Using Grok for Infinite Interns, and Who Will Really Win in an AI World?

0:00Okay, I'm going to talk about infinite interns. so Grok this is what Elon said about Grok he said it should really save you a lot of time something that might take half an hour or half an hour of web searching or scrolling social media just ask Grok to do it 10 minutes later it's done an hour's worth of work and maybe even better than the work you could have done yourself so he's basically saying Grok will be like having an infinite amount of interns and you know we've been saying this with agents and stuff but Elon's confirming it himself it's gonna improve daily voice interactions coming all these things we're gonna have an app for all that so I think this is good for everybody because there's all these apps that you can try.

0:33I like that Perplexity has deep research. I've been using that a lot. Have you been using it? No, definitely not. No, not as much as you. I use it at least once or twice a week. Perplexity deep research? No, no, I thought you just said perplexity. I didn't hear the deep research part. What's perplexity? Oh, perplexity, yes. Because I'm reading at the same time the Grok answer, and everyone says pretty much open AI doesn't discuss too much about their infrastructure, so they can't compare. Yeah, so look, just so everyone knows too, okay, so Grok will be like having an infinite amount of interns.

1:02Perplexity Deep Research. You don't need to pay$200 a month for this thing for OpenAI. They both have good deep researches. But when I wanted to do research, I had to also do research on the account-based marketing industry. I also had to do research on how I can stop nasal breathing. And it gave me deep research on how to do that. It was like a full-on doctor case study and things like that. What I'm going to do next is I'm going to take my mouth x-rays and I'm going to dump it into deep research for OpenAI and perplexity. You know why? because my dentists keep bugging me to take out my wisdom teeth.

1:33But then my other dentist friends and family people, they're like, if it hasn't bugged you up to this age, you don't need to take it out. So this dental office, they've been hesitating to give me the x-rays and I bugged them like five times. They're finally sending it to me. I have an amazing dentist here. I don't want to pay money though. Okay. These are really expensive, but they're probably one of the best dentist shops I've ever been to. I'm just saying I don't want to get my wisdom teeth pulled out and I just need my x-rays to verify. Dude, when I go in for a cleaning, You lay down on a chair.

2:00There's a TV in the ceiling. I have a TV on the wall when I go to my dentist. And there's Hello Kitty characters. Yeah, I know. But when you're laying down for the cleaning, you can look straight up and you can watch whatever you want. Oh. And mine has a view of the whole LA. Is that worth the extra money? No, but what's worth the extra money is they have like the latest machines. So when they're cleaning your teeth, they're just using something that doesn't even hurt. Well, my Asian place doesn't hurt me either. But there goes a thousand bucks. Yeah. See, that's a lot of money. I can't take that right.

2:31I would do it without the TV. I do it for, it doesn't hurt. Let's talk about, and maybe we can save this one, but we have probably two, three more episodes. Here's one. We've been running a lot of experiments on corporations with influencer marketing. And we all know that micro-influencers convert better, have a higher ROI. When I say they convert better, They convert better for the amount of visitors they drive and what portion of those visitors convert into revenue. And it's much more profitable. But what we're seeing a lot of companies not do because they're just like, man, is influencer marketing better or just running paid ads on that platform?

3:13And the way I look at it is, is you shouldn't do one or the other. You should go find all the influencer deals that you can do that are really popular and Or that are profitable. And then go run ads with that influencer video. And we find that to drive the best results. Let me ask you a question. So you're speaking at my event in Miami in a couple months. Yeah. The closing keynote can be Kevin O 'Leary. Or it can be, imagine it's like a music artist, like 50 Cent or something like that. Who would you prefer? Which influencer would you prefer? Kevin O 'Leary because it's related more towards business.

3:51It's funny because we were on a planning call yesterday because we're talking about influencers. You have to pay these influencers. And then some people are like, hey, I just want to play devil's advocate here. It's not going to be 50 cent, but if it's 50 cent, it will be totally different and it's a change up and people will be talking about it. Now, I personally would rather prefer Kevin O 'Leary because I think I'd have a great conversation with him. But I just thought it's interesting that some people just maybe they want entertainment sometimes. Well, Kevin O 'Leary can talk about the TikTok deal and everything that's happening.

4:20about everything. He can talk about crypto, he can talk about TikTok, Shark Tank, everything. I think he would be good. David Sachs would be good because he now works for the government. Oh! I will email him. I told you, right? I ate sushi once and his wife was very kind to me. He didn't talk to me after I told him. I thought Freeberg was the smartest guy on the podcast. Great way to build a relationship. But his wife was really nice to me. I think he lives somewhere around here, right? Or is it SF? I think it's SF. I think he probably has a place here. I'm sure he has a lot of places. So this guy tweeted this.

4:56I thought this was interesting. And we can talk about it. Maybe we can talk about how it's affecting our business. And then this will be the last episode. But the quote here is, people who are good at coming up with ideas who will enjoy great leverage in the age of AI. And you have no shortage of ideas. I have no shortage of ideas. We have a shortage of what? Time. Time, aka talent. too. Because talent gives you time leverage, right? And then this guy kind of said under it, and we can react to this, particularly systems thinkers who are good at designing the solution to a problem. Not so much people who can blurt out one-liners like Uber for cats.

5:34Yeah. Yeah. No, you definitely haven't read this book, right? Because thinking in systems. Okay, everyone should read this book that's interested in systems. Because it talks about how, like, we talked about this, like, how a dam is built, right? The systems, or how your thermostat works and all that. The more you understand about the world, and I do think, yeah, if you do understand physics and other things like that and math and things like that, you'll come up with really good ideas. Because now, you don't need to learn how to code anymore. You just need to learn how to ask really good questions and then just keep refining the questions and you can build whatever you want to build.

6:06Have you ever done a tour of Hoover Dam? No, why would I do that? Have you? Yeah. What? Huh? It's just interesting to see how these things were built. When did you go to Hoover Dam? I used to live in Vegas. Oh, that's right. But yeah, just like seeing how some of these things are built and how they did it, it's kind of crazy to think about how they did it back then. Even in today's world, it's not easy to do. But yeah, just digging in and understanding how things get done, it could be mind blowing and it can actually reveal quite a bit on your business on how to think about things or how to accomplish things when they may not seem realistic to accomplish and motivate you.

6:46The other thing that I've seen, and this is a little bit of a tangent, speaking of like seeing how a thermostat is built or seeing how a dam is built. Dude, a lot of the businesses that hit us up and that I've learned over the years that have money are in the businesses that no one ever talks about. Like, oh, I got introduced to a company that makes doorknobs. Who would I ever guess? They make billions of dollars a year selling doorknobs where there's doors everywhere. They need knobs, right? We forget about little, no, not little. We forget about unsexy, more so boring businesses, but they just print cash and there's so many of them and we tend to neglect them.

7:29It goes back to focus again. It's really hard to focus. It is. Yeah. There's just too many opportunities. Yeah. But I think, again, people, I think really any entrepreneur that's a lifelong learner, there's going to be a lot more leverage and a lot of things. You look at it, maybe, again, 14 years ago, the things you wanted to create, you had multiple things going on. There's a heat mapping thing. There's a survey thing that you had. There was your blog that you had. What else did you have? E-books. You had e-books. And then you had an online poker website, too. Yeah, you sold courses for a little bit.

8:04That's the e-books? Yeah, because I was working online education. I was talking about the numbers with you. You're like, oh, I want to do it, right? Yeah. And so all over the place. All over the place. I don't think it works. And people always talk about how Elon Musk does it or how Richard Branson is in many different divisions, right? Virgin Music, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin America. I don't know what other Virgin company, Virgin Cruises, Virgin Hotels. Virgin Records. Oh, and then Virgin, I think they're going to plaster the Virgin thing for the new Sonic planes. Oh, cool. Yeah. But most of us are not Richard Branson or Elon Musk.

8:46And Elon Musk, I would say, is very rare on how he's been able to do it at the same time. If you look at most businesses like Virgin, they tend to do one after another. And it's just divisions within an organization. But if you look at Elon Musk, it's completely separate businesses. You know, Neuralink, Boring Company, Doge is almost like a business. It's not really a business, but it's like a full-time job, if not more. He's a good example of a systems thinker because he only thinks about the leverage points and the highest leverage thing. I read on a tweet earlier, he's only doing Doge because it helps him clear the path for SpaceX.

9:25I don't really believe that. I think he's doing it because he cares, but we'll see. Just in general, any country, any organization, any business, you can't keep living in a world where you're just losing money. eventually you got to figure out how to turn things around. Yeah. Whether people like it or not. Yeah. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started.

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11:36Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at framer.com and use code MS to get your first month of pro on the house. That's framer.com, promo code MS. Framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. All right. You want to pick another one or we can wrap it. Let's do one more. Let's talk about the ROI from speaking. And then we can wrap it up after that. I was thinking about this. And when we say the ROI, Neil and I have spoken at a lot of events internationally. Neil actually traveled a lot last year, 200 days. I was only at 87.

12:09Usually I'm at like 130 or so. I'm actually still at zero this year so far. What are you at? I'm at zero, but Monday I leave. Okay, I leave Friday. This Friday? Yeah, this Friday. And then I come back Sunday and I leave again Tuesday. Oh, cool. So how long are you gone for? I leave Monday, come back Tuesday. Oh, okay, fast. Okay, so look, Neil and I had talked about how, yes, we are focusing more on speaking less at in-person conferences, but I think we should still talk about some of the ROI that we've gotten. So I'll give you one example that I don't think I've talked about a lot, but there's a period of time where I spoke at SAS stock, the SAS conference in Europe for a couple of years.

12:45And after the event, there'll always be this thing called SAS Society. The founder, Alex, would throw it. And we go to these castles in Ireland. So you get to do these once-in-a-lifetime things. You're like shooting like clay pigeons and all that. You're throwing axes or something. Yeah, you're fishing and stuff. And so you actually do get to meet lifelong friends from that. So that's how I became really good friends with Patrick Campbell. And so there's just some people that you really vibe with and some people that are like, okay, cool hanging out with you. And then there's a couple of Indians that live in London.

13:14I'm good friends with them. I would hang out with them in London. And so my point of this is saying, okay, that's not directly monetary ROI, but I think the friendships to have friends around the world, that's worth a lot to me. and I don't think I got direct ROI. It's not like we got any clients from that one. But I do remember someone came up to me at the event and I ended up, probably a couple of people, I ended up hiring some of these people too. So there is ROI in different ways, shapes, or forms. And Marvin Liao, remember the venture capitalist? I met him at a SaaS stock event. He was in Miami, yeah.

13:45And so it's cool. And then some people that I haven't seen for a long time, like David Henzel, we'd always pick a European event to hang out in. You get to catch up with people. And then that's also where I met Tim Solo for the first time too. And we argued about Bitcoin. So that's one example of getting ROI. Sometimes it's not monetary. No, I agree with you. I think speaking is great. I don't know how much I was on the road last year. 200 days. I think more. Okay, that's a lot. There's some months, dude, that I was gone, like 27 days for the whole month. It was ridiculous. But yeah, when you look at it, the ROI is huge.

14:21Hence, I did it so much. I think the issue with continually doing it long term is it puts strain on a family. And I noticed it with my children in which, you know, they felt that I didn't love them because I was always gone. And Eric sent me this thing because I was a big believer of work hard when they're young and then when they're older, spend time with them because they're older. And Eric sent me this thing on how a lot of rich people say, when you work hard when they're young, when they're older, they're used to not having you around and they want to hang out with their friends. They just want your money and they don't want to hang out with you anymore.

14:51Yeah. Basically, so to paraphrase it, the thing I sent to Neil was talking about internal rate of return or IRR. So it was like, okay, you can either choose to jack up your internal rate of return to maybe 30 % or so, or you can sacrifice it, maybe let it drop down to 21 % or so, which is still an amazing return. And you can have 30%, but have your two daughters hate you when they're 20 years old, or you can have them love you when they're 20 years old. Yes, and I chose, I don't know how much the business will suffer by me not speaking as much. Time will tell because it's only been, I think, I know I was not traveling for, I think, over 60 days.

15:30Because if you spill in from December, I don't know what it's going to do to the business. But I chose to spend more time with family than have business growth. Do you feel better? Yes. I feel a lot better. I feel healthier. Yeah. You feel healthier? Neil actually sent me this stuff about when you're flying, there's solar radiation coming in and all that. I love traveling. I think it's fun still. When we'd go travel to speak at Germany last year or we went to Boston, we'd speak at marketing school. That stuff's fun. We'd get to hang out with a lot of cool people and we'd throw dinners and all that.

16:03But it does take you away from the things that matter most. Yes, and Eric is right. There is radiation when you continually fly. and this is why flight attendants are limited on how many times they fly on a monthly basis. But I was flying so much, a lot of the flight attendants not only knew me, they would tell me that I fly more than them. Wow. And like, I would do quick trips and you're getting a lot of cosmic radiation because I would go from LA to Hong Kong, land Tuesday night, their time. I would speak in the morning on Wednesday and fly back. And, you know, I would see some of the same people.

16:41they're like, how often do you fly? And then I would come back for a day and then I would be off to India. And in theory, I could have went from Hong Kong to India, but I wanted to see kids for a day or two days and then off to another flight. Usually if it was a day, I would have went direct. But if I have like a two, three day gap, see the family and then I would be flying off all over again. But it was just too much airtime. Dude, you probably don't listen. You don't listen to a lot of podcasts, but this will be the last thing. I listened to the Founders podcast, which I think you would love.

17:10Have you listened to it? Uh-uh, never heard of it. It's basically, all this guy does is read biographies about the most successful people in the world. So I think you would love it. So it was talking about this oil baron, something Hess. And no matter what, he worked hard as hell. He built one of the most successful oil empires, like the last one. And no matter what, he would still make it to dinner and he'd go back to the office afterwards. Or he'd make it to a kid's ballgame or whatever and then he'd leave. And so he'd make it to everything. His kids, even when he died, they loved him so much.

17:39and he was the model of a father because he was always there and he preached family first and then nothing mattered more than that. Everyone check out the Founders Podcast. It's great. That's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. It helps us grow and check out marketingschool.io if you want to grow your agency faster. Goodbye.