John Whitford Talks About The Brutal Truth About AI Content in 2026

Meet John Whitford, entrepreneur and co-founder of Freedom By Number, as he breaks down how artificial intelligence is changing content creation, online business, and the creator economy faster than most people realize.

If you've ever wondered whether AI will replace creators, how to stay relevant in an AI-driven world, or what separates successful creators from everyone else, this conversation is packed with practical insights on what actually matters moving forward.

In this episode, John shares how he transitioned from traditional online business and digital marketing into the rapidly evolving AI landscape, and why he believes most people misunderstand how AI should actually be used inside a business. We talk about the biggest mistakes creators make when relying on automation, why AI alone will not fix a broken business model, and how creators should think about leveraging AI without losing authenticity.

John also explains why trust and human connection are becoming more valuable than ever, how “AI slop” is changing audience expectations, and why polished content may matter less in the future than genuine personality and raw communication.

We also dive into scalable systems, content monetization, conversion optimization, and how creators can position themselves to thrive even as AI tools become more powerful and accessible.

John Whitford is the co-founder of Freedom By Number, an education and software company helping entrepreneurs build scalable businesses through systems, automation, and AI-powered workflows.

Whether you're a creator, entrepreneur, marketer, or simply trying to understand where content and business are heading next, this episode is for you.

Learn more about John:
Free 10 Day AI Insights Series: https://johnwhitford.org/insights
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@johncreates

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Most people think AI content is all about automation, speed, and replacing human work. John Whipford shows there's a completely different way to think about it. In this episode, he breaks down how AI is actually reshaping trust, why most creators are using it the wrong way, and how to build a business that will stand out in a world flooded with content. Hi John, thanks so much for joining us today. For people discovering your work for the first time, how would you describe what you do today and who are you?

SPEAKER_00 0:29

Awesome. Vittors, great to be here. And if you're wondering why we're looking like we're laughing, we were I I totally bossed your name before recording, so thank you for doing that intro a second time. Um hey everybody, my name is John Whitford, my wife, Susie Whitford, and I. We got started online business back in 2014, 2015. We are officially, I think we're getting close to vintage in terms of online business age. Uh, we're the dinosaurs in online business. We got started with following Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income. We started a blog, it turned into online courses, turned into digital products, turned into mentorship. We now have a software company. We've kind of pivoted as we've seen the online business come and grow. We've always been attached to serving people on YouTube. And our brand is called Freedom by Number. The it was kind of play on the words of the whole paint by number or color by number, where we kind of provided step-by-step instructions because we both have engineering backgrounds. And over time, we taught people the skills that were trending that were working towards their ultimate success to provide them freedom, hence freedom by number. And now at this stage, with this pivot to AI, things are changing in a very interesting way. And from a personal perspective, we kind of achieved our personal goal of achieving financial freedom and some time freedom for ourselves. So now we kind of just give back and love doing shows like this and providing any value we can for those who are either just getting started or looking for how do they pivot through. Because as you guys know, online business and any business goes through cycles. And I think the one we're seeing right now is the most unprecedented, and the one where literally this time it feels different. And so it's super fun to uh, you know, from the position that I'm in, where we don't need to be stressed out about the changes in life. We can kind of go into it eyes wide open, and we're just looking for what is going to work for us, for our audience, and ultimately for our three children as they come into age and come into the world of business. And so we're super happy to share anything we have here and hopefully provide a ton of value in the process.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Awesome. And also, you operate in the in this intersection of AI and marketing. So, how did you get into this space? And when was the moment that you realized, hey, there's something there, like I need to hop on this train?

SPEAKER_00 2:35

Yeah, it's a great question. And honestly, it's one of those where if we didn't have to, I don't know if we would. And I always liken it back to forced adaptation. And you think about from earliest biology that notion of if you don't adapt, you will not survive. And in reality, we've always enjoyed being as personal as possible and sometimes not doing the scalable thing on purpose. I enjoy recording, you know, Loom videos, you know, free videos helping out people one-on-one inside the customer inbox and inside of our software, doing the unscalable things. And what that's done for us from a personal perspective, and I promise I'll bring this around to your question, is it's allowed us to create loyalty with our users, with our customers, even with just our contacts inside of our email list. And so doing the unscalable has always been something we've enjoyed doing. Uh, even though, as a trained systems engineer, I know how to scale things, and we do. We've spent millions on Facebook ads and done the scalable, but we also enjoy the unscalable. Bringing that to this world of AI, it seems that everything out there that used to be unscalable has now become scalable. Even from one-on-one little videos, AI is doing that with an AI avatar. You can copy and paste a prompt into an AI avatar, it creates a talking head video, you can get a link and get send that out and have AI agents automate the entire process. And so while the unscalable has become scalable, I find that the trust level online has reached all-time lows. All this AI has created what we all know is the term AI slop. And so it's interesting, coming from the background that I have, of seeing this trust level drop while everybody's able to create highly polished content online, nobody trusts it anymore. And so it's fun to watch. And so pivoting into this is from the requirement that the old way doesn't really work. The pure just I'm going to try to create a piece of content every week, provide a little bit of value, that in and of itself doesn't work. But it's when you're able to increase the trust through doing the unscalable in a way that AI cannot replicate, that's where we see the balance of using scale where necessary, but also using individual trust building and a bit more of the tight-knit uh close quarters combat of talking to people and building relationships allows people to still survive and thrive in 2026.

SPEAKER_01 5:03

Would you say that AI is going to fundamentally change content creation? Uh, what do you do you expect it to be like in let's say five years from now?

SPEAKER_00 5:12

Yeah, it's a bet. We all have to make the bet of what we think is going to happen in the future. And I'll tell you my bet. If you scroll back a couple of years, the more polished your content, the faster, the more value per minute. There is like a metric in terms of how much value bombs can you drop in a YouTube video per minute and trying to add as much density into the value you give, that was how you won. By being able to be succinct and quick. We all know the attention span of average humans is like less than a fruit fly and things like that. There's all these discussion points that worked and was true, but I find we're at an inflection point now where now that AI can create valuable content, it can create polished videos, it can do all of that. I think that what's going to win in the future is going to be actually cutting out some of the editing and showing reality, showing if I sneeze during this interview, keep it in. Like I want people to realize I'm not an avatar. And that's where I think the trust economy is going to surge. And the polish economy, this notion that every individual can have a production-ready piece of content, I don't think that's going to matter as much because that will become commoditized, will become uh unique, and your unique selling proposition is allowing the personality to show through, allowing the philosophy to show through. People will now connect with your values because I think when everyone has access to the greatest brains in the world, everybody has access to Chat GPT, to Gemini, enter your LLM of choice. When everyone has access to that, that becomes a commodity, and your ability to just shout knowledge from the rooftops as fast as possible no longer matters. But in that era, when everyone has the best brain, it's really going to matter what's in your heart and how you can connect with those around you and if you can actually bring your values, not just your value. And that's a very uh important distinction. The value is can I teach you something? Can I show you how to do something? Well, everybody can do that now. And if you want information density, talking to ChatGPT will give you more density than any online course could years ago. Now, the values is when you get to share what's important to you, you get to become that trusted advisor, not just from an information perspective, but providing that emotional support, the uh the authenticity, the one-to-one helping them understand where they're at and what the next step is because you've gone through it before. And so I think that's what's once what's going to become important in AI. It will absolutely help all the stuff that has to be done. Like ultimately, in any business, there's just stuff you have to do. There is that mundane, the monotonous that you would normally hire out assistants for. And while we still have employees, we are leveraging AI agencies, uh, yeah, in individual tasks to get things done. But where the needle is going to get moved in the future is how you can learn when AI is amplifying your business and learn when it's actually decaying the trust and eroding the trust and making sure the humanity comes in in those critical uh components.

SPEAKER_01 8:09

Do you remember which AI tool did you use first? Like what was your first experiment like?

SPEAKER_00 8:14

Oh, I do. Yeah, that's a good question. And it's funny because it feels like AI kind of just came out of nowhere, but it actually has been going on for a while. Uh, the first one, and it's gone through many name changes. I'll see if I can get the etymology of it correct, but I think it was called conversion.ai or something like that. It turned into Jasper, and then it turned into they got, I think they got sued by Disney because they Jarvis, yeah. It was basically a marketing AI chatbot before ChatGPT. So props to them, and then great company. And we were affiliates for them, we used them personally, and it really helped you. You could, it was the first time the aha moment came on because, like I said earlier, we got started with the the written word with blogging and things like that. And to be able to say, write me a blog post about um, I don't know, uh grooming poodles, and it would write you a thousand-word blog post about grooming poodles, and it would have keywords and all the things. It was um it was mind-blowing. And you know, we always think back, oh man, if only I could have leveraged that uh that tool harder and gone all in on it harder. Um, you know, it was a great time. It we were definitely still in the gold rush era, but yeah, I would say that was the first one we used, and I didn't know how important or how impactful it was going to be because we kind of forget that the beginning days of AI, every third word was a hallucination. Like it tried its best, it wanted to serve you, but it was like a drunk toddler. Like it was it would try its best, had a ton of energy, but it would just go off the rails all the time. But those were good days.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

But also, I think it's interesting that you mentioned that in different words, but we pretty much said, like, now it's you have to be vulnerable in front of the cameras, you have to be raw. When it comes to AI content generation, how do we use that to leverage our content, but we're still relatable, we're still uh in touch with our audiences?

SPEAKER_00 10:03

It's a great question. And to be honest, we're all figuring that out right now. I think that we're in that the middle of so I'm not gonna come at you from an authority perspective of this is the way, and I'm sorry if you're looking for that, but I'll give you the real authenticity of the experiments we've run and the experiments we're running forward, and at least from you know my decade of experience, what my best guess is of what's going to happen. Because if anybody tells you they know the exact way to leverage AI perfectly right now, they're selling you shovels in the gold rush. They don't exactly know, they're just trying to monetize off you. So I'll be honest with you guys. Uh, so number one, I'll tell you what probably not to do. And uh I've I experimented early on uh with the notion of end-to-end pipeline automation, basically being where AI comes in from the beginning of giving you ideas, and then AI goes into writing the script, and then AI goes in to generate images based on the words in the in the script, and then AI puts it all together, yada yada yada, and it you just kind of push, it's it's the ultimate dream, right? And I didn't I I knew it was going to be a dream, it wasn't gonna be something that, like, oh, this is the thing that's gonna make you billions, but it's like it's interesting, and whenever you have an interesting problem, you want to see it go to its logical conclusion, and so you basically push the button and you give it a topic, and it goes through and it creates a hundred videos for you while you sleep at night. And and I built that system, I actually have a YouTube video that you can see at work, it's really cool, but I wouldn't advise it. I don't think that's the way. And and the reason why is for all the reasons I mentioned, people are now the same way that people would be able to detect if somebody's real or not real, they're able to detect if AI content is good or if it's slop, and it's very hard to create good content fully devoid of the human touch. Okay, so full-on pipeline, not the way. Full on humanity can be the way, but it's also gonna be hard to uh to scale that. Again, I'm okay doing the non-scalable, but publishing one video per week that's fully edited, the way that used to work, the YouTube playbook that used to work, I don't think that's the way going forward either. I think what the way is going forward is a combination of twofold. One is the raw and authentic content where you get to go on, whether it's YouTube, whether whatever your platform of choice is, and you share what you're doing, you share the journey, you bring the you back into YouTube, where I feel like for a while it got into where everyone has this production studio, everything has to be perfect. And I think that now the AI slop is getting hard to distinguish from those higher quality, you know, snappy cuts. I think being able to be raw, being able to go live, and in some of that had its ups and downs over time. So I think that level of connection on the front end is going to have a resurgence where not everybody needs to have a video editor. I mean, it's awesome if you have good video editing, but you just want to make sure that you find that balance of letting the true you come through and then using AI from that to leverage, distribute, find the clips, use the tools or the agencies that can go through and find the nuggets and distribute that and syndicate that out to multiple platforms. Ultimately, you still have to find customers, and so reach and distribution still matters, but if it gets to where you're trying to just fully take yourself out of the business, I find that then you're just gonna become like everyone else. And as soon as you have a new model, that will be commoditized quickly. The only thing that will still stay true and still stay a unique selling proposition are your views, your angle, your ability to communicate, and your ability to persuade people, not like from a salesy persuasive persuasiveness, but just there's a lot of people talking about AI. There's a lot of people talking about any topic out there. Why do they want to listen to you? And ultimately, that's not gonna be the quality of your information anymore, it's gonna be the quality of your connection going forward.

SPEAKER_01 13:44

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SPEAKER_00 14:36

Truth be told, I I try not to follow too many people. Uh and and there's many reasons for that. Number one is you want to make sure that your individual focal point can come in a little bit and that you don't just become a mouthpiece of other people's viewpoints. So I don't go and have a uh, you know, that yeah, Russell Brunson would always say, get your dream 100 people and like everything they do and follow everything they do. I don't know. I used to do that, I got tired of it. I just do me, and it seems to work out pretty well. Uh, but anybody who is able to engage and not try to stand out on the fact that they have the one secret hack or they have the one method, the one framework that works. Like, yes, everybody has a framework. At this point, frameworks are commoditized. The the ability to get from point A to point B, many paths can work. I think the the people that will be doing it right, you know, in air quotes, are the people that realize it's still their relationship. Uh everyone is putting their heads down and trying to automate their life through AI. And I think the people that don't ignore that, but they keep it in the proper context. They automate the things that don't require their individual voice. If it's answering emails or if it's doing, you know, some basic things that should be automated, yes, use automations and AI for that, but the ones that will succeed are the ones that still will do the work of talking to their audience, of building loyalty and providing value on a multifaceted level, not just a pure information-based level.

SPEAKER_01 16:07

Is there any misconception that you notice that people have about AI-generated content that you're like, mm-hmm? That's like if you guys study a little bit more, you wouldn't think that. Because in a way, like I I have to be honest, I've always feared AI. So it's something new to me that I'm trying to explore more, and I'm like, yeah, we have to live with AI nowadays. So I might as well learn from it and work side by side with it.

SPEAKER_00 16:31

Yeah, that's a great question. So uh is there any misconceptions? I think that whenever there's a new technology, uh, people will flock to it and they will totally forget the fundamentals and they will look to the edge cases because the edge case of any new technology is you know, by definition, it's the frontier. It is like the the newest of the new, the coolest of the cool, and oftentimes the most advanced of the advanced. And so, from the perspective of like building a business, any sort of business, whether it's a personal brand, whether you're selling a physical product, whatever the case might be, if it's not working for you, uh not you, but like let's say somebody's going in and they're they've been kicking their, you know, kicking the tires and they're trying to figure out why it's not working and they're they're hitting resistance on whatever it might be, they will oftentimes look to the newest, latest technology as being their savior, as being, hey, this one, like I said, this one trick will you know make you a million dollars in this one framework. And oftentimes, and this is where, yeah, my my message isn't always the sexiest and and the the most clickbaity. It's oftentimes the misconception people have is that if only I implement this AI system, this AI agent into my broken business model, my business will work. And in reality, is AI is an amplifier in anything that you do, in the same way it used to be that advertising, it still is, but advertising is another form of an amplifier. It will amplify your traffic. But if you don't have a working mechanism of how you build trust, of how you monetize, of how you grow and scale and support and fulfill and do all the boring business stuff. If the fundamentals aren't there, then just amplifying it, like in math, you multiply anything by zero, you get zero. And so when you put a multiplier on somebody that's not already producing, it's not going to magically make one times zero equal one. One times zero is still zero. A hundred times zero is still zero. And so adding AI in to a business that isn't cranking from the fundamentals of what you can do without AI. For example, if we just replace AI with assistant or worker or employee or contractor or agency or anything like that, you can AI is just a way of getting work done. It's just an amplifier of intellectual property and process and outcome. And if you separate that and you say, if I could hire, if I can't hire somebody for, let's say $10, $20, $30 an hour and have that person create results and create profit for my business, most likely AI is not going to do any better for you because the fundamentals aren't there. So if you're able to make $50 as an individual solopreneur, AI might be able to help you make $100. But if you're not making profit yet, AI might just magnify and multiply your path to failure. Because whenever you add in a black box, you know, one of those types of devices like on the airplane, you go down, the black box is just, you don't really know what's going on there, but there's a lot of information in that black box. You add that black box of AI into your business. Not only have you added a lot of power and a lot of multiplication, you've added complexity. You've added processes which are a little bit harder to control. And so I'm not saying this to scare people away from using AI. That would be a terrible strategy. That's that's not a strategy I would recommend to anybody. What I'm suggesting is the fundamentals have to be there. And once the fundamentals are there, AI can help you scale to any place you want to go.

SPEAKER_01 19:50

Do you think AI is actually uh, from what you're saying, do you think AI is actually making content better or just more abundant? And how do you think creators should actually think about originality in today's age? Because it's it's kind of like a juxtaposition, right? Being original and actually relying on AI for leverage and that's a very insightful question.

SPEAKER_00 20:13

And I'm gonna sound like the old man screaming at the clouds, because back in my day, like good content would rise to the top and and and algorithms would reward those who could concisely and clearly spread a message. And yeah, there's a lot of people with a lot of angst, which is very justified, because AI slop has ruined we had a good thing going for a while of being able, you know, if you were prolific, if you were consistent, if you were consistently valuable in what you were producing, it's just a matter of time that the cream would rise to the top. And I think about, you know, again, back in blogging or YouTube creation, your first video, your first blog post, don't expect anything from it, but you're building up that muscle, you're putting those little bricks in the wall that eventually get traffic from Google and would then turn into AdSense and would turn into affiliate marketing sales, and and the business would start to grow. With AI, it's not different, but the number of players coming in and the ability that, like I mentioned, this that you can push a button and have an AI agent every hour on the hour publish a 2000-word blog post or publish a faceless video on YouTube fully automated. Now, does that mean that the content creation game is over? Absolutely not, but it does mean that if you're trying to create average content, if you're trying to just follow that trend and like I said earlier, just try to do what other people are doing, yeah, chances are anybody can take a YouTube video, find the transcript, and have AI try to remix it and publish it. Now, I'll give some warnings about that in a second, but if your goal is to kind of follow that type of a process, it's going to be much harder because you're going to quickly be commoditized, and it's hard for any business to succeed if you're a commodity. And so, from that perspective, the content Game has changed, the creation process has changed, but I would still suggest it's worth it. Not necessarily from a you're gonna go viral, you're gonna get millions of views and hits and things like that. But if you're able to go and connect with people, like it's it's different from the days where you would see a hundred thousand views and 500 million views and be like, oh, that's awesome. Now it's like you see a thousand views, you have to realize that's a thousand real people watching your content. You know, the content game has gotten crowded more crowded, and so those who are consistent and able to show up consistently will still succeed and thrive. And again, using AI where it fits, but not allowing it to take over, people will detect. You know, everybody's able to detect if they start using those crazy dashes that no human really writes in their paragraphs, but AI loves to write them. If you allow the base level AI slop to come through in your content, that will erode trust faster than anything else, in my opinion. Uh, but it's it's definitely it's a pursuit worth it's worth pursuing the content game. It's just a matter of of avoiding that temptation of like, you know, the forbidden fruit of, oh, AI can do it all for me easier. No, you have to have the fundamentals, you have to go out there to serve an audience with a specific transformation in mind, and AI can enhance that, but can never take over the driver's steering wheel.

SPEAKER_01 23:14

If you were to describe it in one word, why do you think most content fails to convert when it comes to conversion optimization?

SPEAKER_00 23:22

Persistence. I think it's just persistence. Speaking from my own perspective, so consistency and persistence are different words. Sometimes people use it interchangeably. Consistency is like doing the same thing over and over and over, and and that's not what wins. Persistence is what wins. Persistence is you keep hitting your head against the wall and you realize eventually, oh, there's a door next to me. And so you're you continue to push up against it consistently, but you're always looking for ways to improve and ways to get around obstacles that show up. And I think that especially now in the world of AI, people will hop from tool to tool and technology to technology without ever understanding why they're doing the thing they're doing. And so I think the thing that will allow anybody to succeed with a long enough timeline, meaning enough patience and enough humility, is just persistence of not only showing up, but looking to find that 1% improvement from video to video, looking to be open and honestly allowing your ideology, like your belief system, not I'm not saying in God or anything, uh, which I believe in God and I think everybody should, but it the ideology of like, if I have this hook and this call to action and this pacing and this timeline, it's perfect. I took a course five years ago, this was the framework it taught me, and I will go to the ends of the earth with this one framework. That's a losing strategy. Because as soon as like this hive mind that has flourished with AI is as soon as somebody figures something out, basically that can be replicated almost instantaneously across all the AI tools. And so the notion of I will do the same thing day in and day out, and it it what whether it succeeds or fails, that's a losing mindset. But the persistence of pushing through, pivoting as needed, and keeping your ears and your eyes open to what's actually happening, that's going to be, I think, the number one tool that that separates the success from the failures in online content creation and in business in general. We've had to pivot multiple times, but our inputs, our efforts of going in and looking around and making decisions and experimenting versus just executing. People always use the word just execute, lock in, do the thing. And I find it have that curiosity of a child, have the have the scientific method of going in, looking, having a guess. Hey, I think if I try to make this hook differently, I'm gonna expect a slightly longer retention rate. And then follow the scientific process through. Implement the experiment, the video, measure the results. Did you get what you wanted or not? And then iterate, make a new guess. And if you just keep making enough educated guesses over time and you have enough patience and humility, it's either gonna be success or like I guess you'll die of old age because like you can absolutely continue that process and that method of being curious, being helpful, and being a servant forever. And if you if you have enough uh patience and and virtue in what you're trying to do, if you're doing it for the right reasons, I think that that authenticity just has no place to go but to success and helpfulness.

SPEAKER_01 26:24

How much of conversion do you think is actually messaging versus offer versus content itself? And because like to you, how what would you describe uh as like a high converting content?

SPEAKER_00 26:38

Yeah, that's uh that's obviously one of those loaded questions. So I'll I'll answer the the basic way and then we'll maybe go a little deeper if you want to. So you asked at first how much of it is content versus offer versus conversion, and and truth be told, it's it's three legs of a stool where you could have two. Let's let's say if we say the three are your offer, your message, and let's say your content, or maybe like the business, the acquisition strategy. If it's three legs of the stool, you have to have all three for it to stand. If you have a good offer, let's let's say, for example, you take one away, you take your distribution method, you don't, you don't, you don't, you have the best messaging, you have the best offer, but nobody ever hears about it because you don't have the third pillar of that acquisition channel, nothing's going to happen. I mean, we have you know, we we have taught thousands of people over the years, and it's always the same diagnosis. When somebody emails and says, it's just not working, and you know, they'll hem and they'll haw and we'll look at their business. And the last time they pushed any content out to the world was like six months ago. So, no, that that's uh that's I'm guessing that's probably the problem. Nobody knows you exist. And we try to say it lovingly, but you know, it's kind of it's required. And then if you take away the uh messaging part, you have the best offer, but nobody knows why they want it or who it's for or any of that stuff, and you're pushing out this opaque offer day in and day out, it's not gonna convert very well. So, long story short, is it does require all three. Is there one that's more important than the other? Not not really. Like, I've got three kids, I love them all. Is there like one favorite kid? Like maybe on a day-to-day basis, but ultimately, like, it's a family, it's a group. The the one doesn't really thrive without the other with them. I don't know if the stool to the child metaphor made sense, but we we went there.

SPEAKER_01 28:20

No, I love that metaphor, so it worked. Okay, I didn't know if it made any sense.

SPEAKER_00 28:26

It made sense up here when I was uh spouting it off without thinking. Cheers.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

Cheers. Uh how can AI actually improve conversion, but not just like content output? Like, what is your workflow like and where would you say AI directly impacts revenue?

SPEAKER_00 28:43

That's a good question. So I feel the best way to use AI is in speed to market and speed to iterate. So, as I mentioned earlier on, I'm a big proponent. I'm a trained industrial and systems engineer, which basically means like I got paid to play around. I would go into manufacturing sites, I would go to operations, and it was my job to you know make the quality higher, make the throughput more, you know, sell more cars per hour, that kind of stuff. And how do you do that? You just kind of do experiments, you kind of guess and see what's gonna work. And in the online space, that's called conversion rate optimization or CRO. And so, where I think AI gives you that unfair advantage is if you try to avoid perfection, and I'm thinking from the perspective of like a sales page, you're trying to sell a new offer, create a new offer, and add a funnel and do all that kind of stuff to make money online, right? So, from that perspective, everyone has a bottleneck, everybody has that part in the process that they either just hate doing or just take they love doing it, but then they kind of over uh they seek perfection. For example, writing a sales page, I love doing it, but I'm never done. I just there's always more I want to add. And so where I find AI can be helpful is helping you just get over whatever that bottleneck is in your process and that hump and get over that so you can launch. And so, in this perspective, you could have an interview with your favorite large language model about your offer. You could tell everything that's in it, everything who it helps, what it, you know, all the details, and it'll help you write out that first draft of that copy. Now, is that gonna be the best copy ever? Is that gonna be the best sales page ever? No, but it's the fastest one you can launch. And that's the you know, the offers that never sell are the offers that never launch. And that that's it's just mathematically true. And so being able to get out the door first in something that's 80% there, that's a huge unlock for AI to be able to let you do that faster, more consistently, and without the kind of the stress in, oh, am I writing the right thing? So it can uh save a ton there from a perfection perspective. And the second part is from the ability to iterate and the ability to find what is not working with your existing offer. Let's say you launch that offer out and it's not crickets, but it's not gangbusters, it's not working super well. Well, AI can help you both diagnose, hey, I'm having this conversion rate, I got this. You can put your stats into your favorite tool. You can say, hey, here's my data, here's what the offer is. You know, come at this as the most uh aggressive uh conversion rate optimizer possible and rip this page apart and tell me 10 things I didn't do very well, or what objections they might have. Um, and obviously augment that if you get feedback from customers, if let's say you have a sequence where you're trying to convert people to buy, and if they don't, ask them, hey, why didn't you buy? All these the basics still apply. And then use all that information to iterate and run that test of okay, this is version A. Now let me make 10 tweaks on version B and see if it got better. And using AI as the team, as the boardroom, as you know, I'm gonna bounce all these ideas off of this intelligent brain. It doesn't have the heart. You have the heart. You have to bring that in and bring your intuition in, but it's gonna be able to iterate those ideas so rapidly and also be able to, even if you, depending on the tools you're using, it could just rebuild the page for you and make the changes for you, and you launch it again. And if you use it as that ultimate doer of getting the stuff done that needs to get done, I think it can absolutely help you in your conversion rate and and ultimately help your business grow and scale.

SPEAKER_01 32:16

And you talk a lot about system. What does a scalable system look like today?

SPEAKER_00 32:22

As far as what it looks like today versus yesteryear, I don't think it really looks differently, but I think that just the mode, you know, and where before you would have teams and you would have humans and you would have these processes. So let's go back to just what is a system. For me, it always goes down to that three and a half by five uh note card, the simple little flash card. If you can't explain your business or any particular process in your business by doing boxes and arrows and simple step-by-step, if it can't fit on that notepad, it's probably not gonna be a scalable system. What I look for is, you know, Albert Einstein always said, you know, the most beautiful process, or he said something that uh there's beauty and simplicity, or you make something as simple as it can be, but no simpler, something like that. There's there's a quote out there, AI will kind of fact-check me. But the the notion of the most scalable system is a system that is most easily explained, most robust, unable to be broken, and ultimately self uh self-enriching and self uh self-evolving, I would say. And so what I mean by that is all these 27-step funnels and these 37-day challenges and these emails to text to Zoom to all these super complicated funnels, I think people are over them. I launched many of them. We we made a bunch of money using very complicated systems. And a couple things have happened. Number one, the market just got saturated. People, we people realized that those systems they started to feel like their numbers in an assembly line just getting like stamped and turned into sheet metal that eventually, you know, they they felt like they were on an assembly line. And I think that the the humanity was lost in that automation. That's one thing. And number two, that depending on your industry, most industries are moving very quickly right now. They're rapidly expanding. And so these mega funnels or these super complicated systems that used to be all the rage, you know, just a couple of years ago, they just don't have the shelf life they used to have. It used to be where we could write 30 emails and run that for years. And it each email would be as valuable in January as it was in August as it was in December, because that was just the pace of change. Now, it looks like every time you you look at your news feed or your Twitter feed or whatever the case might be, something brand new has disrupted. Now, it hasn't disrupted the fundamentals, but in general, those long-standing systems just don't work anymore. And the last thing I would say on it is the notion of any scalable system needs to be kind of self-aware and self-replenishing. And that goes back to that conversion rate optimization. If your system is so complicated that when something's not working, you can't diagnose why it's not working or what is the broken failure point, you'll never improve it. But if your system is simple enough that you know, hey, this is how I get traffic, these are the numbers that matter, here's how I get conversions, here are the numbers that matter, and et cetera, et cetera. And you know where to look when something's not working. All of a sudden, if you spend weeks launching something and it doesn't work, you don't just throw it away and start over from scratch. You're able to more pinpoint where the failure point is and beat that up with experimentation using AI to find that self-fulfilling and self-replenishing system that ultimately, like I said earlier, as long as your costs are under control, it's just a matter of time and effort and persistence to get from failure to success.

SPEAKER_01 35:43

And what are the tools that are actually essential? Because you know, a lot of them are just hype. Some of them are not even real, kind of like you open it and it's just like it's just like an interface that does not give you any information that is not generic. So for you, like what are the ones that you're using in your workflow?

SPEAKER_00 36:04

Absolutely. Uh so I personally I use Go High Level, which is a software that you know is one of the just business softwares. And so categorically, you need a place to collect money, you need a place to build up an audience through an email list, a text message list, a community, things like that. And you need a way to make offers to them. You need to be able to make a sales page, collect money, you know, follow up with them and deliver something. And so I'm not very dogmatic. I am an affiliate for GoHigh Level. I actually have my own software built on it, and it's done very, very well. So that's what I personally use. But whether it's you know system.io or if it's click funnels or some vibe-coded thing some kid comes up with tomorrow, doesn't really matter. But again, going back to there's there's new tech that gets all the buzz, and then there's at this point the crusty old like business software that nobody wants to talk about anymore. But ultimately, if you're trying to build a real business, you need at least a way to collect customers and collect money and do all that. So, some basic way to build a business, you need that. I would recommend go high level because at least, hey, it's it's a little clunky, it's a little hard to learn, it's it's got a learning curve to it. But if you get over that initial learning curve, it at least will keep up with the trends and be good enough across what you need it to do. And then beyond that, I'm I'm personally a fan of Google's Gemini. I, you know, used ChatGPT for a while and just for personal reasons, I just got tired of how it how it worked. And I'm not not throwing shade on it, but it just wasn't the conversationalist I need. I got tired. You know, like there's those friends that just come across a certain way. It's like at a certain point, you you want to stop texting them or you want to stop calling them because I get the conversations kind of drain you. I kind of got that way to chat GPT.

SPEAKER_01 37:43

Everybody's agreing with you, you know?

SPEAKER_00 37:46

Yeah, it's like no, that's that's like a surface level friend. I need like a real friend to tell me when I'm wrong. And and it got to where chat was just the sycophantic um buddy, it's like a fanboy, and I was like, I wasn't having it anymore. Uh so I any AI tool I think is good enough. And at that point, you know, you talk about there's all these tools out there, the vast majority of them, you could take or leave it. Find one that works with your personality type that you will use it as a tool, not as a crutch. I've also, you know, so I I've got, like I said, I've got three kids, and I'm now my my oldest is uh 11 years old now. Make sure I don't mess that up. She's 11 years old now. We're just like dabbling, and I'm almost just watching it to see how AI affects like the younger generation. And what anybody should be aware of is the trap that I see sometimes she falls into you will feel like you're accomplishing the world. You are moving mountains as you're talking to AI, largely because it's agreeing with you, it makes you feel all good in the process. But then fast forward an hour, two hours later, and you're sitting there with still no real accomplishments. You're sitting there just talking to AI, making the perfect plan, and ultimately the perfect plan never executed will is worthless. It has no value. And so when it comes to choosing the tools, the systems that work for you, find the things that actually accelerate your action, that actually accelerate the output, some measurable evidence that what you did accomplished something. Whether it got you the views, the leads, the followers, the sales, whatever, something has to get accomplished. And so I would encourage anybody who's diving into AI, especially this agentic AI, this notion of open claw, this notion of co-working, where these things are building video games for you, or they're building CRMs for you, they're building software and software as a service for you, is it actually accomplishing anything? And if not, just remember, you have to be able to zoom back to that uh three by five note card. What is your business model? When you're working with AI, which of those boxes, which of those simple processes are you actually trying to amplify? Or are you honestly just doing research and development? In other words, wasting time and playing around. Uh, there's nothing wrong with that. So long as you get the must-be done's done on your agenda, then you can always experiment. But yeah, long-winded answer to suggest I'm not a huge fan of saying you need the 37 tools to be successful. You need something to build a business and you need some AI tool to help you unlock those bottlenecks in your process.

SPEAKER_01 40:10

Now, talking a little bit about content creation again and video editing, where do you think video editing is headed with AI?

SPEAKER_00 40:19

I'm a terrible video editor. I'm gonna be totally honest with you. I would love to hear your thoughts on that. Where I am at, the things that I like. So I I've gone through video editing. Maybe I haven't found the right team for it yet. But where I keep coming back to is value I truly see with AI is simple. It's being able to, I will word vomit into the microphone, you know, beautiful word vomit, lovely, high value word vomit, and it will transcribe it and I can edit on the trans on the line. I can like delete the word and the word's gone. So I love that. I I those are true value ads to me. Um, I've looked for the AI tool that can help from a video editing perspective, and I've never found as much benefit from an AI perspective as just having a good video editor to do it. So I would happily kick that off to you. And what should I be looking at? Because that's an area where I don't assume to be the expert in at all.

SPEAKER_01 41:13

I feel like honestly, whenever you're actually seeing like uh you're watching a video, and whatever the editor is doing is kind of their creative vision coming into form. So it's always very specific. If you watch like 10 different videos, you're gonna have 10 different types of editing that uh is focusing on um making you feel different types of emotions. So I feel like AI is gonna be something that is uh, of course, it's gonna help you, it's gonna automate things, it's gonna be much faster, but it's not gonna have the same personality that an editing created by an editor would have. And I do understand that it's expensive, it takes time, and it is boring to edit videos. I do agree with that. But when it comes to the final result, I do think it makes a difference for conversion, for retention, and I do think people notice when it I do have a lot of clients that what sometimes they call me and they're like, We used AI tools to create short form content from the long form, and it was just flop, it just messed up the content, and we had like a great long form content. So, yeah, I I do think video editing is still not replaceable when it comes to AI, but I do understand when people go for it.

SPEAKER_00 42:30

It's one of those promises that, like, oh, this if if I could unlock, if I could just talk into a microphone and then push a button, drag and drop something into an AI tool, and there's this beautifully told story, that is a great promise. And as soon as somebody creates something that truly does it, I'll be the first one to subscribe to it. I've looked, I haven't really found it. And and to your point, and it kind of goes back to what I said earlier, that the things that will still thrive are authenticity and being able to communicate and connect with people. And I find that video editors, like good video editors, they do that, and that is still a very human skill because being able to just say the words, figuring out what b-roll, what video animations, what motion graphics to add in to really hit home with that, I just haven't seen it. And um, and I've honestly stopped looking because it's one of those where I find that we're going to hit that inflection point when when soon AI will be able to throw in so many motion graphics that don't really add to the clarity. I think many people, as soon as a tool's out there that can do it okay, people are gonna flock to it. I find that the conversations like we're having here will stand out even further. And we've seen as short form videos gotten so popular, at the same time, those long form, one, two, three hour long conversations with zero editing are also growing. So it's not really like a one end or the other that's working. It's gonna be that barbell strategy of super short and super long, both. Pulling the weight evenly, but it's just in very different ways. So, yeah, the the perfectly edited five-minute videos, I don't think AI is doing anything except for helping with the rough cuts, maybe helping clarify a little bit of the messaging. I've seen some tools that can do that, like D script has some nice tools, but it's also just so hit or miss that sometimes I'd rather just have a human do it personally.

SPEAKER_01 44:20

Yeah, of course. And also, like if we take a look take it a little bit further now, we also have AI avatars and like synthetic creators, which takes it um I I feel like now we're we're gonna have so much content created with um AI tools and AI avatar that if we're actually being just ourselves in front of the camera, the competition is gonna be lower in a way. Do you agree with that? That's the bet I'm happy. What's your take on AI avatars too? I I I'm curious to know.

SPEAKER_00 44:52

First of all, I think that AI avatars done right can be good. Because as I mentioned, like being consistent and persistent what you're doing is absolutely the way to success.

SPEAKER_01 45:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:04

There are some people, you know, when we we've worked with thousands of people, uh, you know, tens or maybe a hundred thousand people at this point. And a lot of them we focus on are like the stay-at-home moms. Uh, there are there are people that maybe, or they're corporate professionals that can only create in the late hours of the night when their kids are sleeping. That was our story. And so while we were able to soundproof a room and we were able to create content and record videos when the kids were sleeping and things like that, uh, not a lot of people have the luxury of the space to be able to, you know, not keep up their kids or whatever the case might be in the other room while they're trying to build their business in the few hours they have to do that outside of their other responsibilities. So I think the AI avatars and synthetic creators, they have a place. I it's it's good enough. It's never going to be the best. I think if you're able to show up, that is going to outperform an avatar in most cases. Uh, but it for one, if you can't show up, if you're if you can't show up consistently, but you have a message, I see there are a few creators that I think have unlocked that code very well of being able to, with AI, but largely human creating the script, creating what they want, synthesizing their thoughts on paper, and then copying and pasting that into an avatar to perform it. So that's eventually just kind of like a talent. And some people do that. Some people are writers, but they're not presenters, and they'll have uh somebody to perform their intellectual property. That's okay. But the creators, I think, do that very well, have like perfect editing. And so, because it you can't watch a 30-minute video of just an AI avatar staring at you, you're gonna feel like you're stuck in a loading screen for for too long and you're like, I need to get out of here. It's it's weird. I tried it. Don't do it. Because I would experiment with AI avatars as well. And I was like, this just doesn't hit right. But if augmented properly with having good motion graphics, you know, telling that story well, um, it can work. I don't think it'll ever uh replace somebody who's willing to show up consistently and be on camera. Um, but for those who don't need to be the best of the best, they just need to build something that can work, I think it can unlock uh that option for them.

SPEAKER_01 47:16

And you're also promoting a 10-day AI insights challenge. What kind of transformation does that give someone? And what type of creators do you think benefit most from your frameworks?

SPEAKER_00 47:27

Absolutely, and thanks for letting me know. Uh, or thank you for sharing that. Uh I do have a um a free 10-day email series, you get a simple email, nothing crazy, uh, for 10 days. And that's for anybody who is either AI curious or they have, you know, if you're in any of those demographics of you're trying to create a business on the side while you're holding down your full-time job, you're trying to create a little bit of income while the kids are sleeping, is those who are realizing that hey, the the world we're living in is very interesting. There's all this economic struggles that are going in there. You know, I'm the first one to tell you, I don't think that you should put in your two weeks' notice and start a business after you've quit your job. Heck no. I'm all about managing risk. You know, we're real people, I've got kids, I've got property taxes. I never want to put anybody in a tricky position of being too risky. So, whenever you're trying to build something on the side or augment an existing business that you have or a job that you have, even just get that promotion, AI, for all the faults I talked about here on the show, if you can you know avoid those downsides and use it for its pure benefit, that's what I wrote the email series for, is to allow people to see it for the asset that it actually is and not the liability that we oftentimes think of it as. And so over the course of 10 days, you'll learn what not to do in much more detail than I went in through here. And it's completely free. I think there's going to be a link in the show notes, but you can go to insights.johnwitford.org and download that and you know get your first email uh completely free inside of that.

SPEAKER_01 48:56

That's awesome. What what would you say? Uh, one thing that I'm curious and I'm thinking about, like, what would you say that separates a creator who is actually making money or from someone who's just getting views? And like, um, do you think most creators are thinking too small when it comes to monetization? Is there a system that you follow?

SPEAKER_00 49:16

Absolutely. Um, so the first thing I would say is that the creators that are just getting views would consider themselves YouTubers or bloggers or podcasters. They would say that their business is really what I would just consider the traffic component of what should be a larger business. So, what I would the how I would reframe that, and and I was it was fun. I still had my nine to five engineering job. My wife was staying home with the kids, and so she was blogging largely, and I would come home at night and I would help with the ads, the tech, and all that in bit in between um, you know, the the baby naps and things like that. And she had this identity of she was a blogger, and I would come home and you know, as as the as the husband, I'm trying to like understand where that thought process is coming from. Because what I see is I see we have an email list, we have a weekly cadence of conversion people into our sales funnels. We have this back-end membership offer, we have all these things. The blogging is just one component. So, to summarize, the the people that are just getting views, like if you were to look at my my YouTube channel, my YouTube views, it's not that impressive. Really, that's why when you ask me about video editing, I'm not a YouTuber. I have a YouTube channel, it makes a lot of money, but it doesn't look like it from the vanity metrics that most people would consider because they come in and they say, like, this guy has millions of subscribers, you have tens of thousands. Like, why would I listen to you? And that's fine. Because for me, the the goal of my YouTube channel is not for views, it's it's to get those to connect with the right people with the right message who might not subscribe, but they might book a call and they might want to work at a much deeper level. And those are the people that I choose to attract. So AdSense, you know, making a few pennies per thousands of views, that's great. But there is a deeper level of thinking about business where you put everything in its proper place and you give it your proper attention. Traffic and views and things like that are the very tippy top of what matters, and ultimately building that system that can take people from the tippy top all the way through the process and having something simple enough that you can explain it, you can understand it, you can improve upon it. Like, I don't focus so much on my YouTube because we also know how to run ads and we can you know put a dollar in and get two fifty out. It's just an easier use of time and resources than uh then you know, videos are amazing, but they're a lot of work. Um, so that being said, if you're going in to be a creator, I am all for that. I think that everybody should have a message to spread, and that YouTube content, the whatever the video content is you want to do, short form, long form, doesn't really matter. You have to have a through line of who you are, the authority, the connection, the values that you have to share, because it might not go viral, but if you have a proper business at the backbone of that content, you can do amazing things with a very unimpressive business from the outside, but a very well-oiled machine from the inside. And ultimately that's what matters at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_01 52:10

And what's something about AI that you've changed your mind on recently? Like, is there any belief that you have that most creators would disagree with?

SPEAKER_00 52:20

To think about that. I change my opinions about AI every five seconds. No. Um I don't know if I would say I changed my mind about this recently, but thinking that AI is the solution to any problem, I think is a mistake. I think that so many people are trying to sell you the idea that you can give an AI a prompt at 8 p.m. at night and go to sleep, and by the next morning you have a product and a sales page and a process and in a business. And you see this clickbait on YouTube of people saying that AI built me a million-dollar business overnight. Like, you just have to, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And maybe some people get that little bit of lucky success when something is brand new. But if you think about AI as simply a process multiplier or a process magnifier, if it's the ability to go out and hire a massive workforce at an affordable price, then you're okay. But a workforce with no job description, a workforce with no systems and no controls in place, it is just like trying to manage an ant farm. Like it's not going to work. So I think that keeping everything in proper context, having the fundamentals downright, having a system that you can understand and explain to a five-year-old and have them like, okay, I get that, then you've got something that AI can come in as a pure asset. But if you go in without the fundamentals and you just try to get the latest tool, sign up for the latest free trial for the latest agent, agentic software, and try to build a business off of it, it's going to be real hard. It's not impossible, but you have to find those fundamentals along the way. And if not, then it's it's just spinning wheels.

SPEAKER_01 53:58

If someone listening to this wants to start using AI seriously today, what's the first step?

SPEAKER_00 54:04

Well, aside from the shameless plug of getting on my email list to get my 10 tips over the course of the next 10 days. Beyond that, if they wanted to start using AI today, what I would suggest is take 30 minutes and pause and pretend that AI never existed. And put down with an iPad or a notepad or something like that, and draw out what is the business model that you actually want to do. If it's just entertainment for entertainment's sake and creating content, that's fine. That is a business model. But you have to have how am I going to get eyeballs? How am I going to get attention? That's number one. Choose one method. It could be YouTube, could be advertising. I would advise not to do advertising as a beginner. Could be YouTube, could be a podcast, could be a blog post, whatever the case might be. Get a traffic channel. Get one offer, one way to make money. Can it be offering a service? Can it be selling a digital product? Whatever the case might be, get one digital product. Choose one type of person, one avatar that you want to serve. It could be stay-at-home moms, it could be corporate dads, it could be uh solopreneurs, it could be landscape professionals, whatever the case might be. Choose one avatar and choose one process. Like, hey, I want to drive a YouTube video to a free thing and I want to sell them something uh through email after that. Spend 30 minutes, noodle on that, choose that, and then work it and find AI as an employee to implement an existing business. What I would not tell you to do is kind of the way you phrase the question is I'm a I'm fresh out of the gate. I'm gonna come in, I'm gonna start my business. What AI tool do I need? I would say you don't need any of them yet. You need a bit of a process. You don't have to have all the details figured out. That's why I said take 30 minutes, figure something out, choose one aspect of it. I would recommend start with the traffic and just start working on that one tool. And as you're building up the skill of generating traffic, generating some awareness, don't even worry about having an email list yet or any of that stuff. Just start building a bit of a following. Figure out one way that one step of that process you don't really enjoy or you're not very good at. And instead of going out and hiring somebody, find an AI tool. You know, start with you know, Google Gemini, start with Chat GPT, start with the basics and build up. There's a ton of tools out there. I won't try to mess people up with too many lists. But find one actual process that you know how to do yourself and see if you can do it better with AI. Don't try to have it run the entire business. Try to use it as an employee. And like any good business, I have hired and fired many, many people, both in the corporate world and in the online world over the last you know 20 years now. And the the big thing is that people will oftentimes bring a new employee on to their business, and they'll just say, okay, now go and make me money, go do things. And like it doesn't work like that. Like they want to serve you, but they have to know exactly what you want. And until you've done something yourself to know at least what not to do, no AI, no employee, no human, no robot, no nothing is going to be able to satisfy you if they don't know how to satisfy you. And so you have to make that clear, get that system down, and then AI will help it, you know, magnify it as far as you want to.

SPEAKER_01 57:05

And you know, as I've said before, a lot of people fear AI. So my last question is uh if you could give an advice to people on uh how to stay relevant in an AI-driven world, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 57:19

So one of the AI agents I have built is really fun. And if you look at my uh YouTube channel, you can search John Whitford and you know check it out. Is being able to provide me a distilled news feed every day that there's a lot of information that's flying at us everywhere. And so the one thing what I wouldn't do is try to spend eight hours a day reading Twitter, reading LinkedIn, reading whatever your source of information is. That's a great place for AI to do the work for you because it's not doing all the work, it's simply going out there, finding it with its tentacles, and it's distilling it down to what is actually going on, because there's a lot of trustworthy news. There is way more slop out there, and it's getting harder and harder to tell the difference of where is the signal and where is the noise. So AI can help with that, and so being able to give yourself a structured routine. What I do is I have my AI agent send me an email at the at my coffee time. I'm an I'm an old man now. I have like a coffee hour, is when I drink my coffee and I check in on things because you do that when you get older. Um, and so I will have an AI send me one email that distills down everything that I should know. And then if there's anything interesting, it'll also link out the source material. And I show you how to do that on my on my channel. Um, so that would be my recommendation. But beyond that, staying on the frontier sounds like the goal for everybody. I want to be on the latest and greatest. I have often found, you know, if you think about technology, sorry, this is like a long-winded answer, but you look at technology companies like Google and Apple, let's say.

SPEAKER_01 58:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 58:56

What you tend to find is that Google will go out there and innovate first, and they'll be the first to do a thing. And then Apple will not. They'll kind of sit around and they'll wait and they'll observe and they'll see what works. And then maybe two or three iterations later, Apple will implement the thing that Google did a couple years ago. And you know, you hear all these iPhone versus Android arguments, they're like, oh, the Android could have done that years ago. But when Apple does it, it's like more polished and it kind of comes, it works. And in a similar way, I'm watching a lot of these AI technologies come and fail and come and grow, and some take off, some work, some pivot, all that kind of stuff. And I wouldn't advise you to try to be on the absolute frontier. Try to find something that will actually solve a problem that you have and then implement it then. But if you're just trying to just, oh, what's new? What's new? What's new? It's dopamine. You're just seeking out more information and more stimulus. Uh, solve problems. You know, you as a business owner, even if you're just getting started, you're not you're not paid to be on the forefront of technology, you're paid to solve problems. And so don't feel the temptation and don't succumb to that temptation of having to go and just drop everything you're doing because something new just dropped. You know, Gemini just has a new model. Let me stop everything that I was doing in my business and go play with a new model. Solve problems. And then if if a new technology allows you to do that, latch on and take it as far as it can take you. But uh stay focused because there's gonna be more and more distractions than ever in the coming months and years of any business. Um, so I think focus is gonna be pretty key.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:26

That's a great advice to wrap it up. Thanks so much for joining us. And is there anything you'd like to promote? Just feel free and have your moment right now.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:35

My moment. Uh no, just uh go check me out on YouTube. I'm sure you'll put a link on the show notes, or you could just you know Google John Whitford on YouTube. Again, not the most impressive channel from a numbers perspective, but it builds a pretty awesome business. And if you want to connect with me, you hop in on my 10-day uh AI insights uh challenge email sequence and go through and give you one simple tip every day. And uh there'll be links to all that in the show notes, I'm sure. And just uh, you know, thank you, Vittor. It was really fun connecting. I think what you guys are doing is awesome. And um, while you know the the last parting piece of advice is if you can be authentic and have a plan and implement that plan, you'll be okay. Pretend AI isn't there, just pretend it's not there. Get a process and then leverage that process once you know what problem you're trying to solve, and you can do wonders in this world.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:25

Awesome. Thank you so much, John. Of course. There's one takeaway from this episode it's this AI is not replacing creators, but it is raising the bar for authenticity, connection, and real value. Subscribe, leave a comment, and I'll see you in the next episode. Bye.