Ep. 217 – Dan Kennedy on AI: The Fastest Way for Lawyers to Become Invisible

Everyone is telling lawyers the same thing right now: lean into AI or get left behind.

Dan Kennedy says… not so fast.

In this episode of The Renegade Lawyer Podcast, Ben Glass sits down with legendary marketing strategist Dan Kennedy to unpack his newest book, The Business Owner’s Emergency Survival Guide for the AI Revolution—and to challenge the hype, the herd mentality, and the hidden risks no one is talking about.

This is not a conversation about tools.

It’s a conversation about what happens to your business when everyone uses the same tools.

Dan explains why:

•  AI is rapidly commoditizing professionals by making everyone sound the same 
•  Big firms rushing to automate client interaction may be creating a massive competitive opening 
•  Over-reliance on AI can quietly destroy differentiation, pricing power, and trust 
•  The real leverage point in any practice is still marketing, persuasion, and human connection 

You’ll also hear a practical framework for thinking about AI the right way:

•  Where it belongs (internal efficiency) 
•  Where it doesn’t (client-facing experience) 
•  And how to use it without surrendering your unique voice and value 

If you’re a solo or small firm lawyer trying to figure out how AI fits into your practice—without becoming just another interchangeable option—this episode is essential listening.

Bottom line:
AI may be the most powerful tool we’ve ever seen…
But used carelessly, it may also be the fastest way to become invisible.

Link to the book:
https://www.amazon.com/business-Owners-Emergency-Survival-Revolution/dp/1953321305

Ben Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury and long-term disability insurance attorney in Fairfax, VA. Since 2005, Ben Glass and Great Legal Marketing have been helping solo and small firm lawyers make more money, get more clients and still get home in time for dinner. We call this TheGLMTribe.com

What Makes The GLM Tribe Special?

In short, we are the only organization within the "business builder for lawyers" space that is led by two practicing lawyers. 

One thing we're sure you've noticed is that despite the variety of options within our space, no one else is mixing
the actual practice of law with business building in the way that we are.

There are no other organizations who understand the highs and lows of running a small law firm and are engaged in talking to real clients. That is what sets GLM apart from every other organization, and it is why we have had loyal members that have been with us for two-decades.

Transcript

Welcome And The New AI Book

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Okay, we're here with Dan Kennedy, my friend, and marketing expert and guru, my personal guru for the last 20 plus years. Dan has a new book out, The Business Owner's Emergency Survival Guide for the AI Revolution. And Dan, this comes at a really cool time for the solo and small firm lawyers that I speak to because on every stage in the sort of business of law type conferences,

How Lawyers Use AI Today

SPEAKER_01 1:26

this is the thing that gets people into the room, like AI, AI for everything. And I'll I'm going to give you sort of four big areas that it's being talked about. So number one is the whole legal research space, which is crazy because we've got great products out there that have, you know, from Westlaw and Lexus that have for decades delivered real results. We have amazingly AI intake, and some of the big some of the conferences that I have been to, these big giant plaintiffs firms are talking about. I don't need a live person answering the phone anymore. Listen to this tool, it's really cool. There's, of course, the whole marketing thing, like how can I write better copy either for the web or otherwise. And then there's the place where we're using it a lot, and I think it's personal opinion, the most effective tool for lawyers now is just helping a lawyer put his or her arms around the data that's in documents, because a lot of our cases obviously involve documents, and AI is really good for sifting through that. But now you've come out with the emergency survival guide, my friend. And as I read through it on the plane, I went out to Phoenix last week to speak. You say in the book, you had just had to get this out now, right? It wasn't really planned in your arsenal of books. So let me just talk about that first.

Why An Emergency Survival Guide

SPEAKER_01 2:48

Like, why an emergency survival guide for AI when so many businesses and most lawyers think that AI is like a Godsend and it's all going to be great.

SPEAKER_02 2:59

Yeah. Um uh uh I have I have my stepson visiting. I saw him this morning for a few days, and he's an executive at Hub Hubs and um kind of a bit of an evangelist for all things AI. And so the timing is that is you can't go anywhere to a business conference of any kind, and mostly anywhere else, that you are not being sold on the utopian transformation of business and society occurring at a pace never seen before, every day getting better and better and better. And you can't I mean, you can't even talk to ordinary Joe and Jane without hearing about it. Buffett, it's stated, but Buffett always said that when your cab driver, barber, and shoesike guy start giving you stock tips, it's time to get out of the market. And there's a cautionary tone here. So because it is really a mania that has just consumed the attention and the interest of everybody, and really people in every type of business, and every practice, by the way, because I was with a group on Friday of high-income dentists, and I had to keep dragging them out of the AI tree so we could talk about something else. Um so the timing is that this is being rust into existence and into acceptance and into replacement, like you just alluded to with Westlaw and your other resources. Um, hey, let's just throw them over the side of the boat

AI Mania And The Hidden Risk

SPEAKER_02 4:45

and we can we can tell Claude or Gemini or whoever just to go find this stuff for us. And um there's there's there's a book full of problems with that unbridled, uncautioned mania and enthusiasm. One is that whatever big dumb companies are doing is the last thing a small business ever ought to do. So, for example, the big dumb company rush to eliminate human beings talking to people on the phone and forcing them to engage with AI, which often uh I've had and I don't I don't really deal with the outside world much, but I've had four in the past week where I'm being interrogated by an AI that its first purpose in life is never to let me get to a human agent, no matter what I say. And one of them for United Parcel Service, very frustrated with me after about ten minutes, uh said emotion. Well, it literally said your question does not warrant connection to a human agent, and it hung up on me. Now, I assure you UPS doesn't know it's doing that, let alone how many people is it doing that to. But like in your example, the thing that would tell you you ought not do it with your small law firm if you had nothing else to tell you that, is the stampede of the big law firms doing

The Push To Replace Humans

SPEAKER_02 6:18

it. People don't like this, especially people 50 it up, which for a great many businesses, they happen to have the money. So that's where the money is. And they do not like it. And they gripe to each other about it conversationally. It's challenging for number one position against dismay over the attitudes and behavior of their adult children. This this is rising to number one in the conversation at the dinner table in the restaurants. I overhear it. Uh uh, I get it from my friends. They don't like it. And a monopolistic business, they'll be the ones that will be able to force it on people first. Um I have to deal with my partial blindness problem uh every six months at Cleveland Clinic. I don't have a choice. And Cleveland Clinic is finding ways new ways by the day to use AI to make the patient experience crappier. It doesn't matter. Because our market area basically you have Cleveland Clinic, you have you you have one other hospital chain, and since they're both doing it, you're stuck. But in a competitive environment, uh people have choices. And they will still indulge their choices. You know, Target really hurt itself and is still pretty much in the dumper in same source sales, customer loss statistics, stock valuation. Uh they did four uh self-sabotage things. And one is trying to force people to do self-checkout. And every a lot of retail is trying to force it, and the resistance to it is profound. Now they'll get there. They'll get there. You see, I'm old enough to remember you might be when all the gas stations were called service stations, and attendants came out and pumped your gas, and while they were filling the gas tank, they cleaned your windows and they checked your tire pressure.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

100%. I was there, yes.

SPEAKER_02 8:29

Okay. That's how that business worked. Then the decision was made, hey, we can save a lot of money by not being service stations. Let's

Self Service Backlash And Lessons

SPEAKER_02 8:40

just be gas stations. And we'll just force people to pump their own gas. Now, early on, there was a lot of resistance. Because this makes no sense. You're on your way to a business meeting, or your wife is on her way to a luncheon, you're all dressed up, and you are you're you get in the car and realize your kid didn't refill the gas tank, so you've got to stop and get gas. And in your fancy clothes, you are gonna get out and you are gonna do minimum wage work with dirty, greasy, smelly equipment, and that your hands are gonna smell like gas for at least a day, and you're gonna pump your own gas. And if you need your windshield, that courtesy you get is there's a bucket of water and a scraper thing there for you to do this yourself. Well, people were profoundly unhappy, and you would go to a gas station that had one service lane left and all the rest was self-serve, and there would be six cars in line waiting in the service lane, and the self-serving service lanes would be empty. It took a while. Uh, as this dwindled, I and some of my cohort uh we were driving twenty miles out of the way not to pump our own gas. And it took a while, years, for them to fully force this upon people. And and it's a competitive environment, but it's really not, right? You got four oil companies, so as soon as two gas stations started to force it, they dropped down to the one lane and then the no lane, the others did it too. So the next thing that came with salad bar. Early on, people did not like it. Why should I make my own salad? Uh I I could have stayed home, right? And you could be in a restaurant and you could hear customers actually tell the waiter or waitress what they wanted on their salad, and they would go to the salad bar and make a salad for them because they weren't gonna do it. I had a client at the time steak at ale restaurant, and the CEO said, This is a tough uphill battle for us. The majority of our customers are expressing complaints about it, they don't like it, but we're gonna make it happen because here's the math. So this will happen, but at least in the medium term, it's not helpful to your business. There's an opportunity for a competitive advantage. And so this is just one of the things that is an AI issue that business owners need to think very carefully about. Yes, is this helpful to yes, this is helpful to me, but at what visible and concealed expense of loss of business, loss of goodwill, disappearance of referrals, etc. And that's why you see some advertisers, I gave two examples in the book, uh jumping on it and making a big deal in their advertising that you talk to humans here. We actually want to talk to you, and you will not talk to a rope a robot here.

SPEAKER_01 12:01

I I had that exact thought as I was driving from Phoenix to Sonana a week ago, and of course, and and it I know for a while you lived in Phoenix, and you probably can imagine that every 50 feet is a lawyer billboard. And I thought, well, if you were going to play in the billboard space, that that would be the signage, that would be the just text. Like you talk to real people here, here's the phone number. I remember, you know, the first time that I heard so here's what's going on in legal, these big giant plaintiffs firms who rely primarily on broadcast marketing and digital marketing, their ad spend costs are going through the roof. And so they're looking for every single way they can, they think, to cut to cut corners and make profit. And when I sat in a room and I I heard these guys on the stage talking about like AI, everything and AI, particularly AI voice and reception. And I said back, I went back to my

AI And The Death Of Differentiation

SPEAKER_01 12:55

team, I said, this is this is our unique advantage, right? Because we are never going to go there because most of our money is made on personal relationships and people get to talk to a human being. You talk a lot in the book about destruction of differentiation, destruction of your space in the market. So let's talk about that for a minute. You also talk a lot about all humans being walking trauma boxes. Well, that certainly applies, applies in many businesses, but it certainly applies in legal. But how talk for a moment about from a marketing perspective, how this reliance or over-reliance on AI is bringing us all reduced to the mean. Every message is even worse than it has been for Sever Since I've known you, where everything was this the same and you said do that, like don't do what everybody else is doing. You argue that it's worse now.

SPEAKER_02 13:51

So we're so we're where it's already presenting itself and being openly talked about a lot. You can see it in interviews on business TV, you can read about it. Big companies, HR departments, are in despair because when they post a position on ZipRecruiter or indeed.com or any of those places, and they get 200 resumes. So they're seeing them all at the same time. They are now instantly recognizing that they were all written by AI. At best, there's a paragraph of differential copy. The rest of it is dearly a clone, and none of it is accurate in its representation of the person. So they are abandoning the use of resumes, and they are having to go back to double interviews, manual labor intake, somebody talking to the 500 first, and w widowing it down to 200, and then somebody else talking to the other 200, and finally getting it down to 50, and then having to interview them, and nobody's even using the resumes. So that's exactly what AI does. The other place it's being talked about is college admission essays, because they all arrive at the same time, and they are all alike. So AI, what we in copywriting call a swipe file. AI, whenever it's given a task, so a marketing type task, a writing task. So let's say you tell it to to write a article for your client newsletter about Roth IRA conversions as part of a state planning. You're an estate planning attorney, and you tell it to go do that. If it already has a template and it has done that before, and it then it it uses the same template. It doesn't create a new one. It just reaches on the shelf for templates for that subject matter, and boom, it pulls down one or two templates. Then it goes for the content. Well, where is it getting the content? The content has all been scraped largely off of the web. Everything from Wikipedia to Google to attorneys' websites, estate planning attorney's websites. And so it scrapes all that if this is the first time it's doing this, and it puts it in a swipe file, in a swipe file folder that says articles, estate planning attorneys. And now you give it that assignment. If it's already got that file folder, it uses what's in that file folder in order to create your article. If you give it any new things of your own, not only does it use it for you, it puts that in the swipe file. So there's a circular process here. So when the next guy asks for the same task, it's got a template and it's got a swipe file. So which is exactly

Why AI Writing Starts To Clone

SPEAKER_02 17:10

what's happening to HR with uh uh with resumes. And it's exactly what's happening with college admission essays. It's the same process. If you so over time, and not long a long time, everybody begins to look and sound alike. And essentially what does that do? It it commoditizes. It turns everything into a commodity. Therefore the buyer decisions get narrowed down to uh convenient location, who's closest to my house, cheapest price, and not much more. And everybody gets leveled, which was actually the true purpose of the internet, and now in a more micro environment, it's clearer that it's the true purpose of AI. This whole thing is built to create the DEI version of equity. It is coming from people who are equity ideologues, and its purpose is to make sure every plumber makes the same amount of money, to make sure every personal injury attorney gets their income leveled out because they're all gonna sound alike. And the advantage, like you sit in a room and you see the the guy with the giant ad spend in his market area. Well, if we level out his money, we reduce the number of them who can outspend the others. Not to mention that the ad costs are all going up, online and offline. And the Facebook crash coming, social media ad rates are gonna go through the roof. So this is actually its job. It's uh i it's hardwiring, if you will. It's not the correct term, but but you get the idea. So and anything else it's tasked to do, it happens within that overarching purpose. So if you want to sound like everybody else, and you want to look like everybody else, and you want to be a same as alternative, then you should do as much as possible with AI. If that sounds to you like something you want to opt out of and a bad idea, then you gotta be really wary of anything you do with AI. There's gonna be a day so like you sent me that lawsuit that's a mess because of all the AI hallucinations.

SPEAKER_01 20:06

So there's from one of the biggest law firms in the world.

SPEAKER_02 20:11

Yeah. Well, I mean my stepson would call that pilot error, and which he immediately did, and the problem here is people using AI who don't know how to use AI. Maybe, maybe, but one of the biggest law firms in the world just made a god-awful mess out of their lawsuit by by having AI do their work. Now, one of the things that's going to happen before this is all over

Commoditization And Price Pressure

SPEAKER_02 20:40

with. So there's an ad campaign that runs right now for uh uh being a certified financial planner, which is essentially a certification. You take an online course, you take a test, could you pay a fee? And you're a CFP. And to make that kind of real, they advertise it like it's something more than it is to the public. So the ad campaign has people looking at the financial planner and say, Are you certified?

SPEAKER_01 21:12

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 21:13

Right? And the person says back, yes, I'm a certified financial planner. I promise you, in at least some businesses and professions, in less than 24 months and maybe less than 12, people are gonna ask, is the work you're charging me for going to be done by AI?

SPEAKER_01 21:31

So this is already an issue in legal for the you know, I make my money in contingent fee work, right? But so much of legal is made by billing by the hour.

SPEAKER_03 21:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:41

Right? And that question is certainly being asked. I heard uh I was actually uh speaking at an event that um Addison Watson, the uh general counsel for quick bundles, and they did a panel on this. And you know, he outsources work to other law firms. I think their general Position was just be straight with me with what you're doing. And I'm paying you X. I expect to get X or Y for a product. I don't really care how you get there as long as it's a good product. But there's so the ABA, like you'd be interested in this. Like the ABA has said you can't for something that took you an hour in the past, and now you're taking six and a half seconds to do, you can only bill for six and a half seconds. You can't bill for an hour. The whole thing.

SPEAKER_02 22:30

Well, what does that do to you, right? Yes. Furthermore, so Addison Wesley's sort of super rational, unemotional approach, right? I don't care if you get it done at six and a half minutes and bill me for the hour, as long as it's the work I need. Maybe that's sensible for some things, but it's not sensible for others. So let's take my business, okay, for a multi-piece marketing campaign, let's say lead generation ads, the landing page, the info kit that gets sent out to the leads, and the follow-up six-step direct mail campaign that goes to those leads. I'm going to charge you like $100,000 and 3% of the gross. Now,

Clients Asking Who Did The Work

SPEAKER_02 23:21

that's not mechanical. Part of it is mechanical, but part of it is inventive. Part of it is, I don't like the word creative, but it's creative. Part of it, its success is going to be what comes out of my unique subconscious mind that in many cases, I don't know where the hell it came from when it pops up and becomes part of that copy. And so it's not a matter of just pulling from a swipe file and stitching it together with Scotch tape, like it might be for a legal document that Addison Wesley would be happy with. So I am either going to have to, if I'm going to substitute AI for my creative process, which is time consuming. To get ideas, I might go over to the dollar store and walk around by, depending on what the product is and the system is, I might read six months of Teen Girls magazines before I write copy for Proactive. Now AI can do that too, obviously, a lot faster than I can, but it doesn't have my experience and it doesn't have my empathy, my emotional contribution to the process. So I'm either going to have to charge a hell of a lot less for that, or I am going to be eaten if I use it by others who will charge a hell of a lot less. So one way or another, this thing will kill my income if I let it. So when we let this in, it does things, you know, there's consequences. And so there's positive consequences and there's negative consequences. And in almost every application, there's both. And a lot more thought ought to go into this than is currently going into it. In the book, and particularly for investors, but for users too. I use the kind of the original media example, the tulip mania, but we've had a lot of them where there's a hysteria of money rushing to something with no real consideration of how so think about electric cars. The car makers were coerced and compelled and pushed and motivated to begin switching to making electric cars and advertising electric cars, and everybody was told they should be driving an electric car, and not much thought given to the infrastructure to support electric cars. So if you go out in, let's see, where are you?

SPEAKER_01 26:29

I'm in Fairfax. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:30

Yeah, you're in Fairfax. You're like the communist capital of North America. So if you go drive around Fairfax and you count the number of gas stations, that tells you the number of charging stations you need to support everybody switching to electric cars. However, with the current technology, it takes four times as long to fill the thing with the charging station as it does. So you really need four times as many gas stations. And now multiply that all across the country. And how long is it going to take to do that? Well, we spent $2 billion and we got three. So now do the money math. And who's going to pay for it? And well, everybody that's got an electric car has a charging station in their garage.

Creative Value Can’t Be Automated

SPEAKER_02 27:15

Well, that's fantastic. But the grid can't support it. If one fourth of the homes in my community switched to electric cars tomorrow and they all started to charge them at night, all the lights would go out. Hell the lights go out now when there's a lightning strike. So there was this mad rush of money, capital invested, and changing of manufacturing and changing of consumer attitudes and all that for something that we had no way to support. Well, AI is this on steroids, and nobody likes answering these questions. I had a conversation about this this morning about two hours ago. So they're telling everybody, for example, that all these giant AI farms, AI factories, the data centers, yes. All these data centers are somehow gonna magically create their own power, like maybe with little MIDI nuclear reactors. So they're all gonna have a nuclear power plant three feet from your community in order to power these data centers. However, that technology doesn't exist. It's theory. Nobody's got one. And then they're telling you, so the story I heard this morning is they're all gonna have these giant lithium storage batteries so that they can store power. So the surge needs, which I confess I hadn't thought about until this morning, that these things don't need power on a steady basis. They have surge needs where they're asked to do more than like a level amount. So that the surge needs, instead of all going into the local power grid at one time and everybody's lights going out, they will draw from these gigantic lithium batteries where they have stored all electricity, and the power grid will just continue to be asked for a level, steady amount of power. I said, uh, excuse me, where are you gonna get all the electricity you're gonna put in all the lithium batteries? And where are you gonna get it from to refill the lithium batteries when it's drawn on? So he's described technology to me like my home generator, right? If the power goes out, it's hooked up to my natural gas line and it comes on, and all my lights come back on. But it's hooked up to a natural gas line. It's not trying to draw the same power that went out. I mean, and and and they really don't like to talk about this, but what they like to talk about even less is water. Uh, because all the chips need cooled, and it needs an enormous amount of water, which in case anybody hasn't noticed, we have a shortage of already. And you can argue you can make more electricity. It's a tougher argument that you can make more water. Then nobody has talked about land. So these things are eating huge swaths of land all horizontally. They're like tomato greenhouses. They don't go up, they go across, which is why like Bill Gates wants you to eat bugs, because they

Investment Hype And EV Parallels

SPEAKER_02 30:45

can make food made out of bugs in vertical towers, and they can't make real food that way. So we're roaring ahead with trillions, not billions, trillions of dollars of capital investment and massive conversion of the way we're all going to do business without the infrastructure questions asked, debated, or answered that is going to be necessary to support it. We're already so far ahead of the infrastructure that it's laughable. It's like before we had the interstate highway system and everybody had a car, but that was an easier problem to solve than this. So then then you have the software, and most knowledgeable people are talking about this being the death of software because it will learn the software it's facilitating, and then it will just dispense with it. And that's fine, except again, software is not requiring this kind of infrastructure in order to operate it. So if everybody rushes to replace ServiceNow and HubSpot or let's just take the softwares that the law firms use, if everybody gets orgasmically excited about bringing in AI to work with that software, which really means it's going to eat and eliminate that software, but it requires all sorts of different support than the current software does, could we get ahead of ourselves with this? But the biggest thing I think for people to really think about with all of it, probably half of the book I talk about this, and half of the book I talk about the other stuff, um is the issue of differentiation in the marketplace versus sameness, making yourself easy to be commoditized in the marketplace and making it easy to have your price, profit, power questioned in the marketplace. It's kind of like volunteering to be mugged.

SPEAKER_01 33:07

Which is if if you're out on a street in New Orleans at three o'clock in the morning, you're at the Risco, right? So that's exactly the book and owning every book you've ever written and probably every product you've ever created, it just struck me as so here we have a tool, we have a new tool, but we've always had new tools on the block. And that those, especially in my space, which is a sole and small firm market space, those who truly understand the psychology of marketing, persuasion, and sales, are going to be just fine. And in fact, you've got a section in the book, Dan's Keys to Differentiation by Category of One, with a number of ideas that almost anybody, if they thought about it. And you know, our whole the whole great legal marketing mantra is we're gonna help you become an expert in the psychology of marketing sales persuasion. Just because if you understand that, then there's tools and you can use tools. So so let's maybe spend a few minutes talking about how my solo and small firm friends might be looking at AI in terms of creating a category of one. In one of the things I do, for example, I charge $2,500 for my less than one hour of work, right? I don't frame it as my billable rate is $2,500 an hour. I frame it as this is going to be good for your life, and let me tell you the 17 ways why. But let's talk for a moment to our to my crowd about how they should be thinking about using AI to maximize this creation of differentiation and space for themselves.

SPEAKER_02 35:00

So the first division that I would make is internal use versus external use and invisible use versus visible use. So there's all kinds of efficiencies that it obviously brings internally, but you would never want to reveal that you were using those efficiencies. It's obviously so if you want to do competitive analysis, you could have it go look at every other law firm in your market in depth and prepare a, and I've seen them, yes, a pretty good analysis of who's doing what, who's doing what the same, who's doing what differently, who's in what media, maybe somebody's in a media that will surprise you, AI finds it. You can also, and I've seen these. I got one day before yesterday from a client of mine who uh owns and coaches

Power Water Land For Data Centers

SPEAKER_02 36:05

martial arts uh academies. And so for both businesses, he literally had AI critically analyze what he was doing. And hey, it did a pretty good job. I give it an eight on a one to ten, and it raised three or four legitimate issues, actionable things that would immediately improve his marketing and his positioning. However, I'll tell you something really interesting. So that report is probably 16 pages for the coaching business, and about the same number of pages for the brick and mortar retail business, because he has both. And in each case, it found things. However, the second time I read it, I found five or six places scattered throughout, but where the critique it was giving was about things he was doing differently than everybody else, and arguing that he needed to do the things everybody else was doing. And so there it revealed its true built-in bias.

SPEAKER_01 37:50

So you're talking about at the beginning of the call.

SPEAKER_02 37:52

Yeah. So anything you use this for, you can't trust it. You have to delegate but never abdicate. You have to, just as you would from any other source, you have to take everything with a grain of salt or two. And you have to understand that this underlying bias is there coloring some of its recommendations. And and I I actually missed them the first time, and I got them the second time. Um, but that does not negate its usefulness in this category of looking over your shoulder. It just means you have to be careful. It's kind of like your brother-in-law, who's a really successful dentist, but maybe nowhere near as successful as your law firm is, and he sees your latest book, he may have legitimate and useful comments, but because he is also jealous and envious of your greater success, he will have an underlying bias in the way he reacts to it. And if you're gonna pay attention to him at all, you have to sort through that's interesting, and that kind of makes sense to me, and maybe I should work on that from and I know where that's coming from, and I'm gonna ignore it.

SPEAKER_01 39:20

As you are explaining this, I'm thinking either in the book or in your most recent newsletter, your description of um psychic. And once the psychic says a couple things that you're like, oh yeah, that might be true, then your brain, the human brain, goes to a bias of, well, he's right on that one, like this must be this must also be as useful and as truthful. And then Claude puts it into a really nice format so it looks like a great little report. Um, and boom, but it kind of goes back to the point that you know having this fundamental understanding of marketing across time and across the availability of different media is just so so critical because I I've often said lawyers, Dan, are they find it much easier to whip out a credit card and pay somebody to do something than to engage in deep study and get in groups and and hang out with people who actually know what they're doing.

SPEAKER_02 40:17

Yeah, what we all do.

SPEAKER_01 40:18

Learn from.

SPEAKER_02 40:18

Yeah. So I I I I was I was with a client, mastermind group of dentists, uh, all day Friday. And kind of an open Q ⁇ A discussion. You know, he had four or five places he wanted to go and we got them. But so there were like, I don't know, let's say there were 15. I think there were 12 practices represented, but there were 15 docs, and they're all successful. So these are not goofballs. They're all successful. But toward the end, two of the twelve said exactly what you just said. I kind of get it. I've heard it from you. I I don't want to learn anything about this, I don't really want to know anything about

Internal Vs External AI Use

SPEAKER_02 41:05

this. I just want to have it all done for me by one person or entity, and I just want to write a check and be done. And I said, look, you can certainly do that. The world is full of agencies for dentists and agencies for podiatrists and agencies for lawyers and these who understand this desire well and will certainly take your check. You will probably wind up keeping one for about six months and then replacing them and replacing them and replacing them until you're all the way back around to the first one, in all probability, regardless. However, what it reveals is a fundamental and increasingly dangerous, in part because of the AI revolution, a fundamental and increasingly dangerous misunderstanding of the business you're in and where your success and wealth comes from. Because you think it comes from your deliverable, that your deliverable is your business. And it's not. You are in the marketing business and a lot of things under the umbrella of marketing, advertising, marketing, selling, consumer relations, relationship management, referral stimulation, retention, all that. So you are in the marketing business, and your deliverable just happens to be dentistry. And in your case, your deliverable just happens to be law. But that ain't where the money comes from. The money comes from the marketing of it. And that's the choke point where you're either winning or losing is the marketing of it. You can't even win a case if you don't win the marketing first. So that's the choke point. That's the single most important part of the whole thing. This is real hard. It's especially hard for people to get who have invested six years, eight years, ten years, twelve years in going to school and getting multiple degrees. And when you walk down the hall from the reception

Bias In AI Advice And Oversight

SPEAKER_02 43:10

room to the bathroom, it's covered with plaques. It's really hard to swallow this initially bitter pill. And I get it. I don't understand it sympathetically, because I didn't go that path. But I understand it empathetically. It's like the sun can cost it, right? All my investment up until now is my technical skill, my clinical skill. And now you're asking me to treat that as an oh by the way and develop a whole new set of skills, and I'd like to shoot the message rather than even consider that. But that's not actually what I'm asking anybody to do. Everything up until now has not been wasted. Exceptional technical knowledge in your field, mastery. of your field is the foundation upon which you can either market successfully and be a five percent firm or a one percent firm or market unsuccessfully and be in the bottom forty percent and constantly worry about meeting payroll and wondering why you can't make maximum 401k contributions. Where you are on that spectrum is all about your chief marketing officer job, not your technician job. And if you embrace it, it won't take you as long to get super competent at this as it did for you to get super competent at your technical skill because that was deliberately slowed down. I mean you know well it was I'm with you. I'm with you I mean like the the law school didn't want you to get it in six weeks. That doesn't serve their business model. But you know, a year of serious serious hour a day work on the psychology of the particular customer client or patient we're serving and the psychology of the way that we communicate with them and the marketing media available to us to do that with and success examples that we can model etc about a year of that and and you're up to speed. But if you won't do it then when you delegate you really abdicate because you don't even know enough to delegate intelligently this is why big dumb companies advertising and marketing is usually so awful because most of the CEOs came from the finance side the management side they didn't come from the selling side and they don't know good advertising when they're see when they see it. They don't know bad advertising when they see it. They don't know how marketing is supposed to work. They're spending billions running ads that they can't tell whether they work or not because they don't have an offer in them. And so when you see mostly big business or small business most of what you see in the marketing realm is dumb it's bad and

Marketing Is The Real Chokepoint

SPEAKER_02 46:20

as always if you didn't know much of anything else to do at least don't do that. But this is this is a luxury of avoidance and a misunderstanding of the true reality of a business that that you really can't afford. At bare minimum it locks you out of the top 20% in terms of income to wealth in almost any business category.

SPEAKER_01 46:45

And and everything you just said is you've been remarkably consistent because the very first product almost 25 years ago that I got was the Magnetic Marketing toolbox or handbook and you and there's nothing different. I mean the tools are different the tools are different but the the fundamentals are the same. So I know you probably have another call here folks it's the Business Owner's Emergency Survival Guide for the AI Revolution by my friend Dan Kennedy we checked today it is up on Amazon and selling you can get it in Kindle you can get it in paperback. If you have a minute like why one more book Dan because you are a prolific producer.

SPEAKER_02 47:23

Well there are there are business reasons for having multiple books to the marketplace not one and whether by new or new additions stirring the pot or shaking the tree every so often during the course of every year. So there's business reasons for what you've seen me do. They're only we don't have time to do them and they're only relevant to your folks in the sense that by and large the more media you put out the better you do and it's hard to get people interested in what's old local or national media has no interest in it. Distribution channels have no interest in it. Even your own clients from the standpoint of referral stimulation have no interest in it. So like I had a client two days ago who was on Maria Barterromo's show in the morning on Fox Business for seven minutes or ten minutes, whatever it was and he's good when he does it. We do he does a lot of and some leads happen immediately. But its main value to them is they immediately get it online and they run a massive email at mail campaign letting letting all their clients know that this thing is up there and it just happened and you need to see it because Ted just answered three questions that you know could make or break you in the next ninety days. Now in reality if you went and pulled his interview with Maria from two years ago and you played him one right after the other 98% of it's the same. But we can't use the old one and email everybody and say you should go see the interview Ted did two years ago because nobody will go look at it. So that so there's business reasons. The specific reason for this book is for now in the foreseeable future broadly my audience the small to midsized business owner the entrepreneur business owner has lost their mind about this. They are they're like they're like teenage boys who found dad's box of Playboys in the garage. They are not interested in anything else right now but that. And it'll be a while before they want to think about anything but that and it's not you know it's not helpful to them. It's not I mean I never make the case that you should not use it. I never make the case that you should not pay attention to it or not be interested in it. I'm interested in it. Who's kidding who here but to be completely consumed by it and to be as part of a crazed stampede is uh is not intellectually or financially healthy. So I had things I had been saying about this as you know for some months in my newsletters and I had things I wanted to put out um into the marketplace in a in a promotable form. We actually I didn't use any of my usual publishers we actually published I noticed

Why Publish Fast And Right Now

SPEAKER_02 50:35

that direct to Amazon because of the speed the book was published from its completion on my computer to the book you can get from Amazon today in in 11 days because if I did a regular one the whole thing would be obsolete by the time it hit the bookstore shelf.

SPEAKER_01 50:52

There's a whole nother lesson right there. Well Dan, my friend thank you for taking the time and again most people who are listening to this they know you through me but if you don't Dan has got an entire no BS business book series he and I co-authored the NoBS Time Management book for entrepreneurs and this book is terrific and both a warning and an opportunity. Thank you so much Danks Ben Have a great weekend yeah we'll help sell you copies bye bye now