“Extremes Get Clicks”: What 3,000 Pros Just Told Us About AI vs. Google | Marcus Sheridan, Author of Endless Customers | Ep. 684
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I was 18 days on the road.
I spoke at nine different events.
I told every single audience member this question.
Raise your hand if you're using ChatGBT
as your preferred means of search
or getting answers today over Google.
50% of the audience of these 3,000 people
raised their hand for ChatGBT.
Now, where do you think this number's gonna go?
How do you reconcile that against authenticity, right,
and transparency?
Is there an argument to be said then of
if I didn't personally create the work,
AI assisted me, and or in some cases,
did it all without my intervention at some point,
that it's no longer authentic?
Again, let me stress,
it is very almost politically correct to say
that everything comes back to a human connection.
I don't really think that's true.
Let me explain.
One of the things that I enjoy most
about producing The Dealer Playbook is hearing from you.
The messages that I get of people
who are getting so much value out of the podcast,
applying it to their day-to-day workflows,
and finding a thriving career
right here in the retail auto industry.
It means the world to me.
And one of the ways that we make doing this possible
is through my agency, FlexDealer.
And of course, in the spirit of providing value,
I think this is a perfect time to head over
to www.flexdealer.com to show even further support for you,
my beloved DPB gang.
Right now, if you go to my website, flexdealer.com,
you can get a full free PDF
of my number one bestselling book, Don't Wait, Dominate.
And the reason I think it's so special
is that a lot of the topics that are discussed in this book
are even more relevant today than ever
with this surge in popularized AI
and people wondering, well, what can I do next?
How can I have a competitive advantage?
Well, that's all here in this book.
And so I'd love to be able to offer you a free copy of this
if you go to flexdealer.com.
It would mean the world to me
because that is how we continue to produce this show
for you.
♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh ♪
Marcus Sheridan is one of the most respected voices
in modern sales and marketing
as the author of They Ask, You Answer
and Endless Customers, which by the way,
you need to stay to the end of this episode
because I'm gonna tell you
how you can get a copy of this for free.
He has helped thousands of brands and business leaders
build trust through transparency and communication.
His work challenges how companies sell in the digital era
and prepares them to thrive in an AI-driven world.
I'm so excited to have you back on the show, Marcus.
Thanks for joining me.
Yeah, brother.
It is just a joy to be with you.
We haven't done this probably,
I'm guessing at least in three or four years, right?
Yeah, at least that, at least that.
Glad we can run it back, man.
You, I want to just take,
get a one-way ticket sometimes into your brain
because some of the things that you post,
I'm like, huh, you have so many things
that you post online that are just scroll stoppers for me,
you know, and I wanna read one of them
because it's gonna feed into the conversation today.
You actually posted this morning on LinkedIn,
which by the way, gang,
if you are not following Marcus Sheridan on LinkedIn,
you absolutely must.
You say, quick tip, don't fall for the AI haters
and don't fall for the zealots either.
The haters will tell you it's all hype,
no real progress, no real use cases, no real anything.
The zealots will tell you it's perfect,
utopia without jobs in five years,
which I, my algorithm is full of that.
Both get loud online because as well, as you well know,
quick streams get clicks and for most people,
once they start getting clicks,
they can't seem to turn back the dial,
so that explains exactly why I keep seeing it.
The attention is simply too addictive.
Meanwhile, nuance doesn't trend.
Balance doesn't go viral.
Just look at people in politics, same deal,
but here's what I know to be true.
You say AI is incredibly useful, powerful,
and life-changing when used correctly.
AI is incredibly frustrating, often unreliable,
and generally misunderstood.
Both things can be true.
It seems like you're advocating for,
there's a middle ground here and that middle ground
is actually what we need to be paying attention to.
Yeah, I mean, like at a macro level,
I think middle ground has become
almost frowned upon in society,
which is sad to me,
and there's this whole problem with,
if you're not with us, you're against us.
I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Just because I'm not with you 1% of the time
or 5% of the time or 10% of the time,
doesn't mean I'm not with you.
Like, get a grip, but we have become so obsessed
with differences that we have forgotten
that we're much, much more similar.
And if you look at the world of AI
and if you look at the world of technology right now,
you once again have the extremes
that are forming on both ends.
Again, it really mimics what happens
in the world politically speaking.
The fringes make the most noise
because they're able to speak oftentimes
in the most absolute of way, right?
And they can be full of headlines
because again, they're on the fringe
and they're like, once you hit the fringe,
it's like, I wanna be on the fringe all the time
because the fringe gets the click.
And then next thing is you're suddenly in a debate
with the president of France
as to whether or not his wife is a woman.
I mean, this is what happens.
This is what happens, dude.
Candace Owens just tuned into this podcast.
Yeah, it's like, come on now.
So my point is like, it's okay for you to say,
I think AI is life-changing.
I think it's going to affect just almost every facet
of the world in the future.
And it's gonna take some time
and it's got a lot of issues.
And it's going slower than many people would say,
like it should be going.
And we're probably not gonna have super intelligence
in the next two years.
It's probably not gonna happen.
It's like, okay, that's okay.
But you can't sit there and watch a Waymo go by,
as you're walking down the streets of Phoenix and say,
everything's just like it's always been, no way, man.
I mean, don't deny the thing that's happening
in front of your face.
It is wild though, how quickly we become so accustomed
to something that we don't appreciate.
It's called the law of familiarity
and it's been around forever.
It's like people have quickly become so familiar
with the internet.
It's like, we don't appreciate the internet anymore.
It's like, and then you have chat GPT.
It's like, oh, well, I can do that.
It's like, that's not a big deal.
No, it's a big freaking deal.
This is incredible progress that we've experienced
in a very, very short period of time.
So even though the futurists are for the most part,
all wrong, myself included, there's a lot of truth in it.
Yeah, you've talked a lot.
Like if I were to take some of the themes
of what you're advocating for, speaking about,
cautioning against or cautioning for,
it's, I mean, going back to where you started,
there was the pool business.
You used SEO best practices in that sense.
You were very current with that.
That lasted a long time.
Now you're advocating for like, hey,
don't ignore what's happening here and the impact of it,
which has kind of created this advocacy
for there is a definite tipping point to your point.
My toaster makes recommendations.
My blender is making recommendations on how I want.
Look at this.
All right, I just got off of, I was 18 days on the road.
I spoke at nine different events.
I had roughly 3,000 audience members
over the course of this 18 day stretch.
I told every single audience member this question.
Raise your hand if you're using ChatGBT
as your preferred means of search
or getting answers today over Google.
50% of the audience of these 3,000 people
raised their hand for ChatGBT.
Now, where do you think this number's gonna go?
What's wild, though, Michael,
is there's still SEO professionals out there
that are acting like nothing's happening.
This isn't gonna affect them.
I spoke at a home improvement conference the other day,
and apparently there was this one gal in the back
that was their head of SEO,
and I just said, Google, legacy Google is going to die.
We don't know when it's gonna die,
but we know it's dying because we know every single day
more and more people are moving over
from traditional Google to AI-based search,
and we know that's not gonna stop
and that the future is not gonna be people
clicking on a bunch of blue links on a screen.
It's gonna be getting answers faster.
That's where we're headed as humans.
I actually don't think that's a very smart take.
I think it's very, very obvious.
If you just look at humans, we run away from friction.
We go to faster, friction-free
is what we're trying to achieve, always, as humans.
That's the way that we're wired.
I don't think that's an extraordinarily intelligent take,
but my chief of staff was there with me at this event,
and she just happened to talk to this lady,
this SEO lady, after the fact.
She didn't know she was my chief of staff,
and my chief of staff says, what do you think?
She's like, I didn't like this guy at all.
He said Google was going to die,
and here's what's funny, too.
People hear what they wanna hear, right?
Because what I said was Google itself,
although yes, eventually they're gonna die
because all companies die eventually,
but Google itself may end up winning the war that is AI,
but in terms of legacy search, blue links,
that's not the future.
This is also why you talk to businesses
left, right, front, and center,
they're saying I'm spending more on paid ads
than I've ever spent,
and I'm seeing less results than I've ever seen.
Cost per click, cost per lead, cost per acquisition,
customer, goes up every single year of the last five years.
So this is like, we can't ignore these things.
They're obvious.
It doesn't mean that SEO doesn't matter today.
It just means it's dying.
It can matter, and it can be dying.
Both can be true, and that's the thing
I've tried to help people understand,
is have a little bit of balance in your thought,
in your reasoning.
Don't be so freaking married to what you used to believe
that you can't change.
Like, I wrote this book called They Ask, You Answer.
It has helped hundreds of thousands of companies now
become more known and trusted through content,
and I talk all about blogging and content marketing
and websites, and I am the guy now saying
that you can't continue to do everything
you read in that book and expect to get
extraordinary results.
You've gotta pivot, you've gotta evolve with the market.
The market doesn't wait for us to say,
yeah, but I put my stake in the ground on this.
Sure, that's fine.
Okay, so you put your stake in the ground.
Pull it out, move your dang stake.
Right, this is an interesting thing
I've been thinking about.
I don't know if it's a fully reconciled thought process,
but it makes me think, well,
as long as there are human beings on this planet
that have hearts in their chests,
at some point, the point of all of this content,
AI, whatever, is gonna be to speed up human interaction
because that's the thing that,
when I really think about it, I crave.
You know, I look at the pandemic.
Our kid, the school shut down in Canada.
The kids do Zoom school.
I would have never guessed in a million years
that at some point, there was a breaking point
for high school students that were like,
I just wanna be in a room with another human being.
And I think about that in terms of business.
Well, why am I doing any of this?
Why am I thinking about it?
Why do I want to be relevant?
Why do I wanna do these things?
Well, because at some point, especially with AI,
perhaps it's gonna speed up human interaction,
and in that interaction, there's trust,
and in trust, there's transaction and relationship
and all those sorts of things.
What's your take?
Well, this is a really interesting subject.
Again, let me stress,
it is very almost politically correct
to say that everything comes back to a human connection.
I don't really think that's true.
Let me explain.
I was talking to my daughter the other day.
She's 25 years old.
And she says to me,
Dad, I would prefer, when it comes to customer service,
I'd prefer to work with AI over a human.
And I said, okay, tell me about that.
Of course, I'm not gonna.
I have a very curious mind.
People could come up to me and they could say,
the earth is flat and I've got proof.
And I would say, tell me all about it.
But that's literally what I would say.
Because I love to hear how people think
and how they reason.
She says, the biggest reason is I do not feel judged
by AI when I ask it questions.
Now, see, this is the part that people misunderstand.
I have people consistent,
because I teach on AI a lot.
And they'll say, I would always rather work with a human.
We'll just pose a simple question.
So if you had a choice,
and you could work with a human,
and it took you 30 minutes to get the answer,
and you could work with AI,
and it took you 30 seconds to get the answer,
which would you choose?
Right, yeah, 30 seconds.
Now, that's 99 out of 100 are gonna say,
I want it faster, 30 seconds.
Now, how about this scenario?
If you had a choice,
and you could get the answer from a human in three minutes,
but the human was a little bit grumpy,
or you could get the answer from AI in three minutes,
and the AI, it wasn't grumpy,
it just, you knew it was AI.
In fact, it was very consistently happy,
but it was AI.
Who would you work with then?
If I ask anyone, have you ever worked with a grumpy person
on the other end of the line before?
100%.
Have you ever worked with somebody
that you couldn't really understand
what they were trying to tell you?
100%.
So you can't tell me
that we wanna talk to a human every time.
That's not actually true.
What we want and where we're gonna settle,
again, it goes back to the,
I wanna remove friction,
I wanna remove fear,
I want it to be faster.
Those three things.
That's where we're gonna go,
and if the human provides that,
that's where we're gonna go.
If the AI provides that,
that's where we're going to go.
The issue is a lot of folks
have not had a good AI experience yet,
not because AI is necessarily bad,
but whoever trained that AI or built that AI
didn't really know what they were doing,
wasn't a great experience,
but you talk to anybody
that's had a really powerful experience
with a well-trained, well-designed AI,
and suddenly they're like,
that was incredible.
That was amazing.
And again, we have this recency bias
that what happens is we'll use it,
it won't be a good experience,
and we're like, well, AI sucks for that.
Okay, maybe it sucks today.
It's not gonna suck in 60 days,
90 days, whatever it is.
It's constantly evolving.
You have to have a very short memory with AI
because it is evolving,
and it's evolving really, really fast.
So you can't just have a blanket judgment
and say AI stinks at, isn't good at,
can't be like, it blows my mind
when people say AI is not creative.
What are you talking about?
I am more creative right now,
I would argue, than I've ever been using AI.
I think it's incredibly creative.
And I built a bunch of tools
that help people to be more creative with AI.
And somebody might well say,
well, that's the antithesis of being creative.
I don't agree with you.
We don't agree with that.
That's totally fine, right?
At the same time, I see how flawed it is.
I get all that stuff.
But to say, I only wanna talk with a human,
I do not wanna talk, not true.
Absolutely not true.
Hey, does your marketing agency suck?
Listen, before we hop back into this episode,
I know you know me as the host of The Dealer Playbook,
but did you also know that I'm the CEO of FlexDealer,
an agency that's helping dealers
capture better quality leads from local SEO
and hyper-targeted ads that convert.
So if you wanna sell more cars
and finally have a partner that's in it with you
that doesn't suck, visit flexdealer.com.
Let's hop back into this episode.
Interesting.
It brings up for me,
because that really actually challenged
some of the way that I think about things.
I've dealt with poor AI,
and in that interaction,
I wish I could just talk to a human,
but it keeps spinning me around to a help base article,
and I'm like, this isn't working.
Not good.
Terrible experience, but is, again, to your point,
is that the fault of AI?
That is not a representative.
It's like walking into a church
and one of its members is rude to you,
and you're like, this church stinks.
No, that's actually not true.
You just have screwed up people that go to every church.
Doesn't mean that that religion or that church is bad.
Right.
I mean, it reminds me of just a couple of years ago,
I was on business in Pakistan, of all places,
and did I believe some of the propaganda?
Yes, I did.
It was like, sure, people, we got there, man.
It was as calm as a summer's morning,
and everyone was so apologetic.
They're like, we know we got a bad rap,
but that's like not all of us.
Like, we're actually just kind of normal people
who want to raise our families and, you know, everybody.
And that's how I think about AI.
It's like, that's not the fault of AI.
That's a really interesting take.
How do you reconcile that against authenticity, right,
and transparency?
Is there an argument to be said then
of if I didn't personally create the work,
AI assisted me and, or in some cases,
did it all without my intervention at some point,
that it's no longer authentic?
And do we have a desire for that as humans?
I can't even believe I asked that question
with as humans in the end.
It's too sci-fi for me.
It's actually quite, I think it's appropriate.
I love the question, but I've thought about this one a lot.
Yeah.
I have a company that, one of my companies,
is, does communication training.
So we train leaders, we train salespeople,
and we train account managers how to connect deeply
with their audience when trust, okay?
And one of the subjects that I oftentimes have to teach
is the idea of, what the word performative means,
performative, which is gonna align
with your take on authenticity in a minute, okay?
So I would ask you this question, Michael.
I'm not trying to catch you in a snare right now.
I just wanna know your take.
Yeah.
Are you being performative right now?
How dare you?
How dare you?
I mean, no, and well, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.
Okay.
Fascinating, isn't it?
Yeah.
I'll tell you this, I'm being performative right now.
I am performing what I feel is the appropriate energy,
the appropriate engagement style
that this audience needs right now.
Right.
I am extremely focused.
I am not being distracted by anything else.
If I'm having a bad day outside of this moment,
you're not gonna know it.
Right.
I am performing right now.
Have you ever been on the road before, Michael,
and you FaceTimed your kids, you were utterly exhausted,
and yet you put like this massive smile on your face?
You ever done that?
Yeah, yeah.
Why did you do that?
Because they don't, what's happening in my environment
shouldn't affect them.
It's weird, it's like it's none of their business.
Yeah, it's like it won't help them.
It won't help them.
Because your commitment is to be the best dad
in the world to your kids.
That's commitment, because I know you.
I know how you roll.
Yeah.
That was your commitment.
So some people could say,
is that actually being authentic?
If your kids say, dad, how was your day?
You're gonna say, oh, baby, it was a great day.
No, day sucked.
But you, you are gonna be what they need in that moment.
I have people, when we're training folks on how to,
might be a leader on how to give a more effective meeting
or how to give the keynote speech or a salesperson
how to show up with the prospect.
Yeah.
Sometimes people say, well, that's not really who I am.
Really.
Because oftentimes what will happen is we,
we conflate the characteristics from principles.
Let me give you one more example of this.
And I promise this is, hopefully, hopefully,
I'm not being like esoteric for people right now,
but it's like, I have a daughter that's 18.
She started teaching dance this last year.
Now her entire life, we have struggled with her to speak up.
And she would always say,
because she'd be in the back of the car,
mom and I are in front of the car.
Couldn't hear her very well.
Honey, can you speak up?
Well, that's not, just not my voice.
That's not who I am.
Okay.
All right, okay.
She's good.
She does this dance class.
And it's like six year old girls.
Okay.
Comes back from the first, first class where she taught.
How'd it go?
It's tough.
It's tough.
I struggled for the girls to hear me.
Okay.
What are you gonna do about it?
Well, if I don't, if I don't do something,
I don't know how this is gonna go.
Comes back the next session.
Hey, I'm learning to project my voice.
Really?
Tell me about that.
Yeah.
I mean, they're like hearing me now
and I'm really just like putting it out there.
Okay.
So what's the lesson in that, sweetheart?
Right?
So the point is she might have naturally a soft voice,
but what she needs to be in the moment
of teaching six year old girls dance is more authority,
more projection, otherwise she will not be heard.
Is that performative?
Is that authentic?
Well, to me, that is exactly what the audience needs.
It's being authentic to a value.
The value is I'm going to give this audience
what the audience needs.
Sometimes, again, we conflate authentic
with being utterly honest.
You see, there's a whole lot of things
that I don't necessarily talk about on LinkedIn,
but people consider me authentic.
Just like I don't believe brands should be political.
I don't think that is appropriate for brands.
Why?
Because unless your employees,
every single one of them signed up
for that particular political belief,
I don't think you should espouse it as a brand.
Unless they know, hey, this is how we are,
this is what you're signing up for,
then I'm like totally okay.
Then it's a co-op.
But otherwise, my organizations are gonna be
apolitical in nature, ideally,
because I don't wanna speak for my team
unless they've given me permission to speak for them.
Do you see what I'm saying?
Now, am I being authentic as a brand right there?
I think I am being very authentic as a brand
because my obsession as a leader
is to have a very close team
and focus on the things that bring us together,
not take us apart.
That's how I roll with everything.
That's why so much of my stuff is,
obviously, I've been affected
by all the things that I've seen over the past,
well, since COVID, and all the things since then,
and how everything, there's this energy pulling people away.
I'm like, don't fall for it, guys.
Don't fall for it.
AI is just one example of this.
Bottom line is this.
I think we're all performing all the time.
I know I am.
But hopefully, the way I'm performing
is what is needed in that moment
to hold true to my values as a human,
as a person, to others.
That, to me, is the definition of authenticity.
That's how I roll.
Okay, well, I'll see myself out.
I'll get out of here, big dog.
No, but isn't that interesting?
Have you always been a deep thinker?
Because where you go and how you return back
is someone that says, hey, yeah,
the front of this object is interesting,
but I need to examine the other side first,
because there's another story over there.
And I don't find that happens with a lot of people.
People are just very good at face value,
which I think a lot of the AI conversation
has been out there.
I appreciate the question.
I really appreciate questions that don't get asked often
and that make someone think.
I am in lots of interviews.
And if a question comes my way,
that makes me stop, think, look up.
That's a sign that, hey, I'm actually learning
something about myself here,
which it's like props to you as a leader.
And so as an interviewer as well,
I would say I just don't immediately,
I'm not looking to be contrarian,
but I very much believe in the agency of the mind,
my mind, and our greatest gift,
I think, that we've been given as humans
is the ability to choose, right?
I would call that agency, right?
And when I hear someone give an opinion
or someone's, like the masses have an opinion on something,
I'm not just going to say, that's true.
I'm going to try to look at it and form my own opinion
because I, again, have been given the agency
to think that, to feel that,
which is why, not to hit politics too much,
but the type of person that I want to talk to politically,
all I have to do is ask one question to the person.
Have you ever disagreed with anything that your party said?
If the answer is like, no,
then I don't want to talk politics with that person
because they're not thinking for themselves.
I want to talk to people
that have core beliefs for themselves.
And then I'm like, okay, yeah, yeah.
And they're like, the most fascinating ones
are the ones that are across the spectrum.
Like they just, they have, you couldn't label them
simply because it's like,
wow, this person really is a free thinker.
And they just follow the masses.
They're just not told to do something.
And then they naturally say, okay,
well, despite what my core belief is,
I'm going to just ignore that now.
And suddenly I'm going to start believing this thing
or saying this thing.
No, no, I want you to be an agent.
I want to be an agent of my thoughts.
I'm free to choose how I think.
I need to study it out.
I need to ponder the thing.
But then suddenly I can have something that is mine,
but at the same time can evolve with time.
There's another part of society.
It's like, we've gotten to this point where it's like,
we're not allowed to just like backtrack.
We're not allowed to say, you know what?
I've changed my mind.
I think it's awesome when you change your mind.
I would certainly like to think
that we're all evolving in a positive way,
which means if you're not changing your opinion on things,
you're probably not thinking hard enough.
You're being told what to think.
At that point, you've lost your agency.
I just, I just had this conversation yesterday.
In fact, you know, my daughter and I have a lot
of conversations about this and fun side note,
we're building AI for our inventory software lift kit.
And it's ARIA, which stands for
Automated Response Inventory Assistant.
But ARIA is also Aria's name, my daughter's name.
That's pretty dumb, dude.
I like that.
Cool, right?
It was a happy side effect.
We didn't plan that.
It just kind of happened.
Or did we plan it 12 years ago when she was born?
And we were talking about this exact topic, agency.
The greatest ability is that no one in heaven or hell
will infringe on my agency.
I have the ability to make my own choices.
And similarly, I think about it, what you just said.
Why are we so okay with motivational quotes?
Like, my old friend said I changed.
I took it as a compliment, right?
And then all of a sudden, we don't also wanna change
at the same time.
If I didn't change or evolve as a human being,
to your point, I would still only eat plain noodles.
And everything about me is an evolved creature.
It comes with identity and tribe, right?
Because many people inherently wanna feel
like they belong to something bigger than themselves.
That's why it's always funny to me
when somebody says I'm not religious.
I'm like, yeah, you are.
You have a religion, you just don't go to church.
You're religious because it's the same concept,
same principles.
They've really latched on to a thing
that makes them have in their mind value
and add value to the world, right?
But everybody wants to be a part of a tribe.
And so because of that, sometimes when the tribe
goes a different way, we end up questioning our identity.
Now, it's like, am I still in that?
Am I still in that tribe?
If I don't completely follow everything they say or do.
And look, this is one of those things
where I don't propose to have the answer on all things.
But I do think that I don't wanna be the type
that is an immediate doubter,
but I don't also wanna be the type
that is an immediate agreer with all things.
I really meant what I said.
I wanna hear it, I wanna ponder it, I wanna study it,
and then I wanna exercise my agency
to make a choice for how I am,
knowing that I could change that over the course of time.
AI is a perfect example of this.
There are so many people that are going to end up
hurting their business leaders
because they're not even willing to have the conversation.
They're not willing to think about it, right?
And it's like, okay, well, this is the matrix.
Come on now.
My fiduciary obligation as a business owner
is to meet the market where the market is,
to stay in front of it as much as possible
so as to protect the company, the brand,
and all the employees therein.
That's what I need to do.
So I'm not gonna sit there with an ostrich,
like an ostrich with my head in the sand,
this ain't coming, when it's clearly coming.
I'm not gonna sit there and say Google's gonna last forever
when it's not gonna last forever.
I'm not going to do that,
even if it hurts people's feelings
because it questions their identity.
Going back to the SEO gal that was so upset with me,
her identity, her tribe was being questioned.
So she took that as almost like an assault
and a front on who she was.
Whereas I have this uncanny ability
to just quickly uncouple from anything that I was before
or believed before.
If I sell a business, I'm not sitting there thinking
about that business for a long, long, I'm moving on.
I'm just like, I'm a very much look forward type of guy,
for better or for worse, that's how I am.
I don't sit there and dwell a lot on the past.
I wanna learn from my mistakes from the past,
but I don't wanna live in the past, right?
Because that's not going to help me.
And as a total, like tangent, which that's obviously
by this point, anybody that's still with us knows that,
okay, there's tangents here, but I appreciate them.
I mean, I have learned,
now I wasn't the one that said this,
but I clearly learned that it's our present
that dictates the story of our past,
not our past that dictates our present.
And so many people think, it's like, okay,
so because this and this happened to me,
now it has defined me in this way.
Well, that's very significant
because that's essentially saying
my agency has been stripped.
I can no longer choose who I am
because I am handcuffed by the acts of the past.
Whereas, as you know, Michael,
there are things that happened to you younger,
whether it was marriage or childhood or whatever,
that you had an interpretation of
in that moment when it happened.
And your interpretation today of that is very different
because you have changed.
The act itself did not change.
What changed was your mindset on that thing.
So in a moment, this is also why many people
that go through catastrophic events
that changes their entire life end up saying later on,
I wouldn't change it because I want to be who I am today.
But in the moment, they hated the thing, right?
It's a terrible thing.
I think it's important to have that perspective as well.
There's change happening in me
over the course of this conversation.
In what way?
Well, you pose things in a very, very compelling way,
but similar to the formula that you've articulated,
I'm grateful for my desire and ability to pause
and challenge what I hear against what I thought I knew.
And I mean, what you just said,
I would not be here in this moment doing what I'm doing
if I didn't do that constantly.
And it kind of brings us right back to the beginning,
this middle ground idea where I can live
in the middle ground comfortably
because I'm able to examine both narratives
at the same time,
understanding they're not mutually exclusive
and formulate my own position.
And position to me, I think so many people,
their identity gets locked up in,
you know, like we were talking about,
political parties and religion.
That becomes their religion.
It becomes a religion.
It's like, I am going to be an AI zealot, right?
You know, AI means no jobs, utopia, live forever, right?
Whatever that thing is.
I'm like, but that same person is ignoring oftentimes,
not all of them, but oftentimes they end up ignoring
many of the drawbacks that are with it right now.
You know, it's like, I, for example,
I'm attempting to use AI agents all the time.
For the most part, I have been pretty disappointed.
Okay, I've been pretty disappointed.
Now, that doesn't mean that they don't work
and they're not really good on certain applications,
but for the most part, they're not great yet.
And that's okay because that also says to me,
all right, but I do know they're gonna be good
and I'm gonna start to figure this out now
so that I'm not constantly playing this game of catch up,
which is what, again, most businesses
and most business owners are gonna be coming from a,
a strong place of catch up.
You know, it's like, there's gonna be people
five years from now that are obsessed with SEO
and they're not even thinking about AI SEO
and they're gonna be wondering like,
well, why is this not working at all
and how come I can't generate leads for my business?
Well, because again, you just said,
this is the thing that's worked for years
and my SEO company said that this AI thing
wasn't gonna be a big deal and it wasn't gonna affect SEO
and Google's gonna be here forever
and they're, you know, they're scoring $350 billion a year
in profits, so hey, I think they're gonna be just fine.
It's like, actually, it's not how it really works, right?
I think about, I mean, our business wouldn't exist to the,
let me back up, my brain's moving faster than my mouth.
The compounding effect of what you're talking about,
hey, I don't know fully where AI's gonna end up
but I do know that I need to be aware,
I need to be playing with it,
I'm gonna be disappointed a lot,
I'm gonna try and I'm gonna fail
and I'm gonna learn things
but there's a compounding effect here of learning
that eventually becomes a deeper level of understanding
which, you know, I believe understanding
is the pinnacle of learning when I really just understand.
And the reason I will get ahead
is because I put the reps in
and there is something to be said
of getting the reps in early and often
versus, you know, like I think about this.
Most people don't, I think, realize
that we started playing around with AI
in like, what, 1941 or something like that?
Everything moves really slow
until it doesn't all of a sudden
and if you are perpetually not paying attention
and not playing with and learning
and trying and failing and testing,
the way you, that's the recipe,
what I'm taking from this is that's the recipe
to feeling left out and feeling like things move too fast
because all of a sudden you started paying attention
when it stole the narrative.
Man, that's such a great point.
When I started producing content
about my journey as a pool guy in 2009
and started using the phrase, they ask, you answer,
I made so many millionaires, dude.
Like, of people that have come to me 10, 15 years later now
and said, you know, Mark, it's like,
you really made me a millionaire.
I did the thing.
If those same, like, if somebody read the same book today
and applied it the exact same way today,
might they be a millionaire?
Maybe, right?
But not as easily as they would have been
in those early days of me talking about this stuff, right?
And it's like, this is what we tend to see.
But the problem is, what happens is,
we make a couple bets and the bets don't fly
and so then once again,
we just allow this weird human thing to get in the way
and we just blanket.
We have this, like, blanket opinion.
It's like, oh, it all must be hogwashed.
No, no, no, no, man.
That didn't work or that didn't pan out.
It's like, you know, it was a few years ago,
we were talking.
You remember everybody got, like,
a virtual reality headset for, like, Christmas one year?
It's like five, six years ago.
We're all like, this is gonna be,
this is gonna take over the world.
I'm gonna buy cars in the metaverse, man,
dressed up like a gorilla.
Okay, that's not happening right now.
Could it happen in the future?
It definitely could.
Is Ready Player One still a strong option?
Definitely could be, right?
So the timeframe, the event horizon was very off
of what everybody predicted there, myself included.
You know, I was actually,
that's one of the ones I missed on
was how quickly VR would become a big deal.
I can still look at it, though, today and laugh.
I can say it's probably gonna still be a big deal
in the future.
It's inevitable.
I do think, actually, VR is gonna be very, very big.
I think it's got a long runway.
But what I did do is I tried it early,
and then early, I was willing to get off of the train
because I didn't marry myself to it,
as I never generally do.
And I said, okay, here's, like,
there's all these adoption problems with it,
so it's not gonna be practical in the short term.
Keep your eye open, but don't invest in VR, AR today.
There, for the most part.
Most of you shouldn't be investing in it.
Fine, great.
Like, that's it, moving on.
And by the way, if you are still playing with it,
are you just always motion sick?
Are you always, 17 seconds in there,
and my kids go, how are you not able to live in here?
And I'm like, dude.
Yeah, there's a moment where every single video
we saw online was your grandmother,
like, you know, like, rolling around on the floor
because she had some VR, like, battle
and had never used it before
and couldn't disconnect the senses, right?
You haven't seen a video like that for, like,
five years now.
It's just funny how that changed.
But again, it's like, I'm not pointing back at that,
like, ha ha, you were all wrong.
You failed.
Gee.
It's like, just look at it for what it was
and what it will be.
Yes, it's gonna still be a big deal.
This is a long runway here.
I think of the iteration, too, just since that time.
You know, if the Zuck didn't come out with the thing,
the Meta Horizon or whatever it's called,
if he didn't do that, potentially would not be coming out
with the new iteration of the Meta Glasses
that have, you know, the screen built in that, you know?
And so they needed that development
in order to advance their clarity
or their position or their understanding
of where they wanted to go.
And that's part of the iteration process.
I mean, this happens with all types of businesses,
all types of companies and technologies.
Oftentimes, we get into business,
we think we know what we are,
and the market shows us, actually,
we're something very different.
You know, I've developed a couple software companies
over the last year, actually, really.
And both times, I thought I knew what they were
going into it, and they evolved as the market shows us
what it's actually supposed to become.
But we have to go through those things.
Again, didn't mean that that initial phase
where we had, you know, different like vision
and goals and all these things, it wasn't a waste.
It just evolved.
That's the whole idea.
But if you're not paying attention,
then you don't evolve, and that's the problem.
If you're burying your head in the sand, that's a problem.
Just don't do that.
If you're not remaining open to what's possible, right?
If you're allowing your personal opinion,
script smart business decisions.
These are all the things
that you have to be very, very careful of.
Nobody really cares if you don't watch video.
Your buyer is.
Nobody cares if you aren't using AI.
Many, not all, but many of your buyers are,
and eventually all will be, right?
These are the inevitables that are coming.
So, okay, well, how do I prepare for that?
What do I need to do?
Well, you need to get into the sandbox.
That's what you need to do.
You need to stop treating AI like it's a tool.
I don't actually like calling it a tool at all
because I don't call my employees tools.
I certainly don't call AI a tool.
And AI, the whole problem with the way people use it
is they treat it like a tool, like it's Google.
It ain't a tool.
It ain't Google.
Treat it like it is a literal assistant
that is next to you in the office
that is as smart as anything in the world.
It's just slightly different.
Kind of like on the spectrum, if you will.
And so you kind of work with it.
But if you had somebody that was an assistant genius to you,
right, a genius, and they were working for you for free,
you would say, all right, well,
tell me about what you can do.
And they would tell you,
and then it would ask you questions,
and you'd answer them, and you'd go back and forth.
And that's what would happen.
With AI, most people don't go back and forth.
They don't say, ask me questions.
That's a huge, huge mistake.
But if you just go into AI with,
listen, I got no idea how to use you right,
but I wanna use you right.
And I want you to ask me any question you need to ask me
so as to help me improve my life.
That's starting point, right there.
That's the starting point.
The starting point ain't, hey, go write me an article.
No, that's not the starting point.
The starting point is having a conversation with it
like it's a real assistant and having a back and forth,
figuring each other out, and then producing stuff.
It's actually interesting you say that.
One of my business partners and I this week
had been talking about how good deep research
in GPT has gotten.
Huge value.
And the first thing it does is it asks you
four or five clarifying questions.
And just this morning in a team meeting,
he's our COO at one of our companies
and an all team meeting, and he's like,
hey guys, imagine what would happen
to our customer partnerships
if instead of just saying yes to every request,
you paused and asked three, four, five clarifying questions.
Isn't that great?
And we got it from GPT deep research.
Yes.
Yes, and that is so incredibly true.
And that's the mindset we should have.
That's just good interaction 101,
good communication 101.
Listen, guys, I've, like anybody that's listening to this,
for those that are the AI doomsdayers and the naysayers,
it's okay to say I'm worried about the future,
I'm worried about where all this is headed,
and at the same time, for you to use the thing
and take advantage of the thing.
Perfect case in point.
AI is already solving health complications
that humans couldn't piece together.
This is already happening.
There's been proven evidence of it.
I'm of the camp, and this is purely speculation, of course,
but I'm of the camp that the cure for cancer already exists.
We just have too much data that any single person
or persons can compile well enough to say,
oh, there's the patterns.
Now we see it all come together so that we have the cure,
whereas AI is gonna do that.
So let's say that, just hypothetically,
let's say that it does cure cancer,
or certainly helps it, facilitates it,
speeds it up by 30 years, whatever it is.
How many of you right now would say,
okay, I'll walk away from my career
and do something different for that to be possible?
I know I would.
I would in a second.
So it's like you can't, for those that are saying
it's killing jobs, it's killing this, it's killing that,
you can't also, in the same breath,
say, but I don't want its benefits.
And we're just starting to taste the benefits.
When it comes to the health breakthroughs,
and that's the thing we all have in common
because we all know someone with cancer.
We've all been affected by cancer
in some way, shape, or form.
When that happens, and we start to see
those major worldwide health breakthroughs,
and they're gonna come, I think they're very inevitable,
a lot of people are gonna have to eat crow
and look in the mirror and say,
oh gee, what's my identity now?
Because I want to benefit from it too.
I want my uncle, my mother, my father, myself
to be able to experience that technology.
At the same time, I've been the person here
that's been complaining the whole time
that it's the end of the world and it's taking jobs.
Okay, which one was it?
Brings us right back to where we started
in a lot of ways, right?
Which is it's okay to be in the middle,
and don't let anyone try to say that it's weak
having a perspective that sees both sides of the thing.
This doesn't mean inaction, by the way.
Doesn't mean you don't have strong opinions.
But it just means you are thorough in the way you approach.
Oh my gosh.
It's so true.
I was thinking about this in relation to,
and this could be seen as a polarizing statement,
but I was thinking about it even during the pandemic.
I don't care if you're vax or anti-vax or whatever it is,
but it brings in a moral debate
in which you have to decide,
well, what is my position?
I look at the pandemic, for example.
Here's my polarizing statement.
All of the people that at one point
were mad at the pharmaceutical companies
for how much they charged for medications
is also the exact reason why they were able
to produce a vaccine in under a year.
Because they had the resources and the finances to do it.
And I say that not to create a polarizing statement
for the audience and lose audience,
but what you just said makes me think,
hey, you can be in the middle.
You don't have to be so polar opposite
of everything all the time.
You can be annoyed with how much they make
and also be grateful that you were one of the ones
that were the beneficiary of it.
Yeah, and to really push the controversial button
for a second.
You could attack Joe Biden and praise him
and attack Donald Trump and praise him
and be the same person.
But most people, frankly,
have lost the intellectual maturity to do both.
Because we're so tribal,
because we're so like, I hate that side.
I'm not gonna play that game.
Again, I'm not gonna allow everyone else's emotions
to prevent me from seeing the good
that each one of these people has done.
Because it is definitive that both presidents
had done good and have also probably made bad choices.
And that's true for pretty much every leader
in the history of the world.
That's how it works.
That's what leadership is.
It's a series of good and bad choices,
much of which is judged by history after the fact, right?
And not so much in the moment even.
And that's how it'll always be.
That's why most people refuse to be leaders.
They'd rather complain than to actually be the one
with that pressure on their shoulders.
Ooh, I mean, think of how deep that goes.
Because as a Christian,
they still at a time in our world's history,
there was a group of people
who had enough of a polarizing opinion
that they crucified Christ
because they saw him as the outlier,
as a hippie, as somebody that was just screwing things up.
He was preaching a different point of view.
And he was preaching a different point of view.
And I'm like, wow, I think about that.
It depends on what side of history you're on
and what hindsight you have,
that shapes a different opinion.
But I mean, just recently flying back home from business,
apparently there is a massive Jewish community,
synagogue, camp, something around Dallas.
And we were on a plane with about 487,000 Jews
like from JFK.
And we got to sit next to some of them
because they were all wearing very traditional attire.
And we got to ask them,
what are all the threads mean and what?
And here you have two groups of people
who have two different views on Jesus Christ.
But we were still able to come together
and have a very productive and enjoyable
and interesting conversation about it.
It's a beautiful thing.
About him.
Beautiful thing.
I just think that to me is so powerful.
We can't lose that ability.
Because truth be told,
so many of these people that we think we dislike,
if we sat down with them in a coffee shop or a bar
or wherever it might be at a kitchen table
and just had a chat,
we'd probably find the person was actually rather enjoyable.
And I found that we agreed on way more
than we did not agree on.
That's the thing.
That's what's so wild about it.
Yeah, we're seeing it.
We're seeing it.
We're seeing it in business.
I mean, you layer in one's ability.
You know, when you take such a strong position,
AI zealot or AI hype or whatever it is,
and then you've tied your finances to that position,
that's what makes it really difficult.
But I mean, you've evolved and have,
I would argue grown tremendously from a financial position.
I know I have, by the way,
you talk about they ask you answer.
Before I forget, I have to give you props for this
because you mentioned all the millionaires
as a result of they ask you answer.
I need you to know before our time runs out
that A, I'm one of them
because of your encouragement and your words.
B, there is not a proposal that goes out from my businesses
that doesn't have your name in them.
And I know we don't get to connect as often.
You're globe trotting and we're all doing our things,
but I think it's so tremendous
because you've always been an encourager
and challenged the narrative.
And I thank you immensely for that
because I do sincerely mean it.
The impact that you've had on my ability to provide
and my ability to think critically
about some of these things.
This to me is a continuation of the conversation.
It is, yeah.
It is, you have found a way to evolve
and there's nothing more scary I've found
than putting words in print that then lives forever,
but you've found a way to make a continuation of that
and to evolve your position.
Tell me a little bit about the motivator of-
Endless customers.
Endless customers.
Yeah, it was just, as soon as Chattopadhyay came out,
as soon as Chattopadhyay came out,
I started getting a lot of questions from people that said,
what does this mean for They Ask, You Answer?
What does this mean for content?
What does this mean for blogging?
What does this mean for social?
What does this mean for websites?
All the above, right?
What does this mean for my marriage?
What does it mean for-
Yeah.
You're getting all the questions.
Well, you know, They Ask, You Answer.
So I said, I answered by writing the newest edition to it.
The hard part is, of course,
even writing about AI, it's almost impossible.
Because by the time a book gets published,
it could be very outdated.
So I was trying to focus as much as I could on principles
over very specific, let's call it practices or platforms.
And so that's why this book has a companion guide
for anything that could just become outdated tomorrow.
We put it in the companion guide.
Like, what's the best tools for such and such AI?
Or best prompts for this, right?
You know, I don't even know if we're gonna be using
the word prompts in three years.
So if that's the case, I wanted the book
to become more principle-driven.
It really is a system to become the most known
and trusted brand in your market.
Full stop, that's what it is.
It's a system to become the most known
and trusted brand in your market.
And there's four pillars it's built upon.
Real simple, you gotta be willing to say online
what others in your space are not willing to say.
You gotta be more open, honest, transparent.
Number two, you gotta be willing to show with video
what others in your space aren't willing to show.
Number three, you gotta be willing to sell
in a way others aren't willing to sell.
And number four, you gotta be more human
than others are willing to be.
So I'm literally saying use technology more
and be more human in the book.
And I believe that we succeed in showing people
how to do that in the book.
It's a system that any business, B2B or B2C,
product or service, can apply.
I've seen it work many, many times
because it's rooted in trust.
And trust is gonna be the battle we're all in
as long as we're in this thing called business.
That's not gonna go away.
The platforms will come and go,
the Googles of the world, the ChatGPTs of the world,
they're gonna come and go.
What will not come and go is the need
to generate more trust in the marketplace.
That is eternal, that is evergreen as a company,
and therefore that's where your obsession should be.
And so that's why you should consistently
be saying to yourself, if we did this,
I know no one's ever done it before,
but if we did, would it induce more trust?
And if the answer's yes, you're like, okay, let's play.
Let's see where this goes.
Oh, okay, well, you definitely need to get a copy
of this book for those that are listening and watching.
Hey, we're gonna do something.
If you would entertain me,
if you're getting value from the show,
I would love an honest review on Spotify or Apple.
All you gotta do is screenshot that
once you've submitted it, send it to us,
michaelatthedealerplaybook.com.
We're gonna be giving away, I don't know,
let's say 10 free copies of this book
to the first 10 people that do that.
And I wanna get it into your hands
because it's a game changer.
Marcus, how can those listening
and watching connect with you?
Yeah, you can find me, marcusatmarcussheridan.com
is my email.
My website's marcussheridan.com.
And you should connect with me,
as Michael mentioned, on LinkedIn.
I'm pretty good over there.
That's where I put my most recent thoughts.
And if you need a great speaker for your event,
let's have a chat.
I think I could probably deliver
something really extraordinary for your team,
for your audience.
I know, I know that's true.
Marcus, thanks so much, buddy,
for joining me on The Dealer Playbook.
Yeah, my pleasure.
Hey, thanks for listening to The Dealer Playbook podcast.
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