Navigating AI, Taste, and Digital Disruption (with Jerry Ferguson of Knoodle)
In this episode of the Knoodle Founders Hour, host Rosaria Cain sits down with Jerry Ferguson, Knoodle’s Digital Director, Emmy Award-winning photographer, and two-time business founder, to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping marketing, search behavior, and human creativity.
Originally trained in business information systems and computer programming, Jerry quickly realized that sitting behind a screen writing backend code all day wasn’t his true calling. Instead, he built a career on the sweet spot between technical analytics and creative storytelling, running a photography business alongside his digital marketing work. From flying in news helicopters to capture award-winning aerial footage to helping agencies and clients navigate digital transformations, Jerry brings a unique left-brain, right-brain perspective to today’s rapidly changing tech landscape.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
- Good, Fast, and Cheap in the Age of AI: Why AI makes fast and inexpensive content accessible to everyone, making human taste, editorial judgment, and creative discernment far more valuable.
- The Craving for Authenticity: Why younger audiences possess an acute radar for inauthentic content, and how the flood of automated media is sparking a renewed appreciation for genuine, human-driven storytelling and film photography.
- Surviving the “Zero-Click” Search Era: How AI search snippets are narrowing the traditional marketing funnel, and why businesses must publish explicit information—such as pricing—to ensure AI search engines accurately surface their services.
- Data Security and Contained AI Ecosystems: The hidden privacy trade-offs of free AI platforms where user data is mined, and how privacy-minded businesses can run secure, local language models entirely on in-house hardware.
- Bridging Analytics and Creative Direction: Jerry’s career evolution from database programming to director of photography, demonstrating how technical curiosity and creative passion complement one another in modern marketing.
- Failing Fast and Embracing Chaos: Lessons on leadership, perseverance, and why maintaining authentic human connections remains the ultimate differentiator in an automated world.
Marketing professionals, business owners, and agency leaders looking to navigate digital shifts while preserving brand authenticity will find immense value in Jerry’s practical, forward-looking insights.
Listen to the full episode of the Knoodle Founders Hour podcast to hear Jerry’s fascinating take on AI, digital strategy, and the future of creative content.
Full Transcript
Announcer 0:02
Welcome to the Knoodle Founders Hour, where we go founder to founder and sometimes founder to visionary with host Rosaria Cain. Today, our special guest is Jerry Ferguson, Knoodle Digital Director and founder of two businesses.
Rosaria Cain 0:16
Good morning, Jerry Ferguson. So happy to have you.
Jerry Ferguson 0:19
Good to be here.
Rosaria Cain 0:20
Jerry is digital director for Noodle and is a visionary in his own right and co-founder of two businesses. Today we’re going to talk about everything from AI to digital to founding a business. We’re going to do the scary stuff, the worrisome stuff, and the business stuff. So let’s talk about the scary stuff. Jerry, is AI going to kill us all?
Jerry Ferguson 0:43
Well, I hope not. So I would say I don’t think so, but we need to keep an eye on it.
Rosaria Cain 0:50
Okay,
Jerry Ferguson 0:50
that’s how I would characterize it. You know, I think I’m a lot more afraid of humans using AI badly than I am of, at this point at least, of AI going rogue.
Rosaria Cain 1:02
Well, how bad could it be? What’s the worst that could happen?
Jerry Ferguson 1:05
Here’s the thing with AI. In my opinion, AI is this transformative thing. It amplifies. It’s an amplifier, and it can amplify the good. It can also amplify the bad. So, I think the the best things that you can imagine that AI can do, you know, there’s people using it for those for those purposes to cure diseases and that kind of thing. And on the other side, people are weaponizing it. Governments are weaponizing it, and so you can imagine, you know, it’s already being used. And I don’t have specifics on that, you know, about how militaries are are weaponizing it, but for as a for instance, you know, I think those are some of the worst case scenarios that everybody thinks about when they think about, you know, can AI be used for evil, and is it going to take over, and is AI going to kill us all?
Rosaria Cain 1:55
How bad can AI be? Could they be in competition? Could the AI agents be in competition to us humans and want us dead.
Jerry Ferguson 2:04
You know, I don’t think I think it’s often it’s a human trait to try and attribute human characteristics to this technology. And so far, I haven’t seen evidence that AI feels that way. That it get that it gets jealous, for instance, or that it that it that it can be evil in that sense, but you know one of the classic scenarios that a lot of people put forth is that AI will follow instructions. For instance, one of the often cited ones is the paperclip scenario, where humans tell AI to create as many paperclips as possible, and AI decides that you know in order to make as many paper clips as possible, it should use all of the atoms on Earth, including the atoms in our bodies, and it starts making paper clips out of human beings, and and the world turns into just this massive mass of paper clips, and it’s done its job. And these the unintended consequences is the extinction of the human race. So there’s, I don’t think that that’s likely to happen anytime soon. You know, the AI optimizes and and sees humans as a as a hindrance to its goals. Whether it what if it has goals at all, a lot of that is programmed by humans, but we’re increasingly seeing AI acting on its own, and that I think is the that’s the point where things get interesting. Is what happens when AI starts to act for itself?
Rosaria Cain 3:33
Yes, and there have been recent accounts of that. So, how does AI help us?
Jerry Ferguson 3:40
Well,
Rosaria Cain 3:41
certainly we’ve seen it in our business.
Jerry Ferguson 3:43
Absolutely, yeah. AI. Okay, so you know, let’s get down to like our business in marketing and in a lot of businesses. One of the one of the concepts that I will often bring up to clients is you can you can have it good, fast, and cheap. Pick two, and AI has made the fast and cheap really accessible, but the good part-that’s more subjective-and in our field, that’s what becomes more valuable as AI commoditizes the fast and cheap. I think that makes the judgment call on taste all the more valuable.
Rosaria Cain 4:27
Now that’s interesting. All right. So, what types of things can AI do in an office place or an ad agency? What what’s the what’s the positive, and and where can we use
Jerry Ferguson 4:42
it? Yeah, I mean, with each positive, I think it also brings negative and and the potential for job replacement. I like to think though that AI replaces tasks, or hopefully it replaces tasks before it replaces people, and you know, in in our industry specifically. It can write content really well. It can produce content at scale really quickly. What it’s not so great at is deciding what kind of content to create in the first place, and and prioritizing that content with taste. You know, it’ll produce content, but making the judgment call on whether that content’s good-that is still, I think, really up to humans.
Rosaria Cain 5:27
There’s a debate on whether AI can write well. I’m on the other side of that debate. I think AI writes like a generic robot, which it is, kinda. Where do you stand on that? Do you think it really writes well.
Jerry Ferguson 5:40
I’ve come around more to your side of seeing things, right? I think that at this point, and it’ll be kind of fun to like rewatch these videos in the future, and and and in retrospect, see how far things have come or whether they get further. But right now, I think that a lot of people say it kind of lacks the soul and the human and the character and the and the human to human connectedness. That that as humans, we it’s a subtle thing. It it can be an uncanny thing, an an uncanny feeling when it’s absent. But it’s this it’s this thing that when it’s missing, it’s noticeable.
Rosaria Cain 6:23
Are you noticing it on social media when people are starting to use AI exclusively? I’m seeing a lot of that.
Jerry Ferguson 6:30
Yeah, I like to think that I have a pretty highly attuned sense for that, and I think that I also see it in my kids. You know, they are really attuned to when something is inauthentic, and oh, they they have radar for that strong negative emotion. I see I see increasingly strong negative emotions when people see AI generated content and it’s not labeled as such or it’s it’s passed off as being genuine.
Rosaria Cain 7:00
Well, let’s talk about the creative side because that’s a big debate as well as the writing side. Can AI replace a marketing agency’s creative team?
Jerry Ferguson 7:10
Well, I think, like I said, I think AI makes content really inexpensive, makes it really cheap, but that makes taste all the more valuable, and so it might be able to replace some of the tasks that we currently do. But I think that it is a long way off from replacing a creative team.
Rosaria Cain 7:32
Do people know the difference? And we’ve seen creative drop off a little bit in our agency, and we’re seeing this around the country. It’s not just us. Do people know the difference between the fast, cheap, not so great creative and good creative done by human beings?
Jerry Ferguson 7:51
Yeah. So I think there’s a twofold answer to this question. I think the short answer is yes. People know the difference. People are pretty highly attuned. Now, some people are better at it than others. I just mentioned kids are they they tend to spot it right away. I think the second part of the answer to the question is: Does it matter to a lot of people? Does does it does that auth does the authenticity of content matter anymore? Does having a photo that genuinely represents something that you’re purchasing or an experience is that important to people, and I think that’s a more interesting question or or or thing to think about whether that will become less and less important to people. Right now, though, it seems like people crave authenticity, and there were what I’m seeing is that people are trying to hold on to that authenticity. You see it in lots of different; it manifests itself in lots of different ways. Photography, for instance, I’m a photographer. There’s a resurgence in population. Wait,
Rosaria Cain 8:54
wait, Emmy Award-winning photographer. Emmy
Jerry Ferguson 8:56
award. Sorry, I won’t toot my own horn. You can do that, but you know, with photography, there’s a resurgence in popularity amongst film enthusiasts for its authenticity. It’s it’s a lot harder to fake that and to produce content that’s inauthentic.
Rosaria Cain 9:12
Now I’m going to read this question because it’s so long. I don’t want to mess it up. As we approach the end of internet as we know it, where humans browse websites almost sounds like a movie trailer. Are we moving toward an internet where AI agents do the browsing for us, and how does that affect business?
Jerry Ferguson 9:30
I think that’s already becoming the case. We’re seeing more and more. One of the questions I have is like, is it in the end? Is it just going to be a bunch of AI agents talking to other AI agents and and filling out forms, and we can step away from that that human to machine interaction. I think the short answer to your question is that humans are adapting the way that they interact with technology. You know, we see that in. Search behavior, you know, a lot of people ask: Is is SEO dead? For instance, search engine optimization. We’re just changing the way that we interact with the information.
Rosaria Cain 10:10
Well, okay, so we talked about this. You talked about this at a recent conference you were speaking at the the the rise of zero clicks. Talk about that because I found that really interesting.
Jerry Ferguson 10:23
Yeah, so this idea of a zero-click search, you know, that’s that’s a search where somebody does a web search on Google or one of the search engines, and now we’re seeing the AI snippets at the top. The person gets all the information that they need from that AI snippet. They just read it and they never click through to a website. We’ve seen a huge increase in that, and and that has a material effect on the the on the on businesses when people aren’t visiting their websites. They’re not they’re not going as we say in the marketing industry down funnel and getting into the funnel. They’re making their decisions a lot sooner.
Rosaria Cain 11:01
So they’re so we’re rewriting. We’re rewriting or actually redrawing the funnel.
Jerry Ferguson 11:06
Yeah, it’s it’s it’s narrowing the funnel considerably. It’s not nearly as wide, and it’s just one of those really disruptive things that’s come along, similar to other disruptions and industries that we’ve seen in the past.
Rosaria Cain 11:21
Well, how do we help clients get the results they want with AI eating away at their SEO? And what does Google become then? A phone book?
Jerry Ferguson 11:30
That’s a good question. You know, I think I’m not sure if it becomes a phone book. I don’t see Google going away to the traditional search results going away. In fact, I think it’s more. It’s I see. I could force foresee a pendulum effect happening where people initially there’s some hype and and people get excited about the AI search results, but that they crave original sources for information. But aren’t
Rosaria Cain 11:59
we starting to see that on AI, I know I’ve started seeing things sourced on ChatGPT where it wasn’t like that. I don’t know six months ago.
Jerry Ferguson 12:08
Yeah,
Rosaria Cain 12:08
and other other sites too. Claude, same thing. Perplexity was the only one doing it for the longest time. Yeah, now everyone’s doing. That’s
Jerry Ferguson 12:15
a really positive development, I think, as well. And I think that the the AI companies are savvy to do that because if people stop producing content, it’s it’s one of those things. Like as a content producer, like what’s the point if all of my stuff is just going to be ingested by fact check it, whatever? Yeah, if if they’re just going to steal it and show it on their site and nobody ever visits my stuff, like what is the what’s the the motivation for producing that content? I mean, for a business owner, ultimately you want people to book your services, to to buy your products, and I think that that can still happen. It just happens in a different way, and the decision is made at a different point. It it happens a lot more within the AI tool.
Rosaria Cain 13:00
So, how do we help clients work with all this? It’s not even new anymore, but all this emerging technology that’s changing on a on a daily basis.
Jerry Ferguson 13:10
Well, I’ll be honest. I think we so we’re along for the same ride. It’s chaotic right now and fun. So it’s fun. It’s fun. It’s chaotic. We’re learning right along with a lot of our clients, and we’ll we’ll freely admit that. But we’re really in the trenches every day. And what I would tell folks, if you’re running your business, you really do need a guide that’s in the trenches every day. That’s got their finger on the pulse of what’s happening because it can change day by day with a new algorithm that’s released, or a new model that’s released, it can change overnight. Literally overnight, your your results, your search results, or the you know how how often you’re getting surfaced in those results can change overnight. But we have there are specific ways that you can show up more readily in those results, and you know it’s it’s things like breaking data into smaller and smaller chunks. It’s making it available. AI is getting better though at searching and crawling through that and inferring people’s intent and surfacing that content. I think the key takeaway here is be explicit and give more information, provide more information, so that AI doesn’t just make up the story about you. It doesn’t just hallucinate things about you and your business, but that you explicitly tell it things like, you know, pricing. For instance, that’s one of those things that’s been traditionally kind of held close to the vest for a lot of businesses. A lot of them say, “Well, I can’t really show pricing on my website because it’s a custom thing. What we’re finding is that AI is, for instance, is surfacing those businesses that are more explicit and open and upfront about that type of information more often.
Rosaria Cain 14:55
Now, when people use something like ChatGPT, which of course is the most popular. It’s where people generally or often start. We use a closed system when we work with client work, and when we do research that that’s client related. Describe the difference, because a lot of people don’t know the difference. That when you get on an open source AI interface, you’re sharing it with the world, including right your competitors. So walk through that with people. I don’t think everyone knows that.
Jerry Ferguson 15:27
Yeah, I mean, I think the old saying is, if the product is free, you are the product.
Rosaria Cain 15:31
Oh, so the free versions are all like that.
Jerry Ferguson 15:33
Yes, you are the product if the product is free, meaning they are mining your data and they’re using it, and and yeah, you are the product. That’s not to say that they’re not doing similar things with the paid versions of things, but there are guardrails that you can set in place, and and that we certainly set in place. And there are increasingly there are ways to run AI within a contained environment. For instance, one of the things that I’m tinkering with right now is running an entire AI ecosystem on Mac a Mac Mini, and that’s that’s why Mac Minis and Mac Studios, in particular, they’re particularly well suited to running local LLMs, is what they call. Basically, it’s chat. Think of Chat GPT in a box on your desk, and there’s a whole community around this for security and privacy-minded individuals and organizations who don’t want their information going out into the broader right the broader internet
Rosaria Cain 16:33
right because it’s proprietary and no one wants to share that. Okay, with fabricated voices, video and photographs, how do we how do we know what’s real?
Jerry Ferguson 16:43
It’s a great question, and they’re
Rosaria Cain 16:44
getting better. It used to be it you knew,
Jerry Ferguson 16:47
yeah. It used to be that you could trust everything that you saw on the internet, and now the the mindset has shifted to can I trust any of this? Can I trust that any of this is real, and I think there are companies working on that problem, working hard on that problem to to authenticate images, but it’s a cat and mouse game at this point, and there’s a lot of people producing a lot of AI slop, as as they call it. There’s a lot of that out there. You know, just a week or two ago, I saw that LinkedIn has now created a button for users where you can click it if you think that something looks like AI slop. You just click that button, and it will it will vote. It will add a vote to the tally of this is AI slop, and presumably they’re trying to get rid of a lot of that stuff.
Rosaria Cain 17:45
Oh, that makes sense.
Jerry Ferguson 17:46
There’s things companies are doing to try and mitigate that.
Rosaria Cain 17:49
So, okay, let’s move away from AI. Although we could talk about it all day, tell us how you got here. You have a fascinating story.
Jerry Ferguson 17:59
Yeah, so I, what’s the old saying? I think it was Mike Tyson that said everybody has a plan until they get hit in the mouth, and I had a plan coming out of college. You know, I was going to become a programmer and a computer programmer. Wouldn’t
Rosaria Cain 18:16
that be boring? I
Jerry Ferguson 18:17
know. I had you know I was excited. I didn’t have that reaction, the reaction, until I got into it, and I got my first couple jobs coming out of college as a as a computer programmer, and I realized really quickly I I am not cut out to do this every day. I do I I’ve developed a love for it, and I do I still you still work on it, yeah, every day. But but doing that as my primary job, I discovered that was that was not for me. I moved more to a front end role, and I’ve done just about everything that you could think of in the digital space, and have really it was never really a plan to become a polymath or to a generalist in a lot of this stuff. But that’s kind of how it’s evolved from back end programming to front end development, the marketing it just kind of evolved naturally. You know, when you’re working on a website, naturally one of the questions is, well, how do we get more traffic to this website? And that’s and then you do a deep dive into that. Well, there’s search engine optimization and email marketing and digital ads and all it. So of course, I’ve got to learn all of that stuff, and for me, that’s always been in a course. Of course, I’m going to learn all of that stuff because of I’ve got natural curiosity for that, and I think that has really what’s guided me in my career. And then, at the same time, I’ve had this whole kind of side career or parallel career as a photographer, and that’s those aren’t two worlds that typically collide the very left brain and right brain creative and analytical sides of things. But that sweet spot, writing that line is right. That’s where I want my career to be. That’s I’ve I have been. Intentional about getting right on that line between the creative teams and the the digital and analytical teams, and I love I love that spot.
Rosaria Cain 20:11
But your favorite is media, right?
Jerry Ferguson 20:14
Media.
Rosaria Cain 20:15
Who doesn’t love media? For those who don’t know, I love media, but I’m a dying breed. Anyway, tell us more about your career path and and your Emmy award winning photography.
Jerry Ferguson 20:27
So yeah, it’s it really started. You know, I I got I got two years into a fine arts photography degree in college, and then decided, you know what, I’m gonna I want to make I don’t want to be a starving artist. I want to actually make money at this. So I switched to business, one of the best decisions I ever made. Graduated in business, specifically a subgenre of business information systems. So a lot of database work, nerdy stuff. And coming out of college again, I started. I founded a photography company right away. You know, at the time, I, I guess it didn’t occur to me that nobody’s going to give you permission to start a company. Like you just go out and you just got to do it. You just get started, and I don’t know why. I just I didn’t have very many role models for that, and so I just kind of had to muddle my way through it and bootstrap it, and that’s how I did my photography career. You know, as as that developed, I had more and more opportunities. I I put myself into places where I had more opportunities. You know, for instance, I found myself doing redoing a website for the local news helicopter photographer in Phoenix, and as part of that, and what was
Rosaria Cain 21:41
his name?
Jerry Ferguson 21:42
Bruce Haffner. He is
Rosaria Cain 21:43
famous.
Jerry Ferguson 21:44
He’s yeah, well known. Sure. News news chopper photographer. We were doing his website, and he needed some headshots. And so he’s like, “Hey, why don’t we hop in the helicopter? We’ll fly up to some mountains in Scottsdale, land the helicopter up there, and shoot some photos. I was like, “Let’s do it. That
Rosaria Cain 22:00
sounds good. Oh
Jerry Ferguson 22:00
yeah, so we we hop in the helicopter, we go up and we we shoot some photos. On the way back, he says, “Hey, do you want to play around with the camera a little bit? I said, “Sure. He’s I started playing around with the camera. We did some orbits of Camelback Mountain and and looked at the hikers, zoomed way in on the hikers, and he said, “Hey, can you hold the camera steady on those hikers? And he realized pretty quickly I had a talent for it. He said, “You know, I could always use a backup photographer up here. And I said, “You name it. You name the day, I will be there. And two weeks later, sure enough, I was there. I was helping him not only with the as as a backup photographer, and I eventually became the director of photography over there, but also his director of marketing because I had those skills as well, running both the business side and the production side of this business. So it was a. I think that’s a great example of bridging that gap between the creative and the business or analytical side of things.
Rosaria Cain 22:59
And you won an Emmy.
Jerry Ferguson 23:01
Won an Emmy. What was it? A
Rosaria Cain 23:02
photo of.
Jerry Ferguson 23:03
So this was there was a train derailment. It was a sad story. That was
Rosaria Cain 23:07
that was the day you started. If I remember right, and you said I have to just do this before I can start.
Jerry Ferguson 23:12
Yeah, yeah. I was late. I remember. I remember that. No, I do
Rosaria Cain 23:16
remember that because it was a good reason, though. It was a good reason.
Jerry Ferguson 23:19
Yeah, and you know, and and that also highlights another thing. I think surrounding yourself with people who are all working toward a common goal, you know, the Emmy was a result of that. It wasn’t just me and Bruce up there in the in the helicopter that got it. It was the anchors back at the station, all of the production people, all of the people that the engineering people, you know, everybody worked together. You know, we were we were flying right under the approach path of Sky Harbor Airport. Airliners flying 100 feet above our helicopter, right there on the approach end of the runway over Tempe Town Lake to get those shots. Calling eight different radios, calling law enforcement and you know the FAA at the at the control tower, while also communicating and reporting live on the news to coordinate all that. It’s a lot to do, but that’s where I live. I live in the chaos, and one of my favorite things is creating order from that chaos, and it worked out that big.
Rosaria Cain 24:19
So the Emmy Award award winning photo was of a haboob, right?
Jerry Ferguson 24:24
Actually, the Emmy Award one. Oh, sorry. Was the train dear? Okay,
Rosaria Cain 24:28
okay. But there was a big haboob picture.
Jerry Ferguson 24:31
Yeah, a haboob. For those that don’t know, that’s a one of the massive dust storms that we see here in Phoenix, and that has rolled through. I’ve gotten lots of pictures of those from the helicopter. Getting basically, we would hop up in the helicopter. It was one of the most popular things. We would stream live on Facebook, fly over the valley, and basically just let these huge dust storms chase us until we couldn’t. We’d run out of airspace. We’d land out in the desert and let the the dust storm roll over. But these we’ve got some. I got some incredible pictures from 800 feet above the ground with these huge looming dust storms that would be five another 5,000 feet above us. It really kind of puts kind of your how small we are into perspective when you’re faced with this massive wall of dust like that.
Rosaria Cain 25:17
Is it dangerous to do that?
Jerry Ferguson 25:19
Oh yeah, it’s very dangerous. I thought small aircraft is always dangerous.
Rosaria Cain 25:22
Yes, yeah.
Jerry Ferguson 25:23
So,
Rosaria Cain 25:24
well, dust can be dangerous to an engine, right?
Jerry Ferguson 25:26
Yeah, dust can be dangerous. Now, our helicopter happened to be a naturally aspirated, basically like a car engine on it, but those the jet engines on some helicopters can be especially susceptible to. Okay,
Rosaria Cain 25:37
all right. So, moving on to the business side, which you’ve already mentioned. Did you have any role models growing up or mentors that really formed you?
Jerry Ferguson 25:45
You know, I’m a first generation college graduate, so I didn’t have any role models in the sense of business owners or people that I could look to for for that kind of thing. I really kind of had to do a lot of that on my own, but I will say along my path, one of the things I’ve learned is again to surround myself with people who are working on difficult problems, and and you can’t go wrong. I mean that’s one of the pieces of advice that I would give to my younger self is look for people who are working on difficult problems, align yourself with a group like that, and you can’t go wrong.
Rosaria Cain 26:27
What qualities are most important as you’re as you’re getting into business, and you need that fortitude and that grit?
Jerry Ferguson 26:34
I think there’s a a healthy balance of perseverance and Knowing when when it’s just not there, when when there’s just not a market for it, if there’s just it’s it’s it’s knowing. I hate to say knowing when to quit, but there is a healthy balance of that perseverance and knowing when to quit. And I think that the most successful folks probably lean toward the perseverance side of things, rather than continually giving up on on businesses. One of the one of the other things that one of the founders I worked with said was to learn to fail fast, and I think that’s also important as well. Fail quickly, get over it, improve and iterate, pivot if you need to, and I think that that is another. That’s another really good trait.
Rosaria Cain 27:23
I think well said. As we start to wind this down, what’s something that Silicon Valley believes about the future that you think is completely wrong?
Jerry Ferguson 27:34
I think that it would be silly to say that AI is not going to take any jobs. I think it would. I think it’s already taking jobs. I think it’s already going to have a massive effect. And I think that as humans, we move a little bit more slowly, a lot more slowly in some cases than the technology. And so I think it’s really important for Silicon Valley to to think about that. I mean, I’m not. I don’t presume to counsel them to slow down and be more deliberate about things, but I think that they should think about humans’ ability to adapt to these rapid changes to really have that in mind.
Rosaria Cain 28:18
Is there anyone you respect that you want to emulate? Like it could be someone on social media or in the business world, like mine. Mine would be Richard Branson. He he lives by his principles, and he has he has a very adventurous spirit. And his thing when he does something that people tell him he’s crazy, like when he started his own airline, his thing is screw it, let’s do it, and I just love that attitude. Maybe somebody like that.
Jerry Ferguson 28:46
You know, I I can’t really think of anybody, anyone specifically, but I can tell you the leadership traits, the attributes that I look to the mo the most that I try and emulate is someone who’s who’s got some humility, and who recognizes the need for continued curiosity-that they don’t have all the answers. They may not have all the answers, but that they’re continually seeking to improve and and and find the answers.
Rosaria Cain 29:19
That’s well said. So, on a personal basis, what habits or routines keep you where you need to be? Because you’re an avid runner, right? And you work out five times a week. No, this is not true. I do not. I’ve got. Well, I just thought I would get you started with that.
Jerry Ferguson 29:37
Yeah, yeah. I wish I could. That’s actually my habit. Yes. Got to get that in there. But I don’t,
Rosaria Cain 29:43
I don’t love to pour over computer programming. But I’m so happy that you do because you’re amazing at
Jerry Ferguson 29:50
it. You know, I read a lot, so that’s a habit. I’m, I’m constantly devouring books. I mean, everything from fiction to a lot of business books, a lot. You know all of the best minds, like that’s. I don’t want to leave anything behind when I leave this earth, as far as like gaining knowledge. And so that’s a habit that I’ve created is just this habit of curiosity. I think one of the other habits is whenever a new technology comes out, I want to take it apart. I want to examine it. I want to test it. It’s just in my nature, and so that’s another habit. And then I think, you know, on a spiritual level, I think it’s also important. You know, there’s a lot of kind of spiritual and human connection habits, and I think in this, in the in a world where everything is increasing, increasingly digitally connected, and you know, people have questions, really heady questions, like can AI replace God and and spirituality? I, I, you know, it’s it sounds like a silly question, but when you think about the the types of things that AI could can do and and what it knows, and you know, I think that there are some really, like I said, heady questions out there. I think it’s important to have like those one-on-one human connections with people, and so I try and practice that as much as possible with my family and with the community.
Rosaria Cain 31:15
I know you have no stress here, ever. How do you how do you reduce what small amount of stress you might you might have.
Jerry Ferguson 31:22
Well, I’m one of the ones that’s lucky to have. It’s photography is the short answer. You know, I get out and I shoot, and it’s never become drudgery. Even though it’s been my job for years and years and years, I’ve made it my job, and and I do it for work. I still really really enjoy getting out and and doing some photography, especially travel photography. You know, wherever I travel, my goal is to take the very best picture that’s ever been taken of that place.
Rosaria Cain 31:51
Do you take a camera or do you use your iPhone?
Jerry Ferguson 31:53
Always, always take a camera if I can. But I will say, a lot of people have asked me over my career, “What’s the best camera? It’s the one you have with you, and so if it if that’s an iPhone, then so be it.
Rosaria Cain 32:05
That’s a great that’s a great answer. What about you would surprise people?
Jerry Ferguson 32:10
My choice of music right now. I’m really into EDM, and that’s not
Rosaria Cain 32:15
electric dance music.
Jerry Ferguson 32:16
I know, it’s not something that a lot of people would expect. I am not. I
Rosaria Cain 32:22
don’t know why I find that so funny, and not that I’m against EDM. It’s just not what I would.
Jerry Ferguson 32:26
I’m not a dancer. Right. It’s it’s that it’s not the dance aspect. I was
Rosaria Cain 32:30
thinking more Beethoven.
Jerry Ferguson 32:31
Yeah, you know, I it’s it’s instrumental. I I’ve never been one who’s ever listened to lyrics in music much. No, it’s just not. I’m not into like folk music and stuff where it tells a story. I’m into the music for the for the for the music part of it, so maybe that’s why it appeals to me. EDM synth wave-that’s my jam.
Rosaria Cain 32:51
Well, I think we’re going to leave people dumbfounded on that answer, and we will talk to you again. And I hope everyone enjoyed this interview as much as I did.
Jerry Ferguson 33:00
Thanks.