Build a Business AI Can’t Replace written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
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Overview
Most conversations about AI focus on tools, workflows, and competitive advantage. This episode goes deeper. John Jantsch sits down with Derek Rydall, bestselling author of A Whole New Human, to explore a question that rarely gets asked: what happens to the human being while the tools are getting smarter?
Rydall draws on 25 years of work in human development, neuroscience, and consciousness to argue that the greatest risk of AI is not job displacement. It is cognitive and creative atrophy. When we outsource thinking, writing, communication, and decision-making to machines, we weaken the very capacities that make us irreplaceable. The episode makes a compelling case that authenticity, taste, lived wisdom, and deep self-knowledge are not soft ideals. They are the most durable competitive advantages left.
This episode is for business owners, entrepreneurs, and anyone who suspects that running harder on the AI treadmill may not be the right race. If you are building a brand, serving clients, or trying to stay relevant in a world that is changing faster than your business plan, this conversation will reframe what it means to grow.
About Derek Rydall
Derek Rydall is a two-time bestselling author and human development teacher with over 25 years of experience. He is the creator of the Emergence model, a framework rooted in the idea that the fullest version of what a person can become is already present within them, waiting for the right conditions. His background spans tech, neuroscience, and consciousness studies, and his work has been influenced by a near-death experience that reshaped how he understands human potential. His podcast, Emergence, has millions of downloads. His newest book is A Whole New Human: 10 Ways We Must Evolve to Survive in the AI Age.
Key Takeaways
- The biggest AI threat is not replacement. It is exposure. AI reveals the parts of you that were never fully developed. The answer is to develop them now, not outsource them.
- Outsourcing cognition leads to atrophy. GPS weakened spatial memory. Generative AI, used passively, will do the same to thinking, writing, and communication. This is not hypothetical. MIT research is already documenting it.
- The moat of the future is an authentic human being. Everything else will be commoditized. Your lived experience, perspective, and hard-won wisdom are the one thing AI cannot replicate.
- Taste and discernment are the new premium. People who came up through liberal arts, storytelling, and judgment-based work are better positioned than those trained to execute repeatable tasks.
- Use AI to strengthen yourself, not replace yourself. Write the first draft. Have the real conversation. Let your head hurt a little. Then use AI to scale and refine what is already yours.
- The businesses that will struggle most are those clinging to a model that still works, right up until it does not. Kodak and Blockbuster were not surprised by change. They were in denial about the timing.
- Get back to your founding energy. Most businesses were built on something genuine and human. Then the machine took over. That original core, the story, the community, the touch, is what differentiates you now.
- Live and raw beats polished. On YouTube and beyond, live streamers are outperforming produced content because people trust what feels real. Authenticity is an audience strategy.
- Scale wisdom, not just output. The opportunity is not to produce more. It is to use AI to amplify a singular perspective that only you have.
Timestamps
[00:02] — Opening hook: AI does not replace you. It exposes what was never developed.
[01:21] — Derek explains the Emergence model and where the idea came from.
[03:43] — His personal story: from suicidal and broke to building a six-figure business within 12 months by applying emergence principles.
[05:11] — Why the real AI risk is cognitive outsourcing, and what the history of technology tells us about where this leads.
[08:28] — Practical advice for business owners using AI daily: how to stay sharp while still using the tools.
[12:39] — Why liberal arts backgrounds may outperform technical training in the AI era, and the role of taste and discernment.
[14:25] — How emergence thinking applies to a business owner stuck at a revenue plateau.
[19:00] — The inner shift entrepreneurs need to make instead of running faster in the wrong race.
[20:33] — Why live, raw, and human content wins against polished AI production every time.
Memorable Quotes
“The biggest threat from AI isn’t that it replaces your job. It’s that it exposes the parts of you that were never fully developed in the first place.”
“The moat of the future is an authentic human being. Everything else will be commoditized.”
“Use AI to scale wisdom, to scale authentic taste, to scale a singular perspective, to actually magnify an algorithm only you have.”
“What got you to where you are isn’t going to get you to the next level. Something about you has to change.”
“Get back to the story. Get back to the humanity. Get back to the community. Get back to real connection. That’s going to be most fundamental.”
Connect with Derek Rydall at derekrydall.com or search Emergence on your podcast platform.
John Jantsch (00:02.129)
What are the biggest threat from AI? Isn't that it replaces your job. It's that it exposes the parts of you that were never fully developed in the first place. Sound interesting? Stay tuned. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Derek Reddall. He's a true time bestselling author and transformational leader who has spent over 25 years helping people unlock what he calls their emergent
potential, the idea that everything you need to become is already inside you waiting for the right conditions. We're going to talk about his new book, A Whole New Human, 10 Ways We Must Evolve to Survive in the AI Age. There we go. Got it right. Derek, welcome to the show.
Derek (00:48.558)
Thank you, John. It's an honor and pleasure to be here.
John Jantsch (00:50.981)
So we're not, some tells me we're not gonna talk about prompt engineering, at least not right off the bat, are we?
Derek (00:55.374)
Maybe how we have to prompt the AI within us, but not more than the AI outside of us, yes.
John Jantsch (00:59.783)
Right.
So for 25 years, your teaching has started with this idea of emergence. There's a lot of people on here that maybe that's the first time they've heard that word applied particularly to self-development or self-improvement. You want to give us kind of what you mean by that?
Derek (01:21.304)
Sure, I mean obviously in science there's an understanding of the emergent property of things and you know that something emerges that is more than or different than the sum of the initial parts etc. you know oxygen and what is it hydrogen comes together to make water so you get water as an emergent property and so that's one way to think about emergence and what I speak of it it's more about an experience I actually had
after a near death experience where I saw this and I began to see that, you know, in every living thing, it begins with a seed. There's a pattern. There's a pattern behind everything that is alive. And whether it's the acorn, the oak is already there in the acorn. And even from a quantum physics standpoint or a platonic form standpoint, the oak, the idea of the oak is a pattern in the field.
as a part of the superposition. So we can get scientific about it or not, but the bottom line is the oak tree is already there and it's there in potential. It's there in a pattern and the mechanics of its fulfillment are there. It's simply waiting for the right conditions. When the conditions are a match to the pattern within anything, that potential emerges naturally. And when I saw that
not just theoretically, but experienced it and began to consider there was a pattern in me. There was a seed pattern planted in the soil of my soul or whatever and began to ask what that was, you know. And this really brings us back to the Oracle of Delphi and the OG success self-help guru when she said, know thyself or aristocraties said an unexamined life is not worth living.
the fundamental pattern of knowing what I'm really made of and made for and learning what are the right questions to ask. And then to say, okay, this is what I am like a gardener with a seed going, what are there for the right conditions for that seed to thrive? And I began to cultivate the inner and outer conditions that were a match to the pattern that I was discovering within me. And I went from broke
John Jantsch (03:36.999)
Mm.
you
Derek (03:43.385)
broken, literally suicidal in a one-room apartment, living on macaroni and cheese, no kidding, got very good at mac and cheese though, I could make it in a lot of ways. Within the first 12 months, I ended up launching my life's work, growing my business into six and then multiple six figures, falling in love. My whole life began to emerge or unfold.
John Jantsch (03:49.095)
you
Derek (04:09.824)
And what I saw was that before that, I'd been a self-help person trying to improve myself, you know, for years and years and years. And I found that most of our efforts to fix change, heal and improve ourself is a form of resistance against what is naturally trying to emerge. We end up creating conditions that are oppositional to what is really in us. So that's in a nutshell or in an acorn shell.
John Jantsch (04:30.289)
Yes.
John Jantsch (04:38.009)
You
Derek (04:39.128)
basically where the idea of emergence, I read a book on it called Emergence.
John Jantsch (04:41.223)
So we're all just waiting around for the right squirrel to bury us in the dirt? that it? That's right.
Derek (04:46.698)
Exactly. Squirrels are farmers of the forest, right? And they luckily don't have good memory because they forget about 80 % of where they buried it or something. And then we get oak trees as a result. Exactly.
John Jantsch (04:57.511)
So I've had a lot of guests on here, obviously. AI is a topic of certainly the last 18 months or so. And it's typically about tools and tactics. What's the different argument you are making when it comes to AI?
Derek (05:03.192)
for sure. Yes.
Derek (05:07.682)
Yes.
Derek (05:11.724)
Yeah, I mean, obviously I think it's an important thing. We should learn AI. should master the tools. You should know how to use them. Just like you can use internet and use a phone because you won't be replaced immediately by AI. You'll be replaced by somebody who's really good at it. And, but you are going to be replaced one way or the other. So you want to make sure you replace yourself with AI rather than being replaced by it. But basically the approach is, you know, I've spent 25 years, I started off in tech. I was a computer nerd. I built programs.
John Jantsch (05:24.58)
Mm-hmm.
Derek (05:41.357)
I watched war games. thought it was a great idea to build a program to hack into the government and start global thermonuclear war. Don't ask me why. And so I was, and then I got into the brain and was going to be a neuroscientist. And then I had this opening spiritually, whatever you want to call it near death. And I became more interested in consciousness and the deeper dimensions of us. But what I saw is that I've been practicing the inner technologies and
that we have to understand that AI is an expression and a prosthetic of our capacity for intelligence. And from the Tower of Babel to Chatch-EPT, we're still just building these outer tools. And that's OK. But with every new technology, we outsource a little bit of ourselves. And so on the one level, the very real danger, and it's already happening. MIT has studies about this.
John Jantsch (06:30.8)
Mm-hmm.
Derek (06:38.094)
that we're outsourcing the thing that makes us us, the ability to think, to think for ourself, to think deeply, the ability to create, to communicate, to connect, et cetera. And as you outsource something, if you study the technology history, you atrophy that capacity. Exactly, exactly. I don't even remember where I am right now. It's only been a few minutes. No, and so I don't have my GPS to see where I'm going.
John Jantsch (06:55.514)
Can't remember my phone number.
you
Derek (07:05.302)
And so in like GPS, our spatial cognition, our mapping capacity, all these things, and it's important to understand that cognition is not just linear, it's layered. And so as one cognitive ability starts to collapse or atrophy, there's a cascading effect. so we see this over, and I talk about this in my book, kind of the history of industrial revolutions and the unfoldment of technology.
and the outsourcing and where we're heading in a trajectory is to become like the characters in the movie WALL-E that are basically these slabs on a conveyor belt staring at screens with no more agency and no more even concern with what's happening outside in the world. That's not science fiction. There's already a lot of people sitting in their basement just like those characters. And it's especially dangerous with men who need to have
John Jantsch (07:51.441)
Yeah.
Derek (08:02.121)
utility and usefulness and if they don't, they become self-destructive or destructive in the world and that's also happening now. And the second big piece is it will do everything a human can do better, faster, cheaper. And so the big existential question of our times has to be if that's the case, what's a human for? And there is an answer to that, and we'll talk about.
John Jantsch (08:28.603)
Well, you do lay out some ways that we need to evolve or that you suggest we need to evolve. So for the person that's like, yeah, well, my job is my boss tells me I got to go in and get this work done. Here's the tools I use. it's an occupational hazard, right, that I'm doing this. So what are some of the ways that you teach people to counteract that?
Derek (08:33.315)
Yes.
Derek (08:52.451)
Yeah, when you say counteract that, you mean use the AI tools? And you're basically training the AI.
John Jantsch (08:55.993)
Yeah, just the fact that I'm there on front of that computer screen all day long using these tools, you know, because that's my job. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Derek (09:00.951)
All that, right. That you're becoming like a WALL-E character potentially. Well, yeah, you know, just using the tools, the danger again, yes, we're using these tools and the danger with AI first and foremost is you have to make sure you use the tool to become a better version of yourself. Not like when we started to use power tool, you know, like the plow and all these different things or the automobile.
They got us somewhere faster. They made us more productive, but we didn't have to walk anymore. We didn't have to use our muscles anymore. And you can study the increase of disease by the fact that we don't have to move anymore. so, so we had to build other industries like gyms and exercise and running clubs to do the things. And that's okay. But as we start to outsource our cognition of these things, we just have to make sure, first of all, we are
John Jantsch (09:36.261)
Yeah. All right.
Derek (10:00.483)
doing hard and challenging things on a regular daily basis, because you were evolved and adapted to be chased by tigers and to chase wooly mammoths. And if you're not chasing and being chased a little bit every day, you're going to get fat and sick and cognitively decline much faster. But the great news is you can use AI to strengthen you. You can, and I talk about that with each evolution. I mean, the first evolution is AI is going to think for you.
think for yourself. So we have to deepen our ability. Right now, this is already happening with kids, happening with students. They're hitting a button, they're producing an essay, and over a semester their cognition is falling off a cliff. And already kids cannot read handwriting. They're losing that cognitive ability, let alone do it. So we have to make sure, and you can, and I show people how, to use it to know yourself better.
to use it to become a better writer, a better communicator, a better creator, a better and a deeper thinker. And again, thinking is what got us out of the trees on the savanna and up into the stars. And if we keep giving it to AI, there will come a day not too far in the future, we literally won't have the ability and we will be forced to bow before our AI overlord. That's not a science fiction trope.
So we have to use it to think deeply. If you're writing a paper or doing research, do the first amount yourself. Write the first draft. Make your head hurt a little bit every day thinking as an example. There's other examples, because it's also showing up in communication. Write that first draft of the email. Really try to communicate with that person. Have a real conversation with a human being every day.
You know, these are skills that aren't just nice to have. You know, they call them soft skills, but they're really very hard. But these kinds of skills also will make you more human, more creative, more intuitive, more alive, and it will make you irreplaceable. Because your lived wisdom, your lived experience, your internal technology, that's the one thing AI can't do.
John Jantsch (12:14.801)
Right.
Derek (12:24.727)
AI will do everything else. But if you can embed that in your work, your words, your world, now you become valuable. The moat of the future is an authentic human being. Everything else will be commoditized.
John Jantsch (12:39.953)
Well, I believe that, and I've kind of made the case for saying, think the people that are thriving in this right now are people that came from more liberal arts backgrounds instead of like a technical training to do a thing because taste and discernment I think are going to be what's left. Yeah.
Derek (12:49.903)
Correct. Correct. Correct.
Correct. Bingo, bingo, bingo, bingo. Yeah. Taste and discernment and everybody has it. They just haven't necessarily developed it. And you know, you have a lived experience. Your greatest wisdom will come from your greatest wounds. Your deepest purpose will come from all the pain and the problems you've worked through. And it builds a story and it builds a perspective that only you have, which creates taste, which creates, you know, real embodied wisdom and
John Jantsch (13:04.444)
Yeah, yeah.
Derek (13:24.685)
That is the new Prada and the new Gucci of the brave new world. Because again, AI will do everything that, you know, we're going to see more businesses started than ever before in history until business loses all meaning. We're going to see more books published, more songs produced, more websites, more apps until it's a tsunami that makes everybody want to tune out and look away and become apathetic. But then there'll be those individuals
who get to know themselves, excavate and harvest the wisdom of their life, have real taste, real point of view, real wisdom, and then use AI to scale wisdom, to scale authentic taste, to scale a singular perspective, to actually scale and magnify an algorithm only they have.
Those are the individuals that are going to become a signal in the noise.
John Jantsch (14:25.095)
So let's talk a little bit. So the emergence model says the answer is already in you, or maybe is. How does a business owner who's listening to this and maybe stuck at a revenue plateau, I mean, how did they apply that idea?
Derek (14:38.317)
Yeah, well, you know, there's different reasons why you're stuck at a revenue plateau. Some, mean, you are the biggest bottleneck usually, but sometimes depending on the business, there's, there's just different things. What got us to where we are, isn't going to, at a certain point, isn't going to get us to the next level. What got you to a hundred thousand won't get you to a million, won't get you to five, won't get you to 10 or 15, et cetera, et cetera, depending. And that's the same thing even in not just business, but I know this is business, but you know, you all have relationships too.
What got you to the first year in your relationship is not going to get you to your five, et cetera. It's something about you that has to change a new model, a new paradigm, somewhere where you have to either delegate or outsource or dig deeper. And, you know, the biggest challenge with, with businesses and it's going to be that now is, you know, it's the Kodak experience, the blockbuster experience, the businesses that were in denial, that we're holding onto an old model.
John Jantsch (15:34.459)
Mm-hmm.
Derek (15:36.515)
because it worked and it was still working up to the moment it wasn't. And so we have to be willing to create, creative destruction on ourselves, but not just on our business, but really, you know, this is, this is what could be one of the, it's the biggest existential crisis we're going to face, but it's also, I think one of the greatest opportunities to become the people we're meant to be and to have a whole new Renaissance. So you have to, again, understand that
John Jantsch (15:39.717)
Yes.
Derek (16:02.575)
There's a guy that just launched, started a, just built a billion dollar business. He didn't know anything about the business he built. He used AI and he built a team of agents, but he had a perspective and he tapped into a current zeitgeist. So he had a bit of wisdom and intelligence to identify that, which is what a great entrepreneurial creative mind does. And then he was able to scale it and build a billion dollar business. I think he just hired his brother cause he was getting lonely.
So they're gonna see a lot of the potential for that. But that required somebody to have a couple things that were human, which is a perspective, a bit of intuition, a lot of courage, some grit, the willingness to work hard. And the problem is once you build something, especially nowadays, again, that's gonna be completely competed away, that particular margin.
John Jantsch (16:56.977)
Yeah, right.
Derek (16:58.543)
The worst thing he ever did was have a New York Times article told about him because everybody's now aiming their arrows at him. what's that?
John Jantsch (17:06.503)
Is that 11 Labs, I'm guessing? Is that the company called 11 Labs? Is that who it was? Oh, okay. Yeah. Oh, okay.
Derek (17:12.067)
No, 11 Labs is something else. I think that's got more than one person. This was all about Ozempic and stuff. He just sold Ozempic, but he's not a doctor. He just was a middleman, built a billion dollar business. I think he did it in like a year. But so there's a lot of opportunity if you're creative and entrepreneurial and you're willing to trust your taste, your intuition and perspective. And of course AI can help you there. But when you understand, just follow the logic that
John Jantsch (17:20.401)
Yeah. Funny.
Derek (17:40.021)
Everything is going to be commodified because AI is just units of cognition and intelligence and it can do everything a human can do. And with embodied humanoids, it'll include the physical. You just have to keep going down the stack or up the stack or whatever and ask, well, what's left? And you want to go where the puck's going, not where it already is. And, and like I said, you're going to, you're going to, unless you have the chips.
or the capex, the money, or the energy, the only thing that's left is the humanity of it all. And if you're a company or a person, the most authentic, unique, bold, willingness to be and be creative and intuitive and also be very flexible, know, like all of those things that are natural state as children and as people until we calcify around something.
John Jantsch (18:10.417)
Mm-hmm.
Derek (18:38.369)
or a business, if it has a founder energy, keeps evolving and then it gets, it loses that and then it calcifies. So we have to get back to that and that will become again, the new moat is to be that flexible.
John Jantsch (18:51.911)
So for a lot of folks, business owners, particularly, who feel like, I'm running as fast as I can to keep up with the AI race, right? So what's the first kind of inner shift that you'd encourage them to make instead?
Derek (19:00.227)
Which is the wrong race.
Derek (19:06.179)
Yeah, again, I understand you want to learn the tools. You want to try to become as AI native as you possibly can as fast as you can, because if you don't, you will be competed out of existence. And you may have a moat for now and some things, the moats will last longer because of regulations and different things like that. And just, you might have a really good brand. And so you'll have loyalty up to a point until they can get the same thing for half the cost or less. So you have some time, but, but, but again, what's you got to think about?
Community, real humanity, real authenticity. Yes, people want stuff cheaper and faster and better. There's no doubt about it. Amazon built Amazon over that. But ultimately we have, you have to ask, what is it about me or the thing I do that is truly irreplaceable? And you, and you have to start to really be looking at, and what's interesting is you'll find
The way you built your business in the beginning often had a lot more for most, a lot, a lot more of that humanity in it, a lot more of that touch. And we're going to have to, it's like what I call a handcrafted humanity. We have to return to that. What people, what's going to be a differentiator. It's why like on YouTube, the people that are the most successful now are the live streamers because it's live.
John Jantsch (20:13.927)
Thanks
John Jantsch (20:33.307)
Mm-hmm.
Derek (20:33.443)
because it's in depth, because people feel like they can trust you, they know you versus all of the AI slop and the highly polished and produced stuff. So something that feels real and authentic and raw and live is going to win above all the polished stuff over and over and over again. So this is the kind of thing we have to start thinking about. Again, if you look back to your roots,
A lot of the ways you lived and the things you valued and the things you did are what made you successful. Then you started building a machine and it became all about scaling the machine instead of scaling the original core and heart of why you were doing it in the first place. Get back to the story. Get back to the humanity. Get back to the community. Get back to real connection. That's going to be most fundamental.
John Jantsch (21:27.203)
Awesome. Well, Derek, I appreciate you taking a few moments to drop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Where would you invite people to connect with you and find out more about your work?
Derek (21:34.275)
Yeah, I mean, they can certainly get my book, obviously on Amazon or wherever books are sold or any of the books, whole new human. They can also go to Derek Rydell, legendary life on YouTube, lots and lots of videos or my website, Derek Rydell D E R E K R Y D A L L. And there's lots of free trainings and support. And then there's my podcast emergence, millions of downloads there. And there's, there's more of this deep dive conversation for sure.
John Jantsch (22:01.287)
Awesome. Great. Again, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.
Derek (22:06.839)
Likewise, John, thank you so much. been a pleasure.
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Episode Overview
Episode Overview
Certified Facilitator. Her work focuses on helping leaders build self-awareness, navigate complexity, and create cultures rooted in trust and accountability.