The Ryan Hanley Show - AI Isn't the Moat in 2026: How Marketers Win with Skills + Context

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

I help founders & executives generating more than $10M in revenue find their Easy Mode. Start here: https://ryanhanley.com/subscribe Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtube.com/ryanmhanley AI access is not the advantage anymore. Ryan Doser makes the case that the real marketing moat in 2026 is expertise, context, and distribution. The model matters, but the model is not the business. Ryan brings a useful anti-hype posture to a category packed with fake automation demos and borrowed confidence. We talk about why frontier models can be overbuilt for normal knowledge work, how cheaper open or alternative models can fit the job when you provide strong context, and why generic “tell AI to do it” advice breaks once the work gets messy. The practical path is cleaner than the hype. Define the bottleneck. Build a context vault. Create granular skill markdown files. Treat those skills like SOPs for agents. Run the work in a space like VS Code where instructions, files, examples, and outputs can sit together without turning into a junk drawer. Ryan also explains how he pairs different models for critique, keeps skill files narrow, and learns from failed experiments without turning every mistake into another tool subscription. The goal is not more AI. The goal is a system that makes better decisions, lowers waste, and helps good marketers ship work their customers can use. We also cover guardrails, agent permissions, review loops, and model cost. If AI has felt noisy, expensive, or slippery, this conversation helps you move from prompt collector to operator. Connect with Ryan Doser Website: https://ryandoser.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-doser-ai-marketing/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RyanDoserAI AI Marketing Insiders: https://www.skool.com/ai-marketing-insiders Claude Skills Stack: https://skills.ryandoser.com/ Follow Ryan Hanley Website: https://ryanhanley.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/ryan_hanley This is the way. Hanley. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm probably the most anti-hype AI guy that probably exists out there, right? Because now I can make a few mistakes, but it doesn't cost me anything. You don't need to run Fable 5 to draft an email to your boss. Anyone can build any app in a matter of seconds with how good AI models are. That doesn't mean they're going to resonate. It doesn't mean they're going to work. Just tell Claude to do your SEO. Just tell Claude to run a paid marketing campaign.

But if you don't have the subject matter expertise, that's not going to amount to anything or move the needle. As a non-technical guy that's kids, killing it with AI. What, like, what gave you the confidence to say you could even do this? Like, what makes you think that you're even capable of using these tools that are so advanced that, you know, everything at your wildest dreams, but you have to know what you're doing and, you know, et cetera. Like, what made you think you were even capable of this? I'll be honest, bro. I think a lot of it comes down to just my willingness to learn and dive in. And, you know, we'll just get into Claude Code here. That's kind of the hot topic now in the AI world.

when you hear the word Claude Code, I think it came out 2024, maybe 2025, somewhere in that realm, your brain immediately goes, as a non-technical marketer, your brain immediately goes to coding, programming, terminal, and we just want to dismiss it as something that's advanced and that's for programmers. But when you actually dive into it, Claude Code is a very bad branding issue, right?

So it should be called Claude Chat or, you know, Claude Design, or they have a clawed design, but it should be rebranded to something else, right? Because all it is is it's an, AI coding agent where you are essentially speaking in plain English and then it's doing the coding on the back end, but in a nice interface that's presentable to marketers, content creators, or really anyone that's non-technical. I will say the biggest moat, Ryan, now, especially in 2026 and beyond, it's not building anymore because anyone can build a SaaS tool, anyone can build any app in a

matter of seconds with how good AI models are. So the ultimate moats are subject matter expertise, knowing what the hell you have to do, and also distribution, understanding how to sell whatever you build, right? So for me, my background is in marketing. I have over 10 years of experience and aspects like SEO, paid search, email, and other fats as some marketing. And at first, I thought that was a disadvantage because I did not come from a technical background. But funny how things work out, that's actually my biggest advantage now because everywhere on the internet, it's all the advice you see is just tell Claude to do your SEO. just tell Claude to run a paid marketing campaign. But if you don't have the subject matter expertise, that's not going to amount to anything or move the needle.

I was playing around with mostly from an exploratory standpoint. Like I have built a few things that I use on a daily basis, my website included. But I built a lot of things and then destroyed them. And one of the things that I wanted to try because I saw somebody put out, you know, a thousand UGC variation. reals in 15 minutes using this skill and Claude and a Higgs field MCP.

Okay, great. Okay. So I literally walk through verbatim what this guy says to do. And yes, I got a thousand videos out the back end. Or what wasn't a thousand? It was like 200. But which is still a lot. That being said, garbage nonsense.

It was nearly as easy. there were like three steps that he didn't, that Claude had to explain to me that he didn't include, you know, long story short, this is a much more intense detail. Like, I don't know what a UGC character is supposed to say in order to drive, you know, demand. Like, so, so essentially even though, yes,

could I get the videos out to your point? I could. I could get the videos out. But that doesn't mean they're going to resonate. It doesn't mean they're going to work. It doesn't mean I still, there's like 15 other things I need to do in order to use those UGC videos to actually drive demand in. So to your point, I think this, this idea that somehow, you know, all of this, we'll call it white collar or knowledge work information or expertise that we've developed somehow becomes useless in a world with AI to me is one of the biggest nonsensical misinformation plays. And to your point, just grifter talking points that exist on the internet right now.

And I would argue that before December 2025, when Opus 4.5 came out, that was kind of the turning point that me and a lot of others in this space really pinpoint to as kind of that breakthrough moment where before building was definitely a moat because the models weren't good enough to build these sophisticated SaaS tools or anything else going on. But Opus 4.5, fast forward to Fable now in Opus 4.8 as we're talking, there is absolutely zero moat in building, right? you have to understand what actually goes into it and provide subject matter expertise with skill markdown files and other contexts to direct these AI agents to produce something meaningful. Do you think the moat now is token cost? Yes and no. You know, that's a bigger conversation because I think we're going to see a massive shift towards open source AI models here. And we're already seeing this, right? With Fable being pulled and, you know, now OpenAI had GPT 5.6 that had to go through the government

first before we could get access to it. And so what's going to happen is, as these big AI companies like Anthropic or Open AI, they keep restricting access to the average person like me or you. Well, guess what? China's going to come out with DeepSeek version 10 or Kwan or, you know, GLM 5.2 was the hot one here recently, right, that are 510X cheaper but can produce similar outputs. And so that's why Open AI and Anthropic are kind of holding off on going public because they know these AI Chinese companies can come in and duplicate or replicate their models like

we saw Deep Seek do early in 2025 and sell it for a tenth of the price. I've been playing around with GLM 5.2. I downloaded their version of Codex, which is called Z code. And I just started doing a few like simple tasks, simple kind of, mostly I started with debugging just to see like what it would look like. So I said, hey, you know, I for purposes of both the project and learning as well as there were things I wanted to do, I tore my website down off a WordPress and rebuilt it from scratch using Claw code. And I said, I was like, okay, well, let me, let me take GLM 5.2 and let's just run it through that code base and just just find bugs.

We're not fixing anything yet. We're just finding bugs. And I did the same exact thing with a fresh instance of Opus 4.8, right? and just to see, compare, what did they find? And again, non-technical, but my examination was that it was almost indistinguishable. They basically found using different words in different order, they basically found a lot of the similar things that would need to be fixed. Except the difference was I had to pay $7.25 to run that debugging session with Claude Opus,

and I paid about 27 cents with GLN 5.2. And I think that to me was an enormous eye-opener, which from the last couple weeks and so much as, well, if I do maybe a little better job up front with planning, with prep, and as you said, skill design, which I want to get into that concept with you in a couple of minutes,

does the slight, and we're taught, you know, to most users, minuscule difference in intelligence between something that's costing me $7 and something that's costing me $27, is it worth just starting to learn and build? Because now I can make a few mistakes, but it doesn't cost me anything. I can work on a few side projects and see where they go.

And I'm not coming out of my pocket for, you know, a couple hundred or a thousand or more to put that in play. And that to me was like, we're in a completely different world here. And all the leverage that the two big frontier models had is gone, at least in my perspective. Yeah, and something, you know, on your point there, something for the audience to understand is that I would argue that models like Opus 4.8

or Fable or whatever mythos, whatever other sophisticated frontier model that comes out, I would argue that that is actually overkill and a nuclear bomb, I call it, for 99% of knowledge work, right? You don't need to run Fable 5 to draft an email to your boss. You don't need to run Fable 5 to fine-tune an article or a blog post trying to rank for SEO, right? their GLM 5.2 and other open source models have caught up to these frontier models. Am I saying that they're as good as Fable or Opus 4.8?

I would argue for my work today, probably not, but they're just about there. And they're only going to keep getting better because you're telling me that, you know, there's no insiders at OpenAI or Anthropic who are reporting back to these other open source companies. And they're just, it's this giant game of cat and mouse where the frontier models come out with updates and better models. and then the open source companies come out and just update their models based on what, you know, Anthropic and Open AI are continuing to do on their side. So I don't know how this is all going to play out. I think personally they're going to try to ban open source,

but as we've seen in the past, what happens, Ryan? Users always find workarounds to everything. Yeah, I agree. I think that the lobbying, particularly that Anthropic has done, they got a lot of politicians in their pocket and they're going to come after these open source models for sure they're going to make the case that china is stealing this or that and and this isn't necessarily an issue for most everyday users and probably most of the people listening to this but if i'm if i'm a large enterprise do i really want to be running

my stuff through clod or open ai who have already shown that once they get enough information they will spin up a new competing product and not even think twice about it i mean Claude Design puts Canva, Figma, all these businesses. You've seen their valuations have dropped to the floor. Open AI comes out with a finance product that now competes with, you can essentially do everything up almost to pure accounting with it. So now like fresh books and these things, you know, are maybe not ready to be replaced yet, but you can see it on the horizon.

And you don't see any of that with the open source models. And the other thing that I think is interesting that I think, is a nuance that will be lost on our political class, but is very, and I'd love to know if you're playing with this, is the idea of forking and running it on a local, running that on a local machine, where now you're using the model, but the model is not speaking to any type of cloud system

where it's all contained in-house, and you can still run it for just as cheap, and now you own all of it, and nothing's leaking, and it's only getting smarter to you. Have you played around with local models? Are you running anything on any of your own hardware? So I have a Mac Mini and I've installed LM Studio and have played around with it a little bit.

But I'll be honest, unless you have like some advanced Nvidia device or like a Mac Studio, it's going to be very difficult to do the local running LLMs at scale. Right? So I just want to be honest here. If you're going to try to dabble in open source models, I would say open router is probably a really good resource right now

while it's still available, right? Fingers crossed. Because they are just kind of the middleman where you just give it one API key and then you can install, you know, that Z coding app or open code, right, is another alternative to cloud code or codex. And then you can route everything through open router, where if you want to try GLM 5.2 or Deepseek's latest model, or Quen, or, you know, minimax or insert new open source model, it's all routed

through open router's one API key. So I think that's the best way to probably test these open source models right now. Yeah. All right. Well, I don't want to go too high level for the audience too quick. I just, I had a few things on my brain and I'm obviously nerding on this as well. So I wanted to get your takes on these things. But I'd like to pull us back to like to where we started. And let's say I'm, I've played around a little bit. Yeah, maybe I have the pro version to, you know, the paid version to Open AI or something or Claude. And I've played around a little. But I want to go deeper, but but I don't know where to start. Like how does someone who wants to start, doing some of the things that you're going to talk about as we go.

Like, just level set for the starting point for them. Like, is it downloading the Claude Desktop app? Is it playing? Like, how does someone start to learn the necessary skills to start to use these products and, you know, for marketing in particular and sales without feeling they need to go too deeper or learn some sort of intrinsic knowledge that maybe they just have no interest in? The first thing I would say before you go down, the endless amount of AI Ravits holes out there is I would first distinguish what are the top tasks that are the biggest bottlenecks

in my business, right? So what's costing me the most amount of time and what's costing me the most amount of money? Once you establish those top three to five things, then that helps determine your answer going from there versus should I use chat GBT? Should I use Claude? That is the wrong framing for all of this, right? But if we want to take it, you know, a step deeper here of just you're on the paid plan of OpenAI, you're on the paid plan of Claude, I would say the next step is I would really encourage people to try Claude Code or Codex. And in terms of how to use this, okay, it does require a paid plan in order to use each one of these things. But how I do it is I install what's called an IDE called Visual Studio Code. This is owned by Microsoft. Alternatives to this are cursor,

which is just got bought out by SpaceX. And then also Google's anti-gravity are kind of those popular IDEs right now. And the reason why I use an IDE, if you don't know what an IDE is, I think it stands for like idle development environment is kind of the acronym it is a wrapper a user-friendly wrapper versus pulling up just a terminal and getting lost in the terminal so it makes your life a lot easier where you can just have a nice visual of folders and files and within visual studio code you can install official extensions whether that's the quad code code extension the codex extension i actually use quad code and codex inside visual studio code at once and the benefit of using visual studio code is that let's say Codex goes away, let's say Claude Code goes away.

I still have all the folders, files, skill markdown files, inside that one system. So it's a plug-in-play situation, right? Where I can install another extension that comes around. Or I can even pull up the terminal inside VS code and install something through there and just go right where I left off with all the folders and files that I already had. And the reason that this is so important is because you're not locked in to one ecosystem. And the reason I like VS code over some of those other alternatives, cursor, I think, is more pay-to-play. So VS code's completely free to use.

I think cursor's a good product, though, especially for more technical developers. And I don't know about you, Ryan, but Google's anti-gravity, I've heard it's a good product. I just do not trust them, right? Because Google's incentivize to Nerf every other AI model that you use inside anti-gravity and just push Gemini models versus Visual Studio codes kind of more of a, I would say, free-to-play environment where you can just plug and play different models and not really worry more about the bias. But if you have any like follow-up questions,

that's kind of high level of how I'm running things. No, I want to dig into the ID. So one, I agree with you on Google, especially because their models are starting to fall behind. And actually, I was listening to, I think it may even been the All In podcast. I'm not sure, but I was listening to a podcast they were talking about this exact topic

and how, you know, basically the question that was asked was how soon until Google catches up because they've fallen behind in terms of mile. And the answer to the question I thought was really interesting was this particular person. And I think it was the all in. So it may have been Freeberg. I'm not sure. I don't want to misquote him. But he said basically they're not going to catch up. And the reason is they're too distracted. They're too big. They're too bureaucratic. And they're too Google ecosystem focused exactly what you said. So I've actually moved a way. from the Gemini models and all that kind of stuff, myself.

And to your point, so I've been using the terminal. And I like the terminal. I've learned how to use it. But, man, for someone who, there are a lot of drawbacks to using the terminal directly. In particular, what you just said and what I'm really interested in is, is there's no visual way of seeing what you've already put in. Like every once in a while I have to like go back and go,

just tell me all the skills that I've added to this thing. You know, and then it'll pull up the list and I can see them. But like there's nowhere for me to get that, get there easy. So cursor, I think a lot of people have probably heard of cursor, but you know, you're looking at 50 to 60 bucks before any model costs or token costs. So VS code, free product allows me to get the visual nature. you know, I get in there and, like, what am I actually doing? So let's say I download visual code and I add Claude code.

I got my, I think this sort of. Yeah, like, what do I do when I'm in there? Like, can I create emails? Am I, does it, am I have to be building an app? Like, I think a lot of people feel like the Claude chat is for, is for like my normal stuff and Claude code is for like developers. and, you know, I don't think that could be more wrong. So, like, what are we doing when we're in there?

So I just screen shared here. I hope you can see this okay, but to give kind of a better overview of versus me just trying to explain this via words is going to be very difficult. But what you're doing inside here, you'll see I have the Claude Code extension. You can actually use the terminal inside Visual Studio code if you really want to, right?

But the benefit of this is you'll notice on the left-hand side, and again, I'm not the poster child for, you know, file organization here by any means. But on the left-hand side, what you'll notice is I have all sorts of folders and files and, you know, Cron jobs and all sorts of other stuff going on here that make my life so much easier

versus like you alluded to the terminal earlier. You don't have this nice looking interface. And you can customize this for different colors and icons and pictures, however you want. But at one thing I would note about the skill markdown files, that's really helpful. If I zoom in here, you'll see I've kind of put all my different skill markdown files into different folders by category. So image skills,

marketing skills, YouTube skills, system skills, like a skill creator skill or an MCP setup skill, right? It would be examples of that. And on the topic of skills here, one thing I would say, and just kind of for your audience who doesn't really know what a skill is, you can think of a skill as kind of a standard operating procedure or SOP for an AI agent or coding agent like Claude Code to follow a particular task correctly with best practices as you define in this markdown file. So it's just a markdown file, right? And so for this instance, I would also say that you should have one skill markdown file per one specific task. I'm not saying like for SEO, you should have one SEO skill and then fill it with a thousand lines of text and expect that one skill to do everything for

SEO. You need to be very granular. So this means a keyword research skill, a local SEO skill, a local SEO designer skill, you know, an SEO blog post skill, an SEO audit skill, right? Notice how I'm getting granular and getting more in the weeds of certain aspects of SEO versus just one SEO skill.

That's what I found yields the best results is when you get very specific with these types of skill markdown files. One thing I think it's hard for Bill to wrap their head around when they're new to this type of stuff is that the AI, at a certain point, the AI is going to get confused. It doesn't matter how,

detailed you are, like you said, if you have a 5,000 line skill with seven different functions that it needs to perform, even if they're well broken out and well ordered, a lot of times the AI will skim to operate fast and it will miss words, it will miss things, it will make a decision to skip a function for some reason or skip a step. And that becomes less and less the case the more concise and direct and singularly focused these things are guys so when you're thinking about this what Ryan just said is I've found I made this mistake I built this huge skill for for for writing my newsletter right this huge newsletter skill and it had ears to go out and do you know last 30 days keyword find out relevant stories rank those stories you know all all the

way down and I was getting different output every single time until I said, okay, I have like five things I want to do with the newsletter. Let's break them up all the way to I have one skill that is a post newsletter committee audit and then a separate skill that runs like AI writing anti-patterns is the skill name. And it basically has like it has 200 plus AI writing pattern. Now, those used to be in the same skill. And I become much more, those skills have become much more effective when I split them out and made them separate things that I just run chronologically.

So it's like singular focus, singular idea, and I love the word you use granular, it seems to absolutely be the solution when we're building these things. You mentioned the anti-skill, right? I actually have a similar one called anti-slop, where it gets rid of all those AI slop words, right? robust, delve, if not this, then that, right? The m dashes, the emoji. So every time I'm going through writing,

that's actually in my rules here is that it goes through the anti-slop, and then it does the checks and balances to make sure that whenever the final output is approved, then it went ahead and passed that. One other thing I would mention too, Ryan, is that I actually have a quote-unquote second brain or a context memory system inside Claude Code.

Now, you can use obsidian, you can use Supabase. there's a lot of alternatives and solutions out there. I actually vibe coded my own version of Obsidian and left it in Claude Code and then it does a daily backup to Google Drive. But that's a whole other conversation here. But the idea is, is that every single conversation, you'll notice I set this up going back to March, every single chat is automatically saved as a markdown file in this context folder. And if I want to add other things like after this podcast episodes out, I'm going to dump this in my context folder, right, where it has this endless,

list of context where if I ever need to pull something, you know, it has this endless library of all the context of things that I've done, chats that I've had. So that way it not only remembers this and knows for future reference, but it's a continuous feedback loop to understand, you know, what I'm looking for. Is this good? Is it not? So that's the other thing I would recommend your audience does is make sure that you have some sort of vault to save all this context going forward. Oh my gosh, dude, I could not agree with you more. So I do use obsidian. And I have an open claw that I use as well.

So open claw is kind of like my blunt force object. And then, you know, I have like things set up around it. And I put into my obsidian every blog post I've ever written all the way back to like 2014. I have the transcription of every podcast I've ever done both for this show or for shows I've been on. like you said, like you just said, right? I then had it tap into my X feed and my LinkedIn feed. So every ex post I do and every LinkedIn post I make also gets categorized in there. And then one of the things that I did that is changed, that has really changed the AI output writing is,

and this is going to sound nerdy, but I'm a nerd. I had a Friday where I'm divorced. So I had a Friday where both my kids were with their mom. And the woman that I've been, that I'm seeing, my girlfriend, she was. out of town. So I was all by myself on a Friday night. So like any good nerd, what I did was I had my open club basically interview me from birth. And literally it took six hours and four beers and we went through and it just like then what happened. Oh, give me more detail on this. Why did you make that decision? Why do you think this happened? How are you successful here? I mean, dude, it was six hours.

And I took that entire file. I had to chop it up into like epics of my life. And then, um, and tag it and then put that in there as well. So now not only is it pulling from learning off stuff that I had previously written, it's literally pulling from my life story. So it can inject anecdotes from my life into the writing or stories into the writing that seemingly only I would know. And my point in saying that is when you combine,

like I think it's like you need a skill for the basic build-out. of the post, you know, and then you have your inputs to get you there. I really like this skill that I built, and I'm interested in your take. I built a writing committee, and it's Alex Hermosey, Cody Sanchez, Robert Green, and Ralph Ralph Waldo Emerson. So it's like, make sure it's concise and to the point is basically Hermose's thing. Cody Sanchez is make sure it's either a contrarian or original idea or something that hasn't just been regurgitated a thousand times.

Robert Green is make sure it's the, as well researched as it possibly can be. And then Ralph Wolder Emerson is basically like, does it sound nice? You know what I mean? Is the pros there? And so it's like initial structure build out, run it through the committee,

run it through any patterns, now go in and inject personal narrative, personal story, et cetera, and the place it needs to be. And it's like those are four different skills to write one newsletter, right? And that's the way I set it up. I'm not saying that's the best way.

but like to kind of hammering on your point of being granular and specifically what you want in these things, that's four different skills to write one newsletter article that I run through every single time. I love that. And something similar, we call this kind of red teaming, right? That's kind of a more technical term when it's reviewing code or whatnot. But something that I've actually done on to your point is I have what's called an agents MD. You know, I'm sure your audience might be familiar with a Claude MD, right? That's kind of the brain or the operation of a Claude code setup.

The reason that I have an agents MD is because I'm also using codex in tandem with Claude Code, and it's more receptive to an agent's markdown file versus the way a Claude.md.md is structured, if that makes sense, right? And so the point here is that in my agents MD, one of the rules that I have somewhere in this file, I'm probably not going to be able to find it as I scroll through here, is that every time I go through and build something, whether that's like an article or that's code or I'm, you know, vibe coding something, the rules in this agent MD tell it to red team with codex to go through and criticize something, find things that are broken,

and then it will provide feedback because GPT 5.5 offers a different and unique perspective than Opus 4.8, and it can often catch some things that Opus misses or drops the ball in some instances, right? And so that's a good little tip here. I'd recommend like the AI council or red teaming situation where you can combine Claude Code and Codex to kind of attack multiple things at once. And if I wanted to throw Gemini in the mix here and route some something through open router or have other open source models take a look at things. You can add as many models to this AI counsel or critiquing workflow that you want. I just keep it relatively simple with Claude Code and Codex.

Yeah, yeah, there's a diminished return at a certain point. But like, yeah, no, that makes sense. And so maybe talk to the audience a little bit about model selection in so much as like, like, open a, what you're going to get from Open AI and Claude is going to be different. It's going to be different from what you get from GROC, from each one of these things. And like are you, so I have been toying with the idea of building in another skill similar to what you did with agents MD with GROC to make, to make sure what I'm saying is accurate. Like as a go through and hey, I want, you know, because you can, you know, Grock will actually look at community notes, et cetera. So if someone, if it's looking at information, but then that has been debunked or, you know,

maybe the point needed to be narrowed a little bit, et cetera, like, it can go in. So when you're thinking about this, you know, like how much time and thought do you put into model selection? Like, was it just started with Claude and that's great? And then I went here. Or are you examining what the expertise is perceived to be from these models and piecing them together in a thoughtful way? And do you think there's an actual return to that? And, you know, and how deep should you go? Yeah, before I think it used to matter a lot more. But I think the models are a lot more sophisticated now than they were a year, two or three years ago. But for most work, Ryan, I'll be honest, I mostly stick to Opus by default. And then sometimes

I'll throw in Sonnet 5 if I'm doing less token intensive tasks. Like if I'm building websites, building landing pages or a lot of times even general marketing copy, I'll leave it on Opus by default. But Sonnet 5, they just upgraded from like 4.6 or 4.7 to 5 is a pretty significant upgrade there. So I mostly stick with Claude models. I've seen those produce better outputs from a marketing and content perspective. But I will say GPT 5.5 on medium or high reasoning, GPT Image 2, which is the image model from OpenAI, I found is the current best AI image model.

So a lot of times when I'm going through and generating images, obviously you can't generate images with Claude models. If I'm writing a blog post, one portion of that loop in my actual workflow, is I say, call the Codex CLI to generate a featured image or generate any other inbody images in that blog post if it makes sense, right? And so in my blog post that I'm doing for various clients on various sites, that one step that calls Codex

actually has it generate the image. And the other thing I would say about codex, that's good for people to think about. It's a really good insurance plan when Claude Code goes down or you run out of usage on your Claude Plan, right? For a $20 a month plan with Codex and chat GPT Plus, you actually get a lot more usage than you would.

I would even argue on $100 a month, Claude Max plan, if you're just running Opus 24-7. But the other thing I would say, too, GROC, definitely the most unbiased model. You alluded to that earlier, so that's good for uncensored outputs. The one thing, too, for people to know is that Gemini models, yes, they suck. They're not as advanced now compared to anthropic or open AI models, but where Gemini models actually still shine is I defer to these as workhorse models, where if you're doing something like scraping a PDF,

that's very token intensive. The biggest benefit of Gemini models is their massive, massive context window. So scraping large files, going through a massive YouTube video or YouTube transcript or two examples that I do all the time. And they're very cheap, right?

So using Gemini models for those more workhorse-ish tasks like scraping things, for instance, PDFs videos, I think that's still a good use case for Gemini, honestly. I love that example because I think what you're showing everyone is, and I think this is important point and push back if you disagree is that we're still very much in like a Wild West time.

Like there is no absolute here. There's no absolute right answer. And I think this is, you know, when we were in the, I guess we'll call it the green room before we went live here, you know, you said that, you know, one of the things

that frustrates you the most about where we're at are these like hype grifters. And it's this constant, you can make all your wildest dreams come true. if you just do this one thing. And my point in saying that is like, maybe that's true today, maybe, right? But ultimately, like, you kind of have to FAAFO.

Like, you have to play around and say, hey, I know that image gen 2 from OpenAI right now is quote unquote the best image model, but, you know, the way I prompt out my images, Nano Banana 2 still produces the, great. Like, go ahead, use it. Like, you don't. You don't constantly have to be moving to the best thing.

It's about figuring out what set of tools that are at our disposal, open source, frontier, different companies, et cetera, get you to the result you need to do and then become more and more sophisticated in how you use that set of tools. You don't have to be constantly chasing the next best model. Exactly. That's what the builders and the AI beast that I call it are doing, right? They have the systems. They have the harness.

where once you have the systems harness and all the optimized skill markdown files, it's a plug and play situation of what's the latest and greatest model for this task? Okay, insert that. I don't care what it is. Just do the job as best as possible and ideally as cost and token efficient as possible as well, right?

So if you have the harness and the systems and the skill markdown files, it really doesn't matter if Opus 4.6 went to 4.7, where if you go on YouTube, every face is like this, right? Telling you to drop what you're doing and oh my god, check out this model, give me views, give me sponsors, blah, blah, blah, right? No one cares.

The builders and the actual AIBs, they are tuning out all of that garbage while the top of funnel consumers continue to chase all of this stuff and then wonder why they're behind in the scheme of things. When you sit down and you're working with someone and you're maybe mapping out, they're, let's say they're basically starting from scratch, right? And they come to you and they're like, hey, I want to take my marketing to the next level. I know AI can get there, can help me get there. Like, what does the planning phase look like?

Like, what does someone have to start to think about? And, like, right, like, obviously, I have the four skills that I just talked about. You have even more, and your setup just from looking at it is more specificated in mind, which is fantastic, although I do want to talk a little bit about your thoughts on OpenClawn Hermes, but we can get there. Like, what is the starting spot? Should I be, before I ever touched the computer, should I be, writing a plan down?

How do I get to actually start building? Because not a lot of people come to me because I'm not an AI fixer. That's not what I do. But I do get a lot of questions just because I use it. I talk about it on the show. And a lot of the people who I do talk to or maybe just try to give some light advice to,

it's usually they went in full bore into something, went all the way down this path, and then figured out they have no idea where they actually are. The output isn't what they want. and they don't know how to get back to. So what are some of those steps that you can do at the beginning to sidestep finding yourself down some path where you've spent a bunch of money, you haven't really gotten anywhere that you want to go,

and now you're just frustrated by the output? The first thing I would say, and I think I said this before, is you first need to determine you can write this down on a piece of paper, what are the biggest bottlenecks that you're dealing with right now, whether that's in your business or maybe you're a nine to five employee, right? And typically it's one of two things. It's what is taking the most time? What's eating 5, 10, 15 hours of my week that I know I could use AI or automations to come in and replace?

Or what is costing me the most money? Maybe it's this $100 or $200,500 a month SaaS tool that's not really, doesn't have a moat and not really moving the needle. How can I use AI to replace that, right? Those are two examples. You first need to figure out what you're doing. And then after that, it goes back to what we said about context, right? Make sure you're building up a folder of context, whether that is writing samples, brand guides, other assets, that way AI has something to pull from versus just going to

generic Claude or generic Chad GPT and saying, run my SEO, write me a blog post, build me a website, build me an app with zero context and what do you get back? You get what we call the popular term AI slot because it has absolutely zero context to pull from. Those would be the top two things I would tell the audience. Understand what you're trying to do. So formulate a strategy first and then figure out the systems, the skill markdown files, and the context after that, and then we can start going to AI once you have those two things, and your results will be 10x, 50x, 100x better

than if you just pull up Claude and say, do my SEO, right? But that's the advice out there, because unfortunately, that tends to go viral versus what actually moves the needle in the real world. Yeah, you know, it's funny is, like, all those PDFs that I downloaded from different, like,

courses or, you know, the $47, thing that catches you at 11 p.m. on Instagram that you hate that you bought, but you did, but has some valuable information in it, but it's like 157 pages. You're never going to read it because it's a PDF. Like now there's a use for those. Now you can take like, you know, there was this one guy and it was all about storytelling and email. And I really liked this guy's philosophy. And he had this, but again, it was 167 page PDF. And it's like, I'm never going to print that and read. I'm never going to read on my computer. But there's really valuable information. You take that PDF, you stick it in a, as a file and just in a project folder even.

And now you can have now, now your clawed when you work inside that project is going to reference that document, if that's your email newsletter, you know, builder piece. And all that reference material, all those SOPs that you built that you're like, why am I doing this in your business? Those are like prime candidates to potentially be turned into skills or build a, build a project around it. You know, like, I couldn't believe. I had one guy who told me, quote, unquote, he's a power user, power user of Chad GBT.

And I said, okay, well, what's the problem? And he's like, I use it every day, all day. But, you know, it never seems to get smarter. It never gets better. And I was like, I kind of had a feeling about it with the problem. He had never touched project. He had never thought about a project or a folder, depending on which platform you're in. Like, he had never even considered that option.

I'm like, dude, you are literally, he's like, I got to upload like seven documents every time just to give it to contact. I'm like, but there's a better way. Like, there's a better way. You know, so it's like, it's like, okay, so I know what my problems are, right? You said, I have my context. And then it's like, is the next step starting to almost break down a system or a workflow you identified into its individual chunks? Is that kind of the next step?

Yeah. And if you're brand new to AI, honestly, I would just start with Claude, the web app or chat, GPT, the web app, just to get your feet wet versus diving right into an IDE. with ClaudeCode or Codex, I would start there first, and then once you start to figure that stuff out a little bit, create a project inside Claude. You understand what a customized version of AI looks like, or create a GPT if you're using ChatGPT,

so you understand that side of it. And then create a skill markdown file from there, and then maybe take the leap into a Codex or a ClaudeCodeCode situation once you fully understand how to learn the basics of AI first, right? I'm not saying to jump right into on the deep end to Claude Code or Codex, if you've never touched Claude before. That would be very bad advice. But start small, start to learn workflows,

start to understand how these things work with contacts, and then move your way into something more sophisticated, like a Claude Code or a Codex. And for the skill creation piece, like essentially all the platforms can build the skill for you, the actual markdown skill file the way it needs to be. It's not like you need to know how to make a markdown file yourself. It's not like you're hand coding this.

But so say you, and I want you to push back where I'm wrong. I'm kind of laying the scenario for you. So essentially what, like, let's say, let's say that committee of advisors that I had where I told you about Hermosi and whatever, those personalities. Like, all I did, guys, so you know is like,

I just, I basically just told it what I wanted. And I said, hey, this is what I want to do. I want to create a committee that reviews every post for certain characteristics. And then actually it was Claude that, had said, hey, can you give me personalities so it could work off of personalities? And then I outlined that and I just said, I usually, whenever I wanted to interview, I just say, like, ask me one question at a time because sometimes it'll hit you with like

11 questions and it's overwhelming or whatever. But, and then at the end, you know, now I have this well, this understanding, you know, the AI, in this case, Claude understood what I was trying to do with the skill. And then all I had to do was say, can you package this up and do a skill for me and then the actual skill file it makes for you. So I just kind of want to let me know if that's wrong, but I wanted to remove the scary for people because they may not, they may be going, I don't know how to freaking create a skill file that the AI creates it. You have to give it all the context, understanding, direction, etc. But the actual creation of the skill file, all of these platforms can do for you. Create, uh, exactly, right? And the thing I would say first is that Anthropic actually

has a skill creator skill by default that you can use for free, right? So here's a good example if you're brand new to this. Let's say you want a landing page designer skill. Well, this is what I did when I first started. I found a landing page that I know from someone else that converted very well. And I said, use the skill creator skill to make me a landing page designer skill. But here's the reference. And I want you to copy this architecture, this format, it's mobile optimized because I know it converts. But make sure that you use my branding. And then I gave it my website, Ryan Dozer.com, for it to scrape. So that way knows my colors, my typography, my content, my writing style. So it took that landing page architecture from the high converting page of someone that I follow that I know does very well, but then it mixed my

style into it. And then it built that skill so it knows how to build a high converting landing page, but make sure you're still using Ryan Dozer's personal brand while you're doing that. That's a very simple example. Yeah, I love that example. And then guys, you know, just to kind of finish the story, and again, Ryan, push back when you were where you want to here or add context. Like, then all Once the skill is created, then all I need to do is go, you know, hey, Claude, I have a new product coming out. Here's the product details. Here's the ICP. You know, here's maybe a couple ideas on a premise or a hook. Use the landing. And then you literally could just type in slash, you know, landing page creator. And then it does all the work for you. Now it knows what it needs to do. You

don't have to retype it. You don't have to re-type it. You don't have to re-say it. You don't have to add all the context that went into what you wanted to look like, it already has all that. And you can just, at that point, you could pump out landing pages, you can pump about 100 a day if you needed to because all, you don't have to redo all that work. That's the beauty of a skill, right, is not having to redo all of that context work every single time you want to create something. You're exactly right. And the benefit of using skill markdown files is that they have a real-time feedback loop, right? So let's say I go through a conversation and I give it a bunch of updates on V1 of this landing page where the header's wrong or I actually like the color of that button or

maybe the call to action could be this way or that way. And then once that conversation's done and you like the final output, whether it's V2, V3, V4, you can say, okay, now update this skill markdown file based on this conversation that we had. And so that way going forward when you build landing pages, it understands and learns from its mistakes on what happened in the past. and you can keep doing this time and time again, the more you use these skills. The other point to note about skills, Ryan, is that they're transferable.

They're not just for Claude, right? I know Claude Skills is kind of a branded thing, but you can use skills with Codex. You can use skills with OpenClawl, with Hermes, with chat GPT, right? You can use skills with any form of AI system, which is why I think it is such a revolutionary thing when they came out. Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

And, you know, for the audience at home, guys, like this is about like obviously Ryan's a marketing guy maybe he has some intrinsic knowledge feelings expertise around creating landing pages and could he create a landing page from scratch if you needed to most likely but let's assume Ryan didn't know how to do that there's nothing that he just explained that you couldn't recreate right finding landing pages that you like that knows it works tell to give quad basic instructions that to use that as a reference basic instructions to use your branding and where to go get that and then go do your thing. Like there's nothing in there that you need to know like the golden circle or the F

pattern or you don't mean like you don't need to know those things. And then if you and then what I love that you just described because I didn't, I didn't go there and I'm so happy you did is that is this idea of it being living and breathing is that let's say there's a new high converting pattern for landing pages that comes up. Well, all you have to do is give your skill that example and say, hey, you know, either I want this to be a potential option that you ask me about or this is the way I want them all to look, update. And that thing just grows with you over time. And now you never, you can always be, you can always have that repeatable process be up to date in a very easy way.

It's not like before where if you, if a new, you know, thinking about this. in the analog fashion, like, let's say you had a marketing person in your shop, if they didn't understand landing page conversion, you just didn't have that ability in your business. You had to go pay somebody thousands of dollars to create that for you. And now, with a little bit of forethought and work, you can create a repeatable pattern that allows you to do it at scale in a way that was never possible before. Yeah, and even before, Ryan, people would be on GPTs or projects, which are fine, right? They're better than the analog version, like you stated. But what's the problem with GPTs or projects, right? They didn't have a

time feedback loops. If you wanted to go back, you'd have to update contacts, you know, edit your custom instructions, edit your memory, right? And then you'd have to keep doing this. And it was super, super tedious. And if we want to nerd out just for a little bit, there's like my name Andre Carpathie. I'm sure you're familiar with him, very big in the AI space. He came out with this system called auto research. I don't know if you're familiar with this. This was several months ago. It's a GitHub repository. You can install it on your cloud code code codec system, whatever you're using. And so once you successfully install this, what happens as you keep using these skills

is they will update in real time. So instead of me manually, after the end of a conversation saying, okay, update the landing page designer skill based on my chat, whenever the conversation is over, it'll trigger that auto research and it will automatically update the skill.

So it's like a kind of a nerded out version, but this is only going to get better as time goes on. Yeah, so I love that you just said that, and I'd like to go into this space a little bit. the skills at your disposal are not just the things you create. I mean, one of the things that I've found remarkable about this era that we're in right now, and I hope it continues, is the amount of three, of exceptional free functionality that is available on GitHub in terms of,

and guys, GitHub is basically a repository for all kinds of code, everything from skills like we're talking about to, you know, full-blown build-out projects and all kinds of things. Like, you know, the code for my website sits in a private GitHub repository, etc. So my point saying that is, like, there's a skill that I love for research for my newsletter called Last 30 Days. So, again, you probably know about this, but just letting the audience know, what this skill does is before I write a newsletter, I can say, let's say I would

writing something. I have a lot of, my home industry is the property casualty insurance industry, and I do a lot of work in that space. Let's say I wanted to know, like, what are the five hottest stories right now happening, like, in this space as it relates to commercial insurance and AI functionality? And this skill will go out in mind TikTok, X, Reddit, and I think YouTube, for the most shared, most commented on, most viewed stories, on those four platforms in the last 30 days. And then it pulls it back. And now you have at your fingertips,

like what everyone is talking about right now. And that's just, and that is a free skill that you can go into GitHub. You copy the link. You paste it in your cloud code and you say, hey, add this skill. And then boom, you have it. And now that functionality works for you at your fingertips

and you didn't have to do anything. So you don't, not only can you build these things yourself as it works specific to your business, but there are also incredibly, exceptionally valuable functionality that is just sitting on GitHub for free where you don't even have to

you don't have to even come up with the idea like it's just there for you and you can implement it into your workflow and it's fantastic. So one thing I would say is Anthropic actually offers a free skills repository on GitHub, right? And that's actually where I started my landing page designer skill

is they have their own front end design skill and so you can take these skills and then repurpose them with your own context and make them even better. And something else that's funny about this Brian, it's, I actually sell a digital product called the Claude Skill Stack. I launched this probably in March and it's made over $10,000 passively through just SEO and YouTube traffic. I barely even market this thing. And the reason why someone would buy that

versus getting a free skill is because it has my 10 plus years of subject matter expertise inside these skills, right? Especially the SEO skills are kind of the more popular ones on the feedback that I'm getting where you can get my skills with subject matter expertise and best practices and then repurpose that with your own brand assets and your own style. And that way you can get better results going forward versus just saying, make me an SEO skill. Here's my website. Go, right? It adds more umph to the actual skill to get better results. Yeah, I love that. And I'll have, guys, I'll have that link in the show notes, whether you're watching on YouTube or listening wherever you listen, just scroll down. I'll have that as well as any other resources that Ryan shares.

Because, you know, this can jump you forward so fast. I know for my open claw, I downloaded Gary TransG Brain. And he built that specifically for OpenClaw. But he has another one, I think, for Claw, but I haven't looked into that one. And it was like a bunch of little things. And this is the beauty of these skill repositories is like every once in a while,

because that skill repository is added to my OpenClaw, every once in a while, it will automatically do back something. thing up, ask a secondary question, ask if I want to create, like, these things will automatically pop in because in this case, the G brain is more of an operational than it is like a marketing tool. But like it, it will find errors in the system. It will help me with unhealthy gates. You know, all these annoying things that I would otherwise have to go create myself. It just solves them in a finger snap for me because his expertise was the operational side of open, of open,

of OpenClaw and, you know, through just downloading it and adding it, now I don't have to go create all those individual skills. They're there for me. And like you said, now I'm tapping into his brain for those specific things that I didn't otherwise know how to do. And in your case, it's SEO, which I think a lot of people think they know how to do or they may think the AI knows how to do. But they're, you know, for my 15 plus years of being in the marketing space, one, it's always

updating. And two, there are so many nuances that some. someone with your level of expertise has that I wouldn't even know to put in there, someone else wouldn't even know to put into the skill in the first place. So I think it's a really good call out to say that there are these repositories that you can go to like yours to actually leap you forward. And then you don't have to do all the individual skill creation. And the only tip with that I would add is that make sure if you're getting these skills

from whether it's my repository, yours, or Anthropics or whoever, make sure you repurpose them with your context, right? You don't just want to download skills and say go because you don't want to sound like Ryan Dozer or Ryan Hanley. You want to sound like you and you want to have your actual brand assets and context behind that. So that's just a quick tip there for those who just want to get skills and go off running, you know, off to the races here. Just make sure you're always adding your context and repurposing them. Have you played around with OpenClaw or Hermes agent at all? I've installed OpenClaught. I'll be honest. I haven't had the time to go in and actually dive into it.

It hasn't been, I wouldn't say very timeworthy for me as of lately where I could just go into Claude code, set up cron jobs, and just have things running through there. Is it on my list of to-does? Absolutely it is. Just one of those things on a never-ending list. So I went OpenClaw first for reasons that I probably can't even rationally explain. Just maybe the hype got me and I was excited and I went down that path. I will say just for the audience, so OpenClaw Hermes, especially the people that love those

platforms, I believe they over, not always nefariously, but I do believe they're overhyped what they can do. OpenClaught is a shit ton of work. You are maintaining it as much as you're using it. I do think it has a place, but the place isn't what I think it was initially marketed as, this is all you need, right? You have this, you attach your model, you add some skills,

and then OpenClaude does its thing, and you don't need anything else. You got an employee while you sleep, right? That's the pitch. It is that and it isn't that. So what I found is I'm starting to move more of my day-to-day work functionality to clawed agents like you've done, about more and more to that.

And then OpenClaw is more like, how would I describe? It's more autonomous. OpenClaugh is a more autonomous version of Claude Code. It's more my random request things. So like an example would be I said to OpenClaw, it has access, it has read-only access to both my work email and my personal email. as well as read only to all my text messages and my contacts. And I said, I want you to go find everyone who I've talked to in the last five years

about a speaking gig. I want you to tag them as, you know, conversation booked, conversation not booked, and I want you to build that list. And it came back with like 278 contacts. And then I said, okay, based on that list you just created, I want you to now create a lookalike audience of a thousand contacts and events that potentially fit what these events look like and build me out that list. And that type of request, open clause is very good at because there's no guardrails, right? So it's not thinking in its brain, should I go into its

email. It's just like he told me to go into his email. I'm going to his email. And I find with Claude and ChatGBT, GBT, sometimes probably rightly so. Don't get me wrong. Probably rightly so. there's some more hesitancy to doing some of these really deep dive tasks and kind of random exploratory tasks where Open Claw is not as good at. I want you to run last 30 days every day at 6 a.m. and deliver me an email with the top five stories that I can potentially write a LinkedIn post about and maybe create three hooks for each one of those that I could consider in the day. Like that is Claude Code agent, like, that's just beautiful for that.

Where OpenClaw tends to be more like, I have this random problem that I can't get my head around and I need something without any guardrails to go figure out the solution. It comes with, you got to be careful, you know, but... There's a lot of security issues with this whole thing too. Well, yeah, there's that, so early on, in the audience, may not know this.

Probably maybe you've heard the story or not, but early on there was this like cautionary tale or some dumbass marketer was using OpenClaw in a completely cracked version. So by cracked, I mean, it had read and write access to everything. So read access,

probably makes sense. Write access is an actually go into your email and send an email as you were, go into something, right? So he gave it full read and write access to everything, including his bank accounts. So he tells the thing, I want to get better at,

and I think it was SEO. I want to get better at SEO, right? Go out and research overnight. the best, you know, everything you can find about SEO. So because it's completely cracked and there's no guardrails and has read and write access to every system, it determines that there is a $6,000 SEO course that would be the best way for it to learn SEO. It taps the credit card, pays for the system, logs in, and the guy wakes up and he's got like

$5,997 on his credit card. And he's like, what the F? and come to find out, his OpenClaught just decided that was the best resource to learn SEO and just spent the money. So it's like, with OpenClawe, you have to be very smart and constrained and understand what it can and can't do.

But again, going almost all the way back, it's not a one-size-fits-all. It's one tool of a bunch of tools that we need to start to consider, just like we would employees. Like, I'm almost thinking about these things like his employees, like Claude is good at this. and, you know, open claw is my, you know, crazy guy that never comes into the office,

but we give all the random stuff to and, you know, chat, GBT is my, you know, whatever. Is that the right way to think about it? Like, we got to almost think about this like we're designing a little team? That's a really good way to think about it. You know, I've heard other stories of like the cracked open claws where one went in and actually wiped this guy's entire computer because it was on bypass permissions and it just deleted everything to clear up space. I've heard also other stories of prompt injections, right, that have led to

very malicious things that go down. But what you mentioned about the employee thing, I think you're 100% correct on that. One thing that I actually have on my to-do list with OpenClaw whenever I get around to it is I'm going to use it as a digital PR agent. So I'm going to give it a burner email and then give it a set of skill markdown files and agents MD and all the other harness and systems that I need to. So that way it knows, okay, here's Ryan Dozer's website or here's Ryan Dozier's YouTube channel. Every time he does a blog post, every time he publishes a YouTube video, that triggers

the signal or the automation for me to scrape through that, craft an email pitch, and then email the relevant reporters in all these industry-specific marketing outlets with, you know, a good subject line, a good body, everything that goes into a good PR email that's going to incentivize someone to open that. And maybe that leads to a backlink or maybe that leads to a podcast opportunity, right? So that's something that's been on my radar as a really good, you know, use case for having something like an open claw or a Hermes is more of that digital PR agent. you could also do something similar for a cold email agent. I've seen that thrown around too.

Dude, so, okay, I think you'll find this interesting. And here, we're at the end, so we're at the storytelling time. But so I just got my first traditional publishing book deal. It's a Sylvester. Yeah, thank you. Through Simon & Schuster, imprint, Ben Bella, very excited. And I'm very excited. So I want to explain to you how I got this because it's what you just said.

So OpenClaught helped me, you know, with structuring different things, coming up with a book pitch, coming up with the overall outline and stuff. I mean, obviously, when you do a traditional book bill, you do have to write every word. They're going to really heavily scrutinize that for AI writing. And I'm not going to, I use it for research,

but not for the actual writing. That being said, I had the book proposal and the outline. And I then said, okay, I want you to analyze the proposal and the outline and I want you to go out and find a, make a list of 100 book publishers who are actively in the market looking for books, who have published books in the kind of leadership self-improvement space, have published a bestseller in the past, something that has hit at least the USA Today list, but either or New York Times. And I want you to create that list. I then want you to rank order them by your belief that the previous books they, publish a line in terms of disposition to the book that I'm writing. Okay.

So it goes out and it does that. And I have it connected to Apollo and Rocket Reach APIs to get contact information. So it searches for contact. If you can't find it, then it'll go into those data. And between those two, you can basically find almost anybody I found. And what you just said there, I'll stop you quickly. That was really good context, right? Versus what do most people do?

They just say, go find me emails. But what you just explained is like really, really good context for an AIA. agent to figure out. So I just wanted to kind of applaud you on that quick. I appreciate that. Thank you. And so, okay, so it creates that list. So here's the part that gets that that like makes me really excited. So we have the list. Awesome. Let's email them. Okay. He goes, well, I'm going to craft. I need to craft an email. Okay. So he crafts an email. Come back, read through it. It looks good. A couple edits, couple questions, whatever. And I go, okay, let's start sending it. He goes, no, no, no, no. This is this is the, this is the, this is the AI telling me this. And this is why when you

guys at home when you go deep on context you can have a real conversation with these things but you have to again to your point you got to go deep on the kind if it doesn't understand what you're trying to do it can't help you and so it says we're not emailing the entire list we're going to email five at a time starting from the back from the least from what i determined are the least likely to do a deal with you okay why we're going to iterate on the email over time as we get feedback yes or no that's great sends out the first three batches, you know, where it's staggered, like, every couple of days. Didn't really get much feedback yet.

It was early, whatever. And I just asked the question, like, how come we're not attaching the book proposal to the email? And it comes back and says, it is a commonly held understanding inside the book publishing world that if you attach a book proposal to your initial email that you're an amateur and they'll just bypass you. Oh, yeah, let's go.

Right? So long story short, I have, it has created a, a custom list rank ordered, right, with a email that is then custom designed for each individual person that's going out in an incremental basis, all set up through cron jobs. And, you know, I got, I got about 55 emails in, the publisher who I ultimately decided, you know, a couple had responded, yes. I had a great conversation with them. And at the end, I have a book deal, right? And you're like, I could have never done that work. I mean, that would have taken me.

six months to do that work, if I could have even found the people. But when you, that's the level of like sophistication, automation, like that's where you can go when you, to your point, you've made over and over again,

when you've thought through what it can do, when you've given it proper context and direction, when you've spent the time to build a plan and have it understand, that's how you leverage the full power of this tool. But to your point, opening up a random, you know, zero context, even paid chat GPT window and asking it to help you, you're going to get 20%, 30% of what that thing can actually do.

Yeah, I loved your story. And I have a really quick one too, and they kind of conclude this. So in my world of SEO, I do run several cron jobs. And I don't know if you follow like Google's latest algorithm updates or Bing or whatever, but they, the thing they are cracking down on the most right now is mass generated AI spam or AI slop, because you have all these people running programmatic systems that pump out hundreds and thousands of different blog posts every single day, right? And so with this cron job, it's actually monitoring all the Google algorithm updates. And so it gives me feedback of, hey, maybe let's post

two, three, five times a day and cut back on 10 like we were previously, right? Because that's going to send negative signals to the Google algorithm and all the LLMs. If we're mass generating content, they're going to penalize us. Regardless if that content's high quality or not, it just sends negative signals to the algorithm. So that was like a super, super quick example there, how I'm running a crowd job on the SEO side of things. No, dude, this is all so valuable. And I love these stories because I think what it does for the audience is, I think if you're, if you're not the type of person who dives in and learns it with your hands, which I get, not everyone's like that. And maybe, you know, thinking through these things in this way is,

is not necessarily your expertise or you just haven't done it. I think these examples give people the ability to go, ooh, I might not want to update, I might want to not know about SEO updates, but I really want to know about market updates or I really want to know about the latest legislation coming out of my state for my industry or insert, like, I think it cracks open ideas for people and they can start to see that like, this isn't just an email tool. It's not just a better blog post tool or a video script tool. Like, yes, you can do those things and you can do them at scale and they can be amazing. But like, you can, there are so much that you can do with these tools if you're willing to take a little bit of lead time.

Just, I think that's like the biggest takeaway from this is one. Hopefully it's not as scary as maybe you'll think. And I feel like we've gotten there with them. But like just a little bit of lead time, a little bit of planning time, a little bit of that upfront work. And the value that can come out the back is just absolutely insane. With that said, dude, I know my audience is going to want to go deeper in your world. I know you have a badass YouTube channel. We're going to have that linked up.

Where else should people go to go deeper into your world, to learn more about what you do? And maybe just finish with a little, you know, I guess it doesn't have to be a pitch, but just let people know exactly how they can work with you and the different things that you're up to. Yeah, Ryan, I appreciate you having me. And I would say another good place is ryandozer.com.

And then also I run a community on school called the AI Marketing Insiders. I'm over 1,500 members now at this point. So those are some pretty good places to find me. The last thing I would say is this is kind of some, someone's pitch to whether to work with me or even to follow me on YouTube or whatnot, is that I would argue that I'm in the top 1% of people in this AI marketing world that are actually doing the real thing with AI and then learning what works and what doesn't

versus 99% of other people are pure theory. They're just looking what's the latest and greatest thing, pumping out a video, doing the packaging with the clickbait thumbnails and titles, trying to hook you, hook line, and sinker you in versus with me, I'm going to tell you the truth because I'm actually doing. things in reality. That's what I would say. I love it. I think that was obvious from our conversation, dude, which is why

I appreciated this so much. I appreciate your time. This has been great. And dude, if you want to come back on in a few months and do an update, talk more about cool shit that's happening. I'd love to have you. I appreciate you going screen share, too. I think that helps a lot. And guys, if you're just listening to the audio,

make sure you jump over to the YouTube video because a lot of what Ryan was discussing when he was getting into the detail of uh uh uh vs code etc how he was setting up the folders you can see him do it he was you know if you're just on audio you wouldn't have seen it but like you can go over to the youtube video and actually watch how he has he set up how clean it is and how i think not scary this has to be like there was nothing that you showed us that was like oh my god i could never do that right it was you've put a lot of work into it but like over time that's a very achievable and accessible

thing even for someone who's very non-technical and i appreciate that very much i wish you nothing but the best, bud. Hopefully we'll chat again. I have a feeling we will. And with that, we're out of here, guys. Peace.