AI Fear Mongering is the new marketing strategy

A big thing that is happening right now is that everybody figured out that AI fear mongering gets infinite distribution, okay? So you have to remember there's a joke in the marketing world that everything is great until the marketers show up. Because marketers ruin everything. Like, platforms are like special little ecosystems. And then as soon as the marketers show up, they figure out how to arbitrage the shit out of it. And then all of a sudden, it becomes something completely different, right? Like early Facebook ads. Like, elegant, really simple. Marketers find out, marketers show up, they ruin it. Like, they come up with every gray hat way to hack the system. Marketers ruin everything. And it is what it is. I'm a marketer. I say that you're always looking for the arbitrage opportunity, okay? You have to remember that, like, more and more. I'm not even opening social apps on my phone because everyone has figured out that if you make an article or you tweet something, or you make a video and it starts with insert new AI just launched, everyone is fucked. You instantly, you instantly go viral, right? And so I think it's important to have that context and recognize that just because a lot of people are saying that doesn't necessarily mean that that's a reflection of reality. First point. Okay, second point. There was a really interesting graphic going along with this that went viral in the past week or two, and it showed like a bunch of lines of dots, and it basically said something like, each dot represents 3 million people or whatever it is. And it showed the number of people who are actually using AI and then the number of people who are actually using, like, any paid version of AI. So not just like, I talked to Chatbot for free one afternoon, but people who are actually, like, building with paid tools a paid subscription of ChatGPT or Claude, whatever it is, that number is so unbelievably small that we forget that even you being here asking that question, you are already in the 1% of 1%. The vast majority of people still haven't even opened an AI app on their phone or on their desktop. Okay? So you pair those two things together and you realize there is this very big avalanche style narrative that AI is eating everything. And the reality is a very, very small number of people are tapping into it. Okay, the third point of context, and then I'll tell you my answer. Yeah, thanks for dropping that graphic in the chat, Billy. There you go. The third piece of context I want to give is I might not. I'm in that weird, like, middle child zone. Where I'm like old enough, but still young, you know, I turned 36 this year. I am now getting to the point where I've witnessed lots of different hype cycles. I remember in 2013 when I got my first job at an advertising agency and I remember seeing all of the early influencers start to blow up on vine. And all of a sudden, if anyone was in marketing back then, you had companies that were spending tons and tons of money giving people like Jake Paul and Logan Paul 100 grand to make a six second video on Vine. And I remember going into the office that I was working at and there being that same. Like one side of the room was like, media's not going anywhere, Media will never change. And the other side of the room was like, these kids are about to like destroy big media as we know it and all the budgets are going to shift there. No one's going to spend money on all of these other things anymore. And ultimately the answer was it's somewhere in the middle. Like neither site or neither side was 100% correct. You know, same thing happened with mobile responsive websites. Same thing happened when crypto first came out and everybody said like, oh, banking infrastructure is going to just get destroyed overnight. Is that what happened? No, it's not what happened at all. The banks literally just have been lobbying, being like, actually you can't touch our industry. Like all of these hype cycles, we underestimate how long they take to implement themselves in society. Most, most people can't even create a, like a basic filter in Gmail. You think everyone's just going to like get up to speed on AI tomorrow? You know, it's not, that's not how it's going to happen. So those points of context are very important. My answer. And if the question is okay with all that in mind, still the world is moving in this direction. Where is the puck going and how can you skate in that direction? I don't know, about 10 plus years from now, but I think 10 years or less, the game is going to be all about velocity. Meaning your competitive advantage is your ability to do many of the things that you were doing before 10 times faster. Okay, And a very simple example is like which web designer gets hired? The web designer who takes six months for a project or a web designer who takes six hours for a project. It's the second one. Which person gets hired? The person who can create 10 ads in a week or the person who can create 10 ads a day. The second person, which person gets hired? The writer who can write A book every four years or the writer who can write a book every four hours. It's actually the same thing. It's just speed and velocity is going to go up by an exponential amount. And so I think the thing that everyone should be thinking about is how do I. Like, there's two components. One is how do I keep building valuable skills, which has nothing to do with AI. It's like you can't use AI to help you write an educational email course if you don't know how to write an educational email course. Right. Like, you can't use AI to help you automate something that you've never done before. So the first thing is continuing to build skills and then the second thing is going, how do I use AI to amplify those skills to get more velocity on whatever thing I'm doing? So for you, if you're thinking about offers, I would be asking the question, what is the thing that a client is paying me to do right now? And how could I use AI to do 10 times more in 1 10th the the time that becomes the moat? And you see it everywhere. That's why there's this whole narrative of like, oh, this AI startup just launched. Designers are dead. No, it's not that design is dead. It's not that designers are going anywhere. What is changing is which designer are you going to hire? The one who takes six months to come up with a brand kit or the one who can do a brand kit in two hours? It's like it's, it's just going to be a game of velocity. Does that make sense?

I feel a lot better.

I hope so.

Thank you. I, and, and we say the slogan is moving your business forward. So I'm happy to hear that. Velocity. I'm feeling that. But I, I'm tired of explaining to people why just using AI like a Magic 8 ball or typing in a basic, you know, now I can run all my marketing. You still need some, a steward to use it to your point better. And I think your velocity approach, that's. There's the answer.

Yeah. And I'll tell you, I mean, we're living this in our own business. Like every day I wake up and look at every person on our team and basically ask myself the question, how could I arm them with AI so that they could 10x their output? Right. Like, we have a designer. I literally just, I just did this last week. I like, we have a designer, super talented. Question I'm asking him is, what do we need to change about our process? So that Instead of you spending a week on a design, you can do it in two hours. And if I can help one person go from a week of work to two hours, it's not. That doesn't mean that the role goes away. That doesn't mean I fire the designer. What it means is all of a sudden the designer can do a month of work in a week and then can do a year of work in a month. You know, you're just pulling time forward. And that is what AI is going to accomplish, at least in the short term. Do I know what's going to happen in 10 years? I have no idea. But that is at least I can see as. As AI ramps. Because it's not going to be a. We go from zero to now. Robots run everything. Like that's. It's not going to happen overnight, right? So there is going to be a transitionary period. And in that transitionary period, the people who will capitalize are the ones who lean fully into this idea of velocity. You instantly become more competitive when everyone else is still in the old world. They don't even have a basic Claude subscription or a ChatGPT subscription. And you're like, not only have I been using these tools, but I can help you do the thing that we've already been doing 10 times faster and 1/10 the time. That's the whole game.

That's awesome. Thank you. I really appreciate you.

Yeah, trust me, I feel it. I had an existential freak out about a month ago and I was like, holy shit. And then you start to sit with it and you, like, think through all of it and you're like, okay, let's just take a deep breath. This is, you know, I still can't get like. Like, has anyone tried to send a wire transfer recently? Like, has anyone, like, you know, signed up for like an electrician to come to their house? But, you know, you can't even get like the confirmation text to work, right? Like there, There are some very basic technologies that have been around for 30 years that still don't work. So, yes, AI is very powerful, but it's not like we're going to blink. And all of a sudden tomorrow we're all hooked up to IV drips and the robots run our lives, right? That's just not what's going to happen.

That's good to know.