Full Throttle Leaders - Michael Becker - Episode 4

We're going to record this baby right now. We got Michael Becker, who I've known since 2006.

Yeah, man, long time. 20 years.

20 years. Um, I met him when I was at Tech Station. He was at iLoop. He was heading up all the Basically, that was— wasn't that your company or something too?

Yeah, I, I found iLoop Mobile, and I was also one of the co-founders of the Mobile Marketing Association.

Yeah.

Uh, and helped run that for 10 years. And, you know, and really was that— like you, was that the, you know, the founding of the what, what is now the mobile marketing industry in the United States? We were there, we were there at the very beginning. I remember when I first started my company in May of 2000 '04, you know, roughly 500 million text messages have been sent in the entire month of May of 2004. And now we're doing well over a billion a day.

Billion a day?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, you know, the, the industry is shaped and changed, and, um, and there's a— just the world in that 20 years is similar but different. And what I'm pretty excited about in talking with you about today is just like how the different visionary threads after 20 years are finally coming together.

Well, tell me what you do now, what your role is, and what kind of got you excited to do a podcast?

Well, let's start with the excited to do a podcast. My core nature is I'm an educator. And I'm also this archetype of one of my advisors told me one time, you know what you are? You're a satellite. And I'm like, what do you mean? And he's like, you're sitting up there in stationary orbit, looking over the horizon and seeing what's coming. And you take in those signals and then broadcast them down to individuals or groups that need to know. And that's what I do for a living. And similarly to that, Doug Busk, another person from the mobile marketing days, he had labeled me a profit-motivated intellectual. Right. And so the combination of those two is really what I am. And so I am currently the CEO and founder of an agency by the name of Identity Praxis. And I've been running this agency since 2014. All right. Yeah, 2014. So it's been about 11, 12 years. And praxis is the Greek term for putting theory into practical application. So when I founded the company, my whole goal is that how do we take identity and a subset of that is really data. And how do we essentially— how do we take identity and data theory and put it into practical application into society? And so really what I'm doing is I'm advising companies at that intersection of self-sovereign identity and data. And we'll explain all these terms in a minute, but self-sovereign identity and data, personal knowledge management, artificial intelligence, strategic marketing. And those four pillars rest on a foundation of education. And that education is all about helping people understand not just what it is, but why it is, how these pieces are coming together, and how do we profitably pull these pieces together to be able to solve people's problems, solve companies' problems. And that's what I'm doing today.

So who do you help now? Like, what instance of a client? It doesn't have to be exactly the name of the client, but what have you helped them do and what was the ROI?

Yeah, and so, and there's a handful of different types of projects I'm working on. So, given the current economy, you know, I've been working on a variety of different projects. I'm both an individual contributor for, you know, helping deliver specific projects, and I am advising companies. So, for example, last summer I was help writing a, ghostwriting a book on cybersecurity. And cloud computing and how the whole underlying infrastructure around cloud computing and how we effectively secure it is a complete mess. And we really need to fundamentally change how we're properly and effectively securing and managing data. So, I do a lot of ghostwriting work and I do a lot of research in that regard. I'm also advising companies on— and this is one of my primary lines of business right now. Advising individuals, companies, and their executives and their products on how to add a digital twin layer to their product experience. So in other words, how do you add that AI-mediated layer so that you can have a public digital twin representing either your company, your executives, or your products so that your customers can actually speak with them? And that's real. No, no, it's a little different. So if you think it's the overarching kind of more industry term today is what we'll called digital twin. So, it's in other words, how do we have this AI, this public AI representing you? And, actually, on the side, and when we're done with this podcast, you and I should have another call and I'll help you set up your digital twin.

Okay.

You know, and so, essentially, what it will do is you will put that twin out there and people, rather than talking to you, they talk to your twin. And, if you're interested, depending, like, for example, some of my clients are authors. So, if they're working, if they've published a book, they train their twin on their knowledge set. And so that people are reading the book can actually then be, you know, asking questions in real time with the twin as they're going through the book.

It's almost like ChatGPT, Michael ChatGPT. Yeah, yeah.

No, it's not even— it is exactly that. It is having your personal digital AI, your chat, you know, your language model, your trained language model of Claude, ChatGPT, whatever, Gemini. It's Michael Filato AI, and it's responding to all of the questions and all of the information that you've trained it on. And then companies, if they want, they can set those up as a public twin. So it's free, it's informational, it's marketing, it's biz dev, or in terms of consultants and thought leaders, they can slap a paywall in front of it. And say, look, if you want to talk to me, it's $500 an hour. If you want to talk to my twin, it's $250 an hour.

Right?

And then once you've kind of gotten the base level information you want, then you can upsell it. Another use case of that is if you want to, you know, it's a great tool for qualifying, you know, from a lead sales perspective. Talk to my twin first. And if you actually then get to a point where you think, you know, there's some chemistry and my service offerings align with yours, then, then I'll talk to you. So it's a really effective way for kind of interjecting that into the funnel. And all of this stuff is so new. So partly what I'm— partly what I'm doing is building out all the processes and practices on how to help companies set that up.

Yeah, that SaaStr conference that I talked to you about, both of those people that run it, they have their identical twin Yeah. You can ask some questions and it has libraries of all the stuff they ever talked about.

Yeah, yeah, it's exactly that. And so, that's a lot of the work I'm doing. I also train people on personal knowledge management. And I've developed a methodology over the last 4 or 5 years called the 5 C's of Knowledge Management. And so, I teach companies how to curate and manage content, data, knowledge, And interestingly enough, and I've just realized over the last couple of months, my 5 C's of knowledge management framework that I've developed actually is the ideal structure and framework for training in AI because of the nature of the way that the content and the data works. And so that's been really— that's really been a fascinating thing. So as I said earlier in the beginning of the call, what I'm finding is the last kind of 20 years' worth of my professional and work interests, those threads are all starting to converge. And that, and then that is really exciting.

What, what would you— how would you look back on the mobile days? And are you doing anything in mobile? Because I, I'm not, I'm not doing anything with SMS or, or any type of stuff. I went from SMS into, into kind of a social and then back into HR tech. Now I'm doing top of funnel lead generation using email automation, LinkedIn automation, basically podcasts and roundtables as ways to kind of get the interest and scraping other people's events. Like, you have 15,000 connections. I can add in my connections to go, hey, we're doing a, we're doing an AI digital twin roundtable, we want you to be part of it. And so you just give a little sprinkle of what they're going to learn. But anything that they want to engage, they have to hire us. Yeah, we should talk about too, as well.

But Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So, on the mobile stuff, I'm very, very active in it. And I'm going to start getting more— I've been a thought leader of mobile for 25, 30 years. You know, I actually— I started in mobile in 1996. I gave my first all-media mobile keynote in 1999. And I'll never forget it. It was my first— I've done about probably conservatively 2,000 keynotes, 2,000 presentations, webinars, more if you add in all the press briefings over the last 30 years. But my first one ever was in 1999, and I was giving a talk on what we called all media messaging. And we had a Palm V on a 9800 baud OmniSky sled doing real-time whiteboarding and image transfer via AT&T telecoms, tell you. And I'm up on stage demonstrating how you can do all media messaging influenced with presence and identity in real time on mobile. And I said, and this is what you can do today given today's bandwidth and today's processes and devices. Imagine what you're going to be able to do in the years from now when we have these present-based messaging, when we have this ability to do real-time video and real-time duplex and all that. I was literally laughed off the stage. People are like, "That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. It's never going to happen." And they're yanking me off the stage and putting the straitjacket on me. And I'm like, "Really? It's going to happen." You know, and then fast forward, you know, fast forward, here we are. You know, so, I've been involved in this mobile thing from '96. What I'm doing in mobile today, so I advise companies on strategic mobile marketing across the board. I teach, I've had a— I'm in my 14th edition of my textbook on mobile marketing, Mobile Marketing Essentials, that I published through with my co-author Mary Beth McCabe. And I teach mobile marketing at National University and Cal Poly. And I just got a contract with the Association of National Advertisers last night actually. And I'll be creating a foundation and fundamentals of mobile marketing course for the Association of National Advertisers. So—

What's two things that you've learned in the last 6 months that you're like, "Wow, that was incredible learning." didn't work, but I learned from it, or hey, I figured something out, whether it's tech, strategies, tactics, or just talking to somebody, and you're like, well, that was mind-blowing.

Forget the last 6 months, I'll tell you the last 48 hours. So I had Michael Lamb from Native Message guest speak on my mobile marketing class just this last week. And Native Message is one of the preeminent, if not the preeminent, RCS messaging platform right now in the US. So that's why we're having this conversation, because I'm talking to you about this newfangled thing, right? So RCS stands for Rich Communication Services, and it is— by any other name, it's SMS 2.0. It's the next generation of messaging. And the RCS protocol started— and, you know, this is where I'm going to get the pontificated teacher in me. The RCS protocol was initially started to be developed around 2006. It took 10 years for the GSMA and the industry to get a universal RCS protocol that could be adopted by the carriers. So in 2016, they launched that, and it failed miserably.

I see, like, text come through from Android that says RCS.

Correct, correct, correct. Yeah, and this is where we're getting to it. So, and then in 2019, Google stood up and said, look, we need to get more messaging happening. And so, hey carriers, rather than retrofitting your SMSes, your messaging infrastructure, we're gonna take Google Messenger, slap an RCS layer around it, and we will be the messaging infrastructure for RCS worldwide. And so that's what Google essentially did in 2019. And then once they did that, that then allowed the carriers to offload all their CapEx infrastructure on setting up next-generation messaging infrastructure. And they've essentially put their messaging infrastructure into the Google RCS messaging cloud. And then they took—

Which is basically Google Messaging or Google Voice?

It's Google Messaging, but with the RCS protocol wrapper. And I'll explain what that means in just a minute. And then that took another 5, 6 years for all of the carriers to adopt it, and most importantly, for Apple to adopt it. So Apple didn't adopt the RCS protocol until September 2024. And then it took another year for them to actually get it from P2P RCS into ADP RCS. Application-to-Person RCS. And so now, as of this moment, you— we are— all of the carriers, all 90% of the devices out there in the world have now interoperable RCS messaging. And the carriers in the marketplace are now starting to roll out RCS messaging campaigns. Now, here's where RCS differs from SMS or MMS as we traditionally knew in messaging. And it's going to fundamentally shift It has the potential to fundamentally shift in so many ways the future of how businesses will interact with their customers. So to think about RCS, what you want to think about it is it's SMS plus email plus a website plus AI all coming together and living in the inbox on the mobile phone.

Wow.

And essentially what it allows you to do up to 8,000 characters in any particular individual message. It allows chatbot-like experiences. You can have up to 10 carousel cards that can be swiped left and right. It allows for rich media, high-res rich video, API integration for like connecting into the company's backend networks. So anything you can do on a website, anything you can do in an email, anything you can do as an SMS can all be combined together and doing in a persistent streaming conversation in that user's inbox. And there's 3 categories of RCS. One is the basic message. The next one is— no, yeah, simple message, basic message, and then conversational commerce. And the endgame, if a company really deploys RCS well, you'll never need a mobile app again. You may actually never need a website again. Because if you think about what mobile is really about, and because now we have today 5G, soon There's going to be 6G phones. These phones are essentially supercomputers in people's hands. One thing we need to realize and recognize is the individual has now become the point of sale. The individual is the point of engagement. The individual is the point of discovery. The world now revolves around me. I have a strategy, I call it the celestial orbit of products. And it's all about how do you view your ecosystem and an industry actually circumventing the individual. And when you start grokking and getting that, companies will have this one-to-one at-scale relationship with individuals in the messaging inbox on their phone. And websites, e-commerce sites, mobile apps, email, none of it's needed anymore. It's gonna fundamentally shift everything, and that's what's happening right now. And then when you add in the AI digital twin layer on top of that, game over.

So what is your ideal customer profile for people that want to hire you?

I do the spectrum. So an individual thought leader or author I'll work with all the way up to the Fortune 50 company. And it really— and again, if you think about the kind of the pillars of my interest and, you know, AI digital twins and helping companies add that mediation layer to their products and services. So in other words, it's basically how can we help our How can we enable our products to talk? How our products can actually have this ability to have their own voice, their own ability to interact with my customers. So I'm standing there in the grocery aisle, I scan that QR code on the product packaging, and I start having a conversation. What would you be good for? What meal should I cook you in? You know, if it's food in the grocery store. I'm standing there in the electronics shop, you know, what other— or I'm standing there in the— another example of digital twins are for like properties. I walk into the mall, I scan them, I scan the twin for the mall, and I say, hey, mall, there are 5 of us. We want to have dinner. We're really interested in sushi. 2 of us want to buy some shoes. Can you please make a reservation for us at such and such restaurant? Let us know what time we could be there, and then tell us which stores we can go to to go buy these shoes. And when they actually end up at the shoe store, then they can then start having a conversation with the shoes. You know, here are my feet size. You know, are you good for me or not? So helping anyone that is looking to enable their products to talk and adding that conversational layer to their products or services, that's what I do.

That's like CarGuru. You can go to a dealer mode and not have to put filters, hardtop, convertible. Yeah. So just talk to it and it's going to tell you where the car is at and it's going to tell you what the car versus asking some human that doesn't know what they're talking about.

Correct. Correct. So how— so anybody that's looking to understand how that works, I'm going to help you figure that out. The other thing is those companies that just generally need that generalized AI. So I'm in the process right now of creating a foundational AI course for Mack McKelvey's The Startup Marketer community. And, and so I've been really thinking, you know, like you mentioned, the thing of like agentic. I think what a lot of people realize is when we say AI, they don't really know what that means. And there's actually 2 or 3 different fundamental models that are AI to which Agentic connects into. And then you have all of the other pipelines and workloads that make AI actually work. So another aspect that I can do it beyond just helping you set up the twin and actually having a product or service layer of experience, you know, training your team, training your companies, helping you actually work with models either in the cloud or installing them locally on your machines, I help companies do that. Other areas again where people interact with me, I host an hour-and-a-half podcast every weekend on tools for thought and personal knowledge management. And so, I've been doing that now for about 5 years, have hundreds of videos on how do we actually understand how to think in the modern world. And, that's where my 5 Cs of knowledge management framework comes into play. And, I really help people basically wean themselves off of puppy mill software like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Google Docs, etc. Because those— and I just wrote a LinkedIn article about this yesterday, actually, that software unfortunately sticks you into what's called harmful premature formalization. You know, because like Word or Google Docs forces you to think linearly. Excel forces you to think tabularly. A presentation tool forces you to think in bullets. Whereas if you're working in a, what I'll call input software, if you're working in thinking software, you want to be able to separate your content independent of structure and appearance so that you can actually nurture your thinking, nurturing your content, and allow your ideas to incrementally formalize. And they only crystallize when you're actually ready to present something or to convey it. And when you actually rewire your brain and learn to think that way, the level, the capacity of your output exponentially grows. And so, I've been spending a lot of time helping and coaching and advising people on doing that. And then, another area of interest and where I advise companies is the— and this is what I recently finished my doctorate in. I don't know if I told you, I finally finished, after 21 years, I finally finished my doctorate. And I'm knee-deep in the area of self-sovereign identity and this idea of how do we enable people to cryptographically take control over their identity and their personal data. And there is a new— and this is what my doctorate is on— there's this new category of software called personal information management services, which are enabling people to start taking ownership and control of their data. So, I advise companies on how to adopt PIMS-like services in their environments so that they can instantly start becoming like, you know, at a minimum, just becoming compliant to the regulations. But more so establishing a new layer of trust with their customers and preparing for this new— because another thing that you should be aware of and something that I shouldn't say I've learned, it's something I, it's something I thought of. I'm not— let's say it's inspiration, an idea of mine, or I got it from somewhere else and I can't remember the attribution or source. But, over the last 20 years, with the augment in the introduction of this new concept, self-sovereign identity, and what's called a verified credential, which is a new layer to the internet and decentralized identifiers, what's going to end up happening is your email opt-in database, your SMS opt-in database, and this is going to take a handful of years for it to fully mature, is going to become less and less valuable. Because what's going to happen is when I opt in with your company, I'm going to be connecting with you via my, my cryptographic wallet, and I'm going to opt in with my cryptographic key. And so the next generation metric that brands will start measuring, monitoring is not how many opt-ins I have, but how many verified connections do I have? So the next generation metric for a business is the number of verified connections.

Almost like LinkedIn has verified profiles.

Yes. Yeah. Yes. But, but even then, that's LinkedIn. But even in that context, LinkedIn is owning that relationship.

Yeah.

In the future, I as an individual, Michael Filato, will own his connections.

But what's something that you want to leave us with? Because we're running out of time.

Yeah, the other, the other thing, how do they get a hold of you? Yeah, okay.

And, um, what's, uh, what's, what's, what's the reason why they should, they should give you a call or book a time with you?

Yeah, um, how they get a hold of me, best way to get a hold of me is at michael@identitypraxis.com, P-R-A-X-I-S dot com, or via LinkedIn. And my handle on LinkedIn is Privacy Shaman. And the one last thing I want to say in terms of what, you know, another important knowledge management on January 28th, the IEEE launched an initiative that's been underway now for 10 years called the My Terms. And what that means is individuals will now soon, with the next number of months, years, will be able to set their terms of service and their terms of access. So just like I will be able to control the opt-in through my verified connection, You, the business, will actually not be able to interact with me unless you actually agree to my terms of access and my terms of service. And if you do not agree to those terms, and if my AI agent catches you cheating, I'm going to cut you off and you're going to be legally liable. So, the whole market is flipping as we speak. So, why would you want to contact me? To be able to know what's happening, to be able to see what's coming over the horizon and understand how this is going to significantly change the nature of your business going forward. And the other way to think about this, you know, back in 1890, when Warren Bradys established the right to be left alone, the first legal precedent in the United States that people actually had a right to privacy. It's taken us 130 years, but that market is now here. And that model is now maturing. The tsunami alarm that was set off over 130 years ago, that wave has hit the shores of every economy worldwide. And as the water is receding, the topology and landscape of our economies is going to be forever different. And there is one country that's actually adopted it, Bhutan, sitting on the top of the world in between India, China, and Nepal. And I happened to speak at their first innovation forum last October. And then I did just an epic 70-mile trek through the Himalayas with me and a guide. It was just fantastic. They're the first country in the world that actually has put in their legislation, in their constitution, that identity and data is actually the asset of the citizen. And if you take it, you could go to jail. Um, Europe is now in the process through the IDAS legislations rolling out that exact same type of legislation. And so within the next— now to the next 18 months, 480 million Europeans are going to have similar protections. California already has them. You've got Utah establishing the similar right, and there's 5 or 6 other states. Yeah, like the— like the CCPA. Yeah, then GDPR, but even more so. Cool. And Utah is just absolutely— is probably the leading state right now putting that in the United States. So why—

what— it's all kind of slopes a weeks ago. Yeah.

Yeah. So why you'd want to reach out to me is to understand all of this, understand that intersection between AI, personal data, self-sovereign identity, and marketing.

Well, everybody, I've known Michael Becker for— Dr. Michael Becker for—

Thank you. It took me 21 years. I appreciate that.

You should definitely reach out to him. Reach out to me, reach out to him, and we can give you more information about what he's doing. I'm going to play a little message from our sponsor. I mean, it's kind of funny that The sponsor is actually Full Throttle Full Auto Leads. I don't know how they got in here, but, uh, here they— here we go. Let me put this on.