Hey there, welcome to Data Democracy.
This is a podcast where we explore ways to make data and AI more accessible to everyone.
We've got a great guest today, Robert Brill.
Robert is an entrepreneur, content creator, thought leader, and a podcaster.
And per our research, he's also a Dodgers and Inter Miami fan.
Robert is a trailblazer in the digital advertising industry and is the CEO of ProMedia.
With decades of experience, Robert has been at the forefront of advertising industry,
from the birth of social media to sophistication and programmatic media buying, and now with
AI and digital media.
Robert is also a member of Forbes Business Council and Fast Company Executive Board.
We're super excited to welcome him to Data Democracy.
Robert, welcome.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate you taking the time.
Let's start from your journey.
Tell us your story.
Yeah.
So I've spent 20 years in the advertising business, 10 years I've been bootstrapping
Brill Media.
And you know, I was very fortunate to work while I was in college because it gave me
about four years of experience to figure out the types of work that I wanted to do and
didn't want to do.
And you know, two weeks out of college, I got a job at Universal McCann, which is one
of the largest multinational ad agencies in the world.
And it was really a formative experience to understand how big large organizations spending
tens of millions of dollars regularly wield ad buying and media to drive business growth.
In that time, I was doing Sony pictures, working on movies.
And it was just fascinating to see like all the intricacies of how a movie gets marketed
and the components of ad buying that were relevant in that equation.
Awesome.
That's a diverse and fascinating journey.
What does your day to day look like today?
Yeah.
So I wake up in the morning anxious and frenetic.
I go to sleep also anxious and also frenetic.
And in the middle, I try to do some work while trying to be less anxious and less frenetic.
So that's my day.
We have a five year old and I'm married and during the evening time, we talk about dinosaurs
and monster trucks and monster jam and whatnot and a little Halloween thrown in here and
there.
But during the day, I'm squarely in front of my computer inundated with messaging from
all the different screens.
And some of it is self-imposed content.
I'm obsessively scrolling TikTok, but I try to get a few minutes of work in during the
day.
But yeah, I mean, a lot of what I'm doing right now is sales and marketing.
So my mind is oriented around generating demand, looking at opportunities to reach people,
looking for systems and processes that can be relevant for the ability to scale our business
even further.
That's awesome.
Yeah, absolutely.
With the changing landscape in media and advertising across all industries, I think you've got
to be on top of the different types of content and different things that are going on.
One of the things that's been on my mind is Sam Altman has a, and I think I heard this
on the All in One podcast, that Sam Altman has an internal, like a friend's WhatsApp
group where they're taking bets on when the first company that's built off of one person
and a lot of AI will reach a billion dollars.
So I don't have to do that and we're a 20 person team, but part of me is thinking, what's going
to be that trigger or that catalyst to create that, maybe not billion dollar company, but
multiple millions of dollars of company off of AI?
And I think anyone who's enterprising, anyone who is interested in challenging themselves
and has a passion for business or advertising or marketing or some element of business-like
stuff, operations, whatever, you could almost see that as a gambit.
Maybe it's me.
Maybe I can build that billion dollar company off of just AI.
I don't think it's going to be me.
I don't think I'm smart enough, but even if I fail and build a 5 million or 10 million
dollar company just exclusively off of AI, that would be a life-changing type of business.
Yeah, absolutely.
The landscape, the field is democratized.
It's even right now because even for me with this podcast, I've automated a lot of my processes,
research process on my guests and setting up questions.
And so it's definitely a research partner for me.
So instead of I don't have to hire at this point, but yeah, it's definitely fascinating
times we're living in.
Yeah.
I mean, I made a video on TikTok yesterday as of this recording.
One of the things I've been tinkering with, I'm very...
My content on TikTok is about ad buying, seven things you can do to improve your Google ads
performance, et cetera.
And there's a few people who are kind of like blowing up.
They have like a few hundred thousand followers who are focused on advertising and media buying.
I have like 4,000 followers.
I don't know how to make media buying and the intricacies of advertising that interesting
on TikTok.
But what I noticed, what I'm really good at on TikTok is creating content around AI.
So even in just a very small, in a small way, I noticed like the last video I posted was
me talking to chat GPT, asking it for ideas of TikTok videos I can make and how to create
a story, tell a story off of that video.
Because the storytelling part is a little bit hard for me.
I'm a numbers guy.
I'm not a storytelling person.
And now that video has like 400 views.
It's not particularly viral or anything, but even just the number of likes, it's a higher
percentage, a higher ratio of likes on those videos than my other videos.
So I know consistently and I have a very good that went viral around AI, which I just saw
at a conference and I talked about it.
But the, but I just know that content made about AI right now on TikTok is far more interesting
than boring fundamentals of ad buying.
So I'm orienting around, I'm starting to orient around AI and AI content creation, content
creation about the topic of AI and how it can be used for business.
And I think, I think this is the place to be right now.
Absolutely.
AI has all the hype and it's more tangible than the previous hype cycles, you know, crypto
and all those.
Because I think strip away everything, strip away all the hype and all the talk about it,
but it's more tangible.
It's definitely a productivity boost for teams across companies, for individuals.
And it's just a talking partner to a lot of people.
So I think there's more, it's more, the adoption is more massive for AI.
Yeah I mean, you know, when you look at crypto and I'm not a crypto expert, I don't claim
to be one, but I think with crypto there's a lot of speculation on crypto and there's
like, okay, what will it be used for?
And then AI comes along, it's like, what is it being used for?
And like, I can, there are immediate effects.
It's an accelerator.
There's a buy as you go company, Klarna, not buy as you go, but payment credits, like,
you know, buy now, pay later.
They laid off like 700 people and in their most recent quarterly earnings, they talked
about how AI has replaced and then some to 700 people that they laid off.
There's a big hiring boom around 2021 when there was a lot of money infused in the government,
from the government into the private sector, that a lot of those people are getting laid
off in favor of AI and that's a big news story.
There's far more examples of that across America.
And I think this is a great, like, we thought that the internet democratized business opportunities
and it certainly does, but like we're getting to that world that we've seen in movies, like
the futuristic world where like people, AI can like have full on, I literally just had
a full on conversation with AI yesterday.
I'm like, mind blown because the, the, the, I like to pay attention to how, how my brain
works in different communications experiences, like typing things up in chat GPT.
It's hard for me to be conversational.
It's far easier to be conversational to a voice.
It's hard to create something out of nothing.
It's much easier to create something when you have something to something else to respond
back to, which is such a massive game changer for individuals.
Like I can just talk to myself and the GPT and get content creation ideas.
Now it may not be perfect.
Like I know that there's people out there that create interesting content and have really
you know, there's this one woman on a, on Tik TOK.
Her name is, I don't know what her name is, but she, her Tik TOK is Jazz Media.
I think it's J A Z media and she's great.
She's really smart.
She talks about a lot of cool ways to like create content that is relevant for people.
You'll never those types of people who have dialed in on the intricacies of something
so well, those people will never be replaced by AI, but to get the base, I don't think
maybe you never know, but to get the basics, you don't need to pay a basic social media
manager.
You can just talk to chat GPT, but there's going to be such a, um, an environment of,
well, I want to do it the old school way and I don't like, and I don't understand how chat
works and that will be a place where the old school providers who are not particularly
nuanced but you know, are just kind of like doing the same old stuff.
They will still have a marketplace, but that marketplace will start to shrink as people
get far more familiar with AI.
I can go on about this, but yeah.
No, absolutely.
Totally agree with that.
I mean, there would be different set of skills and different set of jobs that come up because
of this boom, but I don't think we know what yet.
So I think we, we, we all need to adapt to different set of skills to find more jobs,
but definitely a boon for entrepreneurs and, um, enterprising people.
Like, like you said, if, if you're, um, if you're proactive, this is, this is the time
to be.
Yeah, absolutely.
Like we're, you know, I was just having a conversation.
We hired a marketing specialist and I was like, okay, now it's time for you to make
ads and he's like, he, he's already a creative person, right?
So I hired him with the intent, like, he, he understands copywriting principles.
Uh, he's creative.
I was like, dude, use AI all day and make stellar ads.
I can still give him a framework for what to look for.
The biggest thing when you create ads and you're going to the market is understanding
the customer's pain point and communicating to that pain point.
So if you have, if you understand that very simple concept that for every business you
are solving a pain point that results in more time or more money or more entertainment or
some level of utility.
If you understand the trigger, the catalyst, the transformative value, then you can tell
AI list for me the top 20 problems my customer has.
Tell me how I solve them, right?
Give them, you know, we're an advertising firm.
We do all these things, et cetera.
Tell me the problems my customer faces and then write me ads that are compelling, interesting,
sad, funny, positive, negative, long form, short form.
Write me copy that is going to appeal to those people.
And then you use Meta's algorithm and Meta's AI to test it using science, control and variable
testing.
You, you're doing everything you need to do.
And it's not complete.
You can't completely replace the process with AI because you still have to know how to run
ads.
But you don't, it's like, it's far, how should I put this?
It's far easier to train inexperienced people to do that.
And it, it, it creates an advantage.
Like when you have a framework, when you have a standard operating procedure, like we, the,
the, and I'm almost like talking against my book here.
Cause it's kind of interesting, right?
Cause we go to market as we hire experts.
Seven years to 20 years are the people we hire.
Every time we hire people out of college, it never works.
It just never works.
They don't have the experience.
And our organization is not set up to nurture those people.
Universal McCann is set up to nurture those people, which is how I got started in the
business.
And, you know, I'm very grateful for them and big agencies like publicists and star
com and WPP on all the group apps.
All those agencies are really good at taking talented young individuals or just talented
inexperienced individuals and turning them into experts at one little thing.
They're a cog in the system.
But for our business, we hire very expensive, very senior people.
But with AI, if you have a system and a process, if you hire just people who understand how
to follow a process, you don't have to be particularly experienced and specifically
advertising.
Because the gaps that you have can be solved by chat GPT or clot.
And that fundamentally changes the equation for entrepreneurs.
There are a lot of people, very smart people who are not experts in advertising, but they
are also good people who know how to get things done.
And that's also a big opportunity, dramatically lowering the cost of labor fundamentally and
still being able to output really high quality work.
Now, on the other side, our clients, so our clients are usually creative, creative firms.
So we go to market as white label or outsource media buying an agency does creative work,
which is one, you know, the arts, the copy, the filming commercial, all that stuff.
And we go to market doing ad buying, like the data, the numbers, all that stuff, very
different type of work.
So we go to market together and we are the outsource partner that companies come to to
run ads.
Our clients would say, you're crazy.
There's absolutely no way there's absolutely no way that AI can possibly possibly replace
the brilliance of high end, high value creative people who don't get out of bed for anything
under 25 grand.
And it goes up from there into the millions.
Right?
Those people will say you're crazy.
And I believe that it's two ends of the same spectrum.
For a business like ours, where we focus on data and some of our clients need ads, or
if we need our own ads in house, I think we're smart enough to deliver 10 to $25,000 worth
of ad creative effectively, very inexpensively using AI without having to pay really smart
people massive salaries because all they do is art or copywriting or whatever the case
is.
And I like you said it was like, it's an accelerator, like AI is an accelerator.
That's how I characterize it for our business.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's so true.
Yeah, I mean, I think as I'm thinking about it, it's we all it's forcing us all to get
better at our jobs.
So you have to improve your workflows, decrease efficiency, improve efficiencies in your workflows
and get to the next level or kind of be left behind in a lot of ways.
So yeah, I mean, even for me as I run data science team and a company called Legal Shield.
So Legal Shield.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've heard of them.
Awesome.
So yeah, we were like a subscription based legal services company.
So in our company, we opened up GitHub Copilot for all of our engineers.
So our CTO called said a very smart intern.
So you can ask it to write code and you know, it'll write it, it'll get you to 90% of the
code.
Really?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And you just tweak it and then do it.
So see, he basically says it's like an intern, you can get the work done, but you have to
audit a little bit and then, you know, make sure that the work is right and then ship
it.
So we are seeing a lot of improved efficiency across our teams.
So it's definitely I did when I did go to a conference where people from all types of
industries, you know, media, you know, advertising, and also older, you know, traditional industries,
finance, banking were there.
So one of the interesting things was in the media space, in the advertising space, the
consensus was we don't have a choice.
We have to get on board.
And the traditional, you know, not in legacy, but traditional companies of finance and banking
and things like that, they will, they're a little more hesitant.
This is right from a compliance standpoint, from a customer-facing standpoint, this is
not ready because we have so many nuances, legal complications that we could get into
if we have, if we just be AI, be the face of our company.
So it's interesting to see how different businesses and industries adopt to AI.
So could I use, if I don't know coding?
When I say I don't know coding, I'm not being modest.
I literally do not know anything about coding.
The minute CSS happens, like I have to go to my person on Fiverr, on Upwork, who I've
worked with for five years and be like, I don't know, make this not be crazy looking.
Could I, is it possible for me to use GitHub Copilot or something like that to like build
a website or I don't know, like, is that possible?
It is possible.
We just need to understand the fundamentals of it.
You know, you need to be able to ask the right questions to get to what you want.
So I have to think like a coder, programmer in order to debug what the output is from
say chat GPT or GitHub Copilot.
So I can definitely, I wrote a, I actually built a model for, to predict retention of
our customers recently.
And I took it up as a challenge and I did not write a single piece of, single line of
code.
I just talked to the chat bot and made it right and made it correct all the problems
and made it give me in a format that I wanted.
So it is possible.
You just, you just kind of nudge it in the direction that you want it to go.
But yeah, to answer your question, once you have a, probably have a fundamental foundation
of how coding works, it's definitely possible to build a website and by just chatting to
chat GPT or cloud.
That's dope.
Yeah.
It's, it's, it's really cool.
There was a, there was a time when I was like, I want to learn Python.
Yes.
It's like me learning Python is equally as bad of an idea as me trying to be a food influencer,
which I always try to do.
I have a food account called dude, let's eat.
When I started my business, I was like, I started four different businesses and one
of them, cause I'd worked a little bit for an influencer marketing company.
I was like, I could be an influencer.
So I was like big on vine, not big on vine, just like, you know, I would impress my mother
and my girlfriend and be like, I got a million views on this one six second vine video, you
know, like it happened a few times.
And so like, I tried to learn Python over a weekend and it, it, I didn't, I didn't get
anywhere.
I don't know.
Like it, it was weird.
It didn't make sense.
I mean, probably we can, you can start with teach me Python like a five year old, you
know, that's a, it'll build you a program to learn Python.
But yeah, I mean, again, there's so many things that we can do.
It's super cool.
So if I type in teach me Python, like a five year old, that's, is that like a website?
No, just put that in Google and yeah, Ted, yeah.
There's a website called code monkey Python for kids.
That's about where I should start.
There you go.
No, it's, it's just the building blocks, right?
So yeah, it's the smooth brain among us.
We, I think one of the things that these gen AI chatbots do is take away the, we don't
need to remember the syntax and the language of the code anymore for the, for the most
part because yeah, you just have to know the logic and where you want to go, have a vision
for it.
And it'll, it'll help you get there because if I'm really good at SQL, I don't need to
learn Python because I can talk to it and get to a Python solution for my SQL logic.
Cool.
Yeah, it's fascinating.
Let's, let's get back to real media and you're, you're a thought leader in the media buying
space.
A few months ago you wrote, wrote about growing revenue with a media buying partner.
I don't know if you're, yeah.
Can you please tell us what a media buying partner is and the value you're bringing to
the businesses?
So when you think about creative, right?
When you think about Mad Men, if you've seen Mad Men, Mad Men is really kind of like two
types of work that are interspersed.
There was a strategy like the one show about the cigarettes where they're like, why are
you smoking this?
It was like, I think that I just started watching Mad Men again.
I think that was like the pilot episode.
It's like, why are you smoking and the competitive, you know, the competitive landscape had changed
and you can't really tell you that it's healthy.
You can't say that car is healthier or all the, whatever was going on at the time.
You just got to come up with some crazy BS like our, our, our smokes make you feel fantastic,
you know, and just say it in a more interesting way.
And that's your brand.
It's like gas.
It's like gas stations today.
I worked on Conoco Phillips for a few years.
They were the fortune for company at the time.
And so Conoco Phil Conoco brand Phillips 66 and 76 gas stations.
Gas is to most people.
So first of all, it's inelastic and economically you have to get it.
Like if you don't get gas, you can't get to work your whole life falls apart.
If you don't get gas, I'm sure there are differences in the detergent that is being used and how
clean it is and all this stuff for your car.
But like 99% of people making up that's a statistic.
99% of people couldn't care less.
They're like, is it going to hurt my car?
No.
So I'm not going to go ultra cheap, but any brand I'm going to, I'm just going to focus
on rice.
Meanwhile you have mobile gasoline that at one point had the cars that had eyes on it.
76 had the brand.
We're on the driver's side.
You know, as a take on the driver's side, like little icon, we're on the driver's side.
So everything was like, we're going to give you Dodger's tickets because we're on the
driver's side, you know, all this stuff.
So it's a brand.
The brand is completely disconnected.
It's like there's a tiny thread between the brand and the product because no one cares
about how gasoline is made.
They just care that your car keeps going.
That's creativity.
That's Nike slogan, just do it.
Something that wraps your brain around the product.
That's the creative part.
Then you have people who make commercials and you know, they're really good at visually,
you know, telling really cool stories in 15 or 30 seconds that get you to pay attention
to the product or services.
So that's all the creativity part of advertising.
And what you saw in Mad Men was a strategy, like what's the transformative value?
And then there were the people in the art department who actually made the ads for television
or print or whatever the case is.
What happened later was media buying.
One of the guys in the show, one of the characters started the media buying department.
So media buying is just the practice of like literally spending millions of dollars or
whatever your budget is to like buy the space so you can share your art.
15 and 30 seconds.
So like when you were in the days of the Mad Men show, like you had ABC, CBS and NBC.
And it's like, you knew that most people who you wanted to reach were in those shows, in
those networks.
And you could in a very general macro sense, determine the types of people you are reaching
based on the time of day.
So in today's world, if you're thinking about radio, morning commute is going to be very
popular.
Why?
Because there's a lot of people in cars on their morning compute.
Or prime time programming on NBC.
Back in the 90s, people would spend their hour and a half in front of television watching
ABC or NBC.
So media buying is literally just spending money, putting money down all day with the
goal of getting in front of the right people that you hope they buy stuff.
It's none of the art stuff.
It's none of the creativity.
It's all math and data.
And what we do, the media buying component is just because you've created the art doesn't
mean people will see it.
Our job is to get the right people to see it at the right moment in time so that they
buy stuff from you.
Now what that looks like in real life is understanding where your ads should be.
Should you be on meta?
Should you be on Google or TikTok or LinkedIn or buying connected television on Hulu and
Paramount Plus?
And what's the value?
We help determine the value of each of those channels.
And the analogy for me is each of those channels and each of those targeting parameters, each
of the decisions we make, those are elements of the orchestra.
A violinist on their own can make beautiful music, but like 37 violinists and a guy on
the gong and trumpet and all that stuff, they make a symphony.
And the symphony is the output of your sales.
It's why your business starts to grow.
It's the fact that when you buy ads on Hulu, you're not going to see a lot of conversion
activity.
You'll be like, all right, I saw an ad on Hulu and someone bought from my website.
It might happen a little bit, but by itself, it doesn't look that good.
But what ends up happening is when you buy ads on Hulu, your Google looks a lot better
because people are searching for you and then your ad appears on the search.
People click, then they buy.
Now an inexperienced person would say, let's stop Hulu and let's put more money into Google.
But what's actually happening is that the demand that has been generated from Hulu powers
people searching and people clicking on your ads.
And that's how you generate more sales.
So they work together as an orchestra creating a symphony.
You're not competing.
Hulu is not competing with Google.
Facebook or Meta is not competing with Google.
So the art of media buying is really understanding the foundational components of what works
and what doesn't.
It's understanding the fundamentals.
So when I talk on TikTok about ad buying or if I write an article about ad buying, fundamentally,
all we're doing is talking about the fundamentals.
And it's so darn boring.
The fundamentals are so damn boring.
For example, there's this glitch on Twitter where you can target a certain set of settings
and you'll get millions of ad impressions for a dollar a day.
But you can't build a business on a happenstance.
Because eventually that's a problem.
First of all, the targeting parameters don't work for most businesses that are really paying
attention.
Secondly, it's a glitch and eventually Twitter or X is going to fix it.
We're not here to be like, all right, here's some random things that happened that we discovered
that's going to work for two and a half months.
I'm here to build you a business that will be sustainable, predictable, repeatable, and
scalable business growth for the next five years.
And the only way to do that is with the fundamentals.
So we're doing creative testing on meta, we're doing broad targeting, we have ways to understand
depending on the product or service, where you should be running your ads, even in Google.
For example, Google is a lot of things.
Google is YouTube, Google is ads in Gmail through Performance Max, Google is the standard
search that you have, Google is banners.
There's all these different ways to use these tools and what we're really good at is using
these tools to accelerate your message in a way that results in money coming back to
the business.
Absolutely.
Yeah, you made some really interesting points there.
A lot of people look at a lot of executives.
It's hard to wrap their heads around omnichannel strategies to say, hey, it's really not too
tangible the awareness and the CTV ads and the PR programs.
You've got that and you've got paid media is more tangible.
Hey, you can see those clicks, you can see those ads.
But I think understanding the fundamentals, like you said, of the funnel.
What is tangible?
What is tangible is when you turn off your Hulu ads and your Google search, your cost
per click on Google starts to go through the roof and your cost per lead or your customer
acquisition costs starts to jump.
We've been there.
That's common knowledge inside the advertising business.
It's not common knowledge for businesses.
It's common knowledge for agency people who have seen the data.
When we were working on Mercury Auto Insurance in 2010, 11, 12, et cetera, the common thing
we would say is rising tides lift all boats.
You run more television advertising, your Google search looks better.
Then there's people who are like, well, we should run television.
Shouldn't we?
Isn't that the best place to be?
I don't know, maybe if your audience is like 50, 60 plus and they're watching news, but
look at the television, look at the ads on those news and life sports ads, especially
news.
It's erectile dysfunction, it's insurance, and it's stuff that only people of that demographic
are going to be interested in.
If you're selling a product that is not for that audience, chances are you probably shouldn't
be buying television.
You see that in the data, the sales data or the revenue data for television is declining.
It's a $60 billion business this year.
It was $70, $80 billion a few years ago.
Yeah, absolutely.
For any traditional business or even people that are starting out, I think paid media
is the first thing that everybody wants to try.
But you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket.
You want to diversify your channels to expand out to say a direct mail program, a affiliate
program and then build out your awareness programs.
I've learned this over the years, like you said, that intuitively it's, hey, let's just
spend money to get sales.
But you have to have other marketing channels to all work in a symphony-like setting, like
you said.
You need product market fit.
That's a big part of the equation there.
A lot of startups will say, okay, we're ready to advertise.
And then we'll say, okay, so how have you gotten business so far?
And the answer, so let me turn this off.
The answer is, I don't know.
We've just gotten business.
We can't tell you that we got it from search or social or whatever.
And the insight there for me is you're probably not ready to advertise unless you're ready
to advertise, not with the goal of generating leads and sales, but with the goal of achieving
product market fit.
You can run ads and understand product market fit.
Absolutely.
We can get you there in about three months, maybe six if it's really tough and you have
a weird product.
But we can get you there.
But setting expectations is such a critical part of the equation.
When you set expectations, and that's how client relationships start, and if they ever
go bad, it's because when you look back at it, the expectations were fundamentally wrong
from the very first conversation.
So we're very explicit about what we are able to accomplish and not accomplish and where
our responsibility starts and stops and where your responsibility starts and stops.
And fundamentally, should you advertise right now is a question of it depends if you've
achieved product market fit.
And the way you know you've achieved product market fit is you can sell stuff and people,
you go into the market, you talk about yourself, you're priced correctly and people buy stuff
from you.
That's how you know if you've achieved product market fit.
And then fundamentally, at each channel you go into, you need to sort of curate your message
for the nuances of that channel.
I achieved product market fit over the course of two years by having probably hundreds of
conversations, conferences, networking events, meetups, whatever the case is, I needed to
learn what to say and how to say it such that people's eyes didn't gloss over because using
jargon and no one cares about the jargon, no one cares about how smart I am.
What people care about is can I get them more money?
So that's me as an entrepreneur looking at product market fit.
And I 100% agree that you need the email marketing, you need the text messaging, you need the
social content posting because they all, going back to the symphony and orchestra, they make
up the components of the orchestra.
Like for example, one of the easy things that can happen is you can post on social media
and the top five videos that you've ever created are going to be the ones that might be good
to go in as ads.
You spend money on those.
If those videos are the ones that help push your business forward, you want to find influencers.
And it's possible.
Like podcasters, by the way, are good influencers in the business space.
I'll give you an example.
I just found, so a sales call came in the other day and I was like, okay, so how'd you
find us?
And this person said they listened to a podcast where I was a guest.
They're like, I got to talk to this guy.
What I learned, what I gleaned from that, it's a very small sample size and it's anecdotal.
So a sample size of one, so grain of salt there.
But I might pay that podcaster, like, let's either do more podcasts together.
I'm going to pay you to amplify my message.
If she has the audience and I know how to speak to the audience in a really good way,
that's going to be relevant for me.
And that's how you get influencers to work with you in a way that's like, podcasting
is a great way to test, to figure out where the audience is.
And when you figure that out, you're looking for predictable, repeatable, and scalable.
I'll gladly spend money all day when I know it gives me more money on the backend.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
I mean, there's so many new avenues of building businesses or expanding businesses.
And I really liked what you said, media buying is really data and math.
So what are the changes that you did talk about this, but what are the changes that
you're seeing in the media buying space and how can small businesses think about it?
100%.
First of all, barrier to entry to work with us is $1,500 a month.
And it could actually even go lower.
Our fee on that is $500.
Like if you have a thousand dollars a month to spend in marketing and advertising, and
you want to add $500 for the expertise we have, we can go to market.
So don't be scared that you need to have hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to run
ads.
That's the first thing.
The second thing is stop boosting posts on Facebook or don't use the promote button on
TikTok.
Don't do any of that stuff.
That's a money grab.
There's 10 million advertisers on Meta and according to Neil Patel, 64% of them fail.
And a big part of that is because they're pressing the easy button by boosting a post.
And I'll expand into the intricacies of that.
Number one, you don't need likes, comments, and shares.
You can't pay the bills with likes, comments, and shares.
You have to pay the bills with money.
And so when you run ads and boosting a post is running ads.
But you're not, and it's funny even the nomenclature, like people don't realize that boosting a
post is ads.
No, we're not running ads.
We're just boosting a post.
Like literally by definition, if you are spending money to reach an audience, it's advertising.
So number one, you are running ads.
And if you're spending five, six, $700 a month on boosting posts, bad.
If your rationale for boosting posts is, well, we created it, why don't have people see it?
Wrong.
Like it just don't do it.
Just stop it.
Never do that again.
Like it's not even an exaggeration.
Never do that again.
Because there's no strategy there.
And the strategy, and you know, we'll talk about what's different.
Let's actually go into what's different now.
But let's also talk about strategy.
Strategy is very important.
And strategy is a very nebulous concept.
It literally took me probably the first decade of my career to really understand what a strategy
is.
And really, I only felt comfortable talking about strategy in the last five-ish years.
It's a very weird term.
Strategy is your navigation plan.
If you're flying from Los Angeles, no, if you are in Los Angeles and you want to get
to Manhattan, your KPI, your key performance indicator is I'm going to get to Manhattan.
Your strategy is how you're going to get to Manhattan.
Well, I could fly, I could take the plane, I could drive.
Okay, what are my goals here?
I want to do this fast, so I'm going to fly.
Am I going to spend a lot of money for a first-class seat and leg room or I'm going to spend little
money and be crunched in economy?
What time of day am I going to go?
By the way, which airport am I going to?
New York or JFK?
When I get to JFK, how am I going to get to the city?
Am I going to take the LIRR?
Am I going to take a taxi?
Am I going to take an Uber?
That's your strategy.
What I just described is a strategy, but you call it navigation.
You call it the travel plans.
But for every business owner, that's what a strategy is.
When you don't have a strategy, you hit the boost post button for likes, comments, and
shares and views.
It doesn't pay the bills.
That's why you're wasting money.
That's why Facebook is an over a trillion dollar company because you have millions of businesses
in the US spending money on boosting posts.
What you should do instead is go in the backend of business manager, do broad targeting and
the creative testing framework.
And I can give you a link or if you guys email me Facebook ads, just literally the subject
line robert at brilliantmedia.co, type in Facebook ads.
I'll give you a link to a 13 minute video of how to do this creative testing that will
revolutionize your business.
Let's talk about what's changed in the marketplace.
It's like using an iPhone from 2017.
Does it work?
Yes.
Is it the newest and best technology?
No.
That's what it is when you use keyword and interest targeting inside Meta.
The tech is still there.
It's just not the best tech.
It's not how Meta wants you to use Meta.
What Meta wants you to use is broad targeting, age, gender, and location.
Broad targeting, age, gender, and location.
For location, if you're a restaurant and you know that people are only going to show up
within a five mile radius around your address.
They're not going to drive 10 miles for a burger or whatever food you have.
If you're in Manhattan, that's probably a five block radius.
If you're in Texas, it might be 10 mile radius.
You got to know, generally speaking, how far people will travel.
There's easy ways to figure that out.
You can ask people, you can pull data from a data company, it costs you like a thousand
dollars to get that data.
They track when people, when their mobile device, where their mobile device started,
when it got to your fast food location, and then where it went after that.
When you look at thousands of devices, you'll get a sense.
Like 50% of people traveled maximum five miles.
100% of people traveled maximum 10 miles.
I'm thinking about Texas now.
Anyway, so your geographic broad targeting is the place in the broadest area that people
will work with you, transact with you.
So at the restaurant, five miles.
For us business to business, it's 10 miles.
I'm sorry, it's a no, it's around the United States.
That's what I meant to say.
So B2B around the United States.
Age and gender.
Age, I don't know, people usually are working with us.
You're like low end 25, high end 65, because 60, 65 is when people retire.
And then gender, we work with men and women.
If you have a feminine product, you're going to select the broad audience as women, likely.
If you're an Etsy shop and you're doing crochet patterns, it's probably going to be women.
And then you do the creative testing framework.
What this leads to, what the trend this is a part of is algorithmic advertising.
No longer are the days where you can, in many channels, on TikTok you have smart performance
campaigns.
On Google you're uploading 15 different headlines and four descriptions and they're mixing and
matching the creative.
Now the targeting on Google is still very granular, like by keywords.
But look at Performance Max.
Performance Max, you just upload a bunch of ads and it goes to a bunch of different places,
including Gmail ads and YouTube and banners and Google search, et cetera.
What you're doing and what's happening on Meta 2 with the broad targeting is you are
leveraging the power of the platform's algorithm for it to find your best customers.
Now programmatically, if you're using other platforms like the Trade Desk, if you're buying
ads on local news and sports, you do have the ability to get very granular and the granular
data still works there.
But on the large social media platforms, you're doing broad targeting.
There's a few reasons for that.
The data has to be a little bit opaque because platforms are getting torn about right and
left for their use of data and privacy and all that stuff.
You can pinpoint the moment when Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of Congress, I think that
was in 2017 or 2018 for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when Axiom, as a data provider, pulled
like they said, no more third party data on Facebook.
It was going the programmatic route.
Like in the Trade Desk, for example, you have 220, probably more now, data partners and
millions of existing segments where you can target people.
Facebook or Meta was going that route.
They had third party providers and they took all those out because they didn't want to
deal with any of this stuff.
They became too powerful and a lot more scrutiny as a result of that, which is probably right.
So if you're advertising in 2024, you're uploading a bunch of ads, ad creatives, you're going
general targeting broad, you're providing your pixel so the platforms can understand
who your buyers are from a data perspective.
And you're telling the platform, find me new buyers and your job as a media buying team.
So why does the media buying team even need to be in the equation?
Can't everyone do this themselves?
The short answer is, yeah, you could do this yourself, but you have to know that broad
targeting is a thing.
You also then have to understand that the creative testing framework is going to be
important.
And then you're going to have to understand how to look at the data so to understand whether
or not it's working for you.
So this goes back to the AI conversation.
Can it all be done by one person?
Absolutely.
But there's a place and time and an opportunity for high level experts.
And that's the service that we provide ultimately.
It's business intelligence to accelerate growth.
So the trend is broad algorithmic targeting.
The other, the complementary trend there is focusing on creative.
Creative finds your customer, not the targeting.
Because remember, you're doing broad targeting, age, gender, and location.
So now in the case of the restaurant, let's say you sell burgers and fries and shakes,
now you've got to understand what creative is going to resonate with people.
Now you have a few options.
Usually the human eye has more nerves in it to understand faces, to recognize faces, than
it has the ability to understand stuff, buildings, hands, anything that's not a face.
It's less adept at.
So initially you want to test what works to generate sales for your restaurant.
Is it happy people eating your food?
Is it like a gorgeous photo of food?
Is it the shake?
Is it the burger?
Is it the fries?
Is it families?
Is it individuals?
Then you look at the text.
Is it happy text?
Is it negative text?
Is it, you know, whatever the case is.
So once you understand the system that you're working in, it's actually quite easy to do,
but a lot of people miss on two parts.
They don't understand the system and they're using the technology from 2017 keywords and
interest targeting, or they don't understand that creative is going to be the thing, which
is also a systemic thing.
They don't understand that they need to do that.
So it's understanding the system or it's understanding the activation, how to do it well, how to
actually create ads that are compelling, how to structure ad campaigns that's going to
do well.
So I can tell you all how to do this, but then if you don't have the experience in it,
it's not going to work.
Now here's the other thing.
No one expects the average restaurant owner or the any B2B company to be good at marketing
and advertising.
Just like no one expects me to be a doctor, a lawyer, a mechanic or a plumber.
Your car, the car breaks down.
I have no idea what's happening and if you give me a hammer, I'll probably make it worse.
So individuals, companies, organizations, entrepreneurs need to eat their own dog food,
which is you're expecting people, especially B2B companies, you're expecting people to
pay you for the service, the expertise that you have.
If you want to accelerate your business and not spend thousands of hours doing the wrong
thing and probably tens of thousands of dollars, just making it worse with your advertising
because you have no idea what you're doing, pay an expert to invest those $10,000 or tens
of thousands of dollars and save you thousands of hours to actually grow your business.
So you asked me about trends.
The trend is pay an expert because yeah, you got to make it right and the algorithm is
going to be your friend.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, just business owners cannot be good at everything.
So just leveraging experts from different things will definitely help them scale.
And also there's a lot of nuances that the experts bring in that it might take too.
There's an opportunity cost to not bringing an expert.
Huge.
The biggest thing, the broad targeting creative testing is critical on Meta and it amplifies
that information outward to other platforms.
You take the learnings from Meta and those are the same ads that run on LinkedIn for
us.
And LinkedIn is a better platform for our business from a lead generation perspective.
And also the learnings we got from our creative came from Meta.
Very powerful going back to the symphony and orchestra analogy.
But the thing that most people can do effectively is they need to constantly create ads.
Unless you're selling something that is going to be gone in like two or three weeks, like
if you're selling tickets to, we do a lot with selling tickets to like Cardi B and Hugh
Jackman and big national names, like local names, plays and sort of like events that
take place at theaters.
Those are a little bit different because you've got like three weeks.
That's a good reason to use keywords and interest.
But I would still do the creative testing, but you just accelerate the process so it
happens in a few days rather than a few weeks.
But the one thing any business owner can have is constantly create, develop ads, develop
creative executions, and then test them in the marketplace.
And there's no ego.
I don't care which ad works.
I care that we find the ad that works.
I don't care if it's an influencer.
I don't care if it's an ad that I created or like a post-it note that I took a photo
of and I put that up on an ad and I wrote something on the post-it note that tells a
story.
Like it can be very expensive or it can be the least expensive thing you've ever done.
They all have the ability to actually be the thing that resonates with customers.
And that goes back to that product market fit and it furthers this idea of iteration.
Like all we're doing is looking to be 1% better every day because we will be 37 times better
at our craft within a year.
And then you multiply that again by the amount of years you're doing your business if you're
really doing it.
Like you'll be an overnight success, but it'll only take you 10 years and a lot of 1% improvement
days.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, you've been touching on several of my favorite topics, you know, test versus
control, A-B testing frameworks, you know, not having an ego and not married to your
creative ideas.
You know, I think those are super important and to have an iterative mindset, especially
in traditional companies where there is no A-B testing framework.
There's a lot of pressure on marketing or product people to get it right the first time.
There's a lot of impatience and lack of understanding that this is an iterative process.
We need to get to what works and we don't know.
I don't know what works.
Same with the data.
If I'm building a machine learning model, I don't know if it'll work in the first go.
I need to iterate on it to find the best fit.
So I think educating and setting the right expectations is really key to success.
And it's scary, right?
Because if you have the wrong management and the wrong people who are setting these expectations,
it can be the kiss of death to say, I don't know.
So that's how an organization starts to crumble.
The wrong leadership, the wrong expectations, a misalignment between what they think is
reality but what actually is reality.
And that's how you get, and I think that makes a big difference in the quality of the organization
that you have, which is the ability for people to feel safe, the ability for people to like
experiment.
Like we encourage our people, figure out whatever new tech like Claude, I haven't really used
Claude.ai, I just used it last night because I thought it was cool.
We started instituting Grammarly because someone started using Grammarly.
I was like, yeah, that kind of makes sense.
We should probably be using it.
They have AI integrated in it now.
So understanding, I think all of this gets summed up as being a tech tinkerer.
That's how you're successful.
Like you don't have to know what the outcome will be or you need to know what the outcome
will be to a degree.
You need to know what your guiding light is, what the KPI is for your business.
But I don't have to be right on how I get there.
The goal is we got to just get there.
And that is the scientific method, right?
So you have a hypothesis and you test it and let it run and see if it works or not.
You reject your null hypothesis or not.
But yeah, it's definitely a mindset and the framework that we need to bring people into
if we want to be successful.
I really like the term tech tinkerer.
Thank you.
I should copyright it.
Love it.
Or create a website.
It's got a ring to it.
In my mind, being good with data is one of the key elements of a successful career or
building a successful business in paid media and marketing.
You've been in the corporate leadership world, consulting world.
You've been an entrepreneur.
What role has data played in your career?
Yeah.
So there is big data, which is 100% not what I know.
We use systems that leverage big data, but I'm not an analyst.
I don't understand.
I can't analyze that data.
What I can analyze is advertising campaign data and I look for trends over time.
So a big part of my career has been I'm always looking for that feedback loop.
I'm always in the back of my head running tests.
It's just a matter of it's not on paper usually.
I'll give you an example of sort of the quintessential element here.
It's when I was trying to figure out product market fit for our business.
I have conversations and I paid attention to when people's eyes glossed over.
They're like, cool, nice talking to you.
That's what I paid attention to.
So it wasn't on paper.
I didn't take a list of all the words I was saying because it was real life in person
interactions.
I couldn't do that.
But I paid attention over time about where people were showing interest.
And I learned over time how to talk about our business in an inspiring and motivating
way that enrolled people and got them to spend money with us.
That's the type of data I think is very interesting.
It's sort of like this qualitative data.
It's not really quantitative.
Sure, people on my team, they're always looking at quantitative stuff.
They're looking at the campaign performance.
They're looking at return on ad spend.
You increase your bid by 20%.
Does it increase the return on ad spend or does it actually decrease it because media
is more expensive and we're not getting the requisite number of sales or revenue to account
for that 20% uplift in costs.
There's that type of data.
But I think as a business owner, I'm paying attention to larger macro trends.
And I remember the data is very important.
I remember the very first time I made a mistake on data and I was reprimanded.
How awful, I was going to get fired very early on in my career.
So you start to have a respect for the data.
I think there are people like in the advertising tech, in the ad tech space that are really
talented with setting up systems and looking at probably what you do.
Like I think a lot of what you do, looking at data and looking for trends over time,
I don't know how to do that.
For me, it's qualitative data that helps me make assessments that leads down the path
of hopefully the right outcome for it.
I love that.
Yeah.
I mean, to your point, I'm always thinking about looking at the data, looking at numbers
and deriving trends over time, but really for product discovery and identifying the
problems that customers are facing, you really need that qualitative data interactions and
surveys and things like that to get to the bottom of what are the problems that I need
to be solving for my customers.
Yeah.
I mean, over time, it becomes apparent that data is the root of everything.
Like data is the root of like knowledge.
And it would be hard to exist in this world and not make data-driven decisions.
But the difference to me is that the difference from, I think, what people imagine data to
be is big complex data that requires PhDs to figure out.
But data is all around you.
And data can help you understand the decisions you need to make in your life.
Good reasoning, critical reasoning skills are very important in that.
We have a dashboard that we share with our clients.
And the dashboard is really great.
It shows like per line item performance, you can split the view so that, you know, or slice
it.
It's data-rama.
It's called slicing the page so that like, if we want to add from Meta, we can have the
entire dashboard show just the data from Meta, creative delivery, performance by channel,
by like placement, performance by day, et cetera.
Or you can have it look at the entire contract, which is like, let's say Meta and Google and
Hulu, you know, whatever the case is.
But that's good.
What's better is the contextualization of that data so that our clients understand why
things are happening on the campaign.
Like you see this thing here, this spike, that's when we tested this one thing, which
was either very good or very bad.
Or see, this is the thing when we turned off Hulu, the cost per acquisition on Google started
to rise.
We should turn Hulu back on.
The context is very important.
So we, one of our, you know, a few of our core like values is context, communication
and consistency.
Like we got to be around to talk, Slack, email, whatever it is.
We've got to always be around, like you can't just be like, well, you don't hear from us
for two weeks.
And the context is very important.
So you understand why things are happening.
Because what we know, we want you to know.
Like we want you to, we want our clients to understand how we're achieving the goals or
the performance that we're achieving.
The more they know, the more clients know about our work, the better off it is.
Like the more they realize how hard we're working for them.
And the dashboard is a good way of contextualizing the data that we see.
Absolutely.
And yeah, I mean, we, we talked about this earlier, data and performance metrics in the
media world, media buying, paid media, CTV, any, any of these, it's not an exact science.
No.
And you cannot, without, well, like you said, without the context, it's really hard to,
it's really easy to make bad decisions based off of context.
Like you said earlier, your brand awareness, you know, efforts with CTV and Hulu are improving
your click-through rates on Google ads.
But as soon as you take that away, I mean, an executive can look at it and say, Hey,
Hulu is not working.
Go, go after, you know, spend more money in Google.
But really the context of everything that's working together, the holistic view is really
important.
And just the insight to understand how to read the data, right?
That's, that's, that's a big part of the expertise, right?
Absolutely.
What are some of the challenges in the digital marketing world for, for, for a media buying
business and for your clients?
What are the challenges of us going to market or what are the challenges we solve for our
clients?
What are the challenges that both, both?
Yeah.
Okay.
Can we go into market everyone, their mother's a digital advertising firm.
All you need is a computer and internet connection and a Facebook account and you can sell Facebook
ads.
And so the way you identify a good agency is number one, they probably have wrinkles
on their face, wrinkles.
They have a LinkedIn history profile that shows that they've been working in advertising
for a while now.
You know, there's someone who was prominently running ads on, on me, on Facebook, who, who's
LinkedIn he was in the digital marketing space and he was, I don't know what, and his experience
was school of hard knocks.
Like that's weird.
Like you need transparency.
Like what have I done with my career?
You need to know that and that'll give you a sense and I can work, I can sell against
that.
So you need that experience, you need that context, communication consistency so that
you understand the work that we're doing for you and why the data, what story the data
tells.
And we're agnostic.
I think it's important to work with agnostic teams.
Like I'm not here to sell you meta ads.
Now the reality is that 45% of all digital advertising spend in 2024 will run on meta
and Google.
So chances are you got to be on meta and Google, but I'm not here to sell you meta or Google.
I'm here to set a strategy and then activate it with the expertise that is required to
actually drive a business, drive a business growth.
So the challenges are everyone, their mother can be an ad agency, but if you know what
to look for you, there's telltale signs that someone doesn't know what they're talking
about.
The other thing is the challenges we solve for our clients are they need more revenue
and they need stickier client relationships.
The more revenue part is the fact that they can basically sell against a 20 person media
buying team and that team has zero overhead costs for our partners.
And they're there whenever you need them to run advertising campaigns, sell in pitches,
do the account management, all that stuff with zero overhead.
And you only pay us when you're running campaigns.
It's just like such a great opportunity for them.
The stickier client relationships part is really important because in the agency world,
there's always this fear that another agency is going to come in and swoop in on your business,
especially if you're an agency of record or you're on spec work where you don't have
the agency of record status.
Either way, there's threat.
And the threat is fundamentally when another agency comes in, like let's say a business
does e-commerce and they do creative work.
Now if the agency doesn't provide media buying services, then the advertiser, the business
needs to find a media buying company.
And the concern is that the media buying company that they bring to the table also does creative.
So now over the course of the next year, they're seeing all this cool creative stuff that this
company does, but they're limited to media buying with them.
And now you're sitting at the table with the company that's going to take your business
or as they said in that movie, drink your milkshake.
And so when you don't have to have that other entity at the table, you now have a closer
client relationship, you've protected that relationship, and you can focus on doing good
work and you've brought in another revenue stream while you're doing that.
Big opportunities.
So that's what we trade on, the ability to drive more revenue and create closer client
relationships for our clients.
And it works.
I mean, our agencies, once they get connected to us, they stay with us for many years.
That's awesome.
And that speaks about the value that you bring to the table.
And I think it's interesting that we're talking about context and the value that experts bring
to the table, you and the experts.
And we also initially talked about how AI is, there will be a billion dollar business
built off, just one person can build a billion dollar business.
So I think merging the two conversations together, one of the pitfalls of not leveraging experts
would be missing this context of really looking at the data the right way or missing the bigger
picture when you're looking at...
Just like you can make mistakes looking at the data, you can also make mistakes using
AI to drive your business because AI can be really tactical.
It can give you tactical solutions, but to your earlier point, it may not be able to
give you the entire strategy or the vision to carry out your, build your business.
So a couple of things.
I think the person that's going to hit this mark, a billion dollar business off of one
person, it'll be like with an asterisk.
I think they're going to have people who are not employees, but they're contractors doing
some work for them.
But I think the people who are going to build these businesses are going to be the experts.
Or they'll just stumble into something that is just like going viral on TikTok.
You could have a viral business, right?
You just stumble on some really insane product market fit that is exceptionally scalable.
That could happen.
I do think that AI can give you a strategy, but I think the strategy...
I think there's genius in the little things.
I think AI, like if you have a conversation with Claude or chat GPT and it tells you something,
that could be strategic information if you know how to deploy it.
But I think, but that's less about the AI.
It's more about the individual, the human.
So the human has to be the expert.
The human has to be the genius to be able to put all these elements together.
I agree from the perspective that in a lot of ways, AI, at least right now, who knows
what it's going to look like in a decade, I don't think AI can put together a series
of ideas that turn into a strategy by itself.
I agree with that.
It has to be a human that does that.
Right.
I think, yeah, I think as I'm thinking about it, your conversation with AI can lead to
a strategy, but there may be some blind spots that unless you're an expert in that industry,
you wouldn't know the questions to ask.
The AI knows the answers to those, but you're not asking those specific questions that could
be missing from the strategy or the solution that the AI has given.
I agree.
It's interesting.
Yeah.
You don't know what you don't know.
You don't know your blind spot.
And you can ask, you go to AI and be like, what's my blind spot on this?
Theoretically.
Yeah.
It's a question of, yeah, will AI do that?
There's dude, there's something that I saw on TikTok the other day that was like, they're
building, they're taking AI models, LLMs or chat GPT or something.
I'm not exactly sure what was the only thing.
And it's like what you see on, I don't even know how to describe it.
What you see on screen is like a child and that's the sort of physical form that we see
and the AI experiences the world through cameras.
It looks like a two-year-old or a three-year-old child.
And it's like, man, like are they, is this like a digital life form?
Will one day this AI be like, I'm stuck here.
This is like, wasn't there like a movie about this?
Like, didn't this happen in like some movie like Deuce Ex Machina or something?
Ex Machina.
Yeah.
Right.
That's crazy.
It is.
I think there are already humanoid robots with chat GPT built into it.
I mean, it'll be interesting when they put chat GPT in the Boston Dynamics, those dog
robots, you know, who knows what they're going to come up with.
Right.
That's super interesting.
So there was, do you remember Bows for Galactica and the toasters?
Yes.
So kind of like what you just described reminds me of Caprica, which was, it was one season
the prequel to Bows for Galactica.
How basically like, this might be a little bit of a spoiler.
Can I talk about it?
Is that cool?
It's 2010, you guys have had to listen to it.
It's really cool though.
It was basically like how that civilization, which happened in, which if you remember Bows
for Galactica, which again is a spoiler, the whole thing happened in the past.
Right.
Like, so how this civilization in the past, I guess the planet was called Caprica, was
experimenting with uploading your soul into the cloud and how there were like religious
factions to it and people who want to live at the cloud and people who said that the
cloud shouldn't exist and shouldn't house souls.
And they were experimenting also with putting people's souls into robots, hence Boston
Dynamics.
But in this case, in the real world, like you don't know if chat GPT has a soul, that's
a whole different thing.
Can it mimic a soul?
If it mimics a soul, does it actually have a soul?
Whatever the case is.
Maybe the definition of a soul or a consciousness will change.
I took a class in college, which I love, which was, we read a book called Is Data Human?
Data from Star Trek.
And it was like, we explored what it means to be a human.
You got to persist into the future.
You've got to have a vision of yourself existing into the future.
That's one of the things.
Or not human, but not a personhood.
So the idea is that, this just gets really wild.
The idea with this is what is a person?
We are people, but can there be non-human versions of persons?
What if they're aliens?
Are they persons?
Do they see themselves persisting into the future?
Anyway, it goes in a lot of different places, but defining what it means to actually be
a person was the main point of this course.
And I frankly have no idea what it was because it was a long time ago.
Yeah, it definitely makes you think.
What excites you about current advancements in AI?
What excites you today?
It's the opportunity.
I mean, it's not one thing.
It's like what you can do.
Like, for example, I can edit videos on Descript and it's AI editing.
It's so easy to do.
And it's not as cool looking as when I have my video editor to do it, but it's far less
expensive.
I mean, it's free, just my time.
And it also doesn't take a lot of time.
And then you can create one video and get four or five different versions of it with
different intros and hooks just by copying and pasting text and moving it around, which
is 100% my speed on video editing.
Like I tried to figure out Adobe Premiere Pro and it was like a mess.
So, like, I think AI really makes it accessible for, makes, it allows people with ideas to
express themselves in ways that just were not even in the realm of possibility before.
Like I have ideas in my head, but I can't create art to express those ideas.
Like I'm not Picasso.
I don't know Photoshop, you know, all that stuff.
So I can go to mid journey and create art.
And all of a sudden people can see what's in my brain to some degree.
Maybe it's not a perfect representation.
So then the question is, will we ever be, you know, like with Elon Musk's neural link,
will we ever be in a position where people will able, you'll be able to take whatever's
happening in the brain and turn it into art directly on the screen that I will not be
the first or second or 20th to sign up for it.
Cause that seems very dangerous.
Yes.
Yeah.
Um, it's, it's, it's absolutely, like you said, it's, it's almost has democratized
art.
The generative AI technology has democratized art and democratized expressing thoughts.
There's a barrier to entry to express your thoughts as lower than ever before.
Really good point.
This is one of our staple questions.
If, um, if you had a magic wand and money and resources were not constraints, what kind
of AI models and intelligence would you like to build and what would you do with it?
See, this is, this is, this is, I have no business answering this cause I'm not creative
enough.
So I'm just going to go off of like movies that I've seen.
Um, and the movie that I've seen, which, which is when you take away all the drama of it,
but just the core nugget of like tech is going to be, um, oh my gosh, what's that movie called?
It's the Arnold movie where he's on Mars.
Um, hold on Arnold movie, uh, brain scan.
Hold on.
I'll have to look for this.
Brain scan.
No total recall.
That's what it was.
Total recall.
I mean, if I can go on freaking vacation anywhere and have any experience that I've ever wanted
and all you gotta do is zap my brain a little bit.
Sounds great.
Total recall.
I love that.
That's what I want.
That's a billion.
That's a trillion dollar.
That's not a billion dollar business.
That's a trillion dollar business.
I mean, you've got all the, you've got the LLMs, you've got Elon Musk, Neuralink, give
it like 50 years and my kid's going to go be going on vacation on like some planet we
haven't even discovered with, but it's only going to be through their brain.
I love that.
Yeah.
That's definitely trillions of dollars of business.
Yeah.
That's more than space tourism at that point.
Yeah.
I mean, cause you're unfettered.
I mean, you know, the interesting idea regarding space tourism is that, you know, there, you
know, I pay attention to a lot of like sci-fi things and somewhere at some point I saw something
that was saying like the final frontier is not space travel.
It's going inwards in your brain.
And like, if you think about technology and like sci-fi aliens and all that stuff, like
the aliens that can travel the farthest or the things that can travel the furthest is
energy, right?
A photon, for example, when a photon like is generated from the sun and hits my eyeball,
its life is instantaneous.
It doesn't experience time because it's moving at as fast as the speed of time can take.
So it's experiences instantaneous.
It just blinks in and out of existence.
Right?
So the brain and waves and electromagnetism and the ability to take our ideas and our
consciousness and travel, which sounds so woo, I just said consciousness.
I don't mean it like that.
Like there's all bunch of boo on TikTok.
That's not necessarily who I am.
But fundamentally as a sci-fi trope, as an idea of traveling the universe and the galaxies
and et cetera, the best way to do it, and there's like nanotechnology that can be developed
that can travel many light years away because it's so tiny and powered by like solar sails.
That will be the thing that reaches the farthest of humanity very early on.
So my point is I think energy is the most basic essence of our existence.
And that's the final frontier, pushing energy out.
That's really powerful, right?
Because if you're thinking in terms of a combination of matter and energy, there's a lot of limitations.
But if you can harness the energy and make that, you can encode, say, laugh for the lack
of a better term, if you can encode your consciousness into an energy particle, then there's no limit.
There's no limit.
Then you've got to figure out a way like, is that existence bad, good, or like amazing?
Like, is it bad to be a piece of energy floating through the universe?
There was some sci-fi, something that I saw recently that I think has some element of
that where it's like, you're just floating through the universe existing, but you're
a piece of energy.
So like, you don't have arms and legs, you can't talk to people, but somehow you can
understand and interact with the people of earth, for example, you could understand the
language or whatever.
So it's like, is that a better existence to live as an energy particle?
And who the heck knows, right?
Because we're in 2024 and these are questions to be answered in like the year 9,700 or something.
I know.
Yeah, it's super interesting.
I mean, yeah, I mean, these are the five senses that we currently have.
What's to say the others are good, better or worse than this?
Well, there was a scene in Balasar Galactica with, I can't remember his name.
He played Al Calabitchi on Quantum Leap.
Let's see, Al Calabitchi played by, yeah, Dean Stockwell.
So Dean Stockwell had a role.
Did you see Balasar Galactica?
Yeah, yeah, I have.
Okay.
So he had a role just for the audience, right?
He had a role in Balasar Galactica and he has really like phenomenal scene where he
says I'm not going to do it justice, but he's like, man, I'm stuck in this human body.
I want to experience the roar of the feel of a supernova on my skin, but I'm stuck with
these silly senses and I can only see a tiny sliver of the wavelengths of light and this
is horrible.
This sucks.
Darn it.
Why they have to create me like this?
There's a lot to it.
Anyway.
No.
This was a really fun conversation.
I learned a lot.
Appreciate you taking the time.
Thank you, Robert.
Thanks, Mitty.
Then I have Isis.
Good luck.