bad actors to do things at scale. I’ve even gotten phone calls saying, we’re from Google to set your Gmail account. Just click this one link and it’s never from Google. I told them, I’ve been to the Google offices. I know you would never call me to do this. And the guy on the scammer says, who’d you talk to at Google? I’ll go get him on the phone right now. I’m like, buddy, it’s nine o’clock at night and I know he’s not in the office. But they will go through these scams and try to build, you know.

AI deep fake voices, maybe they’ll sound like they’re calling from your loved ones. These scams have been going on for a long time. My grandmother got a phone call 20 years ago saying, hey, it’s your grandson. And then she said, Adam. And she almost fell for the scam because she gave the scammer this information. But if an AI tool or a web scraper can pull all this information and call you and sound like Adam and say it’s me, Adam, and I’m at Adam’s last known location and I need you to do this.

money transfer or give me your Gmail login so I can pull up that file. I think people are going to fall for these scams more and more. And again, it falls back to trust but verify. Last week, my mother-in-law called me saying, are you with your wife? Is she okay? She just got a phone call from the police that she was in a crash and she has the case number. And I opened Find Mine, I saw she was at home. So I know how to use the tools to verify my family is safe and loved. But I think there are bad actors who are using these tools.

to scare people and extort them and make money in unethical ways. Where is that balance going to shake out? I hope we build enough tools to prevent these bad actors from winning, but remains to be seen, right?

Santiago Tacoronte (28:31)
I have a tool that one of my best friends gave me the other day. And I think it’s something that many families, particularly with elderly people, should do. He has created a passcode, password between himself and his mom and the wife, something that AI will never know to verify this call. if the mom gets a call talking about someone speaking about an accident,

Chris Singel (28:47)
I love this, yes.

Mm-hmm.

Santiago Tacoronte (29:00)
The mom triggers a question that only his son will know. And I thought it was fascinating.

Chris Singel (29:05)
And you can be obvious about it. Well, what’s the passcode?

Yeah. We had one, even when I was a kid, where we would call and say, I forgot to feed the dog. And then mom would just come pick you up and you would leave the party and everyone would be safe, no questions asked. The problem was one time I did forget to feed the dog and it got very confusing when I called my mom.

Santiago Tacoronte (29:23)
Chris, rapid fire, 30 seconds answers questions. Number one, interviews conducted by AI, yay or nay?

Chris Singel (29:33)
Yay for first round. Filter out some people who don’t really want the job and later rounds make sure that they’re actually a good culture fit.

Santiago Tacoronte (29:40)
AI generated emails. Time saver or yeah.

Chris Singel (29:42)
Yay, I do it all the time.

Time saver, absolutely. If it’s a first introduction especially, I don’t know who these people are because when I write emails myself, they come off as rude. I’ve sent emails just saying, sure. Like I would rather an AI be more human and polite if it can do it in the one second it takes me to give a thumbs up. There’s a pushback on thumbs up emojis because it’s too terse. Yeah, have an AI write a nice longer email in one second.

Santiago Tacoronte (30:06)
I’m going to push you a little bit on this one. AI girlfriends? Yes or no?

Chris Singel (30:10)
I’ve already told my wife she’s gonna love my AI girlfriend and no, think it’s again fine for like starting to understand how human interactions go, but I think they shouldn’t go much further than that. think kids are using them and thinking this is how humans should work and I mean, they think pornography is how sex should work. That’s not how the real world works. A girl isn’t gonna fawn over you just because you chatted with her, just because you powered up her CPU cycles.

Santiago Tacoronte (30:14)
Yeah.

Okay.

Chris Singel (30:37)
you need to put in the effort to talk to real human beings and chatting with an AI probably isn’t going to teach you that.

Santiago Tacoronte (30:42)
one AI tool you can’t live with without, without, without.

Chris Singel (30:46)
With or without?

Honestly, I still love ChatGPT. Google Gemini, I use a decent amount, but I think ChatGPT is just the industry leader right now. We’ll see, there’s rumors right now of Elon Musk trying to buy it out and what that does to the joining of It with Grok, but who knows? It’s gonna be a wild future, and I’m willing to adapt is the short answer, but the long answer is ChatGPT right now.

Santiago Tacoronte (31:10)
What is the most overhyped AI trend right now?

Chris Singel (31:13)
I think deep fake videos, I was in Los Angeles for the better part of 10 years. If someone cares enough to do the CGI to fake something, we’ve always had that technology. People still think the moon landing is fake. Like they think we’ve had this technology for 60 years. Yes, you can do it at scale and about smaller things, but I think people are way too worried about spreading false information through the news and way not worried enough about, wait, am I falling victim of false information already? Take some responsibility for it and trust, but verify.

Santiago Tacoronte (31:41)
If AI disappears tomorrow, what will be the first thing that you will struggle with?

Chris Singel (31:46)
I think my feed would be so full of the stock market tanking. When DeepSeek came out, it totally tanked Nvidia’s stock. I think if AI disappeared tomorrow, what I might think is, and I read too much sci-fi, did aliens remove AI so that it doesn’t take over our planet is probably what I would be worried about because that’s such a crazy question. How would you remove all AI from the planet? And how do you even define AI? Because we don’t necessarily have something like human and

level intelligence from it. So are you defining every algorithm as an AI? mean, are you counting standing in line as an AI? Every Turing complete machine could potentially be an AI, which is a lot of machines. Is pencil and paper an AI if you really break it down?

Santiago Tacoronte (32:27)
Interesting. Chris, for people that are worrying that AI will make their skills obsolete, what is the mindset shift that they need to adopt today?

Chris Singel (32:37)
Yeah, a lot of people call it a scarcity mindset versus an abundance mindset, but I do think these engineers came in, I don’t know how up to date on American politics you and your listeners are, but engineers came into legacy financial systems run by the federal government. And they’re written in code from 60 years ago that nobody knows how to implement anymore. So I think the fear of everything you know will be obsolete is probably a little overblown, but I do think you need to be able to adapt and learn and grow like in any job.

hopefully aren’t doing the exact same job you were 20, 30 years ago. So as long as you’re willing to grow and improve and change, hopefully you’re doing it in a way that makes you more productive and makes the world a better, safer, happier, healthier place.

Santiago Tacoronte (33:16)
Chris, where can people follow you and know more about your work?

Chris Singel (33:20)
I’m real easy to find online, Chris Singel, S-I-N-G-E-L, or you can go directly to deltadigitalagency.com. I work with companies. I’m also in the process of launching a podcast of my own, so we can talk more about that offline, Santiago.

Santiago Tacoronte (33:33)
I’d love to do that. Chris, thank you so much for this very interesting time and the insight you have given to us. You definitely are an AI optimist. I can surely say that. And I’m excited to read about you and what you do in the future of AI. I do believe if we use it wisely and with critical thinking, it can make our lives much, much better.

Chris Singel (33:55)
I hope so, it’s already made my life better.

Santiago Tacoronte (33:58)
Thanks Chris.

Chris Singel (33:59)
Thanks Santiago, thanks for having me, that was super fun.