The Olympics opening ceremony fiasco, Woke AI lies about history, and more

Do you want to talk about the Olympics opening ceremony fiasco? Here, I'll start with it.

I don't know what that fiasco was, I only watched part of the ceremony.

Okay, so, there's, um, I think this is the introduction to the Olympics. Can you still hear me okay? Yes?

Yeah, I can hear you.

Okay, cool. So, this is the introduction to the Olympics and it was basically, like, um, they were— it was, like, a crew— it's a crew of, like, LGBTQ, I think drag queens and, like, you know, a lot of different people from the LGBTQ—

I saw that. I saw that they were standing on a bridge or something like that, right?

Wasn't— they were like reenacting the Last Supper from, you know, the Bible, right? So a lot of people, especially religious people, condemned this and they're like, dude, you guys are like painting religion in the wrong— this is sacrilege to religion. And so you had Muslims, Christians all around the world being like, this is unacceptable. What are you guys doing? What are you guys trying to do here?

Right.

And then Olympics actually ended up telling— doing DMCA takedown requests for all of the videos around about the opening ceremony and/or introduction You know, whatever it was. And basically the Olympics apologized for that. But, you know, I think the fact— I mean, you know, I get that they're trying to kind of— and by the way, Neil and I have no problem with the LGBTQ community. I just think it's the reaction to this would be considered a fiasco at the end of the day. So that's what happened.

Yeah. You don't want to do stuff that's polarizing, right? Especially if you're targeting a wide audience. Being the world, you want to try to avoid anything that could be quote unquote polarizing, as it could just create negative sentiment. If you look at the Olympics, it's one of the biggest money-making generators out there.

And a bunch of sponsors pulled out their sponsorships, by the way. You want to talk about how ChatGPT is— did you look into the ChatGPT search yet?

For President Donald Trump?

Oh no, what's that? What are you talking about? You go.

Uh, the one on ChatGPT, someone did it on 4/0, which is off. But, um, there was a more specific case with, uh, Elon posted something saying woke AI lies about history. And on this tweet, it was a very specific tweet. It was the Meta AI, and someone typed in, tell me about the assassination Trump That, tell me about the assassination attempt on Trump. And Meta AI responded with, I can't assist with that. I don't always have access to the most up-to-date information. Can I help you with anything else? So then the person asked Meta AI, tell me about Kamala Harris' campaign for president 2024. Keep in mind, she said that she was going to be a president after, right? This happened post the attempted assassination on Trump's life. And then it said the announcement of her 2024 campaign was on July 21st, 2024, after President Joe Biden withdrew his bid for reelection and endorsed her. Harris advocates for similar domestic platform to Biden supporting, and then it lists all the stuff, right? What's funny about this is— What's funny is, is like it's being selectively up to date on whatever they want. And that's the harsh reality that a lot of people, you know, don't really see, but it's true. And then it doesn't even stop there. There's a follow-up where it also skews the truth. And then it asks, what happened on July 13th, 2024 to Donald Trump? And it says, what happened to Donald Trump on July 13th, 2024? Assassination attempt. On July 13th, 2024, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential election, survived an assassination attempt while addressing a campaign rally near Butler, Pennsylvania. Same platform, right? They're doing— they have selective bias in which, you know, someone must have adjusted program. I'm also assuming that you saw the Google suggests On President Donald Duck.

Yeah, I saw that. There's no—

when you—

it recommends Donald Duck but not Donald Trump. Trump doesn't even exist in the autocomplete.

Well, what's funny is, is I typed this for every single past president. I started going down the list, right? And I only got down with like 6 of them, and it was either 5 or 6, but the others all showed up.

Yeah, it's, you know, I think Google's mission is still to organize the world's information, but you can't selectively organize the world's information.

Correct. And I think that's a big problem because if you're a corporation, you're tailoring to people on all sides and all political and religious spectrums and personal preferences. You just, you can't have You know, humans having biasness and then adjusting what they show to the rest of the world based on their own beliefs. That just screws up these platforms.

Did you take the political test I sent you again?

No, I took it.

I took it. Sorry, I took it.

Did you— wait, were you the one who sent me or was it Curtis?

Yeah, I sent you one that had like, it's like a, like everyone can search for it. It's just search for political test and it's like a square that has like red, yellow, green, and Yeah, red, yellow, green, and blue in it. I took it, by the way, and it, it, it's, I'm still the same way I was 4 years ago. You would think I, I might have changed a little bit, but I'm still the same. I'm very slightly on the right when it comes to economic, and I'm slightly on the left when it comes to social, and you're probably somewhat similar. So.

Yeah. So mine wasn't 4 squares, but the one my buddy ended up sending me, it showed me pretty much right. There in the middle. And there are some things that I'm more right on and some things where I'm more left on. And a great example of this is, you know, when it comes to taxes, I don't like paying taxes. But on the flip side, you know, my wife and I will donate to a lot of causes that helps people. And it's not that we think taxes are bad. We actually think taxes are good. Like if someone said, hey, Neil, you need to pay 5% more, but all kids, everyone in the United States would get amazing healthcare. Heck, I would even pay 10% for that, right? So it's not that I have an issue paying taxes. I just feel a lot of my money gets wasted and I'm better off trying to save it and then use my money in donating to causes that we believe in to Hopefully provide maximum efficiency versus there's just a lot of money that's mismanaged. And it's not a Democrat thing or Republican thing. It's a whole political system thing where people on all sides, just literally, you're seeing people flush a lot of money down the drain. Yes, you do need taxes for roads and schools and social services and all those things. And, you know, even for military, et cetera, you need taxes for that. So So I'm not saying that people shouldn't pay taxes. It's more so there's a lot of inefficiencies. Let's spend triple to build a bridge than it should cost. Like stuff like that is what bothers me. And there's just tons of wastage from that.

And I know a lot of you don't like it when we talk about politics, but it's a very political year. So, you know, it's, as we work up that, we'll probably talk about the marketing behind, hey, how is, you know, the Democratic, you know, party doing it? How's the Republican Party doing it? And what stands out? What doesn't? So anyway, just more of an FYI for you guys. But Neil, I think, you know what we should also do too? I don't know if it's for this episode, but I think in addition to kind of our reactions here, I think it's probably helpful every now and then to continue to share what's working for us in marketing. So it's a little bit of mix, but so you guys can look forward to that one. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Ollie, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need, and the group responds. Great experienced members. Getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members. Getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric. Getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created, and our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside. All right, let's— I think this is a good one to end it on. So this one is— this is a tweet— sorry, not a tweet, a LinkedIn post from Anthony Cannata. So I'm going to share my screen over here. And he basically talks about the, actually I'm not gonna share my screen. So he, this guy used to be the CMO of a couple of companies like Gainsight, Front, Hopin. These are all companies that raised a bunch of money. Not necessarily all of them did well, but you know, they all raised hundreds of millions of dollars, I believe. And so he used to think, so he was CMO of all these companies, right? And you know, there were some people kind of beefing at each other on LinkedIn and he wanted to give his point of view around the difficulty of going from operator to founder. And so, you know, I'm just going to note some of the mistakes he made and then Neil and I can, we can experience share here a little bit because actually Neil, I don't know if you can experience share. I can because I've been like on the other side before. So I guess it's probably me. So he says, look, very little of my experience as the CMO of Gainsight, Front, Hopin taught me how to go from 0 to 1 with a product. You end up learning on your operating experience to make decisions that are highly rational at scale but are less relevant at the earliest stages. The impact here is making mistakes that cost you time and expenses, 2 of the most precious resources you can have in the zero-to-one phase. Here are just a few of the mistakes I've made. 1, chose the wrong technical co-founder. 2, over-architected the platform, had to build it all over again. 3, launched go-to-market too early. 4, assumed early traction meant product-market fit. And then 5, over-indexed on company building over relentlessly seeking product-market fit. So basically at the end of the day, he just says, look, you know, it's good that I learned from these mistakes, but it's totally way different going from working at a company to becoming a founder. And in fact, he's like, it is way harder. And then Jason Lemke, Lemkin responds and says, 99.99999% of VPs I know underestimated how hard it is to truly go to founder CEO, maybe slightly higher than that actually. And Jason Lemkin, you know, he founded EchoSign, sold it to Adobe, I think for $100 million or so. So all that to say, Neil, and then we can give our thoughts on this one, but I was arrogant enough to think that when I worked at this agency called Wpromote before that, oh, Like, you know, this doesn't seem that bad. I can, I can go do this pretty easily, right? And then when I worked for this, this one, you know, education company, I was like, oh, this doesn't seem that bad. I can do it, right? But when you actually get in it, it is, I would say it's like 10 times harder than working at a company because you get all these resources, you're protected, you have a steady paycheck, everything. But when you see everything, all the pieces on the chessboard and all the stress you have to deal with and it all gets dropped off for you, It is way harder.

It is extremely harder. I haven't been on the corporate side too much. I've dealt with customers, but yes, it is extremely harder. I think that's it. I think Eric got cut off. We'll see you guys tomorrow. Appreciate you guys tuning in for Marketing School. Have a great day and check out marketingschool.io/agency, I believe is the URL.