Technology, Connected - Your Customer Is Now OpenAI

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

Marketing funnels don't exist. They never did. The internet just convinced us they were real. Meta, Google, OpenAI and a supporting cast of billionaire sociopaths figured out they could control distribution and black-box your customers.Hurrah. Humanity forgot to read the small print. Now you're running a business where you don't even know who your customer is.Well here’s the AI-shaped healthcheck: Your customer is OpenAI.You're paying 3-15% for a digital presence you don't need. It's called the Silicon Valley tax. You're burning money to keep VCs rich while platforms add another layer of black box between you and the people you serve.The alternative? Network methodology. Someone you know, or someone who knows someone you know. That's it.Funnels were invented to sell marketing. Networks are how humans actually work. We've been doing it since we had prefrontal cortexes.Everything that's real is analog. That's true for business too.Welcome to the marketing jungle. The year is 2026, and if you don’t know who the sucker at the table is… you probably shouldn’t be playing the stakes. Please enjoy the reality check.Cheers,Mark and Jeremy. PS: Keep thinking on paper. They don’t want you to, that’s why you must. --Other ways to connect with us:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [e-mail]--

Everyone exists in a mirrored cage of algorithmic distortion. Given all of the above, it's not exaggerated to say there is no central source of truth. 21st century humans are quite comfortable in our house of mirrors, letting algos tell us what they think we want to hear. For sellers who want customers, this means rethinking neutrality. You can't please everyone because they don't even live in the same world as each other. But only community of customers requires accepting and engaging their preferred distortions. pick your facts, pick your perspective, pick your customer. Wow, question for you there.

So the distortion, the distortion gap is real. The distortion gap is totally. Yeah, what do you mean by that? What I mean is if it's, you know, like that classic Michael Jordan quote of people from both parties by shoes, right? The reason why he was politically neutral is he was like, well, people of all political persuasions by shoes. The applicability of that thought is shrinking at a dramatic. rate. There are some brands that are large enough that that is to some degree true for. And the way they've handled it is their POV shifts based on whose box they sit in at the at at at uh at the swearing in.

But for most brands that are sub, you know, 100 million, you just simply don't have the scale, the resources, the tools, the financial structure to serve a broad swath of people. You've got to get specific of who you're going to serve and how you're going to serve them. And one of the ways you have to get specific is what is the information ecosystem that they are consuming? Because that information ecosystem isn't just online. This idea that there's, oh, there's the online in the world and there's the real world and go touch grass. No, our brains are being formatted by these interactions. How we think, I mean, there's already initial research that some of the word choice narrowing that the LLMs are producing is actually changing the structure of language, how we think about the structure

of language. Like your customer is choosing a cage of information, limitation and distortion. You've got to walk into that cage and be comfortable there. It's interesting to think about. So I ran across a quote from Blake Muskogee, the Tom Shoes guy. He was talking about a new idea that he had tried and massively failed and kind of put him into a bit of a funk. His quote was, even if your, even if your idea works, you still have to understand the system that delivers it to the world. What's the best way to connect ideas to these cages, right? And that you're talking about and doing it in an authentic way, because the distortions in and of themselves are not authentic of the people that they emanate from, right? So if you're, if you're

pitching to people, you're not really, if you pitch to them, they may not listen, but if you pitch to their distortions, you might, like, that's mind-boggling, man. Yeah, yeah, it's messy. So the short answer is use as few of them as possible. And that doesn't mean that you go and become an analog business and you send out a printed newsletter and you put flyers under people's windshield wipers on their cars, although maybe that would work. But Bransley to drastically reduce their dependency on distortion platforms.

Because the distortion platforms have figured out the game. And the game is, we're not even going to tell you who we're giving your information to. So not only are you dependent on it for distribution, you're dependent on us for customer recognition. You don't even know who your customer is anymore. We're going to blackbox that too. As soon as they start selling through LLMs, it's just one more layer of black box around who the customer is. So now you're running an enterprise where you don't even know who your customer is. So who is your customer?

Well, your customer's open AI. That's a terrible proposition. So you absolutely do not want to get in a situation. You want to de-risk by being less and less dependent on these, which means you move from a funnel methodology of building a client base, which is lots of people get as much tension as possible. Trickle that into a little bit more focused attention. Trickle that more into a little bit more focused attention

and eventually sucker people into a point of sale. Funnels don't actually exist. The Internet may just think they did. But lots of people are still doing it. And 90% of marketers are trained on funnel methodology and don't know how to break from it. So you move from funnel methodology to where we started this conversation, which is network methodology, which is everything you need to do, every decision you need to make as a business sub 100 million, we'll say, is probably something that needs to happen with someone you know or someone who knows someone you know.

And I don't need a platform to do that. If I believe and start to build a business model where every decision I need to make is somewhere between someone I know and someone who knows someone I know, then I can start to make decisions on a network methodology way. Now, it doesn't mean I don't have a Discord group or it doesn't mean I don't have, I might put some stuff on LinkedIn or whatever. And we're not going to, this isn't an argument for full analog. It's a different discussion. But reducing your digital dependency is, one, a huge de-risking strategy for businesses that they need to think about. And it's also a way of recapturing your financial control.

Because almost every business in America is paying the Silicon Valley tax of spending enormous amounts of money to create digital presence that they've been lulled into believing that they have to have, that they don't have to have. And it's costing them sometimes three, four, five, 12, 15% of their top line revenue and they're burning money keeping Silicon Valley well funded. It sounds a little bit like a thousand, and true fans in a way that you have to narrow down your field to actually people who care

about you and people who care about you are not at the end of a digital funnel that doesn't exist. Yeah. Yeah, it's a little bit difficult to talk about because it's hard to make it sound innovative and interesting because it's not. Well, it is now because we've all be more undecided why when you were speaking to you're saying and thinking, yep, that sounds right. That sounds right. And I felt, at least I'm not the only fool in the world because I believe I bought into it as well. Yeah. The reality is there's a thousand people have written books about or described how to do this because this is how humans do things. Networks exist. Funnels don't exist.

Funnels don't actually exist. They never existed. It was a way to market marketing. It was a way to get CEOs to buy digital marketing was to invent this idea of digital funnel. Thank you, HubSpot. We appreciate you. Networks actually. exist. So there's endless material on how to create a great, powerful and successful network.

Because we've been doing it since we had prefrontal cortexes. So let's do what's actually exists in the real world. One of your previous guests said, I think, everything that matters, everything that's real is analog. This is another application of that. Everything that's real is analog. And that's true for businesses too. Everything that's real is analog.