# I Went to a Godsmack Concert and It Explained Everything AI Still Can't Touch [00:00:00] **Tiana Ned:** Okay, so I need to tell you about my experience on last Sunday night. I went to a Godsmack concert, and I was in the front section, not necessarily against the barrier, . but close enough to feel it in my chest. And for those two hours, I have not pulled out my phone once. [00:00:23] Not once. Not even to take a single photo or video [00:00:27] And somewhere around the third song, I had this moment when Saul is up there doing his thing and, you know, the whole crowd is screaming the words back at him, And suddenly I felt like I was 16 again. And not really remembering being 16, but, like, physically, uh, like I time traveled back to that moment of standing in a crowd at my first real concert. It's the same electricity feeling in my chest and, that same stupid grin on my face. [00:01:02] And as I looked around, everyone around me and near me was doing the exact same thing. exact same sparkle in their eyes, Same presence and same grin on their faces. And so that got me thinking about something that's kind of the flip side of everything we usually talk about on this show. We spend so much time here, talking about what AI can generate, how it can help us do our jobs better, um, how we can create images, text, music, scripts, videos, the whole personalized experiences. [00:01:41] And As I was standing in that crowd, I was thinking, like, none of that touches this, not even close. So today, I wanna talk about experiences that AI can't replace. I'm not talking about jobs or skills here, b- but literally experiences like music, theater, sports, artisanal goods, what all of that has in common, and why it's not going anywhere [00:02:28] Hey, welcome back to AI For Creative Professionals. I'm Tiana, and if this is your first time here, this is the show for designers, writers, marketers, illustrators, videographers, photographers, and basically anyone creative trying to figure out what AI changes and what it doesn't Okay, let's sit with this, framing for a second. because obviously I don't wanna just, you know, wave my hands and say, "Oh, concerts are so special," 'cause duh, of course they are. But I wanna dig deeper into what was happening. So for those two hours, I was not doing five things at once. [00:03:08] I wasn't half watching, half being distracted, half scrolling. I was just watching a band play music. That's it [00:03:18] And the time travel thing that I keep coming back to, it's not necessarily nostalgia because nostalgia is looking back at something. But this was more like my 16-year-old self and my current self collapsing into the same two hours, right? So it's a [00:03:36] I don't even know how I would describe that feeling. And I think that's the thing. It's not necessarily that the songs themselves were doing that because, you know, I could have easily listened to the studio versions at home, you know? But being there in the crowd with bunch of people who are all experiencing the same feelings being there while it happened once at that one point in time, and it cannot be redone again [00:04:09] Okay, so I did go down a little bit of a research rabbit hole on this too, because I wanted to know if there's a reason that this hits different or I'm just getting sentimental in my 30s. And turns out there is a term for it. Uh, there is a sociologist named Émile Durkheim, [00:04:33] And he called this idea collective effervescence. So it's this idea that basically describes what happens when a crowd,when a crowd synchronizes emotionally around something happening live together in real time. It's this specific thing where the group feeling becomes bigger than what any one person's in-individually feeling That's the chest base hit thing. [00:04:58] You know, that's the everyone around me was doing the exact same thing thing, right? And I found this quote that stuck with me. Some writer put it as, "The experiences we treasure most are rarely the ones we watched. They are the ones we lived." And that's exactly what happened to me at the Godsmack concert on a Sunday night. [00:05:23] I lived it. And there's also this thing psychologists call the effort heuristic. So basically what it means is we rate something as more valuable if we believe more effort went into making it. And from what I've seen floating around, there was some research where they showed people the exact same painting, told one group a human made it, and another group an AI made it. [00:05:48] And the human made it group rated it as more beautiful, more meaningful, and worth more. Okay? So it was basically the same painting, but the only difference was the story behind it, which gets at something I think is actually the real thing going on here. A human has a finite amount of time on this earth. [00:06:10] If someone spends 40 hours on a portrait, they gave up 40 hours of their one limited life for that thing. But an AI generates it in four seconds and has functionally infinite time and zero sacrifice. And we feel that difference even when we cannot fully explain it. And there's also a second piece too, which is provenance, basically the origin story of a thing. [00:06:37] So for example, if you are listening to a breakup song, you're basically using it as a mirror for your own heartbreak, right? you're not just enjoying the pretty melody, and that only works because there's a person on the other end who also had a childhood, a hometown, some baggage, or a broken heart of their own And AI doesn't have any of that, no inner life to connect with. [00:07:06] So when you find out something came from an algorithm, that mirror just kind of stops working. So it's just not the vibe, right? There's [00:07:15] an actual psychological reason this hits different [00:07:19] And AI, no matter how good it gets at generating a song that sounds similar to "Godsmack," for example, it cannot generate hundreds and hundreds of hours, and it cannot generate a childhood [00:07:35] So there's another thing regarding this too. It's something like shared vulnerability or embodied friction. So basically, we are drawn to live in-person things specifically because there's a real risk of failure baked in. [00:07:54] So okay, let's do music first since that's where this whole thing started [00:07:59] So even though, from my perspective, this concert was nothing short of perfect, but let's just say that maybe on another night on the tour, Sully's voice cracking on a high note can happen, right? 'Cause he's human and it's like, 15th night on a tour, and the drummer recovering from a missed fill in real time. [00:08:24] So you don't get that experience from a studio track, and you definitely don't get it from something generated in six seconds. And theater is maybe the purest version of this. So when an actor forgets a line and instead of a director yelling, "Cut," You watch a real human being think on their feet right in front of you, and either saves the scene or not. [00:08:49] Okay, so that performance happens once and it's gone. It's never repeated the same way again, even in the next night's show. And also live sports, obviously, no one's on the edge of their seat rewatching a game where they already know the score, right? But the stakes are real specifically because the outcome hasn't been decided yet. [00:09:11] So that's the embodied friction too, just with a scoreboard instead of a script. And then we can also mention artisan stuff, the handmade goods. Why does a hand-thrown ceramic mug cost four times what the machine-made one cost, even though the machine one's probably more perfect, quote, unquote? [00:09:32] Because we actively want or we are seeking for the slightly asymmetrical one. We wanna know a person's hands touched it. And when you think about AI, it is optimized to be frictionless and flawless. But humans, as it turns out, go out looking for the friction on purpose. [00:09:54] So across all of it, when you think about it, music, theater, sports, a handmade mug, The thread is the same. Liveness, risk, and being witnessed. Something happening once in front of you that cannot be redone if you don't like the first take [00:10:12] okay, so here's where I wanna bring this back to you 'cause I don't want this to turn out to be just a personal reflection or personal feelings episode. Let's get concrete about this, uh, 'cause I don't wanna leave you hanging and thinking about how does this all apply to me and my work? [00:10:33] So if your whole business model is, I deliver a polished asset as fast as possible, you are competing directly with on AI's home turf, and you will lose that fight 'cause AI is only getting faster , as time goes by. So the move here is to, in fact, sell the process and not just the asset. [00:11:00] Concretely, let's say next project, you actually keep the ugly first draft, and you screenshot it. So when you deliver the final thing, show the client both. Here's where we started, here's where we landed on, and here is why. So that's not the extra work you're doing for free, by the way, 'cause you are already doing it. [00:11:24] It's just that you are not showing it to the client, and that's the pitch for why you cost more than a prompt. [00:11:32] Don't just hand the client the finished logo, okay? Show them the messy sketchbook, the three discarded directions you made, [00:11:40] The weird cultural rabbit hole you went down before you landed on your first idea. Because clients, when you think about it, are not buying your Photoshop or Illustrator skills at this point, right? [00:11:55] What are they buying? They're buying your lived perspective, which is the one thing that is impossible to prompt for. [00:12:04] Then second thing, if you've got any kind of real live or real-time offering sitting unused in your business, I think this is the moment to price it properly and put it forward, whether it be a workshop, a live strategy session, uh, watch me work through your brief live on a call option, [00:12:25] people will pay a premium for that, specifically 'cause it cannot be generated. It's the same exact reason that Godsmack ticket was not really about the set list, which I could have easily streamed for free at home, right? And then third, and this one's a little uncomfortable, actually put your story somewhere a client can find it before they hire you We're all used to those generic About Me pages, right? [00:12:53] We see them everywhere. But put in there a specific thing, where you came from,, why you chose this particular kind of work. What are you weirdly obsessed with? Provenance, remember? People want to know that there's a person with a story and a childhood on the other end of the thing they're buying. [00:13:16] And hiding that behind a polished generic portfolio is leaving your biggest advantage over AI completely on the table. And one more thing, but this one's specifically for you, not for your clients and, uh, for your client work. if you've got a creative hobby outside of your work, pick one and just protect it. [00:13:38] Okay? Ban AI tools from touching that one thing specifically, even if it technically made you faster at it. If AI offers to speed up your knitting, or your watercolor, or your guitar playing, or whatever your thing is, and you're not doing it for the money, say no. Say no. The entire point of a hobby is the sweat equity itself, and handing that to AI is basically paying someone else to go to the gym for you, okay? [00:14:10] So the friction is never the obstacle. The, the friction is the whole reward in itself So back to that crowd from Sunday night, the 16-year-old me, the current me, and, uh, a couple of thousand strangers all doing the exact same stupid electric thing at the exact same second. [00:14:32] AI keeps getting better at generating things that look like art, but what it cannot do is it cannot generate the hundreds of hours. It cannot generate childhood memories. It cannot put 5,000 people in a room feeling the same thing at once. And honestly, the more I sit with this, the more I think the real skill going forward is you just making things AI can't make. [00:15:03] It's noticing, actually noticing when you're having one of these experiences in the first place instead of half living it through a phone screen, which guilty as charged most of us do constantly. It's not something to be proud of, for sure. I'd love to know what's an experience like that for you. It doesn't necessarily have to be a concert or music. [00:15:26] It can be theater. It can be a game. It can be watching someone make something by hand. Whatever it is for you, tell me about it. . Next week, we're gonna be talking about something that's kind of connected to this one, weirdly. Uh, I've started doing this small thing most days, so it, it's not a, a new app or a new productivity system, anything like that, and it's completely changed how present I am for honestly everything, not just concerts. [00:15:57] And I wasn't gonna make a whole episode about it because it sounds almost too simple to talk about, but then I notice how much that thing actually shifted for me. So next week I'll tell you about what that is and why I almost didn't bother trying it, and what happened when I stuck with it for more than just a few days. [00:16:21] All right, that's it for this one. I will talk to you next week.