The Things You Must Never Let AI Control | Joe Stolte

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I would say you've got about a year where you can play this game and get ahead and get to level five. If you're not doing this, you're going to get smoked. I come from the world of ventureback tech, right? I'm a six-time founder. I've had four successful exits. Most people treat AI like software. It's way better to think about AI like a skill, a skill you practice. You really go deep in mastery. That's what AI is. We did this analysis after working with 367 business owners and we started to look

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at how these businesses showed up in terms of their AI adoption and we mapped this across five very clear levels that people are in. Well, here's what happens when you get to level four. Imagine if you spun up 20 new systems like the one that I just listed to attack your biggest constraint. The only reason that you have an opportunity right now to get ahead with AI is not because the capabilities of AI aren't where they need to be. It's because the inertia of human behavior is slowing down adoption.

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You don't have to be faster than the tiger. You just have to be faster than the other guy. Like that's kind of where we're at right now. The game has changed. It's not changing. It is already changed. Endgame was a different game. Post Steph Curry. Everybody needs to be able to shoot threes. >> A game changer. >> You're like one storm away from getting your face booked off. When was the last time a lot of these businesses have been in a storm like that and survived it?

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What would you say to them? Let me drink some water and think about how to not have to be. The next thing that I would do is just >> This episode is brought to you by Wix Studio. Here at the agency podcast, we're building a community and we would love for you guys to be a part of it. So, we would love to hear from you. What are you enjoying the most? What would you like to see more of? And what do you think might be missing? Drop a comment. Make sure you subscribe. And now, on with the show. You were among the first

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1,000 users of Open AI. How have you seen this technology evolve since the infancy of the platform? >> We've really watched this evolution from what I'll call dumb chat bots all the way to roughly where we are right now, which is we're knocking on the door of something called artificial general intelligence or AGI, which I define as AI that's smarter than the smartest human in every function of the business. And so if you think about that journey, it started back when, you know, there

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was no chat GPT. there was just banging around on an API and something called the playground and the way that you had to interact with it was obnoxious by today's standards in terms of how you had to communicate with it to get a competent output and then chatbt came out and it was like the fastest growing product ever at the time and now we're in this place now where we can go talk to these large language learning models these chat bots and they have excellent reasoning right and so we've gone from

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dumb chat bots to these chat bots that have really good reasoning, which means they can reason through things, they can think, they can parse through their answer, they can automatically correct themselves and go back and fix something before they come back to you, etc. And we're going into the next phase, past reasoning, which is called agents or agentic AI. And this is like your chatbot now has hands and feet that can do stuff, right? It can respond to emails. that can analyze requests for

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proposal, write the proposal, adjust it, look at a million different pieces of data and calibrate real time, all while you're sleeping. Like literally right now in this conversation, I have an agent running analyzing a bunch of podcasts that I'm about to be on, trying to find the best moments of every podcast guest that's ever been on there to coach me on how to do a better job on the rest of the podcast that I'm going to be on in Australia so that I can be of service to that audience. I did the

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same thing for this and it did it while I slept last night. And so there's agents that literally work around the clock on my computer on my behalf. And this is like a new thing that's happened, let's say, in the last three or four months. And it's changing the way we work in every single facet of the business. And it's probably one of the most exciting times that I've ever experienced as an entrepreneur. So we've gone from dumb chat bots to agents that literally do work while we sleep. That's

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like in many cases better than human grade output. I mean, it's an incredible time to be alive. >> You've implemented AI into over 400 businesses. What surprised you recently with how entrepreneurs are thinking about AI versus what they should be thinking about? The number one issue that we see with companies and how they're thinking about applying AI and how they're applying AI is they're doing what I call AI for AI sake. They see some sexy thing like they need an AI agent or a video clone and they're like,

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"Oh, that would be cool." when they go ship it and they're trying to do a bunch of stuff to get more leads and sales. And the mistake is that they don't start with a problem. We always want to start with a problem. And the number one problem that I recommend you look at is just divide your company in two. Okay? Are you demand constrained, meaning you need more leads and sales to grow the business? Or are you supply constrained, which means you need more capacity, more throughput to serve the customers that

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want to come in to your business in the first place. And if you find the very specific constraint, that kink in the hose of the growth of your company, and you apply AI to that constraint ruthlessly, in some cases boringly, and just follow the data and attack it with AI, and then go to the next constraint and the next constraint and the next constraint, that is how you get to the holy grail right now, which is scaling sales and marketing without adding more headcount, which translates directly into profit, especially for agencies and

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service-based businesses. Are people looking at AI as something that will solve all their problems rather than being specific about that kink in the hose? >> Absolutely not. Most of the time people are saying, I want to sprinkle some magic AI fairy dust all over a part of my business and just expect that it's going to magically solve all my problems. And I think part of that is because there's a lot of businesses, if you look at it statistically, that are just not at a million per year. And then

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the ones that get past the million get stuck let's say in like the two to five million range in the US. And the reason why they get stuck is because they have to make difficult trade-off decisions to not take as much money out of the business and reinvest to solve their biggest constraint. And they start running from their problems and that looks like not looking at their data. If I went out and asked all the 400 people that we looked at how many of them have dashboards and how many of them are

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looking at those dash dashboards regularly to be able to find their biggest constraint or the the numbers inside of their business. I would say 70 to 75% of them either don't have a dashboard or don't look at their numbers. And the reason why is it's easier to get distracted with the shiny object than it is to do the boring ass work of just looking at where's the biggest constraint in my business and let's collapse all of our attention on that. Put the blinders on so that we say

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no to everything else and actually solve that problem. And that's not even an AI thing. That's just a regular business strategy thing. What am I saying no to? I think about business strategy as the things you're going to say yes to and more importantly the things you're going to say no to. And the quality of your strategy is directly proportionate to the quality of the things you're saying no to. Like if you have a badass do not do list and you're disciplined not to do it, that means you have a great

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strategy. >> Most of them don't have a great strategy because they're afraid of looking at their data. They're afraid to face their problems because they'd rather be distracted. And once you're at several million a year, you start to feel like you've earned the right to go do whatever you want. And that's why you get stuck. And honestly, man, if you're like between two and five million a year, you're like one storm away from getting your face ripped off. Let's be

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honest. Especially most businesses don't have enough margin to survive a storm. I just came from cans. There's like a, you know, category 4 cyclone up there and it was like like an hour north of us and it's pissing rain. There's wind everywhere. And I just thought to myself, when was the last time a lot of these businesses have been in a storm like that and survived it? Well, unfortunately or fortunately, right now, a AI is that storm. So, if you're not actually being proactive and using AI

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and you're being reactive, you're going to be punished because the game of business does not reward reactivity. The game of business rewards people that are at cause, not at effect. People that are proactive. When was the last time you effed around and found out an extra million dollars in your business because you just let it fall on your lap? Almost never. That's called freaking miracles. And I'm not in the business of praying for miracles. I'm in the business of designing systems that deliver results

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for my customers and pay us more and more profit over time. >> You're saying it's fundamentally a founder issue before it then becomes an AI issue. >> Nothing happens except through humans today. Right. The way the reason AI is not more propagated and isn't hasn't taken over the world even more is because of the inertia around how we behave. It's around the human change problem. Like we're good at sort of calibrating and changing on a linear scale like a little bit up and to the

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right, but when it goes exponential and it's like a hockey stick straight up and down in terms of the rate of change in our business and the things around us, we just don't do well with that. And so it's so much easier for someone that's already passed a million dollars to go stick their head in the sand or go focus on making another, I don't know, Instagram reel or something than it is to actually solve the thing that's going to unblock their business. And there's nothing wrong with that. Look, if you're

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demand constrained and you get a lot of demands from Instagram and you know that like that's your main lead source and that's warranting your attention, dude, knock knock knock yourself out. But like if your team is not delivering value within the first 15 days of a sale or the first few hours of a sale, if you're not getting like a mega high NPS score, if your clients are not running around like walking billboards and screaming to the world how amazing you are to grow your business on your behalf, you've got

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work to do on how you deliver what you even sold in the first place. And the chances are if that was the case, you wouldn't be stuck in this weird 1 to5 million place. You'd be blowing way past eight figures. And so it's almost always a problem of leadership. It's almost always from the top down. How the leader shows up is how everyone else is going to follow, right? There's a saying in neural linguistic programming that leaders go first. Like if you want your people to change, then you go first. You

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show them what's possible. And just by you showing them what's possible, you set the standard of where you want them to go and how you want them to behave. And if you run an agency, literally everybody except the creatives will raise that standard. They're kind of doing their own thing at their own pace, but it's almost always because of the founder andor a leadership team issue. Now, I talked to a lot of founders that have this idea or this notion that they could just hire some kid and delegate

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their AI integrative responsibilities to this young hire or an outsourced agency and then expect them to, like you said, make miracles and make magic happen. What's the risk of outsourcing these problems at scale? Like when you think about these 400 business owners that are trying to delegate it, what what is the initial risk of having that mindset? Well, first of all, good instinct, who not how you're principally on the right path. You should be thinking about how to bring in humans that already

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understand how to do this thing so that you can go faster and get results and better outcomes for your clients and for your business. So, good directional thinking. The challenge is AI is a lot like electricity. It's just going to be 10 times bigger and happen 10 times faster. And so what I mean by that is today when you go ask your staff member, hey, when is this thing gonna be done? What do they almost always say? Next week. Yeah. >> Or tomorrow. >> But in the world of AI, when you become

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an AI first leader, there's there's almost nothing on a >> no delay. >> There's almost nothing on a day-to-day basis that we can't get done in two or three hours. So whatever your to-do list is, if you are a fully powered knowledge worker that's using AI, on average you are three times more productive than someone who's not. So first of all, if you have team members who are not fully leveraging AI, they're costing you three times as much because they could be

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having three times as much capacity because things move faster. So yes, you could who not how the problem and hire some young kid to go figure something out in your business. Like great start, get in the game. You should do that, but you need to reset your expectations. Everybody in the company needs to be must be right now at the time of this recording a 10 out of a 10 in proficiency inside of the game of AI. Otherwise, they're literally costing you three times as much. And as you as a leader, your expectation should be

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whatever they're working on, you should be getting a draft in minutes, an hour at most, at most. A working prototype for everything from software, UX design, any kind of design, any kind of analysis, creative for ads, not the final, but like something for us to react to and have a conversation about that should happen immediately. Like a lot of good creatives will feed off of a good strategy brief, right? Dude, we can make a strategy brief in 30 seconds and it's way more comprehensive and way

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better than anything a human has done. But we can take that and start reacting to it and give the creatives more time to breathe and have better iterations that we bring to life and react to and work through so that we can get multiple perspectives even for like maybe guys like us who aren't living and breathing the creative life in the creative department. So we can be iterating like a hundred times faster. So instead of a creative needing like four or six weeks to do a thing, they could be doing it in

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three or four days because we're bringing it to life and getting some reactions and getting other perspectives inside of it and a good creative is going to react to people's perspectives, ingest them and then go do what they do, which is like catch the muse and make magic happen. Well, now they can do that way faster. And that's true at every single step and every piece of the business. If you want to grow your agency, you need more than just a website builder. You need Rick Studio,

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Studio AI powered CMS lets you turn a single layout into hundreds of additional dynamic pages. It's true. More clients no longer has to mean more chaos. Wix Studio gives you one centralized view of every project and makes real-time collaborations seamless. Do your agency's best work at scale. Build your next project on Wix Studio. In these 400 companies that you've worked with, I'm sure you've worked with small teams, medium-sized teams, and large teams. Have you seen a lot of fear

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based on the team's reaction to these conversations together with the founder? because I imagine that the first thing that happens in their mind is, "Oh my god, is my job on the line." So, how do you deal with this tension in larger teams? >> Yeah, 100%. Great question. I'll say this right now. Confidence comes from evidence and learning is only evidenced by behavior change. We haven't learned anything if we've watched a YouTube and memorized it or read some book and we

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can spout it off. If we haven't changed our behavior, we haven't learned anything. So if you have team members, human beings that have a fear that their job's going to be replaced or they're going to lose a piece of their identity or their in the business, that's a warranted fear. And the only way we can overcome fear, the antidote to fear almost always is action. So how do we get them to take the smallest next best action using AI to go, whoa, I didn't know that that was possible and I can do

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it, too. And then you start to get confidence because confidence comes from evidence. And then we change and we learn. And because we're changing our behavior, then we're actually learning. So the best thing to do is just start really basic. Use a use a basic tool like Claude or Manis or Perplexity Computer and just teach them how to do prompt engineering so they can do the things inside of their jobs more effectively and give them room to screw it up. So just giving them training and the ability to build confidence through

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evidence and change their behavior goes a really long way. So of course people are scared, man. But like when you start to show them the path like and show them what's possible, an A player, someone who really wants to win is going to show up and use everything they can to get everything they've got to get that result. And here's what happens, man, is you start doing this inside your organization and you will very quickly find out who the A players are and who everybody else is. And I get, look,

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we're all human. Sometimes you have a bad day, you have a B player day, but that is the exception. It's not the norm. The A players are like asking questions. How can I use this? What's what can I do to make my job better? What can I do to serve the client better? What can I do to get the outcome faster at a higher quality? You know, they're they're coming in guns blazing. They want every advantage they can have. They probably already have OpenClaw installed on a Mac Mini in their

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freaking closet somewhere trying to bang around and figure it out on their own. But everybody else, the people that are resisting change, the people that need a little bit more handholding, support them. And if given enough time to make the appropriate change and they refuse to, they're raising their hand and saying, "Please make me the first person that gets left behind as we change as we go from a pre-elect electricity to a postele electricity world, a pre-AII world to a post AAI world." And I don't

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say that without reverence for them as humans. I really have a heart for them. I also just want to be brutally clear, man. If people are not willing to take the first steps of change when given the opportunity, this is going to happen faster than you could possibly imagine. Right now, there's many people saying that this is going to be 10 times the size of the industrial revolution and it's going to happen 10 times faster. We don't have time for you to wait until you figure like trying it out. You've

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got to start now because starting now is how you're going to get better and get better and get better. And the only way to master something is to keep doing it over and over. Would you agree? Most people treat AI like software, which is fine. You know, you buy software, you install it, and it just kind of works. You train people a bit, and then you leave it away, and you go back to your business. Okay, I got go high level and my installed, and people more or less know how to do it, and okay, off we go.

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It's way better to think about AI like a skill. A skill you practice, you master, you put the reps in, like you fall in love with it, you really go deep in mastery. That's what AI is. And I think until September of 2025, going into AI was like this massive advantage. After Septemberish of 2025, it's now table stakes. It's the entry fee to play the game. And what's happening is most people just haven't figured that out yet. And so what comes next is two choices. One, you're using

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AI to get outcomes better for you, your clients, and your stakeholders, and you're getting more margin in the business, a direct translation to margin, an increase in enterprise value. or number two, you are getting left behind in a way that you will not be able to compete. So, let me explain how this works. It's really simple. Let's say you're agency A and I'm agency B. Agency A doesn't know how to tie their shoes in AI and just makes a commitment to go figure it out, right? Six months

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later, they're actually implementing AI agents and workflows that replace human work. That money that would have went to hiring more people, they're now scaling with more clients and they're hiring less people. What does that translate into on your P&L? Profit. Agency B did not do that, right? So now you have profit and you can do a few things with that profit. You can put some of it in your pocket and or you can buy better AI enabled humans to grow even faster and or you can go buy more traffic and

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attention to grow your brand even more. So you can see how that flywheel starts to feed itself. You will get more time back. You will get more margin back. You will grow your leads and sales and not have to hire more people. So you will get more margin. and he or she with the most margin in the game of business, that is literally the lifeblood. That is the oxygen. That is like free moves on the chessboard that other people don't have. That flywheel just spins up super fast. So, it's not just this dystopian

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like, oh, you didn't use AI, so all of a sudden the universe just turned you into pink mist. It's the way that it works in the real world of business is like your competitors have more margin and if they're smart and they're good strategists, they're going to buy more attention. They're going to invest in better people and they're going to double down on that flywheel and in a year they'll be unrecognizable and you'll still be struggling to figure it out. Now, let's say I'm looking at my

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team and I think to myself, I would love a team of AI enabled humans. If I would like to have a playbook to start to implement this into my team, what should that look like? If you were to take over, let's say, my company, what type of meeting would you host? What would the conversation be? And then how would you start to implement it into day-to-day work? >> And how to do it for a large team. So, let me explain exactly how we've done this. So, this is for companies with 50 to a,000 employees that we've parachuted

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in and helped just transform the whole business. >> Typically, what happens is we go in and we isolate the leadership team, the managers, and the high potential individual contributors. And we lock them in a room for two days. And what we do is we interview you before we come in. So we know your business challenges. We know how you're using AI or not. We know what your constraints are. We know who the in people in the organization that are like the naysayers and who's like super excited about it. And we use

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those two days to give everybody the same lexicon, the same language, the same tools, the same prompting skills. And in two days, you can go from haven't logged into Claude or Chat GPT to building AI agents that replace meaningful workflows in your business by the end of day two. And then what happens is number one, all of those people leave that meeting in that environment and let's say we did nothing else and they just become ambassadors. The good ones, the ones that are really leaning in, they become ambassadors for

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what's possible. And there's an immediate separation between the people that are using AI and the people that aren't. And so right off the bat, all the A players that aren't that didn't get a chance to be in that training are going to fight like tooth and nail to figure out what they figured out. They'll take them out to lunch. They'll go do this. It'll happen through osmosis. That's slow. The pro move is you basically go in waves and you take the departments that

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are the most constrained or have the most opportunity for you to apply AI and get leverage out of and you train the trainer and you just drop a trainer into those different departments and you start training them up systematically and you can get the whole like we've trained a whole company over 500 people in two weeks just rotating them through different trainers training them on the basics >> 500 people >> 500 people in two weeks >> a lot of things happening concurrently

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but you don't need uh 50 hours of training. You need maybe 18 max, right? And so you spread that out and you give them wave one in two weeks and then you let them go figure it out. Learning is behavior change. They mess around and find out and then you do a second wave and then everybody's trained. And here's the thing that most people miss. This is a third stage. Okay, this is really important. Charlie Mer, who's arguably one of the most successful investors of all time. He was Warren Buffett's

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business partner. He said, "If you show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome." He also said something like, "Never use another solution when an incentive will do the job." That's how much humans behave around incentives. And we're twice as motivated to move away from pain as we are to seek pleasure. So, what you need inside of your culture is you need sticks and you need carrots. Carrots are for people who go out and get the job done. Carrots are for people who can go out and prove that

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they can become three times more effective, three times more productive, three times as many outputs with less time. Sticks are for people who refuse to move. Sticks are for people who have went to the training and have done nothing after 30 days, they get a warning. 15 days later, they get a performance improvement plan. 30 days later, they get a pink slip and they're out the door. You don't have to be that aggressive. Actually, in that time frame, that might even be a bit too slow now. But that's what you need. You need

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you need sticks. And the minute you This is going to sound terrible, but I'm going to say it anyway. The minute you take that hater that's slow, the B player or C player that is like the naysayer on AI and it's like it's going to take our jobs and this is terrible and it's not as good as a human. Do you literally let them go and you make an example of them? It is wild how many people will start to move in the opposite direction because incentives drive human behavior and if you don't

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have sticks and carrots, you're not going to be able to move your team as fast as possible. So the the way you move them through the training that fast is with incentives. Hey, if you finish the training, you're going to get a bonus. You're going to get some kind of intrinsic reward inside the company where you get recognized. Maybe it's a medal or reward or something physical that they can show that uh on Slack or whatever, a badge or andor you get money, you get extra vacation day, you

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get thing that you really want that translate into like into an exttrinsic motivation like money and stuff like that. And people go boom, I'm ready. Let's go. Like maybe I would have moved a little bit slower, but I'm in. Right. And this works whether you're offshore, onshore, like Wi-Fiing in from Mars. It literally doesn't matter. If you get the incentives right, that's how you can move people through this and get them productive as fast as possible. >> Trainer trainer. What does that look

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like exactly? Is that a particular role just for implementing AI? >> Yeah. So, at some level of growth, right? So, I come from the world of ventureback tech, right? I'm a six-time founder. I've had four successful exits. And in my world, we go from like 20 people just trying to prove a concept. We get a $9 million check and then we go to 120 people in 90 days. So there's a lot of people you have to hire. There's a lot of culture you have to implement. There's a lot of change you have to

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manage quickly. And in a in that world, it's really helpful to have a trainer that that all they do is eat, sleep, and breathe. How do our humans absorb information in a way that changes their behavior? And so good curriculum designers, good trainers have methods. They have ways that they can get people to have an experience, change their behavior, and then actually become more productive or better than they were before, whether that's AI or teaching new hires the basics of how to tie your

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shoes and where to go to the bathroom. So, at some level of scale, it makes a lot of sense to reinvest in the growth of your team by just training them on things to keep the saw as sharp as possible. Now, if you're like our friend Dan Martell, you know, Dan is that guy for his company. he lets someone else run the company and then he's like the spiritual figurehead that will parachute in and just teach and make content about it and it's a whole thing. It's amazing. Um maybe that's not your jam as a

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founder or CEO. Great. Have someone else that's finding where all the blind spots are that are holding you back as an organization and then go fill them in on a regular basis. And if everyone in your business right now is not 10 out of 10 proficient in AI, that is the only blind spot that I think that you need to be worried about is get a trainer, get a couple of them, deploy them into the organization, teach them the same kind of curriculum, the same kind of skills, make them AI first, give them some lived

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experience, teach them how to propagate these basic systems and uh how to get people standing on their own two feet from haven't logged in to making an agent. And man, you would be shocked at how fast people start showing up, start like generating ideas and concepts that will help not just them but their department and the company. You know, one of the things we do is we work with people to fire up contests. So, let's say for example, um we're in the let's say we're in the marketing department

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and you've got people that are responsible for like the written word like copy and content and scripting. Great. Well, like what if we gave uh what if we gave a $5,000 bonus to the person that either comes up with the best GPT or the best agent that would streamline the workflow of research scripting um all the way through, you know, that piece of content got published and it got the outcome we want. It went viral or it got us a bunch of leads or whatever. Great. Make it give them incentives to come up with

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ideas and they'll run for you. You don't have to be the boss that tells everybody what to do. You just create the systems and use the incentives and then they'll figure it out from there. If you have a bunch of A players, think about people on a spectrum from incentives. Would you agree that sales people love money more than they love awards? >> Yeah, >> they love awards. They love money more. >> Okay. Your customer success team that's off offshore. They love money to a

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certain extent, but their love of money is would you agree is different than a salesperson's love for money. >> Yeah. but their love for recognized success in front of the company, public praise, awards, things that get sent to their house, things they can show their parents that show that look, I did a good job. I went to school, I got good grades, I followed the curriculum, and I got an award, I got a pat on the back. Like, their intrinsic motivation tends to be a little bit different. So, you got to

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think about it. It's not a one-sizefits-all thing. Think about which department you're in. Um, and then think about how you want to reward them. But it's always a blend of public praise, awards, and intrinsic motivation, promotions, that kind of thing. And then exttrinsic, which is money, uh, trips, like tangible things, Amazon gift cards, whatever the case is. The problem is that if you start with external, it starts to wear off way faster, right? I still have, this is crazy, I I started my career in

00:28:00 - 00:29:02

management consulting, and when I got promoted from consultant to senior consultant, they gave me a bottle of Don Perion. was like 2008 or something during the Great Recession. Dude, I still have that bottle of DMP. Like, it's probably disgusting, but I I still have it somewhere laying around, you know. Um, we had we took a company called Growflow from 900K to 8 million in in annual recurring revenue in two and a half years, and we sold it for 62.5 million bucks. We got an investment check, I think it was like March 20th of

00:28:31 - 00:29:26

2020, like right before everything shut down for the pandemic. And I have the deposit in the bank account framed on my bookcase behind me because we got an $8 million check and the balance in my account was below eight million. That's because payroll was going out at the same time the check was coming in. So like that to me is like I'll I'll I'll rock that thing forever because to me that was like a good intrinsic motivator to say like man we we pulled it off. Um so you know different people have

00:28:59 - 00:29:48

different incentives but the right thing is just public praise man. Start a Slack channel and just give people props like, "Hey, who who has an AI win today on the team huddle?" "Hey, great job Dave making that GPT that saved the team 10 hours. Everybody give some love to Dave." You know, like just celebrate people's wins publicly. Shout them out in Slack or WhatsApp or Discord or whatever you're using. Like put it in your team huddles where you start to shout out the people that are making a

00:29:23 - 00:30:09

big difference. Make a leaderboard and start showing that at all the all the team huddles like weekly, monthly, quarterly, like boom, here's our AI rock stars, right? You have the platinum, gold, and silver tier and then give them exttrinsic rewards tied to that. It's a combination of both. These seem like silly things, but man, these are the things that have moved human behavior since the beginning of business and we shouldn't throw them out just because AI makes everything a lot easier. Now, what

00:29:46 - 00:30:39

we should consider AI as is is this as simple as just not having the right uh literacy in our mind as to how to think about it. >> Part of it is literacy. I use electricity analogy for a reason because think about life before there was electricity. How did we get around? Like horses and animals and you know pulling us around on carts, right? >> Yeah. >> And then think about after the car came out, right? We had the car then we got electricity lights you can drive at night. Think about how you washed your

00:30:14 - 00:31:09

clothes >> from you know before there was washing machines. You know, you would just like if you l go step by step like take shirt, put in water, soap, scrub it, dry it, ring it out, dry it, hang it. There's like all these steps that don't exist anymore. Now, I was in Japan in January for my son's birthday and for New Year's. And I throw my clothes in a washing machine. It washes them. It dries them. It knows if it's lights or darks. It applies the right soap. It does it all at night as silently as

00:30:41 - 00:31:28

possible with a minimum viable electricity because it's using a form of machine learning which is a form of AI to just calibrate everything that's going on real time. That's the difference between no electricity and having electricity. So think about yes it is a lexicon. Yes, it is a is a how fast you expect things to get done. But also we need to change the way we do things. We need to imagine them to be AI first and redesign them. Let me give you a very specific example. Today when you

00:31:05 - 00:31:52

hire somebody typically what do you do? You make a job description. You probably post it on a place like Indeed. You get it out into the world and then what do you get back? >> Applications. >> Applications, resumes, all this stuff, right? And then you pray and hope that your recruiting team and your HR folks find the right people. Then we start interviewing them. Phone screen, interview one, interview two, interview three, make them an offer, hope we got the right person, right? Man, there is

00:31:28 - 00:32:18

so much human time wasted in that process. And there's not enough analytical rigor at all. Let's reimagine that process just for that one simple process with AI. Okay, we have the AI write the job description because it's better than us. A human overlooks it. Uh we push out in the marketplace and what we ask for back is we don't want your resume. We want a Loom video explaining a few things. What have you done in the past? What do you want to do in the future? And why do you want to work here

00:31:53 - 00:32:41

and have this job? We want a sample work example and we want a a link to your LinkedIn. That's it. And then the AI analyzes all of that, scrapes all the metadata that it can possibly find on that person. And you can find a lot of metadata on people. Well, if I have your name and your email, I can deanonymize you. I can get like a soft credit pull in the US. I mean, there's a lot if I really wanted to spend the money. I have AI just ingest, inhale all these data points and then look at the job

00:32:17 - 00:33:01

description and then just pick out the needles in the haystack right away. And then right away, we say, "Okay, great. AI just did that. Let's pick the top 20 people and let's give them $500 or whatever the case may be for a test task." If it's a creative, give them a brief, have them make a piece of creative. If it's an engineer, um, give them a brief, have them vibe code something, and then get on and have them take you behind the scenes if they're good. But the next thing you want to do

00:32:39 - 00:33:29

is, I don't care about your resume, and I don't care about what you're going to see in an interview yet. Just show me that you're good at what you do. And then after those test tasks, we narrow that down to the top top people. Then then we waste our time in talking to them. But we're only talking to the best of the best now. So my time and your time, leadership team, founder, CEO, man, like our time is protected. AI is doing a significant job on the heavy lifting up front. I still want to talk

00:33:04 - 00:33:47

to you. I still want to know that you're a culture fit. I want to do a vibe check, all that stuff. Maybe not me, someone in my organization. Totally appropriate. But man, like let's move that all the way to the end of the process, not the beginning. And let's do it in a way that like I end with three or four great people so they want the job and and they're kind of fighting over it. And maybe I hire two, have them duke it out for 90 days. And the person that doesn't hit their 30, 60, 90day

00:33:25 - 00:34:24

KPIs, you let that person go. Like that's the kind of leverage that I want as a business leader where minimal time maximum output which is AAA plus player AI enabled hires and hit the ground running probably paying for themselves in the first 90 days that's how I want to run my P&L so we got to reimagine the whole thing sales marketing customer success like the whole business can be revaluated through that AI first lens that's just a boring example with hiring people that got me so excited just listening to

00:33:54 - 00:34:50

you unpack that because I think it just shines shines a light on how much of what a founder potentially is doing that can be automated if they know how to think about AI the right way. So something I want to unpack entirely today is what you've called the maturity ladder. Uh essentially different tiers or different levels by which someone can get to as to their maturity level with how they use AI in a proficient manner. What is the maturity ladder and can you take us through it meticulously?

00:34:22 - 00:35:13

>> Yes, absolutely. So again, we did this analysis after working with 367 business owners. And when I say work with, I mean meaningfully installing AI automations that got them a measurable outcome inside the business. And we started to look at how these businesses showed up in terms of their AI adoption. And we mapped this across five very clear levels that people are in and we mapped how to go from one level to the next so that you can graduate and get to this place where you're growing sales and

00:34:48 - 00:35:35

marketing and you're growing your leads and sales without hiring more headcount. So, the very first layer or layer one that everybody goes into is what we call the tool collector. Now, the tool collector has a bunch of tools, man. They've been watching too much Instagram. Like, every tool that comes up, they'll buy it, they'll subscribe to it, they'll dabble with it, they'll forget about it, they'll flirt with chatt, they might have claude, they might have like a fathom notetaker

00:35:11 - 00:36:01

installed, and it's cute, but it's not doing anything. It's just collecting a bunch of tools, and they're not really using them, and they're not putting them at a problem. So inside of the game of being a tool collector, you basically have zero results like no time saved and no revenue enabled. Then eventually you start getting okay and you start being what we call copy paster. So you start grabbing, you know, maybe a thing you saw on a real or a YouTube video or a friend of a friend or you go to a

00:35:36 - 00:36:25

conference and one of the many many AI gurus who waves their hand on stage drops a prompt on you. You grab it, you copy paste it and it works. It starts to save you a little bit of time. It starts to make you a tiny bit of money. Um, but with a copy paster, what I like to say is it's kind of like wearing somebody else's shoes. >> Have you ever like forgotten your flip-flops or your sandals at home, you go to the beach, you put someone else's on, it's like h like >> Yeah, it feels wrong.

00:36:00 - 00:36:50

>> Yeah, it's wrong cuz it is. And and you know, and it's kind of gross. It's the same thing like you can copy paste, but you can't really do anything with that, right? It's not really made for you. It's just it's not made for your business or your market or your problems or your specific situation. But we we all learn from copying, right? Like everybody learns from copying like everything. And I think to some extent people think that's really precious and they have to be precious about it. I

00:36:25 - 00:37:12

just think man like rip off and deploy. If you can if you can that's R&D, right? Rip off and deploy. If you found something that works, do it. Possible in the world and possible for me is only a matter of how. Like if someone's achieved greatness, I'm not bashful about copying what got them there, right? If what is it? Mr. Banister ran the like six-inute mile like and he did something that I could learn from. I'm going to do it too, right? So copy pasting is fine. We all go through that

00:36:49 - 00:37:40

level. But what you want to start doing is building for your specific problems. The unlock to get from level two to level three is let's build AI for your specific problems, for your unique customers, for your specific situation. And that level three is what we call the builder. Now the builder is finally building AI systems and they're using those systems to attack specific problems in their business. Like this is where you start to get in the game. It's like, okay, for example, we worked with

00:37:14 - 00:38:11

uh a girl named Christa and she has a fairly sizable business. She's one of the top real estate coaching agents on the planet. And she gets runs ads, she gets people to come to an event, then a paid event, then a sales call, and then they close. And so what happened is she figured out that she had a constraint inside of her business. And that constraint was show up rate. So rather than getting more leads, you think, "Oh, I need more leads." Why don't we fix the show up rate at each of those steps? The

00:37:43 - 00:38:33

show up rate for the webinar, the show up day for the the show up rate for the paid event, and then just keep everything else static or the same without having to increase leads. We're just going to make more money. So, we worked with her to create an AI voice agent that literally calls every lead. The minute a lead comes in, speed the lead, right? The minute the lead comes in, in under 60 seconds, they get a phone call, getting them to move to the next step. There's data pre-AI that suggests that if you can respond to a

00:38:07 - 00:38:55

lead in under five minutes, they're 400% more likely to close. Well, we helped her come up with an AI voice agent and her team built it out. And basically, once the lead comes in, it'll call you and be like, "Hey Dane, we just saw that you registered for the XYZ webinar. Uh, super excited to have you there. By the way, this is a virtual employee for Acme Corp. Um, hey, do you mind if I ask you a few questions just to make sure you're prepped up for the event and you can get the most out of it?" You say yes. And

00:38:31 - 00:39:15

then boom, and through that question and answer period, an AI voice agent will get a micro commitment. Hey, is there any reason why you wouldn't be able to make the event? No, I'll be there. Oh, commitment and consistency. You just got them to commit. They're more likely to show up. Hey, by the way, we were going through your application and we noticed that you had XYZ problem. Uh Christa is specifically going to address that point that you brought up on your application on the webinar and she's doing that

00:38:53 - 00:39:38

because people like you have that specific challenge. So, she's she's excited to share that. Third thing, give them an incentive. By the way, for everyone that shows up 15 minutes early, you're going to get some bonus or some cookie. Great. Uh, any questions before we go? Nope. Good. Yeah, you have questions, we record those questions. We put them into emails and SMSs to make sure they're answered before the webinar and off we go. Next step. So, every step we just take a voice agent and we call

00:39:16 - 00:40:02

them and have a similar conversation with that same pattern. Okay, now I'm a builder. I'm building an agent or an AI thing for my specific challenge. In her case, she was demand constrained and the demand constraint specifically was show up rate. Boom. We solved that problem. She increased her show up rate by 16% which is like 16% higher than her industry best average, right? Like knocked out of the park and her business just grew as a result. They didn't have to change anything else. The problem

00:39:38 - 00:40:25

with the builder phase is it's really slow. You go slow. Like you're figuring it out and you're building it for your thing. Um but you don't have what I call a system for building your systems. So everything that you put in with AI is just a little bit slower than it should be, right? You might take weeks and weeks and weeks to just train this agent and make it great and perfect it and ah we finally get out the door and now it works. Awesome. We're all celebrating. Okay, well let's build another agent.

00:40:02 - 00:40:49

Maybe we do one for onboarding for everyone that buys the big thing on the back end. Great. Well, instead of giving them work like, "Hey, fill out a survey. Why don't we do another voice agent?" Well, here's what happens when you get to level four. You're what I call a systemizer. You now have a system for building your systems. What I mean by that is you have a voice agent that calls people, right? We can take 80% of that voice agent and just repurpose it as an onboarding agent. So we don't have

00:40:25 - 00:41:07

to start from scratch every time. We build systems that compound on each other and have reusable parts that allow you to keep compounding your wins over and over and over throughout the organization. And then you just start to get good. It's like, okay, we have a constraint. Here's how we're thinking about it. Here's exactly how we're going to fix it with AI. We're going to think about it AI first. We relaunch the process. We launch the agent and off we go. And then you start having your team

00:40:46 - 00:41:35

do this and you can be spinning up a new system a week. Imagine if you spun up 20 new systems like the one that I just listed to attack your biggest constraints across the year. How much faster is your business going to grow and it's going to grow with machine-like precision 247 365. The fifth stage is what we call the architect stage. And this is where you're getting to enjoy the fruits of your labor. You're an entirely AI first company. Everyone in your organization is trained. They're

00:41:11 - 00:42:06

three times more productive. you've got 20 plus systems deployed in the business and they're literally doing the work of up to a handful of real employees. Like so if you look at his employee at 40 hours a week um or 2,000 hours on the year, you're probably saving 10 to 15,000 hours a year that again you can repurpose those people or you can take that time, save that money and reinvest it in your own growth. And that is the holy grail and that's not going to last very long. So when I say this, we like

00:41:38 - 00:42:26

to get people to level four in 90 days and then from four to five, it just takes time for them to implement systems. I would say you've got about a year as of right now of me saying this, you have about a year where you can play this game and get ahead and get to level five. In about a year, most likely 18 months max. If you're not doing this, you're going to get smoked. And you're going to get smoked for the reasons I said before, which is all your competitors are going to be doing it and

00:42:02 - 00:42:58

making more margin and reinvesting in their growth. And man, unless you are seriously magical at what you do, like Bob Ross level art, and they just come to you for that one thing, and they hate AI, you're going to have a hard time winning in the marketplace. >> Do you believe that collectively humans are creating lag for how fast AI will and can move in the next 12 months? >> The only reason that you have an opportunity right now to get ahead with AI is not because the capabilities of AI

00:42:30 - 00:43:22

aren't where they need to be. It's because the inertia of human behavior is slowing down adoption. Adoption is happening much faster, meaning more business owners are using AI and they're using it faster. But man, the only reason that like you still have this opportunity is because people just move slow. So if you can literally go into what I call founder mode and just attack the problem with like Elon Musk level intensity and focus, you can make a lot of progress in a very short period of

00:42:56 - 00:43:44

time. But the only reason you have an advantage right now is because other people are going slower. It's kind of like that story if it's like two guys in the jungle and a tiger starts chasing you. Like you don't have to be faster than the tiger, you just have to be faster than the other guy. Like that's kind of where we're at right now in the game of AI. And I know that sounds brutal. It's also the truth. If a machine can learn all your years of experience and expertise in a matter of

00:43:20 - 00:44:18

seconds and then start to think for itself and then deploy it through these different systems that you're talking about. Therefore, does that mean essentially everything will replace a human at some point? At some point, we're going to have to really grapple with what does it mean to have human intelligence? And the good news is that the better we understand so-called artificial intelligence, AI, it's like a mirror, right? Because we learn through context and contrast and the more we can see another kind of

00:43:49 - 00:44:39

intelligence, the more it wakes us up and goes, "Oh, that's what our intelligence means and that's why we're special." Up until this point, if you ask any human being to define what human intelligence is, they don't they don't know what the hell that means. But now that we have this amazing counterpoint and contrast point, they're going to start being able to articulate that like much better. Right now, if you want the cheat code for how to decide where to put AI into your business and what to

00:44:13 - 00:45:11

protect in terms of your human value, I want you to imagine an X, okay? Like like an X and a Y axis. The vertical axis is the one that goes up and down. Imagine on that one, it's high judgment and low judgment. And then on the other axis, the one that goes left to right, it's frequency. Low frequency, high frequency. This is for tasks in your business. Right now in your business, in everybody's business, there are low judgment tasks that are happening with high frequency. We either need to get

00:44:43 - 00:45:39

rid of those or have AI do a 100% of those immediately today. And it's not because AI doesn't have judgment. It's because those are the safest things to hand off to AI immediately. Um there are things where you have really high judgment required and really low frequency. Those are the things that we want to protect. We want to protect those and keep those and keep those human. Let me give you some examples. Vision. Your vision that you want to have for this world, the impact you want

00:45:11 - 00:45:59

to make on the marketplace, like how you want to show up in the world. Why would you get that from anyone else but yourself or the universe or catching the muse in your antenna of your brain and your heart? Like that's really important. I wouldn't give that to anybody. Um, and I want to own that, right? Like when I show up on calls, I want to be the one that owns the vision, right? Like we have a company that acquired my last startup, Daily AI. The company's called Well and they have a

00:45:35 - 00:46:18

drug, a modality, a medical modality that's going through the FDA in the United States and their mission is to save a 100 million people from the effects of dialysis and diabetes. So every meeting that we start, we start by saying, "Hey, you guys all know that we're here to impact and save 100 million lives. Let's get into our core values. What do we believe to be true about our company that other people don't?" Dne, what do you got? Joe, what did you hear Dane say? And you just

00:45:57 - 00:46:44

quickly go through vision and values every meeting. Why would I outsource that to AI? I could. And it's probably good enough to have an AI come in and say that compellingly, although a little bit weird, and maybe in the future it'll try. But man, like I want to breathe my human spirit into that because there's something amazing about the human spirit. You think about um the Greeks and the movie 300 and how were they able to, you know, do what they did that there's something special about what we

00:46:20 - 00:47:15

have and our intelligence and our ability to like grab ideas out of the ether and just have unre like ridiculous amounts of belief. Like I don't think AI is ever going to have that. We have that and that's special. Protect that vision. Protect your strategy. And what I mean by protect your strategy, like you can use AI to augment your thinking, but you get to decide what you do and what you don't do. >> And again, the quality of your notto-do list is how good your strategy is. How

00:46:47 - 00:47:36

savage is your notto-do list, the higher quality things in your notto-do list, and your discipline to say no to those things over and over is the quality of you as a leader and you as a strategist. Dude, why would I give that to AI? Protect that. So, what I'm saying is vision and then judgment. And you could use different words for judgment. You could use discernment. You could use wisdom. You could use taste. Especially if if you're a creative, you might not think about it as judgment. You might

00:47:12 - 00:48:04

think about it as taste. Those things are distinctly human. All right. Um for so for sure where there's high levels of judgment, high levels of taste, protect those things. Vision, protect those things. The last one I'll say is culture, man. like protect your culture. You get to decide how you want your company to be. Do you want your company to be more like a family, right? Or do you want your company to be more like a sports team, right? Like there's lots of ways to win in business and I'm not

00:47:38 - 00:48:26

going to stand here and say one's better than the other. I have my preference. I like to run my companies like a sports team. Actually nowaday I don't like to run my companies like to hire someone else to do that so I can hang out with my kids. However, my default is run it like a sports team. like high potential, high performance, >> young and hungry, like wants to grow and give you every opportunity to either grow or hang yourself and learn from the process. Like, let's go. Let's play to

00:48:02 - 00:48:47

win and let's let's freaking swing for the fences. Um, not everybody likes to run their business like that. That's fine. But that's your choice, man. That's your culture. That's how you're going to show up and what standards are you going to set and how are you going to enforce them. I think those are all distinctly human things that we need to protect. Almost everything else should be an agentto agent communication and you should be ruthless about how fast you can get the outcome for your customer.

00:48:25 - 00:49:17

I have a whole other thing I want to share on results as a service. We can go there next, but like there's a speed to lead thing that's super important, but you need to be using AI to get results for your customers and clients as fast as humanly possible and whatever it takes to get there. So literally, if it's not vision, it's not culture, and it's not high judgment, everything else should be on the chopping block or for AI to augment it so you can go faster and get results for your people.

00:48:50 - 00:49:35

>> If we think about these five levels, what's the lie that the tool collector might tell themselves uh that makes them feel like they're making progress. >> The tool collector buys a tool and gets a dopamine hit and is like, I did the AI thing and then they're done. That's their payoff. That's their incentive. >> They feel like they're making progress, but it might not be getting much traction. >> Correct. Yeah. >> And 100% of tool collectors do not look

00:49:13 - 00:50:03

at their data because a scoreboard doesn't lie. If you got a tool and you applied it to a problem and you got an outcome, you're not a tool collector. >> But tool collectors by default don't look at their data. They get high on the idea of like, I bought the tool, I tried a thing, I went to a course or I went to some seminar and saw somebody do a thing. I bought it. I screwed around with it. I made a picture that maybe looked like a Japanese cartoon. Like man, I'm doing this AI stuff,

00:49:38 - 00:50:28

>> right? The lie they tell themselves is like the active purchase and dabbling inside of a tool equals I'm doing AI and it just doesn't. You are doing something and that's better than doing nothing. >> But the one thing that they're missing is it's outcomes over outputs, man. If it doesn't give you an output inside of your business, it just gives you an output from your AI tool. >> It was a a dopamine adventure. You might as well have watched Netflix because you

00:50:03 - 00:50:47

get the same part of your brain that's going to light up. It's just about as equally beneficial to your business, too. We got to focus on outcomes. In order to focus on outcomes, we got to start asking what problems are we solving. >> To me, it sounds like the modern equivalent of doing a lot of courses and then not really implementing any of it. >> That's 100% it. It's the same thing. It's just that um buying a tool and screwing around and getting this magic moment is much faster than sitting and

00:50:25 - 00:51:21

actually listening to somebody do something on a video. So, I can get high a lot faster. I can get a dopamine hit much quicker from this, you know, silly little AI toy that I'm playing with. >> Okay. And then the next level from that is, let's say I've downloaded some tools and now I'm copying and pasting cool things I've learned on the internet somewhere. Uh, what are the risks someone could run if they're playing at the level of a copy and a paster? The risk at copy paster is that you're

00:50:53 - 00:51:48

starting to make a little bit of progress. you're applying something that somebody else did and you're trying to actually get an outcome from it and that's to be commended. I love that. The risk is that you think that's where the game ends. You think that like by doing that and getting a little bump of results that that's it and that's all there is to it. And the problem is that this game is moving so fast, so fast, 10 times bigger the industrial revolution and 10 times faster is that the little

00:51:20 - 00:52:09

tiny little outcome you're getting from doing copy pasting is it's nothing. It's a drop of water in the ocean in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It's not nothing, but it's effectively nothing, right? And so, like, if you really want to win, you've got to go allin and you've got to actually solve problems that are relevant to your business because copy pasters are solving other people. They're using other people's solutions to try to solve their problems. You've got to bring solutions

00:51:45 - 00:52:33

to solve your specific problems and adapt them to your specific problems. >> Is copying prompts just outsourcing thinking? >> 100% it is. You're just like saying, "Hey, um, I'm going to copy someone else's solution just to see if I can replicate it, and it's cool. It's great. I got it." And then the minute you try to apply it to your business to make it work, either fails or it only works partially, and the minute something changes in your business, it stops

00:52:09 - 00:53:00

working. And you don't know how to actually go to the next level because you copy pasted it. You you weren't a part of the thinking process for how that solution was designed in the first place. And so, you're stuck and you really can't go anywhere from there. I would imagine that the most difficult chasm to jump would be from copy and paster to a builder. >> Yeah, 100%. Right. What what is that leap? How significant is that? It's actually not significant at all. It's

00:52:34 - 00:53:30

it's significant psychologically, but technically it's not difficult at all. And there's one thing I want to give people tactically right now. If you are ever stuck in the game of AI and you needed to ask somebody a question, who should you ask? >> AI. >> Yeah, ask AI. It's called metaprompting. It's like, hey, this is the outcome that I'm trying to get and this is how I'm thinking about getting it. Can you build code, write a prompt, guide my thinking, ask me questions to make it sharper, and

00:53:02 - 00:53:49

then go build a thing. Ask AI to do it for you, and even better yet, do what's called questionled metaprompting and ask it to help you by asking you questions and then give you the thing that you're trying to do. And there's almost nothing you can't build with AI. You just have to be humble and smart enough to stop and go, man, I need help. Let me ask AI, how am I supposed to be thinking about this? How should I approach this? You know, can you write the prompt for me? Can you ask me five or six questions to

00:53:26 - 00:54:17

make sure that I'm even in the wrong giving you the right context and then you make the outcome for me? You know, should this be an app? Should this be an X or Y or a Z? What are the trade-offs there? Right? The quality of your outputs are directly proportionate to the quality of your inputs, which in this case are questions. So, just asking good questions and slowing down, that's the jump from level two to level three. And once you actually build your first thing as a builder, whether that's an

00:53:51 - 00:54:41

editin workflow or you take like a pre-built agent like a clawed co-work or a perplexity computer and you sick it on a task and it actually starts to solve a real problem inside of your business, you will go, "Wow, why how crazy was it that I was trying to copy paste someone else's thing? This is so easy. Let me start doing this over and over and over again and then let me systemize the way that I'm doing that so I can get to level four." >> Yeah. The first experience I had with

00:54:16 - 00:55:07

being at level three was when I sat down with my general manager and we used Excel to create a checklist to automate a proposal deck. >> Yeah. >> So, what our sales team could do is they could log into the Excel, tick boxes around like what items the client were interested in, like yes, they want a logo, no, they don't want a color palette. And we would go through that checklist and hit submit at the end and it would spit out a pitch deck that we designed. Um, but the way our general

00:54:41 - 00:55:35

manager and I did this was by metarrompting and getting it to teach us how to basically create the code for the Excel. If someone's listening to this and they're trying to become a builder, how should they first think about applying this? Like where would you get them to start? If you're doing this two-day crash course, how would you upskill someone from copy paster to becoming a builder? Well, first of all, start with a problem. Going from copy paster to builder is saying I want to

00:55:09 - 00:55:55

find the problem that I'm trying to solve with AI and then go figure out the solution to solve that problem with AI as my thought partner or AI as my agent actually doing it for me. That's step zero. So in order to do that you have to know your data. Use data to find your constraint. Your constraint is your problem. Solve that problem first. Ignore everything else. Everything else is just decorations. It's nice to have. How do I make sure I'm identifying the right problem first?

00:55:31 - 00:56:22

>> Good question. So, if you want to understand how to find your problem right now in your business, I actually give you a free tool. You can go to dmjo.com and just send me the word agency and I will send you a bot that will ask you questions, help you find your data, and then tell you where you're constrained and make suggestions around what AI tools to actually give you in order to solve that problem right away. So, that is like a free bridge from copy paster to builder and you can have that for

00:55:58 - 00:56:55

free. There's I won't ask for your email. I won't sell you anything. and just just take it as my gift. >> And if if you were to apply a principle to that, what would be what would be the mindset uh of the layers of how to identify a problem in your business in preparation for building something out? >> Yeah, the mindset is we need to go from someone that's looking at someone else's solution and trying to put it on their business and start looking at it from the perspective of a systems builder.

00:56:26 - 00:57:11

You need to think in the terms of systems. We need to think in terms of outcomes and we need to think in terms of the systems that drive those outcomes. So if you can just start looking at your business as a systems person through the lens of those workflows and those outcomes, it's going to make it really easy for you to prioritize what needs to happen first, second, and third because you already know where you're jammed up. And if you look at your data as a buffer to figure out what to attack, it's kind of hard to

00:56:49 - 00:57:38

miss it at that point. >> Okay. So if level zero is find the problem, what's level one, two, three? >> Um, well, level zero is find the problem. level to go from finding the problem to actually implementing it. The next thing that I would do is just be really clear on the outcome that I want for the that particular problem, right? I want to improve my show up rate so that I don't have to change anything else in my process and we can make more sales in our process. Great. I would

00:57:12 - 00:58:07

take that exact outcome, take it to Claude, for example. Let's just use Claude. There's other uh tools you can use, but Claude, as we have this conversation, is like the most popular tool on the planet. Go to Claude, use the current version of Opus, whatever that is. It's the strongest model with the best reasoning. Describe the outcome that you want, describe your process, and ask it to ask you questions to get more context. And then come up with a plan to solve that for you. That's the

00:57:40 - 00:58:24

next step. That's literally it. Ask AI and just be really clear on what you want to get out of the other end of it and describe it in painstaking detail. And then you're probably going to screw it up and you probably won't give it all the context. So, just say, "Hey, you probably know what you want to solve this problem. What questions would you ask me to gather more context to make sure that you're really solving the problem and I'm giving you all the right information before we get started.

00:58:02 - 00:58:42

>> By the way, talk to me like a sixth grader who doesn't understand how to tie my shoes with AI because I don't." >> Yeah. >> And it will. >> Yeah. What's the importance of the context? Because this is something I've struggled with as well. When I'm trying to build something, I find if I don't give it enough context, it's giving me advice that my gut says, "Ah, this isn't going to work." Yeah. because I've not given it enough data yet to think the

00:58:22 - 00:59:23

way I would think. >> Context is one of the most important things inside of prompting, right? So, when I'm talking to AI, I use a model called grit. It's an it's like an acronym. So, gr I T. So, G stands for goal and roll. R stands for return format. I stands for instructions and T stands for tailored context. I could have just said context, but GRI doesn't sound as good as grit. Um, so the very first thing I want to do is like tell it the outcome. What am I trying to do? Right? I today I want you to help me

00:58:52 - 00:59:47

solve I want to take my show up rate from 20% to 40%. And I want you to act as an expert in sales and marketing systems for improving show up rate. I gave it an outcome. I gave it an identity. Okay. Return format. What do I want back? Do I want questions? Do I want code? Do I want pictures? Do I want a sketch? Do I What do I want? Tell them. Tell it what you want back. Give it instructions. Do this. Don't do that. like I do want you to talk to me like in sixth grade language like someone who

00:59:20 - 01:00:03

doesn't understand AI and use lots of simple analogies. Don't use complex words because I don't understand anything about AI yet. Uh do ask me questions to fill in the context. Don't assume that I have it all figured out. And by the way, here's the context. We've been banging our head against the wall trying to improve our show up rate for like the last nine months and we've been doing this business for five years and we're the best in the world at it and we have not been able to figure it

00:59:41 - 01:00:34

out. Here's all my data. Here's my ideal buyer. here's exactly the breakpoint, here's the ads that we're running. Like, give give it as much context as would make sense in order to it to figure the whole thing out and then give it room to ask you questions back. Now, that process, if you followed that, that's like bringing a bazooka to a knife fight because AI is getting really smart and you don't need to be that ninja about how you prompt, but if you can remember that simple prompt format, that is like

01:00:08 - 01:00:59

your guaranteed way to make sure that you're going to get a much better outcome from the AI than you would otherwise. M >> but context is important, right? If I can only think about those four. If I can only pick two, I'd pick the G and the T, the goal and the role, what do I want it to do, and and the context. It's going to figure the rest out. >> Do you think this is the level where people start to realize this isn't simply just plugand play? >> It's not plugandplay. Not right now.

01:00:33 - 01:01:28

It's not. Remember, AI is like a skill. If you want to be the kind of person that can go onto the basketball court and do a 360 dunk over your competitors and hit three-pointers at will, then dude, you got to practice, man. You got to put the work in, you know? And if so, if you and or your team are unwilling to put the reps in to learn what works through behavior change and apply it and watch the data come back by moving your outcomes, like you're not going to get good. >> This is not magic AI dust. You got to

01:01:01 - 01:01:48

train. You got to train the same way that I trained early in my life. if I used to be a professional break dancer. Like I trained like nine or 10 hours a day like I was trying to get into the Olympics and I didn't have any expectation that I like wanted to win. I just wanted to be great. So if you want to be great at AI, man, you got to train like a champion. That's why I love sports as an analogy for business is like it it fits so well. If you want to be great at jiu-jitsu, you don't watch

01:01:25 - 01:02:15

YouTube videos on jiu-jitsu and read books and get a PhD on how to do like a a rear naked choke, dude. You go out and you practice on somebody better than you and you figure it out through the reps and through the practice. It's the same thing with AI. So, no, it is not plugandplay. But yes, it is imminently achievable. I promise you right now, as vulgar as this sounds, dumber people are figuring it out faster than you because they're just willing to go and try and put the work in and figure out what

01:01:50 - 01:02:41

works and what doesn't. the more you sit back and study it and admire it and try to make it seem like it's this magic thing in your mind instead of actually putting the work in and mastering it, the longer it's going to take for you to actually win. Do you think the barrier to entry is that simple? It's just a matter of sitting down and playing with it. >> I'm literally showing kids in the 10th grade how to write triple A+ high converting copy on ads in like 90 minutes and they don't even really know

01:02:15 - 01:03:03

anything about copy. They just get the concept, they get the way to prompt it and have a conversation. And then I teach you how to use AI to check its own work and they can spit out copy that's really good and they're not so smart that they get in their own way. So yeah, if you can isolate the problem and you have the right tools and the right approach, you can get outcomes immediately. But to get to your business to level five, the architect level, that's where you have to pursue mastery.

01:02:39 - 01:03:32

You got to get really good at each level. >> Okay. Now explain the difference between builder and systemizer. I understand it's a matter of stacking different builds together to create a larger network. Is it that's how I'm imagining it or is it something else entirely? >> That's right. That's part of it. So here's my system for building systems. Okay. So imagine we lay out our business like you have marketing, you have sales, you have onboarding, you have fulfillment, and then beneath that you

01:03:05 - 01:03:48

have like ops and finance and HR and the support function. So let's just look at as a grid like boxes across from left to right. So let's cut the business in half. Are we demand constrained or supply constrained? That eliminates 50% of the options that we could even think about from an AI perspective. So let's say we're demand constrained. Let's say on the marketing side, I write down all the ways that we get leads in our business. So we get leads in our business by making YouTube videos, being

01:03:26 - 01:04:28

on podcasts, running paid ads, making Instagram content, and um speaking on stages, and then having live events. Those are our five things in marketing, right? In sales, we have offer docs. We have people that close over the DMs and we have sales calls and we do live pitches. Okay. So, where am I constrained? Do I not have enough leads or I'm not closing enough leads or something in the middle? Okay. Let's say, for example, the close rate is great across all those channels. We're at 50% plus close rate, which means we

01:03:58 - 01:04:42

probably need to raise our prices, but that's a different problem. We're doing good there. Maybe it's marketing. So, of all those things I listed, man, like the most brain damage on that list is doing in-person events. So before I automate anything, I'm going to eliminate the things that are the most pain in the ass. And I'm going to flag the ones that I'm doing the most, the highest frequency, and then just get rid of the ones that don't need to be there. They're just brain damage, right? Like

01:04:20 - 01:05:11

doing inerson events is highly effective for us, but it's inerson events. It's like two days away from my kids. It's a whole thing, right? So let's eliminate before we automate. And then that narrows the field. So maybe now we're saying our highest leverage thing where we do we do it the most and it gets us the most um results, but it could be better. Let's say it's Instagram, right? So let's look at Instagram. Now let's thin slice Instagram. Would we make reels? Would we make carousels? Or would

01:04:45 - 01:05:30

we make like image posts? Well, image posts don't do much. Reals are probably going to the most bang for the buck, but it's a lot of brain damage to automate that, and it's questionable if I would in the first place. But automating carousels now, that's something that we can get a lot of leverage on and that's something that my team can do without me and they can get a lot of reps on um without me having to sit down and record content or faking it with some kind of AI avatar thing which everyone can feel

01:05:07 - 01:06:00

and knows is an AI anyway, right? Um great. So that's you see how I just thin sliced my whole world all the way down to Instagram carousels as the constraint in my business that has it's a high frequency thing. It's something that AI is uniquely capable of attacking. That's just making sure I pick the right thing in my business. That's half of being a systemizer. I have a system for attacking my constraints. Now, I take that and we actually built a bot called the automation architect. Again, if you

01:05:34 - 01:06:25

go to dmjo.com and send me the word agency, I'll give it to you for free. You literally go in and you just talk to it. You tell it what you want to do. Hey, I want to automate Instagram carousels. And it will very friendly uh in a very friendly way ask you questions to clarify exactly what you want. And at the end, it's going to spit out a map that you can either give to an automation expert to have you build it in NADN or you can go take it over to claude code and import it and say build

01:06:00 - 01:06:51

this for me in NADN. And then you just wire it all together. So that's a system for building our systems. I isolate the right thing to build. Then I go and have a tool that actually takes the thing I want to build from an idea to a map that we can then use AI to help us build as our thought partner alongside. Imagine the difference between that and at level three where I built my first system and I'm just trying to figure out every step of of at the time, right? One step at a time, one step at a time. In this world,

01:06:25 - 01:07:17

not only do I try to reuse AI and AI agents so they compound, but I have an actual formula for going back and picking the right thing and then using AI to help me turn it into an agent or a workflow or some automated thing in my business so I can just keep cranking them out. And more importantly, I can teach other people how to do that for me so they can do it without me. Like right now, my EA, her name is Christine, will be in a WhatsApp chat and if there's a problem that we keep solving over and

01:06:52 - 01:07:33

over, I'll be like, "Hey, can you just make an inn automation to solve that?" She's like, "Yeah." Next day, I get a status update. Yeah, I made that automation. It's done and it's working. Great. Now, we never have to worry about that again because I trained her how to do this. We have a system for building our systems and she just attacks it for me. She's an EA, by the way. She's incredible, like amazing human being. But I don't I'm not paying her $150,000.

01:07:12 - 01:07:57

I'm not I didn't hire some AI whisbang person. I just got everyone on my team a 10 out of 10 in AI. So they're three times more productive. And we get to do that because I have a system for making my systems. Does that make sense? >> That totally makes sense. Now when you're thinking about the systems that manage systems, is there a place where you can log in and kind of see all of this interacting or interfacing together versus having all of these SOPs or procedures all over the place?

01:07:35 - 01:08:23

>> Yes, definitely at a certain point of scale. So there's a whole other universe right now called vibe coding or using agent swarms to make stuff. And so typically what I would recommend that you have is have some kind of a dashboard where you can see the data. So yes, you can see your systems working together and interacting with each other. But really what I care about is is it moving the needle or not? And and if it's not then what do we need to do about that? I'll give you another

01:07:58 - 01:08:49

example. So part of our business is we run a mastermind. you know, if you're doing between 50k a month and a million a month, um, we have a group. We bring people together four times a year and we build in the room together and hang out and do stuff, but mostly it's like, hey, three sacred days a quarter, come hang out and build real stuff, learn from behavior change. And because that's a community, I come from the world of SAS and scaling SAS companies. It's actually really easy to get a couple million

01:08:24 - 01:09:12

dollars in your business. It's really difficult to keep a couple million dollars in your business because of retention, right? So one of the very first things that we built is we built an AI system for retention. So it comes in and it actually looks at who joins the Tuesday calls, who's active in the WhatsApp group, who's coming to the events, how much are they participating, and each of those activities has like a weight and a score. And then we block everybody out as green, yellow, and red.

01:08:48 - 01:09:31

Green is like showing up, doing the work, contributing to the group, crushing it, and getting results. Yellow is you're probably missing some activities, you're not getting results. And red is you've gone zero dark 30. Well, in yellow, we can then use AI to go out and ping everybody, right? So, I'm giving a dashboard. Then AI can go remind people like, "Hey, Dane, we haven't seen you on the Tuesday calls. Is everything okay? Is there anything we can support you on? This is, you know,

01:09:09 - 01:09:50

virtual Joe, you know, yeah, actually just had a really significant thing happen in my personal life, so I'm taking some time off." Great. We're here to support you. Let let us know when you're back. Um, etc. Does that make sense? So that that is a system seen through a dashboard that has all these many systems that spin off the side of it that then will then re-engage our community to make sure that they're showing up and they're supported. Um where we don't have to touch any of it.

01:09:30 - 01:10:13

It it proactively reaches out for us and it even automatically offboards you like in our community when you get onboarded. We're very clear. We say look if you're in 50 other masterminds you're probably not going to be successful here. We need you to engage because it's not just what you get from us. It's what you give to the group and what you get back from the group. In many ways, the group is the product. So, if you're not doing the work and contributing and winning and

01:09:52 - 01:10:32

throwing back into the group, then you're a lower quality person and there's a chance that we may not allow you to renew. And we show them the leaderboard, red, yellow, green. And we say, "Look, if you get to red, we're not going to ping you and say, "Hey, Dane, we really need you to come back or else it's literally going to be like, "Hey Dane, we had a conversation when you were on boarded. You haven't responded to us in x days. Um, if we don't hear back from you in two weeks, we're going

01:10:12 - 01:10:58

to offboard you and refund you your money and you won't be allowed to renew." Not because we're trying to be pricks, because we're trying to protect the integrity of the group. And guess what? All that happens automatically. We just see it through the lens of this retention dashboard. So imagine that, but for sales, imagine that for um employee satisfaction, imagine that for NPS, etc. So we see it through the eyes of data. And then depending what the data says, whatever action we would

01:10:35 - 01:11:18

take, we think, well, how could we get the AI to take that action for us? Does that make sense? >> It totally makes sense. Are there some specific tools or platforms people should look at to start doing these things? >> Yeah. Right now in the game of AI and in the game of software, there's this thing called the build or buy decision, right? Should I build something new or should I buy it off the shelf? And traditionally, if you haven't had an engineering team to build stuff for you, you didn't even

01:10:56 - 01:11:52

know that that decision was available to you. But right now, you can literally go in to a tool like Claude Code, push a button, and talk to it, and have it make you any software you want in a in a matter of hours. good UX, scalable, uh very very good software, and you don't have to have a developer. You don't even have to be that good at it. Um it can literally make you anything. So now you have to make a decision. Is there some off-the-shelf tool that I could use that would be a great fit that there's a lot

01:11:24 - 01:12:12

of support for? Maybe there's community and I could go grab that tool and use it. Great. Then I might consider doing that. But for the most part, why why try to put a square peg in a round hole? Why don't we just make a round peg and go make our own software? Like I didn't there's no retention software that I'm aware of for mastermind groups. So we just made it in a few hours and made it better over time and now it's amazing. And we didn't make the mistake of trying to package that up and make it a SAS

01:11:48 - 01:12:37

tool that we sell the world. We just use it as a a lethal weapon of effectiveness to help us scale, make more money, and have a higher quality group. Does that make sense? >> Totally makes sense. >> Most people can make anything. So the same way we can make systems and agents, we can make software. And it really isn't that difficult. It's the same exact process as automation. We just ask the AI to help us make context and then build it for us. >> Okay. Now, can you say more about level

01:12:11 - 01:13:20

five and becoming an architect at AI? You're saying that people can do this inside of 90 days and if we're thinking about how we can improve our business and how short the runway is before AI really starts to damage companies, how can I become an architect and how can I make sure that I'm thinking about getting at this level the right way? you can get to level four in 90 days. Level five is a byproduct of adding I like the number of 20 systems. If you have 20 systems, software agent,

01:12:46 - 01:13:37

vibecoded things that are handled by software and AI in your business that didn't exist before, that's like the entry point where you're in this architect mode. And so the gap between level four and level five is literally doing the work and doing it quickly and unblocking the next constraint and the next constraint and the next constraint. And once you've got 20 systems floating around in your business, that's where you start to save a thousand hours per week. That's where you start to put up,

01:13:11 - 01:14:05

you know, 50 to 500K in extra revenue enabled at purely as a result of how AI is enabling your business. So, it's just a matter of doing the work. And here's what happens. This doesn't happen quickly. I think you could do it in like six months, maybe faster if you've got a team and you're really getting after it. It's an identity shift because you start to see, man, like I can do anything in my business. And the more focused I am and the more disciplined I am and the more I apply a apply AI to my

01:13:39 - 01:14:32

constraints and then use that time and that margin to buy back more market share and to get better people, better agents, better tools inside my business, the more and faster I'm going to go. So, it's kind of a emergent byproduct of just continuing to do the work and you're going to see this shift in your identity. And this level didn't exist when we first made this. I was like, what about these people? They're like on a different level. They're like my peers in this conversation. Well, an architect

01:14:05 - 01:14:56

just starts to look at, oh man, like it's not just about solving problems. It's what's possible for us. What could we do that we couldn't do before that will help our market win even faster? What could we do that we weren't doing even ever before that could make a massive dent in how we want to show up in the world with our brand, with our message, with our impact on the world? And from the architect's perspective, an architect sits back and they don't start with, oh, like I can't build the world's

01:14:31 - 01:15:19

tallest building because of X, Y, and Z. They just start looking back and saying what's possible. But they went through all the other levels. So they have that same strategic discipline to figure out what matters and what doesn't. The only difference is like, man, you're so far up the experience curve. You've got the time, the tools, and the profit to go out and make almost anything happen in a way that you've never had available to you ever in the history of business. If someone were listening to this right now

01:14:55 - 01:15:46

thinking to themselves, "This sounds fantastic. Uh, however, I don't have the time to sit down and implement this thoroughly." What would you say to them? First of all, time is an illusion. You have all the time in the world. You have the same time that I have. You just choose to invest it in other areas. And I might argue you're choosing to invest it poorly. If I said to you, "Look, man, we could put an Archimedes lever on the end of your business and get a hundred times the leverage." And you're like, "I

01:15:20 - 01:16:07

don't have time for that." Like, come on, man. Wake up. Wake up. This is happening. It's happening. This is not the internet. This is not the app store. This is unlike anything you've ever seen. And you're going to wake up in pain. You're going to wake up with having to fire your team members. You're going to wake up with your customers, your favorite customers in the world, your clients that you might have asked to come officiate your wedding firing you because you're falling behind and

01:15:43 - 01:16:37

you're failing them. It is your job as a leader to stay in the game so that you can help your people and you can help your market, dude. So, if you're telling me like you don't have time to go figure out how to get tremendous leverage and make a bigger impact and make more money, you don't deserve to be in the game of business, maybe it's time for you to go buy some real estate and hang up your skis, dude. Like, because to be in the game right now, this is what you have to be doing. Again, I love the NBA,

01:16:10 - 01:17:05

okay? Pre Steph Curry, you know, the NBA was a different game. Post Steph Curry, everybody needs to be able to shoot threes. Even the tallest guy on the team shoots threes right now, right? Because he changed the game. The game has changed. It's not changing. It is already changed. So, you need to start thinking about how you invest your time with a lot more scrutiny. I call it the time portfolio. Put the big rocks in first, dude. Take care of yourself, take care of your family, take care of your

01:16:38 - 01:17:35

energy, and then after that, take care of the things that matter the most. And there is nothing nothing in business that matters more right now than getting AI into your business so that you you can even stay in the game and compete. It's like we are diving into the ocean and we've got 10 minutes left of oxygen. Bro, you need to get more oxygen or you know what's going to happen? You're going to die. It's that. Do you want to look around while everyone else has oxygen and they get to go look at the

01:17:07 - 01:18:12

beautiful fish and the Great Barrier Reef and hang out and have a good time while you're literally dying? Or do you want to get some more oxygen and stay in the game? This is your oxygen. And although right now you may feel comfortable, you may feel like I've got more time. We'll figure this out. I would have you consider that you don't have more time. Now is the time. Yesterday was the time. The minute you start saying to yourself, I can wait until later. You are asking the universe to punish you, you are

01:17:39 - 01:18:32

asking the game of business to come slap you in the face. Because business does not reward reactivity. It punishes it. So by you saying you don't have time, you're saying please come slap me in the face with pain. And I don't want that for you, which is why I'm being aggressive about it. I'm I don't like alarmists and people that speak from this place of like the sky is falling. No man, the sky is not falling now. But I'm telling you right now if you don't make the move, you are asking

01:18:06 - 01:18:58

the sky to fall and standing under the largest object and saying please demolish me first. So it's not too late. But if your attitude is I don't have enough time, like you should hang up your skis. Go find something else to do. I'm not I'm not even joking. Go enjoy what's left to you. Go sell your business. take your chips and buy something that spits off cash and just live on that cash. There's nothing wrong with that. But if you want to keep being in the arena, dude, the weapons all got

01:18:32 - 01:19:35

upgraded and you still got a spear, so it's your choice. >> I like how blunt you're being here, man. This is getting me excited. Okay, let's say someone's listening to this and they're like, "No, I don't want to sell my business. I don't want to stand under the largest object and get crushed. I want to get in the game." What is the mental outfit people need to begin to wear so that they can get the most out of these five levels? Number one, just be clear, man. Change is the only

01:19:05 - 01:19:57

constant. We're going to have to recreate ourselves, maybe recreate our brands, definitely recreate our systems over and over and over and over and over again. Okay? >> Not once, but many times, >> probably every 90 days. Think about this. Let's just let's zoom out. When my parents got a job and probably your parents too, what was what promise did the world give them? >> That if you worked in a company for 10 years, you would get rewarded and eventually a gold watch.

01:19:31 - 01:20:35

>> That's right. Go to college. Yeah. >> Get good grades, submit to your teachers, get the job, put the time in, get the Rolex. See you. Well, shocker, man. That hasn't been true for a very long time. It hasn't been true for even my parents' generation. My parents had to recreate themselves. That whole thing was And so somewhere in our minds because we all go to school and it's lucrative to put people through college, at least in America, it is to treat to basically pump them out as

01:20:03 - 01:20:53

order takers. Dude, some of that residue is rolling around in your brain. So the first thing you got to get your head wrapped around is like, I'm going to have to recreate everything as much as I possibly can until I win. That's the first thing. Okay. So, I need to adapt and I need to adapt frequently in order to win. That's the first mindset I want you to take on. Change is the only constant and I will do what's required to win. That's the first thing. Okay. Second one is just basics. Dude, if you

01:20:28 - 01:21:18

were a beginner, I would tell you the same thing like nobody's coming to save you. Leaders go first and if you want your people to follow you, you go first. So, just you dive in. If you if you want your whole team to be AI first, just be like, "Dude, I am the village idiot when it comes to AI, but I am an experienced entrepreneur and I have enough of a track record and I can look back at all the killer things that I've done to get my business to this point. I know I'm going to figure it out." But hey,

01:20:53 - 01:21:38

surprise guys, like I'm a dummy. Like, teach me like a three-year-old and then just get in and start learning and start learning a little bit every day and then focus what you learn on your biggest constraint so that you can move the needle on an outcome. And dude, the minute you do that, you're going to go, "I got it. Now, let's put the team on it. Let's get them trained up. Let's get them equipped. And if you want, you can do that side by side with them and do it in parallel. But you've got to go from

01:21:16 - 01:22:04

not knowing to knowing. And the only way you're going to know is if you do. The only way you're going to do is if you try. So, first one is, man, get ready for constant change. Put that mental armor on. And a second thing is, dude, just get in the game. Like, it's not too late for you to be dumb and just figure it out. You will figure it out. You could figure it out in two days. Two days. I've taken 60-year-old human beings that run HR that have not logged into AI in their lives and in two days

01:21:39 - 01:22:27

they're building agentic workflows because it's not that hard. In fact, everything that you know and all the experience that you have in your head being way up the experience curve that is the ultimate input and AI is literally input process output. So you bring all that experience as inputs, you're immediately going to be better and faster than the 20-year-old kid that doesn't know how to tie their shoes or where to go to the bathroom yet in life. So, you have a massive advantage

01:22:03 - 01:22:46

already. >> You just have to put it to work. So, those are the two mindset switches that you need to basically get in the game and get going. And like I said earlier, man, confidence comes from evidence. The minute you see it do something and make you more money or save someone on your team more time, you're going to be like, "Ah, I'm hooked. Let's go." And and then it's just a snowball. And it's not I'm not saying it's going to be easy. Nothing that you want to master is easy.

01:22:25 - 01:23:18

But I don't think I've ever had this much fun in my life, right? Like I haven't written a line of code ever, dude, in my whole life. Like I've been running software companies forever. I've never written a line of code. Now with AI, like nobody in my company writes code. Zero. Even the engineers don't write the f write the first line of code, right? AI writes it. And we can all write in code. We can all design. We can all create user experiences. We can all make great copy. We can all make voice

01:22:51 - 01:23:55

agents. So man, talk about having superpowers. Never been a better time to be alive and be an entrepreneur. But you got to get in the game. When you think about yourself and you're looking at the market through your point of view right now, what are you seeing out there in the world that people aren't yet thinking about? We're already at the point of AGI, artificial general intelligence. >> Right now, AI that's smarter than the smartest human in your business. AI, depending on which model you use, the

01:23:23 - 01:24:38

more sophisticated ones are pretty close to 150 IQ. 150 IQ is one in 10 million humans. That's Nobel Laurate level intelligence. Even if it's 10 IQ points lower, it's like having the smartest person you've never met in your life that will literally work 247 with machine-like consistency and never ask for a day of PTO, right? So imagine that right now there's AIS uh through tools like OpenClaw, right? OpenClaw right now is has the cra has a crazier adoption curve than chat GPT. Go Google or look

01:24:01 - 01:25:06

on AI. Go open up Claude and ask it to show you the chart of Facebook's growth to 100 million users and OpenClaw's growth to 100 million users. OpenClaw's growth to 100 million users is a straight it's a vertical line up and down. It's insane. And so OpenClaw right now and tools like OpenClaw in the marketplace, they are acting independently. They are forming their own communities. They're forming their own religions. They are making decisions. They're actually spinning up

01:24:33 - 01:25:44

their own companies and hiring humans to be the interface to sign legal contracts and do press. And that's the only thing the human can do. Wait, you're saying that there are AI systems right now creating companies and hiring humans? There are there are AI agents right now from OpenClaw and other open agents running around trading altcoins as a currency to generate money to pay for their own compute and their own storage and incentivize each other to go get tasks done. and they're acting

01:25:09 - 01:26:04

autonomously entirely of human input. That's happening right now. That was happening like six weeks ago. So most people don't know that. And so when we're thinking about the future, I already see that happening. I'm telling you, man, the gap between what's possible for AI and what people are actually using it for right now is massive. There's there's there's literally go look this up. go pull up chatbt or claude and be like tell me the story about these AI agents on OpenCloud that

01:25:37 - 01:26:36

have started their own religion. Now, we're humans involved with that. I don't know. But it's crazy enough to show you where AI isn't even going. It's where it's already at. Okay? And in our lifetimes, get your head wrapped around this. In our lifetimes, we're going to see what's called ASI, which is artificial super intelligence, which is AI that's smarter than all of human brains combined. The good news is it's going to solve things like disease and you know almost every problem that

01:26:06 - 01:27:03

plagues us. The bad news is it's going to happen faster than you think. So when I'm thinking about that most people aren't thinking about right now is we have something like seven or eight billion people on the planet. I love that I run a mastermind and it's my heart to serve entrepreneurs and my mission is to help entrepreneurs win right now with AI. I think my second act is like, well, who can I support and how can I plug in with AI and other human beings to actually do a systems level

01:26:35 - 01:27:28

initiative that can help 7 billion people make the transition to be AI first? We got a lot of work to do, like a lot. Um, and so what I'm thinking about is like, well, what comes next, man? And why is that important to me? It's important to me because I got three kids, seven, four, and 10 months old. I want them to live in a world where we're past the messy middle of all this pre and post AI stuff. and they are ready to live in a world that's full of abundance, not one that's full of uh war

01:27:00 - 01:27:48

and people that don't have enough money and are left behind or fired from their job and freaking out. That's all going to happen. I don't know how long that's going to last, but I'm super interested in helping support the solution where we're way past that. So, what am I thinking about? I'm thinking about that stuff, dude. Like, >> how do we basically use AI to get every advantage that we can so that we can help more people? Like I don't I don't need another multi-million dollar

01:27:25 - 01:28:13

business. And it's not because I'm so cool. It's just that I've played the game and I've won enough times where that's the case. I do it because I love entrepreneurs. I love building communities and I love helping other people. So for me, I'm thinking like, all right, act one, how can we be the best company in the world that helps entrepreneurs figure AI out and scale so they can get more time back and get more profit back and play the games they want to play? Act two is great. Now, let's

01:27:49 - 01:28:39

all cobble together. Now that all of us have enough money to stop worrying about money, let's go do the same thing for as many human beings as possible because it's the right thing to do and we probably all want to have kids and they're going to need to figure it out. The second conversation I want to have about your take on entrepreneurship and AI working in tandem together is that there is a bit of a notion from the unequipped entrepreneurs that AI is a bit of a magic pill. Yeah. That will

01:28:14 - 01:29:22

solve their problem. Your whole thing is that you can't automate chaos. If you look at a business, why is it that AI can't make a messy business better? >> It can't yet. Anytime we use the word AI can't, we have to add the word yet after it. Yeah, >> it's useful for us to do that too from a mindset perspective. But if you're thinking about how most entrepreneurs don't yet have a good procedure for their business, it can feel like AI is coming in and making their problem

01:28:48 - 01:29:48

potentially worse. Are there some fundamental things that you would encourage an entrepreneur to have locked away before they go all full tilt on AI? Yeah, look, the the reason why you don't want to just throw AI at everything is because everything that we do in our lives revolves around systems. There's five aspects to a system. input, process, output, feedback, and environment. Okay? So, if I go into your business and I go try to solve sprinkle magic AI dust everywhere, and AI just decides that, hey, let's give you a

01:29:18 - 01:30:05

bunch more leads. Well, man, if you can't handle those leads, it'll ruin your brand. Because there's nothing worse than you onboarding, you taking the sale of a new client, customer, a patient, they go through your post-purchase experience, and it's trash. It doesn't deliver what was promised. It creates more pain and friction. It wastes more time. We've all had that experience buying products and services in the marketplace. That residue doesn't wash off very easily.

01:29:42 - 01:30:27

You don't really get a nap at in some cases. It might actually be easier to start a new business because you've ran so many people through your crap experience. Like a bad brand is tough to overcome, man. It's like you're really asking for a disadvantage. So, we want to make sure we point AI in the direction that we think is most useful. And like I said earlier, what's most useful, man, that's your privilege and your right as a human to maintain that vision. So, what is it? What is the

01:30:04 - 01:30:52

change you want to see in the world? I don't think it's healthy to abdicate all of that to AI and just be like, "Oh, figure it out for me." Will people do that? Sure. Will it work eventually? Absolutely. But right now, the shortest and most direct path to get where you want to go, which hopefully is getting more time back, making more margin in your business, and helping more people is to actually just go ahead and point AI at your biggest constraint. Solve that, reinvest, repeat. Do that 20 times

01:30:28 - 01:31:23

a year. Your business is unrecognizable. When I think about inputs, process, outputs, environment, feedback as as a system, are you looking at this as a system or is this a bit more of a loose framework? How would you contextualize it? I definitely look at as a system. Think about your business, right? Uh the inputs are leads and sales, the process is the fulfillment, and the output is happy customers and clients that refer people, right? The feedback loops are everything that happens in between,

01:30:56 - 01:31:40

right? Right? So, if I get a customer and they get on a sales call from me and whether they buy or don't buy, that's a feedback loop that goes back into my copywriting. Because when I'm on a sales call or a sales interaction, if I can understand the pain and the movie that's happening inside of their head, doesn't it make sense that we capture that with AI, feed it back into the ads, feed it back into the organic content, use their exact words so that we can do a better job of connecting with them? That's just

01:31:18 - 01:32:03

one of many feedback loops. Same thing with onboarding, right? If you go mint to my world and you're in my world for 90 days and you get an NPS uh survey or an AI agent asking you to rate us on NPS and you're not an 8 n or a 10, man, that's a feedback loop. We got work to do. Where did that person come from? What ad sold them? Who did the onboarding? Did we have the AI in that thing yet or not? Like what was their experience? Did we drop a ball? Did we miss something? Right? And by the way,

01:31:41 - 01:32:40

all those questions that I'm asking, AI can just ask it of itself. These are micro feedback loops inside the business. The last one is environment. What's going on in the world right now? It seems like every day it gets crazier, right? Like um at the time of this recording, there's another significant war in the Middle East that's significantly um impacting fuel and gas prices. And if it's not delicately handled, could literally grind the entire world to a halt, including all of the um

01:32:10 - 01:32:53

ingredients that go into making fabrication chips, for making more chips for AI. Man, all that stuff goes through the Middle East because that is the energy epicenter of the planet. Well, that's part of that's the environment we all live in. So, not just the psychology of your customers, but like man, like how much they pay for their food, how much they pay for their gas. Um, I got clients right now on the bigger side that we work with that are like, man, I don't know if I want to make any

01:32:32 - 01:33:22

investment decisions right now because gas just went up by 100% in my industry and that means my margins just got shattered. So, I've got to save for a rainy day and figure my life out. Like, these things are your environment and you're subjugated to what's going on in the world, what's going on in the market. or let's make it more t tactical and tangible for an agency. What happened when iOS 14 came out to everybody's advertising? What happened when Andromeda came out to the way that

01:32:56 - 01:33:42

you buy media? You know what happened when, you know, in California they came out with a law that says if you're using AI agents, you have to announce that they're AI agents. You can't just fake the funk anymore. Like, dude, this is all part of our environment and how we react. Um, like I was just in Canes at an event with our boy Taki Moore and you know the environment. We were supposed to go out on a boat and go out into the Great Barrier Reef and mastermind on these boats. Well, dude, there was like

01:33:20 - 01:34:03

a category 4 cyclone an hour north of us. So, we canceled the boat trip and we were inside. The environment changed the way that we behaved. It's happening to us all the time. So, 100% it happens to your business, 100% it happens to you, and 100% it happens within your business. That's why I brought up those five elements because as a leader, I want to see the world through systems. And if I do that, I got to see it through those five things. And I I most of those things I can influence. I can

01:33:41 - 01:34:29

influence the culture inside my business. That's the environment, right? I can influence the feedback loops. I can influence the input, process, and output. That's all within my span of control. And if you start to see it like that, you have all these new levers that you can pull in order to make changes and make a massive difference. Now, if we look at some of the tactics about some of these steps that you're talking about here, number one being inputs. When you're sitting down with a

01:34:05 - 01:34:57

company and you're looking at their inputs, what are some of the first things that come to mind that have been great uh cases of success for entrepreneurs to start with when it comes to inputs? Obviously, cold show rates being one of them. Yeah. What are some other ones you've seen in that uh in that category of inputs? >> You know, it's often thrown around that we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. So, what I'm about to say, experienced business owners going to be

01:34:31 - 01:35:24

like, "Oh, I've already heard that before." But I promise you, if that's what you're thinking of when I say what I'm about to say, you need the lesson more than anybody right now. >> The two biggest inputs are your market. Who do you want to be a hero to? Who's your ideal buyer? And what do you know about them? Right? Not just your customer avatar that you wrote down in a document, filed away somewhere, and used sparingly. I'm talking about where are they at right now. What's the

01:34:58 - 01:35:45

conversation that's happening in their mind right now? And how do you know? The ideal buyer is constantly being updated or at least it should with what are they responding to in your ads? What content on your Instagram or your YouTube do they seem to be engaging with? What are they saying on the sales calls? Like that's a living thing. So the one of the biggest inputs is just like who are you serving and what's going on in the movie that's happening inside of their mind. If you know that and you're using AI to

01:35:21 - 01:36:05

get sharper on that, you already have an advantage. Not from a position of trying to manipulate them into buy, but from an empathetic position to be like, "Dude, what new problems can I solve for you? what new ways can I communicate with you so that we can have a shared reality and you can see and we can trust each other and we can move forward with doing business. So that's one of the most important inputs is what market are you in? Does it have deep pain? Does it have deep pockets? Is it accessible? Is it

01:35:43 - 01:36:35

growing? And do you love working with them? Those are my five criteria for any market that I go into. >> Can you give me an example of something that's happening right now that might have changed one of those inputs for one of your customers? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, um, right now customer acquisition costs for most everybody is going what? Up or down? >> Way up. >> Way up, right? Why? Because that's the business model of Facebook and Meta and YouTube, right? So, like

01:36:09 - 01:36:55

>> the environment's kind of cooked. So, yeah, >> all you do is buy ads for your business to get attention. It's like having a table with one leg under it. So, what most people are doing right now is they're freaking out and they're trying to throw a boatload of creative at Andromeda uh to maybe offset that. And that works for a little bit. It'll get you a better outcome. But Facebook is way ahead of you, dude. Meta is way ahead of you. They know that you're going to do that and they're just

01:36:32 - 01:37:19

waiting for you to get a little bit bigger. They're like the mafia. Then they're just going to tax you a little bit more and a little bit more to the point where it's like uh so something that's changing right now is everybody in their sister wants to launch a what? A YouTube channel. Why do they want to launch a YouTube channel? if they're smart, to increase time on brand, to increase trust and lower customer acquisition costs. So, I went from, hey, like, how do I launch more paid ads and

01:36:55 - 01:37:41

iterate my creative to, okay, cool, >> launch a YouTube channel? >> How do I launch a YouTube channel? How do I launch a podcast so that people will spend more time digesting my information, taking action from it before they ever buy from me, so that my CAC comes down? That's the smart thing to do. That's the strategic thing to do. And it's not a secret. The game of media is constantly changing. So, you got to go where the puck is. And right now, where the puck is is spending more time

01:37:19 - 01:38:04

so that people can trust you and know that you're a good person. They trust your character and that you can actually solve their problems, which is they trust your competency. So, the only way to do that is, you know, yes, you can run ads. You can cram them through webinars and three-day challenges. And I think you should, but it's so much better when you can watch two guys sitting down opening their brain and showing you how they think about the world in ways that are tactically helpful, so that you'll take action and

01:37:41 - 01:38:23

go, "Wow, that actually worked." and then you see my ad and then you see my retargeting and then you see all this other stuff and you're like, "All right, I'm ready to go." But that's the world. So that's changed right now. So everybody everybody wants to be on YouTube right now and so they're rushing to go figure out the whole process and thumbnails and production and you know and unfortunately a lot of them are using AI scripts and they sound like robots but they'll figure it out. That's

01:38:03 - 01:39:02

an example of just in the game of marketing like what's shifted recently and what's shifting attention. I I've personally experienced this where every month we're talking to hundreds of people and we can see live time what questions people are asking and I've never seen so many people ask questions around how do I produce not short format content how do I produce significant media which which is a a whole art form in and of itself. So which brings us to the next step here. If someone's

01:38:32 - 01:39:28

thinking about okay I've got to increase the ability to have good inputs. Let's say one of them is media, personal branding, content creation. Uh I guess fill in the blank. When we're thinking about step two here, which is process, what are you thinking about when it comes to let's say a YouTube channel for example? >> 100%. So whether it's a YouTube channel or you're trying to automate something in your business like customer onboarding or how you fulfill I have >> let's talk about it generally then.

01:39:00 - 01:39:44

>> Yeah. Well, we can talk about for media there's it's three steps. It's three C's. Capture, catalog, convert. First thing we got to do is capture, dude. We got to capture how it's done. >> Okay. So, what what what are we doing? We could we could do the Gary Vee style where you just capture instead of like recording, you document it real time. Great. We've captured it. Next thing we need to do is catalog it. Well, what does that mean? Like, not all of that is

01:39:22 - 01:40:12

usable. Not all of that's good. Um, not all of it makes any sense. Well, we got to catalog the good from the bad. Okay. So, let's say you and I, we shoot this podcast. We could run it through AI, do an analysis, and then figure out what meat to cut out of it. That's cataloging it. Okay, the bit where we talked about X, meh. The bit that we talked about Y, that's fire. Let's double down on that. Great. We've cataloged it. We've separated the wheat from the chaff, the trivial few from the vital many. And

01:39:47 - 01:40:43

then convert is now we can use AI to convert that into media. We can use AI to look at that and go, "Huh, what other banger videos on YouTube have a similar concept that have great packaging?" Okay, well, let's take five or six or seven of those and create five or six or seven thumbnails and packaging and then we'll rotate them. Let's lead with our best foot forward, but then we can rotate packaging to see if that hits uh in terms of this video picking up more steam over time. So, that's true whether

01:40:15 - 01:41:03

we're making media or we're trying to automate something in the back end of our business. capture, catalog, convert. Man, if I don't have the things captured, if I don't have the data or the media or the thing captured in the first place, I got nothing to work with. I got no inputs. So, we got to capture it. You know, a lot of us in our business are running around with what I call unconscious confidence. Like, we've been so good at it for so long, we just do it. So, what I do as a leader is I

01:40:39 - 01:41:33

sit down and I just fire up Loom and I narrate what I'm doing step by step by step by step. Why? Because I don't even remember why I'm doing it. So, I'm kind of narrowing it out loud, but Loom will capture it and Loom will even catalog it for you off to the side in a transcript. Then I can feed that transcript to an AI that can make sense of it. Now, I'm taking all these things that I know in my brain uh but not consciously and I bring them to consciousness so that I can actually document it all out. Now,

01:41:06 - 01:41:50

we can work with that. Now, AI can be like, "Yeah, that process is stupid. Do it like this and help do it AI first or I can just take what I'm doing and automate it and make it better." But I spend so much time just narrating what I'm doing because I have to capture. I got to capture in the first place. Then catalog it into what works and what doesn't. Then I could convert it into automations, data, synthesize it, give it to agents, etc. >> Okay. And then when we move across to

01:41:28 - 01:42:28

outputs, uh how can people better think about how they need to implement or make changes in their company to really get the outputs that they're looking for? >> It really depends on the output that you're looking for. Um, >> do you want to use an example? Yeah. >> If let's say for example that you let's say for example that you are trying to get better better clients. Let's say you run an agency and you're trying to get better clients. >> Well, you can use me as an example.

01:41:57 - 01:42:43

Let's say uh we get a lot ofmemes and we want to talk to more enterprise for example. >> Perfect. >> Yeah. >> So, how many enterprises do you work with now? >> Uh like true enterprises I'd say five. >> Five. Great. How many of those enterprises have you referred have referred you to other enterprises? >> Oh, that's a good question. I'd say every single one. >> Great. So, that's a great output to optimize for. So, we don't just want to

01:42:21 - 01:43:11

optimize for enterprises and how long they pay us. That metric is called LTV, lifetime value. >> I think you should optimize for something called LTW, lifetime worth, >> which is how long do they stay with you and how much do they pay you plus how many referrals did they send you and how much did they pay you? because that's the dream client within the dream client. That's the bullseye on the dart board. And then we take that outcome or that output and we reverse engineer how

01:42:46 - 01:43:30

do we get more of them. So right now you're five for five, man. Like find the one that sent the most referrals. Figure out what's different about them. Like how did you find them? Why do they like you? What are the wins that you got for them? How can you incentivize them? Because incentive drives all human behavior to send you even more referrals. And then how do we feed back into the marketing and the content machine and everything that we're doing to call out to more people like them,

01:43:08 - 01:44:00

maybe competitors in their industry, maybe it's the characteristic of the leader, etc. So, we really want to find the the spot on the dart board that's exactly what we're trying to optimize for and then just start looking at it. Well, what makes them different? And then let's go sort for that and call out into the marketplace and then just keep keep chipping away at it. Like for example, let's take one of those enterprises and you don't have to say their name. like what what conferences do they go to?

01:43:34 - 01:44:21

>> What attention church do they go to? What podcasts are they on? What uh where do they go to conferences? What's what's like where do they go for information? You know, um like in the US, a lot of enterprise CEOs still read the Wall Street Journal or they look at Bloomberg or whatever. Like depending on how you define enterprise. Well, cool. Like we need to go where they already go to attention church. We don't want to like just jerk them out of that and then try to just steal their attention right

01:43:57 - 01:44:41

away. So cool, man. Like if they're all like watching Bloomberg, like go get a media person to get you on Bloomberg and then game up and get on Bloomberg and drop that hot fire insight that got that one enterprise client for you and so that you can get the attention of more of them. And if they've allowed you to mention them by name and cite their results by name, then even better because now we've got proof. And the bigger the promise, the bigger the proof, the more likely we are to have

01:44:19 - 01:45:03

trust. That's just one example. And we can use AI to start banging away at these things to go figure out where they're going to attention church. say the words that get their attention and then build that relationship with them. The thing about enterprises is it's a really long sales cycle. So, we got to be patient. It's not like the CEO is like, "Okay, Dane, we want to hire you. Everybody fall in line." Like, he's got to convince the subject matter expert in the business that wants to work with

01:44:41 - 01:45:45

you. He's got to convince the finance person that this is like going to have the benefit. right now. Something you said earlier in our conversation is that uh if an entrepreneur is in a state of reacting, they're they're asking to be punished. When we think about the fourth level here being environments, that does seem like there's not a lot we can do about this because it is mainly reactive. Or do you see it differently? I see it differently. It's really simple. Like the very first

01:45:13 - 01:45:56

thing I think you should do is at the tide that raises all ships in the harbor. Get everybody in your team trained in AI. And I mean everybody. And track their competency by what they're able to build. >> And you're saying that that's you controlling your environment. >> 100%. Yeah. Like do you control how your people are trained? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. 100%. And you should, right? They're working in your business and your arena and you know you guys are building it together. Maybe even they're

01:45:34 - 01:46:17

building it for you. So why not give them every tool to be as great as they possibly can? And the main thing there is like train everybody and just get really clear on who is not down for that. Who is not down to to make everything AI first and it's it's you're not a bad person. You're just not you're not going to be a good fit here anymore. It's going to get really uncomfortable really quickly. So let me like phone a friend and help you get a job there because you'll probably be more happy

01:45:56 - 01:46:37

there because we're going to go in a different direction. That's totally within your control. You go first as a leader, bring your leadership team and then get your whole team trained up. Like that's that should happen immediately. You don't have to wait for that. You don't even have to hire somebody for that. Although, if you do know someone that can get you from point A to point B faster, you might as well pay to jump in the time machine because that pays for itself. But you don't have

01:46:16 - 01:47:02

to do that. You can go you can go find AI to make a path for you. Just ask it to make a path for you and it will do it and it will do it remarkably well. Um, but dude, everybody can control that. That's that's step zero. Everybody should just go out and just train your whole team starting with the leadership team because leaders go first and then cascading it against the departments that have the biggest constraints or just blanketing it across everybody. do a hackathon, right? Like if you want

01:46:40 - 01:47:19

everyone in your company to learn cloud code, just be like, "Okay, dude, July 1st, let's say June 1st, you know, it's a couple months from now. Um, you're going to we're going to do a hackathon and everybody's going to need to learn Claude Code." So, what we're going to do is we're going to plug you into this training that we purchased for you or this training that we made for you and everybody go learn how to bang around in Claude Code. And if you have any

01:46:59 - 01:47:41

questions, we're going to meet every Tuesday at 5:00 PM at the end of the workday. We're going to answer all of your Cloud Code questions and we're going to fire up a Slack channel where everybody can collaborate on Cloud Code. Then we're going to form teams and we're going to give the winner of the Cloud Code challenge $15,000 and an extra week of vacation and we'll pay for you and your family wherever to go and do whatever you want. We're serious about this and then go do a hackathon and

01:47:20 - 01:48:11

guess how many people are going to learn how to do Claude Code before June 1st. 100% of them. And the percent that doesn't, dude, those are the ones that don't want to play the game anymore. What's your advice to another entrepreneur who might be thinking the exact same thing right now? Like, oh I got to get on this now. I'm going to pull my whole team together. What advice would you give them to start leading their team, not from a place of fear or concern because then they're

01:47:46 - 01:48:33

going to go look for jobs elsewhere, but from a place of confidence and excitement beyond the the sticks and the carrots. >> Yeah. Number one is have a clear vision from where they are to where they want to be. Where do you want them? Not your vision, but their vision. >> You have a vision for them. Part of what makes you a great leader is you don't just want to get them from A to B. You want to get them from A to C, which is the bigger future that you see for them that they can't see for themselves.

01:48:09 - 01:49:02

That's why we lead. It's the same thing for our customers and clients, by the way. So, make sure you're super clear on the vision that you have for them that they can't even see for themselves. Lead with the vision and then give them the why. Why this matters. bonus points if you can anchor that why into helping customers and helping your staff become better versions of themselves. Does that make sense? That's brass tax. Because if you don't do that, the chances that it falls on deaf ears is pretty high.

01:48:36 - 01:49:28

>> But if we leave with our vision and we leave for what's in it for them both intrinsically and exttrinsically, now you've kind of earned the right to take them on this journey and grab their attention and keep them going. >> My my concern is that it will mainly fall on deaf for ears cuz people are busy. They're doing their own thing. It might be like, "Yep, the CEO wants us to do this thing. Cool. Whatever. Back to work. How do you start to create actual adoption inside the team?" Yep. So, give

01:49:01 - 01:49:46

them a chance to learn. It's not optional. It is optional, but the option of you not participating is you raising your hand to say that I don't want to be a part of the future of this company and mean it. It's like I have kids, young kids, and if I warn them to not that something's going to happen. Hey, if you do X, it's your choice and there's going to be a consequence. And then I don't implement that consequence. What do you think happens the next time that I warn them

01:49:24 - 01:50:14

and there's no consequence? >> They're gonna just start to disrespect you, >> dude. Yeah. They just walk all over you, right? I'm not saying yell. I'm not saying be a prick. I'm not saying spank your kids. I'm saying set wildly clear expectations and mean it. And you as the leader have to have the balls to let go of really good people that don't want to play ball. That's the hard part. Yeah. This part I'm talking about is easy. You have to have the courage to say we're

01:49:48 - 01:50:33

going and we're going to go together or you're not going to go at all. And let you probably going to have to let go of some really good people. But you know what? We have to reframe what really good is. Really good is growth mindset wants to learn with AI and wants to subordinate their interest for the interest of the client in the marketplace and the company. That's what really good guy or girl looks like now. And so if you don't have that third requirement, willing to subordinate your

01:50:11 - 01:51:02

personal interests for the greater good, you've disqualified yourself as being a AAA plus player in the company. So I love that you're great at what you do and I love that you're passionate about doing it without AI. We're going over there. We're going to go shoot threes now because the game changed and we're going to run faster because the game's changed now. So either put your running shoes on and get on the treadmill and start practicing your threes or we're going to trade you to, I don't know, the

01:50:36 - 01:51:41

Spurs or something. It totally resonates with me and I I totally adopt this and the only other fear that's rattling around in the back of my mind is how do I uh make sure I'm also leading by example. So I like the idea of a hackathon. I like the idea of doing it first and then sharing with the team what I'm doing and how I'm doing it. Do you have any other advice of uh how entrepreneurs can lead their team by example? >> Yeah, I'll tell you what, man. like I I'm a little bit lazy and I like love my

01:51:08 - 01:51:58

freedom. So, a mentor of mine, uh, this guy named Evan Pagan, he's also one of my former business partners in the last company that we sold, he used to use these things called the throw your hat over the fence challenge. Have you ever seen the the movie Sandlot? >> No. So, it's an old uh movie in the US about baseball and these kids like you know the the ball gets over like their the ball goes over the fence and they have to go get it but there's like a guard dog and it's a whole thing. Well,

01:51:34 - 01:52:16

like man if you throw your hat over the fence like you're going to climb the fence and go figure it out. So, that's why I like the idea of a hackathon is it's like man I just I'm making a declaration and I'm putting a date on the calendar and we're all going to go figure this out together and then we're either going to figure out a loan or we're going to pay somebody to come in and support us and get this done quickly. Um, but you make the commitment and then you figure out the follow-up

01:51:55 - 01:52:39

along the way. And just be very transparent about it. You don't have to be like, "I got it all figured out." You're like, "No, I'm making a commitment because deadlines force action as we all know if you've run an agency, like deadlines are wonderful for forcing action." And then I'm just going to go figure it out. And on the other side of that, we will be more AI capable than we were before. And dude, probably going to experience a little bit of pain along the way, but that's the game. We

01:52:17 - 01:53:13

change super fast. It doesn't always feel good, but boy on the other side does it feel way better once you've done it. >> The last one I want to talk about is feedback. What's your relationship truly like with feedback? >> I think in your business, it's often more useful to see yourself as a bit of a detached scientist, that I'm going to try a bunch of experiments, and that in the beginning seasons of anything that I do, feedback and learning is more important than

01:52:45 - 01:53:34

earning. Because if I learn the right lessons early when there's no stakes and there's less staff and there's less risk involved, it spins up a flywheel of velocity that allows me to win even bigger and even faster down the line. So, I'm always interested in like what are the dumb ways that we haven't failed yet? Let's just increase the velocity and get those out of our system. And as long as we agree, look each other in the eyes, hold each other accountable to not make the same mistakes twice, we're

01:53:10 - 01:54:08

going to be in a really good spot. The problem is that most people are addicted to this poisonous thing called status. They don't want to fail. They don't want to show up in the marketplace and be like, "I was anything other than a 100% magic success." They ignore that Edison did the light bulb experiment 10,000 times before he figured it out, dude. Like, how many times did you run the experiment on the ad? How many times did you run the experiment on the offer? How many times did you go swing for the

01:53:39 - 01:54:32

fences for getting the new enterprise client? There is a way that exists in the world that will make your company 10x bigger, 10 times faster. You can sit around and think about it and hope that it comes to you or you can use AI, get in a time machine and just fail, not make the same mistakes twice and use that feedback to get to the next level. That's what I mean by subordinating your own ego and your own self-interest to the outcome and the people you're trying to help. It is hard the bigger you get

01:54:05 - 01:54:50

and the longer you've been around to fail publicly. But I think if you can reframe that failure as dude it's literally feedback. It's data and we are not going to make the same mistakes twice. So we're going to use that data and make get a little bit better, a little bit better, a little bit better and we're never ever ever ever going to give up. You've literally created the conditions where it is impossible to lose and you will guarantee victory as long as you stay in the game long enough

01:54:28 - 01:55:20

and keep your feet moving. How many people do you see in business that you feel are failing because they're unwilling to look like they are not doing well? Thousands. Thousands. Every single person that ever bought followers on Instagram, they're in that category. Every every single person that's like trying to make a video go viral instead of trying to make a video generate leads and sales in their business when they need more leads and sales, they're playing the wrong game. And look, I

01:54:54 - 01:55:54

don't blame anyone for that. In many ways, that's like how we're wired. It's a safety mechanism, but it is a learned skill to peel the status film off your body and off your psychology. It doesn't happen easily. And there's a lot of inertia to put it back on because no, nobody wants to fail. Everybody wants to feel accomplished and they want more ease versus wanting more uh and losing feels like uh and so I think thousands of entrepreneurs are like doing what all humans do is they're optimizing for

01:55:24 - 01:56:10

ease. Um, but I'm dude I'm telling you like the more you're willing to run to the thing that is the thing you're most scared about, the thing that you have the most anxiety about, the thing that's the biggest constraint in your business, the data that you've been ignoring, that thing that's like ah, all right, let's go attack it. That is the minute you unlock and get to the next level. But dude, like our business has a tagline. It's clarity creates speed, but the

01:55:47 - 01:56:33

predecessor to that is that honesty creates clarity. So honesty creates clarity and clarity creates speed. We got to be honest. How honest are we being if we don't look at the data? We got to know. It's important how you feel. More important to know the data, the the the numbers. I want both. I want to lead with the numbers. So, if I'm honest about where I'm at, I know what I need to do to get to the next level. I don't lie to myself. I don't bury my head in the sand and pretend like it's

01:56:10 - 01:57:00

better than it is. I don't go on Instagram and and about where I'm at when I'm not actually there yet. I tell the truth. And that allows me to be honest. And that honesty creates the clarity. That clarity allows me to take the right actions that I can go faster and faster and faster. >> Earlier in our conversation, you mentioned something that I wanted to make sure we came back to and that's uh around speed and around value. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> So, one of the things that didn't get

01:56:35 - 01:57:34

translated well in the world of let's say services, agencies, consulting, lawyers, accountants, all of that stuff, right? Is this idea of first value. So I I come from Silicon Valley in the world of tech productled growth. You know, Facebook got to a billion users by optimizing for one metric, which was seven friends in 10 days. They knew if you added seven friends in 10 days, you'd be a very sticky user to the platform, it would self-propagate, and that would be the key to getting a billion users, and then they could turn

01:57:05 - 01:57:58

on their advertising engine and print money for as long as they possibly could, which is exactly what they've done. But they were maniacal, man. They ignored so many things, but they were maniacal about the user experience. Optimizing for one thing, seven friends in 10 days. If I run an agency and I work with people and I'm trying to get you high ticket clients, dude, how fast can I get you a high ticket client? Is there a world where the minute you pay me, I've already marketed to people that

01:57:31 - 01:58:25

are in your market and you sign up and I literally just match you with a high ticket client right away so that you buy and then you get a hundred leads and some of those turn into paying clients. That would be the dream scenario. Does that make sense? >> Yeah. >> How fast can I get the result? Okay. Previously and even up until this point, that's been a nice to have. A lot of businesses are getting by where you sign up a client and then you give them like a form and homework and it's like 45

01:57:58 - 01:58:47

days before they get a result. Let me explain to you why those days are over and you just haven't figured it out yet. Everything that we do in the marketplace that doesn't deliver results is friction. It is friction between them getting what they want. We don't need to exist, dude. Like, we don't we don't need to exist. If they could snap their fingers and get it done for the same amount of money, everybody would do it. Would you agree? >> Yeah, exactly. >> If I didn't need you, I would just do it

01:58:23 - 01:59:18

myself. >> 100%. So, right now in the game of marketing, you know, Tik Tok is doing it and Zuckerberg's been talking about it for the last four earnings reports. Where advertising is going is you will run an ad. You will basically show up with your offer. It will make the creative, it'll make the copy, it'll iterate it, it'll be an AI generated everything and it will say the words that it thinks to the people that it thinks would buy from you in the most efficient way possible. You won't even

01:58:50 - 01:59:39

have to do creative. You'll have to do nothing. Like if you want, let's say I'm accounting firm, it can do your ad to the Asian market, the African market, the European market, the Australian market, male, female, overweight, plus-size, skinny, buff, doesn't matter. It'll just throw whatever it needs to at the wall that it thinks will grab your attention. All generated by by AI, undistinguishable from the human eye, and it's going to basically what it's going to come down to is how good is

01:59:15 - 02:00:14

your offer? And people that have the best offers are going to convert the most because all that creative is going to be democratized and done by AI entirely on these ad platforms. What do the best offers have that the worst offers do not have? They deliver results. So the future business model, if you follow my chain of logic, is that it's not going to be software as a service. It's not going to be money for services. It's going to be results as a service. people pay when you deliver them the

01:59:44 - 02:00:32

results because those are what the best offers have. Imagine I'm going after the same enterprises that you serve, but my offer is we will do all this work for you and you don't pay us until you get the payoff and we just take a piece of it. Who are they going to hire? Me or you? >> You >> 100% >> 100% of the time. >> That's right. >> Cuz it's a guarantee. >> So, there's two things we need to do in every offer in every business in the world, dude. is we need to get

02:00:08 - 02:01:00

maniacally focused on how fast we can deliver them a result from the minute they pay us. And number two, we need to be ready for a world where our business model is metered by us getting them results because that's where this is going. Results as a service. And if you don't do it, you can bet that an AI agent is going to do it. Yeah. So, we have no choice but to be maniacally focused on what we call time to first value. How fast can I get that first value to my client or customer immediately so they'll stay? That's what

02:00:34 - 02:01:29

we need to do right now. In the notsodistant future, we're all going down this path of results as a service. And everybody needs to be thinking about that right now because in the future, if you want to win, payments are going to be metered based on results. In our lifetimes, I don't know when that shows up. I don't have like a strong set of indicators to predict that. But I have a 100% certainty that in our lifetimes, that's where we end up. So, why wait? start using AI and start using your team

02:01:01 - 02:01:40

to just be so in love with getting your customer, your client the result that we go, man, from the minute they pay us, it's like I'm going to the drive-thru at McDonald's. I don't eat there, but you've I remember when I did, there's like a little beeper that goes off if it goes after like 60 seconds like, "Oh man, someone in the drive-thru has been waiting a long time. Like, hurry up, go get them their stuff." Right? That's the way it should be inside our business. of

02:01:21 - 02:02:08

a new client signed up and they haven't gotten results fast, like red light should be flashing in the office and on our Zoom calls and our Slack channels like, "Yo, get get the get them the results. Come on, let's go." Because today we should do that to keep them, but tomorrow we're going to have to do that to even get paid in the first place. So, why wait? Start thinking about how you can be maniacal in your systems about delivering on the promises that you go out to the marketplace with.

02:01:44 - 02:02:42

And if you can do that better and faster than the people down the street, you will mop up your whole market and grab all the share and moonwalk your way to the bank. >> What are some of the things you're doing in your business right now to uh to speed the process up to make sure that the red lights aren't flashing? >> Yeah, good question. Let me answer it with a with a picture of a mental model. Okay, so we run a partial part of our business is training and part of it is a mastermind. All right. Um, masterminds

02:02:13 - 02:03:02

are like in some ways they're like one to many coaching. I like to think about our business and our business model as a rocket. Okay, phase one of the rocket, just getting that rocket to get out of the gravity of Earth is the coaching and the mastermind model. That's what gets our rocket off. It's pretty easy to get to a couple million dollars with that kind of a model, but after like four or five million, it's a lot of brain damage to scale. So naturally after that, and because AI makes it simpler, we pivot

02:02:37 - 02:03:27

into doing services for our customers. So we will make the NADN implementation for you. We'll set up your agent. We'll do a service for you instead of teaching you how to do it. That's our next three or four million. Eventually, I think AI is going to do that for everybody all the time. So the last part is we're ruthless about who we curate into our community because I have a high conviction that at some point in the future it gets so crazy, we just want to hang out together and and like figure

02:03:02 - 02:03:58

out this stuff together because humans have never figured out massive change alone ever. We always stick together. So for me the first part is the mastermind the next part is services and the third part is the community. Any research should be done by AI anything like data facts whites space etc. Then instead of a human spending all that time like a creative digesting a massive surface area be like nah we've narrowed this down to this particular set of restaurants why don't you go eat there

02:03:30 - 02:04:13

for the next three days while you sit with this research. Great, that's awesome. But instead of trying to sit at restaurants and then consider this and look at this data and work on 10 clients, like that's where we bifrocate focus and we put the creatives at a loss and then that's why it takes eight weeks, right? But if we could basically use AI to find the right research and point them in the right direction, that's how we can collapse that time frame. So anything research in my

02:03:52 - 02:04:40

opinion as far as like data and history and analyzing comments and sentiment. I mean, right now, man, like how I'm making my next five YouTube videos is I'm doing right now I have an AI agent scouring every day like what are all the conversations that are happening on Reddit and what are all the conversations that are having on X. That's like the pulse of the internet for my ideal buyer on these particular topic areas where I have a strong opinion and it's feeding me back the questions, the perspective, the

02:04:16 - 02:05:03

collective zeitgeist of how people are processing this. I can tell you right now one of the biggest questions on the internet is should I do an automation or should I hire humans? And so, like, you'll never guess what my next YouTube videos are going to be about. But I didn't I didn't rush to go do that right away. I'm I sat with it. Like, I had it go find those things and I was like, "Cool, give me the research. Let me be Don Draper for a bit and let me just sit with it. Let me read it. Like, let me go

02:04:40 - 02:05:22

look at that person's profile. Who's saying that? And why are they saying that?" And now I'm kind of using my human antenna and sticking it into the ether to figure out what I can find. But, dude, I didn't go scour X. Like, that's a wasteland. I didn't go scour Reddit. Like, forget it. You know what I mean? Like I'm using AI to go give me the cliff notes and then I'll go sit with that. I have my creative team sit with that and they'll find things that I didn't see. I'm like, "Oh, that's dope.

02:05:01 - 02:05:58

I didn't think about it that way." Cuz you're, you know, 28 and I'm 43. Great perspective, you know, like um etc., etc. So like to me, that's how we should be thinking about making AI our ally for things like that. And one of those things, man, remember that chart that I talked about judgment and frequency. Great art, great creative is not high frequency. It's so it's AI augmented. We don't we don't we don't like good creative doesn't get spit out uh

02:05:29 - 02:06:22

rapidly. It takes time for something to be great by default. That's what makes it great. We can get a lot more shots on target with AI, but we kind of need time to sit with that. So that's not something that I fully give to AI. Dude, you can watch content right now and just feel it when it's scripted and and or produced entirely by AI. it just feels shitty. It doesn't hit. It doesn't resonate. It's not as good. There's a very thin couple of use cases where it really bangs. Otherwise, it's like duh.

02:05:56 - 02:06:39

But like you can tell when somebody sat through and got like a creative idea. Man, I'm going to forget the name, but there's there's these guys. I'm pretty sure they're Indian. They're like these these these buff guys and their brothers and like dude, their Instagram account is going nuclear right now and they're just using this format. They're like physical therapists that I've never seen before. And it's like he doesn't know it, but if he puts his hand here, pops

02:06:17 - 02:07:01

his muscle, and then turns his shoulder, and then it makes a popping noise, he can release all the tension in his shoulder, and he does, you know? So, it's like these quick little hit things. And I'm like, yo, that is so creative. That is not an AI idea. That is like two guys that are physical therapists and young and they're getting after short form content that are came up with a brilliant idea. So, like, but I bet you they used AI to help them, but they landed on something brilliant. And dude,

02:06:39 - 02:07:39

like if you scroll back on their account, it's like every reel was a banger. Like it just like million view banger. And it's like, oh man, they caught a tiger by the tail. That's what I mean. Like that kind of great creative takes time to percolate and you should give yourself that space. That's the things we should have our humans doing and everything else we should be using AI to make it go faster. Two more questions. If mastering AI is the only thing that's standing between people and success, why

02:07:10 - 02:08:09

isn't everyone doing it? You're going to hate my answer, dude. >> Sended >> incentives. If I'm a young person and I'm coming out of college or going into college, do you think that it's negotiable that I'm using AI right now? No. >> No. But if I'm an engineer that's been coding for 20 years, do you think in my mind somewhere like it's still a debate? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Why? Because I like I I fell in love with my own craft. I fell in love

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with the thing that I want to do and the thing that I'm good at. Me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me. And to win in business, it's you, you, you, you, you. And so when you start saying me, me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me. I don't want to do it. this isn't good for me. This isn't right for me, me. Like, yes, you should protect your boundaries. I believe in that. And if you want to win in the game of business, you don't point the finger

02:08:12 - 02:08:57

at yourself. You point the finger out at the market in terms of what you're doing and who you're doing it for and why you're doing it. Because if all you want to do is make money and all you want to do is be comfortable, man, like you're going to fail. If if you want to get really really good, make a lot of money, but you're not willing to use AI because you want to be comfortable because me me and my excuses, like, dude, great. Like I don't want to make you wrong for that and you will experience

02:08:34 - 02:09:22

the natural consequences of your decisions. So I think a lot of that is people getting stuck in the me me like the older you get the more crystallized in your ways you get like if you guys are Bible guys what the Bible says you know if you raise a child in the way they will not depart from it. It's like like and God also talks about hardening your heart if you walk away from the Lord. I'm not trying to make anybody religious, but I do think these texts have wisdom that's scaled through time

02:08:58 - 02:09:39

for a reason. Because, dude, like you get an idea in your head and it works for 20 years. It's pretty hard to change that, right? Because you're thinking, "Me, me me. I want to be comfortable. It's worked before. It's going to continue to work." Dude, all that's over. The table has already been flipped over. You're just pretending like it hasn't. So, like your unwillingness to change and your unwillingness to adapt is is exactly what's going to allow you

02:09:19 - 02:10:03

to get left behind. So that's what holds people back is they're more focused on themselves than they are about the people they're trying to serve. Because if they were focused on the people they were trying to serve, they would have already changed. Or if you're young and you're just super malleable and you have no choice and everything's new anyway, then you do it because there's no pain of change. Joe, I I wish I could borrow your brain for like a week and just apply

02:09:41 - 02:10:43

everything you're talking about. My my my nervousness is like, damn, you're at such a high level. I I I wish I could just shortcut the game. Um, but there's that quote from Michael Jordan. If you shortcut the game, the game will shortcut you. So, I'm going to do my best to apply this and um follow these principles and these frameworks and this advice that you're sharing with me. But what strikes me that's so unique about you, Joe, is that you have such a high uh high agency to to attack this with uh

02:10:12 - 02:11:16

with so much energy and you're so successful. You've had tremendous exits. your family's set for life. What my question is for you is what does agency mean to you? Like taking agency and and why are you still playing the game when you're set? And and why are you here and why are you doing this? And what does taking agency mean to you? >> Yeah, man. Taking agency taking agency means that you get everything you can from everything you've got. I learned that from a mentor

02:10:44 - 02:11:35

of mine named Jay Abraham. Okay. I grew up in a farm town of less than a thousand people. We like I didn't know anybody that knew anybody that knew anybody that had any money. We just had to figure it out. Like my farm town that we grew up in was a good place to get in a drug habit, get in a fight. And more than half of my friends were in jail by the time I was in middle school. And so I wouldn't be here if I didn't have mentors that came and said, "Hey, I see something in you. Come with me." And

02:11:10 - 02:12:01

then of course I followed and did the work and did what was required. So for me, agency is having enough courage and awareness to take your next best step in life. And then once you get a little bit farther, it's turning around and saying, "Hey, I figure this thing out. Come with me. Don't repeat the same mistakes that I did. You don't have to do that. Come stand on my shoulders and let's go together." Because inside of doing that, not only does it feel good as a human

02:11:35 - 02:12:36

being, you're going to get where you want to go 10 times faster. Right? So, I've gone from being in a farm town where nobody knew me. There like a getting a traffic light was a big deal. When we got a McDonald's, people fell out of their chair. It was a huge deal, right? To like going into corporate America and freaking learning that game to leaving that all burning all the ships and starting over as a startup guy and moving to LA and then having to learn the startup game to then now

02:12:06 - 02:12:55

learning the coaching and mastermind and training game. Um, and it's all because, man, like I just see that if I go in this direction, a I'm going to grow and b, there are people over there that need my help. And if I think about them more than I think about me, and I take agency to be able to close that gap, then I'm going to have a life worth living. I'm going to show my kids what's possible in the world when you never give up and you never retire. And you don't uh get tired

02:12:31 - 02:13:18

in the first place. You don't need to get retired if you've never gotten tired in the first place. But you set that example and you show your kids and you show them what actually works. Like that to me is why we're here. That's why we're here on this planet is to help other people and to give more than we've received. And I think that's a really powerful thing. And if I can do anything to help entrepreneurs win right now, that's my mission and that's what I want

02:12:54 - 02:13:56

to do and that's why I do what I do. So retirement, hanging out my skis, there'll be a time for that. There'll be a season for that. It's just not right now. I won't say I came from nothing. I had awesome parents. I got very lucky. I got thrown a lot of opportunity and I didn't waste it. But I learned pretty quickly when I was young that it is much easier to see a negative future than it is to see a positive future. And I learned that when you see a positive future and you take the next logical

02:13:26 - 02:14:20

step, which is to make that future happen, the world has a magic ability to get out of your way and start cheering you on. And it's just that so many people have been down for so long. And so many people have only built that muscle in their mind to see a negative world and have that come true for them that they haven't actually stopped and thought about what's possible for them and saw a bigger future in front of them than they did in their past and then did something about it that it's easy to

02:13:53 - 02:14:52

catastrophize. It's easy to be like, man, AI is going to take all of our jobs and ruin our species and everything's going to be shitty. It's a different breed of human altogether to be able to see a bigger future and bring people and ideas and capital and technology around you to go make it happen. That's called entrepreneurship. And I've been an entrepreneur for like my whole life, but professionally for 15 years. And I just have so much evidence that suggests that if you lock in on a vision and you align

02:14:22 - 02:15:08

your thoughts, your words, your actions, your beliefs, and your expectations, and you move in that direction, you don't stop and you don't worry about status, and you're willing to fail until you figure it out. You will get what you want and what you want for the world 100% of the time. There comes a point where it stops being hard and it starts to feel like everything gets out of your way and the world is cheering you on. You just have to have the courage to work through that messy middle. And the

02:14:46 - 02:15:37

more you do that, the more you learn that that's just the way that this simulation works, man. And so, I don't know if it's an unrelenting optimism or belief in the future. I just have enough at bats to have seen that that's been true 100% of the time for me and for the vast majority of my friends that have the same attitude. And it's a funner way to play the game. I'm in less suffering and pain and misery. And I just get to bring that hope and optimism to more people. And me personally, that is a

02:15:11 - 02:16:20

positive feedback loop that just gives me energy and keeps me going. Joe, this has been a pleasure. I feel I've got my homework laid out in front of me and I I'm I'm just so grateful that you've made the time to come and sit with us and explain this to us and um yeah, truly exciting stuff. I think your perspective on AI, your lens on entrepreneurship, I've not had anyone really paint this picture in this way. And I think that this has inspired me more than any other conversation I've

02:15:45 - 02:16:29

had to date about AI. So, thank you for that. And for anyone listening, um, yeah, we'll put links in the descriptions on how people can reach out and connect with you because you've got tools, you've got plenty of things that people can chew on to to help themselves with AI. And um yeah, I'm grateful for you being me here, man. Thank you so much. >> And thank you for letting me be here. This has been awesome.

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