AI and the Next Generation
Last week we were finishing up a week-long Claude Code bootcamp, and it was time to see what the attendees had built. We were blown away by the results.
- A snake game where you play as Kobe, Michael Jordan, or Shaq, each with their own abilities.
- A fully 3D theme park escape game, with mascots that each follow their own rules, and a darker sequel.
- Minecraft meets tower defense, with 42 different golems, achievements, and an arena mode.
- A zombie shooter with a math mode and a blackout mode, already live at a real web address and running on a phone.
What's crazy is that almost none of these people had touched Claude Code until a few days earlier.
What's crazier is that they were all children. The median age was around twelve.
I've written fifteen issues of this newsletter and nearly all of them have been about marketing. Light buyers, mental availability, the messy middle, the 95/5 rule, patio furniture ads following me around the internet.
Very little about AI. That's a strange ratio for someone whose first book was called Join or Die and whose agency spends a growing share of its time on AI transformation.
That was deliberate. Never Always, Never Never is built in the same order: twenty-four chapters on marketing and strategy before the AI material begins in chapter 25.
You have to understand the work you're actually trying to do before you can ask a good question about how AI should change it.
The plan for this newsletter was the same. Build the foundation first, then get to AI, and not just as a way to do the same work faster, but as a way to do work that wasn't possible before.
Last week moved up the timeline.
Are you a marketing agency or an AI company?
To explain why a marketing agency was running a coding camp for twelve-year-olds, I have to go back further than most people know.
AdVenture Media didn't start as an agency. Isaac Rudansky founded it as an education company called AdWord Academy, producing content that taught people how to run their own Google AdWords campaigns. (After a series of cease-and-desist letters from Google about the word "AdWord," the company became AdVenture Media.)
Then some of his students asked if they could just pay him to run the campaigns for them. He woke up one day and realized he was running a marketing agency, and that side of the business has been our primary focus for the last twelve years.
But we never stopped teaching. Isaac's 27-hour Google AdWords course became the best selling digital marketing course of all time on Udemy, with more than 300,000 students across 195 countries. All of our course content now lives in a separate business, The Modern Marketing Institute, run by the brilliant Esther Nadoff.
I understand why people paid for that course, because I was the kind of person who needed it.
I came out of Penn State with six figures in student loan debt and a marketing degree that had taught me legacy marketing principles and nothing about e-commerce, social media, or any other part of digital marketing. All that time at a top-20 business school, and not one course taught me how to calculate a percent change or build a simple pivot table in Microsoft Excel, two skills that turned out to be table stakes for any marketing job in the real world.
My choice was to learn those things on my own time or find a different career. I learned them on my own time, and the people who taught me were mostly people like Isaac, who had figured it out and had a knack for explaining it in plain English.
The AI part isn't new either. I published "Join or Die: It's Time to Embrace Google Automation" on our blog in November 2018, when most of the industry was convinced Google's in-platform AI was a trick to make you spend more money.
So when the marketing world, and then the non-marketing world, woke up and realized they were desperate to learn tools like Claude Code, we were in a good position to help.
We started hosting live workshops (live, not a pre-recorded webinar pretending to be live). Over the last few months we've trained more than 1,200 professionals on Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and Claude Design, and run private workshops and transformation consulting for more than a dozen organizations. Lawyers, accountants, marketers, operations people. Smart adults who understood their jobs were changing and decided to get in front of it.
Then we ran the same idea for kids, and nothing in a year of adult workshops prepared me for what happened.
About forty kids signed up. We had built a week of content around the assumption that they would struggle, that things would break, and that a lot of the time would go to teaching them how to get unstuck.
Instead, they picked up the skills faster than we expected. By the middle of the week we were rewriting the sessions on the fly, because the kids had already worked through everything we'd planned.
By demo night, several of their games were live on the internet at real links their friends could open on a phone. One mother sent us a video of her nine-year-old, who did the work right alongside the older kids and at one point announced that this was the best day of her life.
Now compare those kids to a meaningful percentage of people in their early twenties.
This past May, graduates at the University of Arizona booed Eric Schmidt for talking about AI in his commencement speech. The same thing happened at ceremonies in Tennessee and Florida that week.
A meaningful share of college students and recent graduates have such a distaste for the concept of AI that they refuse to go anywhere near it. They treat "you used AI for that" as an accusation.
I get it. I've been there.
My generation graduated into the wreckage of the financial crisis. If you had told me at 22 that Wall Street was the reason I was interning for $15 an hour with a degree that didn't apply to the job I wanted, I wouldn't have argued with you.
Every generation gets a version of this. What matters is how you respond to it.
Peter Diamandis put it better than I can in an article I shared on LinkedIn last week: the doomers and the utopians are both selling you the same thing, a future that happens to you. In one version you're a victim and in the other you're a beneficiary, and in both you're a passenger.
The people booing commencement speakers have chosen the passenger seat. They are not short on intelligence or credentials, and the tools they refuse to touch are easier to get than any new technology in history. They've decided that ignoring it is a form of protest, and the technology is not going to notice.
The morning after the kids' final build session at the Claude Code bootcamp, I couldn't stop thinking about Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.
Gladwell's argument is not that talent doesn't matter. It does, up to a point. But above a certain threshold there are a lot of people with a lot of talent, far more than there are spots at the top of any field. What separates the ones who get there is rarely more raw ability. It's who got the most reps, earliest.
His opening example is Canadian hockey, where he found that about 40% of elite players were born in January, February, or March. The age cutoff for youth hockey is January 1, so at the tryout when they're seven, the January kids are almost a year older and bigger than the December kids. They make the travel team, get the extra ice time and better coaching, and ten years later they look like natural talents.
Then he gets to Bill Gates, who was born in 1955.
Of everyone born in the world that year, was Bill Gates the smartest? Of everyone born that year who went on to start a company, did he have the best idea? Roughly a hundred million people were born in 1955. The odds that the answer to either question is yes are close to zero.
But Gates went to a private school in Seattle that installed a computer terminal in 1968, when most universities didn't have one. As a teenager, he and Paul Allen used the University of Washington's computers at night, during the hours nobody else had booked. By the time he got to Harvard he had thousands of hours on a machine almost nobody his age had touched.
Ironically, guess who else was born in 1955? Steve Jobs.
At twelve, he needed parts for a frequency counter he was building, so he looked up Bill Hewlett in the phone book and called him at home. Hewlett talked to him for twenty minutes, gave him the parts, and offered him a summer job on the assembly line at Hewlett-Packard.
It's unlikely that either of them were the absolute smartest kids in the world born in 1955. But both of them were twelve years old with access to the most important technology of their lifetime, and both took it upon themselves to go use it.
The kids in our camp are twelve.
Think about the gap between them and their classmates whose parents are currently telling them that AI is bad and should be avoided. How does that play out over the next ten years?
So much of the general public is anti-AI right now, and that is exactly what makes this the largest opportunity most of us will see in our careers.
Zagging against public sentiment is the biggest advantage I've ever had. I've been writing some version of this argument since 2018. Back then it was about bidding algorithms, and most of my industry thought I was wrong. This time it isn't about marketing at all.
That nine-year-old who had the best day of her life last week enters the job market around 2040. She'll be competing with the people who are booing commencement speakers right now, and I don't think it's going to be close.
Nobody is coming to hand you the reps, not your school or your employer, and certainly not the technology itself. The kids in that camp didn't have more talent than the graduates booing in Arizona. They had a parent who signed them up, and then they sat down and typed.
Whatever you think of AI, your future with it is going to be decided by your attitude toward it. That is the one variable that is entirely up to you. Take responsibility for it, because no one else is going to.
Prefer to listen? The audiobook is on Spotify and Audible.
Next week: the AI search issue I promised last week, for real this time.
Something new
I'm trying something new: turning previous newsletters into short, Vox-style videos. Here's the first one, on the messy middle, the topic from two weeks ago.
The Marketing Funnel Is Dead: What Google Found in 310,000 Purchases · 1:54
I put new videos up on YouTube most weeks. Subscribing there helps more than you'd think.