From Getting Found to Getting Represented: The New Rules of Executive Visibility with Dennis Yu

Michael interviews Dennis Yu, joined by AI builder engineer Leo Pohlmann, about Google’s recent move to AI results first instead of the traditional “10 blue links,” a shift Dennis says is the biggest in 25 years and has caused many SEO experts to report major traffic losses. Dennis argues the fundamentals of visibility still matter—expertise, credibility, stories, and real experiences—while warning against chasing hype and generating “AI slop,” especially as networks adopt AI content fingerprinting. He recommends creating evidence-based, unedited original content (like podcasts and real videos), repurposing it with AI tools, and using small paid distribution (“social postage,” e.g., dollar-a-day boosts) to amplify proven winners tied to business outcomes. They also discuss AI’s impact on jobs, emphasizing that AI-enabled A players will outcompete B players, and Dennis shares his “learning curve vs earning curve” career turning point while Leo describes meeting Dennis as a life-changing moment.

Timestamps:
00:24  Intro
03:16  Dennis Yu Background
06:40  Ignore The Hype
08:09  Real World Advantage
12:01  Fight AI Slop
14:06  Repurpose Real Proof
17:12  Enough Content Question
17:58  Quality Beats Quantity
20:42  Boost The Winners
22:15  Ads Versus Selling
22:40  Pay for Distribution
23:29  Story Clips Strategy
25:52  Consistency Builds Trust
27:24  Publish Skill Files
28:54  Agents Will Shop
30:55  AI and Job Shifts
32:14  Multiply Your Impact
34:04  Direction Over Horsepower
36:37  Sliding Doors Stories
39:32  Where to Find Dennis
40:33  Closing

Connect with Dennis:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennisyu/
https://dennisyu.com/

Michael's National Workforce Study on Change Management:
https://www.michaeljlopez.coach/research

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Welcome to the Top Voice Podcast, where each week I sit down with leading voices in business leadership and transformation to unpack the issues that matter most. Together, we explore fresh insights, bold ideas, and real-world stories from people shaping how we think about change, culture, and what's possible. Hello and welcome to the Top Voice podcast. I'm excited to have on with us uh Dennis Yu and uh and a bonus guest to talk about the biggest change in search that we've seen, according to Dennis, in the last 25 years. And I think, Dennis, you've been somebody championing this conversation over the last several months since it happened. So maybe to get right into it, why don't you tell us what is this big change that's happened for the uninitiated viewer or listener who hasn't heard about the big shift?

SPEAKER_01 0:55

Well, thank you, Michael. And thank you to Leo Pullman, who's our AI builder engineer who can fill in on some of these pieces too. Google announced last month, in their words, that this is the biggest shift they've made in 25 years. And that is moving to AI results first instead of the traditional 10 blue links. And in the last week or so, you've seen people who are SEO experts freak out, saying they've lost 60 to 70 percent of their traffic. And they're mad because they say Google and LLMs in general are showing the answer instead of people coming to the website. But what they don't understand is all the things that we used to do before in the world of SEO, or now they call it AEO, GEO, or EIEIO, the same fundamentals are there in terms of the expertise and the stories and the credibility and podcasts like this, all of those raw ingredients are just being reformatted and shown in different ways. And because Google has made these changes rapidly, because SpaceX went public for a trillion dollars, Anthropics going for a trillion, OpenAI is about to do their trillion dollar AP, you know, all of these guys are doing their IPOs now. We are in the takeoff, the hard takeoff phase of AI. And this is not one of those like Terminator Hollywood movie kinds of doomsday scenarios, but it's saying in the world of search, which was owned by Google and still is owned by Google increasingly, what do we need to do to be able to show up as founders and executives and leaders? That's the big shift, and that's what's catching people off guard.

SPEAKER_02 2:38

Yeah. I want to dig into that. And uh before we do that, because I I I know I get my my Instagram, my Facebook, all of these things are piled up with people who are telling me how to take advantage of the new system. And I know you're gonna help us do that. Before we do that, maybe let's just talk about why you're so qualified to talk about this topic. You've been in this space for a long time and love to learn a little bit more about Leo. Tell us about your background and your experience with search and visibility and and and your kind of unique perspective on the shift that's happening. I think that'd be helpful for people.

SPEAKER_01 3:12

I was one of the first engineers at Yahoo back in the late 90s. And I built the analytics. So with internal analytics, there's a lot of data. And prior to having an analytics team, it was just a bunch of log files. And you remember Yahoo was the number one homepage on the internet, had the most traffic. And from that homepage, which was search, Yahoo was able to create mail and sports, shopping, travel, small biz, horoscopes, all kinds of other properties. And because we had the concept of a logged-in user, which at that time Google didn't have, or and at some point Google didn't even exist, we had a view into what people wanted. Because when someone logged in and they wanted to check their Bank of America or their stock portfolio or see the news or the weather, we had to surface and surface information that was relevant to who they were. Before Google had Gmail, you know why they launched Gmail? It wasn't because they wanted to make the world a better place or provide free email for people. It was a way to be to create logged in user cookies. So when someone's logged in, you have much more information about them, especially when you're reading their mail and serving ads against that. And so we knew, and a lot of the engineers that I trained up at Yahoo went to Google. And we learned, you know, at Yahoo, we learned how to personalize search. We learn how to personalize based on their activity, on what kinds of shopping they did, on the queries that they made, on when they logged into the dating site and lied about their age, all of these kinds of things. And we've always had this tension between what do we do we give the user what they say they want, or do we give them what we know they actually want? Right. And that that's implied in any query, anytime someone types something into a box. And as social media has come through, and now AI and other ways where people are asking the same questions, the same intent has always been true. So it's funny because I come at it from the standpoint of an engineer from having built a lot of these original systems on the foundation of information and what you do day to day and what you eat and where you drive and the questions that you whisper asking, you know, about relationship advice or whatever. That's the data that we had. And that fundamentally has not changed. And because that has not changed, then we understand the context of all the technology changes that have occurred through, you know, since then. That's not changed. When people understand human behavior is still the same, people still want the same kinds of things, you realize all that's changed are the layers that sit on top of the fundamental desires and information that people have, right?

SPEAKER_02 6:03

So now that we have AI, if if nothing's changed in terms of the type of information we want and the type of information people are searching for, the I think the question on everyone's mind is what am I supposed to do differently as a marketer, as a solopreneur, as a small business, as a big business, how do I take advantage of this new world? What's my strategy for creating the momentum of eyes and attention that's now funneling through a different process or experience?

SPEAKER_01 6:35

So, two parts, Michael. First one is don't chase the noise. All these people are constantly trying to hype you up and talk about everything is being, you know, whatever, up-ended. And if you look at who these people are, they're usually selling courses and they're selling on fear or selling some kind of program. People have told me that for years. My next door neighbor runs AI at Google, and she and I have had dinner. She's got hundreds of engineers. You never want to argue with her because she's just way too smart. We've had dinner. And I asked her, I said, so, and then this was when I remember when ChatGPT first came out with her, that was like three and a half years ago. And I said, I know you guys have this stuff. I know you have the LMs. I know, like, why don't you release it? And they said, Because it's not necessary to. Because we've been testing and we found that when you run an ads platform inside the consolidated search, because all they're doing is taking the regular search results and then consolidating it to a single that that's what ChatGPT is, right? It's just a word calculator. We found that the ads platform didn't work very well. So we're not about to crush our earnings just because people are freaking out about the chatbots. And I thought, oh, that's really interesting. They've had it all along. But people are who are in the marketing space, it's like the people who are crypto experts became social media experts, who then became AI experts and jumped on whatever the latest thing is. Ignore all that. Ignore that because that that doesn't that the noise changes every day. Here's what you do think about. Here's the one question to ask. As AI gets a hundred times better and smarter and can answer every question and can do all kinds of stuff, can even use software and write its own software and build itself. What is left when you strip all that? When when the AI is able to do all that, what is left? What's the only advantage we have left? Because you're never going to want to beat the chess computer at chess. Like you never want to beat the thing at its game. It will beat you. What's left? It's our reputation, it's our relationships, it's credibility, it's stories, it's experiences, things that the AI can convincingly talk about, but doesn't, as of 2026, have physical reality, grounded experiences, have feelings, have you know, be able to, you know, Leo and I, we we just what was the place we ate at?

SPEAKER_00 8:59

Um kebab kebab.

SPEAKER_01 9:04

Yeah. So here in Cologne, the AI doesn't understand what it is to have a kebab here versus a kebab in Afghanistan somewhere, right? Right. It doesn't have that. So what should you be focusing on? The things that that are real. So I I know the top people in AI. It's funny because we speak at these AI conferences. I'm speaking at an AI conference in two days and or uh four days in uh Azerbaijan with the president and some of these other guys.

SPEAKER_02 9:29

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 9:29

And the the best, the people I know who are at the leading edge of building these systems, a lot of them are billionaires for some reason. That's how tech is in Silicon Valley. That's how it works. They are ironically, they are focusing on the exact opposite of what everyone else is, they're focusing on meeting people in person for real. Do you remember when the government pulled Fable Five and Mythos three weeks ago? Yeah. And all that hubbub. And Dario is one of the seven, he's like the main guy for anthropic among the seven founders. You know what he was doing? What's that? He was at a wellness retreat. He was the furthest thing away from technology. Yeah. Right? And if if people like that, who are supposed to be, I guess, like wired into the matrix 24-7, if people like that, if you see how they're actually spending their time, that's a much better signal than whatever the hypsters have to say.

SPEAKER_02 10:28

Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about that because I think you've painted an interesting tension. I think two tensions. One wrapped around the behavior of the senior people who are driving the AI industry, maybe not being as plugged in. I want to come back to that. But another one you brought up is about not chasing the noise and focusing on reputation. So maybe to tell a little story from my perspective is uh, you know, coming on to LinkedIn and being really active in the way that I was, I had several years before ChatGPT really came online for the public. And then Claude, I had several years of social media posts that I had written that I had written. They were my words. I had a book, I had all of this stuff. And there was an archive of information that I could plug now co-work into. And it wasn't pulling from the universe of the intellectual corpus of the world. It was pulling from my universe. And so it did a better job at seeing me. I had years of building that foundation. But for people who are trying to chase the hype train, they're trying to build a foundation based on this broader corpus of intellectual knowledge that exists. So how do I do that? Because I I feel like I'm saying I, as in the the person listening or watching this, if I'm playing ketchup, I need to create the volume using the tools. But you're telling me, no, do less of that, create more original content. But then I feel like I'm falling behind to all the people who are chasing the noise. How do I reconcile that?

SPEAKER_01 11:57

Well, the people that are chasing the noise, uh, they're unwittingly creating AI slop because they're trying to produce more, they're generating more. They say, hey, look, this thing can generate this graphic or generate a podcast or generate these different things that are so believable. You know, all the stuff like whatever, Trump and Putin on a sailboat, you know, cartoon characters fighting, kind of like all this AI slop, right? That's believable. Well, here's the the only thing that matters when the noise gets super high is what can be shown as real. And you may have seen, like, for example, there's a there's a technical angle, auth ID or where uh synth ID, where Google announced this at I.O. last month, where they can all of the networks agree. You then the all the major providers within 24 hours signed up to say anyone who's using AI in the production, creating, editing, any step along the way, they're using AI. There's now a fingerprint on that that's undetectable by humans.

SPEAKER_02 12:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:56

So stop generating the fake stuff. Start focusing on what is real. So, Leo and I, for example, are going all around Germany these next few days and we're creating real videos talking about real experiences. 20 minutes ago, we were just with Cam Hazard via Zoom, who is the arguably the world's best professional dunker. He can hit his head on the rim. He's he's one of those sorts of guys, right? And that's a real experience.

SPEAKER_02 13:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:23

That's a real raw Zoom call where we were coordinating on AI agents that we're building, right? And that published, we publish a lot of stuff to YouTube and articles, and we publish them raw as they are, because we want to be able to show that this was a real experience and it wasn't an edited kind of thing. So, those of you guys that are listening or watching, I'd ask you, what are those real components? Not what can you generate out of thin air, but what are the relationship and trust and credibility and experience components that you can put into the machine and the machine will multiply it, right? Technology is a multiplier, AI is just the latest multiplier. So in four days, I'm going to Azerbaijan to keynote at the Global Media Forum. And I spoke there last year, and there was a viral clip because it was held in Shusha in Azerbaijan, which was 80 miles from the Iranian border, of me and the president walking off the private jet down the stair thing, red carpet, into a fleet of these black armored SUVs, right? And so the media caught that, and you know, I became micro-famous for a moment. The Armenian media picked up on that because Armenia and Azerbaijan had this rivalry going on, this civil conflict going on for quite a while. And that was a real experience. That was real because it was captured by trustworthy news sites. It wasn't, I mean, it was on my Instagram, but who cares what happened on my Instagram, right? But what are things that you have that can be positioned with organizations that already have trust? So, for example, uh, my buddy Scott Clintzworth runs Sloan Appliance out of Columbia, South Carolina. And him and his wife, Debbie, also run the National Association of Appliance Repair, whatever the acronym is for like all the companies in America that repair appliances, right? So they have a big conference in San Diego every year, they all get together. And we've done a lot of videos together on how do you work in an appliance repair shop? How do you grow it? How do you do the CRM? How do you pay your people? How do you, you know, how do you say thank you to people who come in the front door? Like there's tons and tons of real stories that are on my phone, for example, and on his phone. And they're growing, they're now, I think, probably a $15 million a year appliance repair company. They're one of the largest ones. Because they're literally taking their experiences and using AI to process those. In other words, to put them on Google, to put them on YouTube, to cut up clips and put them on Instagram, to turn them into blog posts, to put them on Google Business Profile. That's all repurposing, right? That's why we we advocate everybody should have a podcast and interview people in their industry to create real experiences. And then use AI, it can be clawed with D script or Cap Cut or Premiere Pro, whatever your favorite tools are. The AI can use whatever tools that you were using before and do all the work that's in the world of digital marketing, right?

unknown 16:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:27

What are you going to do that the AI can't do? Well, you better think about that one.

SPEAKER_02 16:31

Well, that's one of the reasons that's been the motivation for this podcast is that it's live, it's unfiltered. We take this conversation and we put it right up right away. There's no post-production editing where we take out ums and ands and ors or or a cough here and there. We let that run live. And because I think the conversations are they're planned but unscripted. And we have a plan of what we want to talk about, but it's really about the genuine discussion that you have in real time. Uh I use Opus to make a bunch of clips from here and I pick the ones I like. I use D script to download the transcript and do all of that. Yeah, a little bit of sound leveling, but that's just quality. That's not changing the nature of the conversation. So so my question then is for people who are now thinking about original content, how do I know when I have enough? How do I know if I've never done this before? Either I'm a small business or I'm a solopreneur or somebody who's getting into the world of original content. How do I know what to make? How do I know how often I should make it, where to put it, how often to put it? And I ask because again, I get hit up all the time with I can make your clips go viral, I can make your SEO and I can build your backlinks and I can do all this stuff. And nobody knows if you if you don't understand the world, how to make sense of it because somebody's always pitching you the easy button or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 17:53

Sure. So people who ask that question, how much content or when is it enough, they're asking the wrong question. If you're an influencer and you're making money off of views and going viral and trying to get to 100,000 subscribers on YouTube or whatever the number might be, sure, right? If you're a content creator and you make money off of the content, sure. But if you are a founder, if you sell services, if you are a chief marketing officer at a product company, if you are the director at a hospital or in all these different roles where you're rendering a product or service, who cares how many TikToks or snapshots you have? What matters is the business result. So what we do is we say, what is the evidence of you doing what you do? So Tommy Mello, who just became a billionaire, he told me that a couple months ago, rubbed in my face. He he runs A1 Garage, and he grew that thing from nothing to $350 million a year. And then he started buying up all these other companies and home services. He's got a big conference, Home Service Freedom. He owns a bunch of AI companies now that cater to that whole industry. So he's got the whole supply chain integrated. And he knows with my help that what matters, because I said to I said to him the last few years, what is your goal? And he says, I want to create more home service millionaires. Okay. Well, then if that's the business goal, let's go back to what's the proof that shows that you've done that? Well, it's the original crew that he had, a bunch of them are millionaires. Okay. Um, he's friends with Ken Goodbridge, who's done a billion dollars in HVAC, right? And all these other people at that level. Like, okay, there's proof of that. Can you show that there's proof of you being with these people? Can you show there's proof of how you grew your company? Can you show proof of what the struggles were along the way and tell those stories? And he's put them out there on YouTube, on Instagram, in a book, but it wasn't based on the number of pieces of content. It was on how thoughtfully and with high fidelity, not 4K, but like the actual raw power of the stories that are out there to be able to create more millionaires. And so now we can see how many more people you can look. You we have a an agent that goes out there and looks across social media and whatever every day to see like who's actually succeeding, who's enjoying the content. People will reply saying, I now have a $2 million a year plumbing company because of what I've learned from you on how do you pay teams or how do you negotiate with suppliers or how do you, you know, wrap your trucks the right way or do newspaper apps or all that kind of stuff. And there's proof of that. And he never looks at how much content he produces, because that is the wrong question. Because it's it's quite quality, not quantity. And so when you have a winner and he's produced hundreds of videos, hundreds of pieces of content, when you find a winner, what you then do is you run ads against it. You you do what we call dollar a day. And now you can target other people who are plumbers. Here's one plumber that started and now they're grew to two million dollars, right? Awesome, right? Not a billionaire, just grew to two million dollars. You know, one city, he's got five trucks, right? 10 people on his team, whatever it might be. That's a great story. And then if we recognize what the algorithm does, whether it's YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, LinkedIn, the same thing is true for Netflix, Amazon, eBay. That algorithm is trying to share that content with anyone else who would benefit from that. That's what we were talking about before you hit record. Right. And so by boosting that, by paying money so it shows up in the news feed, not because we have an ad, we're not selling anything. We're literally putting out there the highest value content and letting the algorithm determine what's working or not, we're creating a greater impact. So the idea of finding a winner where people actually stay and watch 85% of the video or stay for seven minutes or whatever the metric is you want to look for, and we put dollars behind it, that's showing signal strength, engagement, which is what Google had to reveal when they were sued by Apple and the whole DOJ thing. Google revealed that they look at engagement signals and how long people watch, you know. Clickstream, maps, and directions on you know Google Maps. They look at that more than anything than the content itself. They don't even know what the content itself is about. And we knew that all along. I knew that because that was that's what our team did almost 30 years ago, right?

SPEAKER_02 22:11

So so we still need to pay for ads, but they need to be strategically placed ads, is what you're saying against content that shows evidence of you.

SPEAKER_01 22:19

Yes, but we don't even think of it as the term ads. Because when you say ads, that implies you're trying to sell something. Oh, sign up now, 20% off by Friday, you know, or use the code. Like, no, no, no. I get it. And selling, yeah, when you want people to buy or sign up or call the phone number or fill out the form or put in their credit card, yeah, yeah, yeah, fine. But what I'm saying is if you're creating thought leadership content, which is what you're doing right now, Michael, you should pay to have distribute. I think of it as social postage, right? When you send a happy birthday card to grandma or whatever, and you pay what is the price now? 45 cents?

SPEAKER_02 22:53

I don't know what I have no idea what a stamp is. Whatever it is, you're paying the social postage.

SPEAKER_01 22:58

And do you think that that is it? So just because you're paying UPS or FedEx, doesn't mean there's an advertisement inside when you rip open the package. Yeah.

unknown 23:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:08

You're paying for delivery. That's the way I look at it. And if if you're taking the time, like what is your you and me and Leo and our time, you know, think about what's what's that worth. Well, it's certainly worth more than a couple dollars. Right, right. And so just when I honor my guests, like I well, Leo just edited a podcast where I interviewed Nathaniel Stevens and he sold his company to uh he started the largest digital marketing agency, Yodel, sold it for $342 million. And I flew out there to New York in his new penthouse at the top floor. We were doing all these videos. It's awesome. You know, he was still furnishing it. It was like the second day moving in. And Leo edited it, cut it into different clips, and then I put my own money against that to make sure that that's seen. And we weren't selling anything. I was asking him about his story. I was like, hey, you know, when you dropped out at UPen and you told your parents that you were gonna start this internet company, what did they say? And he gave this whole story of it, it was an amazing story of what happened, and then his dad died, who owned the car dealership, and then this whole thing happened. He took over the car dealership and all these different stories, incredible stories. And I put money against that because YouTube's algorithm or Instagram or Facebook's algorithm, when it picks up those stories, is going to find the people that are most interested in those particular topics, right? And that creates call it good karma or reputation or trust or whatnot. And then the algorithm kind of credits that back to me. So ChatGPT and Claude and whatever, credit that back to me. I know this because we've done this for hundreds of entrepreneurs who've literally taken their best, most helpful content and put it out there for a dollar a day. So you spend seven dollars for one week, dollar a day times seven days. Yeah. See what happens. It's not, it's not a you know, get six-pack abs in four hours. It's a you know, over time, you start to see that reputation multiply. You start to see conversion rates increase. It's not a hope and pray magic happens. It's measurable every step along the way. And that's what most people don't understand because they're chasing the latest height. They want the instant results instead of what's the advantage that you have? Who are those relationships? What kinds of stories can you tell where you achieve something? It's actually helpful, and you're not selling, you're explaining how you did something, step how I achieved this result in one, two, three, four, five. Yeah, it's literally that simple, right? And you put it out there, you build a reputation, put it out there on LinkedIn. People interview you about how you did that on their podcast, and vice versa. You interview other people about how they achieved a certain thing, then that's valuable content.

SPEAKER_02 25:45

Yeah. And I think true, right? And and you know, I think you're you're hitting on a on a on a truth that's really important, which is consistency beats intensity every time in terms of the the way you go about building your reputation, consistent, diligent, deliberate, thoughtful placing of content that tells your story, and then being patient to let that pay off. And I I know I just did a a little speaker reel that I needed to update for mine. And I put I put raw cell phone video of me in workshops with clients doing real change work because I thought that's, you know, my brand is I'm a practitioner. I do the work. I'm not just on a stage talking about concepts that aren't real. I'm in meetings with senior leaders and people turning wrenches in in power plants who are trying to change their behavior. And I think that's got value. And, you know, the people that want to see that, they'll they'll find it and they'll reach out and go, hey, we need someone like you. So uh at least I think I'm unintentionally walking into your strategies that you're describing, Dennis. Maybe I need to spend more time with you outside of the show, getting a little bit more uh advice. I did see, and we're we're kind of getting to time, I want to ask two more questions really quickly. I did see that you put out a post, I think it was yesterday, maybe today, where you you published a pretty big marketing skill, an MD file for Claude that was a soup to nuts uh framework that you could load in and have it do all of this work for you. Tell us a little bit about that because I think it's it's both incredibly generous and really impactful. So tell us about that.

SPEAKER_01 27:20

I've been telling people who have professional services for years, publish everything that you know for free. No secrets. Oh, it's proprietary. Oh, they won't hire me anymore as clients because you know I'm giving away exactly how to do it. All my competitors are gonna see how I do it. Put it out there. Because the thing I put out there today, I've done this hundreds of times, but today I published all the skill packs that we use in Claude that have done the great work that we've done. And now anyone that wants to build AI agents or whatever, they could literally just grab all that, ingest it. They can quiz Claude or whoever they want to quiz, ask Grok, hey, what's what are in these skill files? Do they work? Uh does Dennis properly incorporate recursive self-improvement and subagents and other components that make AI smart? Like, is that in there? Is there anything nefarious? Does it abide by basic standards and you know that sort of thing? Like, and they'll find it's absolutely true because we know we we are we're playing this chess game many steps ahead. Information was commoditized by Google and made free. And so ironically, with information free, services become more expensive because anyone can just do it, you know, you can go to the grocery store and buy all the stuff yourself, or you go to the restaurant, and they're of course they're going to charge you a little more, right? And anyone that provides services, understand what you're able to charge. Well, where does that little more come from? It comes from brand and reputation, right? And also, we know that agents are going out on behalf of their users and doing shopping and comparing, and people are having these conversations. And I asked ChatGPT, hey, we're in Cologne, where should we go? Oh, we should go check out the cathedral, or we should there's this cool nature trail we should go check out too. And it's making recommendations. How? Based on the quality and depth and trust of the information that's out there. When that is out there, if you know that agents are doing the shopping increasingly, some of our articles on how to like the skill empty files, I see there's more agents that are coming than humans, which is hilarious. That's awesome. You expect that, you want that to happen. If you know that's going, like you know, in three or four years from now, for sure there's gonna be way more agent traffic than humans, right? Yeah, oh, for sure. All right. Well, then if you're if you are in change management and you're putting on workshops and you're roll up your sleeves with these executives getting stuff done, you know that agents are gonna shop on behalf of these organizations. Wouldn't you want to be able to please those agents and show them, convince them that you're the one to be hired? Yeah. How would you do that? Through what you have to say or what other people have to say?

SPEAKER_02 29:58

Yeah. Yeah, it's gotta be from you. I think that's and it's and and and to your point, I think it's gotta be evidence-based with real content that shows you in those moments. I think that's just powerful, powerful advice. Uh, before we get to kind of wrapping up, I want to go back to the second tension that you mentioned earlier about Dario not being in a wellness retreat and the senior leaders of AI maybe pulling back. I've seen some articles. There was a big article, I think, yesterday uh from Sam from Sam Altman about changing some of the doom and gloom narrative around job loss and destroying the economy and all of these things. How how should we be interpreting this moment? Because everyone's racing to learn the tools and adopt the technology, but there's a there's a second narrative developing around the future that I think's got some tension in it. I'm curious about your point of view on that.

SPEAKER_01 30:51

The cynical people will look at what Sam Altman said and say, well, that's because he's trying to go public, and that's why he's walking back, the doom and gloom, and the young adults can't find jobs and all that. The truth's in the middle, because we all know that AI is not going to take your jobs. It's smart people. A players using AI, they're going to take the jobs of the B players.

SPEAKER_02 31:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:11

And thus, if you are not keeping up, and this is not one of those, like, you know, jump on every little thing that that's coming out and try to stay up on the news kind of stuff. But if you are not incorporating AI into how you work and how you reason so that you can become up-leveled up as a manager, as an orchestrator, which is the kind of change management I think that you initiate in these organizations, then the workers who are unable, who are still stuck as workers because they are locked into this mindset, they're the ones that are going to be left behind. Not because the company did anything bad to them, but because you have agents that are doing the work better than we can. And the ones who are winning are able to be managers and orchestrators of these agents. And, you know, Leo is showing me the agents that he's working on. So sure, he knew how to edit videos and do social media and all that. And that qualifies him to train up a bunch of agents that now multiply what he does a hundredfold.

unknown 32:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:10

So I'd ask any, I'd ask you, what is it that you do? What would that look like at a hundred times the impact? What would you need to do where to make that happen without having to work any harder, right? How do you get 100 times the impact? And if you don't think about it that way, you're not, you know, you're not using AI properly. That's yeah, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_02 32:31

Yeah. Well, I'm I'm actually working on a proposal right now for a small client, and I'm using Claude, I'm a big cowork guy, and designing the entire response, harvesting all of my IP across the case studies and work that I've done to build that. And it's, I'm not building a single slide or or word, but it's all based off of my content. And we're interacting through a conversation that says, tell me the story of how I win this proposal, giving given my experience. And that would have taken me a month before this. And now it takes a couple days of thoughtful, but it's not just fire and forget. It's a diligent and deliberate interaction that I have. That's still my voice and my story creating all of that. And I've actually thought about you, you can see the study behind me, uh, which I'll send you a copy. You might really be interested in it, uh, of turning that study, a thousand people across the US, on what they need when it comes to organizational change and turning that into a skill file and making it fully, fully accessible. Because just because you know the tactics doesn't mean you can deliver that in a real human context. So uh I I think I'm leaning in the direction you're recommending, which is great. So more uh more to do, of course. Uh Dennis, we we've talked about a lot here. I'd love what are what are we talking about a lot of things in a short period of time. What are two to three things that you want the viewer, listener to take away from this moment, this shift, and what they need to be thinking about in terms of visibility and the kind of AI revolution when it comes to visibility and reputation?

SPEAKER_01 34:00

So instead of approaching it with fear and running scared, running harder because there's this bear chasing you, think of it in terms the other way. If I didn't have to work, what would I be doing? What value do I derive when I don't have to worry about things like that? And you'll find that there's an intersection between that and where it's some people call it ikagai, right? The intersection of what you do, what you know, what you get, you know, all of those things. And this there's no more focusing moment uh of that than right now, because anything you do can be multiplied now. I think of it in terms of like, you know, when cars came out, you had these, like I guess they're technically one horsepower because you had like one horse. One horse, literally single horsepower. But now you have you know 100 horsepower. We were on the Autobahn a few minutes ago and we were going very fast, right? No speed limit. But if you could, if you could multiply your stuff, whatever that is, what would it be? So it's not about how many, how much horsepower the car has, it's what direction you want to go. And that's the thing that always trips people up when it when new tech comes out, is if you look at what all these AI people are saying, they're constantly talking about basically like what the engine does and how much horsepower and the pistons and the transmission. And I'm like, okay, that's interesting and all. Yeah, this new one's got 400 horsepower. Okay, awesome. But where are you trying to go? Yeah, what are you trying to do? And whenever I see people talking about AI, because it's easy to get lost in the noise. The very first thing I look at is, but what did they get done with that? Okay, great. You spent $12,000 on tokens yesterday. Good for you. What did you actually build? And did that create economic value? Because if it didn't, I'm not gonna listen to you. And that eliminates 99% of the noise, Michael. Ask them, what did you actually get done that created economic value? Not that, oh, I built this this, I rebuilt my CRM and all that. Okay, good for you, right? But where did you create economic value?

SPEAKER_02 36:11

I think it's I think it's an absolute great reminder. And I think there's a level of experimentation that's required for anyone who's getting into these tools to figure out what to do, go solve a microprogram. You know, maybe it is your CRM system that you rebuild just to learn how to navigate, but then at some point you should be asking yourself the big questions. And I think that's just such a great reminder to everybody. And I know that's the work that you do. Uh, before I ask you where people can find you and follow you, you and Leo, and the work that you do, as you may know, there's a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest. They're always fun and they're always new ways to get to know each other. I'm gonna ask both of you, since Leo, you you've you've been here, you you get to answer this question as well. Uh so what is the sliding doors moment in your life or career that has led you on the path that you're on? And and how did you recognize that that moment occurred?

SPEAKER_01 37:05

I'll go real quick. I went to my mentor who is the CEO of American Airlines, Al Casey, and I was torn when I graduated undergrad. Did I want to go to investment banking like Goldman Sachs? Or did I want to go into the airline industry and build the website? Now he was biased, of course, because he ran the airline. And because I I said, but you know, look at how much money these partners are making at Goldman Sachs, right? All this money. Even after two or three years, you can make 150 on my mom's side. My cousin, you know, is making $200,000 a year after three years. And that's kind of the thing you want when you graduate, right? Yep. But then he asked me the one question, and that is, son, are you working on your learning curve or your earning curve? Because if you make an extra $20,000 a year, is that really gonna matter in 10 years from now? What's really going to matter? In 10 years from now, look at the perspective of 10 years from now, where do you want to go? I'm not deciding for you, but if you believe the internet, I mean back then the no one knew the internet was gonna be. This was like before even AOL, okay?

SPEAKER_02 38:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:14

But he had the foresight, this old man, to know that the internet was gonna be a thing, right? But he said, Where do you want to be? In 10 years from now, what's really gonna matter? And that's when I decided to choose. I'm gonna go the the internet route instead of the investment banking route.

SPEAKER_02 38:30

That's one of the best phrases and pieces of advice I've ever heard. I'm gonna steal that and think about that myself. So what a great answer. Leo, what about you?

SPEAKER_00 38:39

Oh, um, I'm I'm just in the beginning of my of my journey right now. Like I finished school last year, um, then decided to travel in April. And on a random evening in Toronto, I met Dennis. And since then, uh yeah, my complete uh my life completely changed. And yeah, before before that meeting, I just thought, okay, AI is there for making my homework. And now, yeah, I know there's so much more to do with it. It's pretty impressive, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:15

Yeah. Well, I do think you're probably living your sliding doors moment as it speaks because you're connected to Dennis, and clearly it's gonna change the trajectory uh of your life and the work that you're doing. So, uh, Dennis, this has been great. Where can people find you, follow you, learn more, download your skill file, all of these things so that they can uh get more of the wisdom that you've shared on this show briefly?

SPEAKER_01 39:38

They can ask Claude, who is Dennis U? They can go to Google and type in my name and see a full knowledge panel. We are all practitioners of what we preach. If you want to be really smart, you could say, who is Dennis U and how does this apply to me and my situation and the conversations that we've had and the issues that I'm trying to solve.

SPEAKER_02 39:58

I love it. I love that provocative send-off that says to practice what you preach. Uh, Dennis, this has been great. We'll be sure. I know there are a few links, we'll include that in the show notes, but I do think everyone should go do that and then probably do it for themselves. Who, who, who am I if I've got a presence? I know I've done it a couple of times. And so uh I think it's a great reminder for everyone to go ask the question and get the results, and then maybe reach out to you if they need some help to figure out how do I make those results better. Uh Dennis, sorry, go please.

SPEAKER_01 40:29

I'm happy to help, right? Information's free. There's an abundance. All of us can win.

SPEAKER_02 40:35

I love it. I love it. I love that mindset. Thank you so much for taking the time after traveling across the world. Please go get some sleep. We'll include all of this. The show will be posted up within the hour for people to download and listen to. Thank you for a wonderful conversation and thank you for being a part of the Top Voice podcast. We'll see you all next week.