MarketPulse: Pros & Pioneers

How Fake Engagement is Destroying Your Business | Dan Hall

• Daniel Hall • Season 2 • Episode 14

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Social media is broken—and Daniel Hall is on a mission to fix it.

This Special Edition of MarketPulse: Pros and Pioneers dives deep into two powerful stories:

1️⃣ The personal journey of Daniel Hall—from a childhood marked by adoption and dyslexia to becoming a tech innovator, entrepreneur, and creator of SPOTAPOD.

 2️⃣ The dark truth about social media pods and fake engagement—how thousands of professionals unknowingly damage their credibility with tactics designed to manipulate influence instead of earning it

🔍 In this episode, we uncover:
 🚀 Daniel’s early programming obsession and rise in the tech industry
💡 How his daughter's question changed his perspective forever
🔥 Why social media is full of lies—and how to see through them
🚫 The hidden damage of fake engagement & how to protect your brand

If you rely on social media for business, or care about real influence over artificial reach, this episode is a wake-up call.

Grab Daniel's book "The Top 100 Lies of Social Media" at https://www.amazon.com/Top-List-Lies-Social-Media/dp/B0DY2JYRPM - It's STILL a #1 Besteller!

🎧 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5BAEbmuQs0vpihAPuaGfXf?si=ac3dfbf2e62a44b0
🍏 Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/yourpodcastlink
📖 Get Daniel’s book - Top 100 List of Lies on Social Media:

🔍 Find more from Daniel: https://lnkd.in/eXHqi7wT

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Paul:

Today on MarketPulse Pros and Pioneers, I am joined by the author of the Top 100 List of Lies on Social Media. Bestselling author Daniel Hall, who has also the amazing personality behind the SPOTAPOD group and newsletter on LinkedIn, who I'm eternally grateful for. Daniel is a genuine pleasure to have you on the show Thank you very much for joining us.

Dan:

Oh, thank you so much Paul, and thank you for everybody that's listening right now and taking time out of their life to make it. about you and I and, putting the human back in humanity.

Paul:

I'm gonna give a bit of your bio and then I'm gonna explain a little bit of how I found you in the first place. And this is a special edition, anybody's watching along. This is a special edition, so normally we do a half hour. Chat with the guest. We've had some amazing personalities on the show, some amazing stories. But the reason I want to share so much time with Dan here today is because I. I found him through professional terms, so I found him through his activity on LinkedIn and what he does, and I'll explain a bit more about that in a moment. But as you can see from the wall behind Dan, he's so much more than that. There is a huge personal life behind him that I think we should share a little bit more information about at the same time. So I wanted to split this show in two halves, and I really don't think that we could have done of these. of an hour in a 15 session. It wouldn't do it justice. So I wanna give us some breathing space. So we're expecting this to record for about an hour. along and you're finding this fascinating, feel free to just book this and come back to it. I don't expect you to watch it all in one go. There are some phenomenal truths and lessons that you will pick up from this story that I cannot wait to share with you all. Dan is a full stack Microsoft developer, data analytics expert and the founder of Dream IT Software, and he's got a career spanning over 20 years and he's worked on high stake software development projects across industries. From aerospace to NU programming started and I love this'cause it's very my own story. I started at a eight with a Commodore VIC 2020, setting the foundation for a lifetime of innovation. Beyond this technical expertise, Dan is a bestselling off. We've mentioned the top 100 list of lies on social media, not below will have links to both Books and Barnes and Noble as well. He is the creator of SPOTAPOD. There it is. There it is. Yeah. It's the creator of SPOTAPOD, which is how I found you in the First and is a dedicated advocate for adoption. Having built an amazing family of seven children's unique blend of data driven problem solving, and a deep commit commitment to human fuel's mission, as you said, to put the human back in humanity through Taji. That is easily one of my favorite bios that I've had to read. So far date, Dan and I know the truth behind it. we've swapped message messages on LinkedIn for time now. I think I, I probably found you about a year and a half, nearly two years ago. SPOTAPOD and newsletters, which I do, you know what I'm gonna, I'm gonna leave it to you to explain SPOTAPOD and means for people. And we can get into it a little bit later the story of how you came to, to. And start that.

Dan:

So all those accolades that you just rattled off Paul, pale in comparison to being a dad, they just so minute for me. we talk about SPOTAPOD, oh my gosh, that, that started as a temper tantrum. For our 4-year-old daughter who was severely drug and alcohol exposed in utero, she's adopted. She two weeks in detox after she was born and within a, within about four and a half months part small intestines had died. So anytime you are thrown into the situation of working with fetal alcohol. You're going to be dealing with multiple temper tantrums, just self-regulation, and one day she was throwing one of her screamers and she just disappeared. It went completely silent. She came back about 15 minutes later with a picture of her and I holding hands. And you can see by this picture my mouth is huge, which means I was probably a little bit loud that day. And she came down with this picture. She had gone to her room and she came down with that picture and she said, daddy, I am sorry. I am so sorry. And of course she got emotional. I got emotional. And she asked if she could hang it up. On my wall back here and I was like, and then the pictures just started rolling in some just because, and some because of, you know, more tantrums. But, oh my gosh, Paul, she was four and she knew that taking time out of her life to make it about somebody else was so impactful. So over the course of three years, I developed software to solve the vanity metrics. I can actually calculate how much time we're spending together in the comments on social media, but as I was writing the software and looking at some of the data, I noticed that there was a lot of artificial intelligence inside the comments. And I'm like, is this what our future generations have forward to is all these. vanity metrics. Our kids have some remarkable special abilities, but we don't want them to become a vanity number. We want people to see love here in value the time that they spend with our kids. Not worried about whether they're, you know, number one in this and number two in this. And I've got a million likes here and a million likes here. Nobody's gonna ever remember your vanity metrics. Like Maya Angelou said, they're going to always remember how you make them feel, and that's what. We want for our future generations, our family. That's me being selfish. But for our family, we wanted them appreciated for who they are. So that's why I started the spot, A pod That's why I started the SPOTAPOD movement, was to call out and help humanity identify what was really going on under the hood with social media.

Paul:

And so, like I say into that a little bit later, but I found you because your newsletter came up and at that point never I'd of pods, but I wasn't really sure how prolific they are or much of impact had on me or the people around me and read that first news letter and there were some names mentioned in that newsletter that, that really threw me out because ones that you do is you call out the people that evidence as having either been part of or utilized the pod in some way, shape or form to improve their own metrics and likes and things, their engagement. I start to, read those newsletters and the names that were mentioned in it blew me away because they were people that I was using as a role model when it was first starting out on LinkedIn, and I assumed that their metrics were genuine. I thought these were achievable metrics with just hard work, good copy, good content ideas,

Dan:

Yeah.

Paul:

and I realized I'd been fooled and not so much that, but like also everyone around me was being fooled by these people and these tactics. And that really upset me because like, I'm a genuine guy. I don't do things to fool people. Like I'm very straight, honest, straight list, very upfront. And who I am is who I am on the outside as well as the inside. So that really frustrated me. And then I started following you and I realized learned a lot more about your story, you know, as you shared, you know, some of your stories about adoption and fostering, and it blew me away that you give so much of your time for other people, whether it was people on LinkedIn, whether it was your family, and at the time, I didn't really have any reason to spark a conversation with you, right? Like, Yeah. I followed along. I enjoyed your content and kept an eye on things. And until this year, and I came to a point in December where a friend of mine. Had messaged me and she said you know, I've been posting videos on LinkedIn for some time, and I've seen this guy and he does really different kind of videos. They're very different to what I do, but he's getting loads and loads of engagement and I think what I'm doing is wrong. What he's doing seems to be getting loads of engagement. And she's a marketing person, right? She's fabulous. She's really good at what she does.

Dan:

Yeah.

Paul:

came to me and I went, it's a pod. It's a pod and. If you're not fully familiar with pods, we'll explain them in detail in a bit. But essentially it's fake engagement. It's been part of a group for the purposes of automation to comment on or send specified outputs to any post of a member. And as I pointed this out to her, she realized that she wasted an hour of her life looking at this guy's videos, trying to dissect them and understand why he would be doing particularly well. When they were actually just YouTube videos, they weren't suitable for LinkedIn. They wouldn't have driven natural engagement. They were only there because,

Dan:

Yeah.

Paul:

And I sent her your profile and asked her to kind of follow along on, on SPOTAPOD. But that really got me thinking, you know, I've got this new podcast and I'd love Dan to be part of it. So again that's a bit of the journey as to how we ended up meeting each other. Let's go back to when you were a kid, right?

Dan:

That commodore the Commodore. Like that for me I remember having an Atari, an old Atari, and if I wanted to play games, I had to type them in outta the magazine that we got every month, record them onto a tape some check them to make sure that we hadn't put a dot instead of a comma somewhere, which we always had. And then eventually after about six weeks worth of work, you might get to play that game if the tape loaded and didn't crash and you hadn't lost it.

Paul:

Walk us through why you loved it so much? What was about it?

Dan:

I was adopted, you know, until I came into the hall family, all I knew was just, you know, you're nothing but a piece of shit and you won't amount to anything in life. That's what was my, that's what my life looked like prior to the hall family. And then my mom, my adopted mom would go to her church function and drop me off at the local college in Vermont. And had friends and family that worked at the college. They would let me use a computer center there. And I was eight years old at the time. Cobal and Pascal was the language of choice on these digital equipment corporation, big, huge printers with a green bar paper. And I would sit there and come home. With these reams of green bar paper, and my mom would sit there with me board off her ass and just cheerlead for me. She'd be like, that is so cool. She didn't understand anything that I was doing, but that was the first time in my life that I had such a positive experience with another human being. it just became the catalyst, you know, the Commodore Vic 20. You know, I had the little cassette tapes that went into the little tape drives hooked to the back of it and the big cartridges. And I just learned recently, and I never picked this up, that the Commodore Vic 20, actually the computer that's used on the John Wick films. you go back and look at what they're typing in there, there's are, those are Vic 20 keyboards that they're using. And I was like, wow, that brought back some memories. But you know, that became the catalyst of me just wanting to find a solution. If you remember what I said about vanity metrics and finding a solution, it's just I get so much enjoyment of, you know, trying to figure out a solution. a tech standpoint, that's just, it's in my nature because that was what my mom had just inadvertently ingrained into my brain that success equals ah, you know, Yep. like a, like, it got me to a point where I feel like I get a vacation Yep. every day when I come to work anything. Just, I love it so much. And that's what she, that's what she did for me.

Paul:

I guess from the outside to me. kind of feels like you found a way to use technology to create a human link. Not on purpose, but as a byproduct of what you did and not and I think that's, I think that's fantastic. I love that. So then. Using that experience, then I, where did you go from there? What? What was your career path then from that point?

Dan:

I became a Microsoft junkie. After that, you know, back, they got me that Commenter Vic 20 and I went through the. Lifecycle of computers that came af after that. The 80, the Radio Shack computers. Then they got me my first pc, which was an Amstrad. It was an 80 88 processor. And that's when I started picking up gw, what they call it, GW Basic. and you know, it was. Just going through the iterations of what Microsoft had come out with in, in Windows and the evolution of software back in the eighties having, just having access to all that they gave me, my parents gave me access to all that, whatever it was, because they saw. much it, I was absorbing it and they knew that it would just become a career path for me. And on the flip side of that, they sent me down the career path of music, which I absolutely loved as well. And, but I have dyslexia, so whenever I need to read something, like even the book. You know, writing this was such a chore I thought it was a piece of crap until I actually started using to narrate it. So yes, if you ever get the audio book version that is ai, it's a product called hera, which 11 labs under the hood. It's AI narration, and I couldn't. wrote, started writing music when I was 10, but I couldn't line up because of my dyslexia. I couldn't line up the lyrics and the notes and everything. It was just, it was all just jumbled for me. So I and looked at it, suno and all the background music that's used in the book for the audio book is all ai. It's completely ai. But. The music, if you ever get a chance, Paul, you should listen to some of the music that I've put out It will rival of the sounds of John Williams. And, you know, even the sounds of Dune and Gladiator. So AI can be used for good and be reused responsibly, but like everything, you just have to have balance. So, So then you I know you've got a you moved into the audio space right?

Paul:

When as you got older, you moved into, correct me if I'm wrong, it was kind of movie production and audio as well,

Dan:

yes. Yeah. Special effects and video production, correct. Amazing. from those early days then what's your favorite, role that you held? What was the bit where you got the biggest kick in those days?'cause that was when all this all the modern. You know, when I think back to like when Toy Story one got released, for example, I remember sitting absolutely blown away by the 3D imagery and knowing that had all been produced by a computer. And now I look back on it and it's still like, do you know what? It's still watchable, which is the amazing thing for me. And well, I what, 35, 30 years later that it's still watchable, blasphemy Aware. But you went through that, right? I did. There's one particular clip that to put together that I absolutely love, and was for, actually a friend of mine who was in House of Cards with Kevin Spacey. And it was in cinema four D, and it was a dog fight with three me German Mesher Schmidt planes. were supposed to fly in opening scene. They were flying in over the Ingles channel, and you would see the three. Measure Schmidt planes coming in and then one would veer off and it was kind of a storyboard for Tales of the Phoenix. Who actually, Darren got Costas Mandal. If you don't know who Costas Mandal is, he is one of the actors from saw the all the saw movies. So just being able to. Work with that caliber of people. You know, people see me as like a tech junkie, but a lot of stuff that I do that I just, I don't talk about and just don't humble brag about. It's fun to have the opportunities to work on some of those projects like that. Paul? Amazing. And then I guess from there, coming into having your own family and moving from that process of being adopted to being an adopter what lessons do you take from that for other people? That is an awesome question. I never wanted to be a dad of. Adoptive kids. Just conceptualized that. My wife asked me one day before we were married, would you ever consider fostering and adopting children? I think she was trying to set me up, but for that path, and I'm like, oh, hell no. don't want to have to parent a child like I was growing up. And she just has this way of into your soul, my wife, reaching into your soul capitalizing on the best parts of you and leaving the negativity behind, also ensuring that she shows you a more positive outlook or positive, you know, she gives you ideas of what can give you a better, positive outcome. Then the path that you're going down. And she does that with me. She does it with her kids and it's just, it's an amazing thing to watch. I follow, learned to become an incredible follower of hers and our kids. You know, in order to be a great leader, you have to be able to follow, you have to be a great follower. And Family and my wife are my biggest teachers. I would not change that anything. I actually am thankful that I was put on a path, you know, in my early years to understand what trauma looks like. Even though I had to live it, I'm thankful that I did live it now I have some understanding of what the impact is. So when I'm working with our kids and they're throwing their screamers, I can just sit back and listen with more than just my ears and take it in and it just, yeah, it's, I'm thankful that she just, it holds my hand and leads the way that's what I needed. So I'm sure that the question everyone at home is thinking now is how do you go from not wanting children to having seven. And a huge family that, that, you know what, as a dad myself and like you, it is something that we gel over is like, I'm my family is everything right? And I came from a corporate world where I was working 16 hour days and working an hour away from home each way, and expected to manage my days off around the business and cancel'em at short notice. And very much for the first three years of my son's life, I wasn't around a great deal and my wife had to just kind of call. And now having him as he's a 7-year-old and I've got an 18 month old as well. I'm very grateful that I have my own business, that I'm able to work from home, that I live in an age where working from home is something I can do even. So I'm very grateful for all that. But I cannot for the life of me fathom seven children in my house like that. You know, I'm good with two. I've I'm like, I don't think there's much left of me after two. I, it takes an incredible parent to, to have seven children in one household. So what's the secret? my wife. She just, yeah, she's, she, you know, we got our first two they came to us, our first two two little girls, four and eight are, you know, 21 and 25 now, they're getting ready to have their first children. And, that was difficult. And then we had. My great niece that was born and that family needed help and we couldn't turn them away. The family and then niece just kept pushing them out and pushing them out, and all of a sudden we went from two to six. And during that journey, my wife and I looked at each other, can we do this? It was mostly me. I can't do this. There's no way we can go from three to four to five. And then finally at number six it was like, honey, we can do this. You prepared me for this moment. And it's that 4-year-old girl that I talked about that drew that picture. She was actually the last one. The number seven is a biological. from my first marriage. So it's just, again, my wife, just having that amazing way to work with our kids and even through all the chaos, she's able to prioritize what we need to look at. You know, if you got three kids throwing screamers, okay where's the conflict at that we need to be able to, diffuse first. She just, she knows. And, you know, and as far as you know, being able to manage it all, it's all about forgiveness. night when they lay their heads down, we will ask them, what's tomorrow? And they'll tell us it's a new day. they know that it doesn't matter what crap happened to happen today when they wake up tomorrow. My wife and I are gonna be like, good morning body. Love you. You know? And just, it's a fresh start for them every single day. And that level of forgiveness is so important. And you know what, Paul? Sometimes at the end of the day, will turn to us and say, mommy, daddy, what's tomorrow? Because maybe we've had a little bit of a rough day. gonna do that with their kids. They're going to, it's just they, it's that, just that positive positive spin that you put on life that your kids are gonna pick up and remember. And that's how we do it. And, you know, people that don't want to be parents, I applaud them they know what their limitations are as a person. If you only have two kids that's what you've decided is your limit and that's awesome. I commend you for that. If it's six or nine or 12 and you can do that's amazing. That's incredible. How do you do it?'cause I want to know it's I'd say it's, it is more of being a sponge, but that's a great question. Fantastic. I've thoroughly enjoyed digging into some of these topics with you because I just think it's amazing to meet somebody who, like, let's be honest from my perspective, I can see that everything that you do is aimed at helping make the world a better place. Starting at home. Yeah. But with the, you know, knowledge that every decision that you make, every success that you have at home impacts on the wider world, and that has a ripple effect outwards. I know that's part of the reason why you then got so heavily involved in the spot pod movement because the idea that people were lying to others in order to financially gain. And to con other people into horrendous workloads. Let's be honest, like,'cause some of the answers for, you know, some of these. People at the top of the pod chain, I'm gonna call it, right? I'm gonna corner you for ears. But the pod chain, they, some of these influencers at the top are selling courses for like$69 or$79. Come buy my course and I'll teach you how to be a me at LinkedIn. And I know loads of people who've bought these courses and almost ran themselves into the ground trying to follow the tactics that don't work because they're tactics that these people use now. As opposed to, or have an army of people to do for them as opposed to them trying to do it themselves back when they first started on LinkedIn. You know, and you can use that celebrity status that influence that you have once you've got so many thousand followers to gain traction with ideas and themes and courses much faster than you can when you are, you've got a thousand followers or you've got 2000 followers, right? What was the first time that you realized that you could intercept pods? And maybe a better question is to start with what? What's a pod and how do people use pods? Dan? Well, you know, Kevin D. Turner in, our book kind of gave me a really cut and dry term for the acronym pods. said pods are like, you know, the old performance enhancing drugs. You know, back in the day, and he calls them post optimized Deception Services pods. And what that means is, let's say you and I got onto WhatsApp, Paul, and I said, Hey, can you just like and drop a comment on my post? And you're like, sure. And you would go and probably read it and. You know, put a genuine comment in there. But if you magnify that by hundreds of people, not everybody's gonna go in there and have your best interest in mind. those are what are called manual engagement pods, where you have hundreds of people in there, but they're all manually commenting and liking, and that just takes so much time outta your life to be able to do that. Then somebody came up with the idea of. Letting AI do this. you sign up to be part of one of these services and you join 20 or 30 pods, and the same thing is happening except it's ai. So if you have one of your posts, Paul, you said, oh, I want to get some engagement on this, so I'm gonna put my post in here. Pick, you know, the 20 or 30 pods that I want to be able to engage in my post and then just walk away and let AI decide who's gonna drop a, like, who's gonna drop, you know, a clapping or a love, or AI does everything. AI's even gonna drop the comments for you. That is deception like you wouldn't believe, at the end of the day it's like the old style. Ronco products that we used to have here in the US and the tagline for their products was set it and forget it. So you would sign up for these pod services, you could walk away and all of a sudden you're commenting on stuff that you have no idea what you're even commenting which is super scary. There are posts about our political stuff that's going on here in the US blue badges are reacting to and engaging on. And it makes it look like, because everybody looks up to those people that are blue badges and. Oh, this must be legit. This must be social proof because this person is engaging on it when in reality they're in a pod. They have no idea that they engaged on that unless they're actually looking every day, every second at that activity. They have no clue because it's it's there and then it's gone because they're engaging on something else. You could lose your business, you could destroy your brand, you could end up in jail by engaging on something that is nefarious, is disinformation. But you know, you start out with you and I being in a pod and hey But then when you magnify it, you know, and people just don't have your best interest in mind it's super scary. that's not a world that I want our future generations to grow up in. The scariest thing for me is that you also identified that some people out there don't even use the pods themselves, right? They're a pod kingpin. And they're using their influencers and followers to engage with the pods on their behalf, which is even, it just takes the deception to that extra level because they're protecting themselves and using other people. Right. And they're also, those blueprints and all these different groups parties, communities, cohorts, whatever you want to call them. They'll get people to sign up and they will make them think that, you know, you pay them the money and then they turn around. They don't tell you, but if you put a post in as part of their cohort, they'll take that post that you just put in and they'll drop it in their pod. So when you see all the engagement, you're thinking, oh my gosh, person over here that just is helping me with my marketing, knows their stuff. But the moment that you stop paying them. They will take your content out of those pods and will drop, but you have no Yep. You have no clue. those are the the connection kingpins and queen pins that you talked about. they'll find those digital marketers and make some ho unholy agreement with them that they have to. You know, post four or five of their, or share four or five of their posts per month in their pods, it doesn't look like those or queen pins are in pods, but their content is still getting that engagement because, you know, 10 or 15 creators have, are putting their content in their own pods. So you'll never find them in a pod, but You'll You'll always see that engagement there, and once you start seeing how fast it comes in, you'll know right If you have within 30 minutes, a thousand likes, or a couple hundred comments, you know, that's, it's not possible. It, you can post that at the same time every day, but yeah, you're posting it at the same time and dropping it into pods. Yep. Yeah. Yep. And like you can prove all of this too, which is the interesting thing for me is like, I'm. Always skeptical of people when they claim these things.'cause like everybody has their own ulterior motives these days and it almost becomes a point to where like, how cynical do I have to be to survive? But I've seen you, like I know enough about tech to understand the basics of how you do what you do. But you've got a whole database of people that you can prove. You can evidence, you've got their post, you can identify the receipt that went with it to prove that came through a pod, all those sorts of things, I mean, I never will throw or call out anybody unless I have what I, call social Yep. And that's not going in and hacking these platforms. just observing the traffic that's coming back to my system Yep. that's legitimate traffic. If I navigate, I'm in thousands of pods, manual and automated. So if I go and I look at a post, like if I went in today and pulled up Link boost, navigated to the pods that I'm in, pulled up a post. sends all the data back down to my computer, which I can then collect that post, includes everybody that engaged on it. It includes the creator that pushed it out, the digital marketer that pushed it out, and it also includes the actual link to the post. And the hilarious thing about this is includes the AI comments that are used. So those comments that you see that are dropped, that looks like ai I like calling out the comments that were used because that's what comes back down to my pc, you know, and that's the digital receipt. And you've also caused those people in the pods to comment on your post and identified themselves, right? Because I thought that was hilarious because it That's one of the reasons why we ended up chatting again, because I actually saw somebody who. It's in my local area who is a digital marketing expert and who is part of quite a big social media agency here in the uk. And I screenshot that he was in the pod at the time and I sent it to my friend'cause I was furious. I was like, how can somebody who runs a social media agency resort to these tactics and get caught? And of course they don't realize they're being caught out because it's just another comment on another post unless somebody tags them back and goes, what you doing here? Then they have no idea. So I'm, and I'm pleased that I did screenshot it because his boss commented on one of my posts about something about how AI shouldn't be used for nefarious means. And I went, you can talk your team's doing it. And he went, oh, my team's not doing it. And I screenshot, I put the screenshot in the post. Strange enough, he went quiet. He went really quiet. And I'm like. You guys, just honestly. So it's amazing. It's a tool to be able to fight back. And I know that, you know, I've, a couple of times I've looked at influencers and all I have to do is I just have to type in their name and SPOTAPOD. And if they've ever been in one of your articles, their name's gonna come up and the article comes up, you know, and I'm not even, I'm not even gonna drop names on this show, right? Like, I don't need to, they're all out there already. But if, seriously, if you're curious, go and have a look. In Daniel's articles online, and if you find it of use, I'll also say this, right? Dan has a community where you can buy access to the entire database of people that he's caught to date. So by all means, it's not expensive. It's not about Dan making money out of this. It's about paying for his costs and upkeep and things. you know. if you've enjoyed the story today and you've. You are like me, you are a big believer in the work that Dan does. Then go and have a look at the website and purchase a membership or something because honestly, it makes such a difference to meet other people in this world who are trying to make a positive difference. Not because you're paid to, but because you care enough to do something about it. People have asked me, you know, how do I know when I'm successful at this? I tell them, success looks like helping people see social media with their eyes wide open. It's that simple that, you know, and just they talk about it and then others talk about it. It's about the impact. It's not about, I mean, if you look at. What, how we put the book out into market. We did the audio book first. We gave it away for free. People don't understand why I did that. Why didn't I put a print version out? I and my wife, our family is comprised of children that have disabilities. That was to meet the needs of the accessibility community. The audio book was out there. It was for free. And anybody that was blind, anybody that was dyslexic like me, that couldn't pick up a book and read it, you know, because you get lost after the first page, but they can listen to it. It's there, then after that it just. You know, putting out the ebook and everything you know, for free. And it's interesting because the best selling part of this is people paying for it. That's been the biggest sellers, just people want the printed copy just to have the printed copy. And I never expected that, Paul. It's, I just, I wanted them to be able to be impacted and to learn You know, don't sit there and just keep grilling yourself why your content is not performing well. You're doing the right things. Just rinsing and repeating and learning from your process. Not everybody's content is gonna be your content. Yep. Your content is your own. You're gonna meet the needs of community. Only, you're not gonna meet the needs of the masses. That's never gonna happen. Yep. But if we can help people see the other side, the dark side of this, then that's what success looks like. As a bit of advice for people who are out there who are. Now perhaps beginning to open their eyes a little bit to what's going on in, let's be honest, it's not just on LinkedIn. I could be clear on that. This is not just LinkedIn, this is Facebook. It's all of the social media platforms. No matter where you go, this automated engagement happens. How can I, as a non-expert, get some idea of whether somebody's working using a cheat code? How do I know that they're part of a pod in some way, shape, or form? The biggest telltale sign is, and I always say the devil's in the details. can have somebody that has the big reactions, the really, a whole lot of reactions, a whole lot of comments. But the consistent telltale sign for me is the shares and who is sharing that information. If you drill down those reposts or those shares and you just keep, it takes a little bit of time. But if you keep scrolling to the bottom of that list and you see that, you know, the creators reposting it, maybe the next five or 10 reposts are from accounts that have like 10 or 15 connections. Then you know that's probably an engagement pod that's, so you have to do the legwork. Most of the stuff on Facebook, the crap that you're seeing that's AI is all pushed through engagement And I'll sit there and on those posts and I'll say, you do know it's against the law to use fake engagement, you know, on social media, no, that's not true. Yeah, it is. The federal Trade Commission passed that law on October 21st, 2024. It's against the law to use that in the US to use fake followers, fake reactions, fake engagement, period. Yeah. Amazing. So my take on this and what I might suggest to members of the audience who's watching this, you know, like if you're out there. And you are comparing what you are doing with someone else, which I think is a danger anyway, right? Like ultimately you're in a race with yourself. Like compare with yourself and get better based on your own. And if you do find somebody that you want to role model with, reach out to'em and have a conversation and find out how real they are. Right? And you'll figure it out pretty quickly.'cause I can guarantee there's no substance to a lot of the people that are getting thousands of comments and likes. But more importantly. If you're in any doubt that they're in a pod, and you have to ask yourself the question, are these people in a pod? Because their engagement is so amazing, probably they are, you know, without the research, you can't prove it. But let's assume that they are and move on and just get on with your life. The most horrifying thing for me is if I look at my friend and I talked about in December, and she wasted an hour of her time trying to figure out why her videos weren't performing as well as this guy. We multiply that across the, how many people are using LinkedIn even just on its own? Like what, two, 4 billion? Something like that. It's a ridiculous number of people. Yeah, a billion, but 25% of those are fake accounts. And it's not just me saying that, I was saying that last there's a company called Lumio, that has done all kinds of research behind it, and I think they came up with like 24.7%, which was pretty accurate. And I said 25% because. Michelle J. Raymond from Australia had said she's been approached by multiple maybe king, queen pins, and they're telling those people to create 20 to 30 fake accounts to drive their business funnels and to put them those fake accounts in pods. And it's it is true. One of the posts that I'm working on now is, There's like 20, 20 or 30 fake accounts called James Brown. They're on Limb Pod, and I was just, and those fake accounts are driving engagement for some of those connection king and queen bins, Amazing. pretty, pretty hilarious. It's it baffles me, Yeah. That's the level that we go to in order to fake success when actually what we should really all be focusing on. the irony is, like I, I know some people that work with. Top LinkedIn influencers and I'm gonna use court marks for the influencer part because they've got hundreds of thousands of connections or followers rather, and are still struggling to monetize their LinkedIn because ultimately it's a bunch of bots that are following them or people who don't care what they have to see, or they're in the same space and they're a competitor or you know, all of these crazy things. And like the whole digital engagement is just not achieving anything other than. Ripping people off, calling people outta money and wasting so much time for so many good people. And like I said, I mean, I get people come to me and all the time, you know, Paul, I wanna launch a podcast and I wanna podcast with millions of followers. You know, I wanna monetize it. I wanna get thousands of views on YouTube. Like you've got three ways you can do that, right? You've, you can either be a celebrity right now, are you a celebrity? No. No, I'm not a celebrity. Okay. Well, your celebrity status is out the window, so we can't use that one. Number two, you can put thousands and thousands of dollars behind it and pay for paid media adverts. Can you do that? No. No, I can't do that. Okay. Your third option is automated engagement, then, and fake your engagement, which all of the podcast platforms will be able to identify by the way. Yeah. So now what do I do? Well, you do what everybody else does and you launch a podcast and hope to get a sponsor if you're good enough or you just accept that you're not gonna get thousands of views, but you'll add some value. And that's the whole point. It's just frustrating that we have to keep having these conversations over and over again. But it's good to know that there's somebody out there who's trying to do something about it and help us help shine a light on. The dark corners of social media so that we can see what's there. So Dan I'm gonna, I'm gonna draw this to a close now. We've done just under an hour and I've said I'll keep it to the hour. I appreciate your time so, so much. And genuinely we haven't even touched on some of the stories that you have to tell around, you know, I, the half the stories you can't tell because you'd have to kill me afterwards. The rest, you know, you know, we haven't talked about the nine 11 project. You know, there's so many things I'd love to have you back on in a few months when we've cleared down the queue a little bit more. But thank you so much for your time today. Appreciate it. Massively done. Oh, thank you so much, Paul. I'm gonna leave people with this one thought. Life is not defined by how successful you are. It's defined by your fail failures and how well you learn from them. I love it. Thank you everybody so much for taking time outta your life to spend it with Paul and I. Thank you very much Dan and yes, exactly. Thank you very much for watching along at home. I hope you are enjoying season two as much as I am recording it because it's been an absolute blast and I will see you again next week. Thanks for your time. Bye-bye.

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