Start With A Win - The AI Revolution is Here: Harnessing the Competitive Advantage of Human Connection with Jon LoDuca

Episode Date: February 22, 2023

In the age of artificial intelligence, how can entrepreneurs offer products and services that hold value beyond what a machine is capable of providing? Jon LoDuca believes that going back to the basics of authentic human interaction is the new million-dollar idea. Jon is founder and CEO of PlaybookBuilder, an award-winning knowledge management software that helps leaders and teams capture and share best practices, core process, and story to drive performance, scalability, and sustainability. Wisdom is a company’s best asset, and Jon’s software programs help organizations monetize their intellectual property in a world where humans find themselves competing with AI.With conversation software such as ChatGPT and Google’s LaMDA replacing entire industries like customer service, business owners are doing their best to adapt and grow within new technological and cultural parameters. Current AI software passes the “deity test,” meaning it is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, and immortal. This reality demands that entrepreneurs address how AI will relate to their business. To prevent being disintermediated, Jon encourages leaders to come back to their core values that motivated them in the early days of their careers. The best way to offer a unique experience is by boldly preserving human interaction, creating  a sense of intimacy in communication, and offering deep empathy. Entrepreneurs can guarantee their success by playing a trump card that’s outside the wheelhouse for AI: human-to-human interaction. In the near future, it may just become the world’s most valuable commodity.Main TopicsJon’s start in the technology industry in San Francisco (02:00)AI passes the “deity test” and what this means for entrepreneurs (08:20)Jon’s 2017 TedTalk predicted trends in AI that have come to fruition (11:33)Future demands for face-to-face interactions to confirm identity (16:00)Changing definitions of intimacy (19:55)Avoid the Metaverse to prevent being disintermediated (24:00)Two types of business models: wide and deep (30:23)How to compete with AI by emphasizing the human component of business (36:00)Return to original values that focused on building relationships with the client (40:10) Episode Linkshttps://playbookbuilder.com/demo/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEURpISHCpA Connect with Jon:https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonloduca/https://twitter.com/jonloducahttps://www.instagram.com/therealjonloduca/Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/https://www.facebook.com/AdamContosCEOhttps://twitter.com/AdamContosCEOhttps://www.instagram.com/adamcontosceo/Listen, rate, and subscribe!

Welcome to Start With A Win, where we give you the tools and lessons you need to create business and personal success. Are you ready? Let's do this. Coming to you from Brand Viva Media Headquarters, it's Adam Kantos. We'll start with a win. Producer Mark, you had some mean moves going on there, man. Hey, man. I was probably some awkward dancing, but I didn't realize. Hey, yeah.

Oh, yeah. It gets good here. It's crazy. You know, it lightens the mood. That was beautiful. I climb up on a table, but my headphones cable is too short here. Hey, well, hey, I'm excited for today's episode. We hear a lot about artificial intelligence and AI and all these other kind of things happening.

And I think a lot of people have questions about it, and they want to have conversations and dialogue and understand a little bit more about what's going on in the world. And so I thought we could talk with a guy who is involved in business. He's a leader. He's in technology. And he had a great TED Talk that I found. Like five years ago, he did a TED Talk about AI. Yeah. And you talk a lot about EQ. So it was like AI and EQ. And I was like, hey, let's talk with this guy. So John Loduca, he's on our show today. He's the founder and CEO of Playbook Builder, an award-winning knowledge management software that helps leaders and teams capture and share best practices, core process, and story to drive performance, scalability, and sustainability. John has been featured as a technology and business leader in Forbes, Advisor Today, and Wall Street Journal, and is a sought-after speaker nationwide.

John, welcome. Hey, John. Great to have you here. That's a pleasure to be here with you. Awesome. Hey, John, why don't you give us a quick flyover of your background and what you're doing now with Playbook Builder. I had Napoleon Hill's career.

I just netted it out for you. I was a West Coast kid, started the dot-com in the early 90s, and a great opportunity. I was straight and single, and I learned how to swing dance, and I built this little business that was capturing restaurant club,

cafe, and bar listings for the city of San Francisco. So we were just a couple of dudes. We were goofing off, having a ball, alighted upon a really kick-ass idea and we're too dumb to realize it. And while we were waving the flag and saying, hey, this is so cool, and had no idea what we were doing,

some big kids came and took our lunch money away and that kind of left a mark. But it also proved a really interesting point to me that I continue to embrace. And that is if you have a shitty idea, you have all the time in the world. If you haven't have a good idea, you better be willing to like run it down the ground

and defend it and all the rest. So I built a business, an intellectual capital development company after an exit from a little startup in the Midwest. And it was a humble conceit. I had this hypothesis that the greatest asset and competitive advantage in a business is its wisdom. And harvesting that and packaging that and monetizing that wisdom became my career.

And so just like being an author, I got access to everybody. Got started in, ironically, without any background in it, was introduced to a guy named John DeMonder. John was running the Northeast for Lincoln Financial. And he asked me to help him build a practice management consulting process. For him and John was brilliant and we got along really well and did a nice job together. They tapped John to run all of Lincoln. And overnight I was like, Mr. Cool and the wealth management and insurance industry, which again, just funny as hell.

Cause I didn't even have an insurance policy. I was just this guy sitting across the table, asking funny as hell, because I didn't even have an insurance policy. I was just this guy sitting across the table asking really dumb questions, bringing these amazing entrepreneurs back to their learner's mind. So top quarter percent income earning entrepreneurs, US, UK, Canada, top, you know, just top of the food chain in their respective space, they kind of normalized excellence. And so my job was to kind of help them see how their values inform their choice-making so they could operationalize it and scale. So you can imagine how much bloody fun I've had just sitting across the table from,

well, I don't know, like the Zigglers or Orchard Woodhunter CEOs, or just somebody you've never heard of who's crushing it in some little town out in the middle of nowhere. And he's like looking around going, what am I doing? Like, I'm ready for the next level. How do I bottle this? And along the way, built a software company to capture and scale that IP using video as a tool, of course, and let them lever that. By and large, and this is why we were talking, you know, those clients were highly commoditized service businesses. Right. They couldn't compete on price.

They couldn't compete on product features. It was like, I got the same stuff you've got. Why are you making an extra zero at the end of your paycheck than me? I don't understand what the distinctions are. And it was always unique experience design. It was always having a way of interacting with the client that was different. And so it was this elusive stuff. And to the winner go the spoils. And so, you know, I just watched these

people get better and better and better until they'd reached a place in their career where they couldn't even relate to somebody else. It's just like, what the hell is wrong with these people? You know, I don't understand why they don't understand it. It's so common sense to me now. And so my job was to play the bridge, you know, to play the neophyte, go in and say, what are you doing? Teach me and help them to, to, to figure that out. And so that's my background. You can tell why conversations around AI were germane. That stuff was knocking on the door in these industries and they were having to figure out a way to compete against it. Okay. So on that, so we've got, you know, a commoditized industry, which let's just,

let's call it what it is. There's really not too many industries out there that are not commoditized, either from a competitor level or from a product manufacturing or, you know, somebody has a certain IP. People are just one degree off of that IP or something of that nature. I was on a Forrester research call the other day listening to their CEO talk about 2023 predictions. And they kept going back to customer experience and customer obsession and how that goes through, which exactly is what you've been talking about of separating and commoditization is you got to give a better experience. You dug into two concepts, though, that really kind of impact these things, but also are really a dichotomy today or even a combination today that I want to dig into, and that's EQ and AI. So we've all heard about chat GPT, okay? And how that's taking off. And then we see Google has Lambda, Lambda 2. That's it, Lambda 2. And then Bing, because it's owned by Microsoft,

is pushing out chat GPT. I think like the version 4 or something like that, where if you go on their current version, so just OpenAI is the company that has been invested into by Microsoft to the tune of billions of dollars, it seems. They have an iteration online that people can go play with right now that is ChatGPT-3, which essentially, the three has nothing to do with this in my understanding, but it's basically three times the Library of Congress in knowledge. And not just knowledge, but language knowledge, where it can have a conversation with you like a human being about these things. So now we're not just mixing in AI, which is traditionally, you know, the past several years has been data infrastructure and prediction and, you know, hey, this is likely to

happen because blah, blah, blah. But now it's fake EQ, fake emotional intelligence, essentially, computerized emotional intelligence, if you want to call it that, as a computer of emotion. No, but this is really convincing. So give me a little bit of information. Take me back five years when you gave this TED Talk, John, and what were you thinking about AI versus the leadership and things like that? And then what do you think about today? Yeah. All right. So the second question is, is really, what is this thing looking like today? What are the implications of it? And then I'll go backwards and I'll explain what we were looking at a few years ago. The question really is, is this technology, this idea of self-awareness, are these softwares intelligent

to the extent that they're now outstripping human beings? And it's a toss-up in some regards. The question on the table is, do they pass the Turing test? And both Lambda2 as well as ChatGPT have effectively passed the Turing test. And that means that they can spoof a human being. That the imitation game, which is basically to enact a conversation back and forth between two parties, could you trick a person into thinking that the software was intelligent enough? Does that actually mean that this thing is self-aware? Does it mean it's intelligent enough to just go off and is this, you know, Terminator? Is that what we're going to immediately know? Not necessarily.

But it's still astonishing in its capability and why. The reason why something that needs to be addressed is that AI passes the deity test. The deity test? Omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and immortal. That's a god.'s apollo or zeus that's i am all-knowing i am unbelievably powerful i can be everywhere at once and i will never die and that's a god we have created effectively a species and while it's in its little infancy and it's toddling around and we're looking at as a on chat GPT, and we're tinkering around it and marveling at

its capabilities, while you and I go to bed at night and go, man, that was pretty cool. This thing's getting smarter. And it'll continue to get smarter at ever increasing paces. This is that construct that Kurzweil introduced called the singularity. This is exponential. We don't operate exponentially. We grow geometrically. This thing is going to be insanely smart in six months. In 12 months, we won't even be able to continue to recognize the distinctions. That's where we're at. And that inflection point, Kurzweil called it around 2024 with the singularity, where we would ultimately decide to combine power with AI to extend life. This is what Noah Ivol Harari was talking about with Homo Deus. Like, what's the big project for human beings now that we've solved everything else?

It'll be immortality. And if you look at these softwares, if you look at an AI and you think of it through that lens, you have to ask yourself objectively, how is it going to relate to you? Right. You know, in 25, 30 years, if this thing has the intelligence that you would, you know, see the delta between your intelligence and a fly, how would you treat a fly or an ant in your kitchen? Adam, you wouldn't think twice about exterminating it. I can't believe that I'm the person saying that. It sounds so dire and alarmist, but here's the deal. Five years ago, I got involved in an AI. And so I had to take the deep dive into what are all the capabilities of artificial intelligence? Because it's a blanket

term, but it means different things, right? Yeah. Natural language processing, you know, you've got machine learning, there's a host of different applications for it. But fundamentally, the line that I thought was so astonishing was this is the first pitch of the first inning of the first game. We're just getting started seeing its capabilities. And as this thing progresses and learns, it'll begin to transform beyond what we are even coding it into knowing. So right now it's reflecting an algorithm that's designed to emulate your brain. It just does it without sleeping. It has perfect retention and it's incorporating all that information. So when I did that talk and you know how TED talks are like, you're stuck with that son of a gun forever. Like I give a talk around the corner.

It's okay if everybody thinks I'm crazy and five people liked it. But when you give a TED talk, you realize like this is going to be around your neck forever. And I had to think about like, I have had the incredible opportunity to sit across of competing in the 21st century to aggregate and simplify what they taught me and to put it into some relevant understanding. We will fundamentally have to create either a separate economy, I think, or we're going to end up having to exalt our humanity. The little window we're in right now, this chat GPT concern, I think it's going to play out like social media. So social media and even podcasts, why are they appealing? They're appealing because you got John on here and he's just having a conversation with Adam. We're being vulnerable and honest and authentic with each other. You can kind of see what we're like when no one's around. We're just having a chat, right?

Everybody loves social media because it's not the polished corporate sanctioned marketing schlock. It's actually maybe you walking down the street with your dog, sharing a thought or a feeling. It's the transparency. It's the feeling of intimacy. We have, as a general public, become pretty good at digging that authenticity out.

We're pretty good at vetting and sniffing to see if somebody's really 100% authentic. Why we're so curious about others, we're kind of interested in knowing if, you know, if the carpet matches the drapes, if the ideas that they're espousing are reflected throughout their entire world or only when they're, you know, in front of the camera.

In a similar way, I think AI will tune up our ability to sniff out voice, wisdom that's unique, reflections that are context-driven. I liked your remarks about this world of commoditization. It was a book that came out a long time ago, 90s, and it's still relevant. And they actually did a new version. It's Pine and Gilmore is the experience economy. Yeah. Are you familiar with that?

Read, right? Oh, yeah. And the idea was you got commodities, you've got goods, services, and then unique experiences. And there's like this competitive advantage in the unique experience arena. Starbucks is the example. You know, you go to Denny's, you get a cup of coffee for $1.20. You go to Starbucks, you're ordering an Italian for $4. What's the difference?

They're not selling coffee, are they? Disneyland is not selling rides. That's, you know, somebody else's amusement park. They're selling Magic Kingdom. How you frame it, what's for sale, those are things that inform those choices. I think with this world of AI, we're just going to have to have a more refined engagement with people that is uniquely human. Right, right. We play and it's going to maybe be face-to-face stuff because now we have deep fakes. It's going to be the authenticity era because that's how we're going to sniff out what we're really getting. Is

it the real deal? And I think that that's where we as humans can continue to compete is how we empathize with each other, how authentic we can be, how much we're willing to really lean in and connect and create value on a unique way, not an algorithmic way, not on a mass scale way, but to maybe bend a rule to connect with and create value for another human being. That's always been our jam, but we've tried to mechanize that to scale it. Right. We may end up kind of reverting back. Does that make sense? Yeah. So let me ask you a question about that. I've always, especially since the pandemic,

I've used the mantra, presence creates trust. And I think a big part of this, the whole AI piece, is people are going to start to distrust what they're reading. And you talk about deep fakes and things like that. But ultimately, there's likely, I mean, at some point, sure, I know, and yeah, probably we're pretty close to it. I could theoretically be a deep fake of Adam Kantos having this conversation with John Loduca. But I mean, here's the reality. I'm regurgitating what's going on. Did I watch your TED Talk, which sure, the AI would have done that, done research. But ultimately, if I'm doing a transaction with you, you're probably going to see or hear from me on the phone, on video this way, with, you know, even if it's on Zoom or what have you, where I start to build that trust account. Do you think people are going to have this immediate distrust of just

textual interaction or even phone voicemail interaction or anything like that, that we're going to have to replace with our physical presence? So an idea that I learned was basically we all have two spots in our wallet. Yeah. We have commodity money and we have unique experience money. Right. We have, I'm going to go to a store. I'm going to buy a bottle of milk. I don't, you know, maybe I'm going to look at a handful of brands I know, but it's not a deep, it's not a very important decision I'm going to make. And I might just buy the cheapest one. But when I go to Italy and I buy a bottle of wine and I'm there with my wife, I don't actually care. I'm going to get the best bottle and I have a very different kind of metric or rubric for making that decision. What you're saying, I completely agree with. I think we are going to become highly

suspicious, but we may not care when it comes to certain things. Like when I call my phone carrier and try to get something done, I don't think I'm going to care if the person is an AI or the person is a disgruntled employee or the person happens to be a marvelous account rep or whatever. But the likelihood is efficiency for me is going to mean a higher score. So I think that's where that's going to be hard on the workforce, but easier for us as consumers. But there's also going to be stuff that I'm not going to want to outsource. I'm not going to want an AI therapist, I don't think. I'm not going to want an AI friend. Although there have been movies suggesting this, I don't want to believe that that's a possibility for us. Now, I have seen research where the dopamine triggers with seniors and facilities

where there are robots providing care and providing a sort of a, you know, a nice chat dynamic with a senior emulates that of a human interaction. I just can't seem to allow myself to get there. I came up through. Go ahead. Yeah, well, it's interesting. I just want to jump in here because I'm a huge, I love science fiction. I love, you know, all this talk and it's very, is very much a science fiction-y feeling that we're talking about this right now.

But one thought I had too, as far as what you were saying, like not having a therapist that is going to be AI and what you said earlier about, you know, this AI is becoming godlike, you know, where it's everywhere, it's omniscient, it's, you know, all-knowing, all these other kind of things. I think in the same way, right, us as human beings will want an authentic and true relationship with something. You know, like the idea of, like, God wanting a relationship with mankind that's unforced and that's free will-based, right? Same thing as humans, we'll want relationships with people and those around us that are true and authentic, that we know that they're coming from a place of sincerity and not just forced to love us like, oh, this AI is programmed to make me feel all the things I think in the back of our minds, Mark, I wonder. And to what extent this is true. I'm Gen X. I know what it's like to get a letter in the mail from someone who took the time to say thank you. My children don't. I make them write a letter, like a card to say thanks to grandma. And they're like, why don't I just call her or do a FaceTime or send her an email. So the things that we signify as meaning intimacy might change. They may evolve evolutionarily. We may not even know what people are missing.

My guess is if we talk to somebody from a hundred years ago, they'd say, my gosh, you people have no time for deep thinking. You're just running from pillar to post and you're just, you know, multitasking and they would know what we've lost. And maybe we're sort of in this intersection point. We're watching this tide come in and we're saying, wow, I hope we don't lose sight of this. But human beings might. It may not necessarily bother the humans that grew up normalizing it. But for those of us old fogies, we may be like, oh, you have no idea what it's like to dance with a girl, right? You don't know what it's like to get a letter in the mail. You wouldn't know what it's like to stand in front of an audience and feel the

energy coming back from them. Like all this stuff with COVID you talked about, Adam. I mean, we all went to this and I'm very aware that it was a good proxy and it really kept some people who are comfortable pivoting right in the game and it even opened up doors that had otherwise been closed. I own a software that is about capturing on video conversations that you may not be able to have because Adam, when did you exit? March of last year? Yeah. March of last year. Yeah, I might be working at Rheanax and never get a chance to meet you, but I could be the beneficiary of a lot of your wisdom. Like, how cool is that, right?

Right. Is it the same thing as having lunch with you? No, it's not. The Hindus have this idea of ray emulsion that we actually, almost like on a quantum level, like we're really interacting with each other, you know, through some sort of invisible rays. And I'd like to think that that's true. And I think there's some science that would support it. The question ultimately would be, would a large part of the population even miss it?

Now, the apocalyptic consideration with all this stuff is if they don't, all of our best thinkers on the topic have said, universal basic income is going to be the way that you solve this. If we're going to completely like structural unemployment, like not just jobs that are not available right now, but jobs that will never come back. Customer service reps, it was a Gartner study. And it was, I think 40% of customer service reps will be gone in the next five years, never 2017 to AI. And if worse, when you look at this chat GPT, like you wouldn't even know. All they need to do is give a voice avatar and that language inflection, tune that thing up.

And you'd never really know that you're not talking to a person unless you're really, really astute and paying attention. Right. It may throw a non-sync or say something that doesn't quite sound right. But nonetheless, like we talk to people all the time that you're like, really? Is this a person? You know, I mean, we would, you would even be an improvement in many regards. Google did that, that, that reveal last year or a couple of years ago where they essentially had their AI call to schedule a haircut for their CEO. And the person

didn't even know. They're like, yeah, I'm here to schedule a hair appointment for my client. And they scheduled the whole appointment. The person at the hair salon didn't know they were talking to a robot. They just scheduled the appointment. They're like, all right, thank you. I had people using this software to schedule appointments with me. And I remember thinking how embarrassed I was for them. Right.

Because I knew that it was phony and it was awkward. You know, this is why I assisted Angie. It's Because I knew that it was phony and it was awkward. You know, this is my assistant, Angie. It's like, no, it isn't. What if I couldn't tell? What if I couldn't tell? Right. What if actually, you know, it would be like, or even if I could tell it would be so normalized. I mean, the last time you guys went to the grocery store and saw a little robot carrying stuff on the shelves, like we're absolutely living in the middle of it. Let me ask you this, John. Here's a reality. There are opportunities for us to crank up, you know, that customer obsession, that experience that the customers have on an interpersonal basis that we know we can separate from some sort of an AI, a bot, whatever it is.

For instance, just getting on a phone call with somebody and then reminiscing something or, hey, where are you at? How's the weather there? Stuff like that. Granted, the AI can think fast enough where it can substitute for some of these things, but it can't give me, if I'm like, where are you at? I'm at the beach. Oh, show me the waves. Oh, cool. It's going to struggle to give me a free-flowing experience like I would with a human being. And it's going to struggle to give me a free-flowing experience like I would with a human being. And it's going to struggle to give me that interpersonal connection. And I'm a relatively suspicious person. I spent a couple of years working undercover as a police officer, and I ask a lot of questions.

So how can we, moving forward, take a look at where we're at and answer that question for ourselves of, am I going to be disintermediated and how can I prevent from being disintermediated through my interaction, my EQ with my, my customer base? Yeah. I think that, um, if we can keep people, I'm going to get in trouble for saying this. If we can keep people out of the metaverse, yeah, I think it'll be significantly easier. But if you and I only operated in our business interactions through avatars, there'd probably be no way for you to know you're not dealing with somebody else on my team who's a proxy for me, much less an AI,

who's been sort of... So we built the software to, I told you, house all the intellectual property out of the heads of these brilliant clients that we were exposed to. Right. We pull it out of them in an analog fashion. But don't think for a minute we didn't cross our mind to build some sort of crazy Orwellian software that would follow them around. Tracking all their calls and recording and then translating those for keywords, patterns and emails, looking at their database, and basically deconstructing their job and putting it into a playbook. It just scared the crap out of

me. I didn't want to do it. But if we can keep the human interactions analog, if we can basically have occasion where we're having a coffee with someone, taking a walk with a friend, or I hope getting some sort of verification process through blockchain that I'm actually talking to the real Adam, not his avatar, it would be of great advantage because we could have conversations that I wouldn't dare have with an avatar or with your AI.

I liken this to the same language I used in my TED Talk. I haven't upgraded my opinion. It'll be radical, radical empathy. That really does it. Total authenticity, you're going to have to fly your freak flag to differentiate and let people know that you are authentic and real and what you stand for as it pertains to your values, because efficiency will no longer be the currency, right? And so that's number one. And then that authenticity is coupled with an empathy for the person across the table. And those are not talking skills.

Those are listening skills. Those are not presentation capabilities. Those are insights that are gleaned just from shutting up and listening. And that is a time-honored tradition. And while I think an AI could probably approximate it, I have this romantic ideal that somehow or another, we as humans could transcend it. There'd be something beyond it. The last rule that I had was humble irreverence.

And that was, the people that I saw breaking out and breaking free were unhindered by the bureaucracy. They weren't constrained by the so-called rules that hemmed them in. Platforms that we're on have a desire to automate and simplify us as humans too, like cogs in a wheel. Don't be the weird guy who's trying to do his own thing. Unless, of course, you want your individuality and you want to actually pioneer a new pathway of success, then you kind of have to break out.

And so I like entrepreneurs because they're unregulated. You know what I mean? And so if you're going to see those innovative efforts of connection happening, it won't happen because you work for the massive corporation and you have the PowerPoint they give you. That's not where it'll live. It'll live in the frontiers. The merchant class, always trying to find those angles. They'll be, you know, finding new ways to do it.

It might just be the most absurdly old school stuff it might be let's meet for coffee whoa the guy meets face to face i can't believe it he wants to you know do a mortgage and he wants me to sit down with him right like that would be the currency of differentiation and unique experience design it is an't efficiency. It's not cost. It's not marketing collateral. It's not guy's got a big brand. It'll be, I'm important to that person. It'll be a sense of self-worth, that sovereign individual connection.

Like I'm going to treat you like a real human. That might be it. Fascinating. I mean, I promised you at the top of this, we were going to do it on our pre-show. And I said, I'd love to tell you, I've got this thing licked. I looked directly at it and it scared the crap out of me. I know I'm

not the type to go, oh, you know, but I, I honestly reconciled myself to the idea that there's nothing I can do to stop this. We could electively not use AI, but we're not going to do that. This thing will march forward and everybody with their Siri, guess what you're doing? You're teaching it. Yeah. Yeah. Siri and Alexa. I mean, it's, I don't believe it. It's learning every single day, every moment for crying out loud. Yeah. I was describing the idea to a group and I said, so just imagine the complexities of this. If I say it can be anywhere, it's networked, all this stuff, that's a kind of buzzword thing. But think about it from this perspective. I've got teenage kids. I teach my son a quadratic equation at the kitchen table.

And in the morning, all your children know how to do quadratic equations. And they don't get it wrong. And there's no degradation. They all know exactly what I programmed my son to know. All of them in the morning. That's that node kind of hive mind idea. So while they're learning over here, it's getting absorbed by the main database. It's getting stripped for ideas and then it now becomes the norm. That's that increasing pace of learning. It's so daunting. Anyway, go ahead.

You had a question. I interrupted. No, this is really fascinating because it makes me ask this question. We went through this with the pandemic. You know, everybody was locked up. They were trying to do everything via text message, email, messenger. Real estate transactions are going off over Instagram chats and things like that. You've got all of these intermediary resources that are actually pulling this data from us. And people are like, OK, I like this part for the efficiency, but I like this part for the personalization. It's up to us to maximize that personalization is what I'm hearing from you, because there are

going to be some efficiencies created through the rest of this. Everybody's like, I'm just going to, I'm going to sit on the beach someplace and collect my mailbox money because I'm going to run my business in an automated manner. Well, guess what? Those are going to be the first people to go because that stuff is going to be just, I mean, that's going to be shut out. And you think of it like a textbook. Like when you go to college, a textbook gets reiterated on every year because there's an opportunity to sell something new. No longer is that textbook going to be some sort of a commodity. It's going to come down to that professor of how well can I teach the interpersonal relationships to the textbook in order to build your business.

I'm sitting here listening to this, thinking from the mind of, you know, we have real estate agents, we have mortgage people, we have entrepreneurs, we have business leaders in our space that are listening to this podcast, listening to you and I pontificate on this. And they're wondering the same thing that you and I are talking about of how do I make sure that I can make it to 65 and retire without getting the pink slip via a text message or something like that. Or it's be a better leader. It's be a better human being to your customers and to your partners in the business and stand out in your business as a human being instead of relying on everything you've got to fix your time. You've got it, Adam. I talk about there are only two business models. There's wide and there's deep. Wide is high transaction volume. It's low margin, but you pick it up on the spread, right? It's great if you're on the chassis. If I'm Remax, right? It's marvelous to have all these widgets basically moving through the product, through the supply chain. And every single person that works there is one of those

that's doing the transacting. The alternative to that, and I saw this, and I'm sure you'd see it at Remax too, and I've seen this in wealth management and insurance and other commoditized industries, is not to go wide, but rather to go deep. And deep is really where you fly your freak flag of values and price becomes irrelevant. And so as opposed to, I need to have a transactional style relationship with an increasingly large number of people, you're going to get beat by software eventually. Like it just isn't a game you can win unless you happen to own the chassis. If you own the chassis, it's a nice game to play.

But if you're a person stuck inside that machinery, you need to go and look at it from another perspective and that is to go deep. And deep means you're aligning with values. That's where authenticity and empathy matter. But you're also outside the range of the typical commodity pricing constraints. You can sell a unique experience. Starbucks is selling a $4 cup of coffee and you're paying a lot more money for tickets

to Disney. Why? What's for sale is not rides. What's for sale is not a cup of coffee. They're buying something else. And so the books that have done it have said, okay, I'm going to go really deep. I'm going to have a very narrow niche

of a psychographic profile of people that totally get what I believe in and stand for. And it doesn't matter what it is. Like my clientele are gay, left-handed, Latino bowlers. Cool. Knock it out. Have every single one of them have a relationship with you and understand your value proposition and create extraordinary value for them. They'll be loyal.

You can create new products and services as they evolve through their careers or it's their second home or third home and that'll be your little niche that you own. Alternatively, build a machine, AI or some other kind of a scalable platform and take your little tiny transaction amount off of an increasingly large number of microtransactions that are happening out there. Where guys get screwed is they don't realize that that is not a continuum. Like maybe you could do this, maybe you could kind of do that. They're really very fixed. They're foxholes. This one works. Point deep totally works look at

canyon ranch that's a thirty thousand dollar weekend does it work you bet it works bangalovson speakers the polka channel on the radio you know like there's k-light the best of the 80s the 90s and beyond like how do you win at that game you buy every you buy like four or five channels on every major you know market you play five channels on every major market. You play the spread. But if you're the Polka channel, all Polka all the time, 24-hour Polka network, you get every Polish person. You get the Chicago market, you lock it down and you have your advertisers are selling kielbasa and accordions, but they're loyal and you can monetize them because you're selling something they cannot get anywhere else.

And so that's the leap of faith. The authenticity aspect of it is flying the flag. And the empathy component of it is saying like, I'm not building stuff for people. I'm building stuff for this particular niche. And they, in fact, helped me build it. It's a partnership. We're collaborating. So the fear and the scarcity that kicks in with a salesperson of any type, any entrepreneur of any stripe, that scarcity moves them to being somewhere in between.

And that's where they're most vulnerable. That's no man's land between two foxholes. That's actually where they're vanilla. They kind of strip any uniqueness out of their messaging. God forbid they piss somebody off. They stop making sense. It's all cliches. They become irrelevant. It's the guy who's like, I don't care. I charge an arm and a leg. I only work with people like this, and they can't find me anywhere, and they pay a premium for what I do. That maybe sounds like swagger and bravado, but it's actually just saying, I don't lose a lot of sleep over picking up Mrs. McGillicuddy. I only work with these people. And once you catch on with them and you hone your

messaging in and you use the kind of language that they pick up on, it becomes like this flywheel effect and you can pick up a decent size of that market. So anybody who's listening to this, there's absolute hope. Don't go the way of software. You'll never win. Either if you don't own the software, you're not going to compete with AI. You're actually not going to. You have to play a fully different game. The rules of such are basically emphasize the human, the unique aspects of what you do, but charge for the kinds of things that they're actually asking for. There's so many examples where people said, well, our service is this, but we really get paid to do this thing that surrounds the service or the product. And those things can sometimes become their own little business or they can make price irrelevant. And those people have very nice careers. I mean, I was working with people making eight figures, selling something somebody across the street

was selling exact same product, same things in their tool belt, they're making 250. How do they do that? It wasn't because necessarily they were breaking any laws or doing something at enormous volume. They just got laser beam focused on who they serve and they built the whole business around empathizing

and serving that unique need set. And that to my best understanding, at least in this window where AI hasn't kicked our ass, it's not so intelligent and pervasive that we're not going to be able to tell the difference at this particular junction, maybe the next 10 years. I think we can definitely still compete if we go human and we stop trying to be transactional killers. You're not going to keep up. And so I think that's a window. Wow.

Thanks for the window there. No, that was amazing, John. Here's what I got. People, stop trying to play in this broad space. You've got all these people going, I'm going to go generate leads. I'm generating 600 leads, whatever it is. No, go generate 1% to 5% of that in actual interested relationships that you're going to follow through on transactions with. Everybody's like, it's not that easy.

Yes, it is. You have to get as hyper-focused and hyper-tight on that niche as you possibly can. You can supplement some of this with AI. Maybe you do some sorting with AI. But ultimately, I loved your no man's land, John, between the foxhole of the wide and the foxhole of the deep. If you're in the middle and the FOMO kicks in, the fear of missing out on, oh my gosh, I could have had those customers. Stop. Get the ones that you can have a continuous relationship with. That is where you shine as an entrepreneur. That's where you shine as a human-to-human business, a person-to-person

business, because that is what will win. You said something I want to really shine the light on. You can't compete on the large scale with these large organizations that own the technology. All they're doing is monetizing you. They're not going to give you their business model and they're not going to give you their customers. You have to go get those customers and tie them down into your business model. Don't get greedy. Just get focused and you will grow. I really like that. Don't get greedy. Get focused is brilliant. That's exactly the way to look at it. It's liberating. And I think you've seen this too, and I bet you'll validate this. Nothing strips a soul out of a man than actually to bastardize his own value so he can win and then find out it doesn't work either.

True. It just destroys them. They feel like it's just gross and they know it and there's still no honor left because they're not even winning. It's like the worst vicious cycle. They start to get wayward on their own values. They start to bastardize their own opinions. They're not flying the freak flag. They're trying to do what they think the market wants from them. And you said it and I agree with you. It starts with go all the way back to the beginning of your career where Mrs. Jones wanted to buy a house from you and you would go to her house and you'd sit in her kitchen

and you would learn what matters to her. That is something that happens to men and women over the course of their career. And I think it's a danger for all of us is that we start figuring out like, okay, I got a pattern here and I can exploit that and shortcut it and try to kind of run this as a system

and this kind of stuff. And at some point they stop listening. They stop kind of tuning into the person across the table. And that's like the end of intimacy. And honestly, you've seen it too. Like I have called a midlife crisis too. I'm not in accord anymore, right? Like I'm not in harmony anymore. And it's because you bought a bunch of books, you learned a bunch of stuff in your thirties, you were super hungry, willing to do anything. You'd get a client, you totally pour into them. And then at some point, it became rote and routine. And somebody just became another number

and you need you need so many more that it doesn't matter. But it's like, take a week off. Stop doing that. And go the other way, go really deep. And I think that a lot of this requires a thoughtful approach to the monetization of intellectual property. There's a whole other conversation, Adam, but you can imagine why. If you sell a widget for five bucks, you're not going to just meet Mrs. McGillicuddy at her house. You're going to get screwed. You'll never make a living doing it. So you have to know what business you're in. And if the business you're in is high transaction volume, get out of it. That's it. Sell something you can actually compete with. I love it. John LaDuca, amazing

information. Go back and re-listen to this. I've been sitting here typing notes out. This is fantastic. It's so nice to have you here. I have a question that I ask all of our amazing guests on Start With A Win. And John, that is, how do you start your day with a win? I start my day with the three G's. I get my two teenage boys out of bed at six o'clock in the morning. I bait them, I give them coffee, and we do God, goals, and gratitude every morning. We just spend a few minutes. They write down some positives from the last couple of days. They set a goal for the day. We pray together. We get them. And I just think it's probably one of the best things I've ever done in my household. Awesome.

Awesome. Thank you so much for being on Start With A Win. We appreciate all of your knowledge and insight. And, you know, thanks for starting with a win. Pleasure. And thank you for listening to Start With A Win. Hey, if you are ready to get your time under control and you've been having issues, well, head over to Adam Contos dot com. And there you can get access to Adam's exclusive system on managing your time.

It's foolproof. It'll fix anything in your life that you're missing out on. This will this will fix it. It'll help you hyper anything. Wow. Because time at least you're going to know what it is, right? That's right. Time is the only thing that we don't get more of. So if we can master that, we can fix all sorts of other things in our lives. I love your optimism, Mark. That's right.

Head over to adamkosmos.com. Until next time, remember, start with a win. you