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The LFG Show
AI Is Useless Without Systems ft. Jason Akatiff
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AI can write words all day… but can it actually run real work without you babysitting it?
We sit down with Jason Akatiff, a 25-year marketing veteran, to break down what separates casual AI users from real operators getting consistent, repeatable outcomes. This isn’t surface-level “prompt tips” — this is about turning AI into infrastructure inside your business.
We get tactical on how to actually use Claude and ChatGPT inside performance marketing, media buying, and daily execution. From campaign ideation to creative iteration, Jason explains how to build prompt systems your team can reuse — not just one-off wins.
Then we level up: prompt frameworks rooted in proven copywriting principles, paired with a simple but powerful loop — make the model grade its own work, refine it, and repeat until it hits the standard. That’s how you go from “AI output” to operator-level results.
We also dig into the human side of the AI shift. Working with AI looks a lot like managing employees: clear direction, structured inputs, ongoing training, and fast feedback when things go off track. That same mindset is changing hiring — “AI-first” isn’t a buzzword anymore. The best teams are testing workflows, tools, and API fluency… not resumes.
Zooming out, we hit the bigger questions:
What happens to jobs?
Why exponential change is so hard to predict?
And how thinking like Ray Kurzweil can actually reduce fear and help you prepare instead of react.
On the lead gen side, we keep it real:
Quality > volume
API-first platforms are winning
And where calls vs. leads actually break down when you scale
We close with forward-looking bets — telehealth, peptides, longevity — and what it means when distribution, compliance, and acquisition all collide in an AI-driven healthcare world.
This episode is for builders. Operators. People who don’t just want to “use AI”… but want to win with it.
NO MONEY. NO HONEY. 🐻🍯
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SPEAKER_00Newsbreak is the fastest growing local news app in the United States with over 50 million monthly and 16 million daily users checking in throughout the day. When you sign up, the Newsbreak team reaches out with White Love Service to get you on boarded and making money right away. Up to$5,000 in matching ad credits, quick account approvals, and dedicated account management to help you find early success. To learn more and sign up, check out the link in the description below. Don't waste time. Sign up now and let's fucking go. Rainbow is the leading inbound call tracking and analytics platform for marketers, brands, and paper call teams. It gives you real-time reporting, intelligent call routing, and fully customizable call flows backed by global telecom access in more than 60 countries. With enterprise-grade reliability, a powerful API, and no contracts instead of fees, Rainbow has become a go-to platform for performance marketers worldwide. To learn more and to sign up, check out the link in the description below. Get goaded and let's fucking go. Guys, I'm normally hyped up. When I first met Jason, I was super hyped up. He didn't understand one damn word I said. He told my wife, I don't know what the fuck this guy's saying. Anyway, I'm slowing down because this guy is a real uh legend in the space. He's been doing this for 25 years. And what I love about you, Jason, is that he's given me a lot of good advice, man. I think when I met you, I was on a rock. It's all like, shh, I was going up. Then I came down like this, and then I was coming down. I'm like, damn, I need some advice. And you gave me a lot of good advice. And one of the biggest things he said, operate lean. I started fucking cutting. And I and it was hard, but I freed up. I remember I called you one day, like Jason, I cut I have$75,000 lighter and it feels good. Keep going. 80,000, 90,000. And bro, that kind of saved the company, man. You know, but he's a he's a he's a guy that's been doing this for a long time, 25 years of experience. And I feel like you're just very um, you're very uh forthcoming. You want you want to help people out, man. Yeah, and you're doing it right now with your AI community, which is I think is amazing, right? So it's really an honor to have you on the show. I'm really glad I've been wanting to get you on for like over a year, and I'm glad we finally did it, man. I mean for the bottom R, man. Yeah, but I really that's all that's it's it's I really appreciate you, man. You've helped my career on. I know you helped a lot of other people in this industry. Oh, sure.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I love watching people be successful, man. Like, you know, I've I've done well, I'm I'm happy. I wake up every day and be able to do the things that I want to do, and you know, I I hope to, you know, give that to other people or share it with them, you know.
SPEAKER_00What gets you going, man? You know, I feel like you're a student, you're like a like an eternal student, right? And you you always have this thirst, this hunger to keep learning, right? Is is that true or what 100%.
Curiosity Driven AI Learning
SPEAKER_02I mean uh Tony Robbins talks about uh I think it's Tony Robbins, but uh talks about like your core driving question. And you know, for for me that I I figured out kind of what makes me happy is struggle and then and then breakthroughs and growth, right? Like that's what makes me happy. And you know, some people might look at oh, struggle's hard and this, but struggle is really where you're growing as a human. And so then do harder things, take on bigger challenges, whatever, and it all compounds on itself. And that's what keeps me motivated every day is being curious about stuff, new things coming out all the time, playing with them, testing them, seeing how they fit in that in that puzzle of the marketing technology universe, consuming content constantly. And then now, you know, working with Claude or any kind of AI, you know, you can see something and then you can go to Claude and be like, tell me how this works. Like, what is what does this company do? How do they make money? Right? Like, and it can just give you any any of those answers on a whim. You know, it used to be a a world of like, oh, that guy has a secret sauce for Google. It's like, nah, no, no, Claude has a secret sauce for Google, right? Like I was telling John, like, I just hooked up an API key into Google and into our search campaigns, and he gave me like a 10 bullet point list of things on how to optimize those campaigns, and I was like, Whoa, that's cool. And and then you don't even have to optimize the landing page, you can just tell Claude to fix the landing page, and it just makes the quality score better, right? I know these are like nerdy media buying stuff, but like it's uh it's just that like all those things that you had to have so much knowledge for before you can just tap into Claude, you gotta know kind of how to direct it, yeah. But it'll just do the work for you.
Prompt Frameworks That Stay Consistent
SPEAKER_00That seems to me uh to be what most people are struggling with is how to direct it, right? And um, because you could direct it wrong, put the wrong prompts, and you get fucked up information, right? So I think is that the secret, or how do you figure that out?
SPEAKER_02I think a lot about frameworks, structure, frameworks, right, systems for using those that tooling. And so, like if you're gonna go from hey, I'm gonna ask Claude a question to I'm gonna have Claude build me a landing page, well, there's things in the landing page that need to be there for structure, or maybe you need images, or maybe you need a copy a certain way. So, yeah, anybody can prompt into Claude to get copy, but after as you get better at it, you learn systems on how to prompt it to get consistent results out. Like a one thing I like to use a lot is all these LLMs were trained on basically the tomb of human knowledge, and so they have all the books in them already. People are like, Oh, I'm gonna give it all these books, and then I'm like, the books are already there. Yeah, like you don't need to give it the books. Yeah, so um, a couple of the things that we use a lot on on uh copywriting side is like cash for Tising, uh Cialdini's influence, breakthrough advertising, which is like which stage are they at? And then you tell you tell the AI, hey, based on these three books, I want you to write me copy about a persona that's this. Now it's pulling versus it just coming up with stuff, it's following the principles. And then what I like to do is get it to basically rate itself afterwards. So I'll say, write me say three headlines that uh and three body copies, whatever for Facebook ads. And then after the fact, I'll tell it now I want you to rate those on a scale of one to ten for each of these book principles. Uh, you know, life force aid out of cash fertising, you know, whatever, right? Go through the list. So then it rates itself and then it loops. And I say, All right, well, you got to keep going until you get all eights. Yeah, and it'll just improve itself over time. So that's a that's a big principle in AI is looping, right? Like getting it to check itself and then looping through.
Looping And Self Grading Outputs
SPEAKER_00You know, you know what I love about you is that uh, I mean, we I don't know, we we see each other all over the world, all these different shows. I feel like I think like a year ago we're in Las Vegas and we weren't even talked about any of this stuff, right? I feel like this is something that you just you got into and you hit go head first, and now you really know this stuff and you built a community, right? A telegram community. And then all right, let me know if this is true. I heard with your community. I have my a little private community, I think we're gonna make it public. But the the bottom line is that uh it's hard to manage the community, but you the engagement, I think you have something. Is this right where if someone doesn't post uh I don't know if it's daily or every certain amount of time, they get kicked kicked out.
Building A Telegram Community Bot
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so it actually started at uh you needed to post one time within five days, and so then people would just like say hi or some little comment, right? Just to stay in the group, and so then everybody's like, no, we have to be more strict because the reason I put it together was like I wanted to talk to people about this shit all day. Like I'm building stuff, I'm building 12 hours a day, a lot of days, sometimes 14 hours a day. I'm in Claude Code, and I want to talk to other people that are doing that, and so you know, it was like I wanted a group of active people. I I have built with AI the main group, it's got 700 people in it, but it but it nobody talks, so you know. So I was like, I'm gonna make a bot, and and I just went in with the mindset of like, I would rather have 10 people that are talking about the things that we want to talk about every day than a thousand people that aren't saying anything. That that doesn't make sense to me. So rather than being the cop myself, I used AI and I built a telegram bot that essentially it monitors whether people talk. So they've got you got you're supposed to have at least five, some kind of something in five in three days, and then you and then you get a warning, and then there's another two days, and then and then the bot kicks you out of the group. And you know, it's it's not me, right? It's you know, if it was hey, could I stay? It's just a bot, yeah, it's a robot. And then so now what I've done in that group, I think we're I think we're at 75,000 messages. Wow. It's a like two months old. Yeah, yeah, two maybe three now. Um, and so I've taken all of that content and I've synthesized it down for the users so you can go log into the built with AI site, and it has summaries every day of like what are people talking about, what's kind of like breakthrough technology that's coming out that people are talking about in the group. Yeah, I don't know what I'm gonna do with it, but I it was just kind of fun that I could pull it all in from Telegram and then have AI process it all, synthesize it all down. So it like gives a summary into the group every day, and then it uh there's very public in the group, like, hey, we kick such and so out today, you know, and everybody cheers.
SPEAKER_01That's great, man.
Visionary Operator Roles With EOS
SPEAKER_00I love that. So it's a real sense of community. So um, I don't know. I travel, you know, I travel like crazy. I go to all these shows. I like going to shows where I don't know people. I went to one, uh Sam Parr. You know, Sam Parr? I saw him, yeah, it was awesome, man. Newsletters, uh Cody Sanchez was there.
SPEAKER_02His podcast is great.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and and they they said something interesting. They said that Sam Parr said the people that are gonna make the most amount of money are the ones that aren't in front of the computer, they're the ones that are in front of the computer the least. And I'm like, and it blew me away. I'm like, because you know, we're used to this world where everyone's a media bar, there's they're fucking glued to the computer. And then someone else says something similar, and I realized, you know what? I don't, I'm not in front of the computer a lot. I'm always fucking traveling. I got people running my business. So sometimes I feel like I'm doing, I'm I I'm very hard on myself. I think we all are as entrepreneurs, right? And I'm like, what the fuck am I doing? But I'm man, I I could travel the world, I got people running my business, I'm doing all this stuff, and I thought I kind of go in there as we speak, right? And uh, it just blew me away because that's kind of counterintuitive. And I think that's kind of shocking for people from this world who are used to being in the front here, they're a media buyers. I think they have panic attacks not being in front of the computer. But I guess the thing is that you want the AI, you want, you want them to work for you, right? You want a delegation, they're they're your your army, your employees as a low-cost labor force.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. I uh, you know, with regards to that being in front of the computer or whatnot, I I think a lot about the book Rocket Fuel, which is part of the EOS series.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you were the first one to tell me about that. Yeah, great book.
Why AI Feels Like Managing People
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and it's like the visionary is the person that's supposed to be out and about, pressing the flesh, putting the putting the brand front and center, you know, and then you got your your operator that's running the business every day, day to day, right? So that's a that's a great pair. There was a somebody who mentioned something on Twitter the other day, and they're like, Oh, I don't believe in that. And it's just like, well, maybe in a small business you can know everything, but you can't scale that fast unless you've got great leaders, you know, supporting you, supporting you through the process. I think a lot of the people that are great at AI manage teams because AI is a lot like managing a team of people, right? It people are like, I'm frustrated. I asked it to do this, and I didn't get what I wanted out. Well, guess what? Have you ever had employees?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, oh my god, that's a word. This fucking guy. Show the people this. This some people, this fucking John Chastler showing me the other night in New York on Greenwich on Greenwich Village site. Fucking guy. Uh motherfucker. Kick him out of here. Yo, tell it to Alex. This guy's inappropriate. I feel uh I feel molested. What the fuck would this guy fuck us?
SPEAKER_02Anyway, but yeah, no, I I was just saying that uh, you know, I think if you manage people before, yeah, you get to manage people, you gotta be patient, right? You gotta teach them, train them, coerce them into the direction, get them up to speed, they're gonna make mistakes. Well, AI is the same way. Yeah, you know, it's not like I can tell it what I want, it reads my mind. I think there's a whole art in communication, right? Like if we think about how we communicate. Uh I remember when I, you know, first started, I did everything myself, and then I hired my first employee, and you're just like, Yeah, just uh make some landing pages and run some traffic, right? It's like, what do you mean? Yeah, and then you start to think through that, and you're like, okay, I gotta break all that shit down. And then, oh, by the way, that's a designer and a media buyer, like these are different roles, even. So, you know, and I think I think AI is very much the same way as like going from learning how to communicate clearly, because a lot of people communicate cryptically. Like uh, I always explain, like you're driving and somebody's like, turn right here, and there's three directions to go.
SPEAKER_01Oh, and then you're like, which way? They're like right here, and you're like you're like exactly well, there's three directions, bro. Like, which one do you want? Oh, I I said go to the right.
Hiring AI First Talent
SPEAKER_02You're like, no, you did it, right? And I think working with AI well is about learning how to communicate well.
SPEAKER_00So, how can you listen? I'm I'm uh I'm the visionary, right? Obviously, and I want to talk about EOS a little bit later, but you said something that's very important. My my uh in what I do, hiring is important, hiring the right people for the right lane, another EOS principle, right? Yep. So, um, how do we hire like who how do we find people that know this shit and know it well, man? I mean, because I feel like that can make or break your organization, right? There's not many, yeah, there's not many. And in in my organization, like no one up to like six or nine months ago, no one really knew AI very well. Anker came to Anker from Flight Coast, came to my office. Like, he's seen that word. It's like, Dave, you're so old school, and and he gave me some. I'm like, bro, he collapsed time frames. I love this. I told my team we got to get on this fucking shit, right? So, anyway, um, we were lucky. We got a guy named Chris that we got added to our team, and this guy's a geek, he loves it. I think he's in your community. I hope he's in the community. I totally get in it, but this guy, like, he he he lives and breeze. He's like he's he's obsessed with this shit, right? But then I also worry that you could go down the wrong rabbit hole and and and like really fuck things up. So I feel like that's gonna be the next challenge is finding it's it's I I come from the call center space. The real to me, the real uh chemistry gonna call center is a manager. You need a rock star, it's not a lot of rock stars out there. I I love people, I like throwing chairs, rah, right. I was perfect for the call center environment, but I I was limited, I had to get out of that, right? But right that it was so hard to find a fucking rock star, and that would make or break a call center. So I feel like the new rock stars are the people that really understand I know how to communicate properly, and like how do we do that, man?
SPEAKER_02Well, I think I think uh I was explaining to John that you know, I think we're at uh very, very, very early days, right? Like um, we're going through another massive shift. If you think about the industrial age, right? Manufacturing and car manufacturing and all that stuff to the information age that is Google and Facebook, right? Like we're going through that shift, probably times 10 or times a hundred. And we're right on the you know, I think it's like one percent or two percent of people in the world have used AI.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02In the world, it's crazy. You know, we talk about it all the time. I live it every time.
SPEAKER_00Is that an actual fact? Oh, yeah, yeah. That you know what that reminds me of crypto? I don't know when Bitcoin was like at a thousand and they they would have these stats, and this is why I'm like, this is gonna go up. If if if the adoption is only three percent, I'm like, the fuck is it gonna go up and it happened? But that that's huge what you said. I didn't realize I would have imagined three to five percent. Yeah, wow.
SPEAKER_02It's very small, okay, very, very small. And then there's like a sub-segment of that that there's a segment that's like just use chat GPT and ask the question sometimes like Google search, but then the sub-segment of people that actually can produce good outcomes from it consistently is like under one percent. Wow. And so the whole workforce needs to be retrained to use these tools. But the same way we saw in the industrial age to the information age, factories are gonna close, those high-paying jobs are gonna go away. That workforce is either gonna be need to be retrained or they're going to retire, right? There's not gonna be jobs to move into, in my opinion, that are just some job that you can just push a button or turn a crank. All of that stuff is gonna be automated.
Vetting Skills And Cutting Fast
SPEAKER_00So, again, going to my question, I mean, you know, I'm in Miami now, I came from Jersey, right? And uh, one thing I like about Miami is that there's a lot of there's a lot of Gen Z here, these young kids, and some of these kids are doing some fucking crazy shit, like great stuff. And I I like I get excited seeing this. I mean I was a 19-year-old kid doing TikTok. The guy, I think he dropped out of high school and he fucking started making money at 16. Yeah, and he's like, fuck Kyle. I'm not what I'm making all this more. I'm gonna go to college. Like he figured out this the TikTok automation, all this stuff. So I see these kids, and it kind of reminds me of the VCR. Man, I remember whenever I was a you know, we're I'm a 46, and I remember like my dad didn't how don't you know how to use a fucking VCR, right? But now I feel like I'm those guys with all this, but I like hanging around these kids because I feel like they know, but is is that the secret finding a young Gen Z guy? I mean, I mean I try to crack the code.
SPEAKER_02I put a mandate in my company that like we don't hire anybody that's not an AI first person. Uh we just hired two uh editors. Uh, you know, video editing is still a problem that hasn't been solved in AI yet, and so we just hired two editors, but like the most important things was they needed to have strong dexterity with AI tools. 11 Labs, VO3, SORA2, right? They needed to do the bulk of their work in these things and a small amount of work in their in their editor time. So, you know, it's just interviewing through that process. Somebody comes to me and says, I'm a media buyer, I'm like, Cool. How are you? Which APIs are you using into Facebook and and Claud Code? Oh, I'm I'm an old school media buyer. It's just like, yeah, that's that's not the fit, right? You you can be super powered with these tools. Like I was saying, uh Google, you just go in and ask it, what should I do to optimize? It's gonna give you 10 things, and then you just do those 10 things, right? So uh I think it's just changing the interview process, you know holding their feet to the fire, right?
SPEAKER_00But how do you is it just answering those questions? And and but how do you actually because sometimes people can bullshit obviously they could be typing the AI right there and they get the answers right? But how how do you actually put their feet to the fire and make sure? And then let's say you say you hire them and they're full of shit, like when do you cut the cord?
SPEAKER_02Oh, cut the cord fast, yeah, always. Um but try and find somebody in your organization that interviews them for that skill set, right? Like I could tell uh very quickly if somebody how capable they are at using AI tools. Oh, I use chat GPT, right? Like I have a little interview list that for people to join the advanced group because I want to kind of vet people out how far along they are in the process. Um, and you know, you could see, oh, I use chat GPT and you know, I I write some copy with it, and maybe maybe I use VO3 or something to make or nano banana to make images. That's like tier zero. Okay. Yeah, so they're like, hey, I'm building workflow automations with whatever with Claude Code, yeah, okay. This person, they get it. Right. And none of it's that hard. You know, I think it's an amazing time for for younger generation that embraces these tools. Yeah, like I think the old world of of college is probably gonna totally change. I don't know what it's gonna look like in the future. I don't think it'll go away, but I think it's gonna look different. What you learn in college or or school, and granted, there's a lot of other benefits like you know, uh social type stuff and out on your own with school support and you know, a lot of this stuff. But you know, the actual learning process is so efficient with AI. Like if you want to learn something, yeah, like you're like you're like, hey, I gotta go read about how software engineering works. Uh, you don't have to be an expert, but I'm gonna just go give me an overview with a bullet point so I can sound smart on a podcast about software engineering. Like it'll just give you that. And you're like, okay, and then but what does this mean? And why does this work this way, right? It just gives it's like having a tutor there all the time. Education has to change. Um, but yeah, I guess all that to say make sure that they're an AI first person, unless they're in certain roles like sales or so yeah, like that. I don't and I don't think you need to be.
Using AI For Investing Research
Real Estate Taxes And Scenario Modeling
SPEAKER_00You made me think of something, right? And this, I'm I'm not very good at this stuff, but I I actually are I will now. Yeah, well, yeah, yeah. Well, you're you're helping me, but uh when Anker came to my office, he lit a fire under my ass, right? And I then Chris came into our life, he's our AI guy, right? So Anchor is a big investor. He he's he's a great story. The guy fucking I think he spends an hour a week on his business making they're making great money. He's got the business on autopilot, he's got other people running the business from he spends most of his time investing, looking for investments. So we did ColumbiaCon too. He was the last speaker, he broke out the whole way he does it. Everyone loved it. And he put all these stocks on the board this stock, this stock, they all doubled in the trash. It was like amazing. His speech was a blue peak because no one talks about this stuff, right? Right. All these guys make money or like good chunk do, but they don't know. What the fuck to do with their money, right? And I listen, I've done the same shit. But anyway, with that being said, he's a big believer in uh water companies because you need water to cool down the AI data, the data centers, right? So I I started I started um I went on I went on chat DPD and I he gave me these these this I forgot what you call like cash flow all these different uh KPIs I put them in there and I kept going deeper and deeper and deeper. They gave me three stocks. I didn't buy the stocks, but I'm going to. They're all up 25% the past three months. Nice. Despite the mark, the mark SP I think is down like three percent. These stocks are up. So I use a guy like that, and then this this research would have taken me, I don't know, a long, long time to do. I did this in like a minute or two, and it blew me away. And then it was almost me testing it. But um, like guys like that, they give you the information, you put it in there, it's just amazing what it can do. Even for me, that is like a super novice. Yeah, but I love that stuff because one of the things I want to do, I want to create generational wealth. I want my kids to be well off. I want to, you know, I've done a lot of dumb shit with my money right now. I want to learn from those fucking mistakes. So I love it, man. I think it's so amazing. But for guys like me that don't get it, you hire the right person. And I was amazed to see how quickly I was able to collapse time frames with that man. It was beautiful.
SPEAKER_02My dad's 81, uh, real estate investor, commercial. Uh, we we he uses AI all the time. Like uh he he has a company that makes aircraft electronics for private aviation, and you know, he has all these old old equipment and he needed to reprogram something on one of his old equipment. He went to ChatGPT, it's like a 60-year-old programming language. Chat GPT wrote the program, it compiled for him, and it it fixed his problem. But um, we uh Thanksgiving, we were in Lake Tahoe, and I was like, let's just go through a fun exercise, Dad. And um, I was like, what if you you didn't want to pay taxes for the next 20 years? And you know, with depreciation, accelerated depreciation of a building and your tax rate, and you know, how much property do you need to buy in order to write off all of the income that was created from the year before? Right. And so, like, we went through this exercise and it took into account like cost segregation, interest rates. It was like 10 or 12 variables, and we were working with Claude and it just it just kept going, right? Like it was like, okay, well, what if the interest rates changed and it gave you the whole change in return? Like you would have hired an investment bank to grade type company to do that in the past.
SPEAKER_00100%, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Where now you just you need to know what the things are, like it didn't think of cost segregation, yeah, uh, which makes a big difference. So you uh you know, I had to go, hey, you're do we have cost segregation in here? It's like, oh no, we don't. And then there was a change in the tax code as well, because we just moved to accelerated depreciation, and so it basically was like, okay, between cost segregation and accelerated depreciation, that changed the whole mock. You know, so it it can just do anything.
Jobs Anxiety And The Long View
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you blow my mind with that. That's 25 years' experience in the stream, and the the stuff that you know, you're such an encyclopedia, you're probably one of the top five minds in our industry, man. I mean, I'm and I mean that from the bottom of my heart. I mean, every time I talk to you, I learn a lot, and and that's why I wanted to have you on the show, you know, create that value. I want to ask you something. You know, Ryan Dice? Yeah, yeah. So he was at that event in Austin. I did a quick interview with him, um, a five-minute, seven-minute interview. And I think the market got hammered that day. Um, that did a lot of the like Microsoft, into it, all these tech stocks were down like 30% of the year for the year. So there's a lot of doom and gloom. AI is gonna disrupt this, people are gonna lose jobs. So I want to ask him what his opinion was of it. So he's saying, no, it's gonna be fine. It's gonna be like an evolution, right? So he's more optimistic, but there's so much doom and gloom out there. Like everyone, you he says this, he's like one out of like 10 people that says everyone else like no, people are gonna lose their jobs, there's gonna be like fucking we're gonna go to socialism. Like, where do you stand on this whole debate?
Ray Kurzweil And Exponential Change
SPEAKER_02Um the the first thing I will say is we have no idea what is the the world is going to look like in the future, right? It's going to be different. We do know that. However, you know, the jobs so the human mind thinks about things like it is today. So it takes the net now, or it takes the now, and it takes AI applying to the now, and then it thinks of the net difference of that. Yeah. But if we go 10 years in the future, who knows, right? We we may be using AI to figure out this is really nerdy, but there's a there's a great show on uh a movie or whatever on Netflix about uh the UFOs. I don't know if you've seen, you know. I can't remember the name, but it's really good. It's like they did all these hearing government hearings and all this stuff, and all the military came forward about UFOs. But the most interesting part about that is at the end, uh it talks about okay, here's all the things we know about eight UFOs. And there was, I forget, like seven to nine bullet points. And they basically go through and they explain, based on physics, how this could be possible. They don't know how to do it, but they're like, if you know, based on these nine bullet points, you know, it basically it's an energy field around it that makes it, you know, not very it's always fuzzy on camera and whatever, right? And it can move these ways. And they're they understand the physics, how it could happen. Yeah, but I think about AI, and it it could figure out how, you know, if if there is alien spacecraft, which I I think there is, um, how you know AI could figure out how those energy fields work around something and we could travel to other galaxies, and maybe I'm fucking crazy, but it that I think about that stuff, and it's just you know, you just don't know, right? And and it's people are always gonna think about what's coming in, what's gonna take our jobs today. And I imagine if you were at the beginning, at the end of the industrial revolution in America, like you probably looked at things the same way, right? Like the Chinese are taking our jobs and we're not gonna have any jobs in America, but then America shifted, right? And we became a service economy and we changed. So, like, we really don't know. One thing I always like to bring up there's a there's an author, his name's Ray Kurzweil, and he's what's called a futurist. He wrote a book about 20 years ago called The Singularity is Near, and then he was hired by Google to predict what they should build because what the future is going to look like. But there's there's a concept called Moore's Law, and Moore's Law says I think it's compute doubles every 18 months, and so he basically forecasted 100 years in the future. Wow, based on compute. He's like, if we had this amount of compute, we could do this. If we had this amount of compute, we can do this. So I read that book like 15 years ago, and the interesting part of it is like for the most part, almost everything he predicted was incredible, and it uh a lot of a high percentage of stuff within one year, and almost everything was within five years, and there was a few things he was wrong on, but for the most part. But if you ever want to look, if you ever want to understand what the future's gonna look like, go read a rake, go read Ray Kerzwild's book. Um, he believes that we will add one year of human life to every year uh the passes, and that will increase exponentially by 2030. Wow. So basically, if you could stay alive for about 20 more years, you'll probably live forever.
SPEAKER_00That's insane, man. This is and this is why I like talking to you because you're you're such a student of that. And I went to college in 1997, 2001, NYU. I was I went to college in the dot-com bubble. And I had scarcity mindset. My mom, my mom came to America from Venezuela,$6 an hour. We at one point in life we were in food stamps. My dad was uh on disability, he was a Marine, but like he's uh he drank too much alcoholic, man. So I didn't come from a lot of money. So I went to NYU, man. I I thought capitalism was bad. Yeah, fuck capitalism. And then I don't know, I I I but I like the stock market, I like the trade, right? And then I remember um I don't know, I started getting involved with the business owners that knew their shit capitalism isn't that bad. It's actually pretty cool. But I remember seeing the dot-com bubble, like these these had the amount of wealth that was created, followed by the the when it collapsed, the the matter destruction. And I've always been um I would read about it, I geeked out on it, and it was amazing. Like some people were they were good at predicting trends, right? And I think that that, and as marketers and what we do, we want to stay ahead of the curve, and we're not always gonna be right, but that's why I I love that you mentioned uh Robert Kurzwell's name. Ray Kurzwell, right? Yeah, that's the stuff you have to you have to be ahead of the curve. And listen, I know I know I'm high energy, but I read a lot. I I'm actually a bit I'll send you stuff links here and there, and that's how I geek out on stuff, and not everything's gonna be right, but you gotta, it's like campaigns, you gotta split tests, you gotta do this, you gotta do that. And then when you hit the right one, you get the right idea, and yeah, you double down, right, man.
SPEAKER_02I think about my I think about my dad on he would always tell me like Dick Tracy was when he was a kid, you know. Oh yeah, where Dick Tracy and it had like a telephone in a shoe, like all these crazy things that they're like that could never exist, right? And it all of it existed, yeah. Fed and you know, a lot of what we think about at sci-fi today will be real at some point, yeah, right? Because it's it's like if it can be thought of, it can be created for the most part. I I don't know how, but I I've just seen it too many times where it is like, nah, that's not possible. And he said, Chat GPT, the first time I use it, I'm like, holy shit. Yeah, like crazy. This is gonna change the world. Yeah, like I was like, I I gotta be an expert at this, right? Like, um, so I you know, I I don't know. I I think you know, the more you can kind of understand what the future looks like, the less fear you can have. Um you know, and then that you said fear, but I I think you know, coming from a place of abundance mindset where you know I I don't know what the future's gonna look like, but I know humans are super resourceful and I I just think we're gonna I think we'll be fine. I love it. It's gonna be shitty for a while for a lot of people, but it was shitty when people worked in factories and they got paid at that point 13 an hour, which was a lot, or 16 an hour, you know, which was back then was a lot of money. Yeah. And they got out of a job and they weren't they needed to be retrained. And that's why I keep telling everybody like you just gotta go learn. But people, you know, humans, it's like they get into a role and a job, and you know, like that's what they're gonna do for the rest of their life. Change is not comfortable, new is not comfortable for people. Um, but it's it's what's gotta happen if people are gonna stay relevant because all these kids are coming out of school, and this is just gonna be normal for them.
Lead Gen Trends Toward Quality
SPEAKER_00100%. I love it. So um we it's we're at a lead gen conference, right? We're affiliate takeover. It's funny, we haven't talked about lead gen too much, right? So we're talking about the future. What do you think is the future of lead gen?
API First Platforms And Agentic Ops
SPEAKER_02I think the future of lead gen is just more quality, you know. I think every business is just demanding more quality, uh, especially the large businesses at scale. So, you know, what is what does that look like? You know, and how do you generate it? A lot of the business we do now is is lead gen or calls, but on CPA back end, right? Because if I can produce great quality, then I want more margin, you know, and so uh by taking the risk away from the person buying it, you know, we can capture more of that margin. So I think you know that I think we're gonna see just a a massive amount of tools come out, platforms come out because it's the barrier to entry to build that stuff has gone way down. Yeah. Um, I've been working on a lead routing platform. I built it myself. You know, there's no lead routing platform in this industry that's API first. You know, they're all monolithic built. And so, you know, you have to have it be API first in order for AI to be able to control it. Right. So I think we're gonna see all there, there's gonna be a tremendous amount of opportunity in this space to rebuild all the software. I think the only software in this space that's an API first platform is Everflow, um, which you can control everything inside of Everflow via APIs, which allowed me to, you know, we use Everflow. It's like I use Cloud Code and I just built a little skill set that I can pull an offer from one system to ours in a minute that used to take somebody 20 to 25 minutes to set up and configure. Right. So everything's gonna people are gonna get, I will say lazy, I'll call it lazy. Yeah. Because I already feel it myself. Because anytime it's like, oh, there's some data entry work or some kind of like buttons to click and I gotta go do this process. I immediately go for like, how do I get this done with AI? Yeah, because I don't want to do it anymore. So, you know, I think if we think about platforms and software, the the olden days of uh, you know, crud-based, crud is a a database name, but it you know what we see with fields and all that kind of stuff is gonna slowly go away and it's gonna become more agentic friendly, and you're just gonna have people like you can just have conversations with you where you're like, hey, take these posting specs and set this up for me. I want you to put these two affiliates on it and send them the posting specs. Yeah, and it'll just do it all. You don't have to know how to what like that's going here, yeah. Yeah, it's here. I like uh in my platform, I'm already doing it. That's a lot of what I've been doing. It's training the agentic side of it. Um, but it's it's unbelievable that kind of stuff. But I think all those things allow people to produce better quality. 100%. Yeah, and I and I think compliance on the other side, you know, there's gonna be tools built there. I think you know, it's just gonna continue to go along like it is, and it's it's unfortunate for people that aren't overly structured. I think it gets harder to be an individual affiliate in this world every year.
Calls Versus Leads At Scale
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I agree. I'm seeing it, I see a lot of people. It's just it's been a crazy past few years. A lot of guys washed out. Yeah, I feel like it was like uh you could kind of be lucky, you know, and and make fucking tons of money in this industry for a long time and it changed. I don't know if it was 2023. I mean, it even happened with me. I had to like, man, like I gotta I gotta like structure this stuff. I can't keep throwing money at stuff, you know, and uh, you know, that's how you learn and that's how you survive, man.
SPEAKER_02You know, at the end of the day, I think calls change stuff a lot, you know. Calls is a much harder business to run a lead business, right? Because you have all the concurrency problems and dropping of calls and all that kind of stuff. So I think it's a much harder, made things a lot more challenging and complicated for people um at scale, at volume. I do see people moving back towards leads more. That's not to say that calls aren't still big and relevant and always will be. Um, but I feel like it went heavy in the call direction for a while. But I'm I'm seeing a lot more interest in people not wanting, they're like, I don't want calls. I'll just take leads and we'll dial them.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. They rotate some. You have like a I don't know what I think just people talk to each other and they're like, I went to a home improvement show uh a year ago or November in Vegas, and everyone was like, There's a whole hoopla about the iOS update, and that was fucking up the contact rates. And that was that was like one thing, but like everyone was like making change. I think like some influence, someone's like have influence in the industry says, and then boom, they all do that. So someone's like, Oh, we need calls, and then boom, 10 people do it, right? It's just funny how it moves and waves that her mentality.
SPEAKER_02Right. Uh calls was hard, man. Like uh I've been working on a new vertical, not gonna disclose it, but I've been working on a new vertical. Uh, and we started with calls. I was generating calls for them, and Eric is like, I can't, we can't do this, right? Like, you got to be a very specific shop to be able to take calls, so right, because maybe maybe you get bursts of traffic and 20 calls come in all at once and there's 10 agents. Well, you're gonna drop you're gonna drop 10 of those calls, uh, especially in an emerging area where there's not a hundred different call buyers for it that you can waterfall to. So it's really hard to like pioneer anything in calls that way. I I've found so we've gone back to a lead model there. They're just like, hey, we're we're more comfortable outbounding, you know, with with a lead model.
SPEAKER_00I love it. Yeah, it works. I have a lot of clients, they spend millions a month and it works for them, right? So, whatever, they're making it work.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, more more we were talking last night, uh, mortgage, they they won't even take calls typically.
Yacht Building And Long Time Horizons
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's surprising. I'm talking about I'm I'm a big believer in cash out right now. I'm trying to get some campaigns going on there, and then I'm shocked. There's really no paper call for that. It's crazy. It is there's some of those guys still buying age data. I was shocked, and that that made me feel good because I have age data, you know, so we're we're gonna probably get that going with them, but uh it's interesting. Yeah, let's talk about something fun for you.
SPEAKER_02Well, yeah, it's been a fun adventure, and then Tramanti, uh Tramontana. Tramanti, damn, I fucked it up.
SPEAKER_00Oh, there's a Tramanti restaurant in Delray, that's why I said that. Okay.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I uh my favorite part of that business is uh it's over in Croatia. I'm involved, I'm involved with it. And uh the founder of that company, uh Antonio, you know, he when I met him, he was 26, he's 31 now, I think. And just watching him develop as an as a leader, you know, it's been spectacular, honestly. It's been super fun. Um, and then uh won some Ofer in Monaco, won some yacht design of the year awards, and it's been a fun it's been a fun journey to be a part of. It's it's a crazy difference from this world, right? Everything here moves quickly. Yeah. In that world, everything moves so slow. Wow, yeah. You're like planning for two years out. Wow. You know, we're like, okay, uh And then he was like, I'm gonna build another boat, and they're like, okay. And so we're just talking about it, and it's like it'll be ready for the season two years from now. Wow. So that's like how far out. It's like such a different time frame for this world because here you could set something up, figure something out, and you know, be making a million dollars a month, you know, if you if you've got the right skill set and you find the right thing that you're you're interested in. I I was talking to somebody the other day, you know, one of my hardest things right now is like I've done pretty well, so like I don't have to chase money. Yeah. And so like I really enjoy building stuff with AI, but it's like, okay, like the sales part of it and the business part of it and all that. I'm like, yeah. Yeah. I need to go find somebody else to be a partner to kind of lead that, right? And so it's a lot of what I've been thinking about over the next few years is you know, trying to find great leaders, you know, CEOs and COOs to you know run things that you know either I'm involved with or build or you know, I get I I love to start things, get them off the ground, build the momentum up, and then hand them off to somebody else to to kind of run with. I I really accelerated that.
From Survival Mode To Thrive Mode
SPEAKER_00I can see that beginning phase. From the time I known you, I could see that, man. It's great. So this has been great conversation. I want to with one last question here. Uh also before I talk about that, we we gotta figure out how to do an LFG event on the yacht. We'll talk about that all the time. That that'll be pretty sick.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Uh okay, the last question I have. Um, you know, I feel like it's been a real damn man, it's it's it's been really interesting past couple years in our industry. And you what was it, 2024? I don't know. There was so every month there was like something new, whether in Medicare or TCP or this. It seemed like there's always boom, boom. It just never ended. People were taking getting pounded, man. So I feel a lot of people in beat, beat up, right? So what would be your biggest advice? And this is for a lead general, like how do you I feel like it's and this happened to me. It was like survive. Like, how do you get go from fucking survive mode to thrive mode? Or like what do you gotta do to get there?
Telehealth Peptides And Longevity
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I always think about it as like you gotta find a key that fits in the lock that opens the that opens the treasure trome, right? Like I've never seen anybody do great chasing lots of stuff. So a lot of it is like what uh what opportunity am I gonna focus on and where am I gonna put my energy? Because the the success usually comes from the depth and the iteration. And so it's like you try it, it doesn't work. You iterate, you iterate, you iterate, you iterate, you know, and you're somewhere between one and 500 iterations between not working and success. Yeah. And if you're trying to do that across 10 things, it just it's not doable, right? I mean, there is something to be said about like I'm gonna put very low energy across 10 things and I'm gonna just see if any of them have signs of life, and then I'm gonna grab on to one and go dean. But a lot of how I think about that kind of stuff now, or when I was earlier in my career as you know, just as a media buyer affiliate or whatever, I would think about um, hey, can I make money on this? And now a lot about a lot, I think a lot about, okay, where does this business end up in five years? Right. I look at telehealth right now, I think it's a tremendous opportunity, not just GLP ones, but I think the whole health system is gonna transform to use telehealth. And I think peptides coming on the market now. Uh I think uh Robert F. Kennedy just said, uh Robert Kennedy, whatever, um, just said uh, you know, they're gonna open up peptides through that, right? So that's just gonna open up this whole new market for telemedicine. So, like as I look at a space, like that's Space has massive opportunity in front of it.
SPEAKER_00What inning do you think it is right now? One. Wow. I would have that's funny because I want to say I'm not as involved. You probably know more about this, but to me it feels like there's a lot of people talking about makes me nervous. I feel like maybe third or fourth, but it's good to hear that from you.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, I I look at it differently. I look at it as a new you know back to what I said before, right? We as humans look at the now and we look at how this is gonna impact the now. But I think how drugs get delivered. I'm I'm a firm believer that there's gonna be a ton of breakthrough stuff on aging, you know, and that stuff may not get delivered through the traditional mechanism of your general practitioner to a hospital, right? Like it all that whole uh youth rejuvenation stuff may happen through telemedicine. Well, if you could uh, you know, if if they figure out this Yamanaka factor stuff, which basically cuts your cell's age reverses them 50%, which they're just now getting into clinical trials with eyes, like if they take these Yamanaka factors and they figure this stuff out, it may spread like GLP one has. Wow, right? And and so, like, who doesn't want some kind of product that would make them fifty you 50% younger? I'm 51, I want to be 25. 100%, right? So, how does that drug get distributed? What does that look like? What are all those breakthroughs look like? We're gonna see so much medical breakthroughs with uh AI technology and protein folding and Yamanaka factors and all this stuff that all of it is is gonna have to get distributed somewhere. I think there's a high probability that people don't want to go to a physician and you know they can do that online and order it at home and do whatever they need to in order to get that thing. We see it with GLP1s, we see it with DRT, we see it with NAD Plus, right? Like that, those are just kind of the starters, but there's you know potentially a thousand products behind that that we don't see yet.
Join The Community And Subscribe
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm sure I'm excited about it, man. I think it's like, no, I'm all I'm all full of energy, right? I was with my mom in Columbia, she's 72, she got all this energy, man. I'm like, is is it is a good thing, but it's you know, I went out late last night, I did ND plus this morning. I took my glutathione, and these things help me. They helped me a lot. I got into peptides because we're looking to exit the company three years ago, and I heard when you go to that, it's very grueling. And I already had a tough schedule. I have kids, you know, I mean, all this stuff. So got a party, yeah, yeah. I go I go hard, right? But I want it to be I want it to be optimized, Dave. Yeah, and it's funny, and everything went to shit. We went up that fucking we are the best quarter ever, followed by our worst quarter ever. I'm like, what the fuck? So we went out of that cellar, right? But I'm glad I got involved with peptides. It's helped me a lot. I I see the difference. I look at the blood. I mean, I my cortisol levels were fucking sky high. Yeah, I thought that was normal. They put me on a plan and boom, they went down more normal. So it's helped me out a lot, but I've seen the difference for me. And I was in Columbia, and uh, there was a lot of stem cell places there, and apparently there's stem cell for hair, yeah, to hair growth, and I didn't know about my hair's thinning, I would love that kind of stuff, right? So anyway, yeah, I do I do believe that. And I'll say one thing about you. I I remember like I don't know if this was two or three years ago. Uh we've been to a lot of the same events, the geek out events, and we we wound up crossing paths a lot, right? Which that makes me feel good. If I'm in an event that you're at, and it's not like we're planning it, we just happen to be there. Yeah, yeah. But you were talking about med spas, like I don't know what else, three or four years ago, and that that came to fruition. That's the freaking big thing right now, right? So I feel like, guys, what Jason's talking about, follow him, follow his Twitter, follow him online. If you're an AI, get in his community. We'll put all the information here, but fucking post. He's gonna AI bot's gonna kick you out if you don't fucking post and contribute, man. Yeah, what's it what's the name of the how do they get in the telegram group?
SPEAKER_02Uh just go to billwithai.com, uh, click you want to join the group. There's three different groups you can join. There's a beginner, there's an intermediate, and there's an advanced. Uh, if you're gonna join the advanced, there's a funnel you've got to go through and answer a bunch of questions. When you get to the end, it'll open a chat with me directly and telegram, paste your clipboard into the chat, and I'll review your application. And then if you look like you'll be a good fit for that group, I'll add you into that group. If not, I'd I'll reroute you to one of the others.
SPEAKER_00I love it. That's a great process, Jason. This has been a pleasure. We're gonna put all the links, all this stuff. Follow Jason. This guy knows the fuck 25 years. It's not, I don't know who's been doing this for 25 years, it's still around. It's fucking crazy. I appreciate you. Gary McNally. I I know Gary McNally. That's funny. He lives here full order there, right? For like 30 years. I've been meaning to get together where we we always forget the I gotta get okay. Gary McNally, let's get on the fucking show, man. Let's go. He's not nervous. Love you, Jason. This is the great, man. Let's fucking go, guys. Your network is your net worth. We got a fucking crazy network of people. I'm not telling me you're average motherfucker. I'm talking about people doing$300,000,$400,000,$500,000 a day in ads that people have made billions of dollars in sales, people exit their companies for about a billion dollars. We hit 100 episodes. Guess what? We're about to take shit to the next level. So you want to be forfeited? Subscribe right now. Remember, no money.