JD Miller on Making More: The Podcast

Billy Fischer and I go back a ways, and our conversation on Making More started, fittingly, with the internship that almost made me a lawyer — a summer in the Clinton White House's office of scheduling that convinced me I didn't actually want to bill by the hour for the rest of my life. I left with a communication degree, no job posting that quite fit it, and a career in dot-com sales that was about to be born.

Philosophy, we agreed, isn't really about saying deep things — it's about training your brain to trace how one idea leads to the next, which turns out to be exactly what a salesperson, a manager, and a board advisor all do for a living. We talked about what happens to leadership when the camera turns off the second the business conversation ends, and how private equity's compressed timelines can start to feel like a renovation on a mortgage clock. AI came up too — I'm mid-way through a second book on it, and my honest read is that it's a pattern-recognition tool, not a relationship. It knows to say "I'm sorry" when you tell it you're having a bad day, but it doesn't actually feel anything about it.

What Billy and I landed on, and what I'd tell anyone building a career right now, is that the core human stuff — trust, empathy, perspective-taking — is the one part of the job that gets more valuable, not less, as the tools around it get smarter.