[00:00:00] Speaker A: One of the oldest sayings in the AI space is that AI is not going to take your job, but people using AI will take your job. There's always going to be people who need problems solved. And if you can help people solve problems, you've got a business.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Our guest today is a serial entrepreneur with over 20 years. He has started and bought businesses with a focus on growth and marketing. In 2014, he launched the podcast Bacon Wrapped Business, amazing Name, by the way, which has over 270 episodes. His mission is to empower innovation, to enrich the human experience. He believes that AI, when used wisely, has the potential to democratize opportunities, enhance operational efficiency, and foster an environment where creativity and innovation flourish. We're all about innovation here. And that's why he named his newest venture accelerateintelligence. Aihdenhe. Welcome to innovate and overcome. Brad Destanza. Thanks so much, man. Happy to have you here. This is amazing. I've been looking forward to this for a while because we met through strategic coach at Coachcon and we just had an amazing conversation about all the incredible amplification that's taking place, especially for entrepreneurs around AI. Now we're going to get into that. We're going to spend a lot of time on that actually today on this show. But I want to rewind the tape a little bit. 20 years in business, you've had a few ups and downs like most people have. But before we hit the record button, you were talking about, there's been a few experiences where really everything was up and then suddenly everything was down and you had to almost restart from scratch.
Walk us through what transpired, where you've experienced that in the past, because it sounds like, you know, with the market, the economy, things can, things can get in the way of a well planned life.
[00:01:47] Speaker A: Yeah, you're right. You know, I didn't almost had to start from scratch. I mean, I had to start from scratch, at least financially. So in the past, oh, I even say more than 20 years, like 20 years in the kind of the stuff I've been doing now. But the first time I've lost everything I've got twice in my life through bad investments. Now when I say everything I've got, I don't mean I lost my house, I lost everything. I mean I lost all my liquid investment assets. I went from having six figures in the bank to being either zero or in debt. And the first time that happened I was, it was back in 2000 and I graduated with a degree in finance and economics and probably my second job out of college, I was a financial advisor for prudential securities, and I was selling stocks and bonds and allocating portfolios. And back in 98, 99 was the big bull market of tech that was with the.com boom, et cetera, and everybody felt like a genius. You throw a dart at a board, stock goes up, buy Cisco at any price. Everything was rocking and rolling. And at the time, they also say, easy money, easy come, easy go. So my dad had saved a bunch of money for my college, so I was fortunate to not have to take out loans, et cetera. And then, so when I got out of college, when I was about 25 years old, my dad gave me the money. It was like not a trust fund, it was just saving it there. And it was about, I think he gave me like $98,000 and I was about 25, 26 years old, and I was like, this is amazing. I felt like richie rich with the silver spoon. My parents arent wealthy, but upper middle class. And here I was in my mid twenties, starting off with $100,000, and I was a financial advisor. So obviously Im really wise. Well, theres this thing called margin.
Making money was way too easy back in the.com days in 99, and I was like, oh, a little margin here, a little margin there, a little more margin here, a little more margin there. Really soon I was having these months where it was just barn burning months, and I said, this is amazing. And I didnt realize that I was pretty much fully margined out because I just got carried away. Im the guy who shouldve known better. And then in March of 2000, when the cracks started to occur and everything started to fall apart and things started to drop, uh, along with my stomach. I just started to see my, um, my portfolio start to evaporate, get margin call after margin call after margin call, hoping it was kind of come back because it went way down. And I was like, oh, it's going to bounce. It never bounced. I mean, it did bounce after it.
[00:04:28] Speaker B: There wasn't a dead cat at the end of the bounce, like they talked about.
[00:04:31] Speaker A: The dead cat was my bank account. So it was, um, you know, I got, I got kind of got wiped out that, you know, that hundred that 90 80 had given me had turned it into like 125, like really quickly. And then it got decimated just within months. I was like, wait a minute, now ive got zero, barely enough to pay my rent and had to go into some credit card debt, maybe about another 15, 16,000 in credit card debt. And that was in my late twenties, and that was a big, thats a big blow going, what the hell? Did I just ruin my life? Like I was set for life? Like, had I grown that, you know, that $100,000 at that age, I would have been set for life if I would have done it strategically.
And so there was a lot of me beating myself up, and I'm never going to make this mistake again. But lo and behold, I kind of did, although it wasn't as, it wasn't because I was being as reckless. So lost everything there. Just pulled myself up, my bootstraps, got very austere, just, you know, started saving money, et cetera. But I've never been the type. Like, I think one of this, my strengths as a human is my resilience is I can look back at what happened and I can dwell on it, or I can say, well, that didn't work. What's next? And I've got a very good ability to just kind of put stuff behind me and, and focus on the next piece. And so it was, I want to say it was in 20 04.
20 03, 20 04. I saw people flipping houses. And this was like the heydays of flipping houses, right? Interest rates had gone way down, and I was like, oh, I'm going to start flipping some houses. So I bought a information product online about how to flip houses. And I got about halfway into it, and I stumbled across a guy who was, um, in foreclosure, and he had three houses in foreclosure. And I was like, I got introduced to him through a mutual friend, reached out, and I said, hey, I'd love to, like, buy your houses. And once I didn't, I I was halfway through this book, and I'm negotiating to buy. I ended up buying two of the houses in foreclosure. And I remember thinking, oh, crap, okay, this is really good. Like, I can make some good money on it, but I still didn't know what I was doing. But I just kind of, you know, I like to, you know, build the plane while im flying it. And it ended up working out a lot of trial and error. Its funny, I ended up making about $125,000 on these two houses in profit. Took me about a year to do. I called my dad, come help me rehab these. I probably could have made another $50 to $80,000 if I actually knew what I was doing and wasnt just making a lot of mistakes. But I was like, hey, look, im back. I made this money again. Now I got like $125,000, and it had only been about four years after I lost everything. So that was a pretty good jump back then.
That was a win. But then I worked down the hall from a company, it was an oil and gas company, and I got to know them pretty well, and they were talking about a new natural gas drilling project or two they had. And I was like, well, let me look at this. And I started looking at it. I was like, all right, this is pretty interesting. I think there could be some money here. I went to my dad, I said, hey, dad, look at this. And he goes, son, run, don't walk. Do not do this. But I was a little stubborn. I was like, you didn't even look at the deal. You didn't even look at it. I knew he had invested in oil and gas before, but I was like, man, he doesn't know what he's doing. I'm going to do it anyway. And so a little $25,000 investment here, and then another well was like, another 25. One of the things I didn't realize was that in this kind of an investment, they have cash calls where something goes wrong with the well, they need more money. They say, hey, we're going to need another 10,000. And if you don't put it in, it's not optional. You don't get diluted. You just. You lose your investment. You have to participate or you're out.
So it's like being pot committed in poker. And all of a sudden, this got up to about $105,000 invested in these two wells now. And I was like, you got to be kidding me. But there was still hope they were going to work out until there wasn't, and then they went kaput. And that $105,000 evaporated again, and it was pretty much all. I may have had another, like, five or $10,000 in the bank, but prior to that, I had, like, 105 or something. So now here I was about four years later, five years later, starting back over again. And that really takes a toll on your ego. You really feel stupid at that point. How many times am I going to do this? But I do think that once more, one of my strengths is almost, like, stubborn, this stubborn resilience and delusional optimism. And I've got a really good ability to reframe things that happen. One of my favorite sayings is that there's no such thing as failure, only feedback. And I lived by it like that. And at the time, I just remember thinking, well, if those oil wells would have worked out, it would have given me a nice, like, $10,000 a month passive income for a while. And God doesn't want me to be that lazy because that'll make me lazy. So the universe is saying, you still got work to do, buddy. It's like, all right, let's figure out what's next. And luckily, those two things did make a big impact because then whenever I invested in stuff, I started to invest in me. I started to say, I'm going to invest in my skill sets. I'm going to learn this, I'm going to start a business, I'm going to get coaching. I'm going to find the right experts to take me through this. I'm not just going to throw money at something else, hoping that it makes me a bunch of money.
And then the crypto bull market of 2020.
So the last one I did, now, this was a little different in the fact that I had a lot more money, my wife and I, at this point, to invest. And I started really studying bitcoin and altcoins and crypto and all this. And I started to go toe in and then go bigger and bigger. The more I started to see it, the more I started to make money in a crypto bull market. If anybody's ever participated, you know, it's, it is. There is no ride more fun if you're on this ride than these pumps where I was making $50,000 overnight. And thats only with a few hundred thousand dollars invested. Id never seen returns like this. So I started putting more in and more in and more in, and I kept on telling myself, im doing it conservatively. Im not going to get screwed. Im not margin, im going to be okay. And by November of 2021, I looked at my account and I was in profit, a million dollars off of about, I don't know, $400,000 investment. And so it's million in profit. Six months later, the million dollars in profit has evaporated, and I lost about 250,000 in principle.
And it was one of those moments like, you gotta be kidding me, three, three times this happened. The interesting part about this time is it wasn't even though I lost like, really a million and a quarter, it wasnt everything I had. So we still had real estate, we still had cash. That was still a good chunk of our assets, but it wasnt everything. And ill tell you, Richard, losing $100,000 in my early twenties and going to zero actually hurt a lot more than losing one and a quarter million in my late forties, where I have less, and you would think itd be the opposite but I think everythings all relative, right? If its everything youve got, if you have $100 and you lose $100, you know it's everything you've got.
But still, I refuse to quit and I refuse to look in the rear view mirror. Outside of learning lessons in that time, I've built a lot of that money back, primarily, like in the crypto side, just primarily through dumping it back all just into bitcoin and nothing else. But that's another topic. But yeah, I've made a lot of mistakes in my life going, and these are mistakes that should have maybe ruined me or could ruin somebody else, even psychologically, which is some of the biggest harm you can take. It is the biggest harm you can take psychologically. It just puts you on your heels, afraid to take any risks. But once more, I guess, that delusional optimism that's so important for an entrepreneur kicks in, and I just try to be a little more careful the next time. And one of these days I might even learn my lesson. We'll see, but I'll let you know if it happens.
[00:12:50] Speaker B: Well, I really appreciate, you know, the, the context of, like you say, if you only have $100 and you lose $100, I mean, it's a, it's a big deal and I mean, it's how you're putting food on the table the next day, whereas if you still have some capital left, yeah, you took the loss, but, you know, you still have something available you can recover a little bit easier.
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One of the things I think is important to take away from this grad, and this is a connection point that comes up for me as you telling this story, because, you know, people watching this, they're going to recognize maybe whether it's in themselves or the people that they're close to, they've seen that story, they've lived that story. They've been a part of it before. Everyone's seen markets go up and the crash that happens afterward. And to some degree, we've all probably participated. I know I have. I've got lots of bowel scars to discuss. And so I really resonate with your journey because I, I've had some similar experiences on some, some deals that I thought were going to go really well and then didn't and did the due diligence, at least what I thought was due diligence, and still ended up where someone, it was kind of like one of those joint ventures. It's where someone puts up the money and someone puts up the experience, and at the end of the day, they switch roles.
But one of the things that I really took away from your journey here, and this is happening really over a 1015 year period of time, is over that timeframe. You kept building your skills. You said something about investing in yourself and the importance of doing that. And similarly, I came away with the exact same opinion, like, you know, what's the only thing that's really produced any revenue has been me. So what if I just double down on me and my efforts? And that would probably work out pretty well and in business specifically. So I think there's an importance in people being able to take away how your ability to generate revenue is your greatest financial asset. Yes, we think that our assets are our greatest financial asset, but you as an individual are your greatest financial asset. And often it's this squishy mass in between our ears.
[00:15:29] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, and you know, the other thing, because I've given a lot of thought to this, like, how did I bounce back? How, what gave me the resilience? And one of the things I'm privileged to have is a loving family, and they're, they're, as I said, you know, middle class, they're retired, et cetera. But I've always known that I'm not going to be homeless. Right. I knew that my worst case scenario was not that bad. And I do actually have a lot of sympathy for people who, they dont have a support network of friends and family and other people. It wasnt just my relatives, it was my friends, et cetera. So I knew that if things ever got so bad that id get kicked out of my house or whatever, I knew id have places to go because I had strong relationships, familial bonds, et cetera. And I think that that is the best form of mental health you can get. It kind of goes back to Maslows hierarchy of needs. On the very bottom foundation is safety. And I think that one of the biggest problems that face most people financially is, they dont have any safety and it causes anxiety and panic and worst case scenario is pretty damn bad. Right. And it creates a lot of anxiety. And a lot of this is due to poor financial education, I believe. I was lucky to have a really solid financial education. My dad was a financial advisor at one point when I was growing up, he taught me about investing and he taught me about sound financial management. I didn't always listen to him, but I think that I understood a degree about how money works, both investments, but also earning. And I've always been very entrepreneurial and that's one of my greatest, like, I guess, skill sets that provided a degree of it's going to be okay mentality. And I think that, you know, if people had a better financial education, they would need a lot less mental health, you know, help, because most people who are in those dire situations are, I think they're really anxious and they're really, and money is one of the biggest. Money and health are the two biggest anxiety producers. It's, it can be, you know, money, health and relationships are the, like the three biggest things. Health. Wait, health, wealth and relationships. You know, it's fairly easy to build good relationships. All you got to do is be a kind of a cool, interesting, empathetic, nice person, right? Whether that's a romantic relationship, friends, family.
The next part is health. It's fairly easy to be healthy unless you're dealt a really bad hand of cards, like, you know, eat healthy, move your body. It's a lot harder to make and keep money. Like, it's more complex. And so I think that's what creates a bigger degree of anxiety with people is if this doesn't work, how am I going to pay for this? Especially if you have people who depend upon you, spouse, children, parents, etcetera. And so I think that one of my advantages there was, okay, I know how to make money, I know how to save money, and I thought I knew how to invest money, but I keep on. But once more, it was like, I'd make money, I'd lose money, I'd make it again, like real estate, I'd lose it. I made it again. I started a digital media publishing company and I made money and I sold that business. So it's been up and down and up and down, but that ping pong back and forth, which is no fun, it at least gave me the, it at least gave me the, um, the data that says I can do it again if I lose everything I wish. I don't want to. I can do it again. These days, I'm a lot more careful about not losing. Yeah, Warren Buffett's first rule of money is, or investing is don't lose money. So.
[00:19:10] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's interesting you mentioned some of those things about, you know, again, familiar relationships, family, and the conversations that you're, you brought up with your daddy. We wrote this book, don't spread the wealth, and it's all about having those money conversations in the family so that you can improve your health and wealth and that mindset component. And so if we can reduce the stress around money conversations, especially at the household level, that has a pivot effect in the future, I think that's, you know, where we can start to really see the dial move long term. If we start bringing those family money conversations in early and making them fun, positive and engaging, rather than negative and complaining, we switch that around, we're really going to start to see a more prosperous society.
[00:19:50] Speaker A: Speaking of a prosperous society, it's the number one things. But, yeah, I think it's such a shame that it's not actually taught in school and in families. And it's one of the biggest problems we have is society. But keep it going. I interrupted you, Jeff.
[00:20:03] Speaker B: Well, you're, I think that with some of the new innovations that you're doing, there's a lot of opportunity for some stuff, even in that degree, to happen. And I'm looking forward to talking more about that. Now, one of the things I'm curious about, Brad, with all of the ups and downs, again, were talking a lot about your more personal investing life here. What im curious about for our listeners is whats the impact on all of that happening in the background while youre still trying to forge ahead and running and operating a business. And theres a psychological component that weve talked about. But how does that impact you now as you try to go about just generating revenue? You mentioned resilience. Obviously, youve got that component built into you. Its part of your DNA, but not everyone has that. So what advice would you give them about being able to, uh, take something that's going on in the personal world and being able to, hey, let, let's keep going here and keep moving the ship forward when it comes to our business life?
[00:20:55] Speaker A: Yeah. So obviously every situation is different, but we all have that quiet battle of desperation where, you know, we are fighting. So sometimes it's, you know, once more it's health, wealth and relationships. Either we have financial, you know, problems or we've got health problems with ourselves or other people like our family or we've got relational problems, right? Like we, maybe we have an unsupportive spouse who is, you know, we don't have a great relationship or we're just trying to balance everything. I think that's one of the biggest problems in life in general, is that we're trying to succeed and make a better life for ourselves in the face of all this stuff that is, you know, we're running the gauntlet of life. Like its rare that things just work really well for you. So compartmental. I think perspective and compartmentalizing is really important. The perspective can be anything. From once more looking at whats your worst case scenario? In Tim Ferriss book, the four hour workweek, he talked a lot about worst case scenario planning. And I remember thats probably one of the most pivotal books I ever read and got me into digital publishing. But I remember thinking that like, oh wow, if you really stop and think, what is the worst case scenario for you? The realistic worst case scenario? And go, is it that bad? And I do this to this day. I was having a walk with my wife the other day. We were stressed out about just some stuff going on or like, wait, worst case scenario, we got this going for us. And then I think that provides a nice little baseline to go, okay, yeah, I'm not going to be homeless and living in a van, eating government cheese down by the river.
Like I've got somebody who loves me, I've got this. Like I'm going to be okay. I think that aspect of perspective mixed with gratitude, like daily gratitude, if you're drawn breath and you have any degree of health and ability to do this, that's, that's the important things. And then to try to understand that anything's really possible if you have the intention to achieve it. And this may sound a little woo woo motivational, but I believe, like, if somebody else has achieved something and it's something that I want to achieve, there's nothing standing in the way. I can find a way to do it. I doesn't, I mean, is it not, if it's not against the laws of physics, the only thing standing in the way is knowledge. Knowledge and physics are the key to everything. Once more. If it's not against the laws of physics, the only thing there is knowledge of what to do, how to do it, and enlisting the help of others. I've been a big fan of enlisting the help of others as much as possible, whether that's partnerships, employees, mentors, coaches, consultants and other people like that.
But there's I once more, I think there's a degree that I've got of delusional optimism, and I don't know if I was born with it, if it was nature or nurture, but I just refuse to quit. I'm like, hey, look, I'm on this ride. I may as well keep playing. Like, I don't want to check out of the game yet.
Let's just figure something else out. And as long as the luckily once, I've never been on the doorstep of homelessness, even though I lost everything.
So I think that just propelled me forward. I don't know if that really answers the question. I've never really actually thought about what you were saying. How do you balance those things out, but you kind of do it right.
It's like, thrive or, you know, what's the, I don't know, like sink or.
[00:24:28] Speaker B: Swim, strive or thrive. But, you know, really, I think you did answer it in the relation of, hey, look, I'm here playing the game. I might as well, you know, put me on the court. And that attitude, really what it comes down to is an attitude of perseverance. And we're here, we got work to do. We might as well get started. So that mindset really is the key, I think, Brad, that you've identified, and speaking of mindset, and speaking of enlisting the help of others, when we come back after these messages, we're going to talk about enlisting the help of potentially some artificial others right after these important messages.
Okay, Richard, I keep hearing about this thing called the Colby a index. You talk about it all the time on the show. What is it? How do I get information about this thing and why is it so important?
When I, when I first got my Colby done, it totally revolutionized everything for me. I finally felt like, oh, man, this is what I was looking for. All the things I've been doing that had been working for me and all the frustrations I'd had. If I just understood this at an earlier age, boy, oh, boy, would my life be different.
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We're here with Brad Costanzo, and we're having an incredible conversation about recovering from loss and having the right mindset and the right attitude. We talked a little bit about who power, but now we're going to get into the innovation of the next best who that might be able to help you on a project, on your life, on your business, to really help move the Dow forward. And that is the advent of AI. Now you're an AI consultant, a master, really, at helping people create outcomes. Now, you talked a little bit about that, Brad. What does it mean to help someone use the technology to create an outcome versus people who are just excited about what the technology can do?
[00:26:24] Speaker A: Yeah. So whenever AI really came on the scene in a big way, we're pushing two years now, November of 2020, was it two?
It became jaw dropping innovations. Now, I've been like, first of all, I'm not a technologist. I'm not a computer programmer. I'm not a tech, and I've never programmed anything in my life, with the exception of the other day. I used chats to create the code to create a chrome plugin just because I had an idea, like, I wonder if I can do it, and I did it. So I guess now I'm a programmer, but I've been a serial entrepreneur, a business owner, and also a growth consultant and advisor for many years. And as such, as both a business owner and a consultant, all I care about is outcomes. So I see all the things that AI can do, and a lot of them are novel and cool, and I can make cartoons and poems. And this is what everybody was doing when chat GPT first came out. Well, I had already been using a lot of AI tools in my business and for my clients two or three years. And when this came out, I was like, oh, wow, okay, this is a, this is a totally different ballgame. So I saw all the things it could do, but I kept on trying to hack away, like with a machete, go, no, no. What? How do we get results? Because I actually had clients that I was helping with their growth strategy, and now I was looking at this. And so I started immediately going, okay, how can I use this to help do what I'm doing better, faster, and less expensive? And so I just started to put it into place. That allowed me to put blinders on to all of the novel projects that are out there, that create what I lovingly refer to as tool for, you know, it's all euphoric, look at this, look at this. Look at what I can do here. Look what I can do there. I'm like, nope, put blinders on. We're here to make money, save time, make more profits, and make life a little bit easier. How do we do this? So I just started to focus in on outcome first. I'm already working with these clients, so what's the outcome we want. We want to turn more leads into customers. Awesome. Well whats a good workflow for that? So the outcome first, then the workflow, tech or no tech, if we see technology like AI, makes it a lot easier, which it does. Okay, well now what tool do we want to use? And oftentimes ill say, look, you dont need to innovate with AI as a tool, you could innovate with just people or different processes etcetera. And I think my unique advantage in this space is thats what Im focused on as opposed to you go hire a tech based AI consultant and they just want to AI and automate everything. I learned the hard way that the more moving parts you have and the more you rely on tech, the more things there are to go wrong. And as a business owner, the more successful you are, the less risk you can take. So I always tried to develop elegant, low risk antifragile systems that won't break and cause more of a headache. And then I just started to work with the existing clients. Next thing, one thing led to another and I started to get referrals. Hey, can you come do this for me? Or I heard about you over here. Can you come speak on my podcast? Can you come speak on my show? Can you come speak on my stage? And little by little I went from, I kind of became an accidental expert in all this just because I started to use it to get results, both from my clients, myself. And I was just fascinated by it. It is fun if you've got add like I do, and a lot of entrepreneurs do.
It's like a drug, you chase it. The problem is, it's a shiny object you can't afford to ignore. So I remember very clearly, I remember very clearly when I was working with just Chad chapter alone, and I was able to do like a full marketing campaign for a client I was working on. That normally would have taken me easily three or four weeks and I would have charged a minimum of 25,000 for that. And I was able to do it stumbling around in the dark in about 2 hours. And I just sat there and I was like, I am going to be obsolete real soon. So a lot of my focus on this business is purely out of fear.
Like they say, if you and a friend are outrunning a bear in the forrest, you just gotta outrun your friend. And like, I'm trying to stay ahead of this so that I don't get completely obsoleted and that I can use it in a way that helps me and helps others but that's kind of like the backstory there. And that's kind of, you know, my perspective. But I think, I think it's a wonderful technology. It does have some limits. Those limits are getting blown away all the time. But outcome first, that's how I focus.
[00:31:01] Speaker B: With all that in mind, I'm curious, you know, I've, again, being around strategic coach, a number of other great organizations, the idea of the importance of having an AI strategy for your business. And that's like kind of a bit of a buzzword because that doesn't really specify anything but just the awareness. Okay. If you're in business, you need to have some form of strategy on how you're either going to use, implement, access, tackle AI, whether it's an impact as like a potential danger to your business, as an example, maybe if you're in marketing and it might eliminate some of the things that you bring to the table or how is it a strength and how are you implementing it? So you talked a lot about process, so people in process. I think a lot of people believe that AI is going to eliminate jobs, but there's a whole host of other people who believe it's going to create a bunch of new jobs, but it's also going to take the existing jobs and it's going to make people, uh, potentially happier and more efficient so that they might stay in their job for a longer period of time because they're not doing all the frustrating things that they used to have to do. So, like, there's a lot of different ways of looking at it. So walk me through your perspective on that.
[00:32:10] Speaker A: I think it's yes, yes, and yeah, everything you said, yes, it will absolutely, uh, obliterate some jobs. It is unavoidable. It's already happening and it's scary. And there is no two ways about it that the key, in my opinion, is to upskill yourself. So that like, like I was doing, like, let's try to be valuable enough to where I don't get obliterated by it. One of the oldest sayings in the AI space is that AI is not going to take your job, but people using AI will take your job. There's always going to be people who need problems solved. And if you can help people solve problems, you got a business, right? Because, you know, we are going to get to a point, I believe that.
Let me back up. So technology has always had like an intervention of new technology has always had a very disruptive force in the past, you know, when cars came out, you know, horse buggies you know, disrupted that entire industry. Well, those people went out and, you know, eventually maybe they found jobs in factories making cars or doing, you know, some, something else.
And throughout history, this has always happened. Yes, jobs get disrupted. The people who learn new skills end up surviving. The dangerous part about AI is it's moving so quickly that it's not giving people the time to go learn these skills and upskill and catch up, because it's, it's outpacing anything else we've ever seen in our lives. And it's scary, but it's only scary, I think, if you stay stagnant and don't learn either new skills that are unobsoletable by AI or you learn how to use it to where you become Tony Stark putting on the Iron man suit and become a superhuman with your abilities to solve bigger, better problems. And I think that's one of the, this last thing I just said is one of the biggest problem society we have is that we're all stuck solving, or the majority of us are stuck solving small problems. You know, you've got people like Elon Musk out there trying to get us to space and, you know, the things that hes doing with his various companies. But most of us are just trying to get by in the day and were not necessarily working on things we love. Were trying to make a buck to pay the bills. And the problem were trying to solve is a paycheck. But with this, I think it gives us the ability to utilize it as a great thinking and creative tool that will allow us and hopefully our children to solve bigger problems and focus less on the robotic work. Let the robots do the work and we work in symbiosis with them. Aliana optimistic view of it.
The downside once more is I think we're going to have an inverted bell curve of skill sets. I think you're going to have, one side of the population is going to be highly skilled, have tons of resources, and be able to move quick, whether it's with money or mastery of technology. And you're going to have all the other laggards who just decided not to even bother to learn because they didn't like it and they thought it was a shiny object they could afford to ignore. And I think those are the ones who are going to be left out.
But its optional right. And I dont know where itll go. I just know that my role is to help accelerate the adoption of the technology, but even more so, the mindset of what it can do. I call my company accelerated intelligence, as opposed to artificial intelligence, because accelerated intelligence is the outcome. Intelligence is the seed of everything that we have. Right. It takes a thought first before anything gets made. Artificial intelligence is just a tool. So if we can use mental models, technology, different skills, et cetera, to solve these bigger problems, we're going to be ahead of the game. And we've never had that opportunity to do it like this before. It's literally unleashing superhuman abilities and democratizing the ability to solve problems. Like, not to keep on soapboxing here, but one of the big trends right now is a combination of AI and no code software. So you can spin up a software in hours and monetize it. And in the past, this was really left to companies who had large, you know, large budgets, large programming teams, et cetera. Well, now, just like before, you know, you needed to be a, you need, you know, you needed to have, you know, if you were an artist, you wanted to get distribution of your songs, you had to get a record label. Then all of a sudden, you could just throw your stuff on Spotify or YouTube or whatever, and it's democratized access to your talent. This does, too, because now you have a robotic army of programmers. You can solve problems. And I think hopefully what will happen is that the big behemoth companies will lose some of their moat, some of their protective moat on their business model, and you're going to have a lot more smaller innovators creating new opportunities for themselves.
[00:37:11] Speaker B: Trey, the power of ideas and unleashing AI to take the smallest idea and turning it into reality, I think, is the key in that. When we come back, we're going to talk more about the innovative that AI is having and how you're helping to shape those with your clients. Are you looking for a great book to read? Turns out I have one for you. It's called cash follows the leader. It's available anywhere books are sold. But if you want to get a free copy and you can download it right to your inbox, you can go to coachcanfield.com cashfollows.
We are back here learning all about the incredible utilization of artificial intelligence, how entrepreneurs can really take this incredible technology and be able to implement their ideas at lightning speed. Now, Brad, you know, you're helping people doing this. You're doing this yourself. You're surrounded by a community of entrepreneurs who are big thinkers, and they're taking ideas and they're putting them into action, and they're actively focused on incorporating AI into that action set. What are some of the things you've seen just kind of to give people some scale here on the low level, on the rudimentary side, a way that they've implemented AI to be able to change a process or a procedure in their business to really maximize time saving versus the grand ideas that we're seeing where people are creating brand new business structures from out of thin air by using chat GPT as a sounding board. So walk us through some of the things you've been seeing lately.
[00:38:38] Speaker A: Yeah. So some of the little stuff that I love because it's very outcome focused is creating, you know, every, every most business owners have either former customers or leads that either haven't bought in a while or never bought. Kind of dead leads, et cetera. And like, one of the things that I help them put into place is an outbound text message based lead reactivator, customer reactivator. So we'll like, I'll use software that, you know, they'll, they'll take, let's just say they have 10,000 prospects. Like if they have their phone numbers or these are people maybe who bought from them in the past, never bought again. We'll load this into this and we'll create a simple conversational text message bot that'll just say, hey, Richard, are you still interested in. Yeah. You inquired about getting a new roof on your business, you know, six months ago. Just curious if you're still interested. And if you, uh, if you reply, reply back, whatever you reply back, it understands the nature of what you're saying and it, it starts to converse with you, answering questions with the intent of booking a, an appointment with you on your calendar. Now this is, text messages are ten times better than emails for response rate. But also it would take, and it does take a lot of time, money and manpower to do this manually. And you've got inconsistency in different hours. So this is a relatively simple project, but we put this into effect and it makes a demonstrable impact on businesses, like really, really amazing return on investment if they're the right kind of criteria for somebody for that to work with.
I consider that a little task, like other little projects could just simply be, help me write my emails better, do marketing content or read articles.
At the other end of the scale. Like one of our clients is a wind farm.
They produce wind farms over in the Middle east and they came to us. And one of the things that our lead data scientist, machine learning engineer built was, I'm trying to think if I can do this justice because he's actually working on it right now, which is the ability to take all the data that comes in from all their topographical analyses, et cetera, and drop that into his machine learning model and make all types of highly advanced predictions on weather, weather patterns, profitability, et cetera, and things, things that would take them.
I think typically about 45 days of deep data analysis should be done within about an hour. Now, this is not yet completed, is something we are in the process of working on, et cetera, but it's very doable. We're about three quarters of the way done, and that's going to make an enormous change. I mean, this is a six figure project that they're paying us, but it is also something that's going to save them seven figures a year easily.
Those are two ends of the spectrum. But what I like to also say is I like to demystify and simplify what AI can do and it can't do. So I've got what I call this five bucket framework. The five buckets are real simple. I realized one day that, look, AI only helps you innovate in five different areas. Just five. I'll go through them real briefly, but then I'll go a little deeper. Thinking, creating, communicating, analyzing, automating. So the first two is where most people have been. Playing with chats helps you think and create. So the thinking piece could be brainstorm ideas, do research, come up with a million different ideas. I show people how to turn chat GPT into a virtual board member.
I think of all the thinking stuff as all the things the rest of the world doesn't see, like your customers and people don't see. It's just internal. Then the creating side is what, where this, once more is where most people are playing content copy, you know, marketing copy. It does. It creates text, audio, video, images, art combinations of all these, right? And even derivatives of these. And so a derivative would be, let's say you take this show and you upload it to a tool. Like, one of my favorite tools for this kind of stuff is castmagic. IO you go to cast magic, you upload the YouTube video or the raw video, and it goes in with all these pre created prompts, and it breaks down, it creates the titles, the show notes, the email newsletter, social media posts, and it creates all of this derivative content, articles out of this piece that you could have, you know, record once and then explode it out everywhere. Now, that's thinking and creating, but the other one's communicating. I just mentioned, you know, communicating via sms with prospects. So who do you want to communicate with? Well, you want to turn prospects into leads and leads into customers, and you want to support your customers and give them better customer service. And you want to communicate with your employees and your stakeholders and shareholders. And this can be done through chatbots, through email bots, or through voice agents. Call them voice bots or voice agents, where creating a virtual receptionist that's on 24 hours a day is very consistent. Now, the other two buckets are analysis. Analysis can be done either quantitative or qualitative. Quantitative. Analyze data, spreadsheets, etcetera. And it's like you're a data scientist in a box for a lot less money. I do this all the time. I'll run pro formas, I'll run analyses, et cetera. But I'll also do qualitative analysis. Maybe that's uploading a contract that I need to analyze and analyze it as an attorney would, or I'll upload a piece of sales copy or content and I'll say, analyze this for how persuasive it is and how engaging is this story I'm trying to do, like give me qualitative results or quantitative. The last bucket kind of ties everything together, and that's the automation bucket. And automation has been around for a long time. There's a lot of programs that do this. Some people are familiar with zapier.com and make.com, which are tools that, the technical term is robotic process automation. And that just means you can string together different programs and they can all talk to each other. But now these things integrate AI, so think of it as smart automation. So this was a real simple tool that I built for a client where occasionally he comes up with a quote and he just goes to a Google sheet or an airtable database, and he just drops in a quote that he likes. I don't know how you do one thing is how you do everything. And he walks away. Well, five minutes later, inside that database, a blog post written in his voice shows up and then gets posted to his social media accounts. And that blog post was inspired by the quote, but written in a certain way. So behind the scenes, what's happening is like, in this case, Zapier is watching for that quote to enter. It grabs the quote, it takes it over to OpenAI, it runs a prompt that we designed for them, which prompt is just instructions, and it says, use this as the seed of an article about this topic. Start with a story, introduce an anecdote, give the main lesson, end with a proverb style statement. So we structured in a way that it writes the way we want.
And then it automatically pushes it out to all of the social media. So now one quote becomes posts and graphics and all this other stuff that's smart automation. And it's a very microscopic, easy one to do, deep automation.
There's really no limit to it. So then what I try to do is when I'm working with customers once more looking for impactful projects, the first thing I do is I educate them on these five buckets, thinking, creating, communicating, analyzing and automating. And then I have them audit. Where are you spending the most time, money and mind share in this, in these areas. And if they're spending a lot of time creating copy or they have a lot of phone salespeople and, you know, the leads aren't getting qualified, et cetera, et cetera, we may just come up with, let's say five different potential AI style automated projects. So then we got some ideas and then I rank them. I got a little process called ice, stands for impact, confidence and ease. And I just say, okay, project one, if you're able to do this and it works on a level of one to ten kind of an impact would it have on your business? And they go, oh, it'd be great. It'd be like a nine. Like awesome. How confident are you in that? They may not be that confident. I mean they may be 100% sure if you can do this. We're rocking and rolling, that's a ten. And then the last one is, what's the level of ease, one to ten? Like if it's, we have to rate a mobile app, that might be a one. If we have to just install the program and push go, that might be a ten. So then at the end of these, these, this project scoring, okay, what impact was our confidence? How easy is it? We just sort it by the score and we go boom, here's your project plan. Because you just told me, here's five, here's ten projects, that would be nice. And then you just scored them. And the impact and ease they'll have on your business. Lets get to work. And so that is how we put the blinders on and we remove the noise from all the things you can do. And its a process where you little qualitatively what should we do and then quantitatively when should we do them?
Thats the process that I always follow both with myself, with my clients, etcetera.
But the other piece that I think is really important is just for most people who arent in the business like I am, is understanding whats possible. And thats really the foundation because you dont even know what to ask for if you didnt know it was possible.
I didnt even think about doing that. Holy crap. Lets put that into action. Thats a really big piece that I think a lot of people are trying to wrap their brains around is whats possible.
[00:48:43] Speaker B: Trey. Well, its interesting. You mentioned whats possible. And I think about some of the major more global oriented challenges. We have things like food, security.
Theres a lot of people in the world who maybe dont have the resources that we have here in North America. Things like fresh water, food, what have you housing, all those kinds of things that on a grand scale, if you look at a supply chain aspect and you had a big enough data set and you could see how things were moving through multiple countries and currencies, you could start to solve problems on a much bigger scale by implementing this tool thats doing a lot of the thinking for you. We can see the trends and see the things without the bias of maybe the individual that between, hey, while working with, trying to get things across to this dock over here in this country is a real pain because of some kind of regulation. So I think there's a lot of real power in what you've identified as possible, but the ability to think through things and say, okay, we know this is a problem, we're not sure how to solve the problem. There's a lot of who's that are out there that are working on it. How can we get this to start to take all of those ideas from those people, put it into the blender, stir it up a little bit, and come up with some direction and some plans around how we can actually start moving that dial forward.
[00:49:57] Speaker A: Absolutely. I couldn't agree more.
[00:49:58] Speaker B: I'm so pumped, Brad, about everything you share with us about AI and how it's working in your business. And not only that, but the way that you can begin to take an idea and implement it very quickly into real action. So if you're a business owner watching start to consider, how are you going to, you know, what's your AI strategy and how are you actually going to take those things, rate them as Brad has just taught us to do, so you can actually get that first thing that's going to make the biggest impact operational and moving forward in your business.
Brad, this was absolutely incredible. Thank you so much for being on the program today. I really appreciate all of your knowledge, all of your generosity and sharing with us. And for those of you watching, make sure to tune in next week as we continue to innovate and overcome.
