How Big Brands Rig the Algorithm with Jacob Beau

I would just say if anybody's having troubles advertising on Meta, especially if you're in a highly regulated category, you're tired of restrictions, you're tired of getting blocked up, you're tired of bad results. Our low-ticket program is a great program to help people out. You get all the power of our agency, all of our inside connections at a fraction of the cost. And that's really just helped out so many people. That's what John was saying. He said we're a ripple that is helping so many more people because obviously I knew that we helped John, you know, get back into his business manager and recover the account. But he's helping so many people. Out there.

Welcome to the Speakeasy Mastermind Podcast, where the real conversations happen behind closed doors with the boldest entrepreneurs, creators, and growth minds in the game. No fluff, no filters, just the raw strategies, personal stories, and mental models that move the needle. I'm Eric Berman. Now let's get into it. Welcome to Inside the Speakeasy Mastermind Podcast. So stoked today to have a good friend of mine, Jacob Bowe, who's at the table. He's known as the human cheat code to Meta ads. He knows all the inside secrets for having been working at Facebook at very high levels in the creative department. Also worked at Salesforce, knows what life is like on the big corporate side. Also has got incredible creative chops. And I'm most excited to talk about how he's been able to help and rescue one of our good friends and leaders in the Speakeasy Mastermind community. John Assaraf, got him out of the Speakeasy doldrums where he had lost his account, and Jacob saved the day, and he's going to share with us those top secrets. Welcome, Jacob.

Yeah, thank you, Eric, for having me in. I'm really excited to be part of the Speakeasy Mastermind and meet a lot of really cool people in there. I've already connected with a bunch of people, and so far we've been able to help out significantly. I know we worked with John and, you know, did a couple things with him that we could get into. John Asaraf, that's who we helped out. I think that's how we kind of first started out in the program or in the Mastermind. That was like our first kind of connection there. But yeah, it's been really cool since joining.

That's right. That's right. And I think I initially met you through somebody referring me to you that said, hey, who do you know that can get me out of the— we're stuck with Facebook, can't get ahold of anybody. And, you know, next thing you know, I was given your name and ever since it's been great. But before we get into that, because man, the more I got to know you, I realized you know, super creative genius here. You've always been on that side of creativity and a fun story because I love talking to people that have played both sides of the corporate fence, meaning, you know, they've been a creative, went into the corporate world, got out of the corporate world. And so many of us entrepreneurs, a lot of us in Speakeasy, you know, I always say are the unhireable ones, the ones that, you know, couldn't necessarily be in these corporations because they couldn't handle themselves. And you've seen both sides. So I want to get a little bit of taste of that because You've been at Salesforce, Facebook at, you know, high levels. And so I'm going to have some fun talking to you about that. Let's go back to your history. I know you're out in the Bay Area and you mentioned you started as really a creative. Talk about a little bit where you started off and how you landed yourself at Salesforce.

Yeah. So I did start out as a creative and that's always been kind of my background. I think that's why I got hired even at corporate companies. I actually was a pretty decently known music producer and film producer in the Bay Area. San Francisco scene. So having a background in music, I would do a lot of like music festivals and then I would perform at music festivals and I was kind of very networked into that whole industry. And I got to have this really cool creative craft and outlet and I would just make really cool productions. I would produce music and that was just like my outlet and what I wanted to do. And I think I caught some of the right people's attention over at Salesforce at the time. And they really wanted me to start just doing productions for them for their marketing material. Now at this time, I had no intention to be in marketing or really didn't think about it too much, but I started doing just some contract work for Salesforce, eventually got hired on, and then I would produce all of their content for, they did this big conference called Dreamforce, and there it's like this week-long event where they take over the whole city and I would produce all the content for it. Really cool creative content for whatever they were going to promote at Dreamforce, film production, motion graphics, just making really cool stuff for them and doing their marketing material as well.

Aren't they still doing that? That's like a big event they do. They still got that going.

Yeah, it's a big event. I've gone to it almost every single year. I still go to it and, you know, I would work at it for many years and I still go. It's really cool. I've seen, you know, they always bring in like the biggest bands to it. Like I saw Metallica. In downtown San Francisco in front of the Civic Center a couple years ago. A year after that, I went to Fleetwood Mac at AT&T Park where the Giants play. So it's a really cool event. They really wine and dine you there.

You have to go backstage and play with these guys at all, hang out?

Oh yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I'm used to that because just in my time in the music scene, I was very networked in. I think as a producer and just the guy who would do all the film production and just I used to do it for these big pop artists too. So if you go to our website, you'll see like I worked with Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber and Britney Spears and Ed Sheeran, like all these big names. I would produce all of their LED background content for their concerts. So I'm used to that.

I know this is not going to be the basis of our convo, but like now you got me curious, like, you know, who is the coolest sort of big name artist that you actually had a chance to encounter with that was actually really nice?

I thought Justin Bieber was super cool. Like, he's just like a cool dude, really talented. I mean, you know, people got different opinions and everything, but I just thought he was just like, he just seemed very relatable to me. I grew up kind of like surfing and skating, my background, and he's got this skateboard background. And so we just kind of vibed and he just seemed like, just like a homie that I would kick it with through a friend. So yeah, I really vibed well with him.

What about Bynum? Did you chat with him over at Salesforce? The main man?

Oh, Benny Hopper.

Yeah.

Not really. Yeah. A little bit more just filming him. Like he would do these like executive interviews and he would like Dreamforce, he would meet with who was like Steph Curry or something like that. And he would sit down with Steph and talk about whatever they want to talk about or Michelle Obama. And they would like sit down and like do these fireside chat kind of things. And I didn't really get to kick it with him, but I definitely got to like film with him and whoever celebrity guests he was working with and. You know, cool. Yeah. Meet a lot of the higher ups in the industry for sure.

And how'd you go from there to how did Facebook get you?

I think they just saw like in the corporate, like Silicon Valley tech world, people bounce around and they kind of like climb that corporate ladder. They get started over here, they move up to over here. And like before that I worked at Eventbrite, which is an online ticketing company.

Oh yeah.

And then I got moved over to Salesforce and then I got moved over to Facebook. I think I caught the right attention. Some of my, just higher-ups that were working at Salesforce went over and started working with Facebook. And then they kind of recommended me as like this creative talent who can make great marketing material. And so this is like the first time that I actually like understood like, okay, I'm in marketing essentially. I'm not just a creative, I'm actually creating content for marketing purposes. And that's what I was doing at Salesforce. And so they brought me in strictly for a marketing role. I got, hired over at Facebook on the creative ads team, and I would create the content. I would create the ad content for the biggest companies in the world. So QuickBooks or United Airlines or Uber. Wow. It was my job to come up with the creative concepts and create the ads for these big name companies that would work on social media. And a lot of times, this is like 2015 to 2018, these companies, they wouldn't know how to create content for social media. They were very good at creating content for legacy TV commercials and just other different styles of advertising. But when it came to social media, they didn't have that kind of skillset as of yet.

That's interesting. I'll just pause you there because that's a little bit newish for a lot of us, you know, in our community and others. So is it the type of thing it feels like, is it like an agency within a company? Meaning like, okay, Uber in that example, don't they have their own creative department to make ads? Like, so are they hiring you guys on top of that? And is that sort of the way it worked?

Yeah, they would partner with Meta and then Meta would come in, I guess my team would, you know, our Creative Workshop team would then take their content that they would produce and then we would rework it and come up with our own content as well. And I could show you examples of that for pretty big companies, but we would build out full ad campaigns and, you know, kind of strategic concepts for these kind of companies. So like a company like QuickBooks would come through and say, We have a new campaign. It's about, like our whole, like marketing department wants to do this. It's called Backing You, and it is empowering entrepreneurs to, like small-time, you know, entrepreneurs, not the big companies, but like all these different entrepreneurs, how can they use QuickBooks to level up their business? And so they would have like one gal is a florist, one gal is a pottery maker, somebody like a guy is electrician, a truck driver. How do your everyday average people use QuickBooks? To run their business, right?

Yep.

And so it would be up to us to come up with, like, and work with their marketing department to come up with these social media ad creative concepts that we could go to market with and that would crush it on the Facebook platform. Because their old way of doing it was how to do like a legacy TV commercial. Yeah. That doesn't work on social media. You have to rethink it. You have to, the whole story arc is different. The whole way people engage is different. The call to action. It's direct response marketing as opposed to brand awareness marketing. So all of this stuff would change and we're driving like app downloads for somebody like that. But you have to just think of it from a social media standpoint and they would partner with Meta and then we would be the ones who would go and create that.

Now, how does that work? Do they actually pay? Is it the type of thing where Meta says, if you spend X millions of dollars with us, you get access to our creative department? Or is it like, this is like a pad on, on top of their ad spend?

You know, I don't know how they actually got to partner with them. I'm not quite sure.

You're like, you just told, okay, here's the new campaign we're working on. You're like, you didn't know how to—

I just know we worked with, like, I would one week go in and I'd be building all the ads for Cheetos. And the next week I'd be building all the ads for United Airlines. And then I'd be building all the ads for QuickBooks and Zappos Shoes and IKEA. I mean, our Rolodex, like, if you go to our website, like, we worked with, like, the biggest Fortune 100 brands in the world.

Nice.

Just because like my time at Facebook and what happened was they wanted more creators like me because the ads that I did, I really learned how the backend algorithm works. And so I didn't want to just make cool ads that were beautiful. I wanted them to convert. And so since I had access to the engineers who built out the ad algorithm, I really worked with them a lot and really got an understanding of how does the ad algorithm actually work? How does the ad auction? Who gets to win the right to show their ads to their target audience? How do you do that at the cheapest price point possible? And get the most conversions. And so I worked with them and really learned how the inside works. And then I took that knowledge over to my creative side and would make ads according to how to rig the ad algorithm in your favor. I think that was like a key learning over the 3 years that I worked there. And so my ads started just crushing it over anybody else. So they wanted more people like me, more creatives like me, but I wanted to manage them. And so instead of just getting like, friends of mine hired in the Silicon Valley, I brought people in and essentially ran my own agency under Facebook. So I kind of created like my own department and my own creative team and doing it the way that I knew how to do it. And so it went from like just me doing this to 12 of us doing this. And then my team would go off and work with, you know, Uber and these guys would go work with, Tom's Shoes, or these guys would go work with, you know, Intuit or something like that. And we'd all separate. And then we would, you know, in one week we would knock out like 6 different ad campaigns for 6 different Fortune 100 companies.

So they were still employed by Facebook, but they let you bring them in and then Facebook could cover it, or they are under your agency and you started just subcontracting out?

They were subcontracted by me.

Oh, okay. So you started building your—

I actually built my agency under the Facebook umbrella.

Interesting. That's pretty cool. So they let you just go ahead and do that and you're like, yeah, well, they're getting the results, keeping the clients happy. They don't care how you're doing it.

Yep. Yep. And we were really good at doing it and we became like the main team that built out all of these ad creatives for like the biggest brands in the world.

Anyone that comes to you as one of your favorites, like, wow, like we knew this was good, but we literally crushed it for this one campaign.

Yeah, I could actually, I don't know if I can screen share here, but I can show you an ad campaign that we did that really crushed it. And it was really cool because stories at the time was like the new hot thing on the market. And so with Meta, anytime they roll out a new feature, they're going to prioritize better cost per results in that feature because they want advertisers to use it. So at the time it was Stories. And so we did a big push towards figuring out how to advertise on Stories and, you know, leverage the platform to the best we could get it to get the best results. And so with Stories, what's interesting about it is it's actually got, it's an interactive platform because there's all kinds of different things that you could do with stories, especially if you run it in like a 3 carousel. You can do things like swipe up is an action. You could click the profile button up here. That's an action. You could tap on it and pause. You could tap on the left and it goes to the next story. You could tap on the right, it goes backwards. So there's this interactivity to running ads on stories. And once you figure that out, you can build out ad creatives that are essentially interactive. And we would do that for companies and build out these interactive, like almost gamified ads that we would get people to play along with. And I've got a great case study of how we did that with a company called OpenTable. It's like an online, yeah, reservation platform.

Of course. Yeah.

And I could walk through it if you wanna see it. It's pretty cool.

I would only because I think only the YouTube people watching on YouTube would see it, but the rest would be on audio listening.

I could explain it if you wanted. Just, okay. So, so this is the idea of like what we did. So, I met with the executives at OpenTable and they wanted to run ads to, let's say, Cheesecake Factory or Ruth's Chris Steakhouse, and they wanted to do these as retargeting campaigns to get people to book reservations at these restaurants. So since they were retargeting campaigns, my idea was to come up with this gamified ad that would be rigged to play the game, and then when you pick where you're gonna be dining, you always land where we want you to land every single time. Okay. So the idea of it is you've got 3 carousels, 3 video carousels that we use to do this. And the first carousel works by saying, do you wanna know where you're gonna be dining next? Tap the button to start. Right? And so we designed this out and we've got these beautiful cuisines and it says, tap the button. You tap the button to start and the button's on the kind of the right-hand side. And that makes you flip to the next sequence, the next video that's loaded up, right? So you tap play, there it's pointing right here and it says tap the button right here. Now by tapping, it flips to the next sequence, okay? So now we have a 15-second video that runs and it's flashing all of these different cuisines on, on frame, right? And a prompt that says tap here to decide where you're gonna be dining next. And it's flashing them very fast, right? So you just see all these delicious cuisines just flashing on your screen. And so it's like a random chance what you're going to land on, right? And it's, and that little arrow pointing down, it's all branded out really nicely. And it says tap here to find out where you're going to be dining next. So no matter when you tap it, it flips to the third screen. And the third screen for a split second is rigged. So it looks like you landed randomly on the cuisine that we wanted you to land on, right? So Ruth's Chris Steakhouse, it's going to pop up. Ruth, it's not even gonna pop up. It's just gonna look like the exact same frame from the scene before, but it's gonna pause there for maybe 1 second. And then it's gonna look like you landed on Ruth's Chris Steakhouse. And then since it's a video, then it flips and it says, great job, you landed at Ruth's Chris. Swipe up to get your reservation right now. And then you swipe up and then the landing page we lead you to is the Ruth's Chris Steakhouse landing page. So. You were always gonna land on there, but it made it look like you randomly by fate landed on Ruth's Chris. You swipe up, boom, you book your reservations. And we only run it to people who are already looking at going to that restaurant. So it feels like this game that they played that was rigged to land where we wanted you to land every time. And what I love about this is I would do this for a company like OpenTable, and then I would go over and meet with the executives at United Airlines. And they would say, hey, we wanna push discount tickets to Maui for wintertime. And so we wanna do this as retargeting campaign. So I would come up with this idea on the spot and say, ah, you know this idea like where you, that old game where you spin the globe and then you put your finger on the globe and that's where you're gonna be going next. Well, instead of cuisines, right? We tell them to play the game. Where are you gonna vacation to next?

The key to this genius is that it's retargeting. So you're essentially saying the person was already kind of thinking of it and now it's just, it's fate. I gotta go to this restaurant or I gotta go to Maui now.

Exactly. Because they're already looking up Hawaii. We already know that. And these destinations are popping up. They, it's a spinning globe this time. They put their finger on the globe and boom, what they land on happens to look like Maui, but it was rigged to land on Maui. Swipe up, there's your discount tickets to Maui. It feels like fate, but it was a rigged game. And that's the interactivity that we would do with these at the time, these stories ads.

I love it. All right. So thank you for sharing. That was a great share and hopefully get some ideas who's listening on doing something cool like that. Let's go back to, you know, you're no longer at Facebook. You have your agency. And was that the same group that you started there and then you just completely spun it out, or is that what happened there?

I took some of the guys with me that was working there. We started our agency concept. I was kind of already running it on the side at the same time. And I felt like at the time I'd worked there for 3 years. I had a really deep insight on how that the ad algorithm works, how the ad auction works. I knew how to make creative. That was my background. And so I figured I could do this for myself and go direct to client. No problem. And it worked. You know, there's some ups and downs. Like one thing I found out that, you know, these big companies, they would run with these accounts that were owned by Facebook. And so you're running with a Facebook-owned agency account that now they call it the Fox program that they're in. Now, not everybody has access to that. You gotta be a Fortune 100 company to even kind of get access. So, yeah, through some means of my own and my inside connections, we are able to get access to those same agency accounts because I started running ads. In markets like finances or something like that, or whatever it was, Silicon Valley, SaaS, tech, whatever it is, we would run ads and then we would deal with the restrictions and rejections and all these different compliance policies. And it's only gotten worse since then. But what we were able to get was access to these same accounts as if you were a Fortune 100 company. I've got backend access and now that's what we use to run all of our accounts through. And we run a lot of accounts for big name brands like Cheech and Chong is one of our clients. We run all of their cannabis ads through our backend connections and these agency accounts that we own, or that we're actually brokering out. Some pretty big name brands in regulated markets like GLP-1 supplements, crypto, online gambling, things like that. Cannabis, things that you can't normally run ads in. We do this for some pretty big names in the industry successfully because we've got the backend access to do so.

And is it just more like they know that you guys are compliant and they don't have the risk 'cause they trust you kind of thing?

Yeah, well, they want to make money and basically if you have a legitimate business, but your business is getting flagged by AI, what we have is a preferred partnership with Meta. So we've got like the top level of partnership that you can possibly have as an agency. And I've got inside connections at headquarters in Menlo Park. So between those two things, we can get real humans to work with us and not flag you with AI. That's kind of just run amok. So we got real reps and real, you know, people inside headquarters working with us. That'll help us navigate these issues that people are dealing with. And that's what we're doing for, you know, one of our clients is Ty Lopez and he would get flagged for, you know, whatever business opportunities, you know, I'll help you make money or something like that. Well, his offer's legit, his business is legit, but if you get flagged, the AI, you know, is just gonna drop the hammer on you left and right. How are you gonna run ads at a scalable strategy if you're just getting blocked every step of the way? So, Yep. Run it through us, which we have backend access to these agency accounts and a lot of internal connections that can help us do this. Totally legitimate business, but now you don't have to deal with all the compliance headaches and now you can actually scale at a much faster rate and you can be a little bit more aggressive with your ads as well. And therefore, you know, drop your customer acquisition costs too while you're at it.

Love it. So based on what you're learning now, and for those that don't have that, that aren't able to work with you right now or don't have the cheat, you know, to Facebook, what suggestions, what are you seeing out there that's a good sort of like, you know, tip that you can maybe share with the people listening listening today?

Yeah, so one thing that I actually just spoke, Tai Lopez's mastermind, about this exact subject on how you can get better access within Meta and get to preferred partnership status like we have. And so that once you get preferred partnership, you really start unlocking like cheat codes. You know, they called me the human cheat code to Meta advertising, and I like to take those same cheat codes and teach people how they can do this for themselves. So one thing that we did really well and understand very well is that you have to spend a certain amount with Meta to unlock more benefits. It's kind of a pay-to-play game. So one of the things that you have to do is you have to spend basically a million a month for consecutive 6 months to unlock, I think it's called, well, it's in the partnership program. There's membership and then there's badged membership. And to get badge membership, you have to spend $5 million a month consecutively for 6 months. Now for us, we're doing $40 million a month. So we have like the top tier you can possibly get. But what I like to tell people is that you can do this too, because especially an agency owner or a business consultant or a coach or fractional CMO, anybody who's running ads for other companies, for other clients like agencies. The way you do it is knowing that Meta, what they do is they track your managed ad spend instead of your personal ad spend. So our company, our agency is running right now, it's $37 million in ad spend every 120 days.

So you're basically saying you have to combine and group accounts together to get the managed, which increases the volume.

Exactly. And the key to it is like, what we found is like we have a marketing agency where we'll do your ad creatives, we'll build your sales funnels, we'll be your media buyers, all of that, right? That's gonna cost a client to come and work with us, that's between $20,000 to $30,000 a month for us to come in as an agency and do that. Now, we're not gonna hire, we're not gonna get that many clients in, right? We might have 15, right?

Right.

At that level of the budget. However, right, if you, what we figured out was we launched a lower ticket program where it's a done with you agency services that unlocks all of the backend access that we have to Meta. And we get a lot of clients coming in and we only charge $1,500 a month for that. So instead of just this, you know, the high ticket agency service, we opened it up to everybody at $1,500 a month. It's kind of 80/20 rule. You get 80% of the value at 20% or fraction of, you know, the cost, right? Nice. And so what that did, it brought in, you know, 100 clients into our business that we have ad account access to. So we brought every single client that is paying us at the $1,500 price point. We brought their ad account under our partnership, under our business manager, and Meta gives us credit as managing their accounts. Some of the accounts we brought in, even though they're only paying us $1,500 a month, some of these guys are spending $2 million a month. Like we're working with like Paradigm and Agora. Like they're only paying us $1,500 a month, but they're spending $2 million a month. We get credit for that. Okay. So that's how we were able to, so basically we launched like a, a lower ticket or a mid-ticket offer instead of just our high ticket done for you agency service. Our done with you service is a lower ticket program and we bring in as many clients as we can and now we get credit for managing all of their spend. So if you wanted to take this even a step further, what you could do is if you don't have a done with you kind of agency service, you could do like an ad account audit for $100. And just say, hey, for $100, my consultancy company, my fractional CMO, my whatever, you're right, my coaching and business, right? I will do your ad account audit for you for $100. The way to do it, we have to get partnership access to your ad account. And then you now are technically being credited as managing that account spend. So if you have a $100 thing that you, like a super low ticket program, you could bring in 200 clients under your business manager. And next thing you know, your managed spend goes through the roof and now you've unlocked preferred partner status with Meta.

Got it. Okay. So you got to just congregate, find people and then collaborate that way. Totally cool.

Everybody will want to sign up with you if you can do that. And then you unlock these benefits, which makes you even more powerful as a fractional CMO or a business consultant, a consultant or coach, because now you've unlocked the keys to, you know, become your own human cheat code that you have.

So let me just turn over. Thank you for that share. So that's great. So let's turn over into, was it a similar concept the way you were able to help my good friend, John Asraf and others who, you know, the story for those listening is, you know, there was recently, there were people that were going in and scamming big publishers, big thought leaders and others pretending to do some cool things. Next thing you know, they're inside their Facebook accounts and now they're locking them out and, you know, just a scam out there. And a lot of people got affected by that. So are you able, just because back to this preferred status, is that just a phone call now? Or is it more like you have connections there that are like, hey, you got to take care of my buddy. He's locked out kind of thing.

That level of like a fully hacked business manager, you're going to need like inside connections at Meta. And so I know like even when I worked there, I know who was able to pull strings and I still know a lot of these people and they've introduced me to people since then. And so we are very good at making sure they're happy. They're paid off and happy to work with us. And then we can basically skip the line and pull the right strings and push the right buttons.

I got this vision, two visions. One is like the old school radio days when people are like, play my song. And they send them like a case of beer. Like I can visualize like the special lab coats in a secret room that's locked out that like these people have private security guards. And, you know, every day there's another gift arriving in there at their workstation of the 7 people that have the magic keys.

When I worked at Meta, it was a total pay-to-play game. Like, you know, if you're Uber and you're willing to pay to work with this, you know, company at this higher level, you're basically paying for access and that's how they run it.

Yeah. And so any Zuck run-ins or any fun corporate stories at Facebook?

I did see Zuckerberg quite often. I don't know. I think Silicon Valley has this like, don't be a fanboy kind of mentality to it. It's like, you know, he shows up in jeans and a hoodie. It's like, you know, he's kind of one of the guys kind of thing. So I never wanted to be like, you know, go get a photo. I wish I did get a photo with him, to be honest, just strictly for marketing my own stuff.

Yeah, really helps credibility. Sure.

Yeah. Now that I look back, I'm like, dang, I actually should have done that. But no, I didn't like, you know, go up and he was always busy and stuff. I didn't want to go. Yeah. Yeah. Or anything. I kind of wish I did. I did have this one story and it taught me the value of personal branding a bit. I was working with the executives at. United Airlines, and it was right after I pitched this whole idea of this spin a globe kind of concept idea. And I pitched it within like 10 minutes of meeting everybody because I'd already done it for OpenTable. So they're thinking like, wow, they called me the kid. They were like, this kid's like an absolute savant that he just thought of this on the fly. I just stole it from what else I did before. Right? So they were like, oh my God, this is like the marketing genius. Like, like, who did we get locked in with? Like, this is amazing. Right? I met with the executives at United Airlines and then we all leave, we all shake hands, we're gonna get started on this campaign. They're all like pumped on me and everything. Well, their director of marketing is walking out to the garage with me and I had been driving this like beat surf mobile, like Isuzu Trooper. I think I had like some surfboards in the background and maybe my wetsuit was in the background or in the back of it. Like just like probably soaking, it probably smelled like wetsuit and like, That's just how I drove to work. I didn't really care. And it was just funny because I presented myself as this like top-level executive in the meeting, and then I'm walking out and then the executive, like the CMO at United Airlines is saying, hey, by the way, I parked at the other campus. Would you mind just giving me a ride over there real quick?

No.

Yeah. And so it was just instantly was just like trying to think of how to get out of this. And I'm like, and like I had already saw my car up there and I'm like, Yeah, let's go. And so, you know, I'm wearing a suit and everything. I look professional and we have to hop in this just like beat surf wagon and, you know, that probably smelled like wetsuit and surfboard and everything. And I'm just like, okay, I went out and bought a Mercedes-Benz that weekend because I could afford it. I just didn't, I didn't care. And so after that I was like, okay, I understand the value of personal branding a bit. So that was a nice learning lesson for me. So that next week I showed up to Facebook in a blacked-out Mercedes-Benz, kind of looking the part a little more in case that ever happened.

Did the car have you lose the deal or you're still okay? You survived it?

Oh no, I still got— yeah, I still ran it. Like, they were pumped on me.

Like, you had to get witty on that one.

Yeah, I just had to like kind of just eat it and own it. Yeah, good learning lesson though. So no more was I the kind of guy being like, oh, I'm just going to show up in, you know, like whatever car I want. Like, there really is a value there.

I mean, it's weird. I mean, I just the corporate world out in San Fran. I remember interviewing people out in San Diego that were like, they were like moving from San Francisco and you could just tell a different cultural vibe when I interviewed people from the Bay Area. It was so funny. And same with anybody in San Diego I talked to, you know, it was more like, what's the job title? What's the career? Like, it was all focused on, you could just tell they're so used to hopping around and then that corporate mentality. And it's just a weirdness on that.

When you really make it, because I got some mentors in this game that work at like Y Combinator and they've exited out their companies and Sold for $400 million and everything like that. Like these are some of my mentors in the game. When you actually make it to that level, then you drive a beat pickup truck in the Silicon Valley and then you throw your surfboards in the back and that's like a, like you really own it because then you really don't give a shit. You gotta get to that level though to be like, I really don't give a shit. And then that's kind of a badge of honor. It's kind of weird. It goes backwards.

Totally. Like I don't need any. Yep. No, it's great. I love it. Well, very cool. And one thing I did forget to ask, What are you seeing and what are you most excited about in the AI in the world of, you know, paid media?

I would say right now I'm just super excited about ChatGPT Agent and what it's able to do with ChatGPT-5. Now, I always have like 2 laptops running at any one time because if I'm not utilizing Agent all the time, I feel like I'm not being productive. Like if I can't think of anything, like I'll start like this morning. Sipping my coffee, I had my wife's laptop and it was running for her. She does like the bookkeeping for our agency and it was going through and pulling all of like the credit card statements and bank statements because she needed to send this over to our bookkeeper. And so I just ran Agent, it logged in to the bank, it logged into PayPal or whatever it needed to go into. It was connected to it, it downloaded it to some sort of server on the inside and then uploaded it back into her Gmail and then wrote the email for her and sent it off and CC'd me to our bookkeeper. And he was like talking about this morning. He's just like, ah, I still need to do this. Like I gotta get it done, but I gotta take the kids to summer camp and all this stuff. And, and I'm like, let me just, let me just handle this. I literally like spun the computer around. I'm like, done. It just did it in like, you know, it took about 15 minutes. But it got it done for her. And at the same time, I'm running my own agent on my laptop, and it is going into one of our clients in our lower ticket program. It's doing a full ad account audit. It actually logged into the Business Manager for them, ran an audit 30 days back compared to the previous 30 days, looked for areas to optimize and improve. And then I had it go in and look at all of their creative and then dive into that Meta ads library of all the competitors and then figure out what they're doing and what is performing best for them and what this client can do. And then it even like did it, like linked all the ads in there in Agent and spit out this full report. So both laptops are running like while I'm sitting there sipping coffee and I was actually like on a call and kind of communicating with my team. So I wasn't just chilling. Right.

But meanwhile, you just got way more done and you're just like, holy shit.

It's crazy. Like, agent is the way to go. So if people aren't like tripling down on agent, it's— you got it.

I keep hearing in our San Diego Mastermind group, we got some great people on the AI side and we're going to get— we'll get a San Francisco chapter out for you soon. I promise we're working on some people because that's the kind of dialogues we're having. Well, and trying to think, is there anything I didn't get a chance to ask that you wanted to share? Any other final tips or words of wisdom?

I would just say if anybody's having troubles advertising on Meta, especially if you're in a highly regulated category, You're tired of restrictions, you're tired of getting blocked up, you're tired of bad results. Our low ticket program is a great program to help people out. You get all the power of our agency, all of our inside connections at a fraction of the cost. And that's really just helped out so many people. That's what John was saying that, you know, we're really, he said it pretty cool, which is kind of cool to hear. He said we're a ripple that is helping so many more people. 'Cause obviously I knew that we helped John, you know, get back into his Business Manager and recover the account. But he's helping so many people out there. And so he said, by me helping him, now he's able to get back and help so many people. So he gave me this video testimonial just saying like how we were like a ripple that is now helping so many more people, which I thought was really cool. So yeah, if people are dealing with these kind of issues with Meta, you can absolutely dominate on the platform. You just have to have the right strategies and the right inside connections, really.

Love it. Well, thank you so much for your time today and hopping in and doing all the great things you're doing and look forward to our continued adventures together.

Yeah, Eric, thanks for having me on and hopefully we can sync up in San Diego. I'm trying to make some plans to come down and connect with you guys.

Sounds great. And that's a wrap from the Speakeasy Podcast. If something sparked for you, don't keep it to yourself. Share it, review it, and pass it to the one person who needs to hear this right now. Want in on the real mastermind? Tap the link in the show notes to apply. Until next time, keep scaling, stay sharp, and don't be the smartest one in the room.