RSS 65: Human-First Marketing: Jay Schwedelson on Building Reach With LinkedIn and Virtual Events

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0:34Have you ever walked in to a meeting and met a true guru? A guru who really understands their craft. I'm talking they've studied hundreds of thousands of variations of the work that they've done. They understand technology deeper than most. They've worked with some of the biggest names not only in their industry but in the world. My upcoming guest, Jay Schwetelson, is one of the most prolific content creators that I've ever met. He has a podcast. He runs multiple companies. He puts on some of the most amazing events. He recently wrote a book, Stupider People Have Done It. Folks, this upcoming episode is filled with ideas, concepts, and strategies that I'm going to take, that I'm going to steal and implement pretty much today.

1:26Folks, if you're playing the long game, this episode is the right episode to listen to not just once, but maybe twice. I'm excited for you to get connected to my friend, Jay Schwettleson, in this episode of The Ross Simmons Show. Let's get to it.

1:58Jay, let's start by you taking me back into time a bit. How in the world did you get into this wonderful world of media? Well, I've had an agency forever. And then during COVID, I had a big payroll and the budgets were getting cut left and right for all my agency clients. And at the time, I had maybe 400 or 500 connections on LinkedIn. And I was like, oh my God, I'm going to go out of business. And I didn't want to fire everybody and all that stuff. And I was like, what am I going to do? I need to get more clients and need to talk to more people. So it was towards the end of COVID. I said, you know, I was talking to my wife.

2:38I said, what if I put on a big virtual conference about marketing stuff and make it like fun and different? Maybe I can meet a lot of people and not go out of business. And she's like, okay, how do you know how to do that? I go, no. And so the next day I started this thing called Guru Conference. That event was about email marketing. And we made it wild and crazy. And it was all virtual. And thousands of people attended that thing. And I was like, whoa, that was, I didn't go out of business. My agency survived. And then coming out of that, I was like, wait a minute. Maybe I should do more of this nonsense.

3:13And that's what we did. And we started to double down and do more of these wild virtual conferences and webinars. I don't like calling them webinars, also the content. And now I have this hybrid world where I have an agency and I have a media business. And it's this idea of just connecting with people that really got me going. But it was out of pure desperation and fear that I wound up doing this. That's wild. So at the beginning of COVID, you had 400, 500 followers on LinkedIn. Now I think you're over 60. Like what's been that? I have over 80 ,000 now. 80 ,000. Unreal. Unreal. So talk me through that growth.

3:45Like how did that happen? How did you surpass? surpass that's a tight window to grow that quickly it is a tight window so in my real life i i don't i hate posting on social like i haven't posted on facebook in 400 years i i to me it's like nails on a chalkboard i always felt that way about posting i'm kind of like you know private dude whatever but you know again as related to the fear i'm like i gotta get comfortable kind of being uncomfortable and at first i started posting on linkedin i got a green screen i gotta make it very whatever and i'm like these videos are terrible even though the content was about i'm like who would i don't want to watch this whatever and then i did like some sort of a post which was ridiculous i was like i'm eating lunch i'm eating something i don't even like you know and that pushed it like exponentially better right anything else and then i'm like in a minute and i started doubling down and i realized you know you start to kind of get no flow and i started following people you know like you and our buddies like daniel murray and chase diamond all these different guys it seemed to like be building up all this stuff.

4:44And there was a cadence, you know, what you post on Mondays is not what you post on Wednesdays, on Fridays, and then how often you post. And then I also started to learn that I didn't need salespeople anymore. That once I started getting a lot of people, you know, consuming my stuff, people would just DM me say, Hey, what, I don't know what you do, but let's talk. And I was like, Whoa, I also tried to be on every platform originally. I'm going to do this on, you know, with Twitter at the time and this at the time. And I was like, you can't say the same thing across every platform I learned. You know, it's very into itself.

5:13So I said, you know what? I'm going to focus my energy on LinkedIn. It's paid off in a big way. But it is one of these things where it's in every single day, 15 minutes a day. You got to do it. That's what it's been for me. I love it. One of the things you just mentioned there, I want to double down on a bit because I've also seen you talk about this importance of just keeping it real, not going for the overly polished content. You're eating lunch on LinkedIn. What advice do you give to folks who are trying to make this personal branding thing work on LinkedIn? Like, what's your advice? Do you need to have an elaborate setup with all the fancy cameras and green screens and a DSLR that's over here and then another one over here?

5:51Like, what's your reco there? The world has shifted in the direction of lo-fi content. Lo-fi meaning, like, the opposite of slick and whatever. I saw Adam Massari, the head of Instagram, say this the other day and it blew my mind. he was talking about what on Instagram gets the most traction. And he said, if you film something and you hear a dog barking, or if you screw up and you stutter, whatever, he goes, leave that in. He goes, that gets way more circulation. It's the humanity of it that does really, really well. And then on LinkedIn, the content that we see that's working the best is like, you know, if you're in the hallway at an event and you're walking and talking and pointing the camera at yourself, or it's behind the scenes of your manufacturing company and you're showing how something is made, where you're literally pointing yourself, and this is the worst you've ever looked.

6:34You say, I look terrible, but I'm going to crush today. It is, if you think about Mark Zuckerberg, you know, if you rewind two or three years ago, the dude, we didn't know if he was a robot or not. True. For real. Right. And now you can't find a picture he posts that he has a shirt on because he's a little bit of jiu-jitsu and whatever. And, you know, he has access to all the data in the world. And he knows the secret sauce is the humanity of it all. And, you know, in this age of AI slop, that's how you win. I mean, I see the content that you do. It's like you get to kind of almost feel like you know who you are.

7:07Right, right. Yeah. I think that's one of the key things right now that is really resonating with people. And it probably would have resonated years ago too. But it's this philosophy of like the parasocial relationship where if you can bring people into your world and like make them feel like you're connected, then you ultimately are able to kind of have that deeper connection with them. for you and your strategy today how would you describe your personal brand strategy and how it supports all of the stuff that you have going on you know it's interesting when i didn't realize i had a personal brand until about a year or two ago right all right and then i would start to actually do some work with brands where they say hey you know i do post some stuff and then at the start they would say here's the script that we wrote we want you to read this script and post this thing.

7:53And I would do that and it would do terrible. And I would be like, this script was terrible and I would never post this image, but I was just doing like a money grab. Money, I'll do it. But it wouldn't do well. And then those people wouldn't want to work with me again. And then I started to realize, wait a minute, if you want, and this is the way anybody should think about working with anybody. If you want to tap into somebody's audience or tap into somebody's network, the reason you want to do that is because they build a connection with those people. And the worst thing, at least in my opinion, that you can do is try to put up real deal guardrails.

8:23I mean, I get it. You don't want somebody to be terrible and say horrible things, but you can't put up the guardrails that take away the very thing that allows them to connect with their audience. So what I've learned is that whatever it is that, you know, my personal brand has come to be, I have to lean into that because that's the only reason I find a success. And in general, I think that the brands that are trying to stay too much in one lane are going to be the ones that are living in the world of sameness and it doesn't work. I mean, do you feel, is that what you feel? A hundred percent with the rise of AI, it's so easy for everyone to sound the same because a lot of the scripts are written with cloth.

9:00The scripts on the screen when people are talking sometimes seem like they're saying in the ever evolving world of, and it's like, you never would say that. Like, what are we, what are we talking about? But I'm with you there. I On LinkedIn in particular, do you see a certain type of content working better? Like, is it video? Is it text? Is it image? Like, what stands out for you right now that is working the best? You know, it's interesting. I really do look at the different days of the week and then what content works the best. So, for example, on Monday and Tuesday, we have found that it's real valuable content.

9:35Like, carousels do really, really well on Mondays and Tuesdays. or some sort of like, you know, counterintuitive hero stat or going against the grain kind of opinion. That's kind of the Monday and Tuesday vibe that do really, really well. Then we get into like kind of the Wednesday, Thursday, and there's a little bit more of this motivational vibe that we see working well, where short form videos of, you know, 60 seconds, you know, you can do it, you know, get comfortable, be uncomfortable, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Best practices are garbage. A little bit more of a motivational spin with these short form videos.

10:06and then Friday, I don't know what happened to Fridays during the pandemic, but everyone kind of like turned into like Fridays you're working, but you really are not working. I don't know what the right, right, right. And so memes and positivity and vibes for the weekend. Yeah. Because if you try to post a carousel on Friday about some really boring work thing, good luck to you. Nobody cares. Right. So we are very intentional about where everyone's mindset is when we're posting. And Also Sundays, Saturdays are garbage on LinkedIn, what I think. Sundays at around 1 to 3 p.m. actually crush it. I don't know if you see that, but we see that.

10:42That's cool. I have noticed Sundays tend to be the other day that not a lot of brands publish on, but I have seen on the personal side that it definitely works well. Jay, you've got a lot going on. Guru, agency, subject line, advising, speaking, podcasts, a lot of this stuff. Like, what's the secret to making all of this happen? Like, a lot of people have one company and they're burning out. You've got a lot of different things going on and you seem all right. So give us a secret. How do you manage this all? You know, first of all, I like to be very transparent. I really did face a level of burnout, I would say, in the last year or two.

11:23And I had to take a step back and say, ooh, this is bad. because everything to me, the problem that I've always faced is that every problem is a 10. Even if it's a small problem versus a big problem, they're always a 10 for me. And that was really bad. So I took a step back and I started doing all this kind of woo-woo stuff. I start every morning. I do meditation. Let's go. I go on walks. I do all this gratitude stuff. That's awesome. And the reason I share that, especially a lot of, I'm not being sexist or whatever, But a lot of men, I think, are a little bit reluctant to be like that they don't present themselves as having it all together.

12:01That's fair. I think to be real, you have your good days, you have your bad days. And I try now to really listen to myself more. And then I guess the other thing that I've learned to do is I used to come from a place of yes. Oh, can you do this? Do you want to be a part of this? Can you go here? Yes, absolutely. Because I was always afraid if I didn't take that opportunity that, oh, my God, I wouldn't get the next thing for my business. But I learned over the last few years, now that I'm like 28th year of my career, that that is what really is the time suck. That doesn't allow you to do all the stuff that you want to do.

12:33So I try to come from a place of no, which is hard for me. But then to only do the stuff that actually matters. And that's really allowed my business to move forward. And then, of course, AI. I mean, Claude, this random French man, has changed my business dramatically. Yeah, no, that's fair. I love that. I appreciate you sharing it because I agree with you. I think there's a thing amongst the men where we don't really talk about the hard stuff and you want to wear the shield and kind of go into battle every day. So I appreciate that. With the gratitude piece, I want to dive into that a little bit.

13:06Are you journaling? Are you like, how are you approaching the gratitude? What's the play there? I wake up every day with this one saying. I didn't make the saying. I don't even know exactly where it came from. But every day I start with this saying of, I don't have to, I get to. This has changed everything. That one phraseology, like if let's say I'm paying all my bills in the morning, I don't have to pay my bills. I get to pay my bills, take care of the people in my family that matter the most to me. Or I don't have to do the Zoom call. I get to do the Zoom call, maybe meet somebody cool and do whatever.

13:39And it doesn't matter what it is. I don't have to do the dishes. I get to do the dishes. We do a great meal and blah, blah, blah. Because that one reframing for me every day when I wake up, whenever I think about what I have to do for that day. Yep. It's been really, really, really valuable for me. And I do have to do it daily, in my mind right, daily to start the day. Because if not, I go down a bad rabbit hole. I like that. That's a powerful reframe. I was thinking right before this call, I got a massive bill for something. And I was like, really? But in Betts' case, it's like, I can actually cover this bill.

14:12So it's like, cool, if I take that reframe. So I'm going to lean into that, because otherwise I'm not going to sleep tonight. um sports will suck let's not get to have this cottage that we're building and i'm like okay this is getting crazy but all right one of the things that i love about your events is that they are truly epic how how do you how do you think of like you didn't even run events before and then you just went all the way so talk me through your strategy what inspired this level of wildness that goes into the events. Like, how'd you do it? Yeah. So I appreciate you saying that. It means a lot coming from you.

14:51So my events are all virtual and they're all free. And when I first started the events and the idea was I'm going to run these crazy free virtual events, right? And we're going to get thousands of people there and it's all going to be sponsored driven, all this stuff. Everyone I spoke to said, no one's going to show up. Okay. Virtual events are dead and sustained and no one's going to sponsor a virtual event. I said, okay, I don't agree. So first of all, how do we get people to number one, show up? This is a really important piece. What we do is we don't have on demand. I think this idea that everything is available to everybody all the time, like the Netflix of content is very, very bad because we try to treat virtual events like they're in-person events.

15:31And we created this thing called earned on demand. So our events are generally two days long. And we tell people, if you show up for one hour to the event, you will get the on-demand link. But if you don't show up for at least one hour, you get nothing and you can't get access to it anywhere. And this allows our events to have about a 70 % show up rate. I mean, our last event had about 30 ,000 registrants. We had a 70 % show up rate that people want the content. So we get them there. But once you get them there, you have to treat them like humans because staring at a screen all day is pretty boring.

16:02So the few things that we try to do is number one, session length. Our sessions are all 25 minutes and then eight minute Q &A. So 33 minutes. There are no blocks that are more than two sessions stacked on top of each other, meaning like two boring session blocks. And then we break it up with try to do fun things that have nothing to do with anything. Right. So we did an email marketing event. We had Joey Chestnut there, who is the hot dog eating champion. And we ate spam against Joey Chestnut Live. where we had a dance contest and we had Lance Bass be the judge of this dance contest for teams.

16:36But it doesn't have to be stuff you spend a lot of money on. So we had an event coming up later on this year where we're going to do the happiest pet contest where you're going to have your pet come on screen. Everyone's going to say, it's a happy pet, whatever. There's a million things that you could do. But doing whatever you can to insert humanity into everything is what gets people excited. And don't buy into the fact that these platforms, that it's staying, that you can't do virtual this, that, or whatever. It's just look at it differently. Right, right. One of the things that stands out for me from what you do there, like you're talking about happy dogs, dance competitions, hot dogs and spam.

17:13No one in a traditional sense is typically comfortable with that level of fun and humanity and normalcy, which is true. They want to put on the professional suit and be like, I'm a professional. so during the break we're going to sip coffee or we're going to have a coffee break and we're going to play some elevator music and everybody just sit there for a second what made you convicted to believe that this was okay in a professional setting that's an interesting question i think i just wanted to make something that i would want to attend cool uh and i will tell you you have to have i guess thick skin is the word because i i get a lot of hate i do i mean for all the positivity I get, I get a tremendous amount of, first of all, I get emails about not having on-demand.

18:03I've been told that I should die. I can't tell you how many times, just for not having on-demand. And then I've been told a million times that I'm a disservice to the marketing world because I am, you know, lowering kind of like what it's all about. We're not taking it seriously. And this is a very important industry, whatever. And I'm a big believer that if you try to be for everybody, then you're for nobody. And in some ways, in order to turn people on, you have to turn them off. And if you're going to turn people on, you're going to have to do stuff that stands out. I mean, I could tell you, if I attended, I don't know, 100 webinars in the last year, I think I remember none of them.

18:40But if you attend an event that I do, you're probably not going to remember the sessions, but you're going to remember the fact that we had this guy, which we just did, had shot out of a can in live, and he didn't get up for seven seconds, and I thought he was dead and I thought I was going to get sued. I mean, you'll remember that moment. And so you want to have moments that are memorable and just this idea of being for everybody, it's a recipe to nowheresville for your career and your business, in my opinion. I love that. Someone's listening, they're like, I want to get to Jay's level with an event.

19:11Maybe not to the same capacity, but they want to think differently. What advice would you give them to come up with these concepts? Like, what's your process to say, like, we're going to do hot dogs. We're going to do lance. We're going to do cannon shooting. Can you give some practical advice for how to come up with these types of stunts? Or do you have a stunt person that you hire to do this stuff? How do you think of this? Yeah. Well, it's a ridiculous method that we do. So I have a team and we have a meeting before you any event. And the meeting is called, does this idea suck? That is the name of the meeting.

19:43And anybody in the meeting, if anybody says any idea sucks, it's immediately out. Whatever the idea is, one person, you could have a meeting with three people, 10 people, whatever. And everyone comes to the meeting with the most outrageous ideas they could possibly come up with. And listen, we also use AI. We say, here's ideas that we have. What are 30 other ideas that are even more ridiculous? And it's a great way to use AI to ask it all this and really find the thing that makes you uncomfortable to try where you're like, oh, I don't know if we should do that. That really blah, blah, blah. That's where you're like, oh, that's, that's good.

20:17Right. You know, that's, as soon as you're like nervous, you're like, oh, that's, that's where we got to go. Go towards the nervousness. That's awesome. I love that. You've also had like some wild speakers, big names, et cetera. A lot of folks, when they get started with an event, they're kind of nervous about the idea of trying to bring these big names on. How did you attract them? What's the process? Do you slide in the DMs? Do you go through agents? Could you take us a little bit behind the curtain to understand how you do that? Yeah. We have had some famous people, right? Nicole Kidman, Damon John, Sarah Jessica Parker, Martha Stewart, all sorts of wild people.

20:54And I'll tell you, if you want to get, if I'm in famous people, let's say you want to, you're not going to go after Martha Stewart, but you want to go if somebody is big in your industry or whatever, it's hard to get them to do it. First of all, one secret sauce thing are fireside chats. Almost nobody that has, that's a big deal wants to give a keynote speech because that's a lot of work. They don't want to embarrass themselves and whatever. And so if you say, no, no, no, we'll do a fireside chat. Then there's no lift for the big, important person. Like, okay, you know, like I'm going to give you all the questions ahead of time and you're going to be able to say that you don't want any of them, whatever.

21:27So that's numero uno. The hardest thing is getting the first person to do something cool. The first event that we did, I went to Damon John and we had done no events. Right. And I stalked Damon John. And I had to sell him on the idea of doing, speaking of this virtual conference about email marketing. And I didn't know what I was talking about. I mean, it was coming out of my butt on a good day. But I owe him a lot because he said yes. And then after that, other famous people were willing to come on. Now, yeah, of course we pay them. The downside right now of the celebrity stuff is that the market for them has exploded.

22:05Events in general, in my opinion, virtual or in-person are the thing that kind of outlasts AI, any type of human connection. So getting these big speakers now, what used to cost a certain amount of money to get a famous person probably cost about 5x that has grown in the last two years for the same person. So sliding into the DMs of mid-level people is a really good idea. Trying to get the A-listers is getting to the point where you need to have seven figures, which is out of control. Yeah. You have to have some serious budget. What have you learned about events in running Guru that you don't think most people have realized yet?

22:44I think events is a marketing channel, whether that's a webinar you're putting on, a dinner you're doing, a large event. Events are a marketing channel. They're not a cost. And this is where I think the world is moving, right? Where, okay, we have to have an exhibit hall. We're in a booth over here. That's going to cost us this, or we're going to do a dinner with these 10 people. It's going to cost us this. No, it is a marketing channel that you should be doing attribution on and ROI on and measurement on. And it's going to become more and more of the most important marketing channel, in my opinion, because right now where we're at with AI is everybody's like, well, how do I bring AI into my organization?

23:23Right. That's what we're all trying to figure out. Yeah. I believe in the next few years, you're still going to be doing that, of course, but then it's also going to be be like, how do we humanize everything that we are doing? How do we humanize our marketing? How do we humanize our brand the same way? How do we bring AI into our company? Because there's going to be so much of the sameness out there. And events are the way that you really can put a human face on whatever it is you're doing. Again, webinars or in-person events or small events, roadshows, whatever. And so getting this internally, winning the battle that events are not a cost, but they are an ROI and they're a marketing channel.

24:01I think that that's the battle that everyone needs to be fighting right now. I love that. When it comes to getting sponsors, you mentioned that the events are primarily sponsor-based. How did you approach that and lock in your first few sponsors and continue to do it? I did something horrible, but this might be called extortion. I'm not sure, but I'll tell you exactly what I did. So the first, now it's easier because we're at credibility. But the first year for my first event for Guru Conference was coming out of COVID. And I was like trying to get people to sponsor this free virtual conference.

24:32And anybody who would call up, they'd be like, no. And myself would be like, no, whatever. So I said, oh, we need to get some to get some logos on there. So I went, every vendor I use for my agency, I mean, any vendor of any kind, right? People we order paper from, I don't care. I went to every vendor. I said, I don't care if you sponsor for a thousand bucks. If you don't sponsor, you're fired. To every single vendor I had. But that's not our market. I'm like, I don't care. Doesn't matter. I'm just telling you this is what's going to happen. Yeah, I'm telling you. You have to sponsor her. You're fired.

25:03And then we had like 70 % of our vendors say, okay, fine. We'll sponsor it. And it got the event off the ground. And after that, we were able to roll after that. But in general, behind the scenes, you do got to kind of scrape and claw with that first thing you're doing. And then also the thing about your content, whether you're putting out a carousel on LinkedIn, a webinar event, doesn't matter. I look back on that first conference we did. I see some of the videos. It is so bad. I'm so embarrassed. I don't even want to be affiliated with it. And the reason that's important to know that is that the first time you do anything, the first time you go to a workout, the first time you make a podcast, the first time you put on a newsletter, it's going to be bad.

25:42Right. You can't get to something that's good unless you do something that's bad. It's true. Start. Get it out. Do it. Get embarrassed. It's okay. Yeah. That's awesome.

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26:59You mentioned that it's a marketing channel. What is the mechanism and business model around it? If you're just getting sponsors and then people attend and it's for free is the play to get them into the agency? Like what's the mechanism here? Yeah. So that's a, that's a big loaded question. I'll tell you two parts that, so, cause I'm changing my plan. So it has happened the last, I guess, four or five years now that we've been doing these big events and all this stuff. I didn't sell anything because the sponsors, they didn't want to be part of an event if I was selling something. So I said, I'm not going to sell anything.

27:33My agency, you won't even know that my agent, you don't even hear about my agency, which I'm very almost, you don't even even though it exists during these events. And then the way it benefited my overall business was that everyone would, people would just hit me up afterwards. Oh my God, that was the greatest thing, whatever. I love to have a call with you and your company. What do you, what do you actually do? Right. And there was enough of that, that it made it really, really worthwhile for me. And all the events were profitable, but it made it really, really worthwhile for this halo effect that kind of I had and my overall business had, but I wasn't selling anything.

28:01Right. Now what I am doing, which we're going to see how this goes. I've never done this before. I haven't even announced yet, but that's okay. I'm going to be launching a paid course. It's about how to do webinars the right way. Webinars that B2B companies do. You know, how to get people to register, to show up. What happens in a webinar? How do you follow up? And I'm doing a very expensive paid course that we're launching during this live launch in October. And the reason I'm doing this twofold. Number one, I think that webinars are stained. Everybody uses them. They're used legacy, but they're a critical go-to-market thing.

28:33And so I do about a zillion of these webinars. And so I want to bundle it all up and share that and sell it with a bunch of upsells. I have no idea if this is going to work. But for the first time ever, I'm actually going to try to sell something. And probably going to go horribly wrong, but here I am. I love it. That's awesome. Earlier, you mentioned the Frenchman Claude. I would love to have a bit of a glimpse into your world. Like how is Claude supporting you and your work on a day-to-day basis right now? Yeah. So we use Claude in my business in two very specific ways. One is, and this, I think everybody should do this.

29:07So we've had, we have a Claude project, which anybody doesn't know a Claude project. That's just like, you know, it's like your own GPT or whatever you could, it's something you could build around. And what we did was we had it ingest, first of all, all of our information, anybody that's on our different newsletters, anybody that attended these events, these webinars, how long you've stayed at an event, how many events you've been. everything we have on any person. And then we also went ahead and it's, people don't realize it's, it's, it's easy to do. You can download your entire LinkedIn archive.

29:40So I went into my LinkedIn and I downloaded all of my, all my connections, every comment, every DM that you have, you can download all of it. LinkedIn makes it all available. And I download that archive. And then we dump that into, to the same Claude project. And then what we do is we go into this project and we say, okay, whatever it is that we're trying to promote, we have a new service, you know, whatever, some agency service. So we have some new events. Out of everything we have, who are the best possible prospects for this thing? We detail it out and why. And then it outputs for us this custom database that we'd never be able to figure out that these are the exact right people.

30:20So that's how we use it on the kind of contact data side. And then on the, when we're working on trying to get clients' proposals and stuff, we've had Claude ingest every campaign. We've done about 40 ,000 campaigns. Every campaign we've ever worked on for any client. And we do a lot of media buying. So if we buy stuff on Instagram or Reddit or Connected TV or LinkedIn, every ad unit, every everything. And then we go and say, okay, we have a new proposal we need for X, Y, and Z client. This is what they're trying to do, blah, blah. It's going to be a$50 ,000 campaign, make the proposal for us of what you think it should be.

30:55And we want to have this profit margin. And then we have everything tied to gamma, gamma.app. I don't work for gamma. I just love it. And then we hit go. And then it creates the proposal, makes gamma, which is the best kind of slide deck tool on earth. And then my team is able to get out these proposals that are perfect in a matter of like minutes. So those are the two big ways that we're using Claude. That's unreal. I love it. With Claude today, there's also talks of like the agentic workflows and how you can use things like OpenClaw, et cetera, which then got bought by ChatGPT and that's a whole thing.

31:29But like, how are you thinking about agentic workflows within your businesses and how that all shakes up overall? Yeah, I'm very bullish on all things agentic, everything. And for everybody out there that's not really, you know, agentic, oh, I'm not a tech person, whatever. It's really not that complicated, right? It's like, imagine AI is doing all this stuff. You don't even have to tell it necessarily what you need to be doing, but it's almost like having employees, right? And so in the world of the agency world, which is where I live, what we are trying to develop from an agentic standpoint is not just, hey, what's the best proposal for this client to run, but hey, run the campaign.

32:08Actually, Because you can now do connectors with Meta and LinkedIn, all these things, and you can get the real-time bidding information of all the different ad units that are out there. And you could actually have AI utilizing an agentic role to actually run campaigns for you, optimize the campaigns for you, meet your back-end targets. And so if you fast-forward a year or two, I believe that that is where a lot of our overall marketing is going to be going, this kind of agentification of it all. What would you say is something that you're doing with Claude right now that most people are still sleeping on that they haven't even taken a glimpse into and have realized that there's a big opportunity there?

32:48It's a very little thing, but it's more fun, but I do it and everything I do. So I created this Claude boardroom of advisors. Cool. Okay. And so what I did was I said, all right, who are the smartest, you know, business people on the planet? You know, like Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs. They could be dead or alive. Right. And I made a list of like seven of them. I have another one just for my personal life also. And I go in there and say, these are my board of advisors. And I made this prompt that said, hey, whatever topic I ask it, I want this board of advisors to debate the topic. I want to watch the debate.

33:21And I want the advisors then ultimately to ask me a question that I could then answer. And the key thing is I tell it and I don't want the conversation to stop. Right. And what happens is all of a sudden, whatever idea I have, business idea, maybe I'm stressed about something, I have the smartest people on earth or dead or whatever that are now giving me feedback on the thing and the outcome of it. Because you have to understand how AI works is it's consumed all the information that exists. So when you ask about Steve Jobs, how's every speech, everything he's written, it's got Steve Jobs in there.

33:54And it has really changed the way that I can go to market with anything I'm doing. That's cool. I love that. I think one of the key pieces there that not a lot of people are realizing is that like, this is, in my opinion, one of the best times to be a marketer because you have such easy access to so many brilliant minds, dead or alive, where you can ask Claude, hey, I want you to do deep research into Claude Hopkins, which was like one of the OGs of advertising. Go research all of his thinking, then cross-reference my subject lines and tell me if they're good based off of his philosophies, same with Ogilvy, et cetera.

34:28I think it's absolutely a great time to be alive. With AI, there's a lot of marketers who are somewhat scared. Agentic, all of this stuff, it's changing the way people work. It could replace certain roles. What advice do you give to marketers who might be a little bit nervous about what's coming? First of all, I think it's ridiculous. And here's why I say that. I'm on the older side now. And if I look back, when Amazon first came out, I remember vividly, everyone was like, at this time they were only selling books and CDs or whatever. And everyone was like, you can't give Amazon your credit card.

35:02Crazy. That's so dangerous. You're out of your mind. And there were all these people like, never, I'll never give Amazon my credit card now. Forget it. Amazon has everything, right? And we're in the same phase with AI that if you think that you, well, I don't want to give Claude or OpenAI my information. I don't want to tell it everything because it's going to have everything. Those are the people that are going to have a real problem. Here's how you succeed, and it won't take your job, and it won't do all this bad stuff. Tell it everything, because the more that it knows about you, your goals, your fears, things that you're working on, the more that you're going to get out of it.

35:39And I don't believe AI is going to take somebody's job unless your job is a task. If your job is a singular thing, you do one thing. You come into work and you maybe you set up html emails every day that's all that you do i would have a serious concern about ai taking my job your goal in life is to have your job not be a task because then you're not going to be replaced but if your job is a task get a life you don't really have a career right so in general i think the secret is lean into ai don't have fear of ai because this is it it's here right yeah i 100 agree i think there's it's the cat's out of the bag it's not going back It's definitely going to continue to shape the way that we work.

36:22When you think of AI today and where it's going, is there anything that you would say has changed about marketing because of AI? Or do you think everything has changed? Where are you at with the biggest impact that AI has had on your business, whether it's agency side or even the event side? What would you point to as saying, this has made a big difference because X, Y, and Z? Yeah, you know, the pendulum keeps swinging. So when AI just first was coming on the scene, it was so great for content generation, copywriting and all this stuff. This is awesome. Now the pendulum has swung in the other direction where now we have these guardrails internally like, hey, don't go to AI until you've already written the thing or created the thing or whatever.

37:05Because the sameness stuff is brutal. Right. Right. Is brutal. I mean, you even saw, you know, LinkedIn came out the other day where on any given post, you could report the post as AI. AI slop. I love that they called it that. And so it's like, we now are in this period of time where we have to un-AI what we're doing. We have to use AI from efficiency. We're no longer AI for kind of content generation, at least not the generic content generation. We can't do that anymore. So it's like our jobs are getting easier and harder and harder and easier and all these things. And just we're in this weird, weird time period.

37:43It is a weird time. A great time, cool time, but a weird time nonetheless. So you have your board, they're giving you some feedback, they're giving you guidance on leadership, et cetera. Let's remove AI from a second. From a J first perspective, like what are the leadership philosophies that you have for managing your companies, your people, et cetera? I'm a horrible micromanager, which I'm acutely aware of. I'm trying very, very hard to delegate more. If I look at myself and say the most critical thing I've done, the thing I've screwed up the most in my career is this lack of ability to really delegate.

38:20And I'm also learning this later stage of my career that people actually do a much better job when they own the thing. When you give them that responsibility because they're excited about that opportunity. Yeah. So I would say really try from a leadership perspective, if you can, to delegate and also have the confidence in knowing that it's okay not to know stuff, to not be full of it. Right. I have found that the people that I trust the most, that I want to work with the most, are the people that actually say, I don't know. Right. When I reach out to somebody, I'm like, what do you think of this?

38:57Like, you know, I don't know. I believe that person. And I think it's this idea of just being more vulnerable, more real with your clients, with your partners, with your team. I think realness is the is the currency of the day. Yeah. And so I am trying to get even more comfortable, you know, with all of my, you know, bumps and bruises and warts and flaws. That's actually what makes it all work. Right. Right. Your book's titled Stupider People Have Done It, which is hilarious. It says in the book something that I want to dive into a bit because a lot of people will see these posts on LinkedIn and X and they'll retweet them.

39:33So you said work-life balance is essentially a scan. Explain that to me. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff out there that you hear all the time that I think takes us down bad rabbit holes, right? One is you need to love your job. I think that's garbage, right? You don't need to love your job. You need to be passionate about your job. You need to care about your job. You need to be not surrounded in a toxic workplace. But I don't wake up every day and be like, yes, I'm going to somebody. Yeah, I'm going to whatever. And so I hate some of these sayings. And the same thing about, you know, your work-life balance.

40:03I don't, listen, if you're somebody that can go to work, start at 9 a.m., shut it down to 5 p.m. a day every day. On Fridays, you shut it down. You don't think about working until Monday morning 9 a.m. Good for you. Amazing. High five. Whatever. And you think that's work-life balance. Fantastic. Right. I don't believe that that's the way the world works. I think a work-life balance is you have work, you have life, and there's balance. That when you're with your family or the people that you care about, you're locked in, you're present, you're making time for that, you're not missing out on, you know, important stuff.

40:33And when you're at work, you're locked in, you're doing that thing, and the hours may be funky. And if on a Sunday you want to read something about work and it makes you feel good, that's okay too. I don't believe that this idea of work-life balance is this rigid structure because these things make people feel like they're failing. Oh, I don't love my job. I'm failing as a young person. I don't have great work-life balance. I'm failing. Or I need 10 ,000 hours before I'm considered an expert in whatever. Total garbage, nonsense, ridiculousness. Don't buy into some of these very common things that we hear about your career and about your business because it actually can hurt us.

41:09Yeah, I 100 % agree. I always call it, forget work-life balance, let's strive for work-life integration, where you've got your work and you should be able to make everyone there, say you're a high performer and then you've got your life and hopefully everyone over there also believes you're a high performer. And if you can do that, then you're chilling. Just integrate it all. I love that. And keep everything moving. Yes. You also, in the book, Stupider People Have Done It, I want to talk about that title just for a second. Why did you pick the title? Well, first of all, thanks for checking out the book.

41:39I'll tell you exactly the story that happened. So early on in my career, I was in my office. I was sitting at my desk and I had my hands on my head. And I just was like, I wasn't able to make the sales. I didn't know what I was doing. I thought I was just a total failure. And I didn't know that my grandfather was in the area, but he was. He lived nearby me and he showed up at where I worked and he walked into my office. I was like, whoa, what are you doing here? And I'm like, and he goes, what's wrong with you? You look terrible. And I just started just rambling. I'm a failure because I didn't do great in school.

42:07You know, I'd take statistics three times just to get through that stupid class. And I just felt a lot of imposter syndrome about everything I was doing. And he put his arm around me and he goes, this is going to hurt. He said, but you need to know that stupider people than you have done it. Whatever it is you're trying to do. And in that moment, it was like the most important thing one person could say to another person. Because I was like, you know what? I believe you. I think there's somebody out there who's stupider than I am. Right. And they're doing the thing I'm trying to do. I go, if they can do it, I think I could do it.

42:40And that really helped me in a very pathetic way. So that's been kind of my north star in my career is that wherever that stupid person is out there, I salute them. I thank them because I do think they're out there. Yeah. I think about it all the time. I believe truly that some stupid people are making 50, 100x more than I do. And it's because they just did things differently. They didn't allow themselves to get stuck in their brain. They're too stupid to know they shouldn't be doing it. Right. Exactly. Yes. Stop thinking so much, right? Yes. You also share in the book, after seeing so many webinars, seeing so many speakers, some do's and don'ts for speakers.

43:23And as someone who likes to speak, I've got my list, but I want you to share with the listeners some of the must do's and must don'ts for public speaking. This applies, I think, whether you're speaking on a Zoom to five people in a conference room to 10 people on a stage to a zillion people. You know, I don't think that you have to follow what everybody says to do. So the one thing that really drives me bananas is most people start out their speeches or presentations and they'll put up a slide or something and say, these are the six things that we're going to be going over today. And I don't know about you, but all I think about is, oh my goodness, we have to get through six of these?

43:57Right. It's garbage. You do not want to say, and now this is why I'm going to be boring. Do not start out with a list of garbage things that you're going to talk about because it's just literally inviting boring into your, into everything you're doing. And then the other thing is, first of all, never memorize a speech. That doesn't mean you shouldn't practice. But when you watch somebody that's memorized a speech, you know, they're not in it. All they're trying to do is what is the next word that I have to say? Right. And if they screw up in one syllable, they're like, blah. So you want to practice, but memorization, watching somebody speak from a memorized speech is the most boring thing you could watch.

44:32And then the last thing I would say is when you're going to practice, practice with the TV on. Everyone's always practicing. I need absolute quiet. Everybody get out of the room. I'm going to practice my speech. You're never, when you're speaking, people are turning their camera on and off. People are getting up and down. People are checking their phone and noise is happening. You need to practice in a more realistic environment than this, you know, perfect zone of silence. Right. I love that. You always see someone in the chat asking a question while you're giving a live webinar session. And so you can't just get sidetracked and be like, oh, I lost my point.

45:05Yeah, I love that. Is there any pieces of advice around speaking that you have learned that you've applied that is a must-do thing every time you deliver a keynote or a session? I do try to instantly be, I learned this from, I don't know where I learned from, I instantly try to be relatable the second I walk on stage. You know, sometimes people say, start with a joke. I'm not a big fan of that because I'm not a paid comedian. I'm not Kevin Hart or whatever. Right. So but I do try to instantly be as relatable as I can so everyone feels connected. So like I just walked on a stage somewhere and I said last night I ordered chicken wings in my room and I lied to three different people saying I had dinner plans when I didn't have dinner plans.

45:45I just want to sit in my room like a slob and eat wings and watch TV. Right. And then everybody in there is like, oh, my God, that's so me. I feel so seen. Or I just went to the movies last night. I saw this movie. It was so great, but it was so long or anything. Anything, everybody in the audience is like, oh, that person's like me. I'm connected with them. When you do that, you get more comfortable. They get more comfortable. And then everyone can kind of take a deep breath that the talk is not going to suck. Even if you're on a five-person Zoom. You know, it's Monday. Say, what did anyone do this weekend that was cool because I had the worst weekend?

46:17Anything. Relatability, I think, is the humanization of speaking. I mean, what's your secrets? You give speeches all the time. Yeah. One of my secrets, I'll give it on record, is people love nostalgia. So I strive to always take people back in time a little bit to invoke the feelings of nostalgia, whether it's talking about Pokemon, whether it's talking about the Scholastic Book Fair, talking about R.L. Stine and Goosebumps books, or anything from people's youth, Blockbuster and the smell of popcorn. As I said those words just now, someone who's listening to us literally felt good because it took them back into a time that was lighter for them probably.

46:58So nostalgia is one of my favorite plays. But I've also had some that just completely didn't land because I would be speaking in the UK and they had no idea what I was talking about. I remember Where's Waldo. I tried to bring that up. They have Where's Wally, so they had no clue what I was talking about. Who knew? Who knew? But that was one of my mistakes. So let's go down the path of mistakes. Your book, stupider people have done it. We all make mistakes. We all do some things sometimes that are a little stupid. If you were to look back at your career, is there anything that stands out that would be a big mistake that you would tell people to try to avoid?

47:34Or to try to avoid. I would say fail faster. I think some of the things I've tried to do on different businesses I've started, my ego would get involved. I thought I had the greatest idea. Right. And it would take me six months to a year of investing a lot of money and a lot of time into a stinker. And it doesn't even have to be about a business. It could even be a marketing campaign. Sometimes I look at things and I'll say, okay, we're going to run this marketing campaign and it gets not a great result. And then you're like, okay, well, let's pour some more money into it or more whatever. And what I've come to realize is that if let's say you have a marketing campaign and you You say to yourself, if I was able to increase performance on this marketing campaign 100 % from where it is today, go up a 100%, would I then deem that campaign to be successful?

48:21And if 100 % increase is not still successful, then you should stop immediately. Because the likelihood of you optimizing something, tweaking something or whatever and getting 100 % increase is almost never going to happen. Right. And so this idea of being real with yourself, failing faster, so you're not wasting time and money and your ego. And then the other thing is, I love Shark Tank. Amazing show. It's a lot of great things for entrepreneurs, whatever. But part of the problem I have with Shark Tank is that as a person, you think in order to be a success, you have to come up with an idea nobody's ever had before.

49:00Right. Right. That's everything on Shark Tank. Oh, my God. I never that never existed. Amazing. It's like scrub daddy. It's like, come on. Exactly. It's something you've never seen before. But what I've learned later now, later on in my career is that I now look for industries that have tremendous amount of competition. Thousands of companies doing something. Like an agency. Right. Because I said to myself, okay, there's thousands of companies doing this thing. There's zillions of employees. They're eating food every day because of this, whatever. True. Is there room for one more company? And if I do it a little bit better than the one other company, I can get business.

49:34There's enough business there for these thousands of companies. So now I try to not come up with the idea nobody's ever done. I go towards where is there so much competition because I think that there's room for one more. So that's been a big shift for me. I love that shift. All right, Jay, it's 2036. If you were to call your shot right now, what can people expect from you in the next 10 years? What will you have achieved? will be able to come back to this and say, let's replay it. Yeah, he did that. Well, first of all, I'm probably going to be a lot fatter, even though I don't want to be, because I tried Wagovi and I ate through it.

50:09I ate through Wagovi. My wife was like, that's not how that works, dude. You can just eat whatever you want once you get on Wagovi. So I'll probably be fatter unless I really try to lean into this. And what I do hope for real is that I don't stop. I think that what I've learned about, because I do feel that I'm not the smartest dude in the world. And I do think that if you are consistent, you will beat out 95 % of people on the planet. What I mean by consistent is, you know, I've been putting out 700 episodes of my podcast and my newsletter and doing these events. And I can't, I mean, you know, it's like you wake up.

50:44I can't do it again. I can't do it again. But it's that consistency that ultimately allows you to win long-term. So I hope 10 years from now, I'm still being tortured by all the things that I really, you know, it's a pain for me to do, but I've stayed consistent because I think that that's the secret sauce to success. I love it. Jay, where can folks find out more about you? I appreciate so much of the value that you constantly add to the industry, to the community, to the market and to LinkedIn. But if folks wanted to learn more outside of just the book, which I'll include in the link below, where else should they go to find out more about you and what you're doing?

51:16Well, first, let me give a shout out to you, not because we're staring at each other, but Ross is a great example of exactly how you can, you know, grow in everything you're doing. Because I hit up Ross cold out of nowhere. It's now a few years back, right? I'm like, I'm a big fan of what you're doing. We'd love to just connect with you and do stuff with you. And he's like, yeah, let's talk, whatever. And it's that open-mindedness. Like, you don't exactly know why. And that's how, you know, really cool relationships and things can formulate. So kudos to you for being, you know, willing to take that call and do all that.

51:45And if people want to, you know, consume any of my nonsense, go to my full name, jschwedelson.com. You can't spell it, but oh, well. You'll find me there. and then always hit me up on LinkedIn. You can DM me and yeah, man, I just, I love what you're doing. Keep doing what you're doing and just appreciate you. Likewise. Thanks so much, Jay. Appreciate you seeing me on the internet.