116: James Pollard | Top 50 Most Innovative Voices In Advisor Growth Series | Influential Advisor Media

This interview featuring James Pollard is part of Influential Advisor Media’s Top 50 Most Innovative Voices in Advisor Growth series, hosted by Paul G. McManus. The series recognizes leaders whose ideas, platforms, and work are shaping how financial advisors build trust, attract clients, and grow their firms.

James Pollard is the founder of The Advisor Coach and host of the Financial Advisor Marketing Podcast, where he has created more than 370 episodes focused specifically on helping financial advisors build steadier, more predictable growth. Since 2015, his podcasts, newsletters, articles, training programs, and marketing resources have helped more than 50,000 financial advisors attract clients and build more profitable businesses. Known for rejecting short-lived hacks and empty marketing promises, James teaches advisors how to earn attention and trust through stronger positioning, relevant messaging, consistent visibility, and a substantial body of work that makes them easier to know, trust, and choose.

In this wide-ranging conversation, James shares how he went from helping one financial advisor with marketing to building The Advisor Coach into a scalable media and publishing business with newsletters, products, articles, and the Financial Advisor Marketing Podcast.

You’ll also hear why effective advisor marketing begins by entering the conversation already happening in a prospect’s mind. For retirement-focused advisors, that often means speaking clearly about retirement income, replacing a paycheck, and reducing the fear of running out of money—not leading with technical planning language prospects may not yet understand.

A major theme of this episode is trust. How can a financial advisor build trust before the first meeting? James explains why a substantial body of work—such as a book, podcast, YouTube channel, newsletter, or specialized client track record—can demonstrate expertise before a prospect ever speaks with you. He also explains how appropriate personal disclosure can reduce intimidation, create rapport, and make advisor marketing feel more human.

James shares real examples from his own marketing, including why posts about strength training generated inquiries, how non-financial content can communicate discipline and status, and how private financial advisors can begin revealing more of themselves without oversharing.

The conversation also covers one of the most important questions for founder-led advisory firms: What should you outsource? James argues that financial advisors should not outsource the creation of an unproven marketing strategy. Instead, they should first discover what works, document the process, and then delegate the maintenance of a proven system.

This episode is especially useful for financial advisors, RIAs, wealth managers, advisor marketing professionals, and founder-CEOs who want to attract better-fit clients without relying on generic content or interchangeable marketing.

Learn more about James Pollard and The Advisor Coach:
https://theadvisorcoach.com/

Learn more about Influential Advisor Media:
https://influentialadvisor.com/

Subscribe for more conversations about financial advisor marketing, books, media, authority building, and AI search visibility.

Transcript

Prospect Mindset And Retirement Income

SPEAKER_01 0:00

You are being naive as a financial advisor if you try anything else because that is it. That's what they want. So Robert Collier was another famous marketer from like the 1920s, and he is famous for saying always enter the conversation happening in your prospect's mind. That's a rule that I try to follow all the time. So a lot of financial advisors, I think it's 84% of the advisor market serves retirees at some level. The number one problem that they struggle with is retirement income. Sure, you can get to all the other stuff. You can talk about planning and you can talk about sequence of returns, but to get them in your universe, the thing that is going to get them to stop is when you say retirement income, getting a paycheck from your nest egg, ensuring you do not run out of money, or at least minimizing the probability that you'll run out of money. That is what gets them to stop. You can choose to do whatever you want in your business. But if you're ignoring what your prospects actually want and desire and their challenges and fears and frustrations, you will pay for it, literally and metaphorically.

Series Introduction And Guest Bio

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Welcome back to the top 50 most innovative voices in advisor growth series. I'm your host, Paul G. McManus. In this episode, I'm joined by James Pollard, founder of the Advisor Coach and one of the leading voices in financial advisor marketing. For more than a decade, James has focused exclusively on helping advisors attract clients. Since 2015, his products and services have served more than 50,000 financial advisors. He has also produced more than 370 episodes of the Financial Advisor Marketing Podcast, and he has built one of the industry's most extensive bodies of work on what gets advisors noticed, trusted, and hired. Before we jump in, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel or wherever you're listening so you don't miss a new episode of the top 50 most innovative voices in advisor growth. And now here's my conversation with James Pollard.

James Pollard’s Origin Story

SPEAKER_00 2:01

Let's start with uh just about you and who you are, or how did you get started in the space? What led you into it? What's your backstory?

SPEAKER_01 2:11

My backstory, as succinctly as I can give it to you, is I've always had an interest in marketing and psychology and personal finance. I have been blessed enough to be able to combine those interests into something where I tap dance to work every single day. I was in the marketing world long before I started helping financial advisors, my own businesses, things that I did, projects that I had. Eventually that turned into a financial advisor in Delaware, finding this where I'm from, Delaware, finding me is like, hey, you're really good at this marketing stuff. Could you help me with my marketing and help me get more clients? Well, absolutely, sure, I guess. So at that point, I was James Pollard, just a guy, helping people with their marketing. And that is my crap, the thing that I have honed and not perfected, but I'm getting closer and closer every day. That worked well. He started referring other people. He's like, hey, you got to check this guy out. And one thing led to another. And I realized I had a business there. So I changed from James Pollard, just the guy, to the advisor coach and did coaching from 2015 to uh 2017, like mid-2017, I believe, and got burned out on that because it really, I don't want to say I pigeonholed myself, but what I did was I had stuff that worked. And I'm a I'm the type of guy who I don't want to reinvent the wheel. If I have something that I know is going to work, I'm going to plug and play, kind of like a franchise model. McDonald doesn't want you changing their system. Okay. Chick-fil-A does not want you changing the system. And that's a pro and a con. So it was great for the financial advisors who followed the system, but after a while it gets kind of old. Well, that was actually a very good thing because the advisor coach turned into a media or publishing company, whatever fancy term you want to call it. Basically, lots of stuff that scales independently of my time, information the financial advisors can consume to help them, whether they hire me or not. And at this point, I mean, I think we've got 20 plus products. I mean, financial advisors know me because of the inner circle. They know me for that newsletter. But what's really crazy is there are like 20 other products. There's the podcast, the financial advisor marketing podcast, or our articles, there are other pieces of information out for financial advisors. So that is where we are today. That's where it all started.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

And who knows what it'll be 10 years from now. It's interesting because I got my start at around the same time. And so I want to say 2015. I just left my former company, decided to hang my shingle out online. And at the time I decided to focus in on LinkedIn as a system. So I wanted to get really good at something. You know, it was partly imposter syndrome in the sense that I just graduated from or I'd taken this course. It was Michael Port's Book Yourself Solid. And so I got that he does. Yeah. And there was all these coaches, and I was envious of what they were doing at the time compared to what I was doing at the time. And so I decided to take that leap. And at the same time, it's like, who am I to do this? What do I know, et cetera? And so I decided to go really deep on LinkedIn. And in that process, you know, of course, the people around me were coaches. I like them. And it wasn't until my first financial advisor found me, and this is 2016, and he wanted my help. I started working with him, got him great results. And then, of course, similar to you, it led to introductions, referrals, expanding my business to whereas today and since then I've I really only work with financial advisors. And so I think there's a lot of similarities there.

Marketing Influences And Sales Skills

SPEAKER_00 5:22

Who are some of those early influences for you? So back in 2015, who'd you follow? Who shaped your ideas?

SPEAKER_01 5:27

I don't know about back in 2015, but throughout my career, even before that, Gary Halbert, probably number one. I don't know. They're off to the side here. So these black binders are Gary Halbert's newsletters. Love newsletters. I wonder where that came from. Um, Gary Halbert, for sure. Gary Bensavenga, who is currently the world's greatest living copywriter. If you want to be a fantastic marketer, you need to change your name to Gary. So that's the next step. The next evolution of my career is I'm going to change my name to Gary. I used to listen to a lot of Brian Tracy material and Zig Ziglar material. I realized here's an unfair advantage that financial advisors can give themselves in marketing. Marketing is simply sales applied to it used to be print, but it can be online, basically anywhere. You're applying sales at scale. So if you know the stuff that works in a one-to-one meeting or a relationship with someone, you can apply that in an online ad, in a seminar, a webinar. The sky is pretty much the limit. So that's actually one of the things that gave me an advantage was that I knew how to sell. So I just applied that in a marketing realm. Typically, in the corporate B2B world, the business world, marketing and sales are two distinct departments. But because I was just a guy at the time, I didn't know that and did both of them and grew other people's businesses and my business at the same time, the same way. So those are some of the influences. Jim Rohn, for sure. I would actually move him probably to the number three spot. So Gary, Gary, Jim, I still listen to Jim Rohn every single year in December. I will listen to the ultimate Jim Rohn Library from Audible. So those are just a few of the people, but Gary Halbert for sure. I mean, the guy was the Michael Jordan of marketing. He had a business so successful and generating so many sales from direct mail that he had to have multiple full-time employees just to cash his checks. Think about that. Just to cash his checks. So if he said, I mean, he's gone now, he died a long time ago. But if he said anything, I'm I'm gonna listen to that. Like, I'm not gonna listen to the guru online, I'm not gonna listen to the guy who says all that won't work. I'm gonna listen to the guys that had to have like affording people over time to cash his checks. That's who I'm listening to.

SPEAKER_00 7:41

I feel the the same way about for me, it's probably Dan Kennedy. And so I okay. I I discovered him probably 2017, I guess, after Michael Port. And he's probably been my guru of choice in terms of who's really influenced my thinking over the years up until this point. I love Dan too. I like Dan.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

I I think the reason why I love Dan's material, I actually am subscribed to the Pete the Printer newsletter. There's another newsletter that I pay for and read that he does with Pete the Printer. I I think the reason why I never, I don't want to say I didn't get too deep into Dan's material, but I didn't want to emulate it because I know that he still did the speaking circuits at the time and was bouncing around and speaking and doing live events and and I don't want to say trading time for money, but that's really what it was. I mean, when you're doing events and you're on stage and you're doing client work, I'm I am not talking down about Dan Kennedy at all because he is a legend. But it just wasn't what I wanted to do. And you can see that in my business today, where I don't do the free calls, I don't do the consultations, I don't do client work, I don't do any of that stuff. Like even if you wanted to hire me at for client work, you couldn't. So it's just legitimately not available. I knew that if I got too deep into Dan Kennedy's stuff, that some of that would rub off on me. And I didn't want that to happen at all. So I respect his work. I know he's a legend in the space. I have a ton of his books right here. I know BS Time Management is probably the best productivity book I've ever read in my life. But I just I'm very careful about the information that I I let into my subconscious.

SPEAKER_00 9:10

Yeah. That reminds me of the famous Jim Rowan quote, which is you become the, I think it's it's always attributed to him. So we'll assume it's him. It's probably attributed to someone else before him, but you become the the five people that you spend the most time with. And so I understand what you're saying. So it I heard you say that you have 20 different products or services. Tell me a little bit more about what happens behind the scenes. What's your role, your team? How do clients interact with you? What do you do day to day? What does a team do for you?

Building Scalable Advisor Marketing Products

SPEAKER_01 9:39

Right now, at this point in the big 2026, the pretty much the only thing I do is write the newsletter and just hang out and do whatever. So I've been pretty much semi-retired since 2020. When building those products, however, Abraham Lincoln has a saying that if he had six hours to chop down a tree, he would spend four sharpening the axe. I would say if I have six hours to create a product, I would spend four researching the market. I just love spending time with financial advisors. That's all there is to it. I love talking to them. I love hearing from them. I love seeing what they're doing. I love going to their websites. I love, I don't really listen to podcasts, but if if somebody has a podcast that they send to me that they want me to listen to, I'll listen to it. I love watching the videos. I love everything that they're doing. I love to see it. I am constantly in the market. So I am truly just a student of the game, watching what they're doing, reading what they're doing, listening to what they're doing. That is where I spent most of my time. And because I was building an audience at the same time, primarily email, but also the podcast of Overtime and LinkedIn and so on and so forth, I started noticing patterns. So let's just say I had a list of a thousand financial advisors. And if 100 of them asked me about a specific problem, I knew that there was something there. So I would create a product about that problem. For example, financial advisors started asking about LinkedIn. I created a LinkedIn product. They asked about website marketing, website marketing product. And I started getting very attuned to what was actually something that they wanted help with versus something that they didn't. I started to notice what they would pay for, what they would not pay for, what they would take seriously, what they would not take seriously. As time went on, I started getting more into passion projects. And I guess that's what happens, you know, after you don't really need to do certain things anymore. You do stuff that because you want to do it. I created a product called How Successful Financial Advisors Think. Probably the most underrated thing I've ever created, incredible material. It doesn't sell. Like it just doesn't, because people don't want the how to think stuff. That's what it is. So that's like a passion project of mine. They want how to get clients with LinkedIn. They want the client getting website, which is great. And I appreciate that. There's a market for that. But when I put something out that I don't do the research, I don't look at the market, I do what I want to do. It just flops. And I don't want to say this is never sold because it sells decently well, but it's just not on the level of the other things.

SPEAKER_00 12:00

Yeah, I totally get that. And I can relate to that. I mean, I guess the analogy that I'll use is when people are up at 2 a.m. in the morning, if that's still a thing, watching infomercials, that the one that comes to mind to me is like six-pack abs, you know, and you see these things and people are getting their six-pack abs and you get motivated and you you order the package. At the end of the day, you know, what are they really selling? They're selling you a little bit of a dream. Is it possible? Absolutely. But it comes down to a lot of the boring habits, eat better, exercise, all those different things. But if you actually present it that way, in this more boring way, versus the dream selling, no one's gonna buy it, right? I think the the hope, you know, for people that want to, you know, actually impact and serve people is I think there's always this conflict between, okay, let's give them what really matters, which is oftentimes the mindset, it's the thinking, it's the things that really move the needle, but people aren't gonna buy it, versus the packaged version of it, which people are gonna buy, but it lets them into your world. And now you have the ability to actually help them get what they want. I mean, I I see this all the time. I help them write books, I help them build out their authority. And it's the starting point for me, is always it's it's not about you. It's about being clear on who your ideal target client is. In my case, it's your ideal reader. What are the problems and fears that they have? What are the goals and desires they have, what's going on in their head? And we have to meet them where they are and then take them through the journey that shows that you can help them get what they want. I think to me, just because I've been doing this for at least 10 years or more, it's just so natural to think in those ways. But I see that most advisors and probably most professionals more broadly always start more with a brochure. Hey, we're really good at this. We're really good at this, we're number one at this. And there's this complete disconnect between what they're putting out there and what the actual consumer, what's gonna bring the consumer in.

Messaging That Matches Prospect Fears

SPEAKER_01 13:52

There was a memory supplement that was out on the market. And the company that was selling the memory supplement tried all sorts of different headlines based on typical marketing advice. Have a number, start with how to, use parentheses, all of these copywriting rules of thumb. And they would say something like, How to increase your memory 300% in 90 days with this secret ingredient, very classic copywriter stuff that has been quote unquote proven to work. But then they changed the headline to have you ever walked into a room and forgot why you walked in and that crushed because it followed the Collier principle. So Robert Collier was another famous marketer from like the 1920s, and he is famous for saying, always enter the conversation happening in your prospect's mind. And that's a rule that I try to follow all the time. But when if business is on the line, like when I help financial advisors, that's where I go. Very recently, I was talking to a financial advisor two days ago, I think, where he is targeting retirees. If you've been doing this for 10 years, like I have, 10 plus years actually, helping financial advisors with their marketing, you realize that a lot of financial advisors, I think it's 84% of the advisor market serves retirees at some level. The number one problem that they struggle with is retirement income. Sure, you can get to all the other stuff. You can talk about planning and you can talk about sequence of returns, and you can talk about Social Security and you can talk about protecting from inflation. But to get them in your universe, the thing that is going to get them to stop is when you say retirement income, getting a paycheck from your Nesteg, ensuring you do not run out of money, or at least minimizing the probability that you'll run out of money, that is what gets them to stop. You are being naive as a financial advisor if you try anything else, because that is it. That's what they want. You can choose to do whatever you want in your business. But if you're ignoring what your prospects actually want and desire and their challenges and fears and frustrations, you will pay for it, literally and metaphorically.

SPEAKER_00 15:50

My follow-up to that is I I agree with the logic. And then that presents, you know, everything that we do, it's always you solve one problem and then you see the next problem and you solve that problem, then you see the next problem and you solve that problem, right? And so I totally agree with the logic there. I guess the question I have for you is that if everyone is competing over the same retirement income, it's the whole blue ocean, red ocean problem, which is how do you stand out, differentiate, and find the right audience for you that resonates with the messaging, but also now you're no longer competing with everybody

Standing Out By Turning Dials

SPEAKER_00 16:25

else.

SPEAKER_01 16:25

I think there are you can view it as a series of dials where if you turn enough of those dials, you become the obvious choice. What do I mean by that? One dial might be your experience. It's the all else being equal game, is the way I describe it to my inner circle members. So all else being equal, the advisor with more experience tends to win. All else being equal, the financial advisor with more credibility tends to win. All else being equal, the financial advisor who has built the most report wins. The financial advisor who greatly understands the psychographics, greatly understands the demographics. All of these are individual dials that you can turn, which means if you don't have enough experience, you can make up for it by understanding your market. If you don't have enough credibility, truthfully, I would tell you, you can manufacture credibility, you get the credibility, right? But if you truly don't have it for whatever reason and your life is online and you got to do it, that you got to get the clients, then you go deep into psychographics and demographics and rapport and all of the other things. All else being equal, the financial advisor who has better copy wins. All else being equal, the advisor who has a better lead magnet wins. So there are all sorts of dials and things that you can turn to tilt the odds in your favor. Is anything a guaranteed slam dunk every single time? No, it never has been, never will. But again, the all else being equal game. If you just get better in multiple areas with yourself and in your business, then you slowly increase the odds of someone becoming a client. Because marketing, all marketing boils down to these two things: the number of people who are exposed to your messages and the number of people who convert, the percentage of people who convert. That's all it is. So again, all else being equal, if you have a thousand people at a 5% conversion rate, and I have the same 5% conversion rate, but I get in front of 2,000 people, I'm going to have double the business. If you increase your conversion rate and I don't, and we have the same number of people, you're going to win simply because you have increased those metrics. So that's how I like to think about it. There is no one size fits all, there is no secret, nothing like that. It's just getting better at multiple things over time.

SPEAKER_00 18:28

Totally agree. And I'll ask you back to the question, which is is that what people want to hear? Right? No.

SPEAKER_01 18:34

To be fair, that's a good thing. If you're a financial advisor who actually genuinely wants to be successful, you should be grateful that that's a phenomenon because it means that your competitors aren't willing to do the work that you're willing to do. I love that. I love the fact with the AI stuff. I know that you want to talk about AI. I love knowing that so many people are dependent on AI. It makes me jump for joy, throw my hands in the air, shake my dairy air. I love it because it means that these people are dependent on a machine to help them. And I know the cognitive atrophy is happening. I know that every day that goes by that they depend on these tools. According to real research done from places like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, UPEN, medical research, you can go to Google Scholar and just type in artificial intelligence, cognitive atrophy, and see the research for yourself. I know it's happening. So I know a year from now, their brains will have atrophy, and mine, my brain, mine, I have multiple brains now. They will not atrophy, right? My multiple brains will not have atrophied. That is a great thing. I know that. And it also reveals something about their personality. So Napoleon Hill and Think and Grow Rich talked about one of the reasons why people don't get rich is because they're looking for something for nothing. And I strongly believe that. I've seen it in business, in personal life, I've seen it a lot. So these are cues, they're tells that the competitors or other creators or marketers or whatever you want to call them have that desire. So when they have shown their hands that they have this desire of something for nothing, and I know at my heart that I don't have that, I know I have the upper hand, which is great. So financial advisors should be thankful that other financial advisors don't want the real deal, that they want the quick, easy, bright, shiny object. It's a wonderful thing.

SPEAKER_00 20:16

I like that. That's a good reframe on it. Brian Tracy wrote a book that I recall something for nothing, and it gets into that concept pretty deeply.

SPEAKER_01 20:24

It's a dangerous, dangerous trap. I have never had a full-time job in my life. I'm unemployable, right? So I was forced into entrepreneurship. How how old are you? I am not going to disclose that. I like to keep that a mystery. I'm 59, right? Or 67. I have a wonderful skincare routine. I'll leave it at that. I do the red light therapy. I will say I look younger than I am. I think people would be kind of shocked.

SPEAKER_00 20:46

Going back to something that you said about, I'm going to paraphrase you, it comes down to marketing, comes down to essentially visibility and conversion.

Building Trust Before The First Call

SPEAKER_00 20:53

Correct. I want to not challenge so much, but I want to explore that a little bit because to me, on the basics, I agree. But now what's under the hood? And especially when you're a financial advisor and you're asking someone to help them prepare for the next 20, 30 years of their life, secure their retirement income, their legacy, all these good things, foundationally has to come down to trust. You said all things being equal, experience, et cetera. To me, the one that I've really landed on and really try to help advisors with is the idea of trust. Is and the question that fascinates me, and the reason I got into helping them write and publish books is that how do you take a complete stranger who you can help who two weeks ago didn't know you existed and get them to the point much more quickly than it typically takes to say, yes, I'm, you know, I want you to be my advisor. And actually the person that I go to for answers, you know, how do you establish that position of trusted advisor without it taking the months and the years and the decades sometimes that a lot of people tend to do? And so while on one level, I agree it's it's visibility and conversion, I think what's Missing from that conversation is the trust piece because all of these lead funnels and cold outreach methods, et cetera, if you only look at through, if you only look at it through the lens of, hey, I just need to send out more, I need to send out more DMs, I need to send out more emails, I need to do all these different things, and I can take my conversion from, you know, 5% to 6% or whatever the numbers are, I think it misses to me a big piece of the game, which is how do you actually create trust? And if you can figure out how to create trust in advance of actually talking to someone, I call this pre-sold. The person comes in, you've never talked them a day in your life, but they suddenly come in, they know enough about you, they're ready to move forward. That's the piece that fascinates me. I'd love to get your thoughts on that piece. How do you advise, help, et cetera? Advisors solve for the trust piece.

SPEAKER_01 22:46

Well, I would say that trust it increases conversions. Now, to be clear, there are thousands of ways probably to increase trust, all sorts of different things. Sharing on social media, being clear about who you are, books, that sort of thing. Number one is your body of work. I'm a huge fan of that. Financial advisors typically ask me questions like should I start a YouTube channel or a podcast or this or that? When we get deep into the weeds and those sorts of conversations, we eventually reach a point where I say something like, make sure you get to 100 episodes and be okay, even if you never get a single client from those episodes, simply because having those podcast episodes themselves serves as a credibility mechanism. Because when people view that, I'm just giving you one micro example. When people view that body of work of 100 episodes about a topic, about a niche market, whatever it is, it immediately communicates that you have put the time in, that you have enough knowledge to fill that space, and those sorts of things. It is incredible what happens when you are able to demonstrate a body of work. Another example of a body of work could be your clients. Let's say that you're an emerging musician and you're starting to get deals and managers are interested in you, and you are looking for a financial advisor because you've heard all these horror stories of musicians getting ripped off. You find a financial advisor and you've never seen a single social media post from this person, but this financial advisor comes to you and says one sentence. Some of my clients include Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, and the late Michael Jackson. That's your financial advisor. I don't care. So that's another example of a body of work. My second favorite way to build trust is to reveal more about yourself. So disclosure. That's what is called in psychology. So in psychology, when you disclose things about yourself, you build trust with another person. So when you tell stories about your wife and your children and your dog and how you grew up and what you did and your favorite restaurant, your favorite color, and you like painting, and it doesn't really matter. It's just the act of disclosing creates trust. And here's something that I think financial advisors don't appreciate. I don't want to go up on a tangent. I'm going to try to keep this as simple as possible. But in October 2023, I did private research and released it to inner circle members about the reasons why prospects don't hire a financial advisor. It could be summed up in one word, intimidation. People are afraid. They are intimidated by the process. They don't know what documents to bring, all this other stuff. If you engage in disclosure, you give your prospects something to talk about in the initial meeting, which is insanely powerful. Because now you have an icebreaker that you didn't really create. You're not responsible for it. They come to you saying, So I read in your email this morning that you watched the World Cup last night. What'd you think of it? Or one of the World Cup games. That is what happens. Or do you still have your dog Rex? Whatever it is, you reduce that intimidation. And again, going back to the all else being equal game, all else being equal, if two financial advisors have the same experience, the same clientele, the same goals, if one engages in disclosure and the other doesn't, that advisor is going to get the clients.

SPEAKER_00 25:49

This is actually how this podcast came to be. You, I'm on LinkedIn, you're on LinkedIn, do a much better job than I do at this point. And I and I say that because of the actual engagement that you get on your posts. And what I've observed is that you like to do disclosure, I think. You often do gym pictures, things related to the gym. One of the recent ones you did was you shared something to the fact that you had sent out a direct mail campaign and there was a lot of, I think it was either bald or balding. Balding, yes. Middle-aged white men who took the time to call and complain. And, you know, as as a as a you know, bald, middle-aged white man, I jokingly was very offended. And so I made some comment, and then that actually created a genuine exchange. I think that was actually the first time that we had a genuine exchange on LinkedIn. You were on my radar before that, but we never really engaged. And because of that disclosure, and because of my response to you and then your response back, then I reached out and said, Hey, you know, I'd love to have to have you come on the podcast if you're

Disclosure That Feels Human

SPEAKER_00 26:49

interested. And so I think that's an example that helps to illustrate what you're talking about. Which leads me to the next question about the gym. You know, share with us some of the strategies that you do for yourself and maybe that you recommend to clients. What it comes to closure.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

I will show you. Let me see if I can put this up. This is a message that I got Thursday, and you can read it. Yeah, I hope you can read it. Can you see that? Your bench press post drew me in. The bench press drew me in, and then the actual message drew me in further. I'm curious what your coaching program entails. I don't do coaching, but like I don't like doing it. I mean, I've confessed to you off the air that I'm not the biggest fan of doing it. I don't like setting up the camera. It feels goofy. I feel like I'm some Instagram model. Like the the girls, I mean, it's such a stereotype now. The women in the gym are just filming themselves constantly. So I don't like it, but my goodness doesn't make the cash register ding. And I mean, I'm human. If you cross my palm with enough silver, I'm gonna do it. So here we are. And it was so strange. So the the origin of that story was in February 2025, I turned that room into a gym. That was an unfinished room at my home. So turning that into a gym, and I started documenting the process. I was like, oh, hey, look, I've got this unfinished room here. It's gonna be a gym. Yay! I'll keep you updated. Tomorrow I'll post about it. And people really like that. I mean, here's the thing about these posts. They don't get a lot of engagement, like likes and comments and things, but they get messages. So people started messaging me. What are you putting in there? What sort of exercises are you gonna do? And I thought that was fascinating, I guess, kind of, but didn't really think too much about it. Then I started sharing the lifts that I was doing. This is in the beginning. I I used to be a lot stronger even than I am now. So I'm I'm embarrassed, truthfully, to put a lot of these lifts online because I know where I was, but I know I get in my head about that. So that's a huge insecurity for me. But I do it anyway. And I started getting messages like, hey, saw your overhead press video, just like the one I told you, I showed you. I mean, a hundreds of them. Hey, saw your overhead press video. I have been following you for a long time, but now I really want to learn more. Or that squat video was really impressive, or that I love the post about the grip stuff. I I would like to learn more. Like legitimately, happened again and again and again and again. I I thought about it for the longest time. I couldn't explain it. I still really can't explain it, don't really know. I think what I have concluded is that I think it subtly communicates discipline. I have also realized, and one of my inner circle members told me this, so all credit goes to him. I don't know if he wants me to mention him, but he knows who he is. He told me that it's a status symbol for men. And gosh darn it, I think he's right. I think anybody can buy the Rolex, anybody can, I mean, not anybody, but you can you can buy cars and watches and houses and things, and these are all material objects. But strength cannot be hired. I think that my clientele specifically, they know, I guess what's a good way to explain this. The other status symbols don't really impress them that much. I mean, the financial advisor that I work best with, I mean, I work with all financial advisors from all walks of life, but truthfully, a financial advisor making a million dollars per year has more options, has the ability to spend $50,000 a month on online ads for a couple months to figure something out without really blinking an eye. Like that's just the truth. That's the way it is. That person doesn't care about a Lamborghini, for example, because he can just get one. Like he doesn't care. And that is the status symbol that appeals to him. And I think that's why it works. I don't know. I'm just pontificating, but that that's the best explanation I've been able to come up with.

SPEAKER_00 30:24

So my take on that is that I think the ads that we see with the with the person and the Ferrari behind them, who they tend to attract is the person is is you know broke for lack of a better word, the person struggling, the aspiring person, the person hasn't made it because they don't have that option. So they see the fancy car and they're like, oh, you know, I want that. Yes. To your point, like myself, I've started lifting weights three times a week in August of last year. So it's been about 11 months, and I've been very consistent. I've been I've missed only a couple days, and I've gone from just an identity of not being, you know, just being essentially a couch potato to now I'm more athletic, I'm a lifter, all these good things. And so I know strength, right? Because I'm I'm testing my strength every day. I'm trying to build it. And so I know these numbers, I know what it takes, I know the discipline, I know it can't be purchased and all those things. And so I would tend to agree with what both the person you mentioned and yourself have said is that if I see specific numbers that you're able to lift, I'm gonna immediately calculate that and say, oh wow, that's that's very impressive, right? And so yeah, I totally agree with your point.

SPEAKER_01 31:31

That's actually a very good. So now you've made something else, Click. I have this is getting very deep. I mean, we can move on to the next topic as soon as we're done here. But so I have what's called a pinch hub. The part of grip training is your pinch grip. So you take something round and you pinch it like this and you lift it up. So I can do 50 plus pounds pinch grip, which is legitimately elite, but nobody knows that because nobody has the tiger claw that I have is out of this world, but nobody knows, nobody cares. But 315 pounds on a barbell is something that people know. It's it and it's the same everywhere you go. Yeah. So that sort of thing, I think that is what makes it work. It's so universal.

SPEAKER_00 32:13

So for disclosure, great example about the the photos lifting.

Safe Disclosure For Private Advisors

SPEAKER_00 32:18

For someone who's, I guess the maybe the the pushback I might imagine an advisor or someone just generally give is that you know, I'm a private person. And and I think I think you're private person. Oh yeah, extremely uh you're an extremely private person, and you even mentioned when you're talking about it that you resisted it a little bit, but at the end of the day, you saw that it works, so you're willing to do it. So if you were advising an advisor about doing something and they had that, I would say, common concern, it's like, uh, you know, you know, I don't want to put myself out there that way or in any way, what would your advice be to them?

SPEAKER_01 32:51

This actually happens quite frequently, more than you would imagine. It happens with email marketing because financial advisors are afraid to email daily. But in any context like this, I would say start with books and movies. Start with the books that you're reading, start with the movies that you're watching. Now, if they're super specific, like I'm reading a book called The Noonday Devil about Acidia, and we talked about this off the air. That is a book that nobody is reading. Nobody is reading this book, nobody is is gonna relate to that. But if I say I'm rereading Harry Potter because I watched the Christmas in July Harry Potter movies, I want to see how different they are from the books. That's going to get attention because it's just a popular book. It when I talk about Intelligent Investor, books by Peter Lynch, books by Warren Buffett's letters, I talk about all these personal finance books. If I clown a little bit on Rich Dad, Poor Dad, financial advisors will respond. Millionaire Next Door is another great one, another awesome go-to. These are all books that financial advisors have read. Music is another good one, although it's not as effective I've seen. I mean, I guess it could be, depending on your market, but books and movies for sure are the ones people connect over. A financial advisor that I helped who, this is a long time ago, he served nurses. That was his niche market. One of his most successful emails of all time was about Gray's Anatomy. And it was specifically about the mistakes that he noticed nurses making in Gray's Anatomy. Like you don't put an IV in that way. The first step is not this, it's actually this. You don't help patients this way. I don't know. I'm not a nurse, I don't watch Gray's Anatomy. But that email did well because nurses responded to it saying, you're absolutely right. They don't do that. I love Gray's Anatomy, but I can't stand when they do it. So he tapped into that vein, that market desire or rapport-building technique that he used. That was amazing. So that's the advice that I give. And that's kind of boring. It's not, it's not as sexy as doing stuff about yourself and your life. And it probably won't work as well, just being transparent with you, but it is a good starting point.

Why Outsourcing Marketing Often Fails

SPEAKER_00 34:50

I heard you talking to someone in another podcast. I forget their name, but interestingly, I think they do content for advisors, and their whole intro was there at the gym doing stuff, which initially threw me off because I was trying to think what's going on here. But I I'm guessing it was a personal branding thing. And the topic was delegation and outsourcing, outsourcing slash delegation. And so, in what we're talking about, you know, it takes you being intentional, it takes disclosure, it takes creating that human content that people respond to versus the mass-produced, generic cookie cutter content. Increasingly, the term is AI slop. And at the same time, I think the advisor, when they're thinking about this, they're thinking, look, I'm not a marketer, I'm a numbers guy. I do what I do. I want to do this, I want to hire the marketer to do their thing. I want to be the CEO, the advisor, and I get it, right? And at the same time, that can work, but there's a disconnect, right? So, I mean, I'll bring up an example. I'm personally a fan of Elon Musk. You know, love him or hate him, you know, the guy has a megaphone. And if he has a thought or an idea, he's gonna let everyone in the world know about it and it's gonna move the new cycle. The core question, though, is that for that CEO, founder, advisor who doesn't see themselves as the marketer, doesn't want to spend the time, they simply want to do what their superpowers, what they're great at, and they want to, you know, hire the who to be able to do their marketing for them. How do you integrate those two things in a way that's effective?

SPEAKER_01 36:21

I would first acknowledge that of course they're not marketers because they're financial advisors. So no, no financial advisor is a marketer because it's just legitimately not their job. It's not what they do. I don't want them to be marketers because a lot of the traditional marketing advice actually backfires for financial advisors. It's incredibly dangerous. As there's a lot of nuance when you are in a regulated industry. Now I don't want to give ammunition to financial advisors who believe, oh, well, good compliance is going to limit me. I don't want to do that. But it's just that the fact of the matter is when you go to Amazon and you read best-selling marketing books, a lot of the advice simply does not apply to you because it is made for industries with short sales cycles with low trust. You are in the opposite. You have a long sales cycle with extremely high trust required in order to close the deal, right? That is what you have to do. So following the marketing advice is very dangerous. What I would say is if it were that easy, everyone would do it. I don't think I've ever read a biography, JD Rockefeller, Bill Gates, Snowball about Warren Buffett. I don't think I've ever read a section where they said they filed an LLC and then just hired someone to do marketing and that was it. It just doesn't exist. Like it's not a reality. Another example that I've seen with some of my Christian entrepreneur and business friends is that they want to wait to have children until they're super successful. It's not reality. Like if you go to the Forbes 400 and start looking and see when these people had children, you realize they had children long before they were super successful. They had families. They didn't build businesses and then have families. So it's just you're you're operating in the wrong reality or you you have faulty information. It's just legitimately not true. So I know that financial advisors who think that outsourcing everything is the way to go don't get positive outcomes most of the time. I know that, but they don't. So they believe it makes sense. Of course, if I have a leak in the ceiling and I see water coming down and hitting my desk, I don't know enough about plumbing to safely repair the situation. Of course, I'm going to outsource it. It makes perfect sense. Why wouldn't you do that with marketing? But I'm just telling you, in a long sales cycle with high trust, where the person is buying you, the financial advisor, and engaging in a relationship business, it just truly is different. You can outsource it, but I would say if you are going to outsource it, only hand over proven systems. Do not outsource creation because that's gambling. If you have LinkedIn posts, if you have a thousand LinkedIn posts that are all formulaic and you've got it dialed in and you know that this is what generates business, then you can get an assistant and say, please follow what I have done because you have a proven track record in doing it. Same thing with email. You can get somebody to write your emails, you can outsource it because you have a proven system. Financial advisors will think to themselves, okay, well, why can't I just hire someone who has a proven system? We'll go back to what we just talked about, the disclosure and the rapport and the trust and all the other stuff. They're not building trust. Your client's not building trust with me. Like, that's not how this works. I have to give you the tools to equip you so you are better in the discovery meeting, so you are better in prospecting and messaging and all of the other things that you are doing in your business because all of it stems from you anyway. I'm still not the biggest fan of outsourcing in general, but if you're going to outsource, I have lived this the hard way. I think, I don't think, I know this is going to get ignored by 99% of people. My life is okay. My life is pretty good. I think that this is sound advice. Outsource in your personal life first. Do not outsource in business. If you are still cooking your own meals, washing your own car, cutting your own lawn, doing your own laundry. I mean, laundry services are kind of expensive. So I got I get that one. Cleaning your own house, expensive in the sense that you know other people have to go through your affrilly things. And if you're still doing all of this stuff, you should probably get rid of that first. Because some of the highest leverage time you're ever going to have is time that you spend doing the things that are your superpowers. So I would do that and I would increase or create as much margin as possible from personal to business. And then once you have created those proven systems I talked about, then you can just hand it to someone else. It's not like you're outsourcing the creativity and the building and all of those things. You're outsourcing the maintenance, the running of the thing. That's how I would approach it.

SPEAKER_00 40:43

My two ideas that prompted, which I'd like to have you just expand upon if it makes sense, is number one, I agree that advisors don't see themselves as marketers, but you did make a good point earlier about fundamentally they're salespeople, not marketers per se. And what you put together earlier was that Gary Halbert and writing a sales letter is simply taking that conversation that you normally have one-to-one and now making it one to many. And so I think there's a lot of crossover there that maybe people haven't thought about. And then the second, this goes back to the idea, it's like, hey, I just want the 12 proven ways to run a lead conversion website, which I forget the exact language we said, but at some level is fantasy land, meaning that it's generic, it's cookie cutter. It's what the market buys because they want the 12 generic things. But when you peel it back, there's nuances there that people need to understand. Any additional thoughts on either of

Direct Mail That Feels Personal

SPEAKER_00 41:37

those things?

SPEAKER_01 41:37

I see that a lot in direct mail, honestly, with financial advisors will get this idea that all they need to do is send a thousand pieces of direct mail. And if they get a certain response rate, they're going to get these clients and they try to figure it out that way. But I want you to think about it this like this. Let's say that a financial advisor is experienced, has a ton of money, knows his margins, knows everything about his business. If he sends mass market mailers that are interchangeable with, you know, for every single recipient, the other recipient can't really tell who it's for. It's just the same for everybody, he might be okay because he has the systems and processes and his follow-up speed is super fast and he's efficient. So he can pick up the slack on the back end. He's going to make a lot of money. He knows his average client value, all this other stuff. But if you're a new financial advisor and you don't have all of that, you don't have a lot of experience, and you try to do the exact same thing, it's probably not going to work as well because you don't have all the back end stuff. What you would be better off doing as a new financial advisor is legitimately writing in the margins with a real pen saying, Mr. Smith, I'm writing to you specifically, or I'm sending this to you specifically because I think I can help you. You are making it clear to Mr. Smith beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are personally reaching out to him and only him. And you will get way better conversions than anyone else who is sending a mass mailing. The problem is that takes time. That's not something that can be outsourced because you can't get the knowledge from somebody else. Nobody else can really know every single time why you're reaching out to a specific person. And if you're saying, okay, I'm reaching out to Mr. Smith because of X, I'm reaching out to Mr. Jones because of Y, you might as well just write it yourself at that point because the time spent creating the outsourcing, you could have just done it. So it's fruitless in that regard. But you taking the time to just actually do it will get you the better marketing results. Eventually, you can get to a point where you can just send out a whole bunch. That's I just did that yesterday. I spent 1700 bucks on a direct mail campaign. A it's one page, which I rarely recommend to financial advisors, but in this specific instance, I knew that I could pull it off because of certain variables, but I knew that one page would get the job done for me in this case. But those are just two examples of things that are are nuanced that you need to know who the person is. Who they're serving, what their business goals are, in order to actually make it work. And some of my most successful campaigns that I have sent to financial advisors went like this: Mr. So-and-so, I was on your website and literally give them the real website. I noticed that your homepage had this headline. I saw that this headline, like literally give them the exact headline. I saw that this headline would probably work better. In fact, I have a whole bunch of other marketing ideas that can help you, so on and so forth. There is no doubt in the recipient's mind that I am writing specifically for that person because it's his headline. It's his website, his real headline. I am writing that specifically to him. That is going to get a higher conversion rate than anything else. So that is that is the nuance. That's the effort, right? People want to be able to send direct mail, a couple of clicks, outsource it, boom, you're done. That's what they want. They want the ability to just lay on a beach doing nothing. But that's that's only a small part of it. That has to be earned. If you really, really, really want to jack up your conversion rates, that is the way to do it. I can't tell you. I don't know every single niche in the world. So if a financial advisor is serving federal employees and they're they're writing to a specific group of people in Washington, DC, I have no idea what to say in that copy. And neither does any other marketing guru on the planet. Only the financial advisor knows. But I can say this is like the framework. I just gave you the framework. If you apply that, but you have to be the one to do that.

SPEAKER_00 45:27

Let's move into AI.

Using AI Without Losing Judgment

SPEAKER_00 45:30

And I'm going to give you some context of where I'm coming from. I feel like I was an early adopter to AI. I got into it in 2022 before ChatGPT became a thing. So you may know this company. There was a company called Jasper that's one of the early marketing company. Marketing companies that leveraged AI. You know, went from startup to billion-dollar valuation or something like that before ChatGPT came along. And so I I love AI in many ways. I spend way too much time with it on a daily basis. And additional example I'd say is that I think in many ways, I mean, it's not just the future, it's happening now. And the case in point that I'll share is that back in August, I bought a Tesla and Tesla has a feature called full self-driving.

SPEAKER_01 46:14

Let me show you my garage, my friend. This is my garage. Look at that. I have Tesla on my wall.

SPEAKER_00 46:19

So you so you know full self-driving that yes. So so my point of view is that I feel like it's an early adopter, and so I'm ahead on the learning curve. I got I got knee deep into it back in 2022, 2023, where I see today in 2026 is starting to waken people up and people are starting to see it as a thing. Whereas I'm like, yeah, that was 2023. I'm already ahead of that. But I would also say that, you know, for all the complaints about it in terms of, you know, AI can't do this, AI can't do that. Sure, maybe not today. But I just looked at Tesla, right? When I got the car in in August and my first experience of full self-driving, I was already comfortable with it. I already let it drive me on the freeway or on the roads, etc. But fast forward now 10, 11 months, oh, I would go to sleep if I could. I mean, if it wasn't monitoring me, I trust it so much. It's a better driver than me, right? So that's just a background and context. But the question to start with is we're in 2026. AI is here, the good, the bad, the ugly. What are your high-level thoughts on AI as it applies to, I'd say first your own business, and then by extension, advisors?

SPEAKER_01 47:24

I love AI when used judiciously. I use AI frequently with mailing lists like the one I sent yesterday, the 1700 buck one. I uploaded my ideas to Claude and uploaded the list, anonymous, of course. I'm very sensitive about other people's data, probably more so than myself, and had to clean it up. So, in order to mail using the service that I use, they want you to mail it a certain way in a certain template. And I didn't want to fix it. I'm just so lazy in that regard. I I gave it to Claude. I said, Hey, can you format this the exact way that they want it formatted? And it was done in a couple of seconds. So that's an amazing tool. I love it. I got my blood work done and uploaded it, said, Hey, can you, based on a whole like a holistic view of my biomarkers, what recommendations would you have for in terms of supplementation and lifestyle and things like that? That it's amazing for that. If I do research, for example, if I have a hundred pages of research and I want to say, can you give me the biggest takeaways from these specific research papers and cite exactly where I can read it for myself, just to fact check you? It's amazing for that. I love that. But here are some things that give me pause. I was at a sushi restaurant. I like sushi. I am also conscious of what I eat. I mean, I'm still kind of fat, but I I'm conscious of what I eat. So I take a picture of the menu and I upload it to an AI tool and I say, I would like you to find the roles that you believe have the highest protein to calorie ratio. And it just makes up roles, completely makes them up. Like new names and everything. Like that's okay. I that's that I'm not gonna use you anymore. That kind of soured me. Here's what really scared the you know what out of me. I like to do Bible study. I'm on day 1,399 in a row of Bible study. Tomorrow will be the big 1400. I originally used Chat GPT as a Bible study partner, meaning I would ask questions like, what did Paul mean by this? Or in Psalm 91, what is the noonday devil? What does that mean? Then I noticed, and this is so chilling, it would make up verses. So I would have the English Standard Version in front of me. I have access to all the other ones online, I've got the New Living Translation right behind me. It would just make them up. That now originally I thought it was because of copyright issues, because I know the English standard versions, not to go super deep into any of this, but basically certain Bible translations are copyrighted and you can't really just use them willy-nilly. Copyright issues. Well, there's it was still just making stuff up. It was putting stuff in there that just legitimately was nowhere near it. And that really scared me because I started wondering there are human beings out there who are trusting these services with their personal finance and advice or me, me, with help. Now, fortunately, I verify it with research papers and things like that. There's ways to get around it. But there are so many people who will just say, okay, it told me to invest in these funds, I'm gonna do that. It told me to have this asset allocation, I'm going to do that. Or financial advisors, it told me to do this marketing strategy, I'm going to do that. I think that was the red pill moment for me where I was like, screw this. I can't, there's just no way that I'm going to be a zealot for AI. I still like it, I still enjoy it, I still think it's an okay tool. But I think for creation and knowledge and and information about topics that you don't know about, tread very carefully. Because if it makes up sushi rolls and makes up Bible verses that can easily be verified, who knows what it's doing? And I think that's a very dangerous place to be.

SPEAKER_00 50:59

Yeah, I I generally agree with what you said. And internally at my company, I now jokingly refer to us as the first anti-AI AI companies. Right. That's a pain. You know, all the all the positives, the efficiencies, the, you know, all these things that AI brings to the table, we absolutely take advantage of. And at the same time, we've been using it long enough and we have enough reps and experience to know where the limitations are. And so what you just pointed out is is clearly one of those things that people need to be careful of. I find for the expert domain area expertise that it's an incredible tool because you can get access to things, you can sharpen your own thinking because you and the reason is is because you're just not blindly accepting it. I mean, I argue with it all the time. It'll come back and it'll give me some piece of advice. And then as soon as I give it one more piece of context, you know, it always says, well, that changes everything. It's like, yeah. So, you know, if you didn't know that extra piece of context and you were just assuming that it had the right answer, you know, that's not good. And at the same time, what I also believe, and and we talked about this briefly about about Tesla and how, you know, my car and I guess your car as well now drives me around. I stopped driving, I can no longer drive for the most part. And I see that as a good thing. I believe the stats where the full self-driving is 800% safer than the human driving, and I can totally understand why that's true. I mean, if you haven't experienced it, go to the Tesla dealer, you know, ask to do a test drive, and you'll see very quickly what AI is capable of. And so for all the limitations that are real today, my question is always, well, what about next year? Because we've seen this rapid curve, right? So some of those things that are, you know, just silly where it makes stuff up and it gives you obviously ridiculous answers over time is going to happen less and less. And so, what's the best way positioning for someone to not blindly trust it, but also to benefit from it and I would say calibrate to it today in a way that's going to benefit them both now and

Preparing For An AI Future

SPEAKER_00 53:03

long term?

SPEAKER_01 53:03

I would think in terms of picks and shovels. Chat GPT ads right now are kind of not that great. But you need to be the advertiser, you need to be there, you need to get in the AI answers, you need to look at your systems. Also, I do wonder what my children's adult lives will be when they are 40, 50, 60 years old. I really wonder. But you have to understand, somebody born in 1900 saw the rise of planes and automobiles becoming far more popular, indoor plumbing, electricity indoors, someone landing on the moon multiple times, multiple moon missions, the internet, the ability to FaceTime someone. All of this stuff was unheard of in 1900. So I wonder what will happen there. From the stuff I have seen, there are going to be very good things for AI, but also very, very bad things. You know, as a marketer, you think in terms of propaganda, you think in terms of manipulating human desires. These are the ways that marketing can be used for evil. I I don't endorse this. I don't want to talk about what that could look like on the show, but I it it does worry me. I am looking forward to robots. I bought the or I got on the wait list for the robot, the neo-robot that is gonna do your laundry and cook and clean and do that. I want that. I would rather do that. But I don't know, again, going back to the red pill moment for me, where I don't know if I would use it for knowledge right yet. As it gets better, and if there's a way for me to verify, to trust, but verify, absolutely, I would I would love to embrace that future. Another thing I think of quite frequently is, and this is a joke I have on my wife. It's the kind of like an inside joke, but with the leisure activities. Like I'm engaging in leisure activity right now. These time-saving devices are supposed to enable us to have so much more leisure time. This has been the pitch as a marketer, I think in terms of this, for better or worse, this has been the pitch that has been given to Americans specifically for the last 100 years. Buy this washing machine. You'll say, Did you the average housewife spent like eight to ten hours a week doing laundry 100 years ago by hand? The washing machine came out. You're gonna have eight to ten hours more a week to do whatever you want. Really? I don't know. I don't see that. I see mothers and wives working more than ever before. I'm also scared that artificial intelligence it's just is being pitched the same way, and it is. And imagine all the time you could see, but history does not say that.

SPEAKER_00 55:29

Yeah. One of the positive uses I've found, there's always the I think 90% unfortunately will fall into this where they stop thinking as much. There, and I think you shared some research about it, where people will get unfortunately dumber over time because they overrely on AI. I think there's maybe I'm just making these numbers up, but five, 10% that could have the opposite effect. I think I'm one of those. And very specifically, now that I'm on Zoom all day, I talk to different people, all my conversations are more or less recorded. And back to one of the things that you were talking about, which is, you know, for for you and me who work with financial advisors, we need to understand our market, having these conversations. And one of the benefits of AI is that I don't just benefit from having the conversation, but now I get the transcripts and now I can deep dive into it and really see what those questions are, what those patterns are, what those things are that I need to pay attention to. And in that sense, it's a tool that's enabled me to do things that before I just wouldn't because of scarcity of time. And so I think there are many positive applications, but I think at least for me, and I it sounds like you agree, is just be careful. You know, it has great abilities, but it also has things that you need to be careful about as we all move forward. Final question.

How To Enter James’s World

SPEAKER_00 56:40

So this has been fantastic. I really appreciate your time. For someone that's listening to this, that's not already in on your email list or anywhere else where they can find you. What is the best way for people to enter your world?

SPEAKER_01 56:51

I would go to theadvisorcoach.com and you can choose your own adventure. If you want to join the email list, you can. If you want to listen to the podcast, you can. If you want to check out the products, you can. You can do whatever you want. It's it's set up that way, and it's set up intentionally because it works well. So theadvisorcoach.com. If for some reason you can't find it, you go to Google and type in James Pauler, the advisor coach, and I should be there. If I'm not, I'm not doing my job well enough. So that would be the way to do it. Just you enter my world the way that best serves you, the financial advisor. Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate it. Thank you so much.