Joe Apfelbaum Talks to Eric Thorsen 183 LinkedIn Live - Joe Apfelbaum

I have the wonderful Eric Thorson here. We are live on LinkedIn and I'm so excited to have you here, Eric. Welcome to the program. Thank you. So I love speaking to my connections and learning about their goals for 2025. One of the things that I'm very big into is networking and building relationships and getting to know people. And I feel like a lot of people, they connect with other people on LinkedIn, but they don't actually build a relationship. They don't actually get to know the person and learn about them. So I want to kind of educate people on how to be able to properly get to know somebody and learn about them. When I tell people have a conversation, it's usually a conversation that is usually not very productive. So I want to make sure that our conversation today is productive, that people can kind of also learn from the conversation. Um, so I want to start off just asking you, just a little rapport, how you been? Mm-hmm. Wow. Wow. Wow. Love that. Speaking of generative AI, I wanna leave you a recommendation on your LinkedIn profile, and I'm gonna use I'm gonna show everyone how I do Evvy AI. So I click on your profile, I click on the relationship. So I'm gonna say that, um, Eric was a client of mine. My position at the time, do you want me to leave you one for founder of Vision Catalyst or CEO of Thoratech? Vision Catalyst. Okay, great. And then I'm gonna click on the Evvy AI icon inside, inside the recommendation box. There's a little icon that allows me to leave you a recommendation. It just makes it really easy for me to— Select my persona. In this case, I'm going to select the Joe Apfelbaum persona, and then I'm going to use a little microphone to say something about you. Eric is an incredible leader and visionary, and he helps so many people with his incredible coaching. He has so many years of experience, multiple decades of running his own business and being successful. It's my pleasure to recommend Eric to any CEO that wants to be able to take their business to a whole new level. He takes the time to really get to understand your business and gives you practical advice to take action that produces results. Okay, so now instead of me saying all that, I had the AI type it up, but then the AI will optimize all that. And I'm going to press insert and it just typed up. It said, I had the pleasure of working with Joe Apfelbaum. Oh boy. Okay, it didn't say anything that I wanted it to say. Okay, let's, let's, um, let's redo that right now. I'm gonna do that again. I'm gonna go here and I'm gonna say Eric is amazing. He is a great coach and leader. Okay, now I'm gonna change it to GPT-4o to see if it makes a difference and it knows that I'm talking about you instead of talking about me. Okay, there you go. Now it worked. Um, so I changed from GPT-4 4 Mini to GPT-4o, and it wrote down exactly what I wanted it to say. I had the pleasure of working with Eric when he's the CEO and founder of Vision Catalyst. He's a founder and coach, blah, blah, blah. His expertise in guiding scaling is truly impressive. His leadership style is inspiring and effective, and blah, blah, blah. Now I'm gonna press insert, send, and now you have to, from your end, Eric, you have to go to your profile and you actually have to accept that recommendation. Because if you don't accept it, it's not gonna show up on your profile, and that will be the first Recommendation you ever received on your profile. How does that feel? So what you want to do is for your connections, and I don't know if you, if you know this, but for your connections, you can go to their profile, click on the more button on their profile, and leave them a recommendation. And when you do that, you get placement on their profile. So getting placement on someone's profile is pretty epic. Because now you're getting exposure on other people's profile. Not only are you doing them a favor and they're feeling good about it, but you're also getting placement on their profile. So I do recommend finding somebody that you really appreciate in 2024 that has made an impact for you, that you've networked with, that you've built a relationship with, maybe that you've used their software or something. Can you think of anybody that you could leave a recommendation for? Okay. Yeah. So think of somebody that has impacted you or that you've impacted in the past year and go ahead, that you're connected to on LinkedIn and they're active on LinkedIn. You want someone that you, you're connected to cuz you can't leave someone a recommendation unless you're connected to them. Technically it doesn't work. Um, so then go to their profile and, and do that. I'm not sure if you left me one yet, but if you didn't leave me one yet, is an opportunity, is an opportunity for you to do it and you can use Evvy AI just to make things easier and faster for you the way that I kind of did it. And if it doesn't work right away, that's one of the things I want people to know, that sometimes AI is not gonna work right away. And if it doesn't work right away, that's okay. Just go back and do it again. Um, sometimes it'll screw up. Even, even my AI, it's not gonna be perfect. ChatGPT, sometimes you tell it to do something and it does something else. It just, that's, that's the nature of it. And if you expect it to get it right the first time and you get irked when it doesn't, You're not gonna be able to build a relationship with it and use it because you're gonna be so upset about the fact that it didn't work the first time. Yeah, yeah, it's here to help you and assist you, not to replace you. That's the key. 100%. 100%. Yeah, it doesn't sound like me. It's not what I want to say or whatever. Or even the comment that I left you— I just left you a comment on your recent post. I removed half the comment. I just left the first sentence. But in order for me to have to think about what to say, that takes up a lot of mental capacity, and I could have the AI be able to do the mental capacity instead of me doing it. As a matter of fact, I don't know if you know this, but I'm constantly creating Google Chrome extensions with AI. And in 2025, one of my goals is to be able to add a significant amount of functionality to Evie AI. And we launched this Black Friday, we launched something called Evie AI Pro. And we have a holiday deal going on right now with Evie AI Pro where we're offering $20,000 worth of training and software and support over the course of the next year for less than $1,000. We offer tons and tons and tons of value. And anyone that bought Evie AI, they get prorated. So they end up paying a lot less also. So you get $20,000 worth of training and data and information and support. And we also give you access to a CRM for an entire year. We give you like GoHighLevel access with marketing automation and tons of other stuff. So what's a holiday deal I want all of my connections to know about? What's one thing you want all of your connections to know about in 2025? And this is important. The reason I'm asking you this question is because most people are not meeting with their connections and asking them what their goals are. And I want people to know. Yeah. How important it is to know the goals of your connections. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm having artificial intelligence, uh, look at your last 60 posts right now. To identify your most popular posts, and I can sort it by reactions, by comments. And then what I can do is I can go ahead and download all of your posts. So I'm going to export all your posts to a CSV file. I don't know if you know what a CSV file is, but it's, it's essentially a comma-separated, like, spreadsheet type of thing. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to drop it into Claude. Have you heard of Claude? Okay, I'm going to drop it into Claude, and I'm going to tell Claude To review, um, review these 60 posts and tell me the themes that Eric talks about in a practical way, and give me 10 fun facts about him that I can use when Networking and topics that I can ask him about when building a relationship. Okay, so I just uploaded the 60 posts to artificial intelligence, your last 60 posts. I used the Chrome extension that I built with Claude that I make accessible to everyone in our community, where I just load up all your posts and your recent activity, and then it pulls the last whatever, whatever post it has available, it pulls out and then it gives you author name, date, content, how many reactions you had, how many comments you have, and it gives you all the content of all the posts. So here's what it told me. You want me to— you want to see what it told me? So check this out. I'm going to pull up your video here while I'm looking at this. Okay. So main themes is leadership development and delegation, work-life balance, AI technology adoption, personal growth, business strategy, executive coaching, mental health, and mindfulness. Those are your 7 top— topics. Then it says fun facts about you. Started your career after meeting someone in the music store who inspired you to get into engineering. You've been working with election coverage software for 24 years through your company ThorTech Solutions. You practice yin yoga with his wife every Friday evening as a way to transition on weekends. Your wife is from mainland China. Wow. He is both guitar and digital music enthusiast. You use a Boox Node Ear 4C for digital note-taking, previously by reMarkable. Look at the detail, baby. The detail, you know, like the detail. Like if you were a stalker, you would have so much fun here. The detail. Wow. You enjoy walking Rockefeller Preserve, um, and visiting Star Barn Center near Manhattan. You worked with Warren Mitofsky, who invited Uh, who introduced— invented poll, um, exit polling. And you've been using executive coaching for 15 years. You're a member of EO. And here are some good conversation topics for us to kind of chat about. Uh, music, ask about his guitar playing and digital, uh, music interests. Technology evolution, discuss his journey in the software engineering and current AI trends. Uh, election technology, life-work integration, practice maintaining balance. Um, leadership journey, coaching experience, outdoor activities, digital production, productivity tools, networking strategies, and family life. These are all topics that I can discuss with you. What would you ask your last 60 posts? If you can, if you can ask, if you had an AI that was built around your last 60 posts, and I can do the last 100, 200, 500, I could do every post you ever had. But if you were gonna ask a question to your last 60, posts. And, and everyone listening to this right now, guys, let me know what question you would ask your last 60 posts. But, but Eric, tell me, what do you— what do you think you would want to ask your last 60 posts? Okay, okay. Um, so the ones that had the most comments According to AI was the stop losing precious moments. It's amazing how small moments can make a wake-up call. Years ago, you were watching a show with your son. He leaned over and asked me a question about one of the characters. I opened his mouth answering and realized he had no idea what was happening in the story. Okay, so that, that's that one. AI isn't a buzzword. It's a disruptive force of reshaping industries, just like cloud computing once did. Remember AWS was introduced? It removed barriers, opened doors, blah, blah, blah. So that one was pretty popular. And then the other one was the power of gratitude. Early morning flood of thoughts swirling around in your feet, missed a deadline, blah blah blah blah blah. There's a science behind it. So that those are the top three posts that you've had. But in terms of like you know getting to know your post emotional moments, it's your personal story about watching TV with your son because it resonates with parents struggling with like life balance. It shows vulnerability. Number two would be barefoot blinded over broken glass. Your description of early entrepreneur fears, capturing anxiety and isolation and blah blah blah. And then working nights and weekends, the struggle of missing family time, constant stress about business problems, feeling trapped in operational details. The superstar engineer story, the pain of watching top performers struggle after promotion. Related, showing how you know you know what I love about all this imposter syndrome, the yuck in business, the stuck in your business feeling. The fear of financial transparency, the networking anxiety, the gap feeling, the emotional drain of feeling how far you still need to go, the morning mental overload. You know, the crazy thing is that the AI is able to do this in seconds, be able to analyze your entire thing, which would take a marketing guy hours, in seconds. I also told it to pull out your top most engaging hooks. And it gave me your top 10 most engaging hooks. And by the way, the, the one on top is, why does it feel like your business is running in place when it should be leaping forward? And the second one is, I'm not best, uh, I'm not the best at not needing validation. Just ask everyone I've told. And then you just opened your eyes and the circus is in town between your ears. And AI's not gonna take your job or your business, but people and businesses using AI might. And sorry, that's not just my thing. That's just not my thing. What's stopping you from making a shift? Feeling like you're chasing revenue, but profits are elusive. 6 heads are better than one. Eat your biggest frog first and don't wait another Halloween. So those are, those are your top hooks. You know what's crazy about this, Eric, is I learned so much about you by analyzing your posts and Evvy AI Pro is gonna have this feature where you push a button and all of a sudden you get all these insights from your connections' posts just like in seconds. You'll be able to just download all their posts if they have posts and be able to have AI analyze it and give you information. And so kind of, I'm exploring now, so I use all these tools to help me be able to explore and learn about people. I can manually read your posts, but it's a lot easier to have AI like Claude be able to just read the post for me and give me all the insights quickly, even while we're having this conversation. So you see, I'm talking to you right now, having a regular conversation, learning about you during the call, and then going to use that information to be able to shape our call and to be able to shape our relationship. Isn't that interesting? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 100%. I love that. Somebody told me on LinkedIn Live that they could hear me, but they can't hear my guest. It's good to know. It's good to know 30 minutes in. It's good to know 30 minutes in that somebody can't hear me, um, that somebody can't hear my guest. I wonder if everyone can't hear my guest, um, because we're definitely, we're definitely streaming computer audio. Let me just double check to see, um, to see the— that's fine. You are recording everything anyway on your end, so we could definitely take your audio and repurpose it with your audio. Um, Let me just see. Advanced audio. Enable mix minus. Now you should be able to hear him. Can you hear me now? I think so. I think he could hear you now. What happens is I did not mix your audio into the output. Although I have everything, we have everything on your— all the audio is saved on your cloud. I'll send you a link to the recording. Send me the link to the recording. And also, Everything is being typed up in Otter, so we definitely could repurpose everything. And it's an opportunity for us to do another call, do another LinkedIn Live. Um, and this time possibly a scheduled LinkedIn Live. Yep. Uh, for us to be able to kind of review everything. You know, I'm gonna share my screen with you to kind of show you something. I did, did you look at my screen yet or not yet? Uh, no, let me do that now. Okay. I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll just share my screen on your Zoom so you can kind of see what I'm doing. Great. So this is, this is the extension I created, just FYI. Do you see the extension on the right side? Yes. So this is the extension I created, um, that allows me to be able to hit count posts and collect. And it does this also on the feed. So if I'm on the feed, I'm gonna just delete all these posts from here. I'm gonna go ahead and hit clear all. You sure you wanna clear all? Yes. So if I'm on the feed and I wanna be able to collect the posts that are on the feed, I can hit collect posts and it'll go ahead and collect all the posts that are on the feed right here. So if I wanna scroll down and just load a bunch of posts on the feed, I could just keep scrolling down and loading posts. You see this? Mm-hmm. And then I could hit count posts. It'll count all the posts, the 19 posts from the feed, and I can hit collect posts. And now it just collected all the posts from the feed. So if I wanna look at these later, sometimes you go on the feed and you lose all the posts that were there, and you wanna be able to kind of go through them one by one and do something with them later. You don't wanna lose them. You ever refreshed a feed and then you lost a post? Has that ever happened to you? Yes. That's annoying, isn't it? Yes, it is. So now it'll kind of save everything that you've seen on the feed. I can have it do it automatically, or, um, you can hit collect posts and then you can be able to see the posts, see the content, see the most popular things on the feed that are happening right over here. You see this one over here? This is a promoted post. And it has 500 reactions. That's interesting. That's something to learn about. Very interesting. Um, but even this Nat Berman post over here, I'm sure you know who that is. I do. I'm gonna click on that and it kind of just opens up, opens up his post and I can basically pull all of his posts in here and see all of his recent posts and learn all about him or just drop a comment for him using Evie AI. With a click of a button, just like that. I'm gonna hit— you nailed— you hit the nail on the head. I'm gonna say, why not let AI handle it? You see the way I deleted most of the comment and then I just added that? Um, but that's, that's the idea. Do you wanna, do you wanna do a— I'm gonna stop sharing my screen for a second. Do you want, for those that are tuning in, let me see if we have anyone that's even tuning in right now. That's watching live. Guys, if you're on this thing live right now, go ahead and leave a comment letting me know that you're watching the live. Let me see what, um, let me know if you can hear him now. Let me know if you can hear him now. That was Glenn saying he couldn't hear you. All right, so how would I find the LinkedIn Live now? I'm on your— Okay, so in order for you, in order for you to find the LinkedIn Live, what you need to do is Just go to my profile. There. And then click on see recent activity. You know how you see the recent activity on someone's profile? No. Okay, let me just share my screen and kind of show you. Should I share my screen or should I just show— yeah, I'll share my screen on Zoom so you can kind of see. Here, let me teach you how to do that. So you go to my profile, right? Yep. You go to linkedin.com/in/joeapfelbaum. That's my profile. When you're on my profile, you scroll down to a section called Activity, right? You see it says Activity, 49,000 followers. You see that? Yep. Yep. Under Activity, do you see it says Show All Posts? There's 3 pieces of activity, and then under that it says Show All Posts. Can you see that on top of the word Experience? Yes. When you click on show all posts, it shows you a list of all of my recent posts. And the most recent one is the one that I'm on right now, which is a live. I see it. So if you want to repost that one, you just click on the little repost button on the bottom right, and then you hit repost. Now what we can do is we can do a condensed version of this. I can stop the live. Watch this. This is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna stop the live and I'm gonna go live again. So we have a new version of the live.