One Article Written in 45 Minutes Generated $40 Million in Sales - Here's the Exact Method

The first article I ever wrote that was, "How much does a fiberglass pool cost?" Based on the number of leads we've gotten from it now, it's over— I think at this point it's like a little bit over $40 million in revenue from one article that took me 45 minutes to write at my kitchen table. You're no longer just competing as humans. You're competing against humans that are using agents, and you're still just trying to use your own knowledge. You know, the biggest mistake that I see from so many when they try to use AI is they still treat it like Google. I'm like, please, please, for the love of all that's pure and holy, stop treating it like Google. Stop treating it like a search engine, like an answer engine. Start treating it truly as a team member that you need to engage with in order to get the most from.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Unemployable Podcast. I'm Jeff Dudan. If you immediately recognized that you were unemployable from your very first job out of college and you left that and jumped into the deep end with a residential pool startup, which went swimmingly until the 2008 housing crisis left the business barely treading water and the checking account drained. Instead of going under, Marcus turned crisis into triumph by becoming one of the world's leading authorities on inbound marketing and leveraging the hard questions that consumers wanted answered to engage, educate, drive leads, and create customers. Your name can only be Marcus Sheridan. Thank you for being on, Marcus.

Hey, man, I'm so happy to be here. We're going to have— I got a feeling— a great conversation today. 100%.

100%. You just spoke a powerful future into existence. And here's the opener. Why do people default to selling themselves instead of simply addressing the what matters the most to a buyer.

It's interesting. What I found is that, and this happens a lot, um, we were talking, you and I were just chatting just briefly about this before we, we jumped on here, Jeff, about speaking. The number one feedback I give up-and-coming speakers, they come to me and they said, you know, Marcus, will you watch my stuff? And I'm like, okay, I'll watch it. I watch it. And 90% of the time it's the same feedback. Which is, you don't realize you're doing this, but you're trying to appear smart on stage. And they're always shocked. They're always shocked. There's something within each one of us as humans when we can tell someone is trying too hard to prove either their worth, their value, their intelligence, whatever that is. And then at the same time, we've, we've, we've got this like gauge, this odometer, if you will, that can sense when someone just is completely comfortable in their own skin and they're not trying to impress us. Yet the things they say, they just seem like they hold a lot more weight. And I think that happens all the time, whether it's in sales, uh, whether it's in business. It doesn't really matter the application. When you can just release the need to be a fit for everybody and everything, and you start to become extremely comfortable with what you are and what you're not, and you're okay with both of them, then you truly can become the best version of yourself, and you can communicate at a dramatically higher level. You know, I walk out on a stage, for example, Jeff, I already know that about 3% of the audience is gonna say, "He yelled at me, he invaded my space." You know, I didn't— he was too, too passionate, whatever. Okay, that's fine. I've let those 3% go. Totally, totally good with it. There's the 97%, though, they're going to say, I've never seen somebody like that. And I'm here for the 97%. And if I could just help people to, to become great, it's that— see it all the time in sales. You could just tell they're so desperate to sell the thing that they lose all authority. They lose all respect from the prospect. Same deal.

When you hear something so smart and so wise, why does it always seem so obvious?

You know, it, I think there's like, what, what, what I think about when you ask me that question is The phrase that came, like, I heard early on when I started becoming active online was, "It's dumb not to dumb it down." At first it didn't, like, I didn't fully understand it, but then I really started to get it. It's like, "No, no, I don't impress anybody." What we're after is communion, which is the same root as communication, right? Same root. We're after light bulb moments where aha occurs, where we get each other, we understand, we understand each other. It's like, for example, if somebody's listening to this right now, I don't want, like, after we're done with this, I don't want them to say, wow, that guy was a genius. In a perfect world, what they're saying is, that is so obvious. Why are we not doing that? Like, that's, that's the goal. Uh, you know, you said you'd, you'd read They Ask, You Answer, right? Uh, my book, the whole, like, my whole goal with writing that book is that you would look at the buddy next to you and say, dude, this is like, are you serious right now? Why are we not doing this? And I think if you can communicate something in a way that someone else feels that, you're going to cook because at that point it's attainable. They're not saying this is beyond me, this is above me, this is outside, outside of my, you know, potential, my realm of expertise. They're saying, I can actually do that. That dude did that. I can do this. And that's a beautiful place to be.

And that's when you can start to have just massive adoption of your ideas, whether you're talking to a company about inbound, about, about the strategies in the book, or you're talking to somebody who's looking for a pool. Yeah, I think you get to a point where the people let down their guard. You've educated them, or you've, you've given them the sense that they can ask you anything and that you're not trying to hide information and that not only that, you're probably prompting them with other questions that maybe they should have asked. Mm-hmm. Like when, about the fiberglass from the book about the fiberglass pool. Is it ugly? Is it gonna float up outta the ground? Yeah. Does it look like a bathtub? What happens when I, you know, all of the things that, uh, fiberglass pools versus a concrete pool, or, you know, the people are gonna maybe not want to ask, but they're gonna try to ascertain during a conversation. Table those things right up front. I know that when I was selling, uh, fire jobs, or, you know, my, my best method for closing a huge million-dollar residential fire, you know, unfortunate for these people, was just to stay there and walk through and say things like, you know, um, they're gonna ask you, um, they're gonna ask you in general, like, what are these spices in your cabinet worth? And they're gonna say, you know, they're worth a couple hundred bucks or something like that. I said, you know what these spices actually cost you over time? I said, that one's $10, that one's $12. That was, you have 100 of these things. You have $1,500 worth of spices here. You know, you might wanna think about, you know, not taking $100 for 'em or something like that, which, you know, so I'm giving them, like, I'm, I'm walking them through all of the little gotchas, right? That they're too traumatized to ask and they're gonna realize later that maybe they got, you know, taken advantage from. And I'm just building trust. By, by taking the hard questions, some of which, you know, would have put me at a disadvantage maybe as a contractor. Maybe I could— maybe a contractor would take advantage of them in that situation. But I would just table all of those things, you know, hey, you know, as if it were me and you were my parents or whoever. I was younger at the time. I could get away with that. But now I would say, if you're my— if you were my kids,, but hey, these are the things that I would want you to be aware of. And I think naturally just sold it. And when you're selling a million-dollar job that you're gonna close within 24 hours, you have to find a way to build that trust. Isn't that what you've done with your hundreds of thousands of customers online for your pool business?

Yeah. I mean, if you, if you look at what we did with River Pools and, you know, looking at what you just said just now, Jeff, it makes me think about the golden rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Now, if you ask most people, do you believe in the Golden Rule? They say, well, yes, yes. Whether, whether they're a religious person or not, most people say, yes, I believe that's a good thing. Ask most people, do you follow that rule? They say, yes, I certainly try to follow that rule. Would you follow that rule with your business? Yes, of course I follow that rule with my business. Yes, of course I do. Okay, do you talk about cost and price on your website right now? Well, well, you don't understand. Well, I mean, see, in our situation, in our industry, that's just not the way that works. No, no, no. BS. It's not true because there's never been a situation where you as the buyer, where you said to yourself, you know, I prefer to be ignorant before I call them, before I reach out. I really don't want to have any sense for that. I don't— I don't want to know budget. I don't want— I don't care. You never said that before. What you said is, boy, it'd be really nice to at least just get a sense for, you know, roughly what's this going to cost? What's this going to be like? What are the pros? What are the cons? Be real. See, that's, that's how we roll. And to me, I'm a big believer in the golden rule. When we were struggling with my, my pool company, we started in 2001, market collapses in 2008, 2009. Looks like we're going to lose the business. I started to read about inbound marketing, content marketing. That's what I heard was, okay, Marcus, if you just obsess, like really obsess over what your buyers want to know and you're willing to address those instead of just hiding from it, instead of being like the ostrich with your head in the sand, you could save your company if you're willing to do this. I said, well, shoot, I can listen well. I know the questions they're asking. I can address those. And so that's exactly what we— that's exactly what we did. We were the first swimming pool company in the world to really aggressively address the question of how much does a fiberglass swimming pool cost on our website? Nobody was willing to do that. And to this day, over 90% of businesses don't talk about cost and price online, which blows my stinking mind. And they're in for a rude awakening, by the way, because AI is going to force them to do it. But that's, that's a whole other conversation. We know that most businesses don't do it. They justify it. They say, well, every job is different. They say, well, we don't want to scare them away. They say, well, we don't want to give it away to our competitors. Well, every job is different. Could you explain what drives the cost up and down? What defines value in your space? Of course you could do that. Very easy to do. So the whole, whole component of it depends is very easy to explain. The idea of, well, if we talk about price, it'll scare them away. Nope. Actually, what we know for a fact What scares people away, especially online when they're researching, is ignorance. When they can't find the thing they're looking for. You want to piss somebody off? Don't give them what they're looking for. Right? Number 3, the competition. If I asked anybody that's listening to this right now, do you have a pretty decent sense as to what your competitors charge? Especially if you're in sales, you're like, of course I do, Marcus. I ain't dumb.

Not, not a— you know exactly, by the way.

Yeah.

You know how they price, where you come in high, where you come in low. You have copies of their proposals.

You know, so I tell people, stop treating the buyer as dumb, as uninformed, especially in this era where they can now get very specific answers. So if there's a question I'm going to ask, you know, we were the first pool company in the world to address the subject concrete versus fiberglass pool. Everybody else up to that point were like, oh, we can't talk about concrete pools because, well, that's our biggest competitor. And if we talk about concrete pools on our website, then people will find out they exist. Once again, It's like, come on, people aren't dumb. They're going to get the answer. So we openly address it. We didn't say fiberglass pools were better. We said, listen, people ask us all the time, what's the difference? Here's the pros, here's the cons of each one. I mean, we were honest too. And that like piece of content that generated millions in sales, talking about cost and price of fiberglass pools, many millions in sales. In fact, the first article I ever wrote that was, how much does a fiberglass pool cost? Based on the number of leads we've gotten from it now, it's over— I think at this point it's like a little bit over $40 million in revenue from one article that took me 45 minutes to write at my kitchen table. I mean, you know, so the data is irrefutable, but yet companies still say, well, my buyer's different. Well, then don't tell me you believe in the golden rule because you don't.

Have you ever done an analysis of what is the impact of having a better educated consumer on your close rate?

We've done it. I've done arguably more than anybody in the world on this subject. And I talk about this in Assignment Selling and Endless Customers. Endless Customers, the third— I talk about this subject, assignment selling, in They Ask, You Answer, but Endless Customers is the third edition of They Ask, You Answer. And what we discovered— first, I discovered this with my swimming pool company, which was there's something crazy that happened. I was looking at like two groups of people, both had filled out a form on the site, said, I want to get a quote. And I said, okay, for everybody that filled out a form, said, I want to get a quote, which ones bought, which ones didn't buy? Let's divide them up and let's figure out like what's the behavioral difference between the ones that did and did not buy. And it became very, very obvious. The data said, oh gee, there's this number from the ones that keep buying, which was this: if somebody read 30 or more pages before the initial sales appointment of our website, they would buy 80% of the time. And if they didn't read that much content, if it was less, closing rates were about 25%. So they were literally going from 25% to 80% close rate if they consumed 30 pieces of our content, Jeff. So we said, son of a gun, like, what can we do to get people to consume 30 pieces of content before we go out to their house. Because if you look at content consumed, it's almost like you're going on another date with that person. And if you put enough dates together, eventually you're going to consummate the relationship in some way, shape, or form. That's the way it works in business. There's this thing that I know you've heard of it before, Jeff, and some of your audience too, which is sunk cost fallacy, which basically means the more time we invest in something or someone, the more we try to make it work out. Right? And so in the context of content, when somebody consumes more of your content, they're actually investing more of their time into you. They try to therefore justify why they should go with you simply because they've spent more time with you. They don't want to see that the time that they spent as a mistake. And so we, you know, bottom line, we do absolutely see that in every industry there's a tipping point of content consumed that if somebody hits it from your brand, from your company, closing rates go hockey stick parabolic and they just jump. Your job is to, A, provide the type of content that they would want to consume at that higher level. Like, you know, if it's boring content, if it ain't about really the things that they want to know, well, then they ain't going to hit 30 pieces of content. But if you're addressing the subjects that they really want to know— your competition, what are the pros and cons of your product or service, what are the biggest fears that people have, and could you address each one of them? Talking about cost extensively, right? All those things. That's what people want to know. And if you're willing to talk about that, they're going to spend their time with you. They're going to learn from you. And if they learn the most from you, there's a very, very high probability that they're going to buy from you.

Joe Matthews is a longtime marketer, content provider in the industry and franchise sales. And he released a study because he He did franchise sales for several companies and he, he managed the websites. He said if somebody spends like 76 seconds and they're, they'll never going to reach out to you and they go away, they never reach out to you. If they spend 2.5 minutes roughly, they will fill out a form and, you know, but you probably won't close those people. But if they spend 14.5 minutes or longer on your website consuming your content, that, that was like, again, like an 80% close rate. So it all And it has to be your content, which I think, you know, when I talk to other people, for example, that have podcasts. So what's the purpose of podcasts? Generally are not great lead generators, but they're great converters because anytime that we close a franchise deal or I'll come to our Meet the Team Day or sometimes in training, they will generally tell me, you know, I listen to like 15 podcasts. So if you're listening to 15 1-hour podcasts on the Unemployable Podcast, during the process where you're evaluating which franchise that you would like to join, that's time that they're not spending on the other people. And as long as the content is valuable and it's educational and it's fair and it's honest, then, you know, we're, we're building a relationship with these people.

Yeah. Let me, if I might add to that, you know, today I work with a lot of franchisors because I have a piece of software called Price Guide. Price Guide, it's so aligned with my brand because I saw where the world was headed from a pricing transparency perspective. And so I said, I want to create a tool that allows home improvement companies, home service companies to quickly, easily, cost-effectively build pricing estimators for their websites. And this therefore giving the homeowner in this context a general range, a sense as to here's roughly what it's going to cost. And what's interesting about these interactive tools and this goes back to what you're saying a second ago, is that because when somebody interacts with a tool of yours on your site, especially almost like mimicking what it would be like in a sales appointment, now all of a sudden conversion rates just explode. They flourish. Let me give an example. I've got 1,500 companies. You know, my tool's about a year old. I've got 1,500 paying customers. That are using it. And what we know is the second somebody adds a pricing estimator to their website, they get a 3x increase in leads starting that day, 3x increase. And it shouldn't be a surprise. But let me give you another example of how these interactive tools work. And I talk about these a lot in this. Customers' self-service tools are really such a key part of your website's future, of your brand's future, to generate enough leads. One that would probably shock you, Jeff. This is a cool— I don't think you've heard this before. I don't think anybody in your audience has ever tried this before. So we've been, we've been messing around with— we know that oftentimes a customer prospect, they don't really want to talk to a salesperson. They would rather just schedule time to talk to a salesperson. No surprise, no mystery. People, there's tools for that. But let's say that you wanted to create that type of tool for your site that allows somebody to schedule time to talk with one of your salespeople. Here's where it gets really interesting. What we have found is that if you then show someone a page, let's say on your site, of the different salespeople they can work with. So imagine this, Jeff, you've got an image of the salesperson, you got a name, you got a bio, and you got a video you can watch of the salesperson. So what you do is you vet the salespeople, then you say, hmm, I think I'd rather work with that person. Right there. Well, when someone chooses their own salesperson after having vetted a salesperson, closing rates double almost every single time in any industry we've tried this with. It's really, really fascinating. But as soon as you think about it, it's like, oh yeah, well, of course, that makes a lot of sense. You know, one of the first companies that did this was, was my friends at Yale Appliance. I talk about them in the book, but they, they are an appliance retailer in Boston, in Massachusetts. Well, there's, there's, you know, different ways that you can, that you can set an appointment. You can, you can call them, you can set an appointment, you can walk into the showroom and get an appointment real time, or you can schedule an appointment on the website. But when you schedule the appointment on the website, you see the salespeople in that store and you choose your own adventure, you choose your salesperson. And again, closing rates double. So, you know, this is the type of thing that as soon as you say it, you're like, of course, that makes total sense. But how many companies give that type of, of freedom of choice, of, of agency to their prospects? You give the prospect more agency, it's amazing how trust explodes and therefore closing rates go right along with it.

Yeah, I don't think you get to choose You're a salesperson, but when you're buying a boat, you're, you're doing a boat walkthrough with the salesperson on a video, and then you call and you ask for that person.

Happens all the time. Yeah, I do it. I do a lot in the marine space. I speak a lot in the marine space. I got a bunch of marine clients right now. And that's also why it's like if a salesperson is smart in marine or really any other, but especially marine, somebody, somebody reaches out and says, hey, you know, we're interested in XYZ model. I mean, that second salesperson, should, you know, just do a 1-to-1 video that does a quick walkthrough of that model with them for, in this case, the prospect, and they send it to them before they come to the showroom. I think one of the big flaws I see with a lot of salespeople is, and I say this, this is especially true in home improvement, where you're inviting somebody to walk up your driveway, right? And you're inviting them into your home. Which is a— I mean, that's a big deal, inviting somebody into your home. That's your private place there. So I tell every contractor, every home service company, if the prospect does not know the face and has not heard the voice of the person that's driving, walking up the driveway before they come to your house, you failed them. They should already know it. It should be familiar with them. They should say, oh, there he is. There she is. Exactly. You're, you're taller than you look in the video, right? That's the comments that you should be hearing, but they shouldn't be saying, I wonder if that's him. I wonder if that's her. That should not ever be the case.

Other than price, what are some of the other questions that people naturally have when they visit a website?

Yeah, there's, there's, we, what we call it is the Big Five. And these are the 5 subjects that every buyer wants to know that we've all learned over the course of our time attending what I might call the school of search. For me, that's been about, you know, 27, 28 years of using the internet now. You too, Jeff, right? And there's these 5 subjects that every buyer wants to know. B2B, B2C, service, product, doesn't matter. Number 1 is cost. Everyone wants to know cost, price, rates, etc. Number 2, would be problems, fears, you know, anything that's like a worry or concern. How could this go wrong? How could this blow up in my face? Okay, so that's number 2. So in the context of fiberglass pools, let's say, how much does a fiberglass pool cost would be number 1. And then what are the problems with a fiberglass pool would be number 2. Or along those same lines, is a fiberglass pool ugly? Is a fiberglass pool cheap? Does a fiberglass pool pop out of the ground? All right. Those are all problems or fear-based statements. Number 3 would be comparison. Comparison-based statements. People are obsessed with comparing stuff online, right? They want to feel like they've done their due diligence. And so in this case, it might be fiberglass versus concrete pools, fiberglass versus vinyl pools. It could be salt chlorine versus regular chlorine. It could be River Pools versus AAA Pools, right? It's— people love to compare. Okay, number 4, reviews. We love reviews. We're obsessed with reviews. The thing about the reviews now is we want the good, the bad, and the ugly. We don't just want the positive. We want to see how they handled the negative situations. And number 5 is a big one. Best, best, most top. People are obsessed with searching best, best such and such company, you know, best remodeler Richmond, Virginia, right? That's an example of best, best restaurant near me, you know, best attorney. For, you know, small businesses. I don't care what it is. People love best. So those are the big 5: cost, problems, comparisons, reviews, best. That's what the market wants to know. And that's what most businesses are not talking about online. And then they wonder why they're not— why they're not getting a lot of traction. And speaking of the franchise space, geez, franchisees are terrible at this. Excuse me, franchisors. I see a lot, you know, is is the franchisor, especially if they're handling the, let's call it, the online brand of the company and they're not willing to address these, they are doing such a wild disservice to their franchisees that it will come back to bite them. They will pay the price and it'll be painful.

Yeah, I was just thinking that actually. I was like, I think this podcast is going to be immediately mandatory viewing for not only our home office staff, but probably out to our franchisees as well.

Yeah, well, I see it a lot, and it's getting a lot worse with the way AI works, you know, and I'm super active, you know, with this. I've got a software company that measures AI visibility. We've done about 7,000 tests now for businesses around the world testing their AI visibility. And I can tell you that we're getting to a place where if you don't have— if you don't address certain things on your, on your website, you'll flat out get penalized to the point of you just won't get recommended by AI. That's where, that's where we're headed with these things. And so that's why you get— if you're not leaning into the Big Five, this is what people are searching, certainly what they're searching in AI. You know, number one search in AI when it comes to businesses is best in comparisons. They've already got the data on this. Third is cost. It's like, it's still Big Five. I've been talking about the Big Five literally for over 15 years now, 16, 17 years, I guess. So it hasn't changed. That's organic. That's evergreen. We're going to be talking about the Big Five, researching the Big Five until, until the day we die when it comes to business. A business that leans away from it, they, they, they suffer the consequences. Humans and AI distrust them. The ones that lean into it, uh, that they're really willing to just talk about it from a video, an audio, a text-based perspective, they're gonna win the conversation. They're gonna win the trust. They're gonna win the recommendation.

I understand how we've tackled this in the past. If, if you can't— if somebody came up to you and they had a legacy business and they're doing $10 million or $20 million in some home service space, but they weren't good at this stuff, how would you coach them now? What would be the process for them to start to engage some of these methods? And how has that changed with AI? Because, man, and I know I'm not asking for free consulting for everybody online here or dissertation, but That's what I do all day, man. I'm here for it. Well, there you go. Well, that's right.

I mean, I mean, you know, yeah, because people hire me to do that which I've already taught them how to do in one of my books, right? Full stop. You know, you're not going to hear anything new at that point in time, right? You know, let me, let me quickly share a story. A true story happened to me last week. Jeff, you probably appreciate this. I talked to a remodeling company last week. They reached out. They were having some struggles. Last year they did $14 million in sales, about $14 million, and they were cruising. But suddenly at the tail end of last year, they started just seeing a dip and it's continued so bad into 2026 that they're in trouble right now. They have $2.5 million in sales so far for the year and they're in big trouble. And I said, what changed? That's the big question, right? What changed? What changed for you to go from $14 million to now what looks like they're their run rate this year could be like 6, maybe, maybe. Yeah. So lucky. So that's awful. It's atrocious. You know, sure, most of the industry is relatively flat right now in that world, but you shouldn't be losing 50%, 60% of your business. Well, what changed? The only thing they had changed is they hired last year a sales trainer, and this sales trainer was a legacy sales trainer in the home improvement space. What I mean by legacy sales trainer is it's the classic everything is one call close. And they refuse to even discuss if the homeowner asks anything about price, they say we can't give you any information at all. Sorry, that's impossible. And so what started to happen is, as no surprise to anybody with a brain, is people would call them and they would get very annoyed. On the website, people would get annoyed. They started getting less leads on the site. They started having lower closing rates. You know, this whole model was you can't mention price at all until you've had, you know, like a 2 to 3 hour presentation in the home and then you can start to talk about it. And that's the only point in time. It's 2026, people. Come on, pull your head out of it and let's like look forward. This is not 2005 any longer. That's a legacy sales system and that's the only thing they change and it could torpedo their entire business. Really sad. This is the type of stuff that I see from the different, you know, companies that reach out to us because, you know, you've read They Ask, You Answer, Jeff. It's like literally the antithesis of that, right? And it comes from a place of abundance versus scarcity. That's just the way that I roll, and that's the way that I, you know, that's the way that I see this. So the first thing you need to do if you're going to make a shift towards becoming a more like modern buyer-aligned brand, and you're going to be more abundant in your mentality, is number one— and this is going to— this is not going to be the answer that people want to hear, but this is— I know this as— this is the way. You have to have some type of meeting with the entire leadership team that gets everybody on the same page. I would call that a workshop or training. And you've seen this in your world, Jeff, right? It's like I don't know how I got a feeling, because you and I think pretty similarly. I will not— like, with our sales training company, I'll have people reach out and they say, you know, I'd like to engage you long term. I'm like, that's fine, but we're not going to engage each other until we do a training with your team for one day, and then we'll decide if we want to work together. And the reason is because I don't know if I want to work with you yet, and you don't know if you want to work with me. And it It makes them surprised, but I know that by eliminating resistance on the front end, it's going to cause for a beautiful relationship long-term. But if I don't remove the resistance on the front end, what's going to happen is sales manager is going to catch wind from the CEO that, hey, we're doing this new program. We've got this new sales trainer and he or she is going to resist, not because it's wrong, just because they feel like that They're being attacked. Whereas if we say, hey, we're getting together today to figure out if we want to work together, your job is to say, is this something that I want? My job is to say, is this a company I want to work with? Our job as a whole is to be open heart, open mind. Can we all do this? Everybody agree? Good. Let's get started. All right. That's it. That's how we do our, our training. And that's the first thing you have to do. Uh, you have to have that type of mindset. It's no different than if somebody hears me speak, man, I can't wait to talk to my boss about this. I'm like, nope, don't, don't tell your boss what you heard from me. I'm like, what do you mean? No, no, no, no, no. Ask them if they would be willing to read my book. Say, hey boss, would you be willing to read this book? I, I think there's something here. Would you be willing to read it? Don't tell them, don't tell them what it's about. Would you be willing to read this? They say yes. Say, okay, can we put a timeframe in place? Got to have a constraint, right? So you put a timeframe in place. Okay, can we follow up, have a meeting about in 2 weeks? Because otherwise what's going to happen is you're going to go to your boss and you're going to say, hey, I got it. You know what? We got to change. We got to be more transparent. We got to openly do these comparisons. You know, we got to talk about, you know, our competition online. We got to talk about pricing. Boss is going to be like, no way, because they don't catch the vision yet. So, so everything is about getting buy-in from leaders and key people if you want to create change within organizations. And if you don't get buy-in from leaders, then you're in trouble. And the second thing you do is once you get the buy-in from the leaders, and this is especially true with sales training, you get buy-in from some of your sales champions. So I don't like to start with entire sales teams. Here's the reason why. You put them together and they tend to resist. Whereas if you approach them on a much smaller level and you go to a couple of them and you say, I want you to be a part of our Top Gun program, okay? And we've got a new, we've got a new program that we want to do. We think you'd be perfect for it. And we think that you could be one of the core leaders to this. They're like, pshh. Yeah, I'm game. That's me. I'm a leader. And now you present it to them, they start to have a lot of success, and you start to share those stories with the rest of the sales team. Now, sales teams, they're, they're, they're a competitive bunch. You can guarantee it every time. And so if one of their peers is doing something that is causing them to be very, um, it's, it's, if there's, if, if they're peer is doing something that's working, they are going to want in on the action. They're going to want to be invited to the party, right? So not only are salespeople change resistant, but they're competitive. That's why you start with the champion. You train that small group first. You get the stories. You create competition, a little bit of FOMO, a little bit of missing out, right? And now all of a sudden you can, you can have mass adoption. We've seen that work again and again. So I'm very much into the psychology of getting buy-in when it comes to any of these things, Jeff. And that's, that's my, that's always my approach.

People are less willing to adopt something new if there's not a crisis. So I imagine you get often, you, the, the company that you shared as an example, they were in crisis. They were trying to figure out what changed. The crisis that I've been most worried about with AI is being disintermediated from, disintermediated from leads, lead flow. Just because it's changing so fast. And, you know, now you've got to be on Reddit and you got to be on Quora and you got to be in all these places so that AI will look at you. And there's a real chance to get— gain real estate right now if you, if you're willing to go out and be the authority and all of those things. But in the situation about with the sales team, it's like you've created a micro crisis because now you've got some people that are getting something that's helping them and other people that aren't. And, and again, leaders, if it's not, you know, if, if there's a status quo and everybody's hitting budget and you're hitting normal growth, like what, like Tommy Mello's a friend of mine. You probably know him or know him.

Yeah, he's a buddy. I'll text him right now. Yeah. I mean, he, he's a dog, man.

Yeah. And the thing about him is he doesn't need a crisis to evolve his business and to drive for more. And I think that's what makes him so special and unique.

Tommy, I'll tell you what else makes Tommy special. He's obviously, you know, one of the great minds in business. Uh, he's easily one of the top couple of minds in the world in home improvement. And yet I went and I taught a workshop to his team. I swear to you, Tommy was taking notes like, like he was the intern on the job. Yeah, that's what— like, that guy is hungry, man. And he is, he is so willing to, to say to himself, I don't know enough about that thing. He surrounds himself with experts. He doesn't try to constantly reinvent the wheel. He finds wheels that work well. And then he says, could we, could we use that wheel with our business? Really, really smart. And it makes him atypical because so many leaders are trying to protect legacy systems, just like You mentioned, you know, leads are going to be a big problem out there. There's a lot of SEO companies right now that are just not being very honest about this conversation. They love to act like, you know, nothing has changed. They love to, you know, say like Google is going to be unaffected by all of this. And I mean, I just think it's the most— some of the most asinine statements I hear all the time. You know, perfect case in point, it's like I know that, you know, when I started, I started doing a poll with audiences about 18 months ago. Every audience I speak to when I'm speaking on AI and trust and visibility and, you know, I ask the same question, which is, by show of hands, how many of you now use ChatGPT or another LLM as your primary means of getting information over Google? Okay. When I started, this room was about 30-35% 18 months ago. Now it's 75%. 75% of the room today uses AI, and those people are not seeing those ads on Google. They're not seeing them. Right. And so if you're spending, you know, $50,000, $150,000, $500,000, $1 million a month on, on ads, which a lot of home improvement, home service companies are doing, you know, they're driving the majority of their business through ads. If the world suddenly doesn't see those ads, What do you replace them with? How do you get those leads? And we're not going to get them with SEO because as we know, click-through rates have plummeted. You know, River Pools, yeah, we were getting a million visitors a month at one time. We're way, way down on that now. Way down on that now because people are getting so many of those answers from AI summaries, right? Directly from ChatGPT, whatever it is. And this creates a very unique challenge because brand becomes more important than it's ever been and AI visibility becomes massive. There's no such thing as ranking anymore. You don't rank an AI, folks. I keep— people say, yeah, rank an AI. No, you don't. You don't. Jeff and I could do the exact same search right now on ChatGPT and he gets a completely different answer than I get. Because it's individualized to that person. There's no such thing as ranking. There's no page one. All these things are changing. And if anybody tells you that legacy search is built to last, they do not have your best interests at heart. Our future is not clicking on blue links, people. Our future is getting the thing we want faster, without friction, period, full stop. We don't want to click on a blue link that may or may not be a sponsored ad. At this point, you can't even tell the difference. Now, where's it all going to go? Who's going to win the battle? I don't necessarily know. I don't know that. But I do know that whoever wins, it's going to be faster, it's going to be more friction-free, and ain't gonna be about seeing a bunch of ads on the page. Whatever is going to allow you to do the thing you want, again, faster, friction-free, remove the fear— I call that 3 Fs of innovation. That's gonna be the platform that you use. That's gonna be the one that lasts.

Do you have a projection about cost? I mean, we pay Google, we pay Meta, we pay these people so much money to serve our stuff up, but I'm not paying ChatGPT anything yet. Maybe I'm missing out on it.

Grok.

I use Grok. I mean, I like the, I like the answers that it constructs for certain things. How are they going to monetize or are we just going to have to earn it?

There's no question we're really going to have to earn it. But I mean, already we're seeing a lot. There's a lot of things that you can do to improve AI visibility immediately. And you're going to need to lean into some of these technical elements of AI SEO or AEO or whatever you might want to call it that you haven't leaned into before. There's, there's going to be clear reasons why you, you're not in the recommended list. So you're going to want to be— you're going to want to become, you know, very aware of, of, of what those things are. You also just need to be willing to, to pivot and move and not holding on to the past. I don't understand why so many people are just so freaking married to the past. You know, I wrote They Ask, You Answer. I'm not married.

It's because we want to look smart.

It's certainly, there's certainly that. We, you know, it's like, but it's like when we signed up to become business leaders, entrepreneurs, we said we're going to meet the market where it is and where it's going. We're not going to force the market to, you know, meet us where we are. Uh, no, no, no, no, no. We got to meet it where it is and where it's going. Those are your two options. And so if we're being very honest, I say, okay. So legacy search is going to die. Okay, definitely going to die. Blue links isn't our future. No doubt. Okay, we don't know when, but we know it's going to happen. Future is they're just going to get immediate answers. Yep, that's right. Future, we might not even have websites. Okay, at least as we know it, it's going to be very different. It's like you just got to just be willing right now to say, yeah, that could definitely happen. That could certainly be the case, and nothing's off the table, and you have to be okay with it. Yeah, you can't sit there and complain about it. You can't live in the past. You can't say, oh, but I, you know, I did the way we've been selling for 20 years. This— no, stop it already. Stop thinking that you're gonna hide things from the homeowner and they're actually gonna trust you enough to say, yeah, please come out to my house. Give me a break already. That's not our future. And again, that's not how you yourself would want to be treated in that moment. Yeah.

If we wanted to work with you, what would, what would that look like? And I'd love to give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about your businesses and about who you help and how you do it.

Yeah, I appreciate that. Well, first off, you can find me at MarcusSheridan.com. I, primarily speak on a few things, uh, the changing buyer, where the world is headed, uh, from a, from a sales and marketing perspective. I also talk a lot about how to create immediate connection and trust with your audience. Sometimes we call that marketing, sometimes we call that sales, sometimes we call that leadership communication, but it's really all to me, it's just the through line is how do you create immediate connection and trust with your audience. And I'm very deeply interested in that. I've got a sales and leadership training company. You can find that at questionfirstgroup.com. So that's questionfirstgroup.com. You can find my, my software Price Guide at priceguide.ai. Incredible, the impact that can have on lead flow. It's immediate when you add it. So simple to do. $25 a month. I mean, just nothing. Cost you barely anything. And it's wild. And you should connect with me on LinkedIn as well if you're listening to this. If if it's resonated with you. It's where I put my best stuff, you know, stuff that's on my mind, the stuff that I'm thinking about. I don't write for clicks, you know. One day I write something, it's got, you know, 500 interactions. The next day I write something, it's got 5. I just don't really care. What I really care about is if it's on my mind, if I think the world needs to know it, whether the world's ready for it or not, I'm going to talk about it. And, um, you know, that's, that's, you know, that has, has worked well for me.

I'm interested to know how you've personally leveraged AI as a business leader. And I mean, is there, uh, uh, I think that when you talk about people don't want to change, I mean, the way I go through my, I, I, I might as well put a caveman suit on the way I go through my email these days. I mean, I'm just looking at it and I'm, and I'm, I'm working in Claude and I'm, I'm using AI, you know, the, the best that I can. Um, but I continue to want, desire to really have a thought leader as an AI partner, to have an assistant that can be predictive. I mean, I drive a Tesla and when I get back in my Ford 250, man, I feel like I've gone backwards 100 years.

Yeah, I'm an old T at that point.

Yeah. So what types of things, as somebody who's on the cutting edge of so many of these things and is clearly very thoughtful about it, is there any tips that you have or tactics for business leaders that things that we could do today to help us be productive?

Yeah, to answer that question too, let me just preface it by saying any answer I give here is going to be too advanced or not advanced enough for some of the audience here. So everybody have a little bit of grace with me as I answer this. But, you know, the biggest mistake that I see from so many when they try to use AI is they still treat it like Google. I'm like, please, for the love of all that's pure and holy, stop treating it like Google. Stop treating it like a search engine. Like an answer engine, start treating it truly as a team member that you need to engage with in order to get the most from. The best way right now to start thinking differently, the quickest route, the simplest route, I really do think is by downloading the Claude Cowork desktop app is what everybody listening to this should be using. And the problem is a lot of people using Claude, they're just going into it. And I was talking to a guy yesterday. And interesting, this guy, he's a, uh, he's, he's trying to be a day trader and he's had a little bit of success with it. And, but he's having a lot more trouble in the last 6 months. And I said, the problem is you're no longer just competing as humans. You're competing against humans that are using agents and you're still just trying to use your own knowledge and you don't have any assistants that are helping you. He said, I understand I'm using AI, like, you know, I'll like, I'll feed AI some stuff and da da da da, and it will tell me like after the fact, but it's not in the moment. I'm like, see, you're not using it right. You're using it in a very antiquated way. So how many agents do you have set up? He's like, I don't have any agent. What's an agent? He like didn't know what an agent was. And he's trying to do day trading. Get the heck out of here. You're not going to win. You can't win like that, man. And so at this point, if you set up Cowork, you can at any point in time when you have a problem, you can say, all right, let's build this together. Or show me how to build this or do this for me. That's the mindset. And you should— you have to be in a constant space of, um, this is action that I do or that I don't know how to do. Can you do it better for me, or can you help me with it? Let me give you an example. I just had my, uh, I just had my chief of staff— her name is Becca— and one of the companies that I own is an offshore fishing company. It's called Speechless Sport Fishing. I love to fish. We've got a YouTube channel, the whole nine, right? So, you know, it's, it's in the, it's in the Outer Banks, North Carolina, and And our website really sucked. And so I told my assistant, I'm like, listen, here's our choice. Not my assistant, my chief of staff, excuse me. I said, we could hire an agency to build a new website. I don't really don't want to do that. It's just another $25,000. I don't really feel like spending on that. Why don't you give it a whack? Go break it. Go use agents and go build it together. Now, what's beautiful about Becca, my chief of staff, is she's just a gamer. She knows no code. At all, but she's a gamer. And when I say gamer, I mean like she's up to the task. She's willing to like just say, okay, let's figure this out. And so I told her, go for it, break it. And over the course of a weekend, she built an entirely new website, completely transformed the site, completely AI-optimized site. I mean, it is just cooking. The site is great. Clearly would have cost $25,000, $30,000. Dramatically better than what I had before. You can find it at speechlesssportfishing.com. Took her 48 hours to build.

Okay.

You say speechless? Speechless. Speechless. Like, yeah, I gave it during COVID I bought the boat during COVID I wasn't giving speeches at the time, so I was speechless. Okay. So speechlesssportfishing.com. And so, so my point is though, she built that with co-work. She was talking with it the entire time. Second thing. Is we said, okay, we want to drive more leads for charters. We don't want to hire an agency in this case to handle our Google Ads. So could we do this with Cowork? Of course, the answer is yes. So you go to Cowork and say, hey, I want to build a Google Ads campaign. And the way Google— the way Cowork does, folks, is it says, okay, let's, let's go into this together. It's going to need you to give it its passwords, but then you're giving it access into, let's say, your Google, into your Google Analytics. It can go in there and it can set up the account for you. And then each day it goes back in now without Becca, and it optimizes the account. And it comes back to her and says, here's what I found. Here's what's working. Here's what's not working. So it's giving us a much better user experience than any agency ever has given us, because it's a daily report that it's giving us. And Any changes it'll suggest, and then we'll say, okay, green light, make those changes, budget, anything like that. It's wild. That's for me as a, like, you know, for a business that is not super profitable yet, that's how I'm using it there. But it all starts with saying, hey, let's figure this out. In this case, download Claude Cowork. I don't know how to do this thing. Can you help me to do this thing? It says, yeah, and then you just work with it and you'll figure it out. If it says I need a password, you get the password. If it says I'm stuck, say, hey, push through or tell me what you need, but push through it. Which, by the way, AI does do that sometimes. It'll say it's stuck when it's not really stuck. It's just being lazy. It's weird, I know, but it does get lazy. And so it's changed our life, you know, completely. And I think there's probably about another year or two where the people that are using it really aggressively, they look so much more professional. Assuming they use it right. They look so much more professional and they get so much more work done than their peers. I mean, we're just outpacing everybody. And you can be nimble, you can be lean, you can be outrageously profitable. It's such a great time to be a small business entrepreneur. Good gosh, it's exciting.

It's never been a time like it.

No, I mean, not close. Yeah, not close. Digital Davids are slaying Goliaths every single day right now because they can make their own rules. You can do that too.

So game theory this out, uh, content creation using these tools. You don't have to go to agencies. You don't have to deal with these agencies. You can just create agents that you can talk to just like you're speaking to agencies. Um, that's here and evolving. And, and for, look, there's what, 31 million small business owners in this country. And there's the, one of the biggest opportunities is that, you know, probably 30 million of them have done nothing with AI at this point. So getting everybody on that train is a huge— that's why everybody says there's going to be more AI millionaires, you know, in the next whatever, because you're helping all these people adopt these tools. But then from the sales process, you've got great products out there like Avvoca AI, which is selling, answering the telephone for people with AI agents and bots. And so if the website can be predictive in terms of, and informative and engaging in terms of answering people's questions, having price transparency, solving people's problems, you know, giving the comparison between your company and the other ones, and then it's going to connect you with a, a vo— if they want to talk to somebody, it's going to connect you with a voice AI. How many people are going to expect for salespeople ever to actually show up at their house anymore?

Well, I think there's certain industries where in-home selling is going to remain relatively strong where there's a lot of variables. Swimming pools might be an example of that, although we do a lot of sales appointments over Zoom. And I do think we're going to have probably digital avatar-based salespeople that are going to be doing initial sales appointments.

I sent out my drone, like sat down in your yard, it scanned it all out.

Yeah, like, like I would expect that there's going to be a decent amount of that. And I think, you know, really anything is on, you know, anything is on the table. I do think there's always going to be holdouts. There's going to be people that want to talk with a human. There's going to be one. There's going to be people that talk with AI, want to talk with AI. And then there's going to be— I think the majority will end up getting to a point where they're going to end up choosing. This tends to be our behavior here. The route we end up taking is we just say, I just want to, I just want to do whatever's going to be the quickest, least stressful, um, you know, uh, most effective, right? It's like, that's what people are going to choose. It is fascinating though, how quickly we're seeing groups of people say, I prefer AI. Let me give you an example. My 25-year-old daughter came to me the other day and she said, you know, Marcus, for her, not Marcus. She said, Dad. Dad, that would be weird. She said Marcus, but you know, teach their own. She said, uh, Dad, I've decided that I would rather speak to an AI than a human for, uh, customer service issues. Now, the reason why she said that to me is she knows what I speak about. She's traveled with me before lots of times, so she, you know, this is like normal in our, in our family. So she says this, and I said, of course, why? And she says, well, The reason is, and I want everybody to hear this, she says, AI never makes me feel stupid for asking a question. Think about how many salespeople have made someone feel silly, stupid, unintelligent.

Yes.

For asking a question. It's crazy. This is really prolific in home improvement. You see a lot, sadly. Right. Especially even more sadly, sometimes the way that occasionally, not always, men might address a woman. Right. And these are things that, you know, we just gotta, we gotta do better with y'all. And so it's an indictment on the trust that you're building in the sales process, but at the same time, that's what we're seeing there. So that's my daughter, an example of that. So we need to make people, whether it's a human or AI, we need to make them feel safe. Asking anything. And it comes back to trust. And if they're getting more of that from an AI, you might want to check yourself and your sales team. Another experience I recently had talking to, um, there's a plumber. He does a really good business, probably $25, $30 million a year. And he said, it's interesting, Marcus, we've been, uh, as soon as we get a lead form now, we immediately have AI makes the phone call, and AI then says, hey, you just filled out a form here to set your appointment. We can set it up one or two ways. I can have you talk with a human, or I can have you set the appointment with AI. So in other words, just how do you want to set the appointment? Do you want to set it with AI, or do you want to set it with a human? So guess what percentage of people choose, let me just set the appointment using AI. Take a guess, Jeff. 70%. Yeah, 80%. Yeah, 80%. Now, what's the reasoning? Because in that moment, they say it's going to be faster, it's going to be hassle-free. They see it as less risk.

So once again, I would also say be more passive. You know, I set a dermatology appointment with an AI and I could give two shits whether they cared what I said.

Bingo. Bingo. So again, I'd go back to less risk. Feel safe, right? It's all these, however we want to describe it here, right? It's interesting. So, so I, I think we're, we're clearly seeing trends where, you know, people are, are choosing this and eventually it's going to get to a place where we're going to stop asking if it's a human or if it's an AI because we're not going to be able to tell the difference.

And that's right.

Here's the truth of it. I'm not saying it's great. I'm not celebrating this. We're just not going to care because what do we care about? Do I get the thing that I want as quickly as possible?

You're not going to care and you're going to assume, and it's so interesting you went down this path because the question that I had queued up for you is, do you believe, are you, would you be more comfortable negotiating price with an AI versus a human?

You know, I've never been posed that question. I love this question, Jeff. I can see arguments to both. You see, the sales trainer in me wants to go after the AI because I want to see just how good the AI is, right? I just want to see how good it is. But I think the majority of people would prefer to negotiate with an AI. Because of the discomfort that comes with the, hey, let me go speak to my manager. People hate that. People hate it. Most people— this is what's wild. If you look at the used car industry, we know that roughly 75% of all people buying cars do not like to negotiate. 75%. 25% say, oh, this is fun. 75% say this sucks. The entire industry for almost 100 years was built on the 25%. Can you believe that? It wasn't until CarMax came out and they said no haggle guarantee, the price is the price, salesperson gets the exact same commission on every single car they sell, right? It wasn't until CarMax did that The whole industry changed.

And oh, by the way, here's the report. Here's that it's been damaged. Here's the nicks on it. You're not having to do the work like it gives you everything that you need to make a decision.

Beautiful. And they were the first to offer a money-back guarantee. Right. Start off at 3 days. I think it's up to 10 now with CarMax.

And here's the kicker, because this just turned into this episode brought to you by CarMax now, is that you order it And if it shows up and you don't like it for any reason, you reject it.

You reject it. Our last two, we bought 8 cars from CarMax. I wrote about them in the first edition of They Ask, You Answer. They started in Richmond, Virginia, close to where I'm from. And, you know, our last two have been delivered. Of course, we didn't test drive it first. They just get delivered. There's no, there's no paperwork. Why did we have them delivered? Because go back to the 3 Fs. They eliminated the friction of going, getting in a car, going there, doing paperwork while there. Okay. So they eliminated the friction. They made it much faster. So again, we didn't have to do that stuff. It showed up. We were fine. They eliminated the fear. The way they eliminated the fear was they said, to your point, Jeff, if you're unhappy, you can just send it back. Right? So this is, this is how companies become the greatest scalers in their space. Now, of course, CarMax has to be careful because if they don't look to replace and reinvent themselves, they're going to get left behind too. There's this thing called the pride cycle, which is incredibly powerful. I want you to imagine it. If everybody's listening to this, imagine at the, at the top of the circle, just imagine life is one circle always moving. You're somewhere in the circle. At the top of the circle, you you have prosperity. At the bottom of the circle, you have what's called pain. So you have pain, prosperity, okay? So top, you have prosperity, bottom, you have pain. Now, most of the time in your life, you're somewhere in between pain or prosperity. But when somebody's in pain at the bottom of the circle, they say, I don't like being in pain. So what do they do? Well, they do what's called the little things. That's on the left side of the circle, okay? On your journey up towards prosperity, you start doing the little things. You start making the extra call, you take the risks, you know, you have the YOLO, you know, you only live once mindset, right? You know, you start doing— they ask, you answer, whatever the thing is, right? So you start doing these little things and you start to prosper. And because you start to prosper, you get momentum and then you get to the top of that thing. You know, you lost the weight, you did the thing, you accomplished the goal, you won the game, whatever it was. You made the sale. But what happens at the top of the circle when they're in that place of prosperity? Oftentimes we get a little bit lackadaisical. We get fat and happy. We take our foot off the gas and we stop doing the little things. We don't take the risk. We don't look to replace ourselves. We say things like, well, this has worked for 20 years. I don't foresee it stopping anytime soon. AI is not going to replace us. Or, you know, this is never going to work. We're a human-only business, whatever They say whatever they say, and they stop doing the little things. And before they know it, they don't even realize it, they've started to slide down the right side of the circle. And they start sliding, they keep sliding until, lo and behold, they're right back to where they started— pain. That's why we gain weight and lose weight and gain weight and lose weight. That's why we have successful relationships and then unsuccessful relationships. And there's seasons of marriage, right? This is like the price cycle controls entire civilizations and cultures, relationships, and lives. And the quicker you see, okay, where am I, my business, whatever that thing is on this circle, the quicker you can say, all right, I need to start to do those little things. And if you're doing, if you're focused always on coming from a place and a healthy place, what I mean, a healthy place of scarcity, like, hey, we know if we stop doing the little things, we will lose this momentum. So we cannot stop. We cannot stop the weekly sales training, the role plays. We cannot stop, you know, the innovation, whatever that thing is. Now we stay in that place of prosperity and we don't slip.

All right. Back to the original question. Would you rather negotiate with AI or with a person?

I think I'd rather negotiate with an AI.

Yeah. I think about when you think of, talked about the pride cycle, which is incredible. Uh, and just history repeating itself as I, as I listened to you and thinking back through my life, um, you know, your ego sometimes has multiple faces. So if you're in front of a salesperson and you start negotiating super hard, you know, at some point, is it, is it a, is it a hit on your ego that you can't afford the thing? Right? And some people would say, I can't afford the thing, where other people, it's a hit on their ego that they don't get the best price, that they get taken advantage of, or they overpay, or things like that. So, you know, when you're dealing with an AI, I'm thinking, this is all algorithmic. I've just gotta find my way to the bottom. It, it's not gonna pass judgment on me. It's not, it's not gonna care. I'm never gonna see this thing again. So now I just have to work the algorithm to make sure that I'm trying to get to the bottom. And you know, when I'm comfortable, I've gotten to the bottom and I've walked away and then I'm gonna get the best price. But it's, it's a lot harder to do cuz I'm an empath, right? I like people and I like, that's me. I, I like the guy selling me the car and I'm thinking, and I actually want them to make money. Yeah. I, I'm like, I'm like, you know, this guy needs this money more than I do. And I'm, so I'm gonna, I'm beating this guy up and I'm probably slicing his commission or whatever. And but like at the end of the day, I want them to win. And, and so, you know, that gets in my way sometimes negotiating on things like that. Home services can, whatever it is. So, you know, especially if it's a, let's say it's a painter and I know that he owns the business and I know that it's a small business, you know, and it's like this guy's out here hustling. I know they do good work, that type of thing. So yeah, I think I'd, I think I'd rather negotiate with an AI or I mean, ideally it would be great if everything was CarMax'd, if we could Chick-fil-A everything from a service perspective and CarMax it from a pricing and negotiation perspective.

There's an argument that's where we're headed, Jeff.

I think it is. I think it is. And they say that we're going to be in the most abundant time that we've ever seen. There's going to be more productivity. The cost of providing services is going to go lower. It's just a matter of like, what's everybody going to do with their time and And, you know, how's everybody gonna make their ends meet?

Well, to your point, and this is why all, like, you know, in the news right now, and I don't know when this pod comes out, but there's, there's been all these, you know, Eric Schmidt did a commencement address and he got booed hardcore. And you've seen these others, you know, you got these college graduates The majority of which have been cheating with AI are now booing when somebody mentions AI, which in and of itself makes them hypocrites. And I'm okay saying that because it's true. Yeah. Um, if you've used AI and then you boo AI, that makes you, to me, very, very hypocritical. And the thing is, every single person is going to be begging to use the benefits of AI in the future. Case in point, it's already started to identify cures for the incurable diseases. This is where we're headed. We're going to see a period of, of, of health, longevity, and wellness that we've never seen. And for those people that are, are, are begging for it to go away or begging for it to slow down, they're also going to be begging for that cure for that, you know, special form of cancer, that rare form of cancer, you know, for their loved one. And, you know, I would trade in every speaking gig I've ever had if we could find that cure right now. We've all been touched. We've all lost somebody directly, indirectly from these types of diseases, certainly from cancer. It's very privileged and selfish to say, I don't— I don't want to find the cure for these things. Outrageously privileged. Any You know, like 90, you know, basically, you know, 99% of Africa, if they had the use of AI right now, AI right now, the way it could change a child's life, the opportunity it could give them to say, I don't want them to have those benefits because, you know, you're in a, you know, you're in a prosperous country, I think is just comes from a place of outrageous privilege. I just don't have any tolerance for it. Now, Are people going to use AI the wrong way? Are there some potential drawbacks? Yeah, tell me one thing that hasn't had its set of drawbacks over the course of time. You know, it doesn't exist. There's always got to be a yin and yang. That's a universal law. It works that way, folks. So that has to happen. But to sit there and say, let's just shut it off. And as I'm watching, you know, everyone is losing their mind right now about these data centers. So do you understand the economic impact that a data center will have on your local town at this point and what it could mean for prosperity for your town? First of all, all the new ones are recycling the water. So stop saying that it's a water problem. And then from an energy perspective, all you do is you make them supplement so that your energy bill is not changing, which is easy to do. And it's been done in many areas at this point, you know. And so it's like, why, you know, the agitation, the rage I just— it's just amazing to me, but it just shows that people are fine when everybody else's identity gets threatened. But when their own identity gets threatened, all of a sudden it's like, "Well, wait, wait a second. I was fine with the fax machine repairman, that he got nuked, but I'm not okay that, you know, me as a graphic designer, that I might have to do a pivot." I'm like, "Well, that's not the way that the world works." None of us are, in this context, of careers. I don't think any of us are victims. I have two software companies. There's a pretty solid chance AI is going to nuke them at some point in time. I accept that. That's totally fine because I am here for what's on the other side of that, and I'm going to continue to do what I can do and control what I can control.

Yeah, talk about Africa and the, the things that AI could do there. I had Jeff Hoffman on and he said that they're getting not tens of thousands, but hundreds and hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurial pitches to his global entrepreneurship organization coming out of Africa due to AI, because these people now have tools that they never— and it's— and they don't need, you know, it's not like they've got the advanced tools that sucking all the power from the data center. I mean, just the basic tools to set up a business and to understand what to do. And they're, they're creating entrepreneurship in those places, you know, faster because the need is so great. And then Elon Musk said something about this longevity. I had, I had Anthony Gisler on who's, who's launching with Gary Brecka that ultimate longevity concept. And then, you know, I heard Elon Musk, you know, he said, he says if you live another 5 years, you'll live to 120 based on what AI is doing and the thing and the diseases. Yeah.

Escape longevity velocity.

Yeah. And you know, Elon Musk, he said, he said, I'm not even gonna worry about solving longevity. He goes, because I think it's, and I'm probably misquoting this, but it, the way I heard it was it's too easy. And he goes, the reason I know that is because your right arm and your left arm don't age at different rates, which tells me it's all software.

Which, which is correct. And now they're— now that they have gotten it really to us, aging to a cellular level. Yeah, it's so extraordinarily exciting. And so when I hear people just yelling and screaming about the— about something that they know so little about, I just, you know, I just, I, I have a hard time understanding it, Jeff. I really, really do.. But I can tell you what, in my house, as for me and my house, we are quite excited for the future, and we know we have to do our part in this. But it's a wonderful, wonderful time to be alive. I feel so blessed that, you know, I am alive during this very unique time. Time in history where we're going to see things that we never dreamt possible in a short period of time, a very short period of time.

Can you imagine how lucky we are to have started with corded phones and 3 channels on the TV and to see everything that's changed? And now, you know, depending on how long we live, what we're going to see, we, we're, we are going to see the greatest rate of change in human history in our lifetime.

No question. Amazing. And we're already, we're already seeing it, you know, every other week there's another update, you know, to these Frontier Labs. Uh, you know, it's just, it's, it's just getting the singularity. It's just, it's happening faster and faster and I'm here for it. I really am. Awesome.

Markus, this has been awesome. I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much for being on.

Yeah, me too. Love it. Thank you, Jeff.

I have a curveball and a fastball if you want to play.

I love a good sport.

I know you've got, you got a gaggle of kids over there and you've got grandkids. I imagine there's wiffle balls flying around. Um, here's the curveball. Gun to your head, you have to start a business in the next 30 days. It can't be something that you're currently in. Where do you see the biggest opportunity in the market?

Well, I'm going to cheat a little bit. I would— I'd get into HVAC. I would love to get into that space. I think there's just so— there's just so much opportunity there. And I think, it's just a strong, strong industry. So I love, I love home services actually. I think they're really, really strong. Uh, something like HVAC does, uh, you know, it does a really solid job against, um, the economy, the dips, you know, it's like it, it withstands that pretty well. So I've always wanted to, uh, I've always wanted to start an HVAC company. So it's, that's why I'm answering that.

Yeah, I'm 0 for 1 with HVAC, but you know, I might try it again. I might try it again. Lack of focus leads to a lack of greatness.

And so true, man.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right. You've already told us where to get in touch with you. We will put that in the show notes. And here's the last question. Fastball straight down the middle. If you had one sentence to make an impact in somebody's life, what would that be?

Yeah. I'd quote from, from Jim Rohn, to have, to have more than you've got, you've gotta become more than you are. Pure and simple.

Perfectly said. Thank you for being on. My pleasure. All right. I'm Jeff Dudan. We've been here with the incredible Marcus Sheridan on The Unemployable Podcast. Thanks for listening.