Utkarsh Narang (00:01.008) Welcome to another episode of the IgnitedNeurons Podcast. Today I have someone who's from the other side of the globe. I'm here in Australia and Cara is in North America, New York I believe right now Cara. Cara Parrish-Katz (00:13.152) Yes, New York. Right outside of the city, yeah. Utkarsh Narang (00:14.632) Perfect, Amazing. That's one of my favorite cities after Melbourne. New York used to be the best city in the world for me, but now I love Melbourne a little bit more because of the coffee. Cara Parrish-Katz (00:26.574) because of the coffee? I did not see that coming. Really? Okay. What's your coffee order? Utkarsh Narang (00:28.049) It's amazing. Utkarsh Narang (00:33.33) Yes. Have you been to Melbourne? Have you an espresso? When I'm wanting to like really feel the coffee without sugar, without milk, without anything. But if I want to kind of pamper myself, then I'll do a cappuccino with an extra shot. Cara Parrish-Katz (00:50.158) See I'm a cappuccino girl too and actually and New Yorkers are gonna Guys just like fast-forward really quick like do that hit that 15 second button because you're not gonna like this It's very hard to find a proper cappuccino in New York City It really actually Utkarsh Narang (01:05.972) But in Melbourne, you will find it in every third cafe. And they're good. Cara Parrish-Katz (01:11.832) Really? changing my conference schedule now. Utkarsh Narang (01:17.588) Perfect, perfect. Looking forward to hosting you in Melbourne. Cara Parrish-Katz (01:21.39) I just talking to my husband, was like, I know like Italy is not one of, actually not one of my favorite countries to visit frequently, but I was like, it's been a minute and I could really use like a proper cappuccino. Like, I might need to schedule a flight to Europe just because I need it so badly. So it sounds like actually a flight to Melbourne. In order. Utkarsh Narang (01:43.036) Absolutely, is in the books. Awesome. So for those who have been hearing this podcast, we start with a hypothesis. And my hypothesis is that by the end of this conversation, you would have heard about appeasing the algorithm gods. You would have heard about inclusive marketing. You might have also heard about artificial intelligence and H.I. H.I. stands for human intelligence, because both Cara and I really deeply feel about this, that yes, It is going to take over the world. Here we go. We start with that. But it's the human intelligence that's going to drive it. so, Cara, welcome to the conversation. Cara Parrish-Katz (02:20.344) I am so excited. right to lead up to this, I was listening to past episodes and listening to the episode, the most recent episode for storytelling is absolutely the best episode to listen to before you come into a podcast. So 10 stars. Anybody, anybody who's listening to this one, make sure after this one you go back and listen to the episodes leading up to this because I feel heavily influenced by the ones before this anyway. because they were very good, but definitely go back in time and listen to those. But I already like our prediction list. Utkarsh Narang (02:56.788) Amazing, amazing. Yeah, Shawn is a master storyteller who you're referring to. Love, love how he puts everything in a beautiful story. But if, I mean, you've listened to the podcast, right? So this question is not going to come as a surprise, but we throw ourselves into the deep end as soon as we start the conversation. And the question that I have for you is, that eight-year-old little girl, wherever she was growing up, whatever her starry-eyed dreams were, if that eight-year-old little girl were to come, and meet you right now. What kind of conversation do you think will emerge between the two of you? Cara Parrish-Katz (03:32.776) I think she would be so proud, first of all. I think she would love what I've accomplished. I think she would love my advocacy work. I think she would love my international work. I think she would love the inclusivity. I think she would love how much self-awareness I have versus back then when we knew so little about ourselves and who we were and so little about neurodivergence to understand what she... was going through her to understand herself or her role in the world or her relationships with the people around her. So I think she'd be so proud, but it's a vice versa thing. I'm very proud of her. So I think we would just have a whole like, um, compelling moment if you will, with each other. I think it would be a very sweet thing. And I think the conversation would just mostly be about that. Honestly, it would be about how proud we are of each other and there's some things that I think would really surprise her. I think it would blow her mind that I have a child. But I think the rest of it would be work that she would be really happy to hear happen. Utkarsh Narang (04:44.638) That's beautiful. I love whenever I ask this question and I know why this thought came to me. We're so. We're so thoughtful and intentional when we talk to our eight year old selves, but I've seen this time and again that when we talk to our adult selves, we're like, what the hell, all you do in a day is like three podcasts. What is wrong with you? Like, like, can you do better? And we get this and then I have to consciously stop that critical. thinker to kind of stop negating the work that I've done. How have you seen that relationship play out for yourself? Cara Parrish-Katz (05:21.082) that's a big question. I won't say that I never feel that, right? I will say that there are more seasons of that for me, of like very specific moments where I don't feel like I have the highest level of productivity or I don't feel like I'm making the impact that I want to make and that my personal struggle is that I self-compare because I've had these very high high points in my career. I've been so fortunate though to have the opportunity to make those things possible. I was 23 years old and consulting with Harley Davidson. I was building the largest hiring group in my state in the middle of the 2016 election. When everybody else was facing massive divisiveness, right? I was bringing together thousands of people in my home state. have these spikes of great impact that I think largely come along with having ADHD. But then when I am producing at what is probably just a very normal rate, it's quite difficult to look at that version of yourself and say like, am I not producing like that? Why don't I have the impact like I had then? And a lot of those times I like to just sit down and say like, What am I doing though? What is it that I'm actually doing in my day to day? And when you have designed a life and a career that's always impact driven, the answer to that is always impactful, right? So, you you can sit and say, I've only done three podcast episodes today, but what was the outcome of those three podcast episodes? What impact did you have on people? Utkarsh Narang (07:05.236) you Cara Parrish-Katz (07:16.066) the number of people who heard those episodes, understood the vulnerability that they now need in order to have the storytelling for their team, or to have heard your coaching wisdom, or have even seen your posts on LinkedIn. know, there are thousands and thousands of people who see those. And the impact that you are making just by having that presence, let alone the actual work you do outside of that work, right? When you sit down and you actually write down what you do in a day, I think for most of us, it's a lot more than we realize that we're doing if we focus on the impact that we have. But when you specifically have built a life around impact, it's hard to frankly escape from that. So it's more about, I think, taking stock, right? Utkarsh Narang (08:09.692) Interesting. I love to also ask our listeners to have like a notepad and a pen to scribble thoughts out because we hear a lot of beautiful wisdom. We hear a lot of amazing content in the world. But sometimes between listening and action, there's a big gap. And I think if both of us can today, by the end of our conversation, give people something that they can actually put into the world and act upon it, I think to me then what you're saying. That's the impact, that's the outcome, that's what we've achieved through this conversation. Cara Parrish-Katz (08:44.558) Absolutely, absolutely and a huge portion of I think what holds people back is just understanding what the action is, right? It's so easy for us to see something online someone tells us something when we're out sitting at the table with friends at dinner and someone tells us something and we are outraged, right? Like we're like, that's awful, that's horrible, I can't believe that happened. Or you're excited, you're like, that's amazing, it's incredible, that's great news. And the buck stops there. If we just take that information and even if it's just the signal boost of that information in either direction, Utkarsh Narang (09:05.62) Hmm. Cara Parrish-Katz (09:25.304) you're creating impact of moving it forward. And I think this is something that like existing in the marketing world, we're so aware of, right? So much of what we do is hinged on people sharing it and it getting that massive snowball effect and more and more people becoming aware of what we're doing, either direction when we're combating something that's horrible or when we are trying to get a solution out there to more people. And so, A lot of times it's just about taking even the smallest action of amplification or taking a look at your resources, whether it's time or it's network and saying, what can I do about this thing that I obviously care about? Utkarsh Narang (10:12.244) Very interesting. As I'm hearing you speak, I want to kind of deep dive into the market here and you. But I want to go back to that conversation you were having about the little girl and you. And you use this word self-awareness. How does that play a role in everything? And that's a FaceTime call. That's OK. That's a FaceTime call that you're getting on your phone. Cara Parrish-Katz (10:29.622) Sorry. Sorry. Utkarsh Narang (10:38.1) I've done these too. So I absolutely understand. And to the listeners, this is just a reminder that, yeah, you can put your phone on, not disturb if you're listening to this, because conversation that Cara and I are having is super important. But the question that I was asking Cara was that little girl, you spoke about being self-aware even at that time and now, and then you also spoke about doing this comparison between who you were in certain moments of your life. How did you get to that place? Because it does... And that could be an assumption. So you can absolutely throw it out of the window and prove me wrong. But my assumption is that self-awareness, reflection, pausing to introspect, all the big ideas that you're sharing with us in the first 10 minutes, they're not easy to come because there's so much noise on the outside. There's always this need to keep moving forward, keep making progress, keep running that we don't do that. So how did that come about for you? Cara Parrish-Katz (11:37.324) I think it's largely the realization that we are in a consumption era, right? There's so much to consume around us all the time. And even when I was small, I was one of those voracious readers, consuming, consuming. I've always loved to consume content. I was one of those popular on MySpace millennials. Like I've... always been like give it give me all of the information give me all of the culture give me all of the meme wars give me all of the you know like I like to consume at a mass rate the struggle though with consuming at a mass rate is that there's no action in just consumption there's no creation in consumption It's just consumption. So unless you turn off your consumption, all you're ever doing is just consuming. So it makes it very difficult for you to know what the impact of what you're consuming has on you, but it's also difficult to take any action around what you've consumed. It's difficult to have any awareness of why you want to consume what you want to consume, have any discretion around what you consume, which can be very dangerous to have no discretion around what you consume. So you have to shut that off and go away from it in order to process. And in that processing of what you've consumed, you get the opportunity to also have a lot of introspection. And so even when I was young and like to consume that voracious reader and everything like that. I was so fortunate to have disconnection as a part of my life because I lived on a farm, a very rural farm in middle of nowhere West Virginia where the wi-fi was obscenely slow, right? And to get to the library was there was a teeny tiny library that was like a 30 minute drive. Utkarsh Narang (13:37.172) you Utkarsh Narang (13:44.596) Hmm. Cara Parrish-Katz (13:53.134) But other than that the library at my school was mostly like where I could have books So it was just limited by what was there during the school day that I could get enough of to take home at night to keep reading so I was had these like forced pauses right of forced pause of just lack of connection of being rural and in those pauses I had to Process what I had consumed because there was nothing else to consume And because of that, I had formed this habit. So by the time I was chronically online, I was able to understand that it was necessary that I create that space, right? Even when I was in the middle of New York City or Mumbai or Talon, right? Like I knew that I still had to create disconnected space. Utkarsh Narang (14:35.901) Hmm. Utkarsh Narang (14:51.06) That is so powerful. That is so powerful because and the conflict, not the conflict, I think the idea that I've lived with is that you could either be a consumer or a creator. And how you're helping me evolve even that thought is that you can be a consumer who creates. And what you were able to do because of those forced pauses that was imparted onto you because of the environment that you were in, those four spots allowed you to process, allowed you to think about what you had consumed to then be able to create. I love that. And so But we live in a day and age now where Wi-Fi, even on the plane, if that's not working on some days, we'd be like, what the f... Are we on the right airline? I'm not going to fly this airline anymore because it does not give me Wi-Fi. And we're not grateful for what that technology is allowing us to do, go from Melbourne to New York or New York to Mumbai or whatever that might be. But we are cribbing about the Wi-Fi not being strong on a United flight. And so if we were to now come up with... Cara Parrish-Katz (15:59.022) Mm-hmm. Utkarsh Narang (16:02.334) Some strategies Cara that would help our listeners create these forced pauses. How do you manage these forced pauses now? Cara Parrish-Katz (16:13.11) I actually think that this is a bit of a detox situation for a lot of people. It's the dopamine that we get in the algorithm, right? We, the algorithms have... Utkarsh Narang (16:19.124) you Cara Parrish-Katz (16:28.396) decades now, of experience, of... people programming them to function very similar to a slot machine, right? We are supposed to be addicted, we're supposed to stay. The way that the boards wanna see outcome from a social network is how much time someone remains on platform. Not that you check in, not that you open meta apps 30 times a day. It's that you open the meta app and you didn't leave. for thirty hours in the day. That is where the profit comes from. So because they're gamified to do this and to create this constant dopamine hit in your brain, can be really difficult actually to separate yourself from it in the beginning. And even if you are someone who has regularly scheduled away time, if you are back on, like let's say you have a nice long flight across the world and you are like, hey, you know what? I'm just gonna chronic scroll my way through, know, let me doom scroll for 12 hours. It will be enjoyable. That next day you will find it more difficult to not. open your phone because you have psychologically Cara Parrish-Katz (17:50.422) had a disruption in the way, in where your dopamine spikes are coming from and how often they're happening. So it's very literally in our brain chemistry what's happening. So we have to make a conscious choice in how much time we spend inside these apps. It's also been proven it's more difficult to leave when you've been on for a long time. So if you've been on for say an hour, it's more difficult to walk away from it. than if you've been on for 10 minutes. So having awareness of these, and if you are in the social media space or the marketing space, this is crucial. Right? Because especially if you do social media marketing, you're expected to be on because you comment when the comments come in. Right? So you're expected to be on for eight hours a day. And what that does to someone psychologically can be extremely damaging. There are all sorts of mental health programs that are just in place for the people who do like, quality assurance or the reported posting on say Meta or LinkedIn because the amount of time they have to be online and the nature of what they are consuming is so psychologically harmful that they'll have very severe mental health issues because of this job. So. You actually have to make yourself put it down. You have to walk away from it. You need to set a timer. It's necessary. It's crazy that we don't automatically think of this because if someone said, job is to play slot machines for eight hours a day, five days a week, we would say, my God, are you okay? Like we would do it. Utkarsh Narang (19:27.348) Hmm. Utkarsh Narang (19:45.876) 100 % Cara Parrish-Katz (19:47.18) Are you okay? Do you take a whole season off? How does that work? How are you not broken? Right? And it's the exact same thing. If you are a social media marketer, if you are a creator, which is so many people now, if you're in the creator economy, it's the exact same thing. And you have to have scheduled breaks from this. You have to disconnect from this. Utkarsh Narang (19:53.075) Yeah. Cara Parrish-Katz (20:11.446) unhealthy otherwise, but also you'll never get time to process what you have consumed. You'll never establish any discernment. You will inevitably begin doom scrolling because we as humans are most responsive to upsetting content. Marketers know that. If you want someone to click, you're better off putting picture of someone crying than someone laughing. We naturally as humans with empathy respond to these things. It's actually really critically important to your health that you say, this is how long I'm going to be on, this is how long going to be off. Utkarsh Narang (20:48.788) you It's so fascinating. It's a, I love how you put this example of someone on a slot machine, someone in a casino for eight hours a day for five days a week. And we would be like really checking on their health, but here we are on our phones and no one, no one asks us. It is, it has become almost such a norm that if you're not connected 24 seven, what are you doing with your life? Are you, are you okay? And, and just an example comes this morning and this happens often. My children ask me about like, dad, have you, and elder one is like into fitness and loves to exercise. Have you seen this fitness influence? I'm like, I have not. Where do you live? And that's the question they asked me. And I'm like, it's okay for me to not know someone, but for them it's like, how can you not know that person? Because that's what's happening. So what I'm hearing you say is that it has to be done consciously and it has a positive domino effect. on A your well-being, but also your ability to create more is what I'm understanding. Cara Parrish-Katz (21:56.054) Absolutely. And consumption is a place of inspiration, right? It's where we find the new stories that do inspire us or outrage us or make us cry, right? Consumption is a space where we find that. Some of the most popular studies on marketing that you'll find whenever you are in an MBA program are like Taylor Swift because she would famously spend a lot of time on the internet sourcing heartbreak from teenage girls and then writing to it. And that's her early albums, a lot of her popularity. She was very transparent that she would go online and she would consume what teenage girls were talking about, the phrases they were using, who they were following, and she would write to it. And it worked quite well. But also if we're in the general marketing space, right, this is a lot of what we're doing. Utkarsh Narang (22:51.485) in gold. Cara Parrish-Katz (22:55.758) And when we talk about now trends on say TikTok or any network, you want to talk about LinkedIn AI action figures, the only way to be in on the trend is to have an awareness that there's a trend in the first place. So if you're not consuming, it would be impossible to piggyback on the virality of a trend, right? So consumption in and of itself is not a bad thing. It's a necessary thing. Utkarsh Narang (23:23.124) Mmm. You've reframed it beautifully. Consumption is a necessary thing. It's almost like that optimal balance, right? If you let it go to the far end, then that's when it becomes harmful to you. And I'm currently reading this book, The Molecule of More, talks about dopamine, dopamine all over and the experiments that they did with rats as to how an excess of dopamine can actually make us really not productive, not creative, not all the right things, not human. And I think it's time for us to hear that. But as we're speaking about that, you somewhere said that as a marketer, you know that put some upsetting content out there, put a thumbnail and we're moving into the, from the appeasing the algorithm to the next phase almost. Here's what I, and I'm being selfish here. I want to kind of learn from you and that's why I'm asking you this question. A lot of our conversation that we have in this podcast are meta level conversations, right? They could be, they could be talking about marketing. They could be talking about social media. They could be talking about tick tock, they ultimately are trying to raise the awareness of everyone who's listening. Part of me feels challenged that I'm not being like a Taylor Swift and listening to what the world is talking about. And I'm trying to hear between Karen and myself having this conversation that can be assumed to be meta level. What are your thoughts on that? one be actually tweaking the conversation or should one be... So where is the balance between authenticity and absorbing from the outside world? Cara Parrish-Katz (25:08.642) I would say why do you have the assumption that being meta is not something that's wildly popular? Utkarsh Narang (25:16.018) Mmm. Cara Parrish-Katz (25:18.422) Right. So even though these conversations are meta conversations and you explore really deep subjects. Utkarsh Narang (25:18.824) Good question. Cara Parrish-Katz (25:26.732) to the point of seeing someone crying is more impactful for clicks than seeing someone smiling, the more that we have vulnerability, the more that we have transparency, the more that we're talking about things that enrage us, things that make us cry, the more empathy we are invoking from the people around us. so, meta is popular. It does have a virality component, right? And even the things that we're doing that have what would seem like surface level virality, right? So if we go back to like the AI action figure superhero trend on LinkedIn, right? The reason why people love that so much is because something else is self-identifying them, right? So. What concept is possibly more meta than reaching into AI and saying, am I? Utkarsh Narang (26:31.806) Wow, that's such a good question. Cara Parrish-Katz (26:32.032) any spitting out a plastic degenerative image and saying this is who you are and you saying yeah yeah all this time it's just my hair color and a cat and I'm stoked you know we're such simple creatures like the idea that that these things are are polar or Utkarsh Narang (26:43.06) This is what I was waiting for. Cara Parrish-Katz (27:02.338) don't work in unison, I think, would probably be a misconception. Utkarsh Narang (27:07.092) Hmm. Very interesting. As you're speaking about AI, how are you seeing that play out in the marketing world? I want you to kind of speak to, maybe let's first speak about when you speak about this idea of inclusive marketing. What does that really mean, Cara? Because it's a... It's a newish term for the world to fully understand because for me as well, I still don't fully understand. Like part of me feels like I have ADHD because I've like 20 tabs open. I move from one task to the other and I have to consciously kind of stop myself. But what does really inclusive marketing mean? Cara Parrish-Katz (27:47.234) So first of all, every time someone says, I think I could have, it's important to say, go see your doctor. Because more of us have some form of neurodivergence than we realize, right? And because a lot of the diagnoses are younger, it's something that many of us has go our whole lives without realizing. And then as soon as you do get a diagnosis, all of sudden you're like, that this is that and this is that and this is that and this is that. And when your self-awareness can grow a hundredfold in one day, so much of your life becomes a lot easier because you understand the why of what's happening. But aside from that, inclusive marketing is actually a pretty simple concept. It's just the idea that marketing and the digital world should be designed and built for all of us, not designed and built for the majority of us, and not designed and built for the majority of us with caveats. the opposite, or not the opposite, but the way a lot of us think of being inclusive at first is to add on accommodations for people. So this is the way we do it, but we've added this on. because if we add this on, then it's helpful for people who say need a screen reader, or it's helpful for people who are hearing challenged because we use transcription technology, or it's helpful for people who have seizure disorders or ADHD if we don't use as many screen animations or effects, scroll effects on our website. So we think of it in terms of these accommodations or add-ons. Inclusive marketing is building a digital presence with these things in mind from the beginning. So they're not add-ons later. It's actually designing your digital presence and designing your marketing with as much and as many people in mind as we can from the very beginning. There's a difference between inclusivity and accommodation. Utkarsh Narang (30:11.624) I love how you give very precise examples like the animations on a website, putting transcription for someone who's unable to hear and they can read through. Have you seen examples in the world where you feel like one of these brands didn't add or one of these brands did a campaign which you think was like it hit the sweet spot? Cara Parrish-Katz (30:35.21) I'm gonna forget the name. And this is also an ADHD trait is that my short-term memory recall is horrible, basically Dory the fish. But if you want to look at brands that do this really well, the easiest way to find brands that do this really well is to look at brands that focus on inclusivity in the first place. So if you look at brands that focus on disability advocacy, usually this is at the forefront for them, right? as it's necessary for most of their consumers, their clientele, their partners. But because it's necessary for them, it means that they have inclusive practices. They've designed from the beginning for this. So that would be the place to go look first of all to see this executed at the highest level. But there are plenty of ads that you probably just don't. realize every day that are designed more inclusively and not just ads but websites, campaigns, hiring practices. So even when you think about the practice of applying for a job, the part where you are actually completing a form and completing a process on a website where you're going through multiple pages and the emails that you're receiving, typically that's been done by someone in the communications department. Either internal communications and a lot of times with the assistance of the higher levels in the marketing department working with communications if they're doing inclusive marketing practices because that's going to actually radiate through everything. It's one of the things I love the most about one of the companies I work with now, Magical Teams, is because Magical Teams from the beginning has always had this inclusive practice model. Their founder is really aware. And it's a beautiful thing. And sometimes she even catches things that I, as a practitioner in this space, right, who is regularly getting extra training on this all the time, that she'll catch things that I have not caught on to, right, or have not realized that she does it in a leadership practice. So I focus on this in the marketing space where I'm helping design, say, the actual process where someone does an application from the careers page. Cara Parrish-Katz (32:49.122) where we're using a set of tools where they're not just writing answers into a form. They have an option where they can screen record. So they can speak to a screen recorder and then submit that. Or they can do an audio submission and they have that option. Because some people who struggle with written responses say they have dyslexia, right? It doesn't mean that they're not. Utkarsh Narang (33:01.812) Hmm. Cara Parrish-Katz (33:14.318) perfect for the role. doesn't mean that they're in any way incapable of what they're applying for. It just means that you've created an accessibility barrier for them if you're requiring them to only complete written tasks. And AI has actually made that even more complicated because a lot of people now have set their form fields or functions within different submission tools that you can't copy and paste because they're worried that someone's going to copy and paste something out of Chat GPT. Utkarsh Narang (33:38.441) Yeah. Cara Parrish-Katz (33:42.446) or Claude or whatever, Jasper, and they're gonna put it into this form and they're not gonna get an authentic answer. But actually what they're doing is making it so that the people who used accommodation tools in order to make sure that their writing was legible because they couldn't have, or what they intended to say because they struggle with that as a trait, those people can no longer copy and paste that content in. So in this... Utkarsh Narang (33:49.331) you Cara Parrish-Katz (34:11.854) practice, right? We really have to have an up-to-date awareness of these different tools and how everything affects everyone and their different needs, but even in leadership. So I did a post the other day of we were in a meeting and I said, you know, I've got my list. These are my priorities. This is what I'm going to get done. This is my process, da da. The meeting was only 20 minutes in to an hour long meeting and Christina Salerno, who's the founder of Magical Teams, she was like, okay, well the meeting's done. Utkarsh Narang (34:15.528) Hmm. Cara Parrish-Katz (34:42.018) We're cut. And she's like, Cara knows exactly what she's doing. If we give her a bunch of other information, we are going to sideline her and she'll be less productive coming out of this meeting, less productive this week than if we let her go right now and she does what she has her focus on. And I was like, that, as someone with ADHD, was like the best moment in a meeting I have ever had. I was so grateful and happy coming out of that, but that is inclusive leadership. So. Utkarsh Narang (35:19.23) Wow. I'm getting goosebumps as you're saying that because that's unheard of. That's A, that's such wise use of everyone's time in the room. B, that's supporting you so beautifully that I don't even have words to express it. And as you were saying, just shows how Catherine, did I catch the name right? Christina, yeah, sorry. Christina, yeah. That's amazing. Cara Parrish-Katz (35:41.934) Christina. Utkarsh Narang (35:47.902) But here's my challenge, Cara, that it's a... I think what I'm seeing, and correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm also learning with you as you're sharing all of this, based on what we have, what has arrived in our awareness, our actions will be based on that, right? And Christina has the awareness and then has the awareness to take the action based on what she knows. It seems like people need to educate themselves more often to make sure that they accommodate everyone's needs in a way. Does that make sense? Cara Parrish-Katz (36:29.582) Absolutely, it does and I think a lot of times whenever we are taking on leadership It's not something we realize we're doing especially if you are a founder. I am a five times founder now Five different times over five different companies building five different teams When you first start out building something, whether it's intentional or not, 90 % of what you are going to need to know as a leader, you do not know. And that's from hard skills to soft skills. It's everything from walking in and not understanding the intricacies of finance to not understanding secession, not understanding an exit strategy, not understanding the legalities of HR, right? But it also means not understanding how to lead. And a lot of people don't want to admit that. They want to say like, yeah, I'm learning to manage people. They don't want to say I'm learning to be a leader because we like to say that that's something that's innate for some reason, that you just. Utkarsh Narang (37:22.324) you Cara Parrish-Katz (37:32.94) you're born and you spit out your pacifier and yell something about Six Sigma and you evidently are born to be a CEO. you're, it's absolute gibberish, right? It makes no sense at all to say like, innate leadership quality. No, you learn it. You learn it. You learn it through experience. You learn it because you tried to learn it. You applied yourself to learn it. You hired coaches, you hired mentors, you took the classes, you got the certifications, you showed up repetitively for your people. That's leadership. It's not something that came in like having, being left handed and having green eyes, right? Like it's something that you have to work on and work on constantly because the world is always changing and we are always learning more about people, right? If you opened up a history book that was 20 years old, some of that is still gonna be true, but it's gonna miss everything we've learned in archeology, genealogy, every historian's findings in the last 20 years. So a lot of it's not gonna be right either, right? And it's the same thing when it comes to leading a company, right? What was true about leading a company 10 years ago, some of that is foundational and still accurate, but plenty of it's not. Utkarsh Narang (38:56.98) a master class in leadership right there. Because what you're saying is absolutely true. And we feel that leaders are born, but they need to grow as well without doing all the required certificates and putting this into practice and making sure you have the humility to take feedback and to say that, yes, you can be wrong even as a leader, which you mostly are. So you need to find the right people. I mean, we've all heard this, right? It seems like cliche like, oh, Karen and Utkarsha are talking about leadership again, and they're talking about leadership in a way that yes, thought leaders in the world have spoken about, but that's the truth. It's cliche because of reason. Cara Parrish-Katz (39:34.964) It is cliche because of a reason and because it's frankly not prioritized, right? Like leadership prioritizes the demands that come from a board most of the time. And those demands are revenue demands, profit demands. They are not how you led demands, right? It only comes down to how you led when your turn rate gets high, which by that point, it's too late. It's way too late. Utkarsh Narang (39:57.332) Yeah, It's all about, yeah, 100%. Cara Parrish-Katz (40:02.786) The cost to rectify the damage is so much higher than the cost to be an active learning leader, right? And this is true not only in leadership, but it's true across the board. Marketing has changed so much and changes all the time. I've only been asked to be a guest lecturer twice in universities, and neither time have they ever asked me to come back. And I think it's usually because I tell them the only thing you're gonna actually take from a marketing class on a campus that you are going to apply is going to be foundation and philosophy. Because whatever you are learning to do from a tactical standpoint in the next six months will probably be irrelevant. It moves way too fast for that. So as marketers, we're used to being autodidactic. Utkarsh Narang (40:53.684) Absolutely. Cara Parrish-Katz (40:58.722) Right? It's expected. You need to know how AI is affecting marketing. You need to know that it's making SEO quickly, I don't want to say irrelevant, but shifting dramatically. Right? It's making even what algorithms are responsive to change dramatically. Right? And so that's even in the last year, last six months, like how quickly things have changed with the adaption. of everyone's personal GBTs, right? Like it changes so quickly, you have to be autodidactic. And the assumption that you would have like your CMO be autodidactic or how it's affecting HR, the number of contracts that are being written by AI. So you would expect your COO to be aware, right? To be up on the trends, to be autodidactic. The idea that your CEO would somehow be absolved from that. Cara Parrish-Katz (41:58.774) It doesn't make sense, right? Utkarsh Narang (42:00.604) Yeah, it does not. does not. And so question I think that I must repeat that you've asked for our listeners that and someone each one needs to reflect for their own selves on this because there's no common answer. And I cannot answer that for anyone else. And anyone else can answer for me is that are you an active learning leader? I think it's a beautiful question that you put out there, Cara. And the way the world is shifting, the We've spoken about the pace of change forever since the time you and I were born. We're talking about the pace of change. But the last six to 12 months have actually been transformational because from a five-year-old, let me, from an eight-year-old to an eight-year-old, everyone's getting onto chat, GPD and having conversations, whether that's for recipes, whether that's for directions, whether that's for content, whether that's for legal documents, whether that's for professional advice, whether that's for... ChatGPT is your therapist as well now. And it's a new world. It's a new world. Cara Parrish-Katz (43:01.464) Okay. Cara Parrish-Katz (43:05.462) It really is. People are comparing it to the Industrial Revolution and I think it's the closest comparison that we can reasonably make, right? Utkarsh Narang (43:12.596) Yeah. Yeah. Cara Parrish-Katz (43:15.298) Just today, anybody who doesn't know me yet, I yap on LinkedIn a lot. It's like a personal hobby of mine to be chaotic on LinkedIn. But just today I put a list, was like, these are a handful of absolutely unhinged things that people can use AI for. Tell me, what is your most unhinged thing that you're using AI for? And the list is everything from like, rote my wedding vows to like, making a bot that sends your song lyrics from their least favorite songs every day, right? Like it's because of what you can build in the AI space, the possibilities are hinged on your own creativity, right? However good you are at imagining your prompt engineering, however good you are at connecting GPTs, that is your only limitation. Utkarsh Narang (44:11.636) Fascinating. yeah, I mean, and I can imagine right? Bearing vows and bothering your exes or whatever that might look like. was reading somewhere as I'm trying to grow the podcast that a lot of traffic even for podcasts is coming from Chat GPT because Chat GPT recommends that this podcast is something you should listen to or this link or this is the source of this conversation that I'm just having. And it's fascinating what you also said about SEO. I think it's shifting dramatically. That is so true because people are not going to go on Google. mean, the traffic would absolutely be declining, would now be going to a perplexity or a tragedy or just having conversations rather than searching something. Cara Parrish-Katz (44:53.454) Keep in mind, even if they are going to Google, the top result is now the Generative AI from Google. It's not the search anymore. So someone does go to Google. It doesn't even matter that your website is in the top six, right? Because they're just reading the Generative AI answer right. Utkarsh Narang (45:01.62) Yeah. Yeah. Utkarsh Narang (45:07.283) Yeah. And we're done. Utkarsh Narang (45:13.652) Where are we headed? What's your prediction of the future? Cara Parrish-Katz (45:18.232) I'm actually really excited for this because I think we entered a really unhealthy past era, right? The pandemic, we were in outside of the actual nature of what was happening to us. We were in such a weird and horrific space online, digitally. the invention of doom scrolling, the way that we utilized social media to fill time and terror inside of ourselves was so wildly unhealthy. And the ways that content was then forced to be created in order to meet demand was absurd, right? So even Instagram does these annual conferences. where they come out and they tell creators and marketers, okay, this is what we're doing, this is what we need from you if you want to be successful. And they said, we want five posts a day minimum in the main feed and we need you to have X number of stories. And I don't even remember the number of stories last time, but it was so high. was like minimum 15 to 20 or something like that. This many of your posts need to be reels and the amount of work that goes into creating reels, especially prior to AI. you needed to have storyboarding, you needed to have filming, you needed to have editing, you needed to have audio editing, and then on top of that you needed to have copywriting, and you needed to have social media marketing to know the right content, the strategy to have the right content to have filmed in the first place, but then to use internal SEO inside of the search algorithm for Instagram to make that content even appear in the first place, right? So the sheer amount of work. was exhausting, exasperating. You had to have such a decent sized team to execute this at the highest level or you were a creator and it was your full time job. a lot, I actually shudder to think of the number of amazing marketing generalists we lost to the creator economy. They left the general workforce and they became creators. Cara Parrish-Katz (47:36.514) because they had this variety of skills or they could easily learn them as generalists and they left and became creators. And we had a bit of a, I think, brain drain even in the marketing space, the social media marketing space specifically, because of this. So I think we've actually been in dark days as of late. And on top of that, there's been massive exodus. Obviously Twitter went the way of seven or eight layers of hell. And then Meta is having huge exodus. The business side of Meta in terms of corporate presence is so low and it's really functioning more like a Google Ads these days, right? And it's really just being used for its ad serving platform. There's so few brands building a lot of organic or much organic at all over there, even in the community spaces, right? And so that left LinkedIn, which is now this strange hodgepodge of people who have run from their primary platform and have brought with them whatever their primary content was giving birth to this new LinkedIn that the traditionalists of LinkedIn absolutely hate. But yet here we are, right? So we're getting into this space where we finally get to create something based on its value to us instead of what was forced on us because of having to fill a need of mass consumption, right? The reason the algorithms demanded that is because people were consuming at such a rate, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, they had to have that much content all the time. We need more and more and more and more. And so if that starts to dissipate, Utkarsh Narang (49:22.516) Correct. Cara Parrish-Katz (49:29.474) then what fills its space? We have an opportunity for it to get refilled by relationships? Community? Utkarsh Narang (49:40.02) Yeah. Yeah. Cara Parrish-Katz (49:41.614) I think that's Cara Parrish-Katz (49:46.597) Yeah, I think there's like a little lag. Can you still hear me okay? Utkarsh Narang (49:48.274) That's okay. So relationships and community, you can pick it up from there. Cara Parrish-Katz (49:53.659) Okay, so I think we have an opportunity for it to get refilled. no, it's saying, I'm sorry. There it is, sorry. Something Riverside was having trouble accessing the camera. Okay, go back so it's easy to edit this. So we have an opportunity to actually fill that space with relationships, with community, which I also. see that happening now, right, on LinkedIn, right? It's more like Twitter back in the day is what I keep saying, this new Twitter. Because we used to have full blown conversations, one on one with people, but also in small groups on something like Twitter. It's not something that we had a ton of in a way that had any continuation on say Facebook. right, or even Instagram. So that was something that we haven't seen on a network in a while. It's having a resurgence over on LinkedIn. And now that's spreading outwards, we're all of sudden in forums again, because what is Slack if it is not a forum? So all of a sudden we're back in forums, we're back in chat rooms, we care more about the relationships we're building, the communities we're building, than we have in a long time. So it... Utkarsh Narang (51:08.873) Yeah. Cara Parrish-Katz (51:10.531) I see it as potentially an incredibly positive and healthy future. Utkarsh Narang (51:14.068) Beautiful. I love that. I love how you've shared it. And it seems life's come full circle. And yeah, there's the eternal optimist in me believes that the future holds something special for all of us. We just have to open our eyes to it and capture it. But as we get to this point in the podcast, a few decades from now, AI has taken over the world. Whatever has happened has happened. the cycle of the social media platforms has done. If that 80 year old, 80, 80 year old Cara were to come to you right now and give you one piece of advice, what do think she'll say? Cara Parrish-Katz (52:00.177) honestly think she would just tell me to keep going. Just keep doing exactly what I've been doing. I think she would be as proud of me as I am of that 18 year old version. Utkarsh Narang (52:15.348) That's so powerful. To all our listeners, we're all consumers, but we can also choose to be creators. We have to build these forced pauses in our time, day, week, month, year, whatever that looks like for you. You have to create those forced pauses because they'll allow you to become a better version of yourself. The consumption is your space for creation. Educate yourself. for what inclusivity looks like in your space and then beyond. And ask yourself, are you an active learning leader? And then finally, the eight-year-old Cara is really wise. Listen to her advice. Just keep going because it's worth it. Thank you, Cara, for this time. I truly, truly enjoyed our conversation and I think we'll have a part two as well. Cara Parrish-Katz (53:09.495) I did too. Actually didn't even realize what time it was until the lag set in. Thank you so much! It's been such a good conversation. Utkarsh Narang (53:15.356) Loved it. Thank you so much. Look forward to part two. To everyone who was listening to a podcast platform, like, comment, share, because that's how we appease the algorithm. If you're on YouTube, then you must subscribe to the channel because we must appease to the algorithms. That's the only way that they'll help this podcast reach more eyes, ears and minds. This is Utkarshan Gara signing off. Cara Parrish-Katz (53:42.128) Yeah