Marketing’s Future in the face of AI and Innovation with Wil Reynolds

Wil Reynolds [00:00:00]:
Much did you spend on DoorDash? How many freaking $8 IPAs did you have tipping people? How many times did you take a Uber because you don’t wanna sit on the bus? Because you feel some kind of way about that. All that is the dollars that you could have deployed into your own education, your own future security, but you won’t because you’re waiting for the company to pay for it. That don’t make no sense. There’s no there’s not gonna be room for people like that because the younger people are hungrier. Like, yeah, every few years you gotta reinvent because, like, Google knocks these that out. This this thing don’t work. That thing don’t work anymore.

Announcer [00:00:28]:
Influential and thought provoking minds in marketing, sales, and business. The Business of Marketing podcast.

A. Lee Judge [00:00:37]:
Welcome again to the Business of Marketing. I’m a Lee Judge. After crossing paths and stages with this today’s guest, I finally got a few minutes to chat with him last year at the b two b marketing props conference. And attending his sessions and keynotes, I came to admire his excitement for data, for doing the hard work of determining what’s next, and then most importantly, sharing all that with us. I also came to admire him for his generosity, not only generosity for sharing his knowledge, but for his humanity and caring for people. So I hope today we’ll get some of both of those things from him. So welcome to the show today, Will Reynolds. Hey Will.

A. Lee Judge [00:01:15]:
Hey, how you doing brother? Thanks for having me. Doing good. So this is gonna be one of those conversations where even before we hit record, we were about to go into some very viable stuff for that. Right? So Right. Before I get into I don’t wanna go through typically into, like, a whole bunch of background. Let’s just go straight into the meat of this. And first, I wanna jump into the type of insights that that you bring, and then we’ll get back to that. So among several things, you are an expert in SEO.

A. Lee Judge [00:01:43]:
Correct?

Wil Reynolds [00:01:44]:
So I hear.

A. Lee Judge [00:01:45]:
Yeah. So you hear.

Wil Reynolds [00:01:47]:
That is bestowed on me by other people. Exactly. That’s how

A. Lee Judge [00:01:50]:
it’s supposed to be. And things are changing at an alarming rate. So I’d like to start at a high level and explain to a novice marketer just how much of a shift we’re about to experience compared to last five years.

Wil Reynolds [00:02:05]:
Yeah. So, I have so many thoughts on this. Some of which I haven’t shared because I, I I’m careful of the fact that the things that I say have implications. So a lot of times I just sit with my thoughts for a long time, run things through chat to PT and just talk with that because I’m afraid of putting it out there, not fully formulated, but you’re asking questions that are making me be like, I’ve been thinking about this for two or three months. First thing is, I’ve been thinking a lot about agency sizes, and, specifically to this is our agency’s big enough to where we’re not so big that like, how could I say this? We’re not so big that we’re slow, but we’re not so small that I, as the leader of the company, have no time to work on all this new stuff. And like, there’s a real tension there that I’m seeing. Like, if you’re if you’re too small, you feel like you’re always behind. You’re like, I actually gotta be so I don’t have any direct reports.

Wil Reynolds [00:03:05]:
So people are like, Will, how are you able to put out that level, that amount of content at that high of a quality level? I’m like, well, I don’t have any direct reports. Like you got a company where you got one on ones, you’re going through financial reports to make sure that you’re solid this month, this year, you’re doing projections, you’re doing reviews, you’re doing all those things. I’m like, imagine what would happen if you had, if you’re at a time of hyper change and you had none of those responsibilities, you might be able to catch up on stuff a little bit faster. And the other thing is Gary Vee said this. It it hit me. He’s like, if you had somebody doing your freaking social media, who the freak would you trust? Me and my company where the CEO is inside of Snapchat all day long being like, yo, I he’s like, my fingers are on the phone sending out snaps. I don’t have a team that sends out snaps for me. He’s like, so I know how quickly the algorithm works, how quickly things are starting to change.

Wil Reynolds [00:03:59]:
And I’m like, there’s something to be said when you’re so close to fingers on keyboard type that that you’re like, no, no, no, no, no. If you’re trying to figure out the bridge from SEO and search to generative AI, go look at all the experiments being run by the person sitting in front of you. You know, is it a CEO who had a person who had a person who had a person that did the study? Or is it somebody that’s like, no, I ripped a hundred thousand keywords, put them into this, ran this, did that, pivoted it this way and started getting answers. Like, who are you gonna trust? Right? So luckily, I think the big thing is making space and time, and that is going to be hard. And I have some really harsh advice for people on making time that they’re not gonna like, but we can get into that a little bit later. I went on a little long there. Well, that that leads me

A. Lee Judge [00:04:42]:
to another question. So I’m in the that same boat where I’m running a company, but I’m also hyper inquisitive. I want to try everything. So how do you balance or what’s your advice on well, let’s talk about just well, let’s just narrow it down to LLMs, for example. Okay. For me, any given day, I can spend time getting better at one LLM and fine tuning my prompts there, for example, or I can go after the new shiny object and become more of a journalist and say, hey. I know all these things. What’s your take on how to balance that?

Wil Reynolds [00:05:17]:
Oh, so, my wife and I have been going back and forth on this a bit, for years on the power of the generalist. So what I think is that, like, the more specialized you go, the more well, there’s like, it’s almost like a hourglass. Like if you’re generalist, the beauty is, is you get to connect dots that like Chachapiti ain’t connecting because you know enough of an area. And then when you, but then you go to like a PR conference and then you go to a search conference, then you go to like a programmatic conference and you’re like, oh, I’m stitching together thoughts across all of these things. And then I read this book on self improvement. And then I read this book on this. So then you’re generalist enough that you’re gonna, if you’re curious enough, you’re gonna crush an LLM because it’s really good at going deep on a thing. But if you were to type in, like, I’ve gone deep on how to integrate PPC and SEO data for the last like eight years, right? You go ahead and ask ChatCPT how to integrate PPC and SEO data, I’m gonna smoke it, Right? Because I’ve got a experience across multiple channels that makes me think differently.

Wil Reynolds [00:06:16]:
If I just went, oh, I’ve gotten really good at SEO and all the things and go too, too deep, then sometimes it’s like, well, I got good enough at going deep on SEO as an LLM. So therefore, I like staying kinda generalist and kinda broad and letting things lead me where they lead me. Because if you go I think if you just go too deep in one area, you can sometimes get really good at that one thing. And then you’d be surprised in a future update. It’s like, well, we read 10,000 posts about people that do the exact same thing you do. So the deeper you go, like, and the more people published on it, the more we know it. But then when you start to be like, well, how does PR and SEO work? They’re like, ah, there’s only a couple posts out there on it. And they’re mostly written by people that are super generic with their So therefore the answers are gonna be fricking generic.

Wil Reynolds [00:07:02]:
So when I sit in front of a client and they got their PR team, their SEO team there, you’re bringing stuff together in ways they’re like, I would never get that out of ChatGPT or Claude or Lama or any of these. And your job is to be like, well, eventually, after I publish this and create space for myself being known for this, it’s gonna start to learn my stuff. So So I’m gonna have to, like, reinvent myself again and constantly try to find new ways so that there’s distance between the training data and everybody starting to talk about it and me.

A. Lee Judge [00:07:29]:
Let me split this into two pieces here because I’m hearing two things. So one, there’s the human’s experience plus AI. That’s a differentiator. If you are a biotechnologist, you’re gonna be able to do better with AI for biotechnology than somebody who’s not. Right? Then there’s the other thing of okay. Let’s say you are the biotechnologist and you really know ChattoptyPT. Do you also go out and try to learn Claude? Do you also try to learn Gemini? So there’s two let’s talk about both of those things. So and we’ll get back to the to the expert with the LLM.

A. Lee Judge [00:08:00]:
Let’s first talk about the LLM. For example, I’ll give you set myself as an example. Early adopter of chat g p t. I went in and got a library of prompts. I know how to tweak it for what I need to do way beyond content creation, a lot of analysis and everything else. But I also say, well, you know, Claude may be may be better at writing something, or maybe I can do better analysis with another LLM. Do I spend the time to start scratching this purpose of something else? And this is for the for the marketer who’s in a marketing job who has a finite amount of time to learn all these things because there may be another LLM on the scene tomorrow for all we know. How do you decide whether to go to get better at the ones you know or to say, you know what? I might do analysis and Claude is better at that or Gemini is better at that.

A. Lee Judge [00:08:48]:
Let me just not go deeper on chat, spend some time on Gemini.

Wil Reynolds [00:08:54]:
Great question. It depends on how good you need to be.

A. Lee Judge [00:08:57]:
Is it your job maybe? Or It depends on how good you need to

Wil Reynolds [00:09:02]:
be at it, right? So for me, my job, it’s critical because my job is to evangelize and kind of help to educate. So therefore I need to know instantly, oh, you don’t wanna put that prompt in a Gemini two point zero because it, oh, you wanna do that and this because of this, this, this, this, that. And that’s how I show my expertise to my market, right? If I’m producing day to day stuff, then my job is to basically, I would do, this is hard though. What you wanna do is if it was me, let’s say I just defaulted to ChatGPT for everything, right? It’s not a problem. But I would have like a week, maybe every quarter where I put those same prompts, I would be indexing the prompts that didn’t really work as well as I hoped they did in ChatChippity for whatever reason. And I’m good at that. So I can kind of intuit like, oh, I know how to write that prompt to get ChatChippity. And you’re like, damn, that didn’t work.

Wil Reynolds [00:09:54]:
Damn, that didn’t work. I would index those, run them once a quarter in other LLMs and see like, oh, well, they’re not doing it good either. But then you know when you’re like, oh, I need to hop over to this LLM for this specific thing. The other thing I would recommend to folks is on this tool I’ve been talking about for probably about a year now, it’s called PoE, poe.com and PoE has all the models. And what’s beauty about What’s beautiful about PoE is I can put a prompt in on ChatGPT four point zero and then click a button and have it run-in Claude, click a button, have it run-in llama, click a button, have it run-in 3.5, click a button, have it run-in 3.5 turbo. Then when it’s done, you use your favorite LLM to go compare the answers to all the different LLMs that it just had, because I’m looking for my tone to sound like this or this. And it’ll be like, oh, this one did best for this thing on this instance. Right? So the beauty is you can not only can you run across all the LLMs, you then can pick one of them to analyze all the previous threads of all the LLMs and judge which one they thought it did the best job of.

Wil Reynolds [00:10:56]:
And you’re and it’s so fast because it’s one click. You still gotta put the prompt in to chat g p t. Right? Uh-huh. So you’re gonna do that either way. But when you’re testing models, the best thing to do is just you go into you go into PoE, paste in your prompt, and then once it runs, you just click the next one and it runs, and you click the next one and it runs. And then you’re like, we’re not Mistral. I’ve heard about that. Click it.

Wil Reynolds [00:11:16]:
It runs. You know, I heard they launched a new, a new Mistral yesterday. Click Mistral, whatever, and it runs. And then you’re like, alright. How did Mistral this compare to the one here? And how did that compare to GPT? And now you’re just in your natural language having it compare the answers to one another.

A. Lee Judge [00:11:30]:
That’s genius. I’m actually gonna check that out because

Wil Reynolds [00:11:33]:
This is dope.

A. Lee Judge [00:11:34]:
Like, I had this library and also have things built on it, like other tools integrated with automation. So it’s like, you know what? That’s different. I have to weigh what is the value of the change? Like, if I get 2% improvement, it isn’t worth me unplugging it from automation. But if it’s 50% improvement, okay, let’s Well said. Put a new

Wil Reynolds [00:11:53]:
Well said. That’s exactly why I was saying, like, it depends on how good you have to be at the task. Certain tasks, I have a ton of latitude. So I’m like, you know what? If I go from a if if there’s a possibility for me to go from a 50% done to a 54% done, is that an improvement? Yes. But is that 4% gonna take me a lot of time to get to and this 50% solution’s good enough? Then it’s not worth it. I think everybody, dare I say, everybody should probably have their, their LLM of choice that they mostly use. And then they make time when they can, maybe once a month or whatever to look at some of the other ones. So they’re more educated, but you really can’t be hopping from thing to thing to thing, because it’s hard enough to get good at the one.

Wil Reynolds [00:12:38]:
I couldn’t imagine trying to get good consistently at all of them at the same time. It’d be dare I say, like you got a job to get done. So you gotta be about the job, like right? And my job is to evangelize. Therefore I need to know all of them. But if your job is to produce the content or whatever, or to execute on something that you’re trying to get done, if it’s working well in the current tool, you gotta limit that curiosity time because all all you can go down

A. Lee Judge [00:13:04]:
a rabbit hole and have something come out no better than it was five hours ago. That’s a I love that answer, especially for me personally, because that’s something I struggle with. Like, am I missing out? Am I I’m having FOMO over the new version of of llama that came out. You know what? Maybe I don’t need that for what I do. Maybe I have too many things already built on ChatGPT. And then when I when I speak to audiences, they ask which one is best. Of course, I wanna start with something like, well, which one’s best for you? But there’s also an element of which one do you already know the most about. Like, can you go can you go deeper where you already are? Or because I’m not gonna I don’t want you to pull out of where you’re at and start over again just because I said, Claude.

A. Lee Judge [00:13:44]:
Right?

Wil Reynolds [00:13:45]:
And and to your point, ChatChippity is an OS. So I’m starting to be like, these gangsters are an OS. Like, you start linking together a bunch of custom GPTs. You start running certain things you’ve learned in through automations, like make and whatnot. You do not wanna pull off of that to go to some manual stuff running Claude or llama. And it might be better, but you’re like, well, it might take me more time to get it done now because it doesn’t have all the connectors and all the things that I’ve really gotten good at piecing together.

A. Lee Judge [00:14:12]:
When if I talk to my really geeky computer friends, they may tell me, hey. You know, you should use Linux on your computer operating system. I’m like, well, look. Windows and Mac OS ain’t going anywhere. I know if I build on that land, it will likely not go anywhere. But if I build on something that’s cool and new, it could my whole house of cars could fall because something closed or changed.

Wil Reynolds [00:14:36]:
You know what? I love that analogy because it’s my struggle with, Windows versus Mac OS. Right? Like the amount of products that I wanna install, and it’s like, oh, well, you’re not on Mac. You can’t install that. Like, all these new AI things that come out, you’re like, god damn it. Like, I wish I had I wish I had a Mac. But then for me, my job to be done is not to figure out menus in OSes. That is not my job. My job is not to figure out, well, what do I hit the Apple key and what for? Like, I already know.

Wil Reynolds [00:15:03]:
It’s like control C, control this. Now I’m slowing down on every interaction with my keyboard. If my job was to get good at pressing keys, then that’s one thing. My job is to use these keys as a tool. So anything that slows me down from doing that, I’ve really gotta evaluate is that stuff I’m gonna learn about Mac and are those couple AI tools that I can’t use gonna provide so much value that I should switch my OS and then figure out all the stuff I gotta figure about how to use it? Like, that answer right now is nope. Well, that’s a

A. Lee Judge [00:15:34]:
good segue into something I know you’re passionate about. I wanna talk about is the future of work. Like, the day well, the month after I left corporate, I was a marketing operations person at a large company. And I left there, and I think it was like in September or so, and then November, Chat2BT comes out. And immediately, I realized the job I just left changed fundamentally. Like, I had spent, for example, every every year, I’d spent weeks, if not months, analyzing data from trade shows and all the different sources it came from. And I’m like, I can write a prompt to do this now. I could take the boss’s email with his 10 questions, turn that email into a prompt, run it, and send it right back to him.

A. Lee Judge [00:16:21]:
That’s that’s the change that happened about that time. So marketing operations drastically changed, and I saw that. And so it made me wonder for those who are still in those positions and those who are looking for new positions, how has that changed the future of work, and how has it changed those who are who are both in work and those who are looking for work in technology?

Wil Reynolds [00:16:45]:
I think if you’re in work today, you have to have a real honest assessment of how much of your work is a checklist. Step one. How much of my job is executing off of things that I’ve pretty much done the same way every time for the last six times or the last five out of six times I did it. And once you do the assessment, then the next question you need to ask yourself is, when am I going to retire? You know, it’s like you said before, about all these new tools, like you can spin yourself up if you’re like, or like, do I have a trust fund? Right? Because, you know, for me, I work because it’s fun, but for a lot of people, they work for economic security. I got, I understand that. Right? So like how important is your job to how your family eats? How much of your job today has somebody tried to automate? How many times have you sat in a room and said something couldn’t be done and some punk smartass like me typed the same thing in the ChatChippy team was like, I got a 50% built by the time you finish your sentence. You gotta take inventory of that kind of stuff. And then based on the inventory of that, you need to adjust accordingly.

Wil Reynolds [00:18:03]:
If you’re like, no, I might need to work for another fifteen, twenty years. Okay, well then you better be about that life. If you’re like, no, I ain’t got no trust fund. Ain’t nobody coming to save me. I gotta be able to like save myself. All right, well then you might wanna be about this life. Like you might wanna be working at this stuff. And the problem I think is, if I’m gonna be real and it’s super unpopular is you can’t get better at a thing while you’re doing the thing.

Wil Reynolds [00:18:30]:
Like you gotta make time to try new reps. Like Tiger Woods doesn’t get better at golf by just working on golf during golf tournaments. It’s like, you gotta go and practice. You gotta put in reps. Well, you know, I got so much work to do in my marketing ops role. That’s a nine to five job pre AI. Damn right it is. Post AI, it’s a nine to five job still.

Wil Reynolds [00:18:53]:
Well, where am I gonna find the time? Oh, you’re gonna find out when you can’t put food on the table five or six years from now and somebody’s saying, all right, well, we got 20 marketing ops people. Some of them have been building prompts and stuff. We’re gonna keep them because they’re gonna bring value. The person that uses the prompt that you built, the person that uses the GPT that you built and ain’t never built the GPT, wants enough of the role. So if, you know, if you’ve got 20 people each working 10, you know, forty hour weeks, let’s just say it’s 10 people working forty hour weeks, some bad at math. You have four hundred hours to deploy, right? If you wanna meet 10% of that job, then you really only need nine of them. And who am I gonna pick out of the 10 to bail? The ones that built GPTs, the one that tried to build a GPT or or the one that’s like, yo, I didn’t know you could do that. You’re like, what do you mean? Like, you’re never gonna help make us better.

Wil Reynolds [00:19:42]:
So I’m gonna go to the nine who do.

A. Lee Judge [00:19:44]:
Yeah. The one that built multiplied themselves.

Wil Reynolds [00:19:47]:
That’s what

A. Lee Judge [00:19:47]:
I’m saying. They multiplied themselves into the seats of the people who did not multiply themselves.

Wil Reynolds [00:19:52]:
That’s what I’m saying. So to me, it’s not something that people like to hear, but this is reps. And it’s like, you gotta do reps and it’s like, but I don’t have time. And I work. And then after work, I got yoga. And after and before work, I gotta, you know, eat my smoothie and I gotta do this and I need my meditation. It’s like, okay. Does any of that help you to pay your bills? Does any of that help you to put food on the table for you and your family? Like, now might be the time.

Wil Reynolds [00:20:21]:
It’s funny, a friend of mine, she’s a big runner and so am I. And I saw her the other day and she’s like, practicing this AI stuff has become my new exercise. And I’m like, ah, so she swapped out running for the last six months and swapped in that same amount of time. She gets up at 03:30 in the morning. She runs for two hours. She has put two hours in every morning

A. Lee Judge [00:20:45]:
Brain work.

Wil Reynolds [00:20:46]:
On AI, the brain work, because she’s like, it will not happen during the middle of my day. My boss has got me in too many meetings and stuff. So if I’m willing to take that time to improve my physical, I might need to improve my mental or like my learnings here so that I’m not getting caught by somebody being in the bottom 10 or 20% of adopters. Because that could happen in five years. And if you’re in the bottom 10 or 20%, good luck getting the job.

A. Lee Judge [00:21:10]:
Yeah. I’ll give you a hack on that time thing is that for for me personally, when I want to research or try something new or learn something, I’ll find what projects are our passion projects, our favor projects, our even our own projects. My podcast, for example, I test every type of technology I can that relates to a podcast. Like, if I need to revoice something I said, I’ll go work on 11 Labs to see how close my voice is to replacing myself. If there’s new editing tools, now is my excuse to play with editing tools. I I don’t just do it because it’s a new shiny thing. I figure out how can I apply it while I’m learning

Wil Reynolds [00:21:55]:
it? I do the same thing, you know. I gotta be careful because I’m by my nature a geek. So, you know, like, I’ll go a little deeper on Descript than I need to. I’ll go a little bit deeper in Canva than I need to. But you know what? I come out of that knowing How this works. Yeah. So now when I’m in a meeting, I can’t be with, oh, well, you know, that’s gonna take a week. No, I’ll just do it.

Wil Reynolds [00:22:15]:
I’ll do it by the end of the day today. And then all of a sudden, after I stack up enough of those, why do I need you? Like, what are you doing here? Right? And I think that people don’t get it. Like, so it’s the thing I take most seriously because, you know, I put my head in the pillow at night and I gotta feel comfortable about what I put in the world. And I am constantly internally being like, guys, it is nothing I take more seriously than making sure that you guys are all set up to be ready for this future state that I can see coming. Because some companies are gonna grow at that time, right? Some companies are gonna be growing at that time and I’d like to be one of them. But, you know, I do see a world where, too many people have probably held onto the way they used to do things for too long and they haven’t challenged themselves and or they haven’t put in the reps. And the problem is, can you imagine dragging your feet for a year on AI and competing with my friend that’s been getting up every day for two hours and practicing it the same way she used to run at 03:30. So now she’s got two hours per day, probably more, because it’s just part of her job too.

Wil Reynolds [00:23:14]:
She’s probably got five, six hours a day that she’s putting into AI that you’re putting one in. Well, if she wants your job, nobody’s hiring, not asking questions about AI anymore. Right? So they’re gonna hire, they’re gonna ask questions. I mean, she’s like, Oh, I built this thing in Claude and in Claude’s projects or whatever, I forget what it is. And I built it in ChatGPT. And let me tell you about the differences between the two. That’s the point. And someone shows up like using somebody’s prepackaged ChatGPT, you know, custom GPT.

Wil Reynolds [00:23:41]:
They’re like, Well, did you build this? No, I found it on blah, blah, blah. You’re like, Yeah, well somebody else was getting up doing the reps. And by that point, when you can’t put food on the table for your family anymore, you are two hours behind every day for an entire year that’s six hundred hours. Good luck trying to catch up to them. But the thing is the encouraging part is it’s not that hard right now. Like Right now. I I literally showed somebody something. It took me, like, weeks to figure out.

Wil Reynolds [00:24:08]:
She copied it, and three hours later, she had it running. And I’m, like, better than mine was. And it’s, like, right.

A. Lee Judge [00:24:12]:
I saw your recent video. It may have been years today even where you were tell me which one it was. You were inter it was interacting with you, watching your screen and guiding you through GA four. Which one was that? That was

Wil Reynolds [00:24:24]:
a couple weeks ago. Yeah. Yeah. It’s on Google real time. So it’s the real time streaming. It’s like Google Gemini two o real time or two o streaming that it was.

A. Lee Judge [00:24:35]:
See, that’s one of those posts where I say, okay, let me save this one. I need to go deeper into this, find out what Will said and how can I go deeper into it myself? And as we mentioned earlier, determine this shiny object. How much time do I spend on this? But I’ve already determined that this is something that for things that we can’t automate through APIs, I’m willing to buy a $300 laptop and let it sit there and automate that way by visual if I can’t write the code to

Wil Reynolds [00:25:06]:
do it. So, the other thing that you’re saying there too, that’s very different, and I think people have to start to think this way is, you know, people have said to me things like, Oh, well that can’t We can’t do that for this reason or that reason. I’m like, Did you hire somebody to just like transform that data for you? Like, Oh, go on to Fiverr. Like, Yo, you didn’t find somebody who who you can pay $50 to to move that task forward? Like, instead you’re calling to come to me, so you’re gonna wait two weeks to get on my schedule. You’re gonna get on my schedule and tell me like, oh, well, well, I’ve been waiting to tell you that I can’t get, this data moved from here to there. I’m like, well, did you go to Fiverr? Did you hire somebody to do that? Well, I didn’t know if I had budget. It’s like, it’s $50. Like, go, go, go, go, go.

Wil Reynolds [00:25:46]:
In the same way that you’re like, I’ll buy a separate computer to run this thing so I can keep things moving. I think we’re all gonna have to get a little bit better at not accepting the first no. You know, it’s like, I’ve always said like the, the limit to your greatness is how quickly you accept the first no, that’ll always be the limit. And if you’re the kind of person that like, oh, well that can’t be done. Oh, my company didn’t let me, use ChatChippity. All right, well, what keeps you from firing up a hotspot and bringing your custom laptop in and being off the corporate network?

A. Lee Judge [00:26:16]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Wil Reynolds [00:26:17]:
Oh, my company’s not paying for me to get GPT Pro. So you’re not gonna pay that? You gotta put food on your family’s

A. Lee Judge [00:26:24]:
plate and a couple years ago. You compare that to a tuition. You know, it’s like $20.30 bucks a month compared to what it would cost you to go to a school and pay somebody, pay a tuition to learn those things. That money’s too small.

Wil Reynolds [00:26:36]:
The tuition, how about who drinks the bar? Yeah. Like you’ll pay DoorDash fees out the ass, but you won’t self improve like on your own. Like how much did you spend on DoorDash? How many freaking $8 IPAs did you have tipping people? How many times did you take a Uber because you don’t wanna sit on the bus? Because you feel some kind of way about that. All that is the dollars that you could have deployed into your own education, your own future security, but you won’t because you’re waiting for the company to pay for it. That don’t make no sense. There’s not gonna be room for people like that because the younger people are hungrier. And, they’re like, yeah, well, all that knowledge that you got, no, twenty five years SEO. They’re like, a lot of it is not even that useful.

Wil Reynolds [00:27:16]:
And the cool part is as an SEO who has been doing this for twenty five years, we’re used to that. That’s why I think some of us have an opportunity to be like, because the stuff that I did ten years ago, fifteen years ago, it don’t work no more. And I’m used to that. Like, yeah, every few years you gotta reinvent because like Google knocks these stuff out. This thing don’t work. That thing don’t work anymore. So like, you also gotta look for people that are very comfortable reinventing themselves versus being like, this is my skill set and I got really good at doing it this way. It’s like, but this world is changing so fast that you’ve gotta have a comfort level with being like, all right, I’ll jump into that.

Wil Reynolds [00:27:51]:
I’ll figure it out. Like it’s figureoutable. Like it might take me some work, but then that’s where the reps come in. You know? Oh, the world’s not just search anymore. All right. Well, people are starting to use LLMs. Yeah. Alright.

Wil Reynolds [00:28:01]:
Well, my clients are still on SEO contracts, so I got forty, forty five hours of work just doing that. It’s like, yeah. But when the person that’s putting the five hours in, getting up once a day, putting an extra hour in after work or whatever, like how long are you gonna wait? Because every hour they stack up over a year is real time. Now I would say you can get to the end of a year and maybe try to catch up to them in half the time, but that’s still 150 hours. How are you gonna find one hundred and fifty extra hours at the end of the year? Like, it’s really hard, dog. Like, to find an extra one hundred and fifty hours for somebody that’s been going an extra hour? Yeah. So they spent $3.65. You could probably catch them in one fifty, but that’s still a lot of hours.

A. Lee Judge [00:28:39]:
Well, you you mentioned innovation. I know that’s that’s your thing. That’s what your, I guess your main goal is at your company. So tell us about SERE Interactive. That’s a company, right? Yep. And how it came about, what you do, what kind of clients you serve.

Wil Reynolds [00:28:52]:
Sure. So, I, the reason why I tend to focus on innovation because it’s my natural state. It’s where I create the most value for the company, right? You get me in a meeting talking about margins, I’m zoned out. Like I’m not interested in the financial side of the business. I never really have been because I found something I really love to do. And I’m just like grateful that I have a thing that I love to do, right? It just so happened that it also, performed well and I was able to step out, which a lot of people can’t do. And I let other people run the company because they’re better at it than I am. But if they come into my zone where I’m strong, I’m not strong on many things.

Wil Reynolds [00:29:29]:
I’m strong on very few things, but the few things I’m strong on create a lot of value. So I move myself into this director of innovation role where I am literally like no direct reports on just working on innovation because it’s my natural state, right? You could put me full time on finance and it would take me forever to get anything done because my brain doesn’t naturally work that way. So that’s, where I’m at in the company today. The way it started it, has a lot to do with community impact. So I was, I went to school to be a teacher and, I was volunteering at a children’s hospital, you know, when I was working at my old company. And, I said to my boss, yo, can I like work through my lunch? This is back in like nine, February, ‘2 thousand and ‘1. So if you were a corporate then, right? Like you work through your lunch and leave early. The volunteer was kind of like, nah, you know, I was lucky to have dressed down Fridays where you could wear jeans.

A. Lee Judge [00:30:19]:
Right? That was a big perk.

Speaker D [00:30:21]:
Right? So, you know, it’s a different time, right, bro? So, you know, I was in that environment corporately in Fortune five hundred. So I said to my boss, Hey, can I work through my lunch so then I can get to my volunteer assignment, you know, on time? Because I had been going and showing up a little bit late because the traffic was horrible to get from my office to this hospital, this children’s hospital. And my boss at the time, she’s like, we can’t do it this quarter because of whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever. And I was like, all right, bet, call my mom. And I’m like, I’m gonna have to probably start my own business because I believe that we all as humans have a responsibility to these other humans in our society. And if my company won’t let me work through my lunch, which I used to use that lunch to complain about my boss anyway, right? Because you know what it’s like when you’re corporate, you’re like, ah, I’m gonna eat here at the cafeteria and sit around these other four miserable and we’re all gonna complain about our boss, right? That’s what we’re gonna do, right? So I’m like, I’m just using that time to talk on you. Why don’t we I’m trying to move that time into a positive direction. I can’t say that to her obviously, but it’s like, I’m trying to move that into a positive direction and I’m not getting that.

Wil Reynolds [00:31:23]:
So I called my mom up. I’m like, I just want to start my own thing because I think these two things can exist. I believe you can be good in your community and you can grow a fast growth tech company too. Like these things can mutually exist. And I won’t be one of the people to show that as possible. So my mom was like, what you gonna do about health insurance? You know, if you had a Black mom, right? She’s like, wait, we sent you to school. Like you need to work at a big company with health insurance, boy, what you doing, right? So she wasn’t really about it, but she was like, all right, your sister called me and told me that if anybody was gonna pull this off, it was gonna be you. So, you know, go ahead and give it a shot and you have my blessing, whatever, you know, and that’s how it started.

Wil Reynolds [00:32:00]:
That’s how it started. And then it just, you know, it was a bit of an ego hit because I really started my career in 1999 at digital marketing firm. And that was before I went to the corporate company, and that digital marketing firm, like I went on their door and knocked on their door and got the job. It was like one of those things, right? Like that’s another thing I’ve been trying to tell like a lot of the young people I work with today. And I just recorded a video on this. I’m like, look, like you can’t just put your resume in to me. Like, I don’t know how to live that life. Like I never just put my resume in anywhere.

Wil Reynolds [00:32:30]:
I always was like, I’m gonna go knock on your door. You’re gonna hear my voice. Then like, I wanna win. And like, I wanna win with you, right? So let’s find a way to win together. Did that knocked on the door of a company. That’s how I got my break in search is I knocked on their door and was like, I think this digital marketing stuff is cool. I’d love to work here. So they gave me the crack.

Wil Reynolds [00:32:46]:
And then I worked there for a few years. And then I went to this corporate, company. And then I started SERE, after that. And the cool thing was when I started it, I was like, you have to accept your offer letter. You had to volunteer at least three hours a month in some capacity somewhere, Because my mental was like, if you don’t want to put three hours of your month into helping other people, then I don’t wanna put hours of my time helping you. Because I’m like a teacher by my nature. So I’m very like, yo, let’s huddle up. Let’s figure this stuff out, let’s be the leaders.

Wil Reynolds [00:33:19]:
I’m competitive, but I’m like a teacher. So I like bringing people together and be like, how can we learn from each other? So I know I’m gonna be spending a lot of hours trying to raise you up. And I want you to then put that, you know, to do that in another capacity, right? So yeah, if you didn’t wanna volunteer it and I didn’t wanna work with you. So for our first like 50 hires, like you had to like sign that in your offer letter. But then by that time, the company had grown enough to where I could afford lawyers and they were like, you can’t do that. They’re like, that’s illegal. I I was like, damn, but I’m trying to put good in the world. They’re like, yeah, you’re gonna put less good in the world the first time you get sued because somebody said that you forced them to work as part of their offer letter.

Wil Reynolds [00:33:53]:
It was like, oh, that’s free labor. Free labor, Can’t do that. You know? So, so I’ve learned along the way. Now you can see like, it’s dumb like that. That is the reason why I don’t run the business because I have a team that I can say, Yo, this is what I believe. They’re like, All right, we’ll find a way to make sure that you don’t get your face blown off doing something that’s really good in your heart, but then ultimately could open up exposures for you. Because I would just rip and run and be like, I can trust people and blah, blah, blah, blah. Every once in a while, you know, you run into one person or so that was a little bit of a knucklehead and you’re like, wow, that could really set us back because I wasn’t, you know, I wasn’t smart about the way I’m trying to put good into the world sometimes.

Wil Reynolds [00:34:26]:
Mhmm.

A. Lee Judge [00:34:27]:
So tell me, you know, typically, people start off podcast with the the credibility line of who they are and what they do. We we went straight into the to the meat of things, but I do wanna get a chance to allow the audience to hear, you know, what your expertise is, what SERE does, and, you know, what is the magic sauce and what you guys do? Like, what’s special about SERE, And what we do specifically.

Wil Reynolds [00:34:55]:
Yeah. So what we do is we do, paid search, SEO, content analytics for the most part. And now we’re trying to figure out this generative AI thing, right, and what that means. I like helping people to find things. If you’ve ever been like a great hotel or something, the concierge like listens to your problem and goes, all right, I know what you, you and your wife, you’re all gonna enjoy this spot. Like, let me tell you, right? So there’s something about me that loves that aspect of helping people to find good answers on the internet, right? So therefore wherever, you know, oh, if you’re on social and you’re asking questions on social, like I wanna be able to listen into that and understand what people are saying and what are they recommending? And then like that’s gonna affect how I’m gonna do my content, my SEO, my paid cert, my ads, etcetera, right? So I really like that. And then that led us to being like a kind of like a big data agency because what you start realizing is these freaking agencies are siloed as hell. If you type in the word, it’s obviously a Spanish word, right? All the ads are in English.

Speaker D [00:35:48]:
Why? Because Google’s making money off of all those big comp all those big banks sitting there showing English ads to a query that they know is in Spanish because all the organic results are in Spanish. You’re like, so how is it that the organic results are in Spanish, but the paid aren’t? And you’re like, how does this continue to perpetuate? Because paid marketers never use organic signals to help them do a goddamn thing. They go in there and they put it in, they go to AI, figured it out, and they’re getting ripped off. Right? Whereas like, so what we realized years ago was like, you know, if you could bring together the data across these disciplines, you’re gonna have unique insights that help your client to better speak in the language of their customers, right? Like you don’t really want an SEO pick on all your keywords if you’re doing paid. If you’re doing paid, why wouldn’t you go to your paid search terms and see what your customer is saying in their own voice? Like, why would I let you pick out my keywords when I can listen to my customer in their own voice, how they are solving this problem and how they believe this problem is solved? If I’m doing paid, I get to capture all those search terms. Why would I not use that in all these different places to help me better connect with my customers? So that’s the thing I think that we do really well. And I think the thing that I’m looking forward to us being great at is the bridge from people searching for answers and things like search engines and moving more to LinkedIn, private networks, WhatsApp groups. People are and this is why I think people keep looking at the search to AI disruption.

Wil Reynolds [00:37:13]:
And I’m thinking it’s the search to AI kind of, but ultimately to the human disruption. Because most questions that I have, I can Google them. And AI is better because I it’s just it answers them better than Google does. But really, it’s still like the average answer for the average person asking the average question and putting in these things. Very high.

A. Lee Judge [00:37:34]:
Well, recent Wouldn’t it be better

Wil Reynolds [00:37:35]:
for me to ask a friend?

A. Lee Judge [00:37:37]:
I think I saw you mentioned about the closed groups recently. And what came to mind was I was looking for a software, particular software, and I’d done the Google. I found, like, the top four or five that I kinda narrowed it down to, but I did not make a decision. I went to my Discord group of marketers who do the same thing I do and said, hey, I’ve narrowed down the three or four who’s used these. I miss any. Give me some suggestions. I would not make a decision without those people, and none of that information is trackable.

Wil Reynolds [00:38:12]:
So, like, that’s what I’m saying. Right? Like, so we gotta start looking at, like, alright. Like, Discord traffic, how does it show up? Does it not show up? What’s trackable? Is it not trackable? Like, Slack data, how do I get that? WhatsApp data, how do I understand how many people are going there? Like, that is like the boom moment. It’s like, you don’t understand. You can put all this crap out in marketing. At the end of the day, if there’s any real consequences to the decision you’re about to make, whether it’s time or money, you’re gonna ask a human at some point in that process. And these tools have gotten so good that you’re now in private WhatsApp groups, private LinkedIn groups. If you have a good LinkedIn following, you can go there.

Wil Reynolds [00:38:48]:
So you’re like, before I make this decision, why wouldn’t I ask, is anybody in my network using Monday? Is anybody in my network using this tool before I switch over? You’d be crazy not to do that. Right? So now that our networks have gotten digitally closer, you’d be crazy not to. And I’ll tell you some sub decisions aren’t made at all on those platforms on search at all. People just get like the early search and then they’re just like off and doing the next. And they’re all Some of these decisions are being made completely in these private groups. I’m looking for a recommendation for a company. I got no idea if my company’s being mentioned or not there. Right? So yeah, that’s gonna be the Dude, I think, there’s extreme value in people today starting to take a little bit more seriously helping as many people as they can on these platforms and putting as much as they can out there.

Wil Reynolds [00:39:35]:
That’s truly helpful, not some gen AI written, right? It’s the stuff that people really wanna bookmark and like be like, that’s a different perspective. Like, because what’s gonna happen is with that influence, there are so many other pockets you can go in. So for instance, I index every person that likes or comments on any of my LinkedIn posts, and I pull in their, their LinkedIn profile. So now when lead forms are submitted, I’m building a make automation to basically look through every time a lead form is submitted or any of my deals are lost, and then track that person to see if they like any of my content. Because you’re like, oh, if you if if I lost a deal with you last year and you’ve liked three of my last pieces of content on x y z topic, then, like, I probably could reach back out to you and talk to you about those things. Most marketers have no idea that you can do that, right? They’re like, wait, wait, how are you pulling in each person that commented or liked on each one of your things? You’re like, you gotta go one you gotta wanna go get it. It’s out there, right? There’s tools like Phantom Buster and Shield and other tools that’ll get you that intel. So now all of a sudden, you can be like, who are the people that like my AI stuff? Now I got this new AI thing that we just launched.

Wil Reynolds [00:40:37]:
I’m gonna go message them and be like, hey. If you read this back then or you commented on this, we got a new product that solves this problem. Now you can go through and try to click on every LinkedIn post you’ve ever had looking at all the people and expanding and all that. Mine’s sitting in a in a air table so that I can just natural language query that thing and go, all the people who commented with this kind of a comment, find all of them. And now based on that, help me to write starter copy for my emails to them, and then I’m gonna get that. And then I’m gonna use that as my foundation for each person I’m gonna follow-up with. I never send out anything Gen AI with my name on it ever.

A. Lee Judge [00:41:09]:
That is so Like actionable. Because I’ll tell you where I’m at. I’m at a very I would say, in in my view, a junior level of that. Because what I do is I think about all the things you said in terms of who’s liking, who’s commenting on things, but the content we create, the first focus is being valuable. Like, if I create a piece of content that is valuable to my audience, there’s some part of me that says I’m not gonna spend time trying to measure it because if it’s good, they will come to me. Now I know there’s some ignorance in there probably, but do I spend five hours in in in automations and spreadsheets and exporting and importing and analyzing, or do I spend that five hours creating the content that I know brings customers?

Wil Reynolds [00:41:55]:
Oh, it’s like it’s like taking the temperature. Like, you know if something is gonna take or not. You know if something was creating value or not. Right? Like, you kinda start to into it, but you got the more you put out, the more you start to into it. Right? Like, oh, man, this is this ain’t moving. Like, I must have missed something. Right? So to me, you’re absolutely right. Not not enough people are even doing that.

Wil Reynolds [00:42:16]:
But how do you gain that intuition on what created value and what didn’t? You got to put more out there. Now the problem is, is especially in our world, I would say 60% of the people that follow me, 70% of people that follow me work in agencies. And to this day, Sears doesn’t have agencies as clients. So then you have to kind of mentally be a little bit like, Hey, like I might get less engagement on this one, but this one’s more about people looking for enterprise, blah, blah, blah, blah solutions or whatever. So that one might get less take, but it’s not some hot take that every that’s applicable to everybody. So you do have to kind of think through like, who’s this post for? And then you almost have to mentally adjust. Like the numbers might not be as high, but the people who did engage with it might be the exact kind of target audience. But the other thing is people don’t wanna admit, we all hate looking at our baby and saying it’s ugly, right? So I think too many of us, we put content out and have a hard time looking back at it and be like that, that thing that I thought was a banger, wasn’t.

Wil Reynolds [00:43:15]:
So So what can I learn from that? What did I try to do? So for me, like for instance, I don’t again, I haven’t shared this. I will at some point, but like I’ve gotten so good at sitting on LinkedIn now that I know within about fifteen minutes whether or not the post is gonna take, because I can see LinkedIn starts to give you more and less visibility super quick. So I have enough of a following that for me, it’s like, it’s kinda like that unfair thing that when like, I had a friend who was doing AB tests for, YouTube’s homepage. And he was like, oh, every test runs in like thirty seconds. Like you have a statistically significant sample in thirty seconds, which is unfair, right? So the more followers you have, the more, if you just sit there for like, for me, I post something for fifteen minutes, I know exactly if it’s gonna end up at my at the high, middle, or the low end instantly. Right? So if it starts off super low and I know it’s gonna be low, before I put that anywhere else, I try a completely different strategy on that same piece of content. So now I’m like, alright. Like my followers are super low on blue sky or Twitter, but I still mentally know what their numbers typically look like given my following.

Wil Reynolds [00:44:15]:
So then you’re like, man, that thing sucked on LinkedIn. I missed it. Now what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna take a totally different pivot on the same post, put it on on Twitter, failed there. New pivot, put it on threads, failed there. That idea sucked. Don’t go back to it or rebuild it in a totally different way. But sometimes what you find is like, oh, that did take off somewhere else. So humans do like that.

Wil Reynolds [00:44:35]:
I just maybe did something that LinkedIn didn’t like, like post my third post in a day. Maybe I did, a type of image that they don’t like as much. Maybe I use a kind of thing that they don’t like as much. So that’s how you start to build your acumen on how those things work.

A. Lee Judge [00:44:47]:
Thing a moment ago though, you mentioned the who, like who’s looking at it. I had a video last week that took off. It had, like, 20,000 impressions in a few minutes. I was like, wow. That’s great. It’s a nice spike. But they were all the wrong people. They were people who just LinkedIn decided to just give me a boost.

A. Lee Judge [00:45:07]:
At the same time, I had another post maybe the day before. I only had a few hundred, but they were all client profiles. So I’m like, I’d rather have those hundred than those 20,000 any day. Yeah. But you

Wil Reynolds [00:45:19]:
know what? That’s mental though. Right? Because, like, we we attach so much of our value to these likes and that, like, you know, you it start you know, you start getting, like, oh, that one took off. And then a lot of people literally fall for that and start writing more stuff like that. And it’s like, oh, no. There’s no formula for that. All All I gotta do is put a picture of my kids and talk about like how I became my girl dad. And like, I gave up my career and I was working too hard and blah, blah, blah. And now I have this epiphany and now life’s all about, you know, me taking time for me and my kids.

Wil Reynolds [00:45:48]:
Right? If I say that, I’m gonna get all the likes in the world, right? Yeah.

A. Lee Judge [00:45:51]:
I’ve had to follow so many hackers, people who have LinkedIn hacks because their goal is to get the numbers. My goal is to get the clients. It’s a whole different scenario.

Wil Reynolds [00:46:00]:
It depends on how you get your check. Like I don’t get my check off of likes. Ain’t nobody ever done that. But what’s nice though, to be real with you too, is I try to put out enough stuff because I don’t wanna just be some like, I don’t know. I just don’t wanna be some like CEO ish dude. Like I’m like, yo, I got a family. Like I’m trying to figure out how to be a good dad and yada yada yada. So there’s a space for that, but it’s not some hacky trying to get likes.

Wil Reynolds [00:46:23]:
It’s me being you. Real. It’s me being me. Right? Which is another thing that, you know, I think that people also are gonna struggle with a bit is like, these days you gotta build I don’t mean to build a brand because I hate the word personal branding just because it’s like broadly for me, it just never was a thing. Because you know, I think about my mom, dad, like, they didn’t think about their personal brands, like the kinda some new food and right? It’s like, you know, back in the day, you went to work, you tried to do right by your family and your kids, and that’s what you did. So I struggle with it, but I’ve kinda come to the grips that, like, I’m like, I’m a influencer now. I hate to say it. I hate to think of it that way.

Wil Reynolds [00:46:56]:
I hate to say it, but it’s like, I would be It’d be disingenuous for me to sit here across from you and act like having that size of a followership and these kind of metrics that sometimes come across some of the things that I put out there and these kind of connections and be like, oh, I don’t You know, I might not be sitting around trying to manicure a brand cause that’s not my style. I’m like, yo, I’m me. If you don’t like it, like, that’s cool. Like, you know what the unfollow button is. But my goal is to bring in a value that you’re like, even with his quirky, I’m still willing to put up with this guy. Right?

A. Lee Judge [00:47:22]:
If it happens organically, if if the brand happens because you’re you, that’s how it’s supposed to happen, not you setting out to be a brand. In fact, we all know people who built brands with nothing under it, and then like a flame, poof, they disappeared because all they had was a brain, nothing under it.

Wil Reynolds [00:47:41]:
Well, I mean, the sad part is what I, every so often, I will follow a person specifically to see when they fall off, Because what’s real interesting, right? Because when you live in an algorithmic world, the person that was crushing it and doing all this stuff, they just stop posting as much. And you don’t realize it as a consumer because LinkedIn just replaced them with another jamoke that’s like crushing it. So then you don’t realize this person that you admire or you thought was all great and whatnot. Like they just stop posting about that stuff. Or at some point the chickens are gonna come home to roost. So they gotta stop faking the funk. And at some point, they just post a lot less, you know, or they’re holding on to some award they won twenty years ago, you know, put that in their little bio.

A. Lee Judge [00:48:29]:
There’s so many LinkedIn influencers who I held in high regard for a long time. And then I realized while I’m building substantial experience and relationships and not getting all that attention they’re getting, those are thing those are like solid bricks under my what’s become a brand. It’s it’s who I really am, and it can’t be put out that quickly. I complain. I mean, it’s it’s it is what it is. It’s it’s not, that easily doused, I guess I’m trying to say.

Wil Reynolds [00:48:59]:
No. You know, it’s, I don’t know, man. Like, for me, it is one of those things where I literally sit there sometimes and I’m like, I even try to question myself because you can change your religion, after like the business does well. The beauty of blogging since the time I started this publicly when I didn’t have We always did fine, but I didn’t have as much is I can look back at things that I said about entrepreneurship and running a business twenty years ago, sixteen, seventeen years ago. And I read them and I’m like, back then I got a post on my old blog. That’s like, entrepreneurship is a self congratulatory circle jerk. So, I thought the same we’re saying now fifteen years ago, and sometimes you gotta check yourself, be like, it’s easy that now that it’s worked for me, for me to now have a belief system that’s like, yo, like, yeah, man, blah, blah, blah. It’s like, well, you got the bag.

Wil Reynolds [00:49:55]:
What were you doing back then? And I’m like, I thought the same back then.

A. Lee Judge [00:49:58]:
Doesn’t it feel good to check yourself and go, you know what? I’m consistent.

Wil Reynolds [00:50:02]:
The lies we tell ourselves are crazy. I got caught in one. So I’ve always been like, I went to school to be a teacher. That is a fact. And the story I would tell people, which is about, which is where I’m going, in the next call is I meet with all my new employees and tell them the story of how I founded the company and why it matters. The story I used to tell all these new people at SEER is I’m an accidental entrepreneur. I used to put it all over the internet, oh, an accidental entrepreneur. Like what school be a teacher? Right? So the story I’ve been telling myself is like, you know, I’m not like these other people.

Wil Reynolds [00:50:31]:
I started off, I was cursing, I was doing all this stuff. I ain’t like these people, right? They’re not my people. My mom was cleaning out my high school. I was cleaning out my closet at the house and this was like two years ago. And she’s like, oh, I got your yearbook. What do you wanna do with it? And I’m like, oh, you know, just hold onto it. Let me come get it. I just wanna read through it.

Wil Reynolds [00:50:49]:
Right? I freaking read like, Where do you wanna be in like twenty years? And it said, Start a business with my boy, Bill, who’s my best friend. Right? And I was like, Damn, I’ve been telling people this story that like, I don’t wanna start this And I’m looking at it like, Well, if I wanna start a business, why would I go to school to be a teacher? Right? So like in my mind, like I had forgotten that there was a part of me in high school that really thought that So even for us, right? It’s like nice to have those artifacts that let you go back and check yourself because sometimes you can’t even remember when people are early in their businesses, they’ll be like, well, give me advice on being five people. I’m like, nah. I can’t do that because whatever I tell you is made up. Like, it might be accurate. It might be wrong because I can’t reflect on those days because it’s been a thousand employees later. Right?

A. Lee Judge [00:51:35]:
Yeah.

Wil Reynolds [00:51:35]:
So you’re like, I can’t actually honestly tell you what it was like hiring my first employee because I have forgotten it because I’ve now hired 900 and some other people after that, you know.

A. Lee Judge [00:51:45]:
Will, before you go, I really wanna give you a chance to tell us about some of your causes and some of the things that we can support.

Wil Reynolds [00:51:52]:
Sure. So, I came on pretty hot talking about AI. I think the most important thing all of us can do, find a young person to mentor because they’re the ones that are really gonna be they have an opportunity, but it also can be risky. There’s a lot of grant funding and stuff in helping inner city young kids learn to code. You just heard Zuckerberg the other day be like, yeah, we think all our code’s gonna be written in X number of years by AI for the most part. Right? So it’s like, I think there’s a lot of grant money there. And a lot of people are like, oh, look at this grant money, learn to code, learn to code to our young kids in the inner city, black, brown, poor, whatever, I don’t care, right? But it’s like people that grew up like me. And I think that we all need to try to pick one or two of those kids up under our wing.

Wil Reynolds [00:52:28]:
They can be hard to find sometimes because kids will flap their lips and sound right. And then when it really comes down to being about that life, they’re not really willing to put in the work. But I’ve now found some of those young folks and I’m trying to put them on a path of building out custom GPTs and whatnot and watch me build this and let me send you a video on what I built just so that I can try to put them in that direction. So that’s the thing that I would say more than anything. And then next year will be the twenty fifth anniversary of the Covenant House’s sleep outs that we do and where I sleep outside to raise money for, homeless youth in Philadelphia. So if by some stretch somebody’s listening to this, a year from now wants to make a donation, not a year, probably, we sleep outside in November. So, you know, eleven months from now, maybe we can promote it again then, I would love the support.

A. Lee Judge [00:53:09]:
Awesome, awesome. So where can they find you, Seer, and your causes?

Wil Reynolds [00:53:13]:
Google me, man. Like you’ll find it, I’m out there with my you’ll see me.

A. Lee Judge [00:53:16]:
If they if they can’t find you not doing your job, right?

Wil Reynolds [00:53:19]:
That’s what I always used

A. Lee Judge [00:53:20]:
to say, brother. That’s right. That’s right. So, Will, thanks again for your time, man. I really appreciate it. And thanks to the listeners. If you’re listening to the podcast and want to also see Will and I, video the podcast and others will be available in the podcast section of contentmonster.com. Once again, thanks for listening.

A. Lee Judge [00:53:37]:
Thanks, Will.

Announcer [00:53:40]:
Thank you for listening to the Business of Marketing podcast, a show brought to you by contentmonster.com, the producer of b two b digital marketing content. Show notes can be found on contentmonster.com as well as a leadjudge.com. To continue the conversation, be sure to follow the podcast on your favorite podcast platform.